Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

was out there tossing feed in a sifter, seeming bigger than he was in the daylight, as a broad moonbeam lit up the sifter and his two large hands. The sound — shush shush — emerged rhythmically from the sifter, which seemed to hang in the air; Dad’s hands looked like appendages to it. The feed was dumped into the trough, after which came the slurping sound of a bovine tongue licking it up. I saw the ox’s shining eyes, I smelled its hot bovine odor. Blackie, I heard Dad say, tomorrow we start the plowing, so eat up. You’ll need your strength. We’ll do ourselves proud, Blackie, and give those socialists an eyeful. Lan Lian is the world’s greatest farmer, and Lan Lian’s ox is the world’s greatest ox! The ox shook his large head in response. They want me to put a nose ring on you, Dad continued. Bullshit! My ox is like my son, more human than animal. I treat you like a man, not an ox. Do people put nose rings on men? And they want me to geld you. Double bullshit! I told them to go home and geld their sons! What do you think of that, Blackie? Before you came, Blackie, I had a donkey, the best donkey in the world. A hard worker, like you, more human than animal, and prone to violence. He’d still be alive today if they hadn’t killed him during the steel-smelting campaign. But on second thought, if that donkey hadn’t passed on, I wouldn’t have you. I knew you were the one I wanted the minute I laid eyes on you at the livestock market.
    Blackie, I can’t help feeling that you’re the reincarnation of that donkey, that fate has brought us together!
    I couldn’t see my dad’s face in the shadows, only his hands resting on the feed trough, but I could see the ox’s aquamarine eyes. The ox’s coat, chestnut colored when we first brought him home, had darkened until it was nearly black, which is why Dad called him Blackie. I sneezed, startling Dad. Flustered, he slinked out of the shed.
    “Oh, it’s you, son. What are you doing standing here? Go back inside and get some sleep.”
    “How about you, Dad?”
    He looked up at the stars.
    “All right,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”
    As I lay there half asleep, I could sense Dad crawling quietly out of bed, and I wondered why So as soon as he was out the door, I got up, and once I was out in the yard, the moonlight seemed brighter, almost like undulating sheets of silk above me — immaculately white, glossy, and so cool I felt I could tear them out of the sky and fold them around me or roll them into balls and put them in my mouth. I looked over at the ox shed, which had grown bigger and brighter, obliterating all the darkness; the ox dung looked like white steamed buns. But, to my amazement, neither Dad nor the ox was in the shed. I knew I’d been right behind him and had watched him enter the shed, so how could he have simply vanished? And not only him, but the ox as well. They couldn’t have been transmuted into moonbeams, could they? I walked over to the gate and looked around. Then I understood. Dad and the ox had gone out. But what were they doing out there in the middle of the night?
    There were no sounds on the street. The trees, the walls, the ground, all silver; even the propaganda slogans on the walls were dazzling white: “Ferret Out Those in Power within the Party Who Are Taking the Capitalist Road,” “Pursue the Four Clean-ups Campaign to its Conclusion!” Ximen Jinlong had written that one. What a genius! I’d never before seen him write a slogan, but he’d walked up that day carrying a bucket filled with black ink and an ink-saturated brush made of twisted hemp fibers, and written that one on our wall. Every stroke was vigorous, every line straight and even, every hook powerful. At least as big as a pregnant goat, each character drew gasps of admiration from anyone who saw them. My brother was the best-educated and most highly respected youngster in the village. Even the college students who made up the Four Clean-ups Brigade and other brigade workers not only liked him, they were his friends. He was already a member of the Communist Youth League and, or so I heard, had submitted his application to join the Party. An active participant in Party activities, he drew as close as possible to Party members in order to help his case. Chang Tianhong, a talented member of the Four Clean-ups Brigade, and a former voice student at the provincial art academy, taught my brother elements of Western styles of singing. There were