Under the Red Flag (6 page)

Then the white boar turned and was headed toward the front gate, the black boar following behind. With a crash the wooden gate disappeared in a cloud of dust.

When the men could see clearly again, both pigs were out of sight. The men ran out and saw them rolling in the wheat field across the road. The white boar now stopped escaping and was engaged in the battle. Wheat seedlings and dark clods were flying around the two pigs that were kicking, jabbing, biting, tearing, grumbling.

As the men were going up to them, both boars stepped back a little, then dashed into each other. The two heads collided with such a clash that both animals staggered and fell to their sides, whining in pain. Around them, the wheat field was scarred with dark patches of soil stripped of the green seedlings.

“We must stop them. They’re ruining Sun Fu’s crops,” Liao said loudly to Ma, Leng, and the villagers who had just arrived to watch.

Leng went back to pick up a plank of the gate. “Give me a hand,” he said to Ma. “We’ll use this to separate them.”

Ma carried the other end of the plank. They walked to the boars, which were knocking at each other with their snouts.

Liao went to pick up the other plank of the gate. With the help of another man, he carried it into the field. They tried the strategy of inserting the plank horizontally between the pigs, and once the two were separated, each plank would hold a boar back. Liao kept approaching them from the side of his own pig, because he thought it knew its master and was less likely to turn upon him. After trying a few times, Liao and his helper succeeded in putting their plank between the pigs. He kept yelling at his boar, “Stop it! Stop, you beast that doesn’t know your own parents!”

For a short while the black boar seemed to calm down a little, but it started again. The dark body glided over the plank and
landed right on the white boar. With loud growls the two pigs began rolling about again. “Heavens, that black boar wants nothing but death,” someone in the crowd said. Second Dog was telling his pals how the white boar had toppled the latrine.

“Hey, you folks,” Liao shouted to the crowd, “give us a hand. The pigs have ruined enough things. Do you want the entire field to be turned up?”

Six young men ran over to help. Meanwhile Leng and Ma had managed to insert their plank between the pigs. The other board was immediately put in front of the black boar. Then both planks moved away slowly to separate the pigs as far as possible.

At last the fight was stopped. The two fighters, still whining, were actually too exhausted to continue. Besides, numerous hands were holding them down.

While Ma was tying a rope around his pig’s neck, a few youngsters threw stones at the white boar from a distance and shouted in unison, “Foreign pig, go home! Foreign pig, go home!”

“Little turtles,” Ma cursed, “my boar must’ve fucked your teachers pretty bad, or you wouldn’t be taught to be so patriotic.”

Liao didn’t have his rope with him. It must have been in the yard, so he turned to Second Dog, who happened to be close by, and said, “Can you hold this for me for a moment? I’m going to get my rope.” The boy took over, holding the corner of the plank and standing by the black boar. He looked at its gory face and felt bad about the ear stump, on which some bluebottles were busy sucking the blood.

Now that Ma had led his pig away, the men holding the black boar let it go. While people were wiping blood and dirt off their hands with wheat seedlings, the black boar sneaked aside and bit Second Dog in the left thigh. The boy was tossed down. A
large piece of pale flesh flapped through a triangular gap on his denim pants. He was twisting and gasping on the ground but couldn’t cry out. The white bone and the bluish tendons were displayed for quite a while before the astounded villagers could lay their hands on the boy to stop him from writhing in the soil. Meanwhile the black boar was bolting out of the field toward the willow bushes on the bank of the Green Snake Stream.

“Oh, my son!” Leng cried, holding Second Dog in his arms. “Save my boy!”

A leather waistband was immediately tied at the end of the boy’s thin thigh, and then a dirty yellow shirt was bound around the wound. In no time the shirt turned crimson. Two men ran off to fetch a tractor; the boy had to be sent to the hospital in Gold County without delay.

Liao returned with his rope. He had been in Leng’s yard for a while, looking not only for the hemp rope but also for the pig’s ear, which he had not found. Somebody must have stolen it. It couldn’t be a dog. Liao suspected Leng’s wife had committed the theft. Walking back to the crowd, he swore loudly from a distance, “Whoever stole my pig’s ear and eats it will have his bowels busted to ninety-nine pieces!”

“Fuck your grandma!” Leng jumped at Liao, grabbed the front of his jacket and punched him in the face. “Look at what your beast has done to my boy. If only I had a gun, a gun! Oh my, my boy.” He burst out crying again. Liao was too stunned to respond. He saw fifty feet away a body twitching slightly in the crowd.

He ran over and looked at the breathless boy on the ground. “Oh my heaven!” His calves cramped, and he couldn’t move and had to sit down.

The owner of the wheat seedlings, Sun Fu, arrived. Seeing the field leveled up, his first desire was to pour all kinds of curses on those who were responsible for the damage, but the sight of the injured boy restrained him from doing that. Instead, he went to join the crowd that was talking about the possibility of Second Dog’s death.

Liao dared not leave, though his stomach was gurgling. If the boy hadn’t been injured, he’d have left without delay for the warm supper at home. But had he done that now, all the villagers would have condemned him and his mating business would have been gone in a matter of days, so he stayed, sincerely hoping to do something, if possible, to comfort the Lengs. Since he couldn’t do anything, he kept a low profile, quietly listening to others describing the fight to those who had missed it. Who could imagine pigs were so destructive? Someone suggested the black boar must have had wild blood. By comparison, the white boar seemed tame and less harmful to humans. Maybe white pigs were safer to raise, especially if you had kids.

A tractor arrived ten minutes later and a large cotton blanket was thrown down. The boy was wrapped up and loaded in the trailer. The horn tooted urgently as the tractor was pulling away.

