Red Sorghum

help your mom up. . . . Let’s go home, go home. . . .’
    Father falls to his knees, drapes her arms around his neck, then stands up with difficulty, lifting her off the ground. Fresh blood quickly soaks his neck and assails his nose with the aroma of sorghum wine. His legs tremble under the weight of her body; he staggers into the sorghum field as bullets whizz overhead. He parts the densely packed plants, stumbling forward, his sweat and his tears merging with Grandma’s fresh blood to turn his face into a demented mask. Grandma is getting heavier as the passing sorghum leaves lacerate him mercilessly. He falls, she falls on top of him. He strains to crawl out from under her, and after he lays her out on her back, she looks up, breathes a long sigh, and smiles weakly. Unfathomable mystery is embedded in that smile, an iron that burns a horseshoe brand into his memory.
    Grandma lies on the ground, the warmth of her breast slowly dissipating. She is dimly aware that her son is undoing her jacket, that he is covering the wound over her breast with his hand, then the wound beneath her breast. Her blood stains his hand red, then green; her unsullied breast is stained green by her own blood, then red. Bullets have pierced her noble breast, exposing the pink honeycomb beneath it, and Father is in agony as he looks down at it. He cannot staunch the flow of blood, and as he watches it flow he can see her face pale. Her body grows so light it might float up into the air.
    Grandma looks contentedly at Father’s exquisite face. She and Commander Yu had joined to create him in the shadows of the sorghum field; lively images of the irretrievable past streak past her eyes like racehorses.
    It was raining as she sat in the bridal sedan chair, like a boat on the ocean, and was carried into Shan Tingxiu’s compound. The street was flooded with water, peppered by a layer of sorghum seeds. At the front door she was met by a wizened old man with a tiny queue in the shape of a kidney bean. The rain had stopped, but an occasional drop splashed onto the watery ground. Although the musicians had announced her arrival with their instruments, no one had emerged to watch the show; Grandma knew that was a bad sign. Two men came out to help her perform her obeisances, one in his fifties, the other in his forties. The fifty-year-old was none other than Uncle Arhat Liu, the other was one of the distillery hands.
    The musicians and bearers stood in the puddles like drenched chickens, sombrely watching the two dried-up men lead my soft-limbed, rosy-cheeked grandma into the dark wedding-chamber. The men exuded a pungent aroma of wine, as if they had been soaked in the vats.
    Grandma was taken up to a kang in the worship hall and told to sit on it. Since no one came up to remove her red veil, she took it off herself. A man with a facial tic sat curled up on a stool next to her. The bottom part of his flat, elongated face was red and festering. He stood up and stuck a clawlike hand out towards Grandma, who screamed in horror and reached into her bodice for the scissors; she glared intently at the man, whorecoiled and curled up on the stool again. Grandma didn’t set down her scissors once that night, nor did the man climb down from his stool.
    Early the next morning, before the man woke up, Grandma slipped down off the kang, burst through the front door, and opened the gate; just as she was about to flee the premises, a hand reached out and grabbed her. The old man with the kidney-bean queue had her by the wrist and was looking at her with hate-filled eyes.
    Shan Tingxiu coughed dryly once or twice as his expression softened. ‘Child,’ he said, ‘now that you’re married, you’re like my own daughter. Bianlang doesn’t have what everybody says. Don’t listen to their talk. We’ve got a good business, and Bianlang’s a good boy. Now that you’re here, the home is your responsibility.’ Shan Tingxiu held out to her a ring of bronze keys, but she didn’t take them from him.
    Grandma sat up all the next night, scissors in hand.
    On the morning of the third day, my maternal great-granddad led a donkey up to the house to take Grandma home; it was a Northeast Gaomi Township custom for a bride to return to her parents’ home three days after her wedding. Great-Granddad spent the morning drinking with Shan Tingxiu, then set out for home shortly after noon.
    Grandma sat sidesaddle on the donkey, swaying from side to side as the animal