Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  “That bandanna was Lilypad’s.” Tiger heard himself whisper these words in the half light, half darkness of the early morning.

  5

  THE RAIN continued until midmorning. Baoshen returned from Meicheng covered in mud, with a hired donkey cart full of timber as well as a couple of carpenters. The carpenters unloaded their tools in the skywell and started hammering and sawing away. Wood shavings soon carpeted the skywell floor.

  Ding Shuze and his wife stopped by to see the mistress and talk to Baoshen about a headstone and epitaph. In a side wing, Hua Erniang surveyed bolts of cloth with a seamstress hired to make the mistress’s burial clothes. Grandma Meng was everywhere at once, carrying cups of tea for the guests in one hand and her metal tobacco pipe in the other. To everyone she met she said, “When the mistress dies, that’s another empty seat at the mahjong table.”

  Other visitors sat in the guest room, smoking, drinking tea, and chatting. The seamstress worked energetically and somewhat happily away, marking lines for cuts and hems on the cloth with her triangular tailor’s chalk, her measuring tape dangling around her neck. In fact, everyone but Magpie seemed to be in excellent spirits. Though Madame Lu had not yet died, she slept alone in her room, no one noticing her absence. Which meant no one was looking after Little Thing. He and Tiger played among the guests as they pleased, once slamming into Grandma Meng so hard she dropped a porcelain teacup, which shattered on the floor.

  “If you really need something to do,” Baoshen said to his son, “why don’t you go split some kindling in the rear courtyard instead of getting in everyone’s way?”

  Bursting with energy, Tiger took his father’s suggestion, leaving Little Thing and heading to the rear courtyard. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, he appeared again, walking toward the front door with a slingshot in his hand.

  “Didn’t I send you to split wood?” Baoshen asked.

  “I split it all.”

  “Then go stack it in the woodshed.”

  “It’s all stacked.”

  “That fast?”

  “Go look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  Baoshen looked his son up and down for a moment, then shook his head and continued on with his task.

  Tiger kept looking up at the sky only to see the sun not moving, motionless. Time was passing too slowly for him. Deep within the domestic commotion, he could hear the sound of fluffing cotton. He knew it concealed a secret—a secret as fragile and ephemeral as drifting clouds. He worried that something might happen before nightfall to dash his hopes. Was it real? Could such things really occur? Would she take all her clothes off? he asked himself over and over again. Pondering these questions made him nervous.

  Someone pushed him gently from behind. It was Magpie. She was carrying a wooden bucket to the well.

  “What are you daydreaming about? Come help me draw some water, my back’s about to break.”

  She handed him the bucket so she could twist her knuckles into the small of her back. As Tiger drew water, a cold draft of air from the well made him realize his cheeks were burning. He passed the full bucket to Magpie, but when she grabbed it, he didn’t let go. He thought he heard Lilypad’s voice in the darkness saying, You’re getting me all wet again. What would it be like if Magpie said that? He stared at the little blue flowers patterning Magpie’s shirt and the fine hairs on her arm.

  “Let go of it, you idiot.” Magpie gave an annoyed yank that sent water sloshing out of the bucket and onto the ground. “What’s wrong with you today? Did they put something in your food?” She looked at him with a confused and suspicious eye, as if she didn’t know him.

  •

  With great effort, Tiger made it to evening. After putting Little Thing to bed as early as he could, he sneaked down the stairs. At the foot of the staircase, he ran into his father.

  “I thought you went to bed. What are you doing down here?”

  Luckily for Tiger, Baoshen was too preoccupied to seriously attend to his own question. He was meeting with the heads of a couple of opera troupes, who were offering their services for activities after the funeral. “No opera,” Baoshen replied impatiently. “The world’s falling apart all around us. No opera.” He locked his hands behind him and strode out to the rear courtyard.

  The coffin was almost finished. Tiger watched a carpenter scraping down the plaster that sealed the joints; soon it’d be ready to paint.

