The Garlic Ballads

birds; he thought he saw them deposit traces of phosphorescence on the tips of mulberry branches as they flew by. But when he strained to get a closer look, he realized it was just his imagination, and he couldn’t be sure he had even seen any birds.
    It was past midnight, and he was getting cold; as his stomach growled, he felt an immense buildup of gas, which he couldn’t pass, no matter how he tried. He spotted Jinju moving past mulberry trees and skirting acacias, a red bundle over her arm, her belly sticking way out in front. She cringed as she walked up to him, stopping about five paces away. She held a quivering jute plant in one hand and was scraping its surface with her fingernails. “Come here, Jinju,” he said. Her face changed color—from red to yellow, from yellow to light green, then to dark green, and finally to a terrifying gray. “Elder Brother Gao Ma,” she said, “I’ve come to say goodbye.” The ominous tone of her words hit him full in the face; he struggled to go to her, but his legs were tied to the tree, and he couldn’t move. So he stuck out his arms, which began to grow, longer and longer. Just as his fingers were about to touch her face, when he could detect the chill of her body on his nails—at that critical point between the right length and not quite long enough—his arms stopped growing. “Jinju,” he called out anxiously, “you can’t leave—not before we have spent even a single happy day together! I’ll marry you as soon as I’ve sold my garlic, and Î promise you’ll never again be buffeted by the wind, baked by the sun, soaked by the rain, or frozen by the snow! You’ll stay home to mind the children and work in the kitchen!”
    “Stop dreaming, Elder Brother Gao Ma. You’ll never sell your garlic. It’s rotted away. You broke the law when you demolished the county offices. The police have a Wanted poster out on you…. I have no choice but to take our son and leave.”
    She opened her red bundle and took out a small cassette recorder. “This is yours,” she said. “I took it when my second brother wasn’t looking. You’ll be alone after I’m gone, and this will ease some of the loneliness.”
    She turned and walked off, her red clothes dissolving into a white shadow.
    “Jinju!” His own shout woke him.
    He watched the pale half-moon climb into the southeastern sky; disappointment and loss glazed over his eyes. With mounting fear, he relived what had just happened in his mind. Over and over he counted the days, and it came out the same each time: the baby was due either yesterday or today.
    Finally he stood up, just as he had less than a year before in Pale Horse County, on that piece of land between the jute field and the pepper crop. It was dusk then, and after getting to his feet he had spat out at least a dozen mouthfuls of blood. The Fang brothers had beaten him so badly they had nearly sent him to see Yama, the King of the Underworld—and would have if not for Deputy Yangs life-saving powder, or if the wife of his neighbor Yu hadn’t looked after him, or if she hadn’t come to him with a message from the Fangs that he could marry Jinju for the sum of ten thousand yuan—cash money for her freedom. He recalled the immense joy the news had brought him, and how he had wept openly and bitterly. Mrs. Yu had remarked that they were selling their daughter like livestock, and he recalled saying to her, “Dear Sister-in-Law, Im crying because I’m so happy. Ill scrape the ten thousand together somehow. I’ll keep planting garlic, and I’ll sell it. Jinju will be my bride within two years.”
    Garlic! All because of that damned garlic. He ripped at mulberry branches, bent acacia trees, crashed into mulberry trunks, tore acacia bark—north, south, east, west, he circled in and out among the stand of trees. A sudden cloud formation of birds was swallowed up by the moon, and he was just as suddenly penned in by four walls—the demons’ pen. Men prosper for a decade, and demons dare not draw near! Gao Ma, from the day you met Jinju, from the first time you held her hand, you were fated to learn a lesson in blood.

3.

    Gao Ma spent the night among the mulberries and acacias, not emerging from the world of ghosts and goblins until dawn broke, and then feeling chilled all over—except for deep down in his chest, where a breath of warmth remained. The puffiness had abated around his eyes, and that brought him comfort. The red sun warmed him as it