Pow!

Mother, rumours that I, as the son, referred to as a passing wind, for the benefit of my Father, wherever he was. They were envious of my mother's ability to drive a tractor, and the mouth of an envious woman is little more than a stinking bunghole; words that emerge from it are nothing but a smelly passing wind. Money lined the pockets of Lao Lan, our village head and an impressive specimen of a man who grandly drove a truck into the city to sell his meat, someone who had seen every kind of woman there was. How could someone like that be attracted to my mother, whose hair was seldom combed, whose face was dirty more often than clean and who dressed in little better than rags? I remember him teaching my mother to manoeuvre the tractor on the village threshing ground one winter morning soon after a red sun had emerged over the horizon. A patina of frost covered the nearby haystacks as a red rooster perched on the wall, stretched out its neck and crowed loudly, momentarily drowning out the squeals of pigs waiting to be slaughtered. Puffs of milky white smoke rose from village chimneys; a train pulled out of the station and headed off into the sun. Mother was wearing one of Father's old khaki jackets—it was much too big for her—with a red electric cord round her waist as a belt. She sat on the tractor seat and gripped the handlebars. Lao Lan sat behind her on the edge of the cab, legs spread, hands on top of hers—a true hands-on lesson. Seen from front or back, he clearly had his arms round her. Though she was dressed like a train-station porter, devoid of any trace of femininity, she was still a woman, and that was enough for some of the village women's tongues to wag and for some of the village men's pulses to quicken. Lao Lan was rich, powerful and famously lecherous. Just about every remotely attractive female in the village had flirted with him at one time or another, and he didn't care what people said about him. But Mother was a woman whose husband had left her, and talk about widows is always particularly nasty, so she had to be careful not to give the village gossips anything to talk about. Despite that, she let him teach her his way; it was a sort of ‘blinded by greed’ decision. The tractor's diesel engine roared into life as wisps of steam rose from the radiator and the smokestack belched clouds of black smoke, all combining to give the lie to husky exhaustion and potent vigour. The machine carried them recklessly in circles, like a tethered ox being whipped to keep moving. Mother's pale cheeks began to flush and her ears turned as red as a rooster's cockscomb. It was bitterly cold that morning, a dry, windless cold that nearly froze the blood in my veins and nipped painfully, like a cat, at my skin. And yet sweat dotted Mother's face and steam rose from her hair. It was her first time with a machine, her maiden attempt to steer a vehicle of any kind, even one as simple as a walking tractor. She was in obvious high spirits, unbelievably excited. What other explanation could there be for breaking out into a sweat on one of the coldest days of the year? The light in her eyes stunned me by its beauty, the first time I'd seen anything like it since Father had run off. After a dozen revolutions on the threshing floor, Lao Lan jumped off with an agility that belied his obesity. As Mother tensed and looked round to see where he was, the tractor lurched towards a ditch. ‘Turn the handlebars!’ Lao Lan screamed. ‘Turn the handlebars!’ Mother clenched her teeth, tightened the muscles in her cheeks and managed to steer the tractor away only seconds before ploughing into the ditch. Lao Lan had been turning in place, following her progress, never taking his eyes off her, as if a rope were tied round her waist and the other end clenched in his hand, and shouting instructions: ‘Look straight, not at the wheels, they won't fall off. Don't look at your hands. They're too coarse, not worth looking at. That's it, ride it like a bicycle. I told you that you could strap a sow into that seat and it could drive it in circles. But you're no sow, you're a grown woman! Give it some gas, what are you afraid of? All dickhead machines are alike. You don't want to spoil it, just treat it like a pile of junk. The more you baby it, the more trouble it'll cause. That's it, now you've got it, you've stopped being an apprentice. You can drive it home. Mechanization is the future of agriculture. Know who said that? Do you,