  Tiger walked through the front gate, then paused to get his bearings, as if he were on the cusp of a great decision. He inhaled a long breath and set off for the academy. What would he say if he met anyone on the way? Should he knock if the door was closed? What if he knocked, but they didn’t let him in? All kinds of worrying questions crowded his mind, each as intractable as the next. Fortunately, the initial questions didn’t need to be answered—he met no one on the road, and the academy door was open when he arrived. As he stepped through the temple’s entrance, he seriously wondered if he might be dreaming.

  Inside, all was quiet and calm. Lights were on in every building. A few human shapes passed through the mist, and he occasionally heard the sound of coughing. He crept around the outer wall of the herbalist building, which was connected to the courtyard wall of the Guanyin Bodhisattva hall, and found the kitchen. He knew Lilypad was in charge of things there. Oddly, he didn’t run into a single soul. The kitchen was a rectangular building that people said once fed over a hundred monks a day in its heyday. Tiger arrived at the kitchen door. Before entering, he asked himself once more: Do I really have to do this? It was too late to turn back. He had only to touch the door and it opened.

  He interrupted a meeting. Eight to ten people, including Lilypad, were sitting in the cafeteria. A man in a scholar’s robe reprimanded the others in an unpleasant foreign accent. His voice wasn’t loud, but Tiger could tell that he was angry. He was the only one standing up; the others seated around him in the room, including the Principal, had expressions of morbid guilt on their faces. The foreigner didn’t appear to notice Tiger’s entrance, as he was too busy cursing out the assembled party: “This is shameful! This is truly shameful!” Tiger could see the Principal’s face was burning with embarrassment.

  Tiger didn’t move in the doorway, unsure of whether to go or stay. He noticed Lilypad trying to shoo him away with stern eyes. When the foreigner finished cursing, he sat down and picked his teeth. Then the Principal stood up. She began by acknowledging that she assumed full responsibility for what happened at the academy, since she had been unable to control her subordinates. Then she looked at Tiger—or looked through him, as her gaze didn’t seem focused on him. Her eyes glittered like knives; her face looked inhuman.

  Just as Tiger was beginning to panic, he heard the Principal ask, “What does everyone think, do we kill him or not?”

  A man in an old felt hat seated at the other end of the table chimed in, “Kill him, kill him . . . We have to kill him.”

  Tiger’s legs shook, and he protested, “Kill me? You— Why do you want to kill me?”

  He spoke at the same time another man said, “At this point, it’s all we can do.”

  “Then we’ll proceed accordingly,” the Principal said nonchalantly. “Where is he?”

  “I already brought him in; he’s locked in the stable,” Wang Qidan piped up.

  Tiger let out a sigh of relief. So it’s not me they want to kill. Who could it be then?

  The Principal finally noticed him. “Tiger,” she called out, her voice threatening.

  “Yes . . .” Tiger replied, completely unnerved; he looked desperately at Lilypad.

  “What are you doing here so late at night?” Her voice was quiet yet formidable. Tiger’s gaze didn’t move from Lilypad. He wet his pants.

  “Tiger, did something bad happen at home?” Lilypad prodded, her eyebrows raised.

  Tiger calmed himself, then replied, “The mis
tress is sick. They sent me to ask you to come home.”

  “What about Little Thing? He didn’t come with you?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  Tiger didn’t expect her to ask after Little Thing; he started to relax a little.

  The Principal regarded him in silence, then said, “Go home. I’ll be there in a bit.”

  •

  Lilypad followed Tiger out of the cafeteria.

  “Who knew you’re smarter than you look?” she whispered to him. Perhaps sensing that his body was still shaking, she put a hand on his shoulder. “That scared you pretty bad, huh?”

  “Who . . . who . . . who are they going to kill?”

  Lilypad chuckled. “What do you care? It’s not you, anyway.”

  Stumbling his way home, Tiger went straight to his father’s office instead of going to bed. The light was on, and he could hear the clicking of the abacus. Stopping in the doorway, Tiger looked at his father and blurted out, “Dad, I just heard something that will scare you.”

