Red Sorghum

Water River, which was half as broad as the Black Water River and meandered through alkaline plains. Its grey waters looked like dull glass that gave off a murky glare.

8
    COUNTY MAGISTRATE NINE Dreams Cao had used a brilliant stratagem in the late autumn of 1928 to wipe out the bandits of Northeast Gaomi Township led by my granddad. Decades later, when Granddad was in the mountains of Hokkaido, this tragic page in history was always before him. He thought back to how smug he had felt as he was driven in his black Chevrolet sedan on the bumpy Northeast Gaomi Township mountain road, an unwitting decoy who had led eight hundred good men into a trap. His limbs grew ice-cold at the memory of those eight hundred men lined up in a remote gulley outside Jinan City to be mowed down by machine guns. While he was roasting fine-scaled silver carp from Hokkaido’s shallow rivers, he agonised over the eight hundred deaths. . . .
    After making a pile of broken bricks, Granddad climbed over the high wall around the Jinan police station in the small hoursof the morning, then slid down the other side into clumps of scrap paper and weeds, frightening off a couple of stray cats. He slipped into a house, changed from his black wool military uniform into some tattered clothes, then went out and merged with the crowds on the street to watch his fellow villagers and his men being loaded onto boxcars. Sentries stood around the station with dark, murderous looks on their faces. Black smoke poured out of the locomotive, steam hissed from the exhaust pipes. . . . Granddad walked south on the rusty tracks.
    At dawn, after walking all day and night, he reached a dry riverbed that reeked of blood. The bodies of hundreds of Northeast Gaomi Township bandits were piled up in layers, filling half the riverbed. He felt remorseful, horrified, vengeful. He was fed up with a life that was little more than an unending cycle of kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten. He thought of the chimney smoke curling in the air above his quiet village; of the creaking pulley as a bucket of clear water was brought out of the well to water a fuzzy young donkey; of a fiery red rooster standing on a wall covered with date branches to crow at the radiant rays of dawn. He decided to go home.
    After spending his whole life in the confines of Northeast Gaomi Township, this was the first time he’d ever travelled so far, and home seemed to be on the other side of the world. Recalling that the train to Jinan had travelled west the entire trip, he thought that all he had to do was follow the tracks east and he’d have no trouble getting back to Gaomi County. When one of the trains came down the tracks, he hid in a nearby ditch or amid some crops to watch the red or black wheels rumble past, bending the curved tracks.
    Granddad ate when he could beg food in a village and drank when he came upon a river. Always he headed east, day and night. After two weeks, he finally spied the two familiar blockhouses at the Gaomi train station, where the county aristocracy was gathered to see off their onetime magistrate Nine Dreams Cao, who had been promoted to police commissioner for Shandong Province. Granddad crumpled to the ground, not sure why or how, and lay with his face in the black earth for a long time before becoming aware of the pungent taste of blood in the dirt.
    He decided not to go home, even though he had often seen Grandma’s snow-white body and Father’s strangely innocent smile in the cold realm of his dreams. He awoke to find his grimy face bathed in hot tears and his heart aching. When he gazed up at the stars, he knew how deeply he missed his wife and son. But now that the decisive moment had arrived, and he could smell the intimate aroma of wine mash permeating the darkness, he wavered.
    The slap and a half from Grandma had created a barrier between them, like a cruel river. ‘Ass!’ she’d cursed him. ‘Swine!’ An angry scowl had underscored her outburst as she stood there, hands on hips, back bent, neck thrust forward, a trickle of bright-red blood running down her chin. The awful sight had thrown his heart into confusion.
    In all his years, no woman had ever cursed him as viciously as that, and certainly no woman had ever slapped him. It wasn’t that he felt no remorse over his affair with Passion, but the humiliating verbal and physical abuse had driven that remorse out of his heart, and self-recrimination had been supplanted by a powerful drive to