Cries in the Drizzle (8 page)

In the two years that followed, my brother was never again to see the matchmaker approach him, her face wreathed in smiles. During that period he would think of his father only in bed at night, gnashing his teeth. Sometimes, as dawn approached, his thoughts would turn to his brother, far away in Beijing. I would often receive letters from him in those days, but they said nothing of substance and their vacuous contents made me realize how empty he felt.

When he turned twenty-four Sun Guangping married a Southgate girl. Yinghuas only family was her father, confined to bed after a stroke. The pond played a role in their union. Late one damp afternoon Sun Guangping looked out through the rear window and saw Yinghua washing clothes there. She was crouched down in her patched clothes, so overwhelmed by the hardships of life that she had constantly to wipe her tears away. The sight of her
shivering in the chilly winter breeze triggered the same kind of heartache that his own plight inspired in him. The couple reached an understanding without the help of the matchmaker, who made a point of ignoring them.

Sun Guangping's marriage took place a year or so after he glimpsed Yinghua at the pond. The wedding arrangements were so skimpy that the older villagers were reminded of how a landlord s hired hands used to get married in the old days. Though meager, the wedding was not without its comic aspects, since the bride waddled about with a big belly. Before sunup the next morning Sun Guangping borrowed a flatbed cart and took Yinghua to the obstetric ward in the town hospital. For newlyweds, morning in the bridal chamber is normally a time of blissful cuddles, but Sun Guangping and Yinghua had to brave the piercing cold and rush into town to tap on the doors and windows of the hospital, still locked tight at that hour of the day. Two o'clock that afternoon, protesting furiously, a boy later to be named Sun Xiaoming came into the world.

Sun Guangping had entangled himself in a web of his own design. After his marriage he was duty bound to provide for his bedridden father-in-law. At this point in time, Sun Kwangtsai had not yet completed his career as a deliveryman, but to his family's relief he had restrained some of his impulses and was no longer in the habit of ostentatiously transferring property from our house to the widow's home. He did, however, reveal a new talent, an aptitude for pilfering things on the sly. Sun Guangping's financial and domestic difficulties continued for some years before his father-in-law—embarrassed, perhaps, at being such a burden—closed his eyes one night and never opened them again. For Sun Guangping, the greatest challenge was not his father-in-law's infirmity or
his father's thievery but the period following Xiaoming's birth. During that time he was seldom seen just walking around the village, for he was in a blur of constant motion, scurrying from the fields to Yinghua's house, then to his own home, as nervous as a rabbit.

His father-in-law's death came as a relief to Sun Guangping, but a peaceful life remained far out of reach. Not long afterward Sun Kwangtsai was up to his old tricks again, reducing Yinghua to tears for a full three days.

This was in the summer of the year that Xiaoming turned three. As my father sat on the threshold and watched Yinghua fetch water from the well, he saw how the flowers imprinted on her shorts tightened and then loosened over her fleshy buttocks, and how her thighs gleamed in the sunlight. Worn out by the widow and by his advancing years, my father now had as little vitality as the dregs of an herbal medicine, but Yinghua's robust figure triggered in him a recollection of his exuberant energy of yore. This memory was not summoned up through mental effort as much as by a quirk of his withered body, which suddenly saw a revival of his once so irrepressible lust. As Yinghua walked over, bucket in hand, my father flushed and gave a loud cough. Although villagers were walking by not far away, the incorrigible lecher put his hands on the big red flowers on Yinghua's shorts and on the flesh underneath. My nephew heard his mother give a shocked screech.

Sun Guangping had gone to town that day, and when he came home he found his mother hunched up on the doorsill, tears streaming down her face, muttering to herself, “Such a sin!” The next thing he saw was Yinghua perched on the edge of the bed, sobbing, her hair in disarray.

Sun Guangping did not need to be told what had happened. As the blood drained from his face, he marched into the kitchen and emerged with an ax glinting in his hand. He walked over to where Yinghua was weeping and said to her, “You're going to have to look after Ma and the boy.”

When the meaning of this sank in, Yinghua burst out into wails of anguish. She clutched at his jacket and said, “No, don't! Don't do that!”

