Red Sorghum

dogs,’ she cursed, ‘Chinese dogs, in thirty years they’ll be everywhere. Yu Zhan’ao, you can’t get away. Like a toad that eats a blister beetle, the worst is yet to come for you!’
    Her body arched like a bow, as though she wanted to sit up.
    ‘Oh no!’ Uncle Arhat gasped. ‘A sitting corpse! Quick, give me a flintstone.’
    Grandma tossed him the flintstone.
    Somehow Granddad found the courage to pin Second Grandma down so Uncle Arhat could press the flint down over her heart. It didn’t work.
    Uncle Arhat began to back out of the room. ‘Uncle,’ Granddad said, ‘you can’t leave now!’
    ‘Mistress,’ Uncle Arhat said to Grandma, ‘bring me a spade, quick!’
    Once Second Grandma’s chest was pressed down by the spade her body grew still. She was left in the room to suffer alone, as Grandma, Granddad, Uncle Arhat, and Father went into the yard.
    ‘Yu Zhan’ao,’ Second Grandma shouted from inside, ‘I want to eat a yellow-legged rooster!’
    ‘Take my gun and shoot one!’ Granddad said.
    ‘No,’ Uncle Arhat said. ‘Not now. She’s already dead!’
    ‘Quick, uncle,’ Grandma said, ‘think of something!’
    ‘Zhan’ao,’ he said, ‘I’ll go get the Taoist at Cypress Orchid Market!’
    In the early hours of dawn, Second Grandma’s shouts nearly ruptured the window paper. ‘Arhat,’ she fulminated, ‘you and I are enemies who cannot live under the same sky!’
    As Uncle Arhat walked into the yard with the Taoist, her curses turned to long sighs.
    The seventy-year-old Taoist wore a black cassock with strange markings on the front and back. A peach-wood sword was slung over his back, and he carried a bundle in his hands.
    Granddad went out to greet him and recognised him immediately as Mountain Li, the Taoist who had exorcised Second Grandma’s weasel spirit years before. He was skinnier than ever.
    With his sword the Taoist cut the paper out of the window so he could look into the room. As he withdrew his head, the blood drained from his face. Bowing to Granddad, he said, ‘Manager Yu, I’m afraid my power is inadequate to deal with this evil.’
    Filled with terror, Granddad pleaded, ‘Mountain, you can’t leave. You must drive it away. You will be amply rewarded.’
    He blinked his demonic eyes and said, ‘All right, the Taoist will take a drink of courage and bang his head against the golden bell!’
    To this day the legend of how Mountain Li exorcised Second Grandma’s demon still makes the rounds in our village.
    In the legend Mountain Li, his hair a wild jumble, performs a dance of exorcism in the yard, chanting as he twirls his sword in the air, while Second Grandma lies on the kang tossing and turning, screaming and cursing.
    Finally, the Taoist tells Grandma to bring him a wooden bowl, which he fills half full with clear water. He takes a potion out of his bundle and dumps it into the water, then stirs it rapidly with the tip of his wooden sword, chanting all the while. The water gets redder and redder, until it is the colour of blood. With a greasy, sweaty face, he jumps into the air, falls to the ground, and begins foaming at the mouth. Then he loses consciousness.
    When the Taoist came to, Second Grandma breathed her last. The stench of her decomposing body and rotted blood floated out through the open window. When her body was put in its coffin, all the mourners held goatskin chamois soaked in sorghum wine over their noses.
    Some people say that when she was placed in the coffin she was still cursing and kicking the lid.

10
    FOR TEN YEARS I had been away from my village. Now I stood before Second Grandma’s grave, affecting the hypocritical display of affection I had learned from high society, with a body immersed so long in the filth of urban life that a foul stench oozed from my pores. I had paid my respects at many gravesites before coming to that of the woman whose short butmagnificent life constitutes a page in the most heroic and most bastardly history of my hometown. Her eerie, supernatural death had awakened in the souls of Northeast Gaomi Township a mysterious emotion that germinated, grew, and became strong, flowing slowly through the memories of village elders like a sweet scarlet syrup that fortified us and made us capable of facing the world of the future.
    On each of my previous visits to the village, the power of that mysterious emotion was revealed in the drunken eyes of those old-timers. Comparisons are always risky, but when I approach