Red Sorghum

the kang.

7
    THE FIRST THING Father saw after Granddad shook him awake was a long, coiling dragon coming straight for them as though on wings. Bold howls rose from beneath upraised torches. Father wondered how this wriggling line of torches could have so deeply moved a man like Granddad, who could kill without batting an eye. He was weeping openly. ‘Douguan,’ he mumbled between sobs, ‘my son . . . our fellow villagers are coming. . . .’
    Several hundred villagers – men and women, boys and girls – crowded round. Those not holding torches were armed with hoes, rakes, and clubs. Father’s best friends squeezed up to the front, holding torches made of sorghum stalks that were tipped with cotton wadding dipped in bean oil.
    ‘Commander Yu, you won the battle!’
    ‘Commander Yu, we have slaughtered cattle, pigs, and sheep for a feast for you and your men.’
    Granddad fell to his knees in front of the solemn, sacred torches, which lit up the meandering river and the vast, mighty sorghum. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said in a trembling voice, ‘I, Yu Zhan’ao, should be condemned for all time for being duped by Pocky Leng’s treachery. My men . . . all lost in the fight!’
    The torches closed in around him, smoke rose in the air, flames flickered uneasily, and drops of burning oil sizzled as they fell to the ground like red thread. Red cinders in a floral pattern covered the dike. A fox in the sorghum field howled. Fish, attracted by the light, schooled just below the surface. The people were speechless. Amid the crackling of flames, a thunderous sound came rolling towards them from some distant spot in the field.
    An old man, his face dark, his beard white, one eye much larger than the other, handed his torch to the man beside him, bent down, and slipped his arms under my granddad’s. ‘Get up, Commander Yu, get up, get up.’
    ‘Get up, Commander Yu,’ the villagers echoed, ‘get up, get up.’
    Granddad rose slowly to his feet, as the heat from the old man’s hands warmed the muscles of his arms. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘let’s take a look around.’
    The torchbearers fell in behind Granddad and Father, the flames lighting up the blurry riverbed and the sorghum fields all the way up to the battleground near the bridge. The burned-out trucks cast eerie shadows. Corpses strewn across the battlefield gave off an overpowering stench of blood, which merged with the smell of scorched metal, of the sorghum that served as a vast backdrop, and of the river, so far from its source.
    Women began to wail as drops of burning oil fell from the torches onto the people’s hands and feet. The men’s faces looked like steel fresh from the furnace. The white stone bridge had turned scarlet.
    The old man with the dark face and white beard shouted, ‘What are you crying for? This was a great victory! There are four hundred million of us Chinese. If we take on the Japs, one on one, how do you think their little country will fare? If one hundred million of us fought them to the death, they’d be wiped out, but there’d still be three hundred million of us. That makes us the victors, doesn’t it? Commander Yu , this was a crushing victory!’
    ‘Old uncle, you’re just saying that to make me feel good.’
    ‘No, Commander Yu, it really was a great victory. Give the order; tell us what to do. China may have nothing else, but it’s got plenty of people.’
    Granddad straightened up. ‘You people, gather up the bodies of our fallen comrades!’
    The villagers spread out and gathered up the bodies from the sorghum fields on both sides of the highway, then laid them out on the dike on the western edge of the bridge, heads facing south, feet north. Pulling Father along behind him, Granddad walked down the column of bodies, counting them. Wang Wenyi, Wang’s wife, Fang Six, Fang Seven, Bugler Liu, Consumptive Four . . . one face after another. Tears ran down Granddad’s deeply lined face like rivers of molten steel in the light of the torches.
    ‘What about Mute?’ Granddad asked. ‘Douguan, did you see Uncle Mute?’
    The image of Mute’s razor-sharp sabre knife slicing off the Jap’s head, and of the head sailing, screaming, through the air, flashed into Father’s mind. ‘On the truck,’ he said.
    The torches encircled one of the trucks. Three men climbed onto it as Granddad ran up. They lifted Mute’s body over the railing and onto Granddad’s back. One man held Mute’s head,