Red Sorghum

lie to her. Maybe her girlfriends had made it all up. Once again she looked forward to her wedding day.
    Grandma longed to lose her anxieties and loneliness in the arms of a strong and noble young man. Finally, to her relief, her wedding day arrived, and as she was placed inside the sedan chair, carried by four bearers, the horns and woodwinds fore and aft struck up a melancholy tune that brought tears to her eyes. Off they went, floating along as though riding the clouds or sailing through a mist.
    Grandma was lightheaded and dizzy inside the stuffy sedan chair, her view blocked by a red curtain that gave off a pungent mildewy odour. She reached out to lift it a crack – Great-Granddad had told her not to remove her red veil. A heavy bracelet of twisted silver slid down to her wrist, and as she looked at the coiled-snake design her thoughts grew chaotic and disoriented. A warm wind rustled the emerald-green stalks of sorghum lining the narrow dirt path. Doves cooed in the fields. The delicate powder of petals floated above silvery new ears of waving sorghum. The curtain, embroidered on the inside with a dragon and a phoenix, had faded after years of use, and there was a large stain in the middle.
    Summer was giving way to autumn, and the sunlight outside the sedan chair was brilliant. The bouncing movements of the bearers rocked the chair slowly from side to side; the leather lining of their poles groaned and creaked, the curtain fluttered gently, letting in an occasional ray of sunlight and, from time to time, a whisper of cool air. Grandma was sweating profusely and her heart was racing as she listened to therhythmic footsteps and heavy breathing of the bearers. The inside of her skull felt cold one minute, as though filled with shiny pebbles, and hot the next, as though filled with coarse peppers.
    Shortly after leaving the village, the lazy musicians stopped playing, while the bearers quickened their pace. The aroma of sorghum burrowed into her heart. Full-voiced strange and rare birds sang to her from the fields. A picture of what she imagined to be the bridegroom slowly took shape from the threads of sunlight filtering into the darkness of the sedan chair. Painful needle pricks jabbed her heart.
    ‘Old Man in heaven, protect me!’ Her silent prayer made her delicate lips tremble. A light down adorned her upper lip, and her fair skin was damp. Every soft word she uttered was swallowed up by the rough walls of the carriage and the heavy curtain before her. She ripped the tart-smelling veil away from her face and laid it on her knees. She was following local wedding customs, which dictated that a bride wear three layers of new clothes, top and bottom, no matter how hot the day. The inside of the sedan chair was badly worn and terribly dirty, like a coffin; it had already embraced countless other brides, now long dead. The walls were festooned with yellow silk so filthy it oozed grease, and of the five flies caught inside, three buzzed above her head while the other two rested on the curtain before her, rubbing their bright eyes with black stick-like legs. Succumbing to the oppressiveness in the carriage, Grandma eased one of her bamboo-shoot toes under the curtain and lifted it a crack to sneak a look outside.
    She could make out the shapes of the bearers’ statuesque legs poking out from under loose black satin trousers and their big, fleshy feet encased in straw sandals. They raised clouds of dust as they tramped along. Impatiently trying to conjure up an image of their firm, muscular chests, Grandma raised the toe of her shoe and leaned forward. She could see the polished purple scholar-tree poles and the bearers’ broad shoulders beneath them. Barriers of sorghum stalks lining the path stood erect and solid in unbroken rows, tightly packed, together sizing one another up with the yet unopened clay-green eyes of grain ears, one indistinguishable from the next, as far as shecould see, like a vast river. The path was so narrow in places it was barely passable, causing the wormy, sappy leaves to brush noisily against the sedan chair.
    The men’s bodies emitted the sour smell of sweat. Infatuated by the masculine odour, Grandma breathed in deeply – this ancestor of mine must have been nearly bursting with passion. As the bearers carried their load down the path, their feet left a series of V imprints known as ‘tramples’ in the dirt, for which satisfied clients usually rewarded them, and which fortified