Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (25 page)

“I heard people say Chairman Mao is dearer than any mama or papa. They said Chairman Mao loves me. So Chairman Mao is my real papa.”

“That’s good,” Mama said. “Go play now.”

“Okay,” he said and smiled. “I’m going to find some shit and make my real papa proud of me.”

In the autumn the entire village participated in harvesting rice. Classes were canceled so children could join their parents in the paddies. Even the smallest children worked in the fields. After the harvest, the fields were plowed and the smallest children went through them and stomped down the roots of the previous crop.

At dawn Old Crab awakened everyone with long shrill blasts on his whistle. After barking out the work assignments, he led the villagers in a long column into the fields. He marched at the head of the column, holding a huge picture of Chairman Mao on a wooden pole high in the air. On the march to the fields one morning I was accompanied by my friend Wang Jinlan. Jigui, the village idiot, who was not required to work in the fields, walked behind us. Jinlan was sixteen, and she had already blossomed into a strikingly beautiful young woman. The eyes of all of the young men followed her wherever she went. But her heart was spoken for.

“Old Crab came to our shed yesterday,” she told me as we walked. “He brought a matchmaker with him. They talked to my parents about marrying me to Young Crab.”

“Oh, no!” I protested. “You can’t marry him. Everyone knows you are in love with Shuizi.”

“Yes.” She smiled and sighed. “Everyone knows that. But what can I do? I’m just a girl. I can’t say anything about my marriage. It doesn’t matter that I don’t want to marry Young Crab. My papa and mama make that decision.”

“And what does Shuizi say about that?” I asked.

“His family is no match for Old Crab’s family,” she said. “He’s sad. But there is nothing we can do about it.”

Shuizi and his father lived in a shed near Jinlan’s family. Shuizi was the tallest and most handsome of all of the young men in the village. Ever since he and Jinlan were children, they’d played together. Villagers often saw them walking and talking together just beyond the perimeter of the village. Everyone expected that when they grew up, they’d marry.

Shuizi reminded me of the tenderhearted and melancholy poets of the Tang Dynasty whom I’d read about in Papa’s books. He saw and related to the world differently from anyone I’d ever known. He smiled more and laughed more than the other boys. He seemed filled with a joy for life and he communicated that to others. Somehow he had taught himself to play the flute. He learned songs by listening to broadcasts of music over the public loudspeakers in the village. Some afternoons I saw him sitting at the base of the loudspeaker pole with his eyes closed as Peking operas or revolutionary anthems were broadcast. The next day he’d be sitting in another part of the village, playing the same tunes on his flute. Villagers stopped what they were doing when they heard him and many sat on the ground and listened to the music he made. The young women in the village adored his talent and his temperament and envied Jinlan.

As we neared the rice paddy, Jigui suddenly grabbed Jinlan’s braids and gave them a jerk and shouted, “Look at the braids! Longer than cow tails! Thicker than my penis!” Jinlan turned and slapped at Jigui, who ducked and retreated a few steps. Before he could make another move, Young Crab appeared and swung a hoe at Jigui, striking him
across the shoulder and knocking him to the ground. “Why are you harassing my breast, you damned idiot?” he shouted. “I will kill you right here!” The procession halted and everyone turned to see the commotion. Old Crab raced back and began hitting Jigui with the pole he carried with the picture of Chairman Mao on the end. Mao’s beatific face rose and fell on Jigui’s skull. Jigui cowered and shrieked, “Stop hitting me with my real papa! Stop! I am the good son of Chairman Mao.”

The peasants gasped as the portrait tore upon hitting Jigui’s upraised hand. “Shit!” Old Crab screamed. “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve punctured the face of the Great Helmsman. You are a current counterrevolutionary.”

Realizing the seriousness of what had happened, Old Crab quickly raised the portrait high over his head. But it hung askew and there was a gaping hole under Chairman Mao’s left eye.

“Look what
you
did,” Jigui yelled. “You hurt me and you hurt my papa!”

Old Crab and his son kicked Jigui until he stopped shouting and rolled onto his side and groaned with pain.

“Okay,” Old Crab proclaimed to the villagers. “Let’s get to work!” Holding the damaged portrait of Chairman Mao, he led the procession into the fields. I looked back to see Jigui crawling away.

