Red Sorghum

it out . . . not for my sake . . . for Northeast Gaomi Township. . . .’
    Bong! Bong
! This time the sound of the gong nearly tore Granddad’s heart to shreds.
    Squeezing his eyes shut, he began raising himself up, crazily, suicidally (amid the chaos of lifting the coffin, Second Master Cao saw the bearer called Little Rooster quickly thrust his lips into the bowl on top of the coffin and take a big gulp of wine). With a tremor, the coffin rose up off the stools. The deathly stillness of the room was broken only by the cracking of human joints.
    Granddad had no way of knowing that his face was as pale as death. All he knew was that the thick cotton rope wasstrangling him, that his neck was about to snap, and that his vertebrae were compressed until they must have looked like flattened hawthorns. When he found he was unable to straighten up, it took only a split second for despair to undermine his resolve, and his knees began to buckle like molten steel. The quicksilver shifted, causing the head of the coffin to press down even harder on him. The bowl on top sloped to one side, the colourless wine inside touching the rim and threatening to overflow. Members of the Qi family stared at it wide-eyed.
    Second Master Cao gave Granddad a vicious slap.
    Granddad would later recall that the slap had set his ears ringing, and that all feeling in his waist, legs, shoulders, and neck seemed to be squeezed out of his consciousness, as though claimed by some unknown spirit. A curtain of black gauze fell in front of his eyes, and he straightened up, raising the coffin more than three feet off the ground. Six bearers immediately slipped under the coffin on all fours and supported it on their backs. Granddad finally released a mouthful of sticky breath. The breath that followed seemed to him warm and gentle as it rose slowly and passed through his throat. . . .
    The coffin was lugged past all seven gates and placed in a bright-blue great canopy.
    As soon as the thick white cloth rope fell from Granddad’s back, he forced his mouth open, and streams of scarlet blood spurted from his mouth and nostrils. . . .

3
    DRESSED IN MOURNING clothes, Father stood facing southwest on a high bench and thumped the waxwood butt of his rifle on the ground as he shouted: ‘Mother – Mother – head southwest – a broad highway – a long treasure boat – a fleet-footed steed – lots of travelling money – Mother – rest in sweetness – buy off your pain –’
    The funeral master had ordered him to sing this send-offsong three times, since only a loved one’s calls can guide the spirit to the southwestern paradise. But he got through it only once before choking on hot, sour tears of grief. Another long-drawn-out ‘Mom’ escaped from his lips, fanned out, and glided unsteadily in the air like a scarlet butterfly, its wings carrying it to the southwest, where the wilderness was broad and the airstream swirled, and where the bright sunlight raised a white screen over the Black Water River. Powerless to scale the translucent screen, the wisp of ‘Mom’ turned and headed east after a momentary hesitation, despite Father’s desire to send her to the southwestern paradise. But Grandma didn’t want to go there. Instead she followed the meandering dike, taking fistcakes to Granddad’s troops, turning her head back from time to time to signal her son, my father, with her golden eyes.
    Twenty days earlier, Father had gone with Granddad to dig up Grandma’s grave. It was definitely not a good day for swallows, for a dozen sodden clouds, like torn cotton wadding, hung in the low sky, reeking like rotting fish and spoiled shrimp. An ill wind carried a stream of sinister air down the Black Water River, along whose banks the corpses of dogs shattered by muskmelon grenades during the battle with humans the previous winter lay decomposing amid the sallow water grass; swallows migrating north from Hainan Island flew across the river with dread, as frogs below began their mating ritual, gaunt bodies caught up in the passions of love following a winter of hibernation.
    Father stood with Granddad and nineteen Iron Society soldiers, all carrying hoes and pickaxes, at the head of Grandma’s grave. Golden flowers of bitterweed, the first of the year, dotted the faded black earth of the column of mounds.
    Three minutes of silence.
    ‘Douguan, you’re sure this is the one?’ Granddad asked.
    ‘It’s this one,’ Father replied. ‘I