The iron smelting area was evacuated, and the cauldron they had purchased in town arrived. They had also bought a petrol drum. A whole bunch of the villagers had never seen a petrol tank before, and they all thought it was a really curious object. They asked what kind of gadget it was. I had seen them before during the war so I told them, “It’s a petrol drum. It’s the rice bowl a car uses to eat.”
The team leader kicked this automotive rice bowl and said, “It’s too small!”
The guy who bought it said, “They didn’t have any bigger ones. I guess we’ll just have to smelt one cauldron at a time.”
The team leader was the kind of guy who liked to hear reasonable ideas. It didn’t matter who came up with them. Just as long as they sounded reasonable, he’d believe them. He said, “That makes sense. After all, taking one bite never made anyone fat. We’ll just smelt one cauldron at a time.”
Seeing so many people surrounding the petrol drum, Youqing, with his basket full of grass, temporarily postponed his trip to the livestock shed to come over and see what was going on. His head rubbed and bumped against my waist as he emerged from the crowd. I thought, who could this be? But as soon as I looked down I saw that it was my son. Youqing yelled out to the team leader, “When you smelt iron, you’ve got to add water.”
Everybody laughed when they heard this, and the team leader said, “Add water? This little guy is thinking about cooking meat.”
When Youqing heard this he started to giggle and said, “Otherwise before the iron is smelted you’ll burn a hole through the bottom of the cauldron.”
Who could have known that upon hearing this the team leader would raise his eyebrows, turn to me and say, “Fugui, you’ve got a little scientist in your family. What this kid said is exactly right.”
With the team leader complimenting my son, I was naturally happy, even though it was actually a lousy idea. First they set the petrol tank up where Old Sun’s house had stood. They threw in all those broken pots, iron sheets and other stuff, and then they added water, covering the vat with a wooden cover. This was how we went about smelting iron. As soon as the water inside began to boil, the wooden cover would shake, dancing up and down as the steam rushed out. In the end, smelting iron really wasn’t that much different from cooking meat.
Every day the team leader would go over a few times to check it out. Each time he removed the wooden lid, the water and steam rushing out would scare him so bad he’d jump back a couple steps and yell out, “It’s hot as hell!”
Waiting until the smoke died down a bit, he would stick a pole down in the vat, poking around to see if the iron had begun to soften. After he was finished poking, he’d curse, “Fuck, it’s still hard as a rock!”
During the time the village was smelting iron, Jiazhen got sick. She got a kind of sickness that made her feel exhausted. At first I thought it was just a symptom of old age that she should start to feel like this. One day I was carrying the goat manure out to fertilize the field, which at the time was dotted with bamboo poles that stuck out of the ground. Originally there were little red paper flags hanging from the ends of these poles, but after a few rains the red flags were gone. All that was left were the bamboo poles with some bits of dangling red paper. Jiazhen also carried the goat manure. She walked and walked, and then her legs suddenly went soft and she had to sit down. The farmers all snickered when they saw this.
“Fugui must have been too rough last night,” they joked.
Jiazhen laughed, too. She stood up and tried to pick her load back up, but her legs began to tremble. They shook so badly that her pants looked like they were being blown by a strong wind. I thought she was probably just tired.
“Take a rest,” I told her.
She immediately sat right back down on the ground. The basket full of manure tipped over, covering her leg. Jiazhen’s face suddenly turned red as she said to me, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
I just thought she needed some sleep and she’d have her energy back the next day. Who would have imagined that from then on Jiazhen wouldn’t be able to carry loads, that she would only be able to do light work in the field? It was a good thing we had the people’s commune; otherwise, I’m not sure how we would have made it through those days. After Jiazhen got sick, she naturally felt bad inside as well. Late at night she’d often whisper to me, “Fugui, I’m sorry for making it more difficult for you.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I’d say. “Everybody gets like that when they get old.”
Up until that time I still hadn’t really given Jiazhen’s illness much consideration; I just thought that ever since Jiazhen married me she had never had a good life. Now that she was getting older, I should give her the opportunity to rest. I was caught off guard a month later when Jiazhen’s illness suddenly took a turn for the worse. As Jiazhen and I were watching over the petrol tank and the smelting iron, she collapsed. Only then did I really get scared, and decided to bring her to the town hospital for an examination.
By then we had been smelting iron for over two months and it was still hard as a rock. The team leader felt he couldn’t let the strongest workers watch over the tank all day and all night, so he said, “From now on we’ll rotate house by house.”
When it was our family’s turn, the team leader said, “Fugui, tomorrow is National Day. You’ll have to make the fire bigger. No matter what, I want to see that iron smelted for tomorrow.”
I had Jiazhen and Fengxia go first thing that morning to wait by the dining hall, so they could bring the food back early. This way, after eating, we could go relieve the people at the smelting cauldron. I was afraid that if we showed up late people would talk. But after Jiazhen and Fengxia came back with the food, Youqing was still nowhere to be seen. Jiazhen stood in the doorway calling him until sweat began to drip down her forehead. I knew that Youqing must have been bringing grass over to the animal pen, so I said to Jiazhen, “You go ahead and eat.”
Heading off to the village livestock shed, I thought to myself, this kid really doesn’t understand how things work in this world. He doesn’t help Jiazhen do any work around the house. All he knows how to do is cut grass for his lambs; he spends every spare second he has on those lambs. When I got to the livestock shed I saw Youqing emptying the grass onto the ground. There were only six lambs left in the pen, and they all rushed over to fight for the grass. Carrying his basket, Youqing asked Wang Xi, “Will they kill my lambs?”
“No way,” replied Wang Xi. “If we eat all the lambs where will we go for fertilizer? The crops won’t grow well without fertilizer.”
Wang Xi, seeing me coming over, said to Youqing, “You’d better hurry home. Your dad’s here.”
As Youqing turned around, I extended my hand and patted him on the head. The sad tone of his voice when he asked Wang Xi about his lambs had quelled my temper. As we walked home, Youqing, seeing I hadn’t lost my temper, happily told me, “They’re not going to kill my lambs!”
“It would be better if they did kill them,” I replied.
That night all four of us watched over the petrol tank and the iron smelting. It was my job to add water to the cauldron. Fengxia used a fan to stoke the flames, and Jiazhen and Youqing collected branches and sticks to feed the fire. We kept working late into the night, beyond when everyone in the village had gone to sleep. After adding water three times, I grabbed a branch and stuck it into the cauldron. The iron was still as hard as a rock. Jiazhen was so exhausted that her face was covered in sweat. When she bent over to throw sticks into the fire, she couldn’t support herself and had to kneel on the ground. I put the wooden lid back on and said to her, “I’m afraid you’re sick.”