Holding the unconscious boy in her arms in the trailer, Leng’s wife cried loudly as though at a funeral. All the way to the hospital, Leng never stopped cursing Liao and Ma and their ancestors. Time and again he thought of ratsbane and swore to himself that he would poison the black boar.

Winds and Clouds over a Funeral

Sheng arrived at Gold County to work as a junior clerk in the military department at a large textile mill. Five days later he was informed that his grandmother had passed away. The departmental chief gave him three days to attend the funeral at home. Sheng went to the bus station at noon and got on a bus bound for Dismount Fort.

He used to enjoy seeing the landscape outside the county town, especially the long reservoir that supplied water for six counties, and the large concrete dam that blocked the gorge of a valley and connected two rocky hills. In the middle of the dam stood a small house like a pillbox with loopholes. When the bus crept down the winding road along the bank, the water would flash like large fish scales in the sun. But today Sheng had no appetite for scenery. He closed his eyes and tried to take a catnap. He didn’t feel very sad, though he loved his grandmother.

Four months before, when he returned home from the army, his grandmother had been so sick that few people thought she would survive the spring. At that time Sheng was waiting at home to be assigned a job, so he was free and could look after
her. Every day he talked with her and fed her; occasionally he washed her clothes. He also worked part-time. In the morning, together with a group of youngsters and old men, he loaded bricks onto trucks at a kiln. It was hard work, and in three months he made six hundred yuan—a large sum. He gave all the money to his mother, who saved it for him, or rather, for his wedding, though he didn’t have a fiancee yet. Since his father, Ding Liang, was the chairman of the commune, it wasn’t difficult for Sheng to find a full-time job in his hometown, but he preferred to go to Gold County.

Gradually, his grandmother recovered, could move about, and even began to cook for the household again. People were amazed and would say to her, “You’re lucky to have a good grandson looking after you.” She would smile and nod to agree.

In late February when she was very ill, she had thought she was dying. One evening she asked the entire family—her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson—to come to her bedside. She spoke to them calmly, “I’m dying. I have nothing to regret in my life. I’ve eaten whatever I wanted to eat and enjoyed a lot of ease and comfort. Death is death. When I’m dead, everything will be over for me. Don’t miss me. Don’t think of me. Just go on with your life.” She paused, then resumed, “But I have a wish. I want to be buried after I’m dead. I don’t want to be burned. Don’t take me to the crematory. I don’t want to go there. You don’t have to buy me a coffin. Just put me in a wooden box, nail it tightly, and bury it deep in the earth. Remember, deep in the earth, so that no tractor can plow me out when it turns the soil.”

“Don’t talk like this, Mom,” Ding Liang said. “You’ll be well soon.”

Yuanmin, the daughter-in-law, began sobbing.

“I want you to promise not to burn me,” the old woman insisted.

“All right, I promise,” Ding said without second thoughts.

Usually in the beginning of a year, quite a few old people died; if one could survive the spring there would be no problem for the rest of the year. Sheng was a little surprised by his grandmother’s death in the early summer. But he didn’t take it hard, for he was a young man hardened by his four years’ service in the army, where he had seen his comrades killed in live-ammunition maneuvers. His grandmother had lived eighty years; her death was like a ripe nut that falls.

Yet his mind couldn’t help turning to the burial, because nowadays the government encouraged people to cremate the dead in order to preserve arable land. Recently an editorial in the Party’s newspaper,
The People’s Daily
, said that in a hundred years there would be no land for growing crops if ground burials were not stopped. “We have to be responsible,” the article said, “not only for the dead but, more important, for the children to come. It is our duty to leave them an unclogged land.”

When Sheng reached home, there were a dozen people from the neighborhood in the yard. They were busy helping the Dings prepare the funeral, which was scheduled for next morning, since the hot weather made it impossible for the body to stay home for long. Under an awning in front of the house lay an old black coffin on small stools; Sheng was told that his grandmother’s body was inside. Two rows of wreaths with consolatory words on them stretched before the coffin, forming a fan-shaped space. His mother, red-eyed, came and secured a crepe around his right arm with safety pins. She told him, “Your grandma didn’t suffer.
This morning we found her still in bed. We called her. She didn’t answer. She was dead for a while. Just slept to death.” Tears trickled down her cheeks, and she wiped them off.

“It’s a happy ascent,” said Uncle Wang, who lived next door.

“This old woman was blessed,” said a middle-aged woman, a colleague of Yuanmin’s. “Without any suffering, such a clean, peaceful death. I hope I’ll die in the same way.”

Sheng felt a little comforted. His father came and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be too sad,” he told Sheng. “It’s time for her to go. She had a good life.”

Sheng nodded, feeling they shouldn’t be treating him as though he were a young boy. Then his father pulled him aside and said in a low voice, “I’ve told the Carpentry House to prepare a coffin. They don’t make coffins for the market anymore. We borrowed this one from them.” He pointed at the old coffin. “The new one will be ready tomorrow, but they don’t have good wood, only pine and aspen. We chose pine for her.”

“That’s all right. How much does it cost?”

“About a hundred and fifty.”

Sheng knew that was cheap, at a big discount, but his parents didn’t have the money. Though they both worked, they had a large debt. Fifteen years before, Sheng’s aunt, his father’s only sister, had gone mad and been sent to a mental hospital in Dalian City. Because she was unmarried at that time and he was the only man in the family, Ding had to pay for the expenses. He borrowed the money from the commune. Not until a few months before had the debt been cleared, but the Dings had not yet recovered from many years’ straits. Now, in addition to the coffin, there would be other expenses, such as the new clothes, cigarettes, wine, tea, candies, food, wreaths, and at least one feast.

Sheng found his mother in the kitchen and told her to use the money he had made at the kiln. Some neighbors overheard what he said. “Yuanmin,” an old woman praised, “what a good son you have!” Her words made Sheng blush a little.