The Four Books (28 page)

That day, I greedily ate the pulp from three wheat plants. Later, I cut down some of the stalks that were growing too closely together and placed them in a pot to make soup. When I added a dash of salt, I discovered that even without oil, the result was as delicious as a wild mushroom soup full of fresh meat. Moreover, wild mushrooms typically have a stench of soil, while my soup was as pure as though it had been boiled from water taken directly from the clouds.

Unfortunately, this wondrous taste did not last long, and once summer formally arrived three weeks later, that white pulp inside the wheat stalks disappeared after only three to five days of hot summer sun. It’s not clear whether it had dried up or had simply been reabsorbed by the rapidly growing wheat plants, but by the end of the fifth lunar month, none of my wheat stalks had any more pulp inside. They were already waist-high, and while they had not yet begun producing ears of wheat, the stalks were as tall as they typically are at harvest time, with stems as sturdy as pond reeds. I should have been able to predict that those wheat stalks would be half as tall as pond reeds, just as I knew they would produce ears of wheat that would be as large as ears of corn. Yet I overlooked this, distracted by the favorable weather.

Because the wheat was growing so quickly and needed to absorb so many nutrients, each time it rained I cut all of my fingers and let my blood pour out over the entire field. And if it went a couple of weeks without raining, I would irrigate the field myself, and in the process would pour at least a bowl and a half of my own blood into the bucket. Eventually, I lost so much blood that I began to feel faint, and would frequently become so dizzy after donating blood that I would have to kneel down immediately so as not to collapse. In fact, I had already passed out many times, and in order to supplement my nutrition I began going to a distant pond to catch fish and crabs. But once while fishing, as I was groping under the water plants and pond reeds, there was a sudden gust of wind. The wind was from the north, and while it started as a cool breeze, it soon blew harder and harder, and the water plants and pond reeds were blown down like a head of hair that has been combed flat. I remembered my own wheat stalks, which were as tall as pond reeds. I dropped the bucket I was using to catch fish and started running, barefoot, back to my fields. It began raining. The sky instantly became as dark as night, broken intermittently by bright flashes of lightning and thunder so violent that it practically knocked me to the ground. I ran crazily through the rain, and after several
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finally managed to make it to my sand dune, which I then climbed to reach my plots of land. I gasped, and saw that it was as I had feared. Given that my wheat plants were not as supple as pond reeds, they were now all lying flat on the ground, like a crumpled green blanket. The rain had washed the wheat leaves and broken wheat stalks down from the terrace, and now they were lying in the sand at the base of the dune. I stood there in shock, and after a moment I bit my lip and knelt in the rain. I started wailing, like an infant abandoned in the wilderness.

After the sun came out, I removed those stalks that were completely broken and propped up the ones that were only bent, using some string to bind them to sticks that I impaled in the ground next to them. I also erected the sort of trellises that people often use for beans and squash, to support the stalks. Several days later, I counted the stalks I had managed to save, and found that whereas I had started with a hundred and twenty, I was left with only fifty-two. What had once been a dense field of plants was now merely a few isolated stalks. From that point on, I never again dared to leave the field, and apart from going to the river to claim water and a few other essential tasks, I spent all of my time watching my field with its fifty-two stalks. Even when I needed to return to the district to fetch my grain, oil, and salt rations, I would be careful to pick a day with good weather and quickly hurry back—jogging the entire way, like a mother who has stepped out for a moment and left her children at home alone. I stopped writing my
Old Course
manuscript in order to focus my attention on tending to those fifty-two wheat plants. Those plants were all that I had left, and in addition to irrigating them with my own blood, I even gave them the lard and vegetable oil I retrieved from the canteen, to help nourish their roots. I would take the fish, crabs, frogs, and tadpoles that I managed to catch when the weather was good, and would either make soup out of them or else would chop them up and bury them under the wheat stalks. Although this shrimp soup and crab paste were not as nutritious as my own blood, I could nevertheless use them to supplement the water each time I irrigated the plants. By the beginning of the sixth month, when everyone else’s wheat was just beginning to reach people’s knees, my plants were already as tall as small trees, and their leaves were as thick as a man’s finger and as long as a chopstick and a half.

