As Great-Granddad’s shouts and curses grew more distant and fainter, Uncle Arhat led the hired hands into the compound.
Grandma touched up her hair and smoothed out her clothes, then announced in a stately manner: ‘Men, you have worked hard! I’m young, and have no experience in managing affairs, so I’ll need to rely on everyone’s help to get by. Uncle Arhat, you have served the family loyally for over a decade, and from now on you’ll be in charge of all distillery affairs. Now that the elder and younger master have left us, we need to clean the table and start a new banquet. We will have the backing of my foster-dad at the county level, and will do nothing to offend our greenwood friends. If we treat the villagers and our customers fairly and courteously, there’s no reason why we can’t stay in business. I want you to burn everything the elder and younger masters used. Anything that can’t be burned will be buried. Tonight you’ll need to get plenty of rest. Well, what do you think, Uncle Arhat?’
‘We will carry out the young mistress’s orders,’ he responded.
‘If any of you wants to leave, I won’t stand in your way. Anyone who finds it difficult to work for a woman should look for employment elsewhere.’
The men exchanged glances. ‘We’ll do our best for the young mistress,’ they said.
‘Then that’s all for now.’
The men retired to the bunkhouse in the eastern compound, buzzing about all that had happened. ‘Turn in,’ Uncle Arhat said to them. ‘Get some sleep. We have to be up early tomorrow.’
In the middle of the night, when Uncle Arhat got up to feed the mules, he heard Grandma sobbing in the western compound.
Bright and early the next morning, he went out to look around. The gate to the western compound was closed, and there was no sound from inside. He stood on a stool and looked over the gate. Grandma was seated on the ground next to the wall, with only the comforter beneath her; she was fast asleep.
Over the next three days, the Shan family compound was turned upside down. Uncle Arhat and the hired hands, their bodies sprayed with wine, removed the elder and younger masters’ possessions – bedding, clothing, straw mats, eating utensils, sewing items, anything and everything – piled it in the middle of the yard, doused it with wine, and set it on fire. Then they dug a deep hole, into which they threw anything that didn’t burn.
When the house had been cleared out, Uncle Arhat carried a bowl of wine to Grandma. A string of bronze keys lay at the bottom. ‘Young mistress,’ he said, ‘the keys have been disinfected in wine three times.’
‘Uncle,’ Grandma replied, ‘you should be in charge of the keys. My possessions are your possessions.’
Her comment so terrified him he couldn’t speak.
‘This is no time to decline my offer. Go buy some fabric and whatever else I’ll need to furnish the house. Have someone make bedding and mosquito nets. Don’t worry about the cost. And have the men disinfect the house, including the walls, with wine.
‘How much wine should they use?’
‘As much as they need.’
So the men sprayed wine until heaven and earth were soaked. Grandma stood in the intoxicating air with a smile on her lips.
The disinfecting process used up nine whole vats of wine. Once the spraying was completed, Grandma told the men to soak new cloth in the wine and scrub everything three or four times. That done, they whitewashed the walls, painted the doors and windows, and spread fresh straw and new mats over the kangs, until they had created a new world, top to bottom.
When their work was finished, she gave them each three silver dollars.
Ten days later, the odour of wine had faded and the whitewash made the place smell fresh. Feeling lighthearted, Grandma went to the village store, where she bought a pair of scissors, some red paper, needles and thread, and other domestic utensils. After returning home, she climbed onto the kang beside the window with its brand-new white paper covering and began making paper cutouts for window decorations. She had always produced paper cutouts and embroidery that were so much nicer than anything the neighbour girls could manage – delicate and fine, simple and vigorous, in a style that was all her own.
As she picked up the scissors and cut a perfect square out of the red paper, a sense of unease struck her like a bolt of lightning. Although she was seated on the kang, her heart had flown out the window and was soaring above the red sorghum like a dove on the wing… Since childhood she had lived a cloistered life, cut off from the outside world. As she neared maturity, she had obeyed the orders of her parents, and been rushed to the home of her husband. In the two weeks that followed, everything had been turned topsy-turvy: water plants swirling in the wind, duckweeds bathing in the rain, lotus leaves scattered on the pond, a pair of frolicking red mandarin ducks. During those two weeks, her heart had been dipped in honey, immersed in ice, scalded in boiling water, steeped in sorghum wine.
Grandma was hoping for something, without knowing what it was. She picked up the scissors again, but what to cut? Her fantasies and dreams were shattered by one chaotic image after another, and as her thoughts grew more confused, the mournful yet lovely song of the katydids drifted up from the early-autumn wildwoods and sorghum fields. A bold and novel idea leaped into her mind: a katydid has freed itself from its gilded cage, where it perches to rub its wings and sing.
After cutting out the uncaged katydid, Grandma fashioned a plum-blossomed deer. The deer, its head high and chest thrown out, has a plum tree growing from its back as it wanders in search of a happy life, free of care and worries, devoid of constraints.
Only Grandma would have had the audacity to place a plum tree on the back of a deer. Whenever I see one of Grandma’s cutouts, my admiration for her surges anew. If she could have become a writer, she would have put many of her literary peers to shame. She was endowed with the golden lips and jade teeth of genius. She said a katydid perched on top of its cage, and that’s what it did; she said a plum tree grew from the back of a deer, and that’s where it grew.
Grandma, compared with you, I am like a shrivelled insect that has gone hungry for three long years.
As she was cutting the paper, the main gate suddenly creaked open, and a strangely familiar voice called out in the yard: ‘Mistress, are you hiring?’
The scissors dropped from Grandma’s hand onto the kang.
7
THE FIRST THING Father saw after Granddad shook him awake was a long, coiling dragon coming straight for them as though on wings. Bold howls rose from beneath upraised torches. Father wondered how this wriggling line of torches could have so deeply moved a man like Granddad, who could kill without batting an eye. He was weeping openly. ‘Douguan,’ he mumbled between sobs, ‘my son… our fellow villagers are coming…’
Several hundred villagers – men and women, boys and girls – crowded round. Those not holding torches were armed with hoes, rakes, and clubs. Father’s best friends squeezed up to the front, holding torches made of sorghum stalks that were tipped with cotton wadding dipped in bean oil.
‘Commander Yu, you won the battle!’
‘Commander Yu, we have slaughtered cattle, pigs, and sheep for a feast for you and your men.’
Granddad fell to his knees in front of the solemn, sacred torches, which lit up the meandering river and the vast, mighty sorghum. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said in a trembling voice, ‘I, Yu Zhan’ao, should be condemned for all time for being duped by Pocky Leng’s treachery. My men… all lost in the fight!’
The torches closed in around him, smoke rose in the air, flames flickered uneasily, and drops of burning oil sizzled as they fell to the ground like red thread. Red cinders in a floral pattern covered the dike. A fox in the sorghum field howled. Fish, attracted by the light, schooled just below the surface. The people were speechless. Amid the crackling of flames, a thunderous sound came rolling towards them from some distant spot in the field.