Red Sorghum

other lay across a bayonet buried in his chest. When Granddad turned them over, Father saw that their legs had been broken and their bellies slit open. Granddad sighed as he withdrew the shotgun from the one soldier’s mouth and pulled the bayonet from the other’s chest.
    Father followed Granddad across the road, into the sorghum field to the east, which had also been swept by machine-gun fire. They turned over the bodies of more soldiers lying strewn across the ground. Bugler Liu was on his knees, bugle in hand, as though he were blowing it: ‘Bugler Liu!’ Granddad called out excitedly. No response. Father ran up and nudged him. ‘Uncle Liu!’ he shouted, as the bugle dropped to the ground. When Father looked more closely, he discovered that the bugler’s face was already as hard as a rock.
    In the lightly scarred section of field some few dozen pacesfrom the dike, Granddad and Father came upon Fang Seven, whose guts had spilled out of his belly, and another soldier, named Consumptive Four, who, after taking a bullet in the leg, had fainted from blood loss. Holding his bloodstained hand above the man’s mouth, Granddad detected a faint sign of dry, hot breath from his nostrils. Fang Seven had stuffed his own intestines back into his abdomen and covered the gaping wound with sorghum leaves. He was still conscious. When he spotted Granddad and Father, his lips twitched and he said haltingly, ‘Commander . . . done for . . . When you see my old lady . . . give some money. . . . Don’t let her remarry. . . . My brother . . . no sons . . . If she leaves . . . Fang family line ended. . . .’ Father knew that Fang Seven had a year-old son, and that there was so much milk in his mother’s gourdlike breasts that he was growing up fair and plump.
    ‘I’ll carry you back, little brother,’ Granddad said.
    He bent over and pulled Fang Seven onto his back. As Fang screeched in pain, Father saw the leaves fall away and his white, speckled intestines slither out of his belly, releasing a breath of foul hot air. Granddad laid him back down on the ground. ‘Elder brother,’ Fang pleaded, ‘put me out of my misery. . . . Don’t torture me. . . . Shoot me, please. . . .’
    Granddad squatted down and held Fang Seven’s hand. ‘Little brother, I can carry you over to see Zhang Xinyi, Dr Zhang. He’ll patch you up.’
    ‘Elder brother . . . do it now. . . . Don’t make me suffer. . . . Past saving . . .’
    Granddad squinted into the murky, late-afternoon August sky, in which a dozen or so stars shone brightly, and let out a long howl before turning to Father. ‘Are there bullets in your gun, Douguan?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Father handed his pistol to Granddad, who released the safety catch, took another look into the darkening sky, and spun the cylinder. ‘Rest easy, brother. As long as Yu Zhan’ao has food to eat, your wife and child will never go hungry.’
    Fang Seven nodded and closed his eyes.
    Granddad raised the revolver as though he were lifting a huge boulder. The pressure of the moment made him quake.
    Fang Seven’s eyes snapped open. ‘Elder brother . . .’
    Granddad spun his face away, and a burst of flame leaped out of the muzzle, lighting up Fang Seven’s greenish scalp. The kneeling man shot forward and fell on top of his own exposed guts. Father found it hard to believe that a man’s belly could hold such a pile of intestines.
    ‘Consumptive Four, you’d better be on your way, too. Then you can get an early start on your next life and come back to seek revenge on those Jap bastards!’ He pumped the last cartridge into the heart of the dying Consumptive Four.
    Though killing had become a way of life for Granddad, he dropped his arm to his side and let it hang there like a dead snake; the pistol fell to the ground.
    Father bent over and picked it up, stuck it into his belt, and tugged on Granddad, who stood as though drunk or paralysed. ‘Let’s go home, Dad, let’s go home. . . .’
    ‘Home? Go home? Yes, go home! Go home . . .’
    Father pulled him up onto the dike and began walking awkwardly towards the west. The cold rays of the half-moon on that August 9 evening filled the sky, falling lightly on the backs of Granddad and Father and illuminating the heavy Black Water River, which was like the great but clumsy Chinese race. White eels, thrown into a frenzy by the bloody water, writhed and sparkled on the surface. The blue chill