Red Sorghum

piss? . . . Your father-in-law . . . going to give me a big black mule . . .
    Ignoring his mumbling, she swung her leg over the donkey’s back and turned her face, brushed by the winds of spring, towards the sorghum field south of the road. She knew that the young sedan bearer was watching her. Struggling to wrench free of this unknown passion, she had a dim vision of a new and unfamiliar broad road stretching out ahead of her, covered with sorghum seeds as red as rubies, the ditches on either side filled with crystal-clear sorghum wine. As shemoved down the road, her imagination coloured the genuine article until she could not distinguish between reality and illusion.
    Yu Zhan’ao followed her with his eyes until she rounded a bend. Feeling suddenly weary, he pushed his way through the sorghum and returned to the sacred altar, where he collapsed like a toppled wall and fell into a sound sleep. Later, as the red sun was disappearing in the west, his eyes snapped open, and the first things he saw were sorghum leaves, stems, and ears of grain that formed a thick blanket of purplish red above him. He draped his rain cape over his shoulders and walked out of the field as a rapid breeze on the road caused the sorghum to rustle noisily. He wrapped the cape tightly around him to ward off the chill, and as his hand brushed against his belly he realised how hungry he was. He dimly recalled the three shacks at the head of the village where he had carried the woman in the sedan chair three days ago, and the tattered tavern flag snapping and fluttering in the raging winds of the rainstorm. So hungry he could neither sit still nor stand straight, he strode towards the tavern. Since he had been hiring out for the Northeast Gaomi Township Wedding and Funeral Service Company for less than two years, the people around here wouldn’t recognise him. He’d get something to eat and drink, find a way to do what he’d come to do, then slip into the sorghum fields, like a fish in the ocean, and swim far away.
    At this point in his ruminations, he headed west, where bilious red clouds turned the setting sun into a blooming peony with a luminous, fearfully bright golden border. After walking west for a while, he turned north, heading straight for the village where Grandma’s nominal husband lived. The fields were still and deserted. During those years, any farmer who had food at home left his field before nightfall, turning the sorghum fields into a haven for bandits.
    Village chimneys were smoking by the time he arrived, and a handsome young man was walking down the street with two crocks of fresh well water over his shoulder, the shifting water splashing over the sides. Yu Zhan’ao darted into the doorway beneath the tattered tavern flag. No inner walls separated theshacks, and a bar made of adobe bricks divided the room in two, the inner half of which was furnished with a brick kang, a stove, and a large vat. Two rickety tables with scarred tops and a few scattered narrow benches constituted the furnishings in the outer half of the room. A glazed wine crock rested on the bar, its ladle hanging from the rim. A fat old man was sprawled on the kang. Yu Zhan’ao recognised him as the Korean dog butcher they called Gook. He had seen Gook once at the market in Ma Hamlet. The man could slaughter a dog in less than a minute, and the hundreds of dogs that lived in Ma Hamlet growled viciously when they saw him, their fur standing straight up, though they kept their distance.
    ‘Barkeep, a bowl of wine!’ Yu Zhan’ao called out as he sat on one of the benches.
    The fat old man didn’t stir, his rolling eyes the only movement on the kang.
    ‘Barkeep!’ Yu Zhan’ao shouted.
    The fat old man pulled back the white dog pelt covering him and climbed down off the kang. Yu Zhan’ao noticed three more pelts hanging on the wall: one green, one blue, and one spotted.
    The fat old man took a dark-red bowl out of an opening in the bar and ladled wine into it.
    ‘What do you have to go with the wine?’ Yu Zhan’ao asked.
    ‘Dog head!’ the fat old man snarled.
    ‘I want dog meat!’
    ‘Dog head’s all I’ve got!’
    ‘Okay, then.’
    The old man removed the lid from the pot, in which a whole dog was cooking.
    ‘Forget the head,’ Yu Zhan’ao demanded. ‘I want some of that meat.’
    Ignoring him, the old man picked up his cleaver and hacked at the dog’s neck, spattering the scalding soup about. Once he’d severed the head,