I wiped your bloody nose and announced to the crowd:
“You bunch of thugs, look what you did to my ox! You have to pay!”
“Jiefang,” Hong Taiyue said sternly. “Your father isn’t here, so what I have to say I’ll say to you. Your ox knocked down Wu Qiuxiang, and her medical expenses are your responsibility As soon as your father returns, you tell him he has to fit the ox with a nose ring, and if he injures another member of the commune, he’ll be killed.”
“Who are you trying to scare?” I said. “I’ve gotten this big by eating grains, not by being scared by anybody. Do you think I don’t know national policy? An ox is a big livestock, a tool of production. Killing one is against the law.”
“Jiefang!” Mother cried out sternly. “How dare you talk to Uncle that way!”
“Ha ha, ha ha.” Hong Taiyue laughed out loud. “Will you listen to that, everybody? He sure talks big. He actually knows that an ox is a tool of production. Well, you listen to me. The commune oxen are tools of production, but an ox belonging to an independent farmer is a tool of reactionary production. You’re right, if an ox belonging to the People’s Commune butted someone, we wouldn’t dare kill it, but if an ox belonging to an independent farmer butts someone, I’ll pronounce the death sentence without delay!”
Hong struck a pose like holding a sword, with which he could cut my ox in half. I was, after all, still young, and Father wasn’t around. I was over my head and spouting nonsense. I was totally deflated, and a horrifying scene popped into my head: Hong Taiyue raises a blue sword and cuts my ox in two, but another head comes out of its chest. Each decapitation produces another head. Hong throws away the sword and flees, and I laugh, Ha ha…
“That kid must have lost his mind!” The people were buzzing, wondering why I was laughing at a time like that.
“See the father and damned if you won’t know the son!” Huang Tong said
Now that she’d gotten her breath back, Wu Qiuxiang railed at her husband: “You damned turtle, always tucking your head back in. You coward, instead of coming to my rescue when the ox butted me, you pushed me right into it. If not for Jinlong, I’d have been dead meat on that animal’s horns…”
Once again, all eyes were on my brother. Brother? What kind of brother was he? But, after all, he and I had the same mother, and that isn’t a relationship you can forget about. Wu Qiuxiang’s gaze at my brother was different from the others. And that of her daughter, Huang Huzhu, simply dripped with emotion. Now, of course, I realize that my brother’s manner had already begun to take on the outline of Ximen Nao, and Qiuxiang could see her first man in him. She insisted that she’d been taken into the household as a maidservant, and then raped by the master, leading to a life of bitterness and taste for vengeance. But that’s not what happened. Men like Ximen Nao are masters at taming women, and I knew that in Qiuxiang’s heart, her second man, Huang Tong, was little more than a reeking pile of dog shit. And the emotion Huzhu felt for my brother? It was the budding flower of love.
Look here, Lan Qiansui – calling you by that name isn’t easy for me – you’ve used Ximen Nao’s cock to complicate what should be a very simple world.
15
Ox-herding Brothers Fight on a Sandbar
Unbroken Lines of Fate Make an Awkward Dilemma
In the same way the donkey wreaked havoc in the village government office and drew the widespread notice of the villagers, you, the bastard offspring of a Simmental ox and a Mongol ox, gained fame by disrupting the commune’s welcoming ceremony for Mother, Jinlong, and Baofeng. Someone else gained face that day – my half brother, Jinlong. People saw how his fearless heroics subdued you. According to Huang Hezuo, who later became my wife, her sister, Huzhu, fell in love with him when he jumped on your back.
Father still hadn’t returned from the provincial capital, and there was no more feed for you, so, recalling what he had said to me before he left, I took you out to the sandbar on the Grain Barge River to graze. Since it was one of your old haunts when you were a donkey, you knew the place well. Spring came late that year, so ice on the river hadn’t melted, even though it was already April. The brittle reeds on the sandbar rustled in the wind when wild geese perched on them, which was often, and which usually frightened fat rabbits hidden among them. I occasionally saw a lustrous fox when it appeared suddenly among the reeds.
We were not alone in suffering a shortage of animal feed: the production brigade also had to take its twenty-four oxen, four donkeys, and two horses out into the wild to graze, tended by the herder Hu Bin and Jinlong. My half sister, Baofeng, had been sent to train at the county health department; she would return as our first formally educated midwife. Both she and her brother were given important tasks as soon as they joined the commune. Now you might assume that midwifery was an important task, while tending livestock was not. But Jinlong was given the added responsibility of recording work points. Every evening he went to a small office, where he calculated the daily work activities of each commune member in a ledger. If that isn’t an important task, I don’t know what is. Seeing her children given such important tasks kept a smile on Mother’s face, but when she saw me take my ox out to graze all by myself, she heaved a long sigh. I was, after all, her son too.
Well, that’s enough meaningless chatter for now. Let’s talk about Hu Bin, a small man with an accent that marked him as an outsider. Onetime head of the commune’s post office, he’d been engaged in an illicit relationship with the fiancee of a soldier and was sentenced to a period of hard labor. When his sentence was up, he settled in our village. His wife, Bai Lian, a village switchboard operator with a big, round, plump face, red lips, nice white teeth, and a cheerful voice, had a cozy relationship with many of the commune cadres. Eighteen telephone wires on a China fir pole all fed into the window of her home and were connected to a unit that resembled a dressing table. When I was in elementary school, I could hear her singsong voice drift into the classroom: Hello. What number please? Please hold – Zheng Village on the line. We kids used to sprawl outside her window and look through tears in the window paper to watch as she nursed her baby with one arm and, with her free hand, effortlessly plugged the pegs into or pulled them out of the switchboard. To us, this was both a mystery and a wonder, and not a day passed that we didn’t hang around there, until a village cadre shooed us away. But we’d be right back as soon as he left. We not only watched Bai Lian at work, but were also treated to plenty of scenes that were unsuitable for children. We saw her and the village’s commune representative carry on flirtatiously, even get physical, and we saw Bai Lian scold Hu Bin in that singsong voice of hers. And we learned why none of Bai Lian’s children looked alike. Eventually, the paper in her window was replaced by glass and a curtain, and there were no more shows. All we could do was listen to what went on inside. Even later, the wires were buried underground after being electrified. Mo Yan got zapped by a hot wire outside her window one day and peed his pants as he screamed pathetically. When I tried to pull him away, I got zapped too, but I didn’t pee my pants. After this episode, we stopped hanging around outside her window.
Sending Hu Bin, who wore a felt cap with earflaps, miner’s goggles, a tattered uniform under a grimy army greatcoat, with a pocket watch in one pocket and a code book in the other, to tend livestock was an insult. But someone should have told him to keep his pants zipped. My brother told him to round up the strays, but he’d just sit on the riverbank in the sunlight to flip through his code book and read aloud, until tears fell and he’d begin to sob. Then he’d raise his voice to the heavens: