“Keep quiet,” Father whispered. “They'll be here soon. I could hear them tying up the condemned.”
I moved up close to Father and sat down on a clump of weeds. By listening carefully, I could hear a gong in the village, mixed in with a man's raspy voice: “Villagers – go to the southern bridgehead to watch the execution – shoot the tyrannical landlord Ma Kuisan – his wife – puppet village head Luan Fengshan – orders of armed work detachment Chief Zhang – those who don't go will be punished as collaborators.”
I heard Father grumble softly, “Why are they doing this to Ma Kuisan? Why shoot him? He's the last person they should shoot.”
I wanted to ask Father why they shouldn't shoot Ma Kuisan, but before I could open my mouth, I heard the crack of a rifle, and a bullet went whizzing far off, way up into the sky somewhere. Then came the sound of horse hoofs heading our way, all the way up to the bridgehead; when they hit the flooring, they clattered like a passing whirlwind. Father and I shrank back and looked at the slivers of sunlight filtering down through cracks between the stones; we were both frightened and not quite sure just what was happening. After about half the time it takes to smoke a pipeful, we heard people coming toward us, shouting and clamoring. They stopped. I heard a man whose voice sounded like a duck's quack: “Let him go, damn it. We'll never catch him.”
Whoever it was fired a couple of shots in the direction of the hoofbeats. The sound echoed off the walls where we were hiding; my ears rang, and there was a strong smell of gunpowder.
Again the quack: “What the fuck are you shooting at? By now, he's in the next county.”
“I never thought he'd do anything like that,” someone else said. “Chief Zhang, he must be a farmhand.”
“He's a paid running dog of the landlord class, if you ask me,” the duck quacked.
Someone walked to the railing and started pissing over the side of the bridge. The smell was rank and overpowering.
“Come on, let's head back,” the duck quacked. “We've got an execution to attend to.”
Father whispered to me that the man who sounded like a duck was the chief of the armed work detachment, given the added responsibility by the district government of rooting out traitors to the Party; he was referred to as Chief Zhang.
The sky was starting to turn pink on the eastern horizon, where thin, low-hanging clouds slowly came into view; before long, they, too, were pink. Now it was light enough to make out some frozen dog turds on the ground of our hiding place, that and some shredded clothing, clumps of hair, and a chewed-up human skull. It was so repulsive I had to look away. The riverbed was as dry as a bone except for an ice-covered puddle here and there; clumps of dew-specked weeds stood on the sloped edges. The northern winds had died out; trees on the embankments stood stiff and still in the freezing air. I turned to look at Father; I could see his breath. Time seemed to stand still. Then Father said, “Here they come.”
The arrival of the execution party at the bridgehead was announced by the frantic beating of a gong and muted footsteps. Then a booming voice rang out: “Chief Zhang, Chief Zhang, I've been a good man all my life…”
Father whispered, “That's Ma Kuisan.”
Another voice, this one flat and cracking with emotion: “Chief Zhang, be merciful… We drew lots to see who would be village head; I didn't want the job… We drew lots; I got the short straw – my bad luck… Chief Zhang, be merciful, and spare my dog life… I've got an eighty-year-old mother at home I have to take care of…”
Father whispered, “That's Luan Fengshan.”
After that, a high-pitched voice said, “Chief Zhang, when you moved into our home, I fed you well and gave you the best wine we had. I even let our eighteen-year-old daughter look after your needs. Chief Zhang, you don't have a heart of steel, do you?”
Father said, “That's Ma Kuisan's wife.”
Finally, I heard a woman bellow “Wu – la – ah – ya -”
Father whispered, “That's Luan Fengshan's wife, the mute.”
In a calm, casual tone, Chief Zhang said, “We're going to shoot you whether you make a fuss or not, so you might as well stop all that shouting. Everybody has to die sometime. You might as well get it over with early so you can come back as somebody else.”
That's when Ma Kuisan announced loudly to the crowd, “All you folks, young and old, I, Ma Kuisan, have never done you any harm. Now I'm asking you to speak up for me…”
Several people fell noisily to their knees and began to plead in desperation, “Be merciful, Chief Zhang. Let them live. They're honest folk, all of them…”
A youthful male voice shouted above the noise, “Chief Zhang, I say we make these four dog bastards get down on their hands right here on the bridge and kowtow to us a hundred times. Then we give them back their dog lives. What do you say?”
“That's some idea you've got there, Gao Renshan!” Chief Zhang replied menacingly. “Are you suggesting that I, Zhang Qude, am some sort of avenging monster? It sounds to me like you've been head of the militia long enough! Now get up, fellow villagers. It's too cold to be kneeling like that. The policy is clear. Nobody can save them now, so everybody get up.”
“Fellow villagers, speak up for me -” Ma Kuisan pleaded.
“No more dawdling,” Chief Zhang cut him short. “It's time.”
“Clear out, make some room!” Several young men at the bridgehead, almost certainly members of the armed work detachment, were clearing the bridge of the kneeling citizens.
Then Ma Kuisan sent his pleas heavenward: “Old man in the sky, are you blind? Am I, Ma Kuisan, being repaid for a lifetime of good with a bullet in the head? Zhang Qude, you son of a bitch, you will not die in bed, count on it. You son of a bitch -”
“Get on with it!” Chief Zhang bellowed. “Or do you like to hear him spout his poison?”
Running footsteps crossed the bridge above us. Through cracks between the stones, I caught glimpses of the people.
“Kneel!” someone on the southern edge of the bridge demanded. “Clear the way, everybody,” came a shout from the northern edge.
Pow – pow – pow – three shots rang out.
The explosions bored into my eardrums and made them throb until I thought I'd gone deaf. By then, the sun had climbed above the eastern horizon, rimmed by a blood-red halo that spread to clouds looking like canopies of gigantic fir trees. A large, bulky human form came tumbling slowly down from the bridge above, cloudlike in its shifting movements; when it hit the icy ground below, it regained its natural heft and thudded to a stop. Crystalline threads of blood oozed from the head.
Panic and confusion at the northern bridgehead – it sounded to me like the frantic dispersal of villagers who had been forcibly mobilized as witnesses to the executions. It didn't sound as if the armed work detachment took out after the deserters?
Once again, footsteps rushed across the bridge from north to south, followed by the shout of “Kneel!” at the southern bridgehead and “Clear the way!” at the northern. Then three more shots – the body of Luan Fengshan, hatless and wearing a ragged padded coat, tumbled head over heels down the riverbank, first bumping into Ma Kuisan, then rolling off to the side.
After that, things were simplified considerably. A volley of shots preceded the sound and sight of two disheveled female corpses tumbling down, arms and legs flying, and crashing into the bodies of their menfolk.
I held tightly to Father's arm, feeling something warm and wet against my padded trousers.
At least a half-dozen people were standing on the bridge directly overhead, and it seemed to me that their weight was pushing the rock flooring down on top of us. Their thunderous shouts were nearly deafening: “Shall we check out the bodies, Chief?”
“What the hell for? Their brains are splattered all over the place. If the Jade Emperor himself came down now, he couldn't save them.”