The Garlic Ballads

the ears; when the soft underbelly lay against her palm, and the tiny animal sniffed her hand in that awkward, timid way that rabbits have, she was deeply moved.
    “Get some string and tie it up,” said Elder Brother, who had walked up to her. “Maybe you can keep it for a pet.”
    She felt around in her pocket, hoping to find something, but there was nothing. As she searched the ground, he wordlessly removed a shoelace and tied it around the rabbit’s hind leg.
    Jinju stared down at the now bare foot attached to Elder Brother’s game leg. It was covered with a layer of mud, and shiny as lacquer. He carried the rabbit to the edge of the field and tied it to one of Gao Ma’s cornstalks, then cut down a widowed stalk, stripped it, and chewed it for the sweet sap.
    Each time Jinju glanced at the rabbit, which was often, she saw it struggling to free itself, straining so hard against the shoestring it looked as if it were trying to separate itself from the ensnared limb in order to escape on the other three. Finally she went over, cut the shoelace, untied the end around the rabbit’s leg, and released it. As she watched it hobble off and disappear amid the cornfield’s once beautiful, but now distressed, stalks, a vague sense of hope rose inside her. A dark, boundless secret was hidden amid all that corn.
    “You have the heart of a Bodhisattva, Sister,” Elder Brother said as he walked up. “Your goodness will be rewarded someday.”
    His garlicky breath sickened her.
    She was treated warmly at lunch, probably because everyone had heard of her compassion that morning. During the fall harvest season, when everyone wished he had another pair of hands, they couldn’t possibly watch her all the time. So after lunch she went to the well to fetch water. Father and Mother followed her with their eyes, but neither said a word. She returned with two full buckets, dumped them into the water barrel, then went back for more. Instinct told her she had won their trust.
    Disappointed that she had not seen Gao Ma, she was, however, greeted by neighbor women at the well, and the peculiar expressions she thought she saw in their eyes vanished when she looked more closely. Maybe I’m imagining things, she thought. On her third trip to the well she ran into the wife of Yu Qiushui, Gao Ma’s neighbor, a big woman in her thirties with lofty breasts whose nipples seemed always to be quivering beneath her jacket. As the two women faced each other across the well, Yu Qiushui’s wife said, “Gao Ma wants to know if you’ve had a change of heart.”
    Her heart nearly stopped. “Has he?” she asked softly.
    “No.”
    “Then neither have I.”
    “Good for you,” Yu Qiushui’s wife replied, looking around before tossing a wad of paper to the ground. Jinju quickly bent over as if to draw some water, swept up the note, and stuffed it into her pocket.
    That afternoon, when it was time to return to the fields, Jinju begged off, complaining of a sour stomach. Father eyed her suspiciously, but Elder Brother said generously, “Stay home and get some rest.”
    So she went to her room, bolted the door behind her, and took out the wad of paper (during lunch her preoccupation with the note had made it nearly impossible to keep up a conversation with her parents), which she carefully unfolded with a trembling hand. She could hear herself breathing. When some cold air seeped in through the cracks in the door, she anxiously wadded the paper up again and jerked the door open. The outer room was empty. Then, hearing a rhythmic pounding out in the yard, she tiptoed over to the window, where she saw Mother standing under the radiant autumn sun, pounding ears of grain husks with a glossy purplish mallet. Her net jacket stuck to her sweaty back, and a layer of yellow husks stuck to the jacket.
    Finally, it was safe for Jinju to smooth the paper out. She avidly read the handful of printed characters:
    Tomorrow afternoon. The cornfield. We’ll run away together!
    The words, written in ballpoint, were sweat-smudged.

4.

    More than once she made it as far as the edge of the cornfield, but each time she turned and walked back. Cool autumn winds had removed most of the moisture from the crops, so that Gao Ma’s corn rustled noisily and the bean pods in her field had begun to crack and pop. Elder Brother and Father were up ahead, Elder Brother complaining about Eighth Uncle Yang commandeering Second Brother to help make briquettes at the peak of the