The Garlic Ballads (29 page)

“Elder Brother, come see if there’s anything else we need to do,” Mrs. Yu said to Gao Ma.

He took a last, close look at Jinju. Jute stalks and leaves rusded in the wind, and the eerie fragrance of indigo saturated his heart; the sunlight was bright and beautiful, the outline of the pale daytime moon sharp and clean. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely as he gazed down into Jinju’s smiling face. Jinju, Jinju, your scent fills my nostrils.

Dimly he watched them roll her body up in the pale blue plastic and wrap it with the golden rush mats, which a couple of men then se cured with new cords made of jute, using their feet on the mats as leverage to lash them as tightly as possible. He heard bits of rush fiber snap as the cords tightened and watched the men’s feet step on Jinju’s bulging belly.

Flinging his saber to the ground, he fell to his knees and coughed up a mouthful of blood, some of it dribbling down his chest. The parakeets rose from the jute plants and flew as fast as their wings would take them, then swooped earthward like swallows skimming the surface of water, their bellies nearly scraping the tips of the jute plants. The reporter couldn’t take pictures fast enough. The birds flew like shuttles on a loom, weaving a kaleiodoscopic design over Gao Ma’s and Jinju’s faces.

He raised his arms high in front of him. The stammering policeman removed the broken handcuffs and replaced them with a new pair that gleamed bright yellow—both wrists this time.

“Y-you think you can r-run away again? You might make it past the f-first of the month, but n-never past the fifteenth!”

Gao Yang drove his donkey cart, loaded with garlic, down the county road under a starlit sky. The load was so heavy, the cart so rickety, that creaks accompanied him the whole trip, and each time the cart hit a pothole, he was fearful it might shake apart. As he crossed the little stone bridge over the Sandy River, he tightened the donkey’s bridle and used his body weight to steady the cart for the sake of the spindly animal, which looked more like an oversized billy goat than a donkey. Uneven stones made the wheels creak and groan. The trickle of water beneath them reflected cold stars. Negotiating the rise, he slipped a rope over his shoulder to help the donkey pull. The paved road leading to the county town began at the top of the rise; level and smooth, and unaffected by the elements, it had been built after the Third Plenum of the Central Committee. He thought back to his complaints at the time: “Why spend all that money? How many trips to town will any of us take in a lifetime?” But now he realized his error. Peasants always take the short view, never seeing beyond petty personal gains. The government is wise; you will never go wrong by heeding its advice, was what he told people these days.

As he set out on the new road, he heard the rumbling of another cart twenty or thirty yards ahead, and an old man’s coughs. It was very late and very quiet. The strains of a song reverberated above the surrounding fields, and Gao Yang could tell it was Fourth Uncle Fang. In his youth, Fourth Uncle had been a dashing young man who sang duets with a woman from the traveling opera troupe.

“Sister, Sister, such a fetching sight / Ushered into the bridal chamber late at night / A golden needle pierces the lotus blossom / Stains of precious juice greet the morning light.”

Dirty old man! Gao Yang swore under his breath as he urged his donkey on. But it would be a long night, and there was a great distance to travel, so the thought of having someone to talk to was appealing. When the silhouette of the cart came into view, he hailed, “Is that you, Fourth Uncle? It’s me, Gao Yang.” • Fourth Uncle kept his silence.

Katydids chirped in roadside foliage, “ Gao Yang’s donkey clip-clopped loudly on the paved road, and the air was heavy with the smell of garlic as the moon rose behind tall trees, its pale rays falling onto the road. Filled with hope, he caught up with the cart in front. “Is that you, Fourth Uncle?” he repeated.

Fourth Uncle grunted in reply.

“Keep singing, Fourth Uncle.”

Fourth Uncle sighed. “Sing? At this point I can’t even cry.”

“I started out so early this morning, I never figured to be behind you, Fourth Uncle.”

“There are others ahead of us. Haven’t you seen all the animal droppings?”

“Didn’t you sell your crop yesterday, Fourth Uncle?”

“Did you?”

“Didn’t go. My wife just had a baby, and it was such a difficult delivery I was too busy to leave the house.”

“What did she have?” Fourth Uncle asked.

“A boy.” Gao Yang could not conceal his excitement. His wife had given him a son, and there had been a bumper crop of garlic. Gao Yang, your fortunes have changed. He thought about his mother’s grave. It was an auspicious site. What he had suffered over not divulging the location to the authorities all those years before had been worth it.

