“I give you my word,” Gao Yang promised.
A short while later, the cook returned with the braised pork and potatoes, some peeled green onions, a bowl of bean paste, a stack of wafer cakes, plus half a bottle of rice wine.
The guard removed the condemned prisoner’s manacles, then sat across from him, his revolver drawn, as the prisoner knelt before the food and wine. His hand shook as he poured the wine into a cup, then tipped his head back and tossed it down, managing a single “Father!” before he was choked up by a flood of tears.
2.
As the condemned man was taken out, he turned to give Gao Yang a smile, which plunged into his heart like a knife.
“Outside, Number Nine!” a jailer ordered through the open door. Gao Yang nearly jumped out of his skin. A stream of warm urine dampened his shorts.
“I’ve got a wife and kids at home, Officer! Make me eat shit or drink my own piss, but please don’t shoot me!”
“Who said anything about shooting you?” the shocked jailer replied.
“You’re not going to shoot me?”
“What makes you think China’s got so many bullets we can waste them on the likes of you? Let’s go. You’ll be happy to know your wife’s here to visit you.”
A weight fell from Gao Yang’s heart, and he nearly leaped through the cell door. As a pair of brass handcuffs was snapped on his wrists, he said, “Please don’t cuff me, Officer. I promise I wont run. Seeing them will just make my wife feel worse.”
“Rules are rules.”
“Look at my ankle. I couldn’t run on that if I wanted to.”
“Button your lip,” the jailer barked, “and be grateful we’re letting her visit you at all. Normally we don’t allow that before sentencing.”
He was led to a seemingly unoccupied room. “Go on, you’ve got twenty minutes.”
Hesitantly he pushed open the door. There, sitting on a stool cradling the baby, was his wife; his daughter, Xinghua, stood so close to her their legs were touching. His wife stood up abrupdy, and he watched her face scrunch up and her mouth pucker as she began to cry.
With his hands frozen to the doorframe, he tried to speak, but something hot and sticky stopped up his throat. It was the same feeling he’d had several days before as he watched his daughter in the acacia grove from the tree to which he was tied.
“Daddy!” Xinghua spread her hands to feel where he was standing. “Is that you, Daddy?”
3.
As his wife tossed a bundle of garlic onto the bed of the wagon, she clutched her belly and doubled over.
“Is it time?” an anxious, almost panicky Gao Yang asked.
“I tried,” she said, “but I think this is it.”
“Can’t you hold back for another day or two? At least until f ve sold the garlic?” There was a grudging edge to his voice. “If not a day or two late, a day or two earlier would have been fine. Why does it have to be now?”
“It’s not my fault… I didn’t will it to come now… If it was a bowel movement, I could hold off a little longer, but…” She gripped the railing, beads of sweat bathing her face.
“Okay, have your baby now,” he said with resignation. “Shall I go get Qingyun?”
“Not her,” she replied. “She charges too much, and she’s not very good. I’ll go to the clinic. I think it’s a boy.”
“Give me a son and I’ll buy you a nice, plump hen. I’ll even carry you on my back if you want.”
“I can walk. Just let me lean on you.” By then she was lying facedown on the ground.
“We’ll use the wagon.” After unloading the garlic, Gao Yang pulled the wagon through the gate, hitched up the donkey, then went back to get a comforter for the wagon bed.
“What else do we need?”
“A couple of wads of paper… everything’s ready… blue cloth bundle at the head of the kang.”
Gao Yang went inside, fetched the bundle, then carried his wife piggyback out the gate and laid her gendy in the wagon. Xinghua, awakened by the commotion, was screaming. Gao Yang walked back inside. “Xinghua,” he said, “your mother and I are going to fetch you a baby brother. Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going to get him?”
“In a burrow in the field.”
“I want to go with you.”
“Children aren’t allowed. We have to be alone to get one.” The moon still hadn’t risen as he drove his rickety wagon across the bumpy bridge, his wife moaning behind him. “What are you groaning about?” he asked, irritated by the sight of garlic-laden carts on the paved road. “You’re having a baby, not dying!”
The moans stopped. The wagon smelled of garlic mixed with his wife’s sweat.
The health clinic was located in a clearing by a graveyard. A cornfield lay to the east, a field of yams to the west, and a recently harvested field of garlic to the south. After reining in his wagon, Gao Yang went to locate the delivery room. He was stopped from knocking by a hand attached to a man whose features were unclear in the dark. “Someone’s having a baby in there,” the man said hoarsely. The glow of a cigarette dangling from his lips flickered on his face. The smoke smelled good.
“My wife’s having a baby, too,” Gao Yang said.
“Get in line,” the man said.
“Even to have a baby?”
“You stand in line for everything,” the man replied icily.
That was when Gao Yang noticed the other carts parked outside the delivery room: two ox-drawn, one horse-drawn, and a pushcart over which a blanket was draped.
“Is it your wife inside?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s it so quiet?”
“The noisy part’s over.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Don’t know yet.” The man walked up and put his ear to a crack in the door.
Gao Yang moved his wagon up closer.
The dark red, blurry moon had risen above the yard, where datura plants bloomed at the base of the wall, their flowers looking like ethereal white moths in the murky moonlight. Their pleasant medicinal odor vied with the stench from the outhouse, neither able to overpower the other. Gao Yang moved his wagon up next to the three carts: pregnant women lay in each, either faceup or facedown, their men standing nearby.
As the moonlight brightened, the other carts and their occupants became increasingly visible. The two oxen were chewing their cuds, glistening threads of spittle suspended from their lips like spun silk. Two of the men were smoking; the third was waving his whip idly. Sure that he’d seen them somewhere, Gao Yang assumed they were farmers from villages in his township whom he’d met up with at one time or another. The expectant mothers were a fright: grimy faces, ratty hair, scarcely human. The one in the westernmost cart filled the air with hideous wails that had her husband storming around the area and grumbling, “Stop that crying-stop it! You’ll have people laughing at us.”
The delivery-room door opened and a light beneath the eaves snapped on. A doctor in white, a woman, stood in the doorway, her hands encased in elbow-length rubber globes that were dripping wet- blood, most likely. The man pacing the area ran up to her. “What is it, Doctor?” he asked anxiously.
“A little girl,” the doctor mumbled.
Hearing that he was the father of a little girl, the man rocked a time or two, then fell over backwards, cracking his head resoundingly on tile, which he apparendy smashed.
“What’s that all about?” the doctor remarked. “Times have changed, and girls are every bit as good as boys. Where would you males come from if not for us females? Out from under a rock?”
Slowly the man sat up, trancelike. Then he began to wail and weep, like a crazy man, punctuating his cries with reproachful shouts of “Zhou Jinhua, you worthless woman, my life’s over, thanks to you!”
His shouts were joined by sounds of crying from inside: Zhou Jinhua, Gao Yang assumed. The absence of infant sounds puzzled him. Jinhua hadn’t smothered her own baby, had she?