The Garlic Ballads (24 page)

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.”

By the time he was on his feet, his sadness was gone, except for an occasional pang in his chest. Shovel in hand, he forded the river, heading back; the water, which had risen precipitously, was now above his chin.

The young inmate groped his way over to the window, yanked open the tiny door in the wall, and pissed into the plastic pail, his splashing urine adding to the cell’s rank odor. Fortunately, the window glass had long since been smashed and cleared away; there was a small opening at the bottom of the door where the food was passed in, and the ceiling had a small skylight, all of which admitted some cool night breezes from the outside, making the air inside tolerable.

Wiping his mind clean of all extraneous thoughts, he concentrated on his reveries.

Heaven and earth had turned a misty gray, and the wet pounding noise of rain falling violendy on branch and trunk rose from the wild-wood. Once he was safely home, he stripped naked, wrung most of the water out of his tattered clothes, and hung them up to dry. The room leaked terribly—water was everywhere, especially at the junction of eaves and mud walls, where rivulets of dirty scarlet ran down to the muddy floor. He tried to catch the drips with an array of pots and pans, but resigned himself to sitting on the edge of the kang and letting the water go where it wanted.

Stretching out on his back, he gazed through the barred window at a faint strip of sky.

This is the unluckiest time of my life, he mused. Father is dead, Mother has joined him, and my roof leaks.

He stared up at the grimy, greasy roof beam until his attention was caught by a mouse crouching on the stove after being driven out of hiding by the rain. He thought about hanging himself from the roof beam, but lacked the resolve.

When the rain stopped and the sun came out, he put on his damp clothes and, expecting the worst, went outside to see how his roof, pitted and weakened by the rain, was holding up. Gao Jinglong, the local police chief, came charging into the yard just then, leading seven militiamen armed with .38-caliber rifles. They wore black rain boots and conical hats woven of sorghum stalks, and had draped fertilizer sacks over their shoulders; they advanced like a moving wall.

“Gao Yang,” the police chief said, “Secretary Huang wants to know if you secretly buried your mother, that ancient member of the landlord class.”

Gao Yang was stunned by how quickly the news had spread and amazed that the production brigade would be so concerned about one of their deceased members. “In rainy weather like this,” he said, “she’d have started to stink if I’d waited. … How was I supposed to get her to town in pouring rain like that?”

“I didn’t come here to argue,” the police chief said. “You can plead your case with Secretary Huang.”