He remembered Grandma, seven days earlier, as she lay face up, with sorghum seeds and grains scattered over her face. Her pearly-white teeth shone between blood-drained lips, ornamented by the diamondlike grains.
The charging horse turned with difficulty and headed back, stalks of sorghum struggling bitterly against its rump, some bending and breaking, others snapping back into place. They shivered in the autumn winds like victims of malaria. Father saw the flared nostrils and fleshy lips of the panting warhorse; bloody froth sprayed from between its gleaming white teeth and dripped from its greedy lower lip. Clouds of white dust from the agitated sorghum stung its watery eyes. Seated atop the sleek warhorse was an awesome young Japanese cavalryman whose head, encased in a little square cap, barely cleared the tops of the stalks around him. The ears of grain whipped, pushed, and pricked him mercilessly, even mocked him. He squinted his eyes with loathing and repugnance for the stalks that were raising welts on his handsome face. Father watched him attack the sorghum ears with his sword, lopping some off so cleanly they fell silently, their headless stumps deathly still, while others protested noisily as they hung by threads.
Father saw the Japanese cavalryman rear his horse up and begin another charge, his sword raised high. He picked up his useless Browning pistol, which earlier had both sinned against him and distinguished itself in battle, and hurled it at the oncoming horse, striking it squarely on the forehead with a dull thud. The animal raised its head as its front legs buckled; its lips kissed the black earth, and its neck twisted to the side so it could pillow its head on the ground. The rider, thrown from the saddle, must have broken his arm in the fall, because Father saw the sword drop from his hand and heard a loud crack. A fragment of bone ripped through the sleeve of his uniform, and the limp arm began to twitch as though it had a will of its own. What was at first a clean wound showing nothing more than a gleaming white piece of bone, gruesome and deathlike, soon began to spurt fresh red blood, alternating between gushes and a slow ooze, droplets shining like so many strings of bright cherries. One of the cavalryman’s legs was pinned beneath the horse’s belly, the other was draped over its head, the two forming a large obtuse angle. Father never dreamed that a mighty warhorse and its rider could be brought down so easily.
Just then Granddad crept out from among the sorghum stalks and called out softly: ‘Douguan.’
Father got uneasily to his feet and looked at Granddad.
The Japanese cavalry troops were making another whirlwind pass from deep in the sorghum field, filling the air with a mixture of sounds, from the dull thud of hooves on the spongy black earth to the crisp snapping of sorghum stalks.
Granddad wrapped his arms around Father and pressed him to the ground as the horses’ broad chests and powerful hooves passed over them; groaning clods of dark earth flew in their wake, sorghum stalks swayed reluctantly behind them, and golden-red grains were scattered all over the ground, filling the deep prints of horseshoes in the soil.
The sorghum gradually stopped swaying in the wake of the cavalry charge, so Granddad stood up. Father didn’t realise how forcefully Granddad had pushed him to the ground until he noticed the deep imprints of his knees in the dark soil.
The Japanese cavalryman wasn’t dead. Shocked into consciousness by excruciating pain, he rested his good arm on the ground and awkwardly shifted the leg resting on the horse’s head back into a riding position. The slightest movement of the dislocated leg, which no longer seemed to belong to him, made him groan in agony. Father watched sweat drip from his forehead and run down his face through the grime of mud and gunpowder residue, exposing streaks of ghostly-pale skin. The horse hadn’t died, either. Its neck was writhing like a python, its eyes fixed on the sky and sun of the unfamiliar Northeast Gaomi Township. Its rider rested for a minute before straining to free his other leg.
Granddad walked up and yanked the leg free, then lifted him up by the scruff of his neck; his legs were so rubbery the entire weight of his body was supported by Granddad’s grip. As soon as Granddad let go, he crumpled to the ground like a clay doll dunked in water. Granddad picked up the glinting sword and swung it in two arcs – one down and one up – lopping off the heads of a couple of dozen sorghum stalks, whose dry stumps stood erect in the soil.
Then he stuck the point of the sword up under the man’s handsome, straight, pale nose and said in a controlled voice, ‘Where’s your arrogance now, you Jap bastard?’
The cavalryman’s shiny black eyes were blinking a mile a minute as a stream of gibberish poured from his mouth. Father knew he was pleading for his life as he reached into his shirt pocket with his trembling good hand and pulled out a clear plastic wallet, which he handed to Granddad as he muttered: ‘Jiligulu, minluwala…’
Father walked up to get a closer look at the plastic wallet, which held a colour photograph of a lovely young woman holding a pudgy infant in her milky-white arms. Peaceful smiles adorned their faces.
‘Is this your wife?’ Granddad asked him.
The man jabbered brokenly.
‘Is this your son?’ Granddad asked him.
Father stuck his head up so close he could see the woman’s sweet smile and the disarmingly innocent look of her child.
‘So you think this is all it takes to win me over, you bastard!’ Granddad tossed the wallet into the air, where it sailed like a butterfly in the sunlight before settling slowly, carrying the sun’s rays back with it. He jerked the sword out from under the man’s nose and swung it disdainfully at the falling object; the blade glinted coldly in the sunlight as the wallet twitched in the air and fell in two pieces at their feet.
Father was immersed in darkness as a cold shudder racked his body. Streaks of red and green flashed before his tightly shut eyes. Heartbroken, he couldn’t bear to open his eyes and see what he knew were the dismembered figures of the lovely woman and her innocent baby.
The Japanese cavalryman dragged his pain-racked body over to Father, where he grabbed the two halves of the plastic wallet. Blood dripped from the tips of his yellow fingers. As he clumsily tried to fit the two halves of his wife and son together with his usable hand, his dry, chapped lips quivered, his teeth chattered, and broken fragments of words emerged: ‘Aya… wa… tu… lu… he… cha… hai… min…’
Two streaks of glistening tears carved a path down his gaunt, grimy cheeks. He held the photograph up to his lips and kissed it, a gurgling sound rising from his throat.
‘You goddamn bastard, so you can cry, too? Since you know all about kissing your wife and child, why go around murdering burs? You think that if you squeeze out a few drops of stinking piss I won’t kill you?’ Granddad screamed as he raised the glinting blade of the Japanese sword over his head.
‘Dad -’ Father screamed, grabbing Granddad’s arm with both hands. ‘Dad, don’t kill him!’
Granddad’s arm shook in Father’s grasp. With teary, pity-filled eyes, Father pleaded with Granddad, whose heart had been hardened so much that killing had become commonplace.
As Granddad lowered his head, the wind carried a barrage of earthshaking thuds from Japanese mortars and the crackle of machine-gun fire raking the ranks of village defenders. From deep in the sorghum field they heard the shrill whinnies of Japanese horses and the heavy pounding of their hooves on the dark soil. Granddad shook his arm violently, tossing Father aside.
‘You little shit, what the hell’s got into you?’ he lashed out. ‘Who are those tears for? For your mother? For Uncle Arhat? For Uncle Mute and all the others? Or maybe it’s for this no-good son of a bitch! Whose pistol brought him down? Wasn’t he trying to trample you and slice you in two with his sword? Dry your tears, son, then kill him with his own sword!’