Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

‘Does that mean I’ve wasted my time coming here?’ Granddad asked unhappily.

Spotted Neck tossed Granddad’s two pistols to him. He barely caught one; the other landed on the ground, its muzzle buried in the mud. He picked it up, shook off the mud, and wiped the barrel on his sleeve.

One of the bandits walked up to blindfold Granddad, but Spotted Neck waved him off. ‘No need for that,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Come on, let’s take a bath in the river. We’ll walk part of the way with the proprietor here.’

One of the bandits led the mule. Granddad fell in behind the animal, followed by Spotted Neck and his gang of bandits. When they reached the riverbank, Spotted Neck looked at Granddad with a cold glint in his eyes. Granddad wiped the mud and sweat from his face. ‘I guess I was wrong to come,’ he said, ‘wrong to come. This heat’s enough to kill a man.’

He took off his muddy clothes, casually tossed the two pistols onto the pile of clothing, then ran down to the river and dived in, splashing around like a fritter in hot oil. His head bobbed up and down; his arms flailed like those of a man trying to pull up a clump of water grass.

‘Doesn’t he know how to swim?’ one of the bandits asked.

Spotted Neck just snorted.

‘He’ll drown, chief!’

‘Go in and drag him out!’ Spotted Neck ordered.

Four bandits dived in and carried Granddad, who had swallowed a caskful of water, up to the bank, where he lay like a dead man.

‘Bring his mule over,’ Spotted Neck said.

One of the men led the mule over.

‘Lay him across the mule’s back,’ Spotted Neck said.

The bandits lifted him up onto the mule’s back, his bloated belly pressing down on the saddle.

‘Make it run!’ Spotted Neck said.

With one bandit leading the mule, another behind, and two more holding on to Granddad, the mule trotted down the riverbank; by the time it had travelled about the distance of two arrow shots, a murky column of water shot out of Granddad’s mouth.

The bandits lifted Granddad off the mule and laid him out naked on the dike. He looked up at the tall, hulking Spotted Neck with eyes as dull as those of a dead fish.

Spotted Neck removed his rain cape and said with a friendly smile, ‘You just got a new lease on life, young man.’

Granddad’s ashen cheeks twitched painfully.

Spotted Neck and his men stripped and dived into the river. Excellent swimmers, they had a frolicking water fight, sending sprays of the Black Water River flying in all directions.

Slowly Granddad got to his feet and draped Spotted Neck’s rain cape over his shoulders. After blowing his nose and clearing his throat, he flexed his arms and legs. His saddle was dripping wet, so he dried it off with Spotted Neck’s clothes. The mule touchingly stretched its satiny, glistening neck towards Granddad. He patted it. ‘Be patient, Blackie, be patient.’

Granddad picked up his pistols as the bandits swam towards the riverbank like a flock of ducks. He fired seven shots in perfect cadence. The brains and blood of seven bandits were spattered across the cruel, heartless waters of the Black Water River.

Granddad fired seven more shots.

By then Spotted Neck had crawled up onto the shore. The Black Water River had washed his skin as clean as a snowflake. Standing fearlessly in a clump of yellowing grass at the river’s edge, he commented with considerable admiration, ‘Nice shooting!’

The blazing, golden sun lit up the drops of water rolling down his naked body.

‘Spotty,’ Granddad asked him, ‘did you touch my woman?’

‘What a rotten shame!’

‘What got you into this business, anyway?’

‘You won’t die in bed,’ Spotted Neck replied.

‘Aren’t you going back in the water?’

Spotted Neck backed up until he was standing in the shallow water. ‘Shoot me here,’ he said, pointing to his heart. ‘The head is so messy!’

‘All right,’ Granddad agreed.

The seven bullets Granddad fired surely turned Spotted Neck’s heart into a honeycomb. He merely moaned once as he fell backward, his legs sticking out of the water like fins for a moment before he sank to the bottom like a fish.

The following morning, Granddad and Grandma rode their black mules over to the home of Great-Granddad, who was melting silver into longevity ingots. When they burst in on him, he knocked over the smelting kettle in alarm.

‘I hear Nine Dreams Cao rewarded you with ten silver dollars,’ Granddad said.

‘Spare me, worthy son-in-law….’ Great-Granddad fell to his knees.

Granddad took out ten silver dollars and stacked them on Great-Granddad’s shiny scalp.

‘Hold your head up straight, and don’t move!’ he demanded.

He moved back a few steps. Pow pow . Two silver dollars sailed into the air.

Two more shots sent two more silver dollars flying.

Before Granddad had fired ten shots, Great-Granddad lay in a blubbering heap on the floor.

Grandma took out a hundred silver dollars and tossed them on the floor, which shone like silver.

GRANDDAD AND FATHER returned to their razed home, where they retrieved fifty silver dollars from a hiding place in the wall. Then, dressed as beggars, they went to a small shop in town, near the railway station, where a red lantern hung. They bought five hundred bullets from a heavily made-up woman, then hid out for several days, until they found a way to sneak out through the town gate. They planned to settle accounts with Pocky Leng.

On the afternoon of the sixth day following the ambush and battle at the Black Water River bridge — the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in the year 1939 — Granddad and Father drove a billy goat, nearly dead from the dung building up inside it, to the sorghum field at the western edge of the village. More than four hundred Japs and six hundred of their puppet soldiers had encircled our village like a steel hoop on a barrel. Granddad and Father hurriedly cut open the billy goat’s stitched-shut rectum, and after relieving itself of pounds of dung, it dumped several hundred cartridges onto the ground. They quickly scooped them up, ignoring the stinking filth, and engaged the invaders in a solemn and stirring battle in the sorghum field.

Although they killed dozens of Japanese soldiers and dozens of puppet soldiers, they were still outnumbered. As night fell, the villagers tried to breach the encirclement at the southern edge of the village, where there was no gunfire, but were met by a withering hail of machine-gun fire. Hundreds of men and women were killed instantly in the sorghum field, and their mortally wounded comrades crushed countless stalks of red sorghum in their own death agonies.

The Japs torched the village before withdrawing. Flames shot up into the heavens, and kept burning, turning half the sky white. The moon that night was full and blood-red, but the war below turned it pale and weak, like a faded paper cutout hanging grimly in the sky.

‘Where to now, Dad?’

No response.

THE GLORIOUS HISTORY of man is filled with legends of dogs and memories of dogs: despicable dogs, respectable dogs, fearful dogs, pitiful dogs. When Granddad and Father wavered at one of life’s crossroads, hundreds of dogs under the leadership of the three from our family — Blackie, Green, and Red — clawed out pale paths in the earth near the sorghum field south of our village, where the massacre of our people had occurred. By that time, our dogs were nearly fifteen years old, a time of youth for humans, but an advanced age for dogs, an age of confidence.

That massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 decimated our village and turned hundreds of dogs into homeless strays. Drawn to the stench of human blood and gore, they were easy targets for Granddad and Father, who lay in wait at the bridgehead over the Black Water River. Granddad’s pistol barked loudly as it emitted puffs of scalding smoke, its barrel turning dark red under the autumn moon, which was as white and cold as frost. Father’s intense longing for Grandma during lulls in his pitched battle with the crazed, corpse-eating dogs makes me feel lost when I think of it, lost like a homeless stray.