Sandalwood Death (24 page)

Before Aunty Lü had finished her monologue, Sun Meiniang bent over and vomited, and kept vomiting till all that came up was green bile.

With this difficult episode behind her, clarity slowly returned to Meiniang’s mind, which had been mired in lard. While her longing for Magistrate Qian lingered on, it was no longer an obsession. The wounds to her heart were still painful, but scabs had formed. Her appetite returned: salt now tasted like salt, and sugar was sweet again. And her body was on the mend. This baptism of love, which had rocked her to her soul, had taken a toll on her seductiveness and replaced it with innocence and purity. But sleep remained evasive, especially on moonlit nights.

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5

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The moonbeams were like sands of gold and silvery powder. Xiaojia was sprawled on the kang, fast asleep and filling the room with thunderous snores. She walked into the yard, where moonbeams washed over her naked body. Lingering feelings of dejection diminished the sensation, as the source of her illness lost no time in producing fresh new sprouts. Qian Ding, ah, Qian Ding! Magistrate Qian, my star-crossed lover, when will you realize that somewhere there is a woman who cannot sleep because of you? When will it dawn on you that there exists a body as ripe as a juicy peach just waiting for you to enjoy it? Bright moon, you are a woman’s divinity, her best friend. The heavenly matchmaker of legend, is that not you? If it is, then what is keeping you from delivering a message for me? If it is not, then which constellation is in charge of love between a man and a woman? Or which earthbound deity? Just then a white night bird flew out from the moon and perched on a parasol tree in a corner of the yard. Her heart began to race. Oh, moon, you are, after all, the heavenly matchmaker. Though you have no eyes, there is nothing on earth that escapes your vision. Though you have no ears, you can hear whispers in the darkest rooms. You have sent down this feathered messenger after hearing my prayer. What kind is it, this great bird? Its pristine white feathers sparkle in your moonbeams; its eyes are like gold, white inlaid with yellow. It has perched on the highest and finest branch of the tree and is gazing down at me with the loveliest, most intimate look in its eyes. Bird, oh, bird, magical bird, you with a beak carved from white jade, use it to deliver my yearnings—hotter than a raging fire, more persistent than autumn rain, and more thriving than wild grass—to the man I love. If only he knew what was in my heart, I would willingly climb a mountain of knives or leap into a sea of fire. Tell him I would be happy to be a door threshold on which to scrape his feet, and that I would be content to be the horse on which he rode, whipping it to make it run fast. Tell him I have eaten his feces . . . Eminence, dear Eminence, my brother my heart my life . . . Bird, oh, bird, don’t waste another second, fly away, for I am afraid my yearnings and feelings may be too much for you to carry. They are like the flowers on that tree, soaked with my blood and my tears to give off my fragrance. Each flower represents one of my intimate utterances, and there are thousands of those on that one tree. My darling . . . Sun Meiniang, her face awash in tears, fell to her knees beneath the parasol tree and gazed at the bird perched at the top. Her lips trembled as a jumble of indecipherable words poured from between those red lips and the white teeth behind them. Her sincerity was so moving that the bird cried out as it spread its wings and disappeared without a trace in the moonlight, like ice melting in water or rays of light overwhelmed by bright flames.

A pounding at the gate startled her out of her crippling infatuation. She ran back into the house and dressed quickly, then, with no shoes on her big feet, ran across the muddy ground to the gate, where, with her hand held over her pounding heart, she asked in a shaky voice:

“Who is it?”

She hoped, nearly prayed, for a miracle, that the person on the other side of the gate was the beneficiary of her impassioned sincerity, the one the gods had linked to her by a red thread. He had come to her in the moonlight. It was all she could do to keep from falling to her knees and praying for her dream to come true. But the person outside the gate called her name softly:

“Meiniang, open the gate.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s your dieh.”

“Dieh? What are you doing here at this late hour?”

“Don’t ask, daughter, your dieh is in trouble. Open the gate!”

After hurriedly sliding back the bolt, she opened the squeaky gate for Northeast Gaomi Township’s famous actor, Sun Bing—who fell heavily to the ground.

