The Garlic Ballads

“I should have guessed,” he replied. “This is no job for a woman.”

“People can endure anything.”

“If I had a wife, she’d be home in the kitchen or mending clothes or feeding the chickens. I’d never make her work in the fields.”

Jinju looked at him and muttered, “She’s a lucky woman, whoever she is.”

“Jinju, tell me what the villagers say about me.”

“I’ve never heard them say anything.”

“Don’t worry — whatever it is, I can take it.”

“Well, some of them say … don’t get mad … they say you messed up in the army.”

“That’s right, I did.”

“They say you and a regiment commander’s wife … he caught the two of you …”

Gao Ma sneered. “It wasn’t his wife, it was his concubine. And I didn’t love her. I hated her — I hated them all.”

“You’ve seen and done so much,” she said with a sigh.

“It’s not worth a dog’s fart,” he snarled. Throwing down his scythe, he scooped up some millet and straightened up. Kicking it angrily, he cursed again, “Not worth a dog’s fart!”

Her crippled brother limped up about then, as Gao Ma recalled. Though he was not yet forty, his hair was turning white and his face was deeply wrinkled. His left leg, shorter than the right, was rail thin, giving him a pronounced limp.

“Jinju!” he bellowed. “You plan to stay here through lunch?”

Cupping his hand over his eyes, Gao Ma muttered, “Why does your brother treat you like his worst enemy?”

She bit her lip as two large tears slid down her cheeks.

Jinju, I haven’t known a moment’s peace since you cried that day. I love you, I want to make you my wife…. It’s been a year already, Jinju, but you avoid me whenever I try to talk to you … I want to rescue you from your living hell. Zhang Kou, another dozen lines is all I ask, enough time for me to take her hand … even if she screams in front of everyone, even if her mother jumps up and curses or slaps me. No, she wont scream, I know she wont. She’s unhappy with the marriage they’ve arranged for her. It was the day her older brother called out to her, the day I helped her bring in the harvest that her parents signed an agreement with Liu Shengli’s grandfather and Cao Wen’s parents, stringing three boys and three girls together like so many locusts, a chain with six links, a tawdry way to create new families. She doesn’t hate me; she likes me. When we meet, she lowers her head and scoots by, but I can see the tears in her eyes. My heart aches my liver aches my lungs ache my stomach aches my gut aches everything inside me aches…. ‘ “Commander, hurry, give the order,” wailed Zhang Kou. “Send your troops down the mountain … save our Big Sister Jiang … so many moths have died in the yellow lame of the lantern, our Big Sister Jiang is held captive, the masses fear for her safety. Comrades! We must be cool-headed — if they take our elder sister from us, I’ll be the one to grieve…. The old lady fires two pistols, her white hair flutters in the wind, tears stream down her face.”

Say something, Zhang Kou. Sing, Zhang Kou. “My husband languishes in a prison camp … his widow and orphaned daughter carry on the revolution …” Zhang Kou, just a couple more lines, two more, and I can take her hand, I can feel the warmth of her body, I can smell the sweat in her armpits. “Making revolution doesn’t mean acting rashly…. It must be slow and sure, one careful step at a time.”

Explosions went off inside his head, and a halo of light swirled until he was encircled by a cloud of many colors. He reached out; his hand seemed to have eyes, or maybe hers had been waiting all along. He gripped it tightly. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. It was not cold, yet he was shivering; his heart paled.

2.

The next night Gao Ma hid behind a stack of chaff on the edge of Jinju’s threshing floor, waiting anxiously. It was another starry night, with the slender crescent moon hanging, it seemed, from the tip of a tall tree, its luminous rays weakened by the encircling starlight. A chestnut colt galloped along the edge of the floor, which was bordered on the south by a wide trench whose sloping banks had been planted with indigo bushes. Occasionally the colt galloped into the trench and up the other side, and when it passed through the bushes it set them rustling. The lamps were lit at Jinju’s home, where her father — Fourth Uncle Fang — was in the yard talking loudly and being constantly interrupted by Fourth Aunt, Jinju’s mother. Gao Ma strained to hear their conversation, but was too far away. A yardful of parakeets — well over a hundred of them — were setting up a deafening racket at the home of the Fangs’ neighbor Gao Zhileng. The noise put everyone on edge. Gao Zhileng raised parakeets for profit, of which there was a great deal, and his was the only family in the village that did not rely on garlic for its livelihood.