And still they kicked Sima Liang and Zaohua in an explosion of savage fury. At that moment, a hulking figure with a mass of unkempt hair, an unruly beard, a face covered with soot, and dressed all in black emerged from the kiln. His movements were stiff as he crawled out and got clumsily to his feet; raising a fist that seemed as big as a pile driver, he swung at Wu Yunyu and shattered his collarbone. This onetime hero sat on the ground and cried like a baby. The other three hardy souls stopped dead. “It’s Sima Ku!” Wei Yangjiao shouted in alarm. He turned to run away, but when he heard the angry roar from Sima Ku, like an explosion out of the earth, he and the others froze in their tracks. Sima Ku raised his fist again; this time it crunched into Ding Jingou’s eye. The next punch drove the bile up and out of Guo Qiu-sheng’s mouth. Before the next punch was launched, Wei Yangjiao fell to his knees and began banging his head on the ground, kowtowing and begging for his life: “Spare me, old master, spare me! Those three forced me to join in. They said they’d beat me up if I didn’t, knock the teeth right out of my mouth… please, old master, spare me…” Sima Ku hesitated for just a moment before delivering a kick that sent Wei Yangjiao rolling backward. He scrambled to his feet and ran off like a frightened jackrabbit. It didn’t take long for his barking voice to break the silence over the road leading to the village: “Go catch Sima Ku – the leader of the restoration corps landlords, Sima Ku, is back – go catch him -”
Sima Ku helped Sima Liang and Sha Zaohua to their feet, then did the same for Mother.
Mother’s voice quaked. “Are you human or are you a ghost?”
“Mother-in-law -” Sima Ku sobbed, but didn’t go on.
“Dad, is it really you?” Sima Liang blurted out.
“Son,” Sima Ku replied, “I’m proud of you.”
Sima Ku turned back to Mother. “Who’s left at home?”
“Don’t ask any questions,” Mother said anxiously. “You must get away from here.”
The frantic beating of a gong and crisp rifle fire came from the village.
Sima grabbed hold of Wu Yunyu and said, slowly so there’d be no misunderstanding, “You piece of shit, you tell that bunch of turtles in the village that if anyone lays a hand on any relative of mine, I, Sima Ku, will personally wipe his family off the face of the earth! Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Wu Yunyu said eagerly. “I understand.”
Sima Ku released his grip and let Wu fall back onto the ground.
“Hurry, go on now!” Mother slapped the ground with her hand to get him moving.
“Dad,” Sima Ku sobbed, “I want to go with you…”
“Be a good boy,” Sima Ku said, “and go with your grandma.”
“Please, Dad, take me with you.”
“Liang,” Mother said, “don’t get in your father’s way. He has to get out of here.”
Sima Ku knelt in front of Mother and kowtowed. “Mother,” he said sorrowfully, “the boy is going to have to stay with you. Since I could never repay the debt I owe you in this lifetime, you’ll have to wait till my next lifetime!”
“I failed the two girls, Feng and Huang,” Mother replied tearfully. “Please don’t hate me.”
“It wasn’t your fault. And I’ve already exacted vengeance.”
“Go on, then, go on. Run fast and fly far. All vengeance does is lead to more of the same.”
Sima Ku got to his feet and ran back into the kiln. He reemerged a moment later wearing a straw rain cape and carrying a machine gun; shiny ammunition clips hung from his belt. In a flash, he vanished into the sorghum field, making the stalks rustle loudly. Mother called out after him:
“Hear what I have to say – run fast and fly far, and don’t stop to do any more killing.”
Silence returned to the sorghum field. The moonlight cascaded down like water. A tide of human sounds rushed toward us from the village.
Wei Yangjiao led a ragtag bunch of local militia and district public security forces up to the kiln. Carrying lanterns, torches, rifles, and red-tasseled spears, they put on a show of surrounding the kiln. A public security officer named Yang, who had been fitted with a prosthetic leg, lay up against a pile of bricks and said through a megaphone, “Sima Ku, give yourself up! There’s no way out!”
