The Garlic Ballads

girl. He sent a picture home, and now Old Man Xiong shows her off to everybody he sees.”
    “His ancestral graves are located on auspicious land.”
    That reminded Gao Yang of his mother’s grave: it was on high land, with a river to the north and a canal to the east; off to the south you could see Little Mount Zhou, and to the west a seemingly endless broad plain. Then he thought of his two-day-old son, his big-headed son. All my life I’ve been a brick right from the kiln, and I can’t change now. But Mother’s final resting place might work to the advantage of her grandson and give him a decent life when he grows up.
    A tractor chugged past, headlight blazings, a mountain of garlic stacked on its bed. Realizing that their small-talk was slowing them down, they prodded the animals to pick up the pace.

2.

    They approached the railroad tracks under a red morning sun. Even at that hour dozens of tractors were lined up ahead of them, all loaded down with garlic.
    Their way was blocked by a zebra-striped guard rail on the north side of the tracks. A long line of carts pulled by oxen, donkeys, horses, and humans, plus the tractors and trucks, snaked behind them, as the entire garlic crop from four townships was drawn like a magnet to the county town. The sun showed half of its red face, oudined in black, as it climbed above the horizon and fell under the canopy of a white cloud whose lower half was dyed pale red. Four shiny east-west tracks lay before them. A green eastbound locomotive, belching white smoke and splitting the sky with whisde shrieks, shot past, followed by a procession of passenger cars and the bloated faces of the elite at the windows.
    A middle-aged man holding a red-and-green warning flag stood by the lowered guard rail. His face was also round and heavy. Did all the elite people who worked for the railroad have bloated faces? The ground was still shaking after the train passed, and his donkey quaked from the terrifying shrieks of the train whistle. Gao Yang, who had been covering the animal’s eyes, let his hands drop and gazed at the flag-holding crossing guard as he raised the guard rail with his free hand. Vehicles poured across the tracks before the rail was all the way up. The narrow road could only accommodate double file, and Gao Yang stood wide-eyed as more maneuverable hand-pulled carts and bicycles squeezed past him and Fourth Uncle and shot ahead. The land rose quickly on the other side of the tracks, where their way was further hampered by the rocky surface of the road, which was undergoing repairs. Carts struggling to make the climb shook and rattled in agony, forcing drivers to jump down and carefully lead the animals along by their bridles to steady the carts amid the clay and yellow sand.
    As before, Fourth Uncle led the way. Gao Yang watched steam rise from his body and noticed that his face was black as the business end of a skillet as he strained to lead his cow, the rope in his left hand and a willow switch in his right. “Hee-ya, giddap!” he hollered, waving his switch over the animal’s rump without actually touching it. Frothy bubbles formed at the corners of the cow’s raised mouth; her breathing was loud and raspy; her flanks twisted and wriggled, probably because of stones cutting into her hooves.
    The red ball of a sun and a few ragged clouds were all the scenery the sky could offer; a chewed-up highway and lots of garlic-laden carts comprised the earthly sights. Gao Yang had never been part of such a vast undertaking before, and was so flustered he kept his eyes glued to the back of Fourth Uncle’s head, not letting his gaze wander an inch. His little donkey seemed to be doing a jig on hooves gouged mercilessly by sharp stones; its left hoof was already leaving a dark bloody trail on the white stones. The poor animal was pulled from side to side by the lurching motions of the axle, but Gao Yang was too intent on moving forward to feel much sympathy. No one dared to even slow down, fearing that the subhuman creature behind them might try to take advantage.
    An explosion, as from a hand grenade, went off to his left, scaring the hell out of man and beast. He shuddered. Jerking his head toward the sound, he saw that a handcart had blown a tire, whose red inner tube was fanned out over the black rubber. Two young women, about the same age, had been pulling the cart. The slightly older one’s head was shaped like the bole of a tree and covered with the bark of