Red Sorghum

those caught in the middle; the crowd looked like a black inchworm in motion. Shrieking children were knocked to the ground. Musicians plunged off the swaying bandstands, their screams merging with those of the people being trampled to create the most piercing scream in a whirlpool of chaotic screams. At least a dozen old and infirm people were trampled to death in the stampede, and months later the rotting carcasses still drew flies.
    The soldiers finally managed to quell the riot, and the hapless musicians returned to their bandstands. Realising the danger, most of the people headed to the outskirts to line the road to Grandma’s gravesite and wait for the procession to pass. Five Troubles ordered his troops to patrol the road.
    The badly shaken funeral master stood on his tall stool and shouted, ‘Lesser canopy!’
    Two Iron Society soldiers with white sashes around their waists carried up a small, sky-blue canopy, a yard tall, and rectangular, with a ridge down the middle and curled-up ends, like the heads of dragons. Inlaid pieces of glass the colour of blood formed the crown.
    ‘Host tablet, please!’ the funeral master shouted.
    Mother once told me that a host tablet is used for the ghost of the deceased. Later on, I learned that the host tablet actuallyindicates the social status of the deceased at the time of the funeral, and has nothing to do with ghosts; its common name is ‘spirit tablet’. Leading the procession, amid the flags of the honour guard, it provides testimony of status. Grandma’s original host tablet had been burned to a cinder during the fire, and the black paint on the hurried replacement, carried by two handsome Iron Society soldiers, was still wet. The script read:
    Born on the Morning of the Ninth Day of the Sixth Month in the Thirty-second Year of the Great Manchu Emperor Guangxu. Died at Midday on the Ninth Day of the Eighth Month in the Twenty-eighth Year of the Republic of China.
    Daughter of the Dai Family, First Wife of Yu Zhan’ao, Guerrilla Commander from Northeast Gaomi Township, Republic of China, and Leader of the Iron Society. Age at Time of Death: Thirty-two. Interred in the Yang of White Horse Mountain and the Yin of Black Water River.
    Grandma’s spirit tablet was draped with three feet of white bunting that lent it graceful solemnity. The Iron Society soldiers carefully placed it in the lesser canopy, then stood at attention beside the opening.
    The funeral master shouted, ‘Great canopy!’
    The drum-and-bugle corps struck up the music as a stately procession of sixty-four Iron Society soldiers carried in the large scarlet canopy, on which blue crowns the size of watermelons had been inlaid. The buzzing of the onlookers stopped, until the only sounds in the air were the sad strains of the musicians’ pipes and flutes and the anguished wails of mothers whose children had been trampled in the riot.
    A solitary, repulsive horsefly flitted around Granddad’s injured arm, intent on getting at the clotted dark blood. It darted away when he swatted at it and flew around his head, buzzing angrily. The mournful sound of a brass gong seized his heart and called up a string of tangled memories from the fleeting past.
    He was only eighteen when he murdered the monk, an act that forced him to flee his home and wander the four corners of the earth. By the time he returned to Northeast GaomiTownship at the age of twenty-two to become a bearer for the Wedding and Funeral Service Company, he had endured all the torments of the society of man, and had suffered the humiliation of sweeping streets in the red-and-black pants of a convict. With a heart as hard as fishbone and the physique of a gorilla, he had what it takes to become a formidable bandit. He carried with him always the humiliation of being slapped in the home of the Qi-family Hanlin scholar, an incident that occurred in Jiao City in 1920.
    Golden rays of blazing light shone down on the musicians in the tilted bandboxes, their cheeks bouncing like little balls as they tooted away, sweat dripping from their faces. People stood on tiptoe to watch the funeral, and the light from hundreds of pairs of eyes settled like anxious moonbeams over real people and papier-mâché figurines inside the circle, over an ancient, resplendent culture, as well as a reactionary, backward way of thinking.
    Father was wearing thick white knee-length mourning clothes, tied at the waist by a length of grey hemp, and a square mourning hat