Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

Granddad knew that Detachment Leader Leng and the Jiao-Gao soldiers still had their hearts set on these guns. The night before, when he and the others were asleep in a tent at the foot of the village wall, Blind Eye, who was keeping guard, heard something bump up against a wax tree on the downward slope. Then he detected the soft sound of footsteps coming towards the tent; he could tell there were two people, one brave, the other not so brave. He could hear them breathing. Raising his rifle, he shouted, ‘Halt right there!’ The men threw themselves to the ground in panic and began crawling backward. Getting a fix on the direction, Blind Eye aimed and pulled the trigger Bang! He heard the men roll down the slope and dart in among the stand of wax trees. He aimed and fired again. Someone yelled. Granddad and the others, awakened by the gunfire, ran up, weapons in hand, just in time to see two dark figures dart across the ditch and vanish into the sorghum field.

‘There’s nobody around, Dad,’ my father said.

‘Remember this well,’ Granddad said.

‘I will. It belongs to Beauty’s family.’

‘If I die,’ Granddad said, ‘come get these guns and use them as a bartering chip to join up with the Jiao-Gao regiment. They’re at least better than Detachment Leader Leng’s troops.’

‘Let’s not join up with anyone,’ Father said. ‘Let’s recruit our own army. We still have a machine gun.’

Granddad snorted with a wry smile. ‘It’s not as easy as you think, son,’ he said. ‘I’m worn out.’

After Father uncoiled the rope from the rickety windlass, Granddad tied it around the bundle of guns.

‘Are you sure the well is dry?’ Granddad asked.

‘I’m sure Wang Guang and I played hide-and-seek here once.’ Father bent over to peer into the well, where he saw the outlines of two bodies in the dark recesses.

‘Dad, there’s somebody down there!’ he screamed.

They knelt on the step at the mouth of the well and strained to see who it was.

‘It’s Beauty!’ Father said.

‘Take a good look. Is she alive?’

‘I think I can see her breathing — there’s a snake coiled beside her — and her baby brother Harmony’s there, too….’ Father’s words echoed off the walls of the well.

‘Are you afraid to go down there?’

‘I’ll go down, Dad. Beauty’s my best friend!’

‘Watch out for that snake.’

‘Snakes don’t scare me.’

Granddad untied the well rope from the bundle of guns and secured it around Father’s waist, then lowered him slowly into the well, keeping the weight on the windlass.

‘Be careful,’ Father heard Granddad say from the top of the well as his foot touched a protruding brick and he stepped down on the floor. The black snake with the colourful band raised its head menacingly and flicked out its forked tongue, hissing at Father. During his days of fishing and crabbing at the Black Water River, Father had learned how to deal with snakes, and he and Uncle Arhat had eaten one, baked in dry cow dung. Arhat told him that snake meat is a cure for leprosy; after eating it, they had both felt hot all over.

Now Father stood at the bottom of the well without moving, and, the instant the snake lowered its head, he reached down, grabbed it by the tail, and shook it with all his might until he heard its bones crack. Then he grabbed it just behind the head and twisted it hard. ‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘stand clear!’

Granddad backed away from the mouth of the well as the half-dead snake came flying out. Granddad’s skin crawled. ‘That little imp’s got the nerves of a thief!’

Father helped Beauty sit up and shouted in her ear, ‘Beauty! Beauty! It’s me, Douguan. I’m here to save you!’

Father tied the rope around Beauty’s waist. Granddad carefully turned the windlass and hauled Mother out of the well. Then he brought up the body of my young uncle.

‘Dad, send the guns down!’ Father said.

‘Stand clear.’

The windlass creaked as the bundle of guns was lowered into the well. Then Father untied the rope and put it around his waist.

‘Pull me up, Dad,’ he said.

‘Is the rope secure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make sure it’s tight. This is no time to be careless.’

‘It’s good and tight, Dad.’

‘Did you tie a square knot?’

‘What’s wrong with you, Dad? It was me who tied the rope around Beauty, wasn’t it?’

Father and Granddad looked down at Beauty as she lay on the ground. Her skin was stretched taut over her cheekbones, her eyes were sunken, her gums protruded, and her hair was a tangled mess. Her baby brother’s fingernails had turned blue.

MOTHER’S HEALTH IMPROVED under the loving care of the lame woman Liu. She and Father had been good friends, but after her rescue from the well they were like brother and sister. Then Granddad came down with a serious case of typhoid fever, and at times he seemed on the brink of death. Once, as he lay there semiconscious, he hallucinated that he smelled the sweet fragrance of sorghum porridge, so Father and the others quickly picked some sorghum, and the woman Liu cooked it in front of Granddad until it was soft and pasty. After he ate a bowlful, the capillaries in his nose burst and released a torrent of thick, dark blood. His appetite returned then, and he was on the mend. By mid-October, he was able to hobble out into the garden to soak up the warm rays of the late-autumn sun.

I heard that at the time a clash between the troops of Pocky Leng and Little Foot Jiang occurred near Wang Gan Aqueduct, with heavy casualties on both sides. But Granddad was far too sick to worry about that — or anything else, for that matter.

Father and the others threw up a few temporary shelters in the village, then scavenged the junk piles for the odds and ends they would need to harvest enough sorghum to get them through the winter and the spring. Autumn rains had fallen steadily since the end of August, turning the dark earth into a sea of mud. Half of the rain-soaked stalks lay rotting on the ground, where the fallen seeds had taken root and were already beginning to germinate. Tender green stalks crowded their way through the spaces between the blue-grey and dark-red patches of decay, and the ears of sorghum swayed in the air or dragged along the ground like bushy, matted foxtails. Steel-grey rainclouds, heavy with water, scurried across the sky, and cold, hard raindrops thudded into the stalks. Flocks of crows struggled to stay aloft on wings weighted down with moisture. During those foggy days, sunlight was as precious as gold.

Father, who ruled the roost after Granddad fell ill, led Wang Guang, Dezhi, Guo Yang (whom we called Gimpy), Blind Eye, and Beauty over to the marshland, where they fought the corpse-eating dogs with rifles. The ensuing battles would turn Father into a marksman.

Every once in a while, Granddad asked him weakly, ‘What are you doing, son?’

With a murderous frown creasing his brow, Father would say, ‘We’re killing the dogs, Dad!’

‘Let it lie,’ Granddad would say.

‘I can’t,’ Father would reply. ‘We can’t let them feed on people’s bodies.’

Nearly a thousand corpses had piled up in the marshland, all laid out by the Jiao-Gao soldiers, who lacked the time to give them a proper burial. The few spadefuls of dirt that had been tossed haphazardly over the corpses were washed away by the autumn rains. The bloated corpses produced an exceptional stench that brought crows and mad dogs scurrying over to rip open the abdomens, which intensified the reek of death.

When the dog pack was at full strength, they were probably six hundred in all, made up primarily of village dogs whose masters lay rotting in the marshland. The remainder, those that came and went in a frenzy, were dogs from neighbouring villages that had homes to return to. They were led by our family’s three dogs: Red, Green, and Blackie.