  Baoshen stopped his work and looked up at his son to ask what the matter was.

  “They’re planning to kill someone!” Tiger said shrilly.

  Baoshen stared at him, then waved in annoyance. “Get out, out . . . Best for you to be in bed, not raising hell and throwing my accounts off down here.”

  Tiger didn’t understand how his father could be so composed; he betrayed nothing of the panic and nervous profanity of when he had found the guns in the crates. He left his father’s office and, entering the front courtyard, ran into Magpie and Hua Erniang, who were just exiting Madame Lu’s bedroom with an oil lamp in hand. Tiger stepped in front of them and announced, “They’re going to kill someone.”

  Magpie and Hua Erniang looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

  “Well then, let’s hope they do it,” Magpie said as she cupped her hand around the flame to protect it from the wind.

  “What does it have to do with you anyway?” Hua Erniang asked. Then she added, “Looks like Yellowtooth won’t live to see morning. Not keeping his mouth shut really did him in.”

  So it was Yellowtooth they were going to kill, and Baoshen, Magpie, and Hua Erniang knew about it long ago. Only he had been left in the dark.

  6

  TIGER later learned that when the old woman from Changzhou arrived in Puji with her grandchildren, Yellowtooth was cooking herbal medicine for his mother at his home. He was well known for being a filial son. When the ferryman Tan Shuijin heard that the old women and her two grandchildren were looking for him, he hurried to tell Yellowtooth the news: “Three people from Changzhou have come to Puji, and it looks like they want your blood.”

  Yellowtooth seemed unconcerned. He tapped his chest and said to Shuijin, “So what? An old lady and two kids. I’ll kick the three of them out the door.”

  His blind mother, reacting with the circumspection that comes with age and experience, confronted her son. “Don’t lie to me: Did you do it?”

  “I did,” Yellowtooth replied.

  The old lady sent him up to his room. “Hide and don’t make any noise. I’ll send them off first, then I’ll deal with you later.”

  Yellowtooth obeyed his mother’s order, sequestering himself quietly in a corner of the upstairs room. Soon the old lady and her grandchildren arrived at their door, crying and wailing. Although the mother couldn’t see, she could tell by the visitor’s voice that the old woman was honest and straightforward, and somewhat timorous, and so with a mix of false innocence and persuasive lies, she succeeded in sending her away. After closing the door, the blind woman put her ear to it, listening to the visitors leave, and called her son downstairs only when she couldn’t hear them anymore.

  “Son,” she said, “the money you gave me from your butchery work is all in the camphorwood chest by the head of my bed. I haven’t touched a single cent of it. I had meant it to be used toward finding you a wife, but now you must take it, along with a change of clean clothes, and run. Run as far away as you possibly can, and don’t return for six months, or at least a year would be better.”

  Yellowtooth laughed. “Ma, what are you talking about? As if I should be afraid of them? I don’t need to run anywhere. If they dare to knock again, I’ll kill them.”

  “Your old mother may not know anything, but I lost my parents when I was six, got sold as a child bride, married your father at fourteen, and was a widow by the time I was twenty-six. I might be blind, but I remember every awful thing I’ve been through. Listen to me, son: Despite everything that has happened already, I had a dream last night. I dreamed a flock of white herons landed on your father’s grave. It’s a bad omen, and I’m afraid it has something to do with you.”

  “You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Ma,” Yellowtooth told her. “Times have changed. The world’s changing, chaos is the law. And Puji’s been revolutionized.”

  “I hear you going on day after day about revolution this and revolution that, running around raising hell with a certain girl from the east side of the village, not even doing the job your father and grandfather taught you—”

  “Revolution’s about killing people, and not much different from killing pigs—just a pale knife in and a red knife out. Once we’ve taken down Meicheng and killed the governor, I’ll move you into his mansion.”

  Seeing that her son wouldn’t leave, the blind woman thought for a moment, then tried a different approach.

