After Mother rose unsteadily to her feet, her mother-in-law took off her conical hat and put it on the younger woman’s head. “Go on, now. Pick some cucumbers in the garden. Tonight you can cook them with eggs for the two men. And if you think you’ve got the strength, go draw some water to wash the vegetables. I don’t know how I get through the days anymore. I guess it’s as they say, I carry the rest of you on my back.”
She turned and headed over to the threshing floor, muttering to herself.
Thunder crashed and rolled that night, threatening the grain on the threshing floor, a whole year’s blood and sweat. So, her body still racked with pain, Mother dragged herself outside with the rest of the family to move the grain inside. By the time they’d finished, she looked like a drenched chicken, and when she was finally able to crawl into bed, she was convinced she’d wandered into the doorway of Yama, the King of Hell, and that his little demons had looped a chain around her neck to drag her inside.
Instinctively, Mother bent down to pick up the pieces of the smashed bowl. She heard a bellowing roar that sounded like an ox as it raises its head out of water. That was followed by a blow on the head that knocked her to the floor. “Go ahead, smash it!” her mother-in-law screamed, the words exploding from her mouth as she flung away the now bloodstained garlic pestle. “Smash everything, since this family is falling apart anyway!”
Mother struggled to her feet after the pestle had smacked the back of her head. Warm blood ran down her neck. “Mother,” she wept, “it was an accident.”
“How dare you talk back to me!”
“I’m not talking back.”
With a sidelong glance at her son, the older woman said, “I can’t handle her, you worthless turd. Why not just put her on a pedestal and worship her?”
Understanding exactly what she was getting at, Shouxi picked up a club lying in a corner and drove it into Mother’s waist; she crumpled to the ground. Then he began hitting her, over and over, as his mother looked on approvingly. “Shouxi,” his father intervened, “stop that. If you kill her, the law will be on us.”
“Women are worthless creatures,” Shangguan Lü said, “so you have to beat them. You beat a woman into submission the way you knead dough into noodles.”
“Then why are you always beating me?” Shangguan Fulu asked.
Worn out from swinging the club, Shouxi dropped it to the floor and stood there gasping for air.
Mother’s waist and hips were wet and sticky. “Damn, that stinks!” her mother-in-law exclaimed, sniffing the air. “A few swats and she shits her pants!”
Propping herself up on her elbows, Mother raised her head and said, an unprecedented malicious edge to her voice, “Go ahead, Shangguan Shouxi, kill me while you’re at it. You’re a son of a bitch if you don’t…”
The words were barely out of her mouth when she lost consciousness.
She awoke in the middle of the night and saw a star-filled sky. And there, in the glittering Milky Way, on that night in the year 1924, a comet streaked across the heavens, ushering in an age of upheaval and unrest.
Three helpless little creatures lay alongside her – Laidi, Zhaodi, and Lingdi, while Xiangdi lay at the head of the kang crying hoarsely. Worms were crawling in and around the eyes and ears of the newborn baby, the larvae of greenbottle flies laid earlier that day.
8
Filled with loathing for the Shangguan family, for three straight days Mother gave herself to a bachelor named Gao Dabiao, a dog butcher. A man with bovine eyes and upturned lips, Gao was never seen, regardless of the season, without his padded jacket, so smeared with dog grease it looked like armor. Any dog, no matter how vicious, gave him a wide berth, then turned and barked at him from a safe distance. Mother went to see him one day when she was on the northern bank of the Flood Dragon River, where she had gone to look for wild herbs. He was, at the time, stewing a pot of dog meat. “Here to buy some dog meat?” he asked when she barged in the door. “It’s not ready yet.” “No, Dabiao, I’ve brought some meat for you this time. Remember that time at the open-air opera when you touched me when no one was looking?” Gao Dabiao blushed. “Well, today you don’t have to worry if anyone’s looking or not.”
Once she was sure she was pregnant, Mother went to the Matron’s shrine at the Tan family tent, where she burned incense, kowtowed, made her vows, and handed over the little bit of money she’d brought with her when she was married. But that changed nothing – she had another girl, whom she named Pandi.
Not until much later was Mother able to determine whether the father of her sixth daughter, Niandi, was Gao Dabiao or the skinny little monk at the Tianqi Temple. When Niandi was seven or eight years old, Mother could tell by the shape of her face, her long nose, and long eyebrows.
In the spring of that year, Shangguan Lü contracted a strange illness, with itchy silvery scales erupting all over her body from her neck down; in order to keep her from scratching her skin raw, her husband and son were forced to tie her hands behind her back. The illness had this iron woman howling day and night; out in the yard, the wall and the stiff bark of the plum tree were blood-specked where she had rubbed her back to relieve the terrible itch. “I can’t stand it, this itching is killing me… I’ve offended the heavens, help me, please help me…”
The two Shangguan men were so incompetent that a stone roller couldn’t get them to fart and an awl couldn’t draw blood, so the responsibility of finding help for her mother-in-law naturally fell to Mother. All in all, after riding the family mule from one end of Northeast Gaomi to the other, she engaged a dozen or more physicians, employing both Chinese and Western methods; some left after writing a prescription, others just left. So Mother brought in a shaman and then a sorcerer, but their magic potions and spirit waters also ended in failure. Shangguan Lü’s condition actually worsened daily.
One day, her mother-in-law called Mother to her bedside. “Shouxi’s wife,” she said, “as the saying goes, fathers and sons are bound by kindness, mothers and daughters-in-law are linked by enmity. After I die, this family’s existence will depend upon you, because those two are a pair of asses who’ll never grow up.”
“Don’t talk like that, Mother,” my mother said. “I heard from Third Master Fan that there is a wise monk at the Tianqi Temple in Madian Township who possesses remarkable medical powers. I’ll bring him to see you.”
“It’s a waste of money,” her mother-in-law said. “I know the source of my illness. Back when I was first married, I killed a damned cat by pouring scalding water on it. That hateful animal kept stealing our chickens, and I only wanted to teach it a lesson. I never thought it would die, and now it’s wreaking its vengeance.”
But Mother made the thirty-li trip on their mule.
The pasty-faced, effetely handsome, fragrant-smelling monk counted the beads on his rosary as he listened to Mother. “Madam patron,” he said at last, “this unworthy monk sees patients here in the temple. I never make house calls. So you go back and bring your mother-in-law to see me.”
And that is precisely what Mother did. She harnessed the mule to a cart and took her mother-in-law to Tianqi Temple, where the wise monk wrote out two prescriptions, one liquid to be ingested and another for washing the skin. “If these do not work,” he told them, “there is no need to see me again. If they do, then return and I will give you a new prescription.”
Mother went immediately to a pharmacy, bought the medication, and returned home to prepare and administer them. After her mother-in-law ingested one of the potions three times and was bathed twice with the other, almost miraculously, the itching stopped.