Red Sorghum

another his legs, and they staggered up the dike with their load, to lay it on the easternmost edge of the grisly column. Mute, bent at the waist, was still gripping his blood-spattered sabre knife. His lifeless eyes were staring, his mouth open, as though frozen on a scream.
    Granddad knelt and pressed down on Mute’s knees and chest; Father heard the dead man’s spine groan and crack as his body straightened out. Granddad tried to wrench the sword free, but the death grip thwarted his attempts. He brought the arm down so that the sword lay alongside Mute’s leg. One of the women knelt and rubbed Mute’s eyes. ‘Brother,’ she said, ‘close your eyes, close them now. Commander Yu will avenge your death. . . .’
    ‘Dad, Mom’s still in the field. . . .’ Father began to weep.
    With a wave of his hand, Granddad said, ‘You go. . . . Take some people with you and carry her back. . . .’
    Father darted into the sorghum field, followed by several villagers with torches, whose burning oil brushed the dense stalks. The aggrieved dry leaves crackled and burned when they were splattered, and as the fires spread, the stalks bowed their heavy heads and wept hoarsely.
    Father parted the sorghum to reveal the body of Grandma, lying on her back and facing the remote, inimitable sky above Northeast Gaomi Township, filled with the spirits of countless stars. Even in death her face was as lovely as jade, her parted lips revealing a line of clean teeth inlaid with pearls of sorghum seeds, placed there by the emerald beaks of white doves.
    ‘Carry her back,’ Granddad said.
    A group of young women lifted her up. With torches casting a wide net of light along the route, the sorghum field turnedinto a fairyland, and each member of the procession was surrounded by an eerie halo of light.
    One woman carried Grandma’s body onto the dike and laid it at the westernmost end of the corpses.
    The old man with the white beard asked, ‘Commander Yu, where will we find enough coffins for them all?’
    Granddad thought for a moment. ‘We won’t carry them back,’ he said finally, ‘and we don’t need coffins. For now, we’ll bury them in the sorghum field. Once I’ve rallied our forces, I’ll come back and give them a proper send-off.’
    The old man sent a group back to weave additional torches, since they would be burying the dead through the night. ‘While you’re at it,’ Granddad added, ‘bring some draught animals so we can tow that truck back with us, and chop down enough sorghum stalks to cover the bodies and line the bottoms of the graves before filling them in with dirt.’
    Grandma was the last to be interred. Once again her body was enshrouded in sorghum. As Father watched the final stalk hide her face, his heart cried out in pain, never to be whole again throughout his long life. Granddad tossed in the first spadeful of dirt. The loose clods of black earth thudded against the layer of sorghum like an exploding grenade shattering the surrounding stillness with its lethal shrapnel. Father’s heart wept blood.
    Grandma’s grave mound was the fifty-first in the field. ‘Fellow villagers,’ the old man said, ‘on your knees!’
    The village elders fell to their knees before the line of graves, the fields around them vibrating with the sound of weeping. The torches were beginning to die out. Just then a star fell from the southern sky, its brilliance not fading from view until it had passed below the tips of sorghum.
    It was nearly dawn when the old torches were replaced by new ones. A milky gleam gradually penetrated the fog over the river. The dozen or so draught animals grazed noisily on the sorghum stalks and chewed the fallen ears of grain.
    Granddad ordered the people to remove the linked rakes from the road and push the first truck across the highway and into the ditch on the eastern shoulder. When it was done, he picked up a shotgun, aimed at the gas tank, and fired, filling itwith holes through which the gasoline spurted out. Then, taking a torch, he stepped back, aimed carefully, and flung it. A towering white flame shot into the air, igniting the frame and quickly turning the truck into a pile of twisted metal.
    The villagers put their shoulders to the undamaged truck loaded with rice, pushing it across the bridge and onto the highway, then tipped the burned-out hulk of the third truck into the river. The gas tank of the fourth truck, which had retreated to the road south of the