Su Tong - The Boat to Redemption

Barge number seven was the last to unload, which made sense, since livestock is always hard to control. The stevedores, under the supervision of a man from the Pork Association, came aboard with bamboo poles and ropes, and were greeted by terrified squeals. When the first animal was carried off upside-down, its four legs tied to a pole, the others created a major disturbance, causing the barge to rock precariously as if tossed about by high waves. And still my father refused to emerge. Something must be wrong in there. I picked up a piece of coal, aimed at the cabin door, and threw it. ‘What are you doing in there, Dad?’

The porthole opened and Father’s hand made a brief appearance before vanishing again. Why was he hiding in there? I coughed. Something stirred, but he still wouldn’t come out. Busy as he was, Desheng glanced my way and tapped the deck of barge number eight with his foot as a signal for me to come aboard. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘Don’t stand there like an idiot. Are you waiting for your dad to send a written invitation?’

I shook my head. ‘I can come aboard or not, it makes no difference to me. I will if he wants me to, and I’ll stay here if he doesn’t.’

Desheng’s wife giggled and poked her husband. ‘He wants his dad to ask him to come aboard,’ she said as she picked up a pole, ran to the bow of her boat and banged on our cabin. ‘Come out of there, Chairman Ku,’ she shouted. ‘Zhao Chunmei is gone, but your son’s here. He wants to know if you want him back on the barge.’

Still no sign of him. But the stirrings within grew in intensity. Something hit the deck with a bang, followed by the unmistakable sound of one of Father’s throaty moans. Then his head emerged slowly through the porthole. His face was the colour of clay, but his hand, which followed his head out, was covered with blood. He looked at me with a dull expression and waved his bloody hand. ‘Come here!’ he said. ‘Help me! Hurry!’

At first I thought he’d cut his finger, and as I ran across Desheng’s barge I shouted for him to get his first-aid kit. But I stopped dead when I got inside. He hadn’t cut his finger. I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I could not believe what he’d done.

You won’t believe it either. The stench of blood permeated the air, and blood ran between the cracks of the floorboards. A pair of scissors lay on Father’s favourite sofa. His trousers were down around his knees and there was so much blood in his crotch that I could barely see his penis. At first it looked whole, but then I saw that the front half was hanging by a thread. Rocking unsteadily, he leaned slowly towards me. ‘Help me!’ he said. ‘Use those scissors. It’s my enemy, you must help me get rid of it.’

I was scared witless. Desheng’s wife shrieked, but was quickly shouted down by her husband. ‘What are you standing around here for? Go on, get out!’ With studied calmness he crouched down and examined my father’s bloody organ. ‘It’s still connected!’ he exclaimed happily. ‘That’s a good sign. Let’s rush him to the hospital and get it sewn back on.’

I wrapped a blanket around Father’s waist and Desheng carried him ashore on his back, watched by all the barge people and stevedores. ‘What happened?’ they asked as I ran past. ‘Who stabbed him? All that blood!’

Desheng’s wife was running alongside us, helping by clearing the curious out of our way. ‘Haven’t you ever seen blood before? This isn’t a movie, you damned rubberneckers, so get out of our way.’

‘Did Dongliang stab his old man?’ someone asked.

‘What do you use for a brain?’ she said. ‘Whoever heard of a son stabbing his father? A demon got to him, and it’s all Zhao Chunmei’s fault. She brought that demon down on him.’

Desheng ran on to the pier with my father on his back. Patches of bright sunlight dotted the path, and a strange feeling came over me. Father and I seemed to be heeding Zhao Chunmei’s call, running down a path she’d laid out in white funeral garb. Though I felt the sticky blood leaking on to me, I was oblivious to his weight as I helped support him — from the waist down he was as light as a feather. All the curses that had been flung his way had been fulfilled. Men’s curses, women’s curses, curses by family members and mortal enemies — all fulfilled. Father’s slightly crooked but extraordinarily vigorous member, a one-time bully, an enemy of the people, of women and of men, and, most significantly, of himself, had at last been subdued by Father himself.

He was unconscious by the time we reached the Milltown Hospital, but he’d managed two sentences to Desheng before he lost consciousness. ‘I’m not afraid of Zhao Chunmei, Desheng,’ he said. ‘Brief pain is better than prolonged suffering, so now I can make amends.’ Then he added, ‘I guarantee you that I’ll never again be unworthy of the spirit of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang.’

LATER ON I became a deckhand.

On my trips back to town, there were kids who didn’t know my name, but who followed me and heard adults call out my nickname, Kongpi. If any of them didn’t know who Kongpi was, they said: the fleet’s kongpi . And if that still didn’t do it, they added a footnote: the son of Half-Dick. It was no secret. Everyone in Milltown knew I had a strange and laughable father. He only had half a dick.

I was in good health for the first year or so. But then one day I discovered that I was walking strangely. Following my father’s scandalous act with the scissors, every time I went ashore I was careful to avoid traces of red on the ground, afraid they might be drops of his shameful blood, and I averted my eyes from white bits of rubbish, worried they could be strips of Zhao Chunmei’s mourning garb. One afternoon, as I was walking along with the sun beating down on me, I found myself staring at my shadow as it moved across the cobblestones. It looked a little like a duck, and at first I thought the distortion was caused by the angle of the sun, so I adjusted my walking style and cocked my head to see what my shadow looked like now. I watched as the outline twisted awkwardly, uglier than ever, now a goose, and suddenly I was aware that I really was walking strangely, my feet splayed outward, just like Desheng and Chunsheng. But I was nothing like those two, who went ashore barefoot. I always wore shoes. Having grown up on the water, they had developed a peculiar walking style that was well adapted to the boat’s motion. I’d walked on land for fifteen years, so why were my feet splayed like theirs? I took off my shoes, removed the insoles, shook out the sand and pebbles, and examined them inside and out. Nothing there. So I sat by the side of the road and took a good look at my feet. They were dirty, but that’s all. Strange. Why would two good feet suddenly forget how to walk the way they’d done for more than a decade? Why had they started acting as if they belonged to a duck or a goose?

Walking with splayed feet is ugly. For a woman, it’s humiliating. What kind of woman walks with her legs and feet spread out like that? Is it supposed to be some sort of come-on? And if a man walks that way, he can’t blame anyone for thinking it’s because an abnormally heavy penis and testicles get in the way.

So I sat by the side of the road and analysed the differences between my feet and those of Desheng and Chunsheng. I concluded that I was an acute splayed-feet walker who’d been influenced not by other seamen, but by my own father. Ever since his damaged penis had been restored to a degree of functionality, thanks to reconstructive surgery, I’d been burdened with the feeling that the nearly severed half was now attached to my own body, that my underwear was too tight and that my crotch was getting heavier by the day. I also felt as if my brain was affected, that splay-footed manner of walking was determined not by the feet but by the brain. Even an idiot knows the difference between a river and dry land, but my brain had merged the two and sent messages of caution to my feet: Careful, careful, use as much strength as you need to walk steadily and guard against the ground moving, against the motion of waves and undercurrents and eddies . Once I obeyed those messages, stepping cautiously on the cobblestones and vaguely noting the shadow my head cast, a mysterious image lit up in my brain, and from then on, every road on the riverbank was either my port or starboard deck, and I trod it carefully. From then on, Milltown was a camouflaged body of water, which I had to navigate slowly.