His sudden passage startled jackrabbits out of their hiding places in the willow grove, and even though they ran beside him, he quickly outdistanced them all. As he reached the end of the willow grove, a tottering cobblestone bridge resting on wooden stanchions appeared on his left. Built for horse carts, it linked the eastern edge of the village with the fields. Fearful of being seen, he cut across a patch of ground dotted with holes dug by village thieves and rushed into a woods where mulberry and acacia trees grew side by side. The acacias were just blooming, and the air was stiflingly heavy with their fragrance. He kept running, his legs feeling more and more like lead weights, his vision blurring, his skin stinging painfully, his breath coming in pants. The gnarled tree trunks-white mulberry and rich brown acacia-formed a perilous and nearly impenetrable net. As soon as a path opened up, it was closed off by the next tree, and in one of his sudden lurches he crashed headlong to the ground.
2.
Gao Ma regained consciousness sometime around dusk, and his first sensation was a parched thirst that made even his belly burn, followed by an awareness of painful itches all over-wherever he pressed the skin with his finger, a gloomy breath of cool air seeped into the pores. His eyes were nearly swollen shut, but it wasn’t until he actually touched the puny skin that he vaguely recalled diving into Schoolmaster Zhu’s pigpen and banging a hornets’ nest with his head.
The sun, a red wheel, was sinking slowly in the west. Besides being spectacularly beautiful, the early-summer sunset was exceedingly soft and gentle: black mulberry leaves turned as red as roses; pristine white acacia petals shed an enshrouding pale-green aura. Mild evening breezes made both the mulberry leaves and the acacia petals dance and whirl, filling the woods with a soft rusde.
He stood up by holding on to a mulberry branch, even though every joint in his body cried out in pain. His legs were swollen, as were his feet, and his sinuses felt as if they might explode. He desperately needed some water. For a moment he wresded with his. thoughts to determine whether the events of that afternoon had actually happened or were just a bad dream. Dried bits of pig slops sticking to him and the glistening bracelets dangling from his left wrist were all the proof he needed that he was in fact a fugitive from justice. And he knew the crime for which they wanted to arrest him. He had been nervously expecting it to happen for over a month, which was why he had stopped securing the latch on his window. Debilitating thirst and the painful tautness of his skin made calm thought impossible, so he continued through the stand of mulberry and acacia trees heading north toward the dry riverbed where, he recalled, Gao Qunjia and his son had dug a well that spring.
In order to avoid stepping on more puncture vines growing in the sandy soil, he was forced to walk among prickly reed-grass that was only slighdy less painful to the soles of his feet. Bright red ribbons of light filtering through the acacia flowers and mulberry leaves settled on his bare skin, and as he examined his nakedness, especially his arms and chest, he saw that he was a mass of angry red blisters: mementos bestowed upon him by the scar creepers.
The gleaming sand of the dry riverbed nearly blinded him as he emerged from the wooded area; the descending fireball crackled as it picked up speed, painting the sky to look like a celestial flower garden. But Gao Ma was too busy scanning the area for a sign of the well to notice. Finally, amid the seemingly endless red-and-yellow sand of the riverbed, he spotted some mounds of chocolate-colored earth and staggered toward them.
Water, water. He fell to his knees and greedily sucked up the water like a thirsty horse. Within seconds his mouth, throat, and stomach shared the relief of the craved-for water. But the walls of his stomach cramped up with the sudden flood, and he heard the crackling sounds of bone-dry organs being irrigated. After another minute of frenzied drinking, he raised his head for about ten seconds to catch his breath, then leaned over and started in again, more leisurely this time, in order to savor the water’s taste and warmth.
The water was brackish, salty, and hot. But he buried his face in it one last time before slowly getting to his feet and letting it drip onto his neck and shoulders, then down to his abdomen, reaching the blisters left by the scar creepers, which popped open and released their poison; the killing pain tightened his rectum.
“Oh, Mother!” he moaned weakly, and lowered his head until his glance fell on the well’s crumbling walls and some tender green moss floating on the surface that was home to schools of tiny tadpoles. Three large speckled frogs crouched at the edge of the well, their opaque croaking sacs expanding and retracting rhythmically as six emerald eyes stared greedily at him. He jumped to his feet. A dry belch rose in his throat; his stomach and intestines felt as if hundreds of tadpoles were squirming around in them. Water erupted like a geyser out his mouth. Having seen all he could bear of the well, he turned and returned to the mulberry and acacia woods, rocking back and forth as he walked.
Even though the sun had fallen beneath the horizon, the sky had not yet turned dark; a heavy mist setded around multitudes of silkworms as they raised their strangely contoured metallic heads and gnawed through tinplatelike mulberry leaves, each crunch penetrating Gao Ma’s chest and sawing at his heart. He sat down against a mulberry tree and stared at the filmy waves of acacia blossoms peeking out through the enshrouding mist; the fragrance deepened at dusk, and a saffron powder soared on the wind currents as silkworm droppings like iron filings landed on his legs, which stretched out in front of him.
The moon rose in the deep-blue canopy of heaven, accompanied by a smattering of golden stars; the dew-laden silkworm droppings falling on his legs seemed to him to be the excrement of heavenly constellations. Every so often he felt compelled to jump to his feet in reaction to a powerful stimulus, which evaporated as soon as he tried to bend his knees. At other times he wanted to remove the manacles dangling from his wrist; but that resolve, too, vanished when he tried to raise his arm.
The silence was broken by the flapping wings of night birds; he thought he saw them deposit traces of phosphorescence on the tips of mulberry branches as they flew by. But when he strained to get a closer look, he realized it was just his imagination, and he couldn’t be sure he had even seen any birds.
It was past midnight, and he was getting cold; as his stomach growled, he felt an immense buildup of gas, which he couldn’t pass, no matter how he tried. He spotted Jinju moving past mulberry trees and skirting acacias, a red bundle over her arm, her belly sticking way out in front. She cringed as she walked up to him, stopping about five paces away. She held a quivering jute plant in one hand and was scraping its surface with her fingernails. “Come here, Jinju,” he said. Her face changed color-from red to yellow, from yellow to light green, then to dark green, and finally to a terrifying gray. “Elder Brother Gao Ma,” she said, “I’ve come to say goodbye.” The ominous tone of her words hit him full in the face; he struggled to go to her, but his legs were tied to the tree, and he couldn’t move. So he stuck out his arms, which began to grow, longer and longer. Just as his fingers were about to touch her face, when he could detect the chill of her body on his nails-at that critical point between the right length and not quite long enough-his arms stopped growing. “Jinju,” he called out anxiously, “you can’t leave-not before we have spent even a single happy day together! I’ll marry you as soon as I’ve sold my garlic, and Î promise you’ll never again be buffeted by the wind, baked by the sun, soaked by the rain, or frozen by the snow! You’ll stay home to mind the children and work in the kitchen!”