The Garlic Ballads (34 page)

Her sons’ hands were so coated with blood and gore that the knives kept slipping, so they wiped them off on the ground; the yellow grains of sand that stuck to their hands looked like little gold nuggets. Flies from the government compound, having picked up the smell, came flitting over and landed on the cow’s carcass, crawling all over it. Number Two smashed them with the side of his cleaver. Meanwhüe, Fourth Aunt told Jinju to get her well-used fan so she could keep the flies from landing on Fourth Uncle’s face and producing more maggots.

The sound of birds on the wing broke the silence above them. Dark recesses in the wall were home to the green eyes and urgent pant-ings of wild creatures.

Around midnight the brothers finally finished skinning the cow. Now the animal was in the raw, except for its four hooves—sort of like a naked man wearing only a pair of shoes. Number Two dumped a bucket of water on the skinned animal; then the boys squatted alongside it and smoked cigarettes. When they finished their smokes, they began the butchering process. “Easy, now,” Number One said. “Don’t damage the organs.” Number Two made an incision in the abdomen, and the animal’s guts tumbled out, along with the unborn calf. A hot, rank odor assailed Fourth Aunt’s nostrils. The shrieks of birds rent the sky above them.

After evacuating the long coils of intestines, Number Two was about to throw them away when Number One said they went well with wine if you cleaned them up. As for the calf, he said that an unborn bovine fetus had medicinal properties, and that people got rich palming it off as balm of deer uterus.

Don’t be so sad, Sister-in-Law. You say they gave you five years? Well, those years will just fly by, and by the time you get out, your son will be a useful member of society.

“Better to be a military advisor than a property divider,” the village boss, Gao Jinjiao, said. “Why me? Officials who don’t bail people out of jams should stay home and plant their yams.’ Okay, let’s hear what each of you has to say, and confine it to the here and now.”

“Director,” Number One said, “we want you to divide it up.”

So Gao Jinjiao began. “You have a four-room house. One for each brother, two for Fourth Aunt. When she dies—I don’t mean to make you feel bad, Fourth Aunt, but the truth isn’t always pleasant—each of you gets one of her rooms. Since one is larger than the other, the smaller one includes the gate and the arch above it. The kitchen utensils will be divided into three portions; then you’ll draw lots to see who gets which portion. Damages for Fourth Uncle and the cow came to three thousand six hundred yuan, which divides out to twelve hundred apiece. There is thirteen hundred yuan in the bank, so each son gets four hundred, Fourth Aunt gets five. When Gao Ma hands over the ten thousand, half will go to Fourth Aunt, the other half will be divided equally between the two brothers. When Jinju marries, Fourth Aunt will be responsible for the dowry. You boys are welcome to help out, but no one’s forcing you to. Your grain stores will be divided into three and a half portions, with Jinju getting the half-portion. When Fourth Aunt gets ‘ to the age where she can’t take care of herself, you boys will take turns caring for her, alternating every month or every year, however you want to work it out. That’s about it. Have I forgotten anything?”

“What about the garlic?” Elder Brother asked.

“Divide that into three portions as well,” Gao Jinjiao replied. “But is Fourth Aunt able to go to market and sell her share of the garlic at her age? Number One, why not add her share to yours, and you sell it at the market, then divide the profits?”

“Director, with this leg of mine

Okay, then, how about you, Number Two?”

“If he won’t do it, I’ll be damned if I will!”

“This is your mother we’re talking about, not some total stranger.”

“I don’t need their help. I’ll sell it myself!” Fourth Aunt proclaimed.

“That settles it,” Number Two said.

“Anything else?” Gao Jinjiao asked.

Number One said, “I recall he had a new jacket.”

“Nothing gets past you, does it, you little bastard?” Fourth Aunt snapped at her son. ‘That jacket’s for me.”

“Remember the saying,” Number One protested. “ ‘Father’s jacket, Mother’s bindings, next generation riches finding.’ Why do you want to keep his jacket?”

“Since we’re dividing things up, let’s do it right,” Number Two remarked.

“Majority rules,” Gao Jinjiao declared. “You’d better bring it out, Fourth Aunt.”

She opened the beat-up old chest and took out the jacket.

“Brother,” Number One said, “now that we’ve divided up all the family property, my bachelorhood is settled once and for all. Since you can easily find a wife, I should get the jacket.”

“Dear Brother,” Number Two replied, “I can eat shit, I just don’t like the taste. Since we’re dividing the family property, we have to be fair. No one should do better than anyone else.”

One jacket, and both of you want it,” Gao Jinjiao commented. “Any ideas? Except for cutting it in two, that is.”

“Then cut it in two if that’s the only way,” Number Two demanded. Picking the jacket up, he draped it over a wood stump, went inside for his cleaver, and split the jacket right down the middle seam, as Fourth Aunt looked on and cried her eyes out. Then, gritting his teeth with the fire of determination in his eyes, he picked up the two* halves and tossed one to his brother. “Half for you and half for me,” he said. “We’re even.”

A sneering Jinju picked up a pair of worn-out shoes. “These were Father’s. One for you and one for you!”—and she flung a single shoe at each of her brothers.

