The bandits lifted Granddad off the mule and laid him out naked on the dike. He looked up at the tall, hulking Spotted Neck with eyes as dull as those of a dead fish.
Spotted Neck removed his rain cape and said with a friendly smile, ‘You just got a new lease on life, young man.’
Granddad’s ashen cheeks twitched painfully.
Spotted Neck and his men stripped and dived into the river. Excellent swimmers, they had a frolicking water fight, sending sprays of the Black Water River flying in all directions.
Slowly Granddad got to his feet and draped Spotted Neck’s rain cape over his shoulders. After blowing his nose and clearing his throat, he flexed his arms and legs. His saddle was dripping wet, so he dried it off with Spotted Neck’s clothes. The mule touchingly stretched its satiny, glistening neck towards Granddad. He patted it. ‘Be patient, Blackie, be patient.’
Granddad picked up his pistols as the bandits swam towards the riverbank like a flock of ducks. He fired seven shots in perfect cadence. The brains and blood of seven bandits were spattered across the cruel, heartless waters of the Black Water River.
Granddad fired seven more shots.
By then Spotted Neck had crawled up onto the shore. The Black Water River had washed his skin as clean as a snowflake. Standing fearlessly in a clump of yellowing grass at the river’s edge, he commented with considerable admiration, ‘Nice shooting!’
The blazing, golden sun lit up the drops of water rolling down his naked body.
‘Spotty,’ Granddad asked him, ‘did you touch my woman?’
‘What a rotten shame!’
‘What got you into this business, anyway?’
‘You won’t die in bed,’ Spotted Neck replied.
‘Aren’t you going back in the water?’
Spotted Neck backed up until he was standing in the shallow water. ‘Shoot me here,’ he said, pointing to his heart. ‘The head is so messy!’
‘All right,’ Granddad agreed.
The seven bullets Granddad fired surely turned Spotted Neck’s heart into a honeycomb. He merely moaned once as he fell backward, his legs sticking out of the water like fins for a moment before he sank to the bottom like a fish.
The following morning, Granddad and Grandma rode their black mules over to the home of Great-Granddad, who was melting silver into longevity ingots. When they burst in on him, he knocked over the smelting kettle in alarm.
‘I hear Nine Dreams Cao rewarded you with ten silver dollars,’ Granddad said.
‘Spare me, worthy son-in-law…’ Great-Granddad fell to his knees.
Granddad took out ten silver dollars and stacked them on Great-Granddad’s shiny scalp.
‘Hold your head up straight, and don’t move!’ he demanded.
He moved back a few steps. Pow pow. Two silver dollars sailed into the air.
Two more shots sent two more silver dollars flying.
Before Granddad had fired ten shots, Great-Granddad lay in a blubbering heap on the floor.
Grandma took out a hundred silver dollars and tossed them on the floor, which shone like silver.
11
GRANDDAD AND FATHER returned to their razed home, where they retrieved fifty silver dollars from a hiding place in the wall. Then, dressed as beggars, they went to a small shop in town, near the railway station, where a red lantern hung. They bought five hundred bullets from a heavily made-up woman, then hid out for several days, until they found a way to sneak out through the town gate. They planned to settle accounts with Pocky Leng.
On the afternoon of the sixth day following the ambush and battle at the Black Water River bridge – the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in the year 1939 – Granddad and Father drove a billy goat, nearly dead from the dung building up inside it, to the sorghum field at the western edge of the village. More than four hundred Japs and six hundred of their puppet soldiers had encircled our village like a steel hoop on a barrel. Granddad and Father hurriedly cut open the billy goat’s stitched-shut rectum, and after relieving itself of pounds of dung, it dumped several hundred cartridges onto the ground. They quickly scooped them up, ignoring the stinking filth, and engaged the invaders in a solemn and stirring battle in the sorghum field.
Although they killed dozens of Japanese soldiers and dozens of puppet soldiers, they were still outnumbered. As night fell, the villagers tried to breach the encirclement at the southern edge of the village, where there was no gunfire, but were met by a withering hail of machine-gun fire. Hundreds of men and women were killed instantly in the sorghum field, and their mortally wounded comrades crushed countless stalks of red sorghum in their own death agonies.
The Japs torched the village before withdrawing. Flames shot up into the heavens, and kept burning, turning half the sky white. The moon that night was full and blood-red, but the war below turned it pale and weak, like a faded paper cutout hanging grimly in the sky.
‘Where to now, Dad?’
No response.
THREE: Dog Ways
1
THE GLORIOUS HISTORY of man is filled with legends of dogs and memories of dogs: despicable dogs, respectable dogs, fearful dogs, pitiful dogs. When Granddad and Father wavered at one of life’s crossroads, hundreds of dogs under the leadership of the three from our family – Blackie, Green, and Red – clawed out pale paths in the earth near the sorghum field south of our village, where the massacre of our people had occurred. By that time, our dogs were nearly fifteen years old, a time of youth for humans, but an advanced age for dogs, an age of confidence.
That massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 decimated our village and turned hundreds of dogs into homeless strays. Drawn to the stench of human blood and gore, they were easy targets for Granddad and Father, who lay in wait at the bridgehead over the Black Water River. Granddad’s pistol barked loudly as it emitted puffs of scalding smoke, its barrel turning dark red under the autumn moon, which was as white and cold as frost. Father’s intense longing for Grandma during lulls in his pitched battle with the crazed, corpse-eating dogs makes me feel lost when I think of it, lost like a homeless stray.
In the aftermath of the slaughter of the townspeople, the sorghum field was covered by pristine moonlight, bleak, quiet, and still. Fires roared in the village, the tongues of flame frantically licking the low sky and snapping like flags in a strong wind. Only three hours earlier, Japanese soldiers and their Chinese puppet troops had cut a swath through the village and torched the houses before leaving through the northern gate. Now Granddad’s right arm, wounded a week before, was festering and oozing pus, hanging useless like a piece of dead meat. As Father helped him bandage the wound, Granddad threw his over-heated pistol onto the moist black earth of the sorghum field, where it sizzled. Once his wound was tended, he sat down and listened to the snorts and whinnies of Japanese warhorses and the whirlwind of pounding hooves galloping out of the village to form up ranks. The sounds were swallowed up by the field, along with the brays of pack mules and the footsteps of exhausted soldiers.
Father stood beside the seated figure of Granddad, and strained to get a fix on the hoofbeats of the horses. Earlier that afternoon, the Japanese cavalry, tormented by Granddad’s and Father’s sniper fire, had abandoned their assault on the village’s stubborn defences to rake through the sorghum field. Father had nearly died of fright when a huge, fiery-red beast bore down on him until all he could see was a hoof as big as a plate coming straight at his head, the arc of the horseshoe flashing like lightning. He screamed for his dad, then covered his head and hunkered down among the sorghum stalks. A muddle of foul-smelling sweat and urine splashed down as the horse passed over him, a stench he didn’t think he’d ever be able to wash off.