The corpse detail walked up to Shangguan Lü with metal hooks, but before they could place them under her, she stood up slowly, like an ancient tortoise. With the sun shining down, her puffy face looked like a lemon, or a New Year’s cake. She had a sneer on her face as she sat with her back against the wall, like a miniature mountain.
“Elder sister-in-law,” Sima Ting said, “you have a tight grip on life.”
Covering their mouths with towels sprayed with sorghum liquor to ward off the smell of rotting corpses, the town head’s followers carried up a door plank on which the remnants of a New Year’s couplet could nearly be made out. After laying the plank on the ground, four town idlers – now designated as the official town corpse detail – quickly picked Shangguan Fulu up by his arms and legs and laid him out on the plank. Then two of them carried the plank out the gate. One of Shangguan Fulu’s rigid arms hung off the side of the plank and swung like a pendulum. “Drag the old lady away from the gate!” one of the idlers shouted. Two men rushed over. “It’s old Aunty Sun. How could she have died there?” someone in the lane wondered aloud. “Put her on the cart.” The lane was buzzing with comments.
The door plank was laid out beside Shangguan Shouxi, who lay in the position in which he died. Transparent bubbles floated skyward from his mouth, opened in his screams to the heavens, as if a crab were hidden inside. The corpse detail hesitated, not sure what to do. “Oh, hell,” one of them said, “let’s get on with it.” He picked up his metal hook, but was stopped short by Mother’s shout: “Don’t use hooks on him!” She handed me to Shangguan Laidi, then, with a loud wail, threw herself on the headless corpse of her husband. She reached out to drag the head over, but drew her hand back when it touched flesh. “Let it go, sister-in-law!” one of the idlers said, his voice muffled by the towel covering it. “That head cannot be reattached. Go take a look in the cart out there. All that’s left of some of those bodies is a leg, after the dogs got to them. He could be in worse shape. Step aside, you girls. Turn your heads and don’t look.” He wrapped his arms around Mother and half-carried, half-pushed her to one side, along with my sisters. “Close your eyes, all of you!” he warned us once more.
By the time Mother and my sisters opened their eyes again, all the bodies had been removed from the yard.
We fell in behind the horse cart, piled high with corpses, dust rising in its wake. There were three horses, like the ones my sister Laidi saw that other morning: one apricot yellow, one date red, and one leek green. But now they plodded on dejectedly, their heads drooping, their coats dull. The apricot yellow lead horse had a gimp leg, and thrust its neck out with each step. The driver dragged his whip along the ground, his free hand resting on the shaft. The sides of his hair were black, the middle completely white, like a titmouse. A dozen or more dogs on the sides of the road stared hungrily at the corpses on the cart. A procession of survivors followed the cart, all but hidden in the dust; we in turn were followed by our town head, Sima Ting, and his underlings, led by Gou San and Yao Si. Some had hoes over their shoulders, others carried metal hooks; one man shouldered a bamboo pole with strips of red cloth tied to the end. Sima Ting was still holding his gong, which he struck every few dozen steps. And with every clang, the families of the deceased wailed. But they seemed reluctant to cry, and no sooner had the sound of the gong trailed off than the crying stopped. Rather than grieve for their family members, it appeared, they were carrying out duties given them by the town head.
And so it went, us following the horse cart, crying from time to time, past the church, with its collapsed bell tower, and the flour mill where Sima Ting and his younger brother, Sima Ku, had harnessed the wind five years earlier. A dozen or more rickety windmills still rose above the mill, creaking in the wind. On the right, we passed the site of a company created twenty years before by a Japanese businessman to grow American cotton. Then we passed the podium on the drying floor of the Sima compound where Niu Tengxiao, Gaomi’s county magistrate, had gotten the women to unbind their feet. Finally, the cart turned left, following the Black Water River, and drove into a field that extended all the way to the marshland. Gusts of moist air from the south carried the odor of decay. Toads in roadside ditches and in the shallows of the river croaked weakly. Swarms of fat tadpoles changed the color of the water.
The cart sped up once it entered the field. The “Old Titmouse” driver used his whip on the lead horse, gimp leg or no. The cart bounced around wildly on the uneven road, the corpses giving off a terrible stench. Something wet dripped through the cracks in the bed of the cart. By then, the crying had stopped altogether, and family members were covering their mouths and noses with their sleeves. Sima Ting and his followers brushed past us and rushed up to the cart, bent at the waist as they ran, leaving us and the cart behind, that and the stench. A dozen mad dogs set up a cacophony of howls as they leapt all over the wheat fields on either side of the road. They kept appearing and disappearing amid the wheat stalks, like seals leaping through the waves. It was a day set aside for crows and hawks. All the crows in Northeast Gaomi descended on the township’s basin, like a dark cloud settling over the horse cart. They circled the area, their excited screeches filling the air as they formed a myriad of patterns before going into nosedives. Older crows went straight for the corpses’ eyes, pecking them out with their hard, pointed beaks; younger, less experienced birds attacked the skulls, setting up a loud tattoo. “Old Titmouse” flicked his whip at them, each time bringing down at least one bird, which was turned to mush under the wheels of the cart. Seven or eight hawks circled high in the sky, sometimes forced by competing air currents down below the crows. They were just as interested in the corpses, but refused to join forces with crows, over whom they maintained smug superiority.