Red Sorghum

that time, our dogs were nearly fifteen years old, a time of youth for humans, but an advanced age for dogs, an age of confidence.
    That massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 decimated our village and turned hundreds of dogs into homeless strays. Drawn to the stench of human blood and gore, they were easy targets for Granddad and Father, who lay in wait at the bridgehead over the Black Water River. Granddad’s pistol barked loudly as it emitted puffs of scalding smoke, its barrel turning dark red under the autumn moon, which was as white and cold as frost. Father’s intense longing for Grandma during lulls in his pitched battle with the crazed, corpse-eating dogs makes me feel lost when I think of it, lost like a homeless stray.
    In the aftermath of the slaughter of the townspeople, the sorghum field was covered by pristine moonlight, bleak, quiet, and still. Fires roared in the village, the tongues of flame frantically licking the low sky and snapping like flags in astrong wind. Only three hours earlier, Japanese soldiers and their Chinese puppet troops had cut a swath through the village and torched the houses before leaving through the northern gate. Now Granddad’s right arm, wounded a week before, was festering and oozing pus, hanging useless like a piece of dead meat. As Father helped him bandage the wound, Granddad threw his over-heated pistol onto the moist black earth of the sorghum field, where it sizzled. Once his wound was tended, he sat down and listened to the snorts and whinnies of Japanese warhorses and the whirlwind of pounding hooves galloping out of the village to form up ranks. The sounds were swallowed up by the field, along with the brays of pack mules and the footsteps of exhausted soldiers.
    Father stood beside the seated figure of Granddad, and strained to get a fix on the hoofbeats of the horses. Earlier that afternoon, the Japanese cavalry, tormented by Granddad’s and Father’s sniper fire, had abandoned their assault on the village’s stubborn defences to rake through the sorghum field. Father had nearly died of fright when a huge, fiery-red beast bore down on him until all he could see was a hoof as big as a plate coming straight at his head, the arc of the horseshoe flashing like lightning. He screamed for his dad, then covered his head and hunkered down among the sorghum stalks. A muddle of foul-smelling sweat and urine splashed down as the horse passed over him, a stench he didn’t think he’d ever be able to wash off.
    He remembered Grandma, seven days earlier, as she lay face up, with sorghum seeds and grains scattered over her face. Her pearly-white teeth shone between blood-drained lips, ornamented by the diamondlike grains.
    The charging horse turned with difficulty and headed back, stalks of sorghum struggling bitterly against its rump, some bending and breaking, others snapping back into place. They shivered in the autumn winds like victims of malaria. Father saw the flared nostrils and fleshy lips of the panting warhorse; bloody froth sprayed from between its gleaming white teeth and dripped from its greedy lower lip. Clouds of white dust from the agitated sorghum stung its watery eyes. Seated atop the sleek warhorse was an awesome young Japanesecavalryman whose head, encased in a little square cap, barely cleared the tops of the stalks around him. The ears of grain whipped, pushed, and pricked him mercilessly, even mocked him. He squinted his eyes with loathing and repugnance for the stalks that were raising welts on his handsome face. Father watched him attack the sorghum ears with his sword, lopping some off so cleanly they fell silently, their headless stumps deathly still, while others protested noisily as they hung by threads.
    Father saw the Japanese cavalryman rear his horse up and begin another charge, his sword raised high. He picked up his useless Browning pistol, which earlier had both sinned against him and distinguished itself in battle, and hurled it at the oncoming horse, striking it squarely on the forehead with a dull thud. The animal raised its head as its front legs buckled; its lips kissed the black earth, and its neck twisted to the side so it could pillow its head on the ground. The rider, thrown from the saddle, must have broken his arm in the fall, because Father saw the sword drop from his hand and heard a loud crack. A fragment of bone ripped through the sleeve of his uniform, and the limp arm began to twitch as though it