We stopped working early that afternoon as a powerful thunderstorm approached. The sky darkened, and a heavy rain was soon lashing the village. The wind increased throughout the evening. The roof of our shed groaned and shook with each new blast that night, and the door creaked on its hinges. I lay in bed listening apprehensively as the storm battered our shed. Shortly after midnight I saw a flash of lightning overhead and the rain hit my face. I sat up in bed looking at the ceiling. Everything was black. Then there was another flash, a boom of thunder, and more rain fell on me. I realized that the wind was lifting the corner of the roof off and exposing everything inside. I sat on the edge of my bed and called out, “Mama, the roof’s flying away.”

But before anyone could respond to my cry, another huge gust of
wind caught the corner of the roof. It curled and twisted off the wall, rose into the night sky and in an instant disappeared. I was drenched by the rainfall, and several bright strings of lightning terrified me. I ran into my parents’ room shouting, “The roof is gone, the roof is gone!” I huddled in bed with my parents and brothers. We listened to the rain sloshing onto the floor of my bedroom. As we clung together in the dark, I felt the rain once more splashing my back. I turned to see the east wall of our house dissolving, and what remained of the roof was beginning to tilt at a precarious angle. Afraid that the wall might collapse and bring the roof down on us, we fled into the middle section of the house.

In the morning we saw the part of the roof that formerly covered my room lying scattered over the nearby rice paddies. The wall in my parents’ room was half its original height and the roof sloped at a 45-degree angle. We could hardly believe our eyes. Mama remarked, “Let’s just count our blessings. At least we’re all alive.”

Old Crab examined the damage and concluded, “Well, I’ve seen worse. You’ll have to take care of this yourself.”

“We don’t know how to repair this,” Mama said. “We haven’t the tools or the materials.”

“What are you suggesting?” he asked.

Papa quickly rummaged through a box in the bedroom and emerged with two packs of cigarettes. “These are still dry,” he said and handed them to Old Crab.

“That’s more like it,” the team leader said. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

As Old Crab was leaving, Sun Breast came to our door. “Jigui is missing,” she said. “He didn’t come home last night. Have you seen him?”

“Good,” Old Crab said. “He damaged the portrait of Chairman Mao yesterday. I hope the lightning killed him.”

“We haven’t seen him,” Mama said.

“I’m worried,” Sun Breast said. “Where can my poor idiot be?”

No one saw Jigui for the next two weeks. Many villagers concluded he had been caught in the storm and killed. People stopped asking about him. Even his mother stopped looking for him.

When the rice harvest was finished, Old Crab supervised a crew of village workers who patched our roof with new straw and replaced the fallen wall with mud bricks. While they were working, Mama took Yiding to enroll in the local high school, four miles from Gao Village. At the door to the school they were nearly run down by a gang of students chasing someone. She recognized the boy they were chasing: Jigui. He wore only his underwear and was caked with mud. The students were pelting him with stones.

“What’s going on here?” Mama asked a teacher.

“That damned idiot came here from the leper colony,” the teacher told her. “He’s running around at all hours of the day and night, stealing food and hitting students and telling them, ‘You’re it! You’re it!’ We’re all afraid of getting leprosy from him and some people want to hunt him down and kill him.”

Mama was glad to learn that Jigui was alive, but deeply concerned to hear he’d been living among the lepers in their nearby isolated settlement. As soon as she’d gotten Yiding registered for school she hurried home and told the Suns what she’d seen.

“We can never bring him home now,” Jigui’s father said. “He’ll give leprosy to his younger brother.”

“We can’t just leave him out there,” Sun Breast pleaded. “We have to do something. He’s our son.”

“No, we don’t have to do anything,” the father said. “It would be a damned lot better if the lightning had struck him. This is just our luck. That idiot will never die.”

That night Jigui quietly returned to Gao Village. He went into his shed and tried to crawl into his bed. His parents caught him, however, tied his hands, pushed him outside and bound him to a post in the yard. They left him there for the rest of the night.

In the morning Sun Breast doused him with several buckets of
water and handed him clean clothing. She was careful not to touch him. “If you try to untie the rope,” she warned him, “I know your father will beat you to death.”

