The Garlic Ballads

salt, soy sauce, and other stuff, then fry it medium rare and gobble it up. Dr. Wu took my wife’s afterbirth with him, and when I asked him how it tasted, he said it was just like jellyfish. Imagine that—jellyfish! Have you ever heard anything so disgusting? So when they told me to drink my own piss, I slurped it down, a big bottle of it. And what about afterwards? I was still the same old me, everything still in place. Secretary Huang didn’t drink his own piss back then, but when he got cancer later, he ate raw vipers, centipedes, toads, scorpions, and wasps—fighting fire with fire, they said—but he only managed to keep up the fight for six months before breathing his last!”
    Their carts rounded a bend where the road crossed the wasteland behind Sand Roost Village. The area was dotted with sandy hillocks on which red willows, indigo bushes, wax reeds, and maples grew. Branches and leaves twinkled in the moonlight. A dung beetle flew through the air, buzzing loudly until it crash-landed on the road. Fourth Uncle smacked the cow’s rump with a willow switch and relit his pipe.
    At an incline the donkey lowered its head and strained in silence as it pulled its load. A sympathetic Gao Yang slung the rope over his shoulder and helped pull. It was a long, gradual climb, and when they made the top, he looked back to see where they’d been; he was surprised to see flickering lanterns in what seemed to be a deep pit. On the way down he tried sitting, but when he saw how the donkey arched its back and how its hooves were bouncing all over the place, he jumped down and walked alongside the cart to forestall disaster.
    “We’ll be halfway there at the bottom of this slope, won’t we?” Gao Yang asked.
    “Just about,” Fourth Uncle replied dispiritedly.
    Insects in the trees and bushes along the way heralded their passage with dull, dreary chirps. Fourth Uncle’s cow tripped and nearly lost its footing. A light mist rose from the road. Rumblings were audible in the distance, due south, and the ground shook slightly.
    “There goes a train,” Fourth Uncle commented.
    “Have you ever ridden one, Fourth Uncle?”
    “Trains arent meant for people like us, to use your words,” Fourth Uncle said. “Maybe the next time around I’ll be born into an official’s family. Then I’ll ride one. Meanwhile I have to be content with watching them from a distance.”
    “I’ve never been on one, either,” Gao Yang said. “If the old man up there smiles down on me with five good harvests, I’ll splurge a hundred or so to ride a train. Trying something new might make up for having to drag myself through life like a beast in human garb.”
    “You re young yet,” Fourth Uncle said. “There’s still hope.”
    “Hope for what? At thirty you’re middle-aged, at fifty they plant you in the ground. I’m forty-one, a year older than your first son. The dirt’s already up to my armpits.”
    “People survive a generation; plants make it till autumn. Climbing trees to snare sparrows, and wading in water to catch fish, it seems like only yesterday. But before you know it, it’s time to die.”
    “How old are you this year, Fourth Uncle?”
    “Sixty-four,” he replied. “Seventy-three and sixtyrfour, the critical years. If the King of the Underworld doesn’t come get you, you go on your own. There’s little chance I’ll be around to eat any of this year’s millet crop.”
    “Come, now, you’re strong and healthy enough to live another eight or ten years at least,” Gao Yang said to perk him up.
    “You don’t need to try to raise my spirits. I’m not afraid of dying. It can’t be worse than living. And just think of the food I’ll save the nation,” Fourth Uncle added wryly.
    “You wouldn’t save the nation any food by dying, since you only eat what you grow. You’re not one of those elite parasites.”
    The moon burrowed into a gray cloud, blurring the outlines of roadside trees and increasing the resonance of the insects inhabiting them.
    “Fourth Uncle, Gao Ma’s not bad. You were right to give him permission to marry Jinju.” It just slipped out, and he regretted it at once, especially when he heard Fourth Uncle suck in his breath. Moving quickly to change the subject, he said, “Did you hear what happened to the third son of the Xiong family in Sheep’s Pen Village, the one who went off to study in America? He wasn’t there a year before he went and married a blond, blue-eyed American