Red Sorghum

lungs: ‘Mom – Mom – Mom –’ A single word drenched with human blood and tears, with deep familial love, with the loftiest of causes. When he reached the end of the eastern dike, he jumped over the rake barrier and scrambled up the western bank. Beneath the dike, the stony face of Mute sped by.
    Father threw himself down on Grandma and called out ‘Mom!’ one more time. She lay face down on the ground, pressed against the wild grass. The aroma of sorghum wine seeped from two exit wounds in her back. Father gripped her shoulders and rolled her over. There were no wounds on her face, which looked the same as always. Not a hair was out of place; her fringe neatly covered her forehead; her brows drooped slightly. Her eyes were half open; the lips on her pale face showed up bright-red. Father grasped her warm hand and called ‘Mom!’ yet another time. She opened her eyes wide as a smile of supreme innocence spread across her face. She reached out to him.
    The idling engines of the Jap trucks, which had stopped at the bridgehead, revved intermittently.
    A tall figure appeared briefly on the dike to drag Father and Grandma down off the top. It was Mute, to his everlasting credit. Before Father had a chance to get his bearings, anothergale of bullets truncated and smashed countless stalks of sorghum.
    The four trucks closed up ranks just beyond the bridge, then stopped. Eight machine guns mounted on the first and last trucks were spraying so many bullets they formed hard ribbons of crisscrossing light that spread like broken fans, sometimes to the east of the road, sometimes to the west. Sorghum stalks wailed in concert, their shattered, severed limbs drooping low or arching high into the air. Bullets raised puffs of yellow dust on the dike and produced a tattoo of muffled thuds.
    The soldiers on the outer slopes flattened themselves against the wild grass and black dirt, keeping perfectly still. The machine guns strafed the area for about three minutes, then stopped as abruptly as they had begun. The ground around the trucks was littered with the golden flashes of spent casings.
    ‘Hold your fire,’ Commander Yu ordered softly.
    The Japs were silent. Thin wisps of gunsmoke floated above the river, carried eastward by gentle air currents.
    Father told me that in that moment of absolute quiet Wang Wenyi stumbled up onto the dike, where he stood stock-still, fowling piece in hand, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the picture of great suffering. ‘Mother of my children!’ he shrieked. Before he could take another step, dozens of machine-gun shells ripped a nearly transparent crescent moon in his belly. Gut-stained bullets tore wetly through the air above Commander Yu’s head.
    Wang Wenyi toppled off the dike and rolled into the water directly opposite the body of his wife. His heart was still beating, and there wasn’t a mark on his head or face; a sense of perfect understanding flooded his mind.
    Father once told me that Wang Wenyi’s wife had fed her three sons so well they grew up chubby, lively, and flourishing. One day they went out to tend the sorghum, leaving their sons behind to play in the yard. A Japanese biplane streaked through the air above their house, making a strange growling sound as it laid a single egg, a direct hit on Wang Wenyi’s yard, blowing all three children to bits that flew up to the eaves, were draped on the branches of trees, stained the wall.
    . . . On the day Commander Yu raised the flag of resistanceagainst the Japanese, Wang Wenyi was brought over by his wife.
    Gnashing his teeth with rage, Commander Yu glared down at Wang Wenyi, half of whose head lay submerged in the river. ‘Don’t any of you move!’ he snarled in a low voice.

8
    SCATTERED SORGHUM DANCES on Grandma’s face, one grain landing between her slightly parted lips to rest on flawless white teeth. As he gazes at her lips, which are gradually losing their colour, Father sobs ‘Mom,’ and his tears fall on her breast. She opens her eyes amid the pearly drops of sorghum. Rainbows of colour, as though reflected off the pearls, are embedded in her eyes. ‘Son,’ she says, ‘your dad . . .’
    ‘My dad, he’s fighting.’
    ‘He’s your real dad . . .’ Grandma says. Father nodds.
    She struggles to sit up, but the movement of her body pumps streams of blood out of the two holes.
    ‘Mom, I’ll go and get him,’ Father says.
    She waves her hand and sits up abruptly. ‘Douguan . . . my son . . .