The Garlic Ballads

and a pushcart over which a blanket was draped.
    “Is it your wife inside?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why’s it so quiet?”
    “The noisy part’s over.”
    “Boy or girl?”
    “Don’t know yet.” The man walked up and put his ear to a crack in the door.
    Gao Yang moved his wagon up closer.
    The dark red, blurry moon had risen above the yard, where datura plants bloomed at the base of the wall, their flowers looking like ethereal white moths in the murky moonlight. Their pleasant medicinal odor vied with the stench from the outhouse, neither able to overpower the other. Gao Yang moved his wagon up next to the three carts: pregnant women lay in each, either faceup or facedown, their men standing nearby.
    As the moonlight brightened, the other carts and their occupants became increasingly visible. The two oxen were chewing their cuds, glistening threads of spittle suspended from their lips like spun silk. Two of the men were smoking; the third was waving his whip idly. Sure that he’d seen them somewhere, Gao Yang assumed they were farmers from villages in his township whom he’d met up with at one time or another. The expectant mothers were a fright: grimy faces, ratty hair, scarcely human. The one in the westernmost cart filled the air with hideous wails that had her husband storming around the area and grumbling, “Stop that crying—stop it! You’ll have people laughing at us.”
    The delivery-room door opened and a light beneath the eaves snapped on. A doctor in white, a woman, stood in the doorway, her hands encased in elbow-length rubber globes that were dripping wet— blood, most likely. The man pacing the area ran up to her. “What is it, Doctor?” he asked anxiously.
    “A little girl,” the doctor mumbled.
    Hearing that he was the father of a little girl, the man rocked a time or two, then fell over backwards, cracking his head resoundingly on tile, which he apparendy smashed.
    “What’s
that
all about?” the doctor remarked. “Times have changed, and girls are every bit as good as boys. Where would you males come from if not for us females? Out from under a rock?”
    Slowly the man sat up, trancelike. Then he began to wail and weep, like a crazy man, punctuating his cries with reproachful shouts of “Zhou Jinhua, you worthless woman, my life’s over, thanks to you!”
    His shouts were joined by sounds of crying from inside: Zhou Jinhua, Gao Yang assumed. The absence of infant sounds puzzled him. Jinhua hadn’t smothered her own baby, had she?
    “Get up right this minute,” the doctor demanded, “and take care of your wife and baby. Other people are waiting.”
    Rising unsteadily to his feet, the man staggered inside, emerging a few moments later carrying a bundle. “Doctor,” he said as he paused in the doorway, “do you know anyone who’d like a little girl? Could you help us find her a home?”
    “Do you have a stone for a heart?” the doctor asked angrily. “Take your baby home and treat her well. When she’s eighteen you can get at least ten thousand for her.”
    A middle-aged woman shuffled out the door, her rumpled hair looking like a bird’s nest, her clothing torn and tattered, and a grimy face that looked anything but human. The man handed her the bundled-up baby as he went to fetch his pushcart, in which she sat opposite a dung basket filled with black dirt. After slipping the harness around his neck, he took a few faltering steps before the cart flipped over, dumping his wife and the baby in her arms onto the ground. She was wailing, the baby was bawling, he was weeping.
    Gao Yang heaved a sigh; so did the man standing beside him.
    The doctor walked up. “Where’d that other cart come from?”
    “Doctor,” a flustered Gao Yang replied, “my wife’s going to have a baby.”
    The doctor raised her arm, peeled back a rubber glove, and looked at her watch. “No sleep for me tonight,” she muttered.
    “When did the contractions start?”
    “About … maybe as long as it takes to eat a meal.”
    “Then there’s plenty of time. Wait your turn.”
    The lightbulb and moonlight illuminated the area. The fair-skinned doctor, who had large features on a round face, went from one cart to the next, poking and probing distended abdomens. To the woman lying in the westernmost cart, a little horse-drawn affair, she said, “Screaming like that only makes it worse. Look at the others. You don’t see them carrying on like that, do you? Is this your first?”
    The little man