These were not mere wheat stalks, but rather they were wheat trees.

In this sixth lunar month, these little wheat trees started producing ears of wheat. One evening, I noticed that a bright, tender ear was perched, like a dragonfly, on the tip of one of the wheat stalks in the third plot. I touched it with my hand, and a fresh scent emanated forth. I examined the other wheat plants, and found that about a dozen of them had a small ball surrounded by green leaves at the ends of their stems.

It was only then I realized that the wheat was producing ears significantly ahead of schedule. In the middle of summer, when the sun was beating down on my head like fire, it was heating the wheat plants to the point that they needed to be irrigated once every three to five days. After all, my eight plots were planted in sandy soil that couldn’t retain moisture, and if it hadn’t been for my blood, the plants would have already died from lack of nutrients and water. In order to make sure that the plants had enough as they were producing ears, I exchanged the support rods that were not tall or strong enough, and replaced them with even taller and thicker rods, using rope to fasten them from the base to the middle of the stem, and on up to the top. Then, every morning I would sprinkle them with water, and every three days I would irrigate them thoroughly. When doing so, I would always single out the plants that had begun to ear and make sure they received extra nutrition, pouring half a bowl of my blood-water directly onto the base of each plant.

Previously, I would cut open five or six of my fingers at a time, to ensure that each wheat plant would receive at least ten or twenty drops of blood. Now I needed to prick my fingers once or twice every day, and I would often need to prick them again before the old cuts were even healed, leaving all ten of my fingers a mass of scars and open wounds. Given that I always used my right hand to cut the fingers on my left hand, the resulting wounds had begun to fester, despite the fact that I would always use salt water to disinfect them. Later, I increasingly began to use my left hand to cut the fingers on my right, and once the fingers on my right hand became sliced up as well, I began cutting my palm. But then I found that I was unable to do any other work, given that I couldn’t hold my hoe, my shovel, or even the cleaver I used to prepare my food. In the end, I decided I had to preserve my palms, and particularly the right one. Therefore, when I needed to irrigate the wheat with my blood-water, I made a series of cuts along the side of my wrist. When both of my arms were so full of open wounds that it was not possible to continue cutting them, I turned to my legs, starting from the calves. I would position my legs over the buckets, letting the blood flow in. Each time I tried to hoe, weed, or carry water, these wounds would throb in agony, though the pain would gradually subside when I really began working in earnest.

By the middle of the sixth month, my fifty-two wheat stalks had all produced ears of wheat. When those ears initially appeared, they were as thick as a finger—starting out round but then becoming flat. Within a few days they were as square as segments of a wood beam. But if you touched one of these ears, you would notice that it was actually quite soft, as though the wood had water inside. I peeled off the corner of one of the ears, and discovered that inside the grains had not yet hardened, and instead they were just kernels suspended in a greenish liquid. I knew that the wheat needed to germinate, for which they needed soil and fertilizer. Accordingly, I stopped putting my blood in the bucket to irrigate the plants, and instead began treating those fifty-two plants as though they were fruit trees. I attended to them one after another, hoeing, earthing, and irrigating them. During this period, I no longer gave each plant water mixed with just a few drops of blood, but rather I cut open my wounds and filled a half bowl or more with pure blood, then used it to irrigate the plants.

The weather was unusually nice. Other crops dry up when you have day after day of searing heat, but I needed this hot sun to make sure that my plants had sufficient light and warmth every day. I’m not sure what the daily temperature was during that period; I just noticed that at midday all of the plants in the surrounding area, with the exception of those at the water’s edge, turned gray, and all of the weeds and bushes drooped over. As a result of the steel-smelting activities, all of the trees had been chopped down, and along the entire old course of the Yellow River—a sandy plateau several dozen
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wide and several hundred
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long—there wasn’t a single tree with a trunk thicker than a person’s arm. If you stood on top of the sand dune at midday and looked out in every direction, it appeared as though the area had been burned down. Unable to find any trees for shade, the birds would circle for a while and then would land and crawl under the bushes and weeds. In the reed pond several
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away, you could frequently see parched foxes and weasels drinking and bathing. I saw flock after flock of wild birds scurrying among the reeds, hiding from the sun. If I had wanted to eat meat, I could easily have gone to the reed pond and caught as many birds as I wanted, but I didn’t dare move an inch from my wheat fields.