A jailer led him down the long corridor while another walked behind him to the right, pressing a rifle muzzle up against his ribs. An identical gray metal door with an identical small opening fronted each cell, the only differences being the Arabic numbers above the doors and the faces looking out through the tiny openings. They were bloated, grotesquely enlarged, the faces of living ghosts. He shuddered. Every step was torture. Behind one of the windows a female convict giggled. “Jailer, here’s twenty cents, buy me some sanitary napkins, okay?” The jailer responded with an angry curse: “Slut!” But when Gao Yang turned to see what the woman looked like, he felt a nudge from the rifle. “Keep moving!”

Reaching the end of the corridor, they passed through a steel door and climbed a narrow, rickety staircase. The jailer’s leather shoes clacked loudly on the wooden steps, while the slaps of Gao Yang’s bare feet were barely audible. The warm, dry wood felt so much better on his feet than the damp, slippery concrete corridor floor. Up and up he climbed, with no end in sight; he was soon panting, and as the staircase wound steeply round, he began to get dizzy. If not for the jailer behind him, silently nudging him along with his rifle, he’d have lain down like a dying dog, spread out over as many steps as were required to support him. His injured ankle throbbed like a pulsating heart; the surrounding skin was so puffy his anklebone all but disappeared. It burned and ached. Old man in heaven, please don’t let it get infected, he uttered in silent prayer. Would that aristocratic woman be willing to lance it and release the pus? That thought reminded him of how she had smelled.

A large room with a wooden floor painted red. White plaster shows through the peeling green paint on the walls. Bright daylight shines down from the ceiling on four crackling electric prods. Desks line the northern wall. A male and two female jailers sit behind the desks. One of the women has a face like a persimmon fresh from the garden. He recognizes the words painted on the wall behind them.

A jailer orders him to sit on the floor, for which he is immensely grateful. He is then told to stretch his legs out in front and rest his manacled hands on his knees. He does as he’s told.

“Is your name Gao Yang?”

“Yes.”

“Age?”

“Forty-one.”

“Occupation?”

“Farmer.”

“Family background?”

“Urn … my, uh, parents were landlords….”

“Are you familiar with government policy?”

“Yes. Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse to do so. Not coming clean brings severe punishment.”

“Good. Now tell us about your criminal activities of May twenty-eighth.”

Dark clouds filled the sky on May 28 as Gao Yang drove his donkey; it was scrawnier than ever, after exhausting itself day after day lugging eighty bundles of wilting garlic to town so Gao Yang could try his luck again. Nine days since Fourth Uncle had met his tragic end, but it seemed like an eternity. During that period Gao Yang had made four trips to town, selling fifty bundles of garlic for a total of a hundred twenty yuan, minus eighteen yuan for the various fees and taxes, which left him a profit of one hundred and two. The eighty bundles he was hauling now should have been sold two days earlier at a purchasing station set up north of the tracks by the South Counties Supply and Marketing Cooperative, which was buying garlic at fifty fen a pound. But just as Gao Yang reached the scales with his load, a gang of men in gray uniforms and wide-brimmed hats showed up, led by Wang Tai.

Gao Yang nodded obsequiously to Wang Tai, who, ignoring him, went up and began arguing with the co-op representatives, eventually knocking over their scales. “No one’s going to walk off with a single stalk of Paradise garlic until
my
storehouse is filled,” Wang Tai insisted. The dejected representatives of the South Counties Supply and Marketing Cooperative climbed into their trucks and drove off.

So Gao Yang packed up his garlic. But before he left, he tried again to get the attention of Wang Tai as he walked off with his men.

Dark clouds filled the sky two days later, on May 28. It looked like rain. Gao Yang had just crossed the tracks when someone up ahead passed word down: “The supply and marketing co-op’s storehouses are full, so now we can sell our garlic anywhere we want.”

“But where? The locals have already squeezed out us farmers from outlying districts. They don’t care if we live or die.”

As the talk heated up, feelings of helplessness began to grip the farmers, but none turned his cart around and headed home. It was as if their only hope lay up ahead somewhere.

The line of wagons pressed forward, so Gao Yang fell in behind them, gradually realizing that instead of heading toward the cold-storage area, they were rolling down the renowned May First Boulevard on their way to May First Square, directly in front of the county government compound.

As the number of garlic farmers increased, the air above the square grew increasingly pungent. Dark clouds roiled above the downcast farmers, who began to grumble and swear. Zhang Kou, the blind minstrel, stood atop a rickety oxcart, strumming his
erhu
and chanting loudly in his raspy voice, froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth. His song plucked the heartstrings of everyone within earshot; Gao Yang couldn’t speak for the others, but he felt sad one moment and angry the next, with a measure of hidden fear mixed in. He had a premonition that trouble was brewing that day, for there, in a nearby lane, some people—he couldn’t tell who—were taking pictures of the square. He wanted to turn his wagon around and put some distance between him and this dangerous spot, but was hemmed in.

The county government compound was on the northern side of the boulevard, running past the public square. Pines and poplars grew tall and green behind the wall; fresh flowers bloomed everywhere; and a column of water rose in the center of the compound, only to fan out and rain down on the fountain below. The government offices were housed in a handsome three-story building with glass-inlaid arched eaves and yellow ceramic tiles set in the walls. A bright red flag billowed atop a flagpole. The place was as grand as an imperial palace. Traffic on May First Boulevard was blocked by the carts and wagons and their loads of garlic. Impatient drivers honked their horns, but their sonorous complaints were ignored. Noticing the carefree looks on others’ faces, Gao Yang relaxed. Why worry? he thought. The worst that can happen is I lose my load of garlic.