  “Judging from her speech, the old lady doesn’t seem like the type to cause a scene. Her daughter-in-law dies because of you, and she comes straight to us instead of the magistrate—that means she wants money more than anything else. If you don’t want to take my advice and wait things out somewhere else, at least take half of the money in the chest upstairs and have someone you trust pass it to her. ‘Money melts misfortune,’ as the old saying goes. You can ignore everything else I’ve said, but not this—you must do it.”

  Yellowtooth made a show of assenting to his mother’s wish. He helped her drink her medicine, then went out to gamble.

  A few days passed, and the old lady stopped reminding her son to send the money. Then one afternoon, Yellowtooth came home reeking of alcohol. The moment he stepped through the door, he said to his mother, “The Wang brothers bought me drinks today at lunch, but it didn’t feel right.”

  “What’s wrong with a couple of friends treating you to drinks?” his mother asked.

  “Nothing, but then as we were drinking, Wang Qidan pulled a rope out of his back pocket and said, ‘The two of us have something we’ve got to do, brother—I hope you won’t hold it against us.’ I couldn’t tell what he meant by it.”

  “What happened next?”

  “The two of them got drunk and passed out on the table.”

  His blind mother rolled her eyes back in her head, slapped her thigh, and sobbed: “You fool, you fool! How did I give birth to such an idiot? They’ve put the blade right up to your throat and you still can’t see what’s going on!”

  “Why . . . who would want to kill me?” Yellowtooth rubbed his throat uneasily.

  “Child, don’t you understand? The brothers weren’t buying you drinks; they were setting a trap for you.”

  “Why would they buy me drinks if they wanted to trap me?” Yellowtooth asked.

  “Stupid, with your strength, even the two of them together couldn’t take you sober. They had to get you drunk first, otherwise they could never do it. Thank goodness they got themselves drunk, too, otherwise you’d be dead already.”

  “But I have no business with them . . . Why would they want to kill me?”

  “It’s not what they want. Someone else sent them to do it.”

  “So . . . you mean the Principal?” This unpleasant thought dragged Yellowtooth halfway out of his drunken fog. “Why would she . . . why would she want to arrest me?”

&n
bsp; “To atone for the Changzhou incident.”

  Yellowtooth’s face turned pale. The chair he leaned his hand against creaked as he gripped it harder.

  “How strange,” the old woman noted. “You’re always swaggering around the village like a demon incarnate, not afraid of anything. Yet just mentioning that little girl turns you into a clump of nerves.”

  “Ma, what the hell am I gonna do?”

  “Well, since the brothers couldn’t do it, someone else will try next. Get your things together now, and leave the village at nightfall. Walk me to the kitchen; I’ll bake some flatcakes for you to take with you.”

  That evening, a barber stopped by their house, shuffling up to their front door with a wooden tool chest under his arm. Yellowtooth recognized him as Lame Xu from Xia village. Yellowtooth hadn’t had a haircut in over a month, so he figured he might as well get a trim before fleeing. He bartered the barber down to a reasonable price and plopped into a chair to get started.

  After draping a cloth over Yellowtooth’s chest, Lame Xu reached into his toolkit for a straight razor. He pressed the gleaming steel to Yellowtooth’s throat and whispered, “Keep still, brother. You’re a butcher, you know what this edge can do. If you don’t move, I won’t move.”

  Yellowtooth sat motionless under the knife, completely paralyzed with fear. Several people stormed in through his front door and tied him up. Wang Qidan patted his shoulder, saying, “We were supposed to nab you at lunch today, but my brother and I got a little too thirsty and almost messed up the whole plan.”

  Ignoring the bitter entreaties and curses of the blind old lady, they carried Yellowtooth off to the academy.

  •

  According to the villagers, if Yellowtooth had been able to control his tongue, he would never have faced death.

  The night they took him away, his old mother pawed and stumbled her way across the village to Ding Shuze’s house and fell to her knees at his front door.