Fourth Uncle, who was sitting on the cart railing, lit his pipe, the match flame briefly illuminating his face. The bowl glowed as the acrid smell of burning tobacco was carried off on the chilled night air.

Gao Yang guessed why Fourth Uncle was so melancholy. “People’s lives are controlled by fate, Fourth Uncle. Marriage and wealth are determined before we’re born, so it’s useless to worry about them.” Trying to comfort Fourth Uncle, he discovered, lifted his own spirits, and he took no pleasure in Fourth Uncle’s problems. There was enough joy in his heart for him to hope that Fourth Uncle’s sons would also find wives soon. “Peasants like us can’t hold a candle to the well-to-do. Some folks’ lives aren’t worth living, and some stuff isn’t worth having. It could be worse for us—we could all be out begging. We know where our next meal is coming from, and tattered clothes are better than walking around bare-assed naked. Sure, life’s tough, but we’ve got our health, and a game leg or withered arm is better than leprosy. Don’t you agree, Fourth Uncle?”

Another grunted response as Fourth Uncle sucked on his pipe. Silvery moonlight bathed the shafts of his cart, the horns of the cow pulling it, the ears of Gao Yang’s donkey, and the thin plastic tarpaulin covering the garlic.

“My mother’s death helped to convince me that we should be content with our lot and no harder on ourselves than we have to. If everyone was on top, who would hold them up at the bottom? If everybody went to town for a good time, who would stay home to plant the crops? When the old man up there made people, he used different raw materials. The good stuff went for officials, the so-so stuff for workers, and whatever was left for us peasants. You and me, we’re made of scraps, and we’re lucky just to be alive. Isn’t that right, Fourth Uncle? Like that cow of yours, for example. She pulls your garlic, and has to give you a ride in the bargain. If she slows down, she gets a taste of your whip. The same rules govern all living creatures. That’s why you have to endure, Fourth Uncle. If you make it, you’re a man, and if you don’t, you’re a ghost. Some years ago, Wang Tai and his bunch made me drink my own piss— that was before Wang Tai’s heyday—so I gritted my teeth and did it. It was just a little piss, that’s all. The things we worry about are all in our heads. We fool ourselves into believing we’re clean. Those doctors in their white smocks, are they clean? Then why do they eat afterbirth? Just think, it comes out of a woman’s you-know-what, all bloody and everything, and without even washing it, they cover it with chopped garlic, salt, soy sauce, and other stuff, then fry it medium rare and gobble it up. Dr. Wu took my wife’s afterbirth with him, and when I asked him how it tasted, he said it was just like jellyfish. Imagine that—jellyfish! Have you ever heard anything so disgusting? So when they told me to drink my own piss, I slurped it down, a big bottle of it. And what about afterwards? I was still the same old me, everything still in place. Secretary Huang didn’t drink his own piss back then, but when he got cancer later, he ate raw vipers, centipedes, toads, scorpions, and wasps—fighting fire with fire, they said—but he only managed to keep up the fight for six months before breathing his last!”

Their carts rounded a bend where the road crossed the wasteland behind Sand Roost Village. The area was dotted with sandy hillocks on which red willows, indigo bushes, wax reeds, and maples grew. Branches and leaves twinkled in the moonlight. A dung beetle flew through the air, buzzing loudly until it crash-landed on the road. Fourth Uncle smacked the cow’s rump with a willow switch and relit his pipe.

At an incline the donkey lowered its head and strained in silence as it pulled its load. A sympathetic Gao Yang slung the rope over his shoulder and helped pull. It was a long, gradual climb, and when they made the top, he looked back to see where they’d been; he was surprised to see flickering lanterns in what seemed to be a deep pit. On the way down he tried sitting, but when he saw how the donkey arched its back and how its hooves were bouncing all over the place, he jumped down and walked alongside the cart to forestall disaster.

“We’ll be halfway there at the bottom of this slope, won’t we?” Gao Yang asked.

“Just about,” Fourth Uncle replied dispiritedly.

Insects in the trees and bushes along the way heralded their passage with dull, dreary chirps. Fourth Uncle’s cow tripped and nearly lost its footing. A light mist rose from the road. Rumblings were audible in the distance, due south, and the ground shook slightly.

“There goes a train,” Fourth Uncle commented.

“Have you ever ridden one, Fourth Uncle?”