Of those fifty-two plants, now only forty-eight were left. The remaining four had their ears broken off when birds landed on them, on one of the few occasions I happened to step away. I therefore needed to stand guard around the clock. Flocks of hundreds of sparrows would fly over, attracted both by my wheat ears as well as by the cool shade beneath them. I erected four scarecrows, but within a few days the birds were already so comfortable with them that they wouldn’t hesitate to perch on the scarecrows’ heads and shoulders. The wheat ears started germinating and flowering on schedule, and within a few days they were already as big as ears of corn. Two of the plants were taller than I was, and when I wanted to use string to fasten the ears to wooden frames, I had to bring over a stool to stand on. When I tied those ears, the scent of fresh wheat blew toward me like sugar water mixed with oil. In this way, I guarded my wheat every day, using wild grass to build a small hut to shade myself from the sun. I sat inside my hut all day, not daring to doze off even for a moment.

Eventually, the leaves of those plants began to dry up, beginning with the lowest ones and moving upward. When the awn at the end of the ear dried up, too, it turned white, leaving it two to three inches long and as thin as a thorn. During the period when the plants were flowering, as I sat in my blind at the front of the field shooing away sparrows, I would often notice a tiny red dot dancing back and forth in the middle of the wheat ear. At first I thought that this was an illusion produced by the sun shining in my eyes, but when I brought over a stool and peered directly into the ear, which was as tall as my own head, I saw that the red dot was actually a small cloud of mist. It flew over from somewhere and circled around the tip of the wheat ear. That red mist emitted an intense smell of wheat and grass, together with the distinctive scent of freshly pollinated crops.

I climbed down from my stool.

After hesitating, I cut off a piece of the largest ear. That ear was already larger than an ear of corn, and I carefully cut out another grain from its base. When I separated the grain from the ear, it was as if I were removing a grain of corn. I examined the yellow grain in my hand, and noticed that even though the ear of wheat was bigger than an ear of corn, the grain itself was the size of a pea, though not as round. As I held the grain in my hand, the sunlight shone through the outer shell into the interior. Inside the grain there was a brown drop of viscous fluid, which quickly dried up under the sun. As a result, the grain became shriveled, like a pocket of water that has evaporated in the sun.

I bit the grain, and inside found that the brown liquid tasted like a mixture of wheat and blood. I stood beneath that stalk, gazing up at the blood-colored veins that appeared on the uppermost grain of wheat. I knew I had been too stingy with these plants. They were each as tall as a reed now and their leaves were as thick as those of a tree in spring, but the blood I had fed them had all been absorbed by those leaves and stems, and consequently only a small amount had made its way up to the wheat ear. There had been plenty of wind and sunlight, but not enough blood. In order for the blood to reach the ear, I would need to irrigate the plant with several times more than I had been using up to that point. I could no longer cherish my fingers, arms, and legs as I had before, carefully counting each drop of blood. Instead, I would have to boldly offer myself to the wheat plants. Without hesitation, I decided that evening to fill my bucket, pot, and washbasin with water and place them at the front of the field. Just as the sun was about to set, when it was no longer as hot, I sharpened my knife on a whetstone, boiled it in salt water, then began using my hoe to dig around each wheat plant until I found the roots. Then I placed the blade over the roots and, irrespective of how many wounds and scars there already were on my fingers, arms, and legs, I sliced them open again, so that my blood started pouring onto the roots of the plant. I didn’t calculate how much blood flowed in all, nor did I try to estimate how much the plant actually needed—one cup or two, one small bowl or two. The blood didn’t stop flowing until the wound started to go numb, whereupon I wrapped it with a bandage I had boiled in salt water and dried in the sun, then began to pour several bowls of water into the pool of blood at the base of the plant. After the blood and water had been absorbed by the plant’s roots, I refilled the holes with soil, then proceeded to the next plant. Again, I looked for the densest nexus of roots, then cut open my fingers and wrists and let a glass or small bowl’s worth of blood flow out.