Moonlight revealed patches of blood on her dieh’s face. His beard, which had been the loser in a contest not long before, but had not been torn out completely, was now reduced to a few scraggly strands curled up on his bloody chin.

“What happened?” she asked in alarm.

She ran inside and woke up Xiaojia to help her dieh over to the kang, where she pried open his mouth with a chopstick and poured in half a bowlful of water. He came to, and the first thing he did was reach up to feel his chin. He burst into tears, like a little boy who has been bullied. Blood continued to ooze from his injured chin, staining the few remaining hairs, which she removed with a pair of scissors before daubing on a handful of white flour. His face had undergone a transformation; he now resembled a very strange creature.

“Who did this to you?” Meiniang demanded.

Green sparks seemed to shoot out of his tear-filled eyes. His cheek muscles tensed; his teeth ground against each other.

“It was him, it had to be him. He was the one who pulled out my beard. He won the contest, why couldn’t he let it go at that? He pardoned me in front of everyone, said I didn’t have to do it, but then he carried out his revenge in secret. Why? He’s more vicious than a viper, a marauding blight on humanity!”

At that moment, her lovesickness was suddenly cured, and as she pondered her dazed and confused thoughts over the past several months, she felt both shame and remorse. It was almost as if she had conspired with Qian Ding to rip out her own father’s beard. Magistrate Qian, she said to herself, you are a mean and sinister man, someone to whom justice means nothing. What made me think that you were a tolerant, loving people’s Magistrate, instead of a cruel and ruthless thug? So what if I hovered between human and ghost because of you? That was my fault for demeaning myself. But what gave you the right to treat my father with such cruelty after he publicly acknowledged his defeat? When you pardoned him in front of everyone, I was so moved that I got down on my knees and let you tear my heart to shreds. That gesture earned for you a reputation of magnanimity, while all the time you planned to seek revenge in secret. How could I have let myself become besotted by a beast in human form, a true scoundrel? Do you have any idea what sort of life I have lived over the past few months? It was a simple question that produced both sadness and anger in her. Qian Ding, I will one day erase your dog life for tearing out my father’s beard.

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6

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After picking out two nice fatty dog’s legs, she cleaned and tossed them into a pot of soup stock, where they boiled noisily. She added spices to enhance the flavor of the meat, and tended to the fire herself, making it as strong as possible at first and then letting the meat stew over a low flame. People out on the street could smell it cooking, and big-eared Lü Seven, a regular customer, banged on the door when the aroma drifted his way. “Hey, Big-Footed Fairy,” he shouted, “what wind cleared the air this time? You’re cooking dog’s legs again, so put me down for one.”

“I’ll put you down for one of your damned mother’s legs!” she cursed loudly and banged the side of the pot with a spoon. In the space of a single night, she had recaptured Dog-Meat Xishi’s nature—easy to laugh and quick to curse—and had regained her looks. Where the enchanting gentility that had characterized the days of all encompassing yearning for Qian Ding had gone, no one knew, but it was gone. After polishing off a bowl of pig’s-blood gruel and a plate of chopped-up dog entrails, she brushed her teeth with salt, rinsed her mouth, combed her hair, and washed her face, then applied powder and dabbed on some rouge before changing out of her old clothes and taking a good look at herself in the mirror. She touched up her hair with wet fingers and placed a red velvet flower over one ear. Her eyes were moist and bright, her appearance one of grace and elegance. Even she was so taken by her own beauty that tender feelings made a reappearance. An assassin in the making? Hardly. More like a sexual provocateur. She nearly crumbled under the weight of her tender feelings, and hastily turned the mirror around so she could grind her teeth and let the hatred reignite inside her. In order to reinforce her confidence and keep her will from dissolving, she went inside to take another look at her father’s chin. The flour she’d spread on it had formed clumps and was giving off a sour, unpleasant odor that had drawn flies to it. Presenting an appearance that both nauseated and pained her, he awoke with a shout when she lightly poked his chin with a piece of kindling; obviously in pain, he gazed at her with a vacant look in his puffy eyes.

“I want to ask you, Dieh,” she said coldly. “What were you doing in town at that hour?”

“I went to a whorehouse,” he admitted frankly.