“Trains arent meant for people like us, to use your words,” Fourth Uncle said. “Maybe the next time around I’ll be born into an official’s family. Then I’ll ride one. Meanwhile I have to be content with watching them from a distance.”

“I’ve never been on one, either,” Gao Yang said. “If the old man up there smiles down on me with five good harvests, I’ll splurge a hundred or so to ride a train. Trying something new might make up for having to drag myself through life like a beast in human garb.”

“You re young yet,” Fourth Uncle said. “There’s still hope.”

“Hope for what? At thirty you’re middle-aged, at fifty they plant you in the ground. I’m forty-one, a year older than your first son. The dirt’s already up to my armpits.”

“People survive a generation; plants make it till autumn. Climbing trees to snare sparrows, and wading in water to catch fish, it seems like only yesterday. But before you know it, it’s time to die.”

“How old are you this year, Fourth Uncle?”

“Sixty-four,” he replied. “Seventy-three and sixtyrfour, the critical years. If the King of the Underworld doesn’t come get you, you go on your own. There’s little chance I’ll be around to eat any of this year’s millet crop.”

“Come, now, you’re strong and healthy enough to live another eight or ten years at least,” Gao Yang said to perk him up.

“You don’t need to try to raise my spirits. I’m not afraid of dying. It can’t be worse than living. And just think of the food I’ll save the nation,” Fourth Uncle added wryly.

“You wouldn’t save the nation any food by dying, since you only eat what you grow. You’re not one of those elite parasites.”

The moon burrowed into a gray cloud, blurring the outlines of roadside trees and increasing the resonance of the insects inhabiting them.

“Fourth Uncle, Gao Ma’s not bad. You were right to give him permission to marry Jinju.” It just slipped out, and he regretted it at once, especially when he heard Fourth Uncle suck in his breath. Moving quickly to change the subject, he said, “Did you hear what happened to the third son of the Xiong family in Sheep’s Pen Village, the one who went off to study in America? He wasn’t there a year before he went and married a blond, blue-eyed American girl. He sent a picture home, and now Old Man Xiong shows her off to everybody he sees.”

“His ancestral graves are located on auspicious land.”

That reminded Gao Yang of his mother’s grave: it was on high land, with a river to the north and a canal to the east; off to the south you could see Little Mount Zhou, and to the west a seemingly endless broad plain. Then he thought of his two-day-old son, his big-headed son. All my life I’ve been a brick right from the kiln, and I can’t change now. But Mother’s final resting place might work to the advantage of her grandson and give him a decent life when he grows up.

A tractor chugged past, headlight blazings, a mountain of garlic stacked on its bed. Realizing that their small-talk was slowing them down, they prodded the animals to pick up the pace.

They approached the railroad tracks under a red morning sun. Even at that hour dozens of tractors were lined up ahead of them, all loaded down with garlic.

Their way was blocked by a zebra-striped guard rail on the north side of the tracks. A long line of carts pulled by oxen, donkeys, horses, and humans, plus the tractors and trucks, snaked behind them, as the entire garlic crop from four townships was drawn like a magnet to the county town. The sun showed half of its red face, oudined in black, as it climbed above the horizon and fell under the canopy of a white cloud whose lower half was dyed pale red. Four shiny east-west tracks lay before them. A green eastbound locomotive, belching white smoke and splitting the sky with whisde shrieks, shot past, followed by a procession of passenger cars and the bloated faces of the elite at the windows.

A middle-aged man holding a red-and-green warning flag stood by the lowered guard rail. His face was also round and heavy. Did all the elite people who worked for the railroad have bloated faces? The ground was still shaking after the train passed, and his donkey quaked from the terrifying shrieks of the train whistle. Gao Yang, who had been covering the animal’s eyes, let his hands drop and gazed at the flag-holding crossing guard as he raised the guard rail with his free hand. Vehicles poured across the tracks before the rail was all the way up. The narrow road could only accommodate double file, and Gao Yang stood wide-eyed as more maneuverable hand-pulled carts and bicycles squeezed past him and Fourth Uncle and shot ahead. The land rose quickly on the other side of the tracks, where their way was further hampered by the rocky surface of the road, which was undergoing repairs. Carts struggling to make the climb shook and rattled in agony, forcing drivers to jump down and carefully lead the animals along by their bridles to steady the carts amid the clay and yellow sand.