His nerves were on edge as he turned into the lane, but his heart was warmed by the familiar shapes of houses and trees on either side. From the nearby stand of acacias he surveyed his yard, which was quiet, except for the bats flying around his window. He picked up a dirt clod and flung it toward the window. There was a loud thump when it hit the overturned pot on the ground. Nothing stirred in the house or in the yard. He threw another dirt clod, with no result, but skirted the yard just in case, and went to the back of the house, hugging the wall as he crept up to the rear window. He could hear nothing but scurrying rats.
Feeling secure at last, he remembered seeing clusters of bright parakeets darting in and out among the acacia trees, and he assumed that Gao Zhileng’s cages must have sprung a leak, releasing the birds into the night sky. The chestnut colt, which seemingly would never grow to adulthood, was galloping up and down the lane, its sleek hide smelling like bath soap.
The door stood open; that made the hair on his arms stand up. His eyes were already used to the dark, and he spotted the figure in the doorway of the east room the moment he entered. His first impulse was to turn and run; but his feet seemed to take root. He detected the faint smell of blood just before the familiar but oddly stagnant odor of Jinju came rushing toward him. The scene from last night’s nightmare flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning, and he had to grab the doorframe to keep from falling.
With trembling hands he picked up a match from the stove; it took three tries to light it. In the flickering matchlight he saw Jinju’s purple face as she hung in the opening of the door, bulging eyeballs, lolling tongue, and sagging belly.
Reaching up as if to hold her in his arms, he crumpled heavily to the floor like a toppled wall.
CHAPTER 12
Townsfolk, suck out your chests, show what you’re made of-
Hand in hand we will advance to the seat of power!
Township County Administrator Thong is no heavenly constellation,
And the commonfolk are not dumb farm animals….
– from a ballad sung by Zhang Kou inciting the masses to storm
the county compound on the seventh day after the glut, when garlic lay rotting on the streets, sending a foul miasma skyward
1.
Gao Yang stretched out on the prison cot and was asleep before he’d pulled up the covers. Then came the nightmares, one after the other. First he dreamed of a dog gnawing leisurely on his ankle, chewing and licking as if it wanted to bleed him dry and consume the marrow in his bones. He tried to kick the dog away, but his leg wouldn’t move; he tried to reach out and punch it, but he couldn’t lift his arm. Then he dreamed he was locked in an empty room at the production brigade for burying his mother instead of delivering her to the crematorium. Two members of the “four bad categories”-landlords, counterrevolutionaries, rich peasants, and criminals-carried her into the house at ten o’clock at night. Her head was shiny as a gourd, her front teeth missing, her mouth bloodied. When he lit a lamp and asked what had happened, they just looked at him pitifully before turning and walking silently out the door. He laid her on the kang, wailing and gnashing his teeth. She opened her eyes, and her lips quivered, as if she wanted to speak; but before she could say a word, her head lolled to the side and she was dead. Grief-stricken, he threw himself on her…
A large hand clamped down over his mouth. He wrenched his head free, spitting saliva in all directions. The hand fell away.
“What’s all the screaming about, my boy?” The question, in a low, somber voice, emerged from beneath two phosphorescent dots.
He was awake now, and he knew what had happened. A light from the sentry box lit up the corridor, where a guard paced nervously.
He sobbed. I dreamed about my mother.”
Chuckles emerged from beneath the dots. “You’d have been better off dreaming about your wife,” came the voice.
The dots went out, returning the cell to darkness. But the old inmate’s sputtering snores, the young one’s greedy lip-smacking, and the middle-aged one’s demonic gasps kept him awake.
The mosquitoes, having sucked up all the blood they could handle, were resting on the walls, and at some time after midnight the buzzing stopped altogether. He covered himself with a blanket that suddenly seemed to move on its own-an army of insects began crawling over his skin. Gasping from fear and disgust, he flung the blanket away; but that only brought back the cold air, and the blanket was the lesser of the two evils. The middle-aged inmate giggled in his sleep.
Mother’s head lolled to the side and she was dead. No last words. It was July, the stifling dog days of summer. But that night it rained, creating puddles that attracted croaking frogs. Water dripped noisily from the straw roof long after the rain had stopped. Shortly after dawn he rummaged around until he found a tattered blanket to wrap his mother in; then, laying her over his shoulder, he picked up a shovel and slipped out of the village. He had already decided not to bury her in the local cemetery, since that was where poor and lower-middle-class peasants wound up-he couldn’t bury her among people like that, for fear that their ghosts would harass her-and he couldn’t afford to take her to the county crematorium.
On and on he walked, his dead mother over his shoulder, until he reached a plot of land between Paradise and Pale Horse counties that belonged to no one he knew of. Weeds and other wild vegetation were the only signs of life. After wading across Following Stream, whose rapid, chest-deep waters nearly claimed him and his mother, he laid the rolled blanket containing her body on the other side of the stream. Her head poked out. Lightly falling raindrops splashed into her open mouth and eyes, skittering across her taut, shiny face. Her feet stuck out the other side. One of her badly worn shoes had fallen off along the way; the bare foot, ghosdy pale and shaped like the horn of an ox, was coated with mud. As Gao Yang fell to his knees, dry wails split his throat, but he shed no tears even though a knife seemed to be gouging out his heart.
After scouting the area and choosing a spot on a rise, he picked up his shovel and began to prepare the grave site. First he cleared away the weeds, with dirt clods still stuck to the roots, and placed them carefully to the side. Then he started digging. When the hole was chest-deep, water began seeping up through the gray sandy soil. So he carried the body over next to the new grave, laid it on the ground, and fell to his knees. “Mother,” he said loudly, after kowtowing three times, “it’s raining, and water is seeping into the hole. I can’t afford a coffin, so this worn blanket will have to do. Mother, you… you’ll have to make do.”
With great care he laid her in the hole, then gathered up some fresh green grass to cover her face. That done, he began shoveling dirt into the hole, stopping occasionally to tap it down so as not to leave telltale signs. Still, the idea of jumping on his mother’s body brought tears to his eyes and a buzzing to his ears. Finally he retrieved the weeds and wild grasses and replanted them where they’d been, just as rain clouds gathered overhead and bolts of blood-red lightning split the dark clouds. A cold wind swept past the wildwood and into fields planted with sorghum and corn, setting the leaves dancing in the air like snapping banners of silk. Standing beside the grave, Gao Yang looked around one last time: a river to the north, a large canal to the east, a seemingly endless broad plain to the west, and misty Little Mount Zhou to the south. The surroundings put him at ease. Again he knelt down, kowtowed three times, and said softly, “Mother, you have a good spot here.”