“Pfft!” she uttered in a mocking tone. “Maybe some whore picked your beard clean to make herself a flyswatter.”

“No, we’re all on good terms. They would never do that to me,” he insisted. “When I came out of the whorehouse, I was walking down the lane behind the county yamen when a masked man jumped out of the darkness, knocked me to the ground, and yanked out my beard, hair by hair!”

“One man could do all that?”

“He knew his martial arts. Besides, I was pretty drunk.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“He had a black bag hanging from his chin,” he said confidently. “Nobody but a man with a fine beard would take such care of it.”

“All right, then, I’ll avenge you,” she said. “You may be a scoundrel, but you are my dieh!”

“How do you plan to avenge me?”

“I’ll kill him!”

“No, you can’t do that. That is beyond your ability. If you can yank out a handful of his beard, that will be vengeance enough for me.”

“All right, that’s what I’ll do.”

“But that is impossible too,” he said, shaking his head. “With his powerful legs, he can jump three feet in the air, which is how I know he is a practiced fighter.”

“Don’t you know the adage ‘When virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten’?”

“I’ll wait here for good news,” he said sarcastically. “Except there is another adage that bothers me, and that is ‘Throw a meaty bun at a dog and it’ll never come back.’”

“You just wait.”

“Your dieh may be good for little, but I am still your dieh, and I’d rather you didn’t go. I’ve had a good long sleep, and that’s given me a chance to think some things through. Losing my beard like that is fit punishment for my misdeeds, and I cannot hold anyone else to blame. I’m going to head back, but no more singing opera for me. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, and it has turned me into an undesirable character. There is a line in opera that goes, ‘Cast off your old self and be a new man.’ Well, in my case let’s change it to ‘Lose your beard and be a new man.’”

“I’m not doing this for you alone.”

She went into the kitchen and scooped the cooked dog’s legs out of the pot with tongs, drained the liquid, and covered them with a layer of fragrant pepper salt. Then she wrapped them in dry lotus leaves and put them in her basket. From Xiaojia’s tool kit she removed a paring knife and tested the point on her fingernail. Satisfied that it was sharp enough, she slipped it into the bottom of her basket.

“What do you need a knife for?” her puzzled husband asked her.

“To kill someone!”

“Who?”

“You!”

He rubbed his neck and snickered.

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7

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At the entrance to the county yamen, Sun Meiniang gave one of her silver bracelets to Xiaotun, who was standing guard at the gate with his fowling piece, and pinched him playfully on the thigh.

“My good brother,” she said softly, “won’t you let me in?”

“Let you in to do what?” Xiaotun was so pleased by the attention that his eyes had narrowed to slits. With his chin he motioned to the big drum that stood to the side of the gate. “You’re supposed to beat that drum if you want to lodge a complaint.”

“What sort of complaint could someone like me have that was serious enough to beat that drum?” Her sweet-smelling cheek nearly touched Xiaotun’s ear. “Your Magistrate sent a message that he wanted me to bring him some dog meat.”

With a series of exaggerated sniffs, Xiaotun said:

“That does smell good, really good! Who’d have imagined that Magistrate Qian liked this stuff?”

“I’ve never known one of you vulgar males who didn’t like this stuff.”

“Good sister, after you’ve seen to it that the Magistrate has eaten his fill, you can bring me the bones to gnaw on . . .”

She pretended to spit in his face.

“You naughty boy, do you really think I’d forget you? So tell me, where will I find the Magistrate at this hour?”

“At this hour . . .” Xiaotun looked up to see where the sun was in the sky. “I expect he’ll be in the document room attending to business. Over there.”

After being let in, she followed the path that took her through the garden where the beard competition had been held, past the secondary gate, and into the official compound, with its six offices; she walked down the eastern passageway, skirting the main building, where he held court, drawing curious looks from everyone she met and responding with a sweet smile that let their imaginations run wild and set their souls on fire. Yayi drooling at the sight of her swaying hips exchanged hungry looks and knowing nods of the head. Dog meat, that’s right, taking him some dog meat, turns out it’s the Magistrate’s favorite. She is quite the sleek, plump bitch . . . pleased with themselves, the yayi smiled lasciviously.