Officer Yang kept it up for a while, with no response from inside the kiln. So he took out his pistol and fired twice at the dark opening of the kiln. The bullets produced echoes when they hit the inside walls.
“Bring me some grenades!” Officer Yang called out. A militiaman crawled up on his belly, like a lizard, and handed him two wood-handled grenades. Yang pulled the pin on one, tossed it in the direction of the kiln, then flattened out behind the bricks waiting for it to go off, which it did. Then he tossed the second one, with the same result. Concussion waves rolled far off into the distance, but still not a sound emerged from the kiln. Yang picked up his megaphone again. “Sima Ku, throw out your weapon, and we won’t harm you. We treat our prisoners well.” The only response was the soft chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs in the ditches.
Yang found the nerve to stand up, the megaphone in one hand and his pistol in the other. “Follow me!” he called out to the men behind him. A couple of brave militiamen, one with a rifle, the other with a red-tasseled spear, fell in behind Yang, whose prosthetic leg clicked with each lurching step he took. They entered the old kiln without event and reemerged a few moments later.
“Wei Yangjiao!” Officer Yang bellowed. “Where is he?”
“I swear I saw Sima Ku come out of that kiln. Ask them if you don’t believe me.”
“Was it Sima Ku?” Officer Yang turned his glare on Wu Yunyu and Guo Qiusheng – Ding Jingou was lying unconscious on the ground. “No mistake?”
Wu Yunyu glanced uneasily at the sorghum field and stammered, “I think it was…”
“Was he alone?”
“Yes.”
“Was he armed?”
“I think… a machine gun… ammunition clips all over his body…”
The words were barely out of Wu Yunyu’s mouth when Officer Yang and all the men he’d brought with him hit the ground like mowed grass.
6
A class education exhibit was set up in the church. No sooner had the students reached the front door than they burst into tears, as if on command. The sound of hundreds of students – Dalan Elementary had by then become the key elementary school for all of Northeast Gaomi Township – all crying together rocked the street from one end to the other. The newly arrived principal stood on the stone steps and announced in a heavy accent, “Quiet down, students, quiet down!” He took out a gray handkerchief, with which he first wiped his eyes and then blew his nose loudly.
Once the students had stopped crying, they followed their teachers in single file into the church and lined up on a square drawn on the floor in chalk. The walls were covered with colorful ink drawings, all with explanations written beneath them.
Four women with pointers stood in the corners.
The first one was our music teacher, Ji Qiongzhi, who had been punished for beating up a student. Her face was a waxy yellow, her spirit obviously broken. Her once radiant eyes were now cold and lifeless. The new district head, a rifle slung over his shoulder, stood at Pastor Malory’s pulpit while Ji pointed to the drawings behind her and read the descriptions beneath them.