My mother threw herself on her knees in the doorway, stretching out both arms in an effort to block his way. Eyes wet with tears, she said gravely to Sun Guangping in a hoarse, wavering voice: “If you kill him, it's you who'll suffer.”

Her expression brought tears to his eyes. “Get up!” he shouted. “If I don't kill him, how can I ever show my face in the village again?”

My mother remained stubbornly on her knees and tried a different tack: “Think of your little boy. It's not worth it, going that far.”

He gave a bitter smile and said to her, “I can't think of any other way out of this.”

The outrage suffered by Yinghua made Sun Guangping feel that he had to have it out with Sun Kwangtsai once and for all. For years now he had been putting up with the losses of face that his father had inflicted upon him, but Sun Kwangtsai's latest affront had forced them, he knew, into a collision course. In his rage he saw with total clarity that if he failed to take a stand it would be impossible to hold his head up among the neighbors.

Everyone in the village was milling around outside that afternoon. In the dazzling sunlight and the glowing eyes of the spectators, Sun Guangping recovered the bravado he had exhibited
as a fourteen-year-old. Ax in hand, he strode toward my father.

Sun Kwangtsai was standing under a tree in front of the widows house, and he watched, perplexed, as Sun Guangping approached. My brother heard him say to the widow, “Can this joker really be out to kill me?”

Then he shouted at Sun Guangping, “Son, I'm your dad!”

Sun Guangping maintained a grim silence and a look of determination. As he came ever closer, a note of alarm crept into Sun Kwangtsai s voice. “You've got only one dad. If you kill him, that's it.”

By this time Sun Guangping was almost upon him, and Sun Kwangtsai could only mutter in panic, “He really does want to kill me!” So saying, he took to his heels, crying out to nobody in particular, “Help!”

A hush fell as my father, now in his sixties, set off on a run for his life. He grew increasingly exhausted as he ran along the narrow road into town, with Sun Guangping, brandishing the ax, hot on his tail. Sun Kwangtsai gave incessant cries for help, but his voice sounded so different from normal that Old Luo, standing at the entrance to the village, asked other onlookers, “Is that Sun Kwangtsai yelling?”

It was quite an achievement for my father to maintain such a blistering pace at his age. But he slipped and fell as he was crossing the bridge, and ended up sitting down there and bursting into tears, crying as lustily as a newborn babe. This was the shocking sight that greeted Sun Guangping when he reached the bridge. Tears had made my father's face as gaudy as a butterfly, and snot dribbled down his lips. He cut such a sorry figure that my brother suddenly felt that chopping his head off made no sense at all. Usually
so decisive, for once he was rendered irresolute. But with the throng of villagers around him he knew he had little choice but to put the ax to use. I am not sure what led him to pick my father's left ear, but there in the afternoon glare he grabbed hold of this appendage and lopped it off as cleanly as one might snip through a bolt of cloth. My father's blood spilled out and within a few seconds it encircled his neck like a crimson kerchief. Sun Kwangtsai was so immersed in his own loud weeping that he did not realize the nature of his injury. Only when he grew alarmed by how many tears he seemed to be shedding and stretched out a hand to wipe his face did he see his own blood. He gave a cry of horror and fainted.

As my brother walked home that afternoon, his body was rent with shivers. On this sultry summer day he clutched his arms as tightly as if he was exposed to subzero temperatures. When he threaded his way through the crowd of villagers, they could clearly hear his teeth chatter. My mother and Yinghua blanched as they watched him approach, and both women saw black spots in front of their eyes, as though a horde of locusts was descending. Sun Guangping smiled faintly and went inside. He rummaged through the storage cabinets, looking for his padded jacket. By the time Mother and Yinghua were back in the house, he had already put it on. He was sitting on the bed, his face streaming with perspiration, while the rest of his body continued to shake uncontrollably.

A fortnight later, Sun Kwangtsai, his head swathed in bandages, had a scribe in town write a letter and send it to me in Beijing. This missive, along with much flattery and many endearments, emphasized his role in rearing me and closed with an injunction to seek redress on his behalf from the top officials in Zhongnanhai. The absurdity of this idea left a deep impression on me.

