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 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.