The first dozen or so drawings described Northeast Gaomi Township’s natural environment, its history, and the state of society prior to Liberation. After that came the drawing of a nest of venomous snakes with red forked tongues. A name was written on each snake’s head, and on one of the largest heads was the name of Sima Ku and Sima Ting’s father. “Under the cruel oppression of these bloodsucking snakes,” Ji Qiongzhi intoned with apathetic fluency, “the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township were caught in an abyss of suffering, living lives worse than beasts of burden.” She pointed to a drawing of an old woman with a face like a camel. The woman is carrying a decrepit basket and a begging bowl; a scrawny little monkey of a girl is holding on to the hem of her jacket. Black leaves with broken lines indicating they are falling from the upper left-hand corner of the drawing show how cold it is. “Countless numbers of starving people had to leave their native homes as beggars, only to be attacked by landlords’ dogs that left their legs torn and bloody.” Ji Qiongzhi’s pointer moved to the next drawing: A black, two-paneled gate is opened slightly; above the gate hangs a gilded wooden plaque inscribed with two words: Felicity Manor. A tiny head in a red-tasseled skullcap is poking out through the gate opening – obviously the little brat of a tyrannical landlord. What I found strange was the way the artist had drawn this landlord brat: with his rosy cheeks and bright eyes, what should have been a loathsome image was actually quite fetching. A huge yellow dog had its teeth sunk into the leg of a little boy. At this point, one of the girls began to sob; she was a student from Sandy Ridge Village, a second-grade “girl” of seventeen or eighteen. All the other students turned to look at her, curious to see why she was crying. One of them raised his arm and shouted a slogan, interrupting Ji Qiongzhi’s account. Still, holding her pointer, she stood waiting patiently, a smile on her face. The one who had shouted the slogan then began to wail fearfully, although no tears appeared in his bloodshot eyes. I looked around; all the students were crying, waves of sound rising and falling. The principal, who was standing where he could be seen by all, had covered his face with his handkerchief and was thumping himself on the chest with his fist. Shiny dribbles of slobber ran down the freckled face of the boy next to me, Zhang Zhongguang, and he too was thumping himself on the chest, one hand after the other, either from anger or grief, I couldn’t tell. His family had been labeled tenant farmers, but prior to National Liberation, I’d often seen this son of a tenant farmer in the Dalan marketplace tagging along behind his father, who made a living from gambling; the boy would be eating a chunk of barbecued pig’s head wrapped in a fresh lotus leaf, until his cheeks, and even his forehead, would be spotted with glistening pork grease. Now slobber ran down the chin from that open mouth, which had consumed so much fatty pork. A full-bodied girl to my right had a tender, yellow, budlike extra finger outside the thumb of each hand. I think her name was Du Zhengzheng, but we all called her Six-Six Du. Those hands were now covering her face as she emitted sobs like the cooing of doves, and those darling little extra digits fluttered over her face like the curly tails of little piglets. Two gloomy rays of light emerged from between her fingers. Naturally, I saw a lot more students whose faces were damp with real tears, tears so precious no one was willing to wipe them away. I, on the other hand, couldn’t squeeze out a single one, nor could I figure out how those few badly drawn ink drawings could tear at the students’ hearts like that. I didn’t want to be too obvious, though, since I’d noticed that Six-Six Du’s sinister glare kept sweeping over my face, and I knew she hated my guts. We shared a bench in the classroom, and as we were sitting there one evening, doing our lessons by lamplight, she had touched my thigh with one of her extra fingers on the sly, without pausing in her recitation. Well, I had jumped to my feet in a panic, disrupting the entire class, and when the teacher yelled at me, I blurted out what had happened. It was a stupid thing to do, no doubt about it, since boys are supposed to welcome this sort of contact by girls. Even if you don’t like it, you don’t make a big deal out of it. But I didn’t realize that until decades later, and when I did, I shook my head, wondering why I hadn’t… But at the time, those caterpillar-like digits scared and disgusted me. When I exposed her, she looked for a hole to crawl into from shame; fortunately, it was an evening study session, and in the muted lamplight only a watermelon-sized halo of light lit up the area in front of each student. She hung her head low, and amid the obscene snickers around her, stammered, “It was an accident, I just wanted to use his eraser…” Like a complete idiot, I said, “She meant it, all right. She pinched me.” “Shangguan Jintong, shut up!” So in addition to being ordered to be quiet by our music and literature teacher, Ji Qiongzhi, I had made an enemy out of Du Zhengzheng. One day later, I found a dead gecko in my school bag, and I figured she must have put it there. And now today, as this somber event was unfolding around me, I was the only one whose face was dry – no slobber and no tears. That could mean big trouble. If Du Zhengzheng chose this moment to get even… I didn’t even want to think about it. So I covered my face with my hands and opened my mouth to make crying sounds. But I couldn’t cry, I just couldn’t.