The Garlic Ballads

things from movies.”
    “Cao Wens a fool,” one of the others commented. “Why is someone like him, with a powerful official for an uncle behind him, mooning over not having a wife, anyway? It’s not worth losing your mind over.”
    “Not enough girls is the problem,” the gray-haired man said. “They get engaged when they’re still teenagers. I’d like to know where all the girls went. There are plenty of young bachelors, but you never seen an unmarried woman. It’s gotten to the point where young men fight over them like warm beancurd, even if they’re crippled or blind.”
    Gao Yang coughed. The gray-haired fellow angered him. “Where do you get off laughing at others?” he said. “No one knows what’s in a mother’s belly till it’s out. One head or two, who can say?”
    The gray-haired man, missing Gao Yang’s point completely, continued, although he could have been talking to himself for all anyone knew. “Where did the girls go? Into town? City boys aren’t interested in girls off the farm. A real puzzle. Take a steer or a horse: when it’s time to raise their tails and drop a young one, if it’s female people jump for joy; but if it’s a male, nothing but long faces all around. With people it’s just the opposite. Rejoicing follows the birth of a boy, but long faces greet the birth of a girl. Then when the boy grows up and can’t find a wife, out come the long faces again.”
    A baby’s cry interrupted their conversation. The little man stopped feeding his horse and walked toward the delivery room tentatively, as if his legs were lead weights.
    “You there, little man,” the doctor called to him as she opened the delivery-room door, “your wife’s given you a son.”
    He grew two inches on the spot. Striding into the clinic, he emerged moments later with his newborn son, whom he placed in the bed of the wagon. “Say, friend,” he said to the gray-haired man, “watch my horse for me while I go fetch the mother of my son, would you? Dont spook him.”
    “He’s sure feeling potent all of a sudden,” Gao Yang heard one of the women comment.
    “Hell be able to stand tall around other men now.”
    He emerged all stooped over, carrying his wife on his back, her feet dragging in the dirt; one of her shoes fell off, but the gray-haired man retrieved it.
    “I’m holding you to your word,” she said to her husband once she was lying in the wagon bed.
    “I mean it. I did!”
    “You’ll buy me a nylon jacket.”
    “One with two rows of metal snaps.”
    “And a pair of nylon stockings.”
    “Two pairs. One red, one green.”
    The little man put the feed basket away, picked up his whip, and turned the wagon around until it was perpendicular to the other carts. The pony’s hide glistened like silver. After reining the animal in, he passed more cigarettes around. “I don’t smoke,” Gao Yang said. “I’ll just waste a good cigarette.”
    “Give it a try,” the little man encouraged him. “It’s only a cigarette. Can’t you see how happy I am? Aren’t you glad for me?”
    “Sure, sure I am.” Gao Yang accepted the cigarette.
    The gray-haired man’s wife was next. “Brothers,” the little man said, “you’ll all have sons. Kids are like yellow fish in schools. Since our sons will all have the same birthday, they’ll be like brothers when they grow up!”
    He cracked his whip, shouted at his horse, and rode out of the compound in high spirits, the clicking of his horses’s hooves quickly swallowed up in the murky moonlight
    The gray-haired man’s wife had a baby girl.
    The other man’s wife delivered a stillborn, misshapen fetus.
    After taking his wife into the delivery room, Gao Yang paced the compound, which he now had all to himself. By this time the moon shone directly down on the datura plants. His wife was toughing it out, since not a sound came from the delivery room. Outside, all alone with his donkey, he felt emotionally drained, so he walked over to the flower bed, where, in the grip of his private terror, he sniffed the strange fragrance and studied the fluttering petals. He bent down and poked one of the plump white leaves. It felt cool as dewdrops rolled off it. His heart fluttered. Before he knew it, his nose was buried in the flower, his nostrils filled with its strange fragrance. With a grimace he gazed at the moon and sneezed violendy.
    At daybreak his wife bore him a son. Shit! he muttered amid his joy. Why? Because his darling son had six