In fact, when my father wrote to me, Sun Guangping had already been arrested. As he was taken away, my mother tugged at Yinghua and blocked the policemen's path. She burst into tears and cried out to them, “Take us instead! Two of us for one of him—isn't that a better deal?”

Sun Guangping served two years, and by the time he came home Mother was already ailing. On the day of his release, Mother stood at the entrance to the village with five-year-old Sun Xiaoming. When she saw Sun Guangping and Yinghua walking toward her, all of a sudden she spat blood and fell to the ground.

After this, Mother's condition deteriorated and she tended to wobble as she walked. Sun Guangping wanted to take her to the hospital for treatment but she flatly refused, saying, “I am going to die anyway. The money's not worth spending.”

When Sun Guangping insisted on carrying her into town piggyback, Mother wept tears of rage and pounded his back with her fists, saying, “I'll hate you till the day I die!”

But Mother calmed down after they had crossed the wooden bridge, and as she clung to Sun Guangping's shoulders a girlish, bashful look began to appear on her face.

Mother died shortly before the Spring Festival that year. One winter evening she began to cough blood, and once it started, it wouldn't stop. When she first felt her mouth fill with blood, she did not spit it out, unwilling to soil the floor and give Sun Guangping more work. Though normally unable to rise from her bed unassisted, Mother still managed to get up and grope around in the darkness for a basin to set next to her bed.

The following morning, when Sun Guangping came into her room, he noticed that Mother's head was drooping over the side of the bed and that dark red blood had accumulated in the basin,
leaving the sheets untouched. When he wrote to me later, he said the air outside was thick with driving snow. Her breath reduced to the merest wisp, Mother spent the last day of her life in bitter cold. Yinghua held vigil at her bedside the whole time, and Mothers expression as death grew near seemed peaceful and serene. But in the evening, this woman, hitherto so taciturn, began to rave with startling vigor. Sun Kwangtsai was the target of all her expostulations. Although she had not offered the slightest protest when he was shifting our household property into the widow's possession, her deathbed rants revealed that she had taken these losses very much to heart. In her final moments she cried over and over again, “Don't take the chamber pot away, I need it!” Or, “Give me that basin back!” She listed every one of the items that he had filched.

Mother's funeral was somewhat more lavish than my little brother's had been. She was buried in a coffin. Throughout the whole proceedings my father was assigned the same position that I had once occupied, banishment outside the family circle. Just as I had earlier been the object of reproach, Sun Kwangtsai became the butt of criticism because of his lack of involvement in the funeral, even though his relationship with the widow was now tacitly accepted. When he saw the coffin being carried out of the village he asked a villager in confusion, “The old woman is dead?”

They noticed he was drinking spirits nonchalantly in the widow's house all afternoon. But later, in the middle of the night, the locals heard a piteous wailing coming from outside the village. My brother recognized the sound as that of my father grieving by Mother's grave. After the widow fell asleep he had surreptitiously made his way to the burial site, and grief made him forget how
loudly he was wailing. Not long afterward my brother heard the widows voice. Her scolding was followed by a clear order: “Get back here!”

Father, sobbing, tramped back to the widow's house, his steps as hesitant as those of a lost child. Now that her once unquenchable libido had dissipated, the widow recognized Sun Kwangtsai as her official sleeping partner.

In the last year of his life Sun Kwangtsai exhibited a limitless devotion to liquor. Every afternoon, rain or shine, he would go into town to buy a bottle and by the time he got home it would already be completely drained. I can imagine what a romantic figure my father must have cut as he walked along the lane, swigging spirits. Whether making his way through clouds of dust or squelching his way through mud puddles, encouraged by the alcohol, my father, stooped and bent though he was, was as exhilarated as a boy who sees his sweetheart's hair waving in the breeze.

It was his limitless devotion to liquor that did my father in. On that particular day he changed his normal routine and instead chose to do his drinking in a small tavern in town. Walking back home in the moonlight, completely sozzled, he stumbled into the cesspit at the entrance to the village. As he fell, he did not give a shout of alarm but only muttered, “Don't push.”

When he was discovered the next morning, he was lying facedown in the muck, covered with little white maggots. He could not have chosen a filthier place in which to lay himself to rest, but he was quite unaware of that in his final moments and had every reason to wear a contented expression, given that he died in such a painless fashion.