He understood the warning and sat obediently at the post through the next day and night. When I saw Jigui during the following days, he was sitting silently on the ground, playing with some pebbles he’d dug up. He glanced up at me and then, as if embarrassed, turned back to his pebbles.

Late one afternoon, Sun Breast burst into our shed crying, “Help! Old Crab and my man are killing Jigui! Maybe they’ll listen to you, Teacher Li,” she pleaded. “Don’t let them kill my idiot.”

Mama ran out with her. I followed. A crowd had gathered in front of the Suns’ shed. From the midst of the crowd came the shouts of many people. I squeezed my way through until I could see Old Crab and Jigui’s father standing over the cowering boy. They had bound him like a pig about to be slaughtered. He lay in the dirt. Each of the men held a manure-collecting rake and took turns clubbing Jigui with them. The boy was covered with blood.

“Stop it!” Mama shouted. I was astounded by both her courage and the volume of her voice. The two men holding the rakes turned to her, and I thought they might strike her. But they froze as if waiting to hear her next command. She strode up to them fearlessly and said, “Leave the boy alone.”

Sun Breast threw herself over her son to shield him from further blows. She wailed, “Kill me. But don’t hurt my son anymore. I gave birth to him. I made the mistake. Not him.”

Old Crab and Jigui’s father looked at each other. “Stupid bitch,” Old Crab said to Sun Breast. “Get out of the way.”

Mama knelt to untie Jigui. Sun Breast ignored Old Crab and helped Mama free the boy.

Jigui’s father looked to Old Crab as if to ask, “What now?” But Old Crab merely stood there, perplexed. Jigui got to his feet between the two women and the three of them pushed their way through the
crowd. The moment they had broken through the outer edge of the circle, Jigui ran. Old Crab was on his heels in a second, waving the rake over his head, cursing and commanding the boy to stop.

I followed behind with the crowd. Jigui was fast on his feet, despite the beating he’d taken. He crossed the nearby fields, ran up and down a slight rise, and was about to cross a road when a large truck approached.

The driver heard the noise and was looking toward the approaching crowd of people when Jigui darted in front of the truck. There was a loud bang as the truck slammed into Jigui. The boy flew into the air and landed on the other side of the road.

The driver leaped from the truck and ran to the boy. The crowd converged on the scene. Sun Breast cried, “My son! My son!”

Old Crab burst into a demonic cackle when he saw Jigui lying in the ditch. He turned to the driver and spat, “Damn it! You just killed my best team member! Which work unit do you belong to? You’re going to pay for this!”

Meanwhile, the other villagers huddled around Jigui’s body and Sun Breast wept, “My son! My son! Why did this happen?”

Suddenly, Jigui appeared to rise from the dead. His body convulsed, and a moment later he moaned.

“Oh, shit!” Old Crab mumbled. “The stupid idiot is alive!”

“That’s good!” the shaken truck driver said. “That’s good! Let’s get him to the county hospital right now and discuss a payment later.”

“Shit!” Old Crab repeated, ignoring the driver’s words. “Oh, shit!”

Sun Breast and several men lifted Jigui onto the bed of the truck. Sun Breast climbed up beside him. But Old Crab seemed to come to his senses and grabbed her and pulled her down. “I’m in charge here,” he said. “I’ll take this idiot to the hospital to make sure he gets proper care.”

Old Crab and Young Crab climbed into the cab of the truck. The driver looked at them in astonishment. “Someone has to ride in the back with the boy,” he said, “or he’ll fall off.”

Old Crab turned to his son. “Get back there with that idiot,” he said. “And if he dies, bang on the top of the cab.”

Young Crab got out and climbed up beside Jigui and the truck turned around and pulled away. Mama put her arm around the sobbing Sun Breast and told her, “He’ll be okay. Let’s go home.”

Ten days later the truck returned. Someone cried out, “Look!” and pointed to it. Everyone ran to the road. The truck stopped and the villagers gathered around it. Old Crab stumbled from the cab. He fell back against the door for an instant, steadied himself and tried to stand tall. He was drunk.

Young Crab jumped down from the truck bed. Jigui was sitting on the truck bed, his back against the cab. He slid to the side of the bed and Young Crab helped him down. Jigui turned and pulled two crutches from the truck. We were horrified to see that his right leg had been amputated above the knee. The leg of his trousers had been shortened and pinned shut around the stump.