Now that spring had arrived, Granddad and Father felt confined in the shack. They went out to walk along the dikes of the Black Water River, then crossed the stone bridge to visit the graves of Grandma and of Granddad’s fallen soldiers.
‘Let’s join the Jiao-Gao regiment, Dad,’ Father said.
Granddad shook his head.
‘How about joining up with Detachment Leader Leng?’
Granddad shook his head.
The sun shone bright and beautiful that morning. Not a cloud in the sky. They stood speechless before Grandma’s grave.
East of the bridge, far off in the distance, they saw seven horses trotting sluggishly towards them on the northern dike. When they got closer, Father and Granddad recognised the freshly shaved foreheads of the Iron Society. Leading them was a swarthy man with a ring of dark moles around his right eye. It was Black Eye, who had already had an illustrious reputation way back when Granddad was living a bandit’s life. Back then bandit gangs and the Iron Society went their own ways – well water not mixing with river water – and Granddad had held them in contempt. Then, in the early winter of 1929, Granddad and Black Eye had fought on the dusty bank of the Salty River, with no winner and no loser.
The seven horses trotted up to the dike in front of Grandma’s grave, where Black Eye reined in his mount. Instinctively Granddad rested his hand on the handle of his Japanese ‘tortoiseshell’ pistol.
‘So it’s you, Commander Yu!’ Black Eye sat steadily in his saddle.
Granddad’s hand shook. ‘It’s me!’
When Granddad challenged him with a dark look, Black Eye chuckled dully and dismounted. He gazed down at Grandma’s grave. ‘She’s dead?’
‘She’s dead!’ Granddad said tersely.
‘Goddamn it!’ Black Eye spat out angrily. ‘A good woman like that winding up dead as soon as you get your hands on her!’
Flames shot from Granddad’s eyes.
‘If she’d come with me back then, it wouldn’t have turned out like this!’ Black Eye said.
Granddad drew his pistol and aimed it at Black Eye.
‘If you’ve got the balls,’ Black Eye said calmly, ‘you’ll avenge her. Killing me only proves how chickenhearted you are!’
What is love? Everybody has his own answer. But this demon of an emotion has spelled doom for more valiant men and lovely, capable women than you can count. Based upon Granddad’s romantic history, my father’s tempestuous love affairs, and the pale desert of my own experiences, I’ve framed a pattern of love that applies to the three generations of my family.
The first ingredient of love – fanaticism – is composed of heart-piercing suffering: the blood flows through the intestines and bowels, and out of the body as faeces the consistency of pitch. The second ingredient – cruelty – is composed of merciless criticism: each partner in the love affair wants to skin the other alive, physically and psychologically. They both want to rip out each other’s blood vessels, muscles, and every writhing internal organ, including the heart. The third ingredient – frigidity – is composed of a protracted heavy silence. Icy emotions frost the faces of people in love. Their teeth chatter so violently they can’t talk, no matter how badly they want to.
In the summer of 1923, Granddad lifted Grandma down off her donkey, carried her into the sorghum field, and laid her on his straw rain cape; thus began the tragic ‘internal-bleeding’ phase. In the summer of 1926, when Father was two, Grandma’s servant Passion became the third member of a triangle, thrusting her lovely thighs between Granddad and Grandma; this was when the ‘skinning alive’ began. Their love thus moved from the heaven of fanaticism to the hell of cruelty.
Passion was one year younger than Grandma, who turned nineteen in the spring of 1926. The eighteen-year-old girl had a strong, healthy body, long legs, and large, unbound feet. Her dark face featured round watery eyes, a pert little nose, and thick, sensual lips. The distillery was flourishing at the time, and our sorghum wine had taken eighteen counties in nine prefectures by storm. The air was redolent with the aroma of wine. In the intoxicating atmosphere, when the days were long and the nights short, the men and women in my family had enormous capacities for wine. Granddad and Grandma, of course; but even the woman Liu, who had never tasted wine before, was now able to drink half a decanter at one sitting.
Passion, who at first only drank to accompany Grandma, eventually couldn’t live without her wine. The alcohol enlivened them and instilled them with the courage to face danger fearlessly and view death as a homecoming. They abandoned themselves to pleasure, living an existence of moral degeneracy and fickle passions. Granddad had become a bandit by then: he coveted not riches, but a life of vengeance and countervengeance, a never-ending cycle of cruelty that turned a decent commoner into a blackhearted, ruthless bandit with great skills and courage to match.
After killing Spotted Neck and his gang, and nearly paralysing my greedy great-granddad with fear, he left the distillery and began a romantic life of looting and plundering. The seeds of banditry in Northeast Gaomi Township were planted everywhere: the government produced bandits, poverty produced bandits, adultery and sex produced bandits, banditry produced bandits. Word of Granddad’s prowess in single-handedly wiping out the seemingly invincible Spotted Neck and his gang at the Black Water River spread like wildfire, and lesser bandits flocked to him. As a result, the years 1925 to 1928 marked a golden age of banditry in Northeast Gaomi Township. Granddad’s reputation rocked the government.
This was during the tenure of the inscrutable Nine Dreams Cao, whom Granddad still detested for having beaten him with the shoe sole until his skin peeled and his flesh gaped. His day of vengeance against the Gaomi county magistrate would come.
In early 1926, he and two of his men kidnapped Nine Dreams Cao’s fourteen-year-old son in front of the government office. Carrying the screaming little boy under one arm and holding his pistol in the other hand, Granddad swaggered up and down the granite-paved street in front of the official residence. The shrewd, competent enforcer, Little Yan, pursued him with county soldiers, shouting and shooting from a safe distance. Granddad spun around and put his pistol to the boy’s temple. ‘You there, Yan!’ he shouted. ‘Get your ass back there and tell that old dog Nine Dreams Cao that he can have his son back for ten thousand silver dollars. If I don’t get it within three days, this kidnap is going to end with a dead kid!’
‘Old Yu,’ Little Yan asked genially, ‘where do we make the exchange?’
‘In the middle of the Black Water River bridge.’
Granddad and his two men filed out of town, the boy still under his arm. He had white teeth and red lips, and though his features were contorted by all that crying, he was still a handsome boy. ‘Stop crying,’ Granddad told him. ‘I’m your foster-dad, and I’m taking you to see your foster-mom!’ He really started crying then, which tried Granddad’s patience. Waving his short, glistening sword under the boy’s nose, he threatened, ‘I said no more crying. If you keep it up, I’ll slice off your ear!’ The boy stopped crying immediately and was carried along between the two younger bandits with a stunned look on his face.
When they were about five li out of town, Granddad heard hoofbeats behind him. Spinning around to look, he saw a cloud of dust, raised by galloping horses. Granddad ordered the two bandits over to the side of the road, where the three of them huddled together with their hostage, a gun at his head.
The horsemen, led by the shrewd Little Yan, circled Granddad and his men, then headed towards Northeast Gaomi Township, a trail of dust in their wake.