There was no news at all of Second Sister after she left us that day. The baby boy she left behind caused us no end of trouble. Mother had to nurse him to keep him from starving to death during those days we spent in our cellar hideaway. With his mouth and eyes opened wide, he greedily sucked up milk that should have been mine. He had an astonishing capacity, sucking breasts dry and then bawling for more. He sounded like a crow when he cried, or a toad, or maybe an owl. And the look on his face was that of a wolf, or a dog, or maybe a wild hare. He was my sworn enemy; the world wasn’t big enough for the two of us. I howled in protest when he took Mother’s breasts as his own; he cried just as loud when I tried to take back what was mine. His eyes remained open when he cried. They were the eyes of a lizard. Damn Zhaodi for bringing home a demon born to a lizard!
Mother’s face turned puffy and pale under this double onslaught, and I sensed dimly that little yellow buds had begun to sprout all over her body, like the turnips that had been in our cellar over the long winter. The first of them appeared on her breasts, and that resulted in a diminished supply of milk, with a sweet, turnipy taste. How about you, little Sima bastard, has that scary taste eluded you? People are supposed to treasure what’s theirs, but that was getting harder and harder to do. If I didn’t suckle, he would for sure. Precious gourds, little doves, enamel vases, your skin has withered, you’ve dried up, your blood vessels have turned purple, your nipples are nearly black; you sag impotently.
In order for both me and that little bastard to survive, Mother courageously led my sisters out of the cellar into the light of day. The grain in our family storage room was all gone, as were the mule and the donkey; the pots and pans and all the dishes had been smashed; and the Guanyin Bodhisattva in the shrine was now a headless corpse. Mother had forgotten to take her foxskin coat into the cellar with her; the lynx coats belonging to my eighth sister and me were nowhere to be seen. The fur on the other coats, which the rest of my sisters never took off, had by then fallen off, giving them the look of mangy wild animals. Shangguan Lü lay beneath the millstone in the storage room. She’d eaten all twenty or so of the turnips Mother had left for her before moving into the cellar, and had shat a pile of cobblestone-looking turds. When Mother went in to see her, she picked up a handful of the petrified turds and flung them at her. The skin of her face looked like frozen, decaying turnip peels; her white hair looked like twisted yarn, some sticking straight up, some hanging down her back. A green light emerged from her eyes. Shaking her head, Mother laid several turnips on the floor in front of her. All the Japanese – or maybe it was Chinese – had left for us was a half cellar of sugar beets that had already begun to sprout. Overcome by disappointment, Mother found an unbroken earthenware jar in which Shangguan Lü had hidden her precious arsenic. She poured the red powder into the turnip soup. Once the powder dissolved, a colored oil spread across the surface of the soup and a foul smell filled the air. Mother stirred the mixture with a wooden ladle until it was smooth, then picked it up and slowly poured it into the wok. The corner of her mouth twitched oddly. After ladling some of the turnip soup into a chipped bowl, Mother said, “Lingdi, give this soup to your grandmother.” “Mother,” Lingdi said, “you put poison in it, didn’t you?” Mother nodded. “Are you going to poison Grandma?” “We’ll all die together,” Mother said, to which my sisters responded by weeping, including my blind eighth sister, whose thin cries were little more than the buzzing of a hornet. Her large, black, but sightless eyes filled with tears. Eighth Sister was the most wretched of the wretched, the saddest of the sad. “But we don’t want to die, Mother,” my sisters pleaded tearfully. Even I took up the chant: “Mother… Mother “My poor, dear little children…” Mother said; by then she too was crying. She cried for the longest time, all the while accompanied by her sobbing children. Finally, she blew her nose loudly, took back the chipped bowl, and flung it and its contents into the yard. “We’re not going to die! If death doesn’t frighten a person, then nothing can!” With that comment, she stood up and led us out into the street to find food. We were the first villagers to venture out onto the street. When they spotted the heads of the Sima family, my sisters were afraid. But in a matter of days, it was just another village sight. Mother held the little Sima bastard in her arm, so he was directly opposite me. She pointed to the heads and said to him softly, “I don’t want you to ever forget that, you poor child.”
Mother and my sisters walked out of the village and into a reawakened field, where they began digging up white grass roots, which they would boil after rinsing and mashing them. Third Sister, the smart one, found a nest of voles. What made that such a great find was not just the addition of meat to our diet, but that the food they’d stored away was now ours as well. After that, my sisters made a fishnet out of some hemp twine, which they used to snag some dark, thin fish and shrimp that had survived the winter in the local pond. One day, Mother put a spoonful of fish broth into my mouth; I spit it right back out and started bawling at the top of my lungs. Then she put a spoonful into the mouth of the Sima brat; the moron swallowed it right down. So Mother fed him another spoonful. He swallowed that too. “Good,” Mother exclaimed excitedly. “For all the bad karma, at least this kid knows how to eat.” She turned her gaze to me. “Now, what about you? It’s time you got weaned too.” Panic-stricken, I grabbed hold of her breast.
The village began to come back to life, once we had taken the lead. It was a calamitous time for local voles; after them came wild jackrabbits, fish, turtles, shrimp, crabs, snakes, and frogs. All across the vast land, the only creatures that survived were poisonous toads and birds on the wing. And still, if not for the timely growth of edible wild herbs, most of the villagers would have starved to death anyway. After Qingming passed, the peach blossoms began to fall, and steam rose from fallow fields that cried out for a new planting. But we had no farm animals and no seeds. By the time fat little tadpoles were swimming in the marshes, and in the oval waters of the local pond, and in the shallows of the river, the villagers had taken to the road. By the fourth month, most had left; by the fifth month, most had returned to their homes. Third Master Fan said, “Here at least there are wild grasses and edible herbs to keep us from starving. That’s more than you can say about other places.” By the sixth month, outsiders had begun showing up in our village. They slept in the church, and on the ground in the Sima compound, and in abandoned mills. Like dogs driven mad by hunger, they stole food out from under us. Finally, Third Master Fan organized the village men to drive the outsiders away. He was our leader; the outsiders countered with a leader of their own – a young man with bushy eyebrows and big eyes. He was a master at catching birds, always seen with a pair of slingshots hanging from his belt and, over his shoulder, a burlap bag that was filled with pellets of dried mud. Third Sister saw him in action one day. A pair of partridges was in the midst of a mating ritual up in the air. He took out one of his slingshots and fired a mud pellet into the sky, seemingly without even aiming. One of the partridges fell to the ground like a stone, landing right at Third Sister’s feet. The bird’s head was smashed. Its mate cried out as it circled overhead. The man took out another pellet, fired it into the air, and the second bird fell to the ground. He bent down, picked up the bird, and walked up to my sister. He looked right at her; she returned his gaze with a hateful stare of her own. By that time, Third Master Fan had been to our house to inform us of the movement to drive away the outsiders, which fired up our hatred of them. But rather than pick up the bird at Third Sister’s feet, he tossed her the one in his hands, then turned and walked off without a word.