“I have a couplet, but the two parts don’t match. Well, it’s all I can do.” He wrote: You’re gone, Brother Gong; the value of your calligraphy will triple in value. Here I am, Ruan Zhifei / When we play mahjong, we will now be only three, missing one. He was overcome by grief when he put down the brush. “I’m leaving now.” He walked out and sobbed all the way home.
Zhuang took up the brush, but his hand shook so much he had to stop several times. So he took out a cigarette, lit it, and picked up the brush again as sweat beaded his forehead.
“Aren’t you feeling well, Zhidie?” Wang asked.
“I’m in emotional turmoil. I keep feeling that he’s not dead and is in fact standing next to me watching me write.”
“He did like to watch you write, complimenting your elegant prose while criticizing the composition of a particular character. We will never have a friend like him again.”
The comment made Zhuang’s heart ache; he closed his eyes as tears rolled down his cheeks. Dipping the brush in the ink, he wrote on the spot moistened by his tears: I was born late, you died early / Visitors have never stayed long in Xijing / The wind wails for you and for the loss of a barrier between the living and the dead, and You are in the underworld, I am in the human world / Everywhere yellow dirt buries people / The rain laughs at you and me, blurring the line between there and here.
His face was wet by the time he finished. After kneeling before the bier, he offered up a cup of water to the departed as he crumpled to the floor and passed out. Niu Yueqing yelled out and helped him up, pinching his philtrum and prying open his mouth to give him some water. Finally he came to; everyone sighed deeply over the extent of his grief.
“He’s gone, don’t be too sad,” Wang said. “If he’s watching us, he’d be happy to know how much you miss him.” Wang told Zhuang to go home and rest and that he’d stay behind to make sure everything was done properly. Niu Yueqing and Zhao kept quiet, as they knew what was on Zhuang’s mind, and it wasn’t something they could bring up; instead they hailed a taxi and went home with him.
. . .
At home, Zhuang did nothing but sleep for three days straight and ate very little. Niu Yueqing knew she could only advise him not to go back to the Gong house, so he stayed away, not even going to see Gong’s wife when she returned. Niu Yueqing, on the other hand, bought items for the mourning rites and went over every day to help Gong’s wife. That went on for several days, until she had dark circles under her eyes.
Zhuang slowly recovered, and after ten days it dawned on him that he hadn’t had any fresh milk for quite some time. He asked Liu Yue, who told him she hadn’t seen Aunty Liu, either. One day when he was bored, he went on an outing with Tang Wan’er. When they reached a village, Zhuang said, “Ai-ya! Isn’t this Maowa Village? Aunty Liu lives on the south side. It’s been a long time since I had fresh milk. Maybe she’s ill. Why don’t we visit her? I’d become a cow if we are what we eat.”
“You and a bull do have one thing in common,” she said.
“Do you mean the hair on my arms?” He rolled up his sleeves. “Or my stubborn nature?”
“Neither. Your horn.” Zhuang was puzzled, so she explained with a folk tale:
“Once upon a time, there were a mother and daughter who opened an inn and got rich within a few years. It turned out that the inn had an unwritten rule: The mother and daughter would sleep with traveling merchants. If a man could not take them both, he would leave everything behind the following morning. If a man proved to be too much for mother and daughter, he could stay for free, even for ten days or two weeks if he wanted to. Every single merchant left empty-handed and shame-faced. One particular merchant rose to the challenge and came to stay at the inn with a load of merchandise. Confident that he was strong enough to make all the men proud, he nevertheless was apprehensive, so he carried an ox horn with him just in case. Early the next morning he was losing steam, so he used the horn to defeat the mother and daughter. Feeling sheepish about his ruse, he sneaked off before dawn. Later, when the two women made up the bed, a horn rolled out from under the pillow, but they didn’t know what it was, so the mother said, ‘Hmm! No wonder we lost. Just look at this. I wonder how that thing of his could shed something this big!’”
Zhuang couldn’t stop laughing as he pelted her with pieces of clay. “Where did you hear that dirty joke?” he jeered. “You wouldn’t be afraid even if it were a horn, I’m sure.” Suddenly he squatted down and asked her to clean his ears.
“What’s wrong with your ears?”
“I got so aroused by your story that I can’t walk at the moment. If you clean my ears, I will focus on them and it will shrink back down.”
“I don’t care. You’ll just have to live with the erection,” she said and ran into the village ahead of him.
When they finally found Aunty Liu’s house, she was weaving in the hallway. It was a sweltering day, so she only had a vest on top, with walnut leaves tucked around her waist. She cried out and stepped away from the loom when she saw them.
“My goodness. Why are you here? And why hasn’t your wife come to enjoy the countryside? I haven’t been to the city for days now, and I’ve missed you all. A while ago the soles of my feet were itching, which people say means I’ll see my loved ones. I was wondering who would be coming, and it turned out to be you, not my mother or my uncle.”
“So you’ve missed us. We’re tired from the walk, but you haven’t offered us a chair or some water,” Zhuang said.
The woman cried out as she thumped her forehead and invited them in. She boiled water to poach some eggs, but Tang politely declined, saying she was full. She would just have some water. Unable to change Tang’s mind, Liu put an egg in another bowl and took it outside, where she shouted for her son to come eat it. In the meantime, Zhuang moved two eggs from his bowl to Tang’s. “Eat them. Don’t they look like my you-know-whats? Why aren’t you eating?”
“Behave yourself,” Tang whispered. “She treats you like a saint.”
When Aunty Liu returned, she said many nice things as she watched them eat and drink.
“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Zhuang said. “See how thin I’ve gotten without your milk?”
“I talked to Wu San next door before he went into the city to sell vegetables this morning. I asked him to deliver a message to your house if he happened to walk by. The cow is sick.”
“The cow is sick?”
“She hasn’t eaten in days. I took her out for a walk three days ago, but she lay down yesterday and can’t get back up. The poor animal has made money for us for so long, and I’m really afraid something bad might happen to her. I asked a vet to take a look, but he didn’t know what’s wrong. He just said she should be better in a few days. How can she get better if she doesn’t eat or drink? My husband went to Qianbao to get Jiao the Cripple, a famous vet.”
Zhuang went to the cow pen and was pained by the sight of the cow, which was reduced to skin and bones. The cow recognized him and, flicking her ears, tried to get up, but she couldn’t quite make it. She looked at Zhuang, and Tang’s eyes moistened.
“Poor thing. She’s shedding sad tears, just like humans. Look at her udder; she’s so skinny it looks huge.”
They squatted down to shoo the mosquitoes and flies away.
The rings on the yard gate sounded while they were talking, and in walked two men. One of them, Aunty Liu’s husband, whom Zhuang had met once before, was carrying a leather case on his back. The one behind limped in; he was obviously the vet. After a brief greeting, he squatted by the cow and observed the animal for some time before turning back her eyelids, prying open her lips, and raising her tail to check her back there. He followed that up by putting his ear on different parts of the cow’s body and knocking on her back, making a loud thumping noise. When he was done, he broke into a big smile. “Can she be saved?” Aunty Liu asked.