Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘Not far now. Bo, how are you doing?’ Jinyi kept up the flow of talk every few minutes, in order to reassure the others and stop him from worrying about himself. The boy shrugged, pressed on.

  The village squatted near the bottom of a long, stretched-out hill. It looked like a tall mountain had been splatted out by a giant fist and then the lumpy damage covered over with a smattering of trees and streams. Every week a truck passed through, with a half-trained doctor who spent most of his visits attempting to debunk the locals’ superstitions and warn them away from their homemade remedies. There was no way out. The dirt road could have led anywhere, the couple of work mules looked as if they had already signed a long, drawn-out agreement with death, and the cadre always kept one eye on his rusty motorbike, even, it was whispered, while he slept.

  ‘Are we lost?’ Lard asked glumly as they struggled up into a craggy clearing, amongst juts of rock that stretched out between them and the dark greens of the wood. He was panting, sweaty despite the chill, leaning against one of the animals. They had wound round so far, dodging nettles, rocks and patches of permafrost, that it felt like they were moving in ever-widening circles. One of the oxen lowed in response to Lard’s question, and Jinyi did a quick headcount.

  ‘No, we’re fine. Just leave the navigation to me. And even if we do get lost, the beasts could probably lead us back. I bet they’ve done the rounds a hundred times or more.’

  Bo, slumped down on a low rock, and an ox began to lick at his ankles. They settled there, and Jinyi fished in his jacket pocket for a few shrivelled, dried-out corncobs, snapped in half and passed around. Turkey lit a cigarette which was passed from mouth to hungry mouth, saliva trailing from the soggy tip. ‘So how does this work?’ Turkey asked tentatively. ‘How long are we here? A few months, a few years, what?’

  ‘As long as it takes, I guess,’ Jinyi replied.

  ‘I see,’ Turkey nodded, letting his jowls shake out. He ran his hand over his head, feeling the prickly bristle where his long mane used to be. Red Guards had shaved half to humiliate him, and he had asked his wife to do the other half to match. ‘It’s funny, in a way, you know, before this I used to be a –’

  ‘No!’ Lard interrupted, surprising everyone with the force of his speech. He lowered his voice. ‘We don’t talk about our old lives here.’

  ‘I see.’ Turkey looked to Jinyi, who sighed and began to explain.

  ‘Three reasons. One, if the locals hear you, and report it, everyone’s just going to think you prefer the old bourgeois ways to real work, and they’ll make your life difficult. You’ll be handpicking weeds for weeks if that happens. Two, we’re supposed to be here to change, and you can’t do that with one foot in the past. And three, most importantly of all, if you spend all day thinking of your wife and kids and all the other things you left behind, you’ll go crazy.’

  Turkey and Lard laughed, and even Bo managed a thin smile. They started up again, each man slipping between the lazy, hulking beasts, nudging them ever closer to the tall spray of gaudy greens up ahead.

  Hours later, their battered shoes were still crunching and slipping on the begrudging grass, their hands fumbling at the fat bulks of the herd to keep from falling.

  ‘Did you ever think about how peculiar words can be?’ Turkey said, to split the silence. ‘When I was young, my auntie used to tell us stories about hell. You know, the demons that live there, the tricks they play, the hungry ghosts – all that bullshit meant to frighten you, all the stuff the government thankfully did away with before it could cause any more harm. Anyway, it occurred to me that hell, well, what does it actually mean?’

  Lard looked across at him, wiped the rivers of sweat from his face and attempted to draw in air. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he panted. ‘It’s was just a way of stopping people from questioning the harsh feudal world around them.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know, but what about the words? Hell. Diyu. Two characters, right? What if we split them up and take them on their own. Di: field. Yu: prison.’

  ‘It’s referring to what happens under fields, Turkey,’ Jinyi said. ‘When you bury a body, you put it under the ground, and it’s trapped there, like a prison, because it can’t ever get back out. That’s all.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe it’s telling us something. Perhaps hell is a field that is also a prison. Like when you’re stuck in wide-open spaces with nowhere to turn. Does that remind you of anything?’

  ‘You’d better stop this now,’ Jinyi said sharply. ‘I’m not much good at giving advice, and I’m far worse at taking it, but you’ve got to listen to me. I’m used to keeping myself to myself, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid trouble, to run away from it at any cost. But here I am, and here you are, and we’ve all got to make the most of it. You’re looking at everything back to front.’

  He shifted on his heels, picking at his fingernails as he spoke. ‘Listen, if I’ve learnt one thing in all the time I’ve been here, it’s this: if you think something is hell, it will be hell. You’ve got to change how you think – when that happens, we’ll all get to go back home.’

  ‘What you’re saying is that we’re here to find out what it is that we have to learn.’ Turkey laughed, but no one else was in the mood. It was not a joke anymore; it was the only thing they had left to cling onto.

  The group reached the forest in silence, each with howling stomachs and their mouths curling involuntarily into snarls. They had heard of other groups getting into fights with each other over the smallest things; the shouts, cries, thwacks and other repercussions were measured out in fistfuls of moonlight every other night. Lard was already clutching his chest, walking slower and slower.

  Jinyi clenched his fists and bit his lip; however much he tried, he could not stop himself following the thread of Turkey’s speech. He remembered the kitchen-table calligraphy class, how Yuying had taught him to pick out the intricate web of the veins and arteries of each character, then hurry them into action with the tip of the brush. The sky stretched out around them, and Jinyi prayed to himself that his wife was still out there somewhere, looking at the same frayed clouds and thinking of him.

  Through the first line of clustered pines they came across a covered clearing, where the ice had not yet fully spread. The four figures sank down on their haunches as the oxen grazed, each lost to their thoughts. They had been told to come to the forest, and they had come; there was no more to it than that. They had been told to return by dusk, and they would. Just as the Buddhists told us we would be reborn according to our accumulated actions, Jinyi thought as they waited out the afternoon hours, so we are now being reborn in different places, our old lives given up and new ones thrust upon us, and there is nothing we can do about it. As the light dipped toward the west, scattering between the shivering needles to tug at their shadows, Jinyi waved the others up, and they started to pull the beasts around to retrace their steps. It had hardly seemed worth the journey. Above them, the muddy winter clouds began to race across the sky, as if a pack of unwashed peasants had suddenly grown grubby wings and found the means to escape.

  The cadre, meanwhile, was taking apart and meticulously checking the parts of his pistol. He made sure that he used it at least once a year, usually just loosing a single shot at the trees to scare the locals and remind them who was in charge, though he had been known to fire it at village werewolves scampering through the dark, at the blurry ghosts of people emerging from the bottom of his bottles of rice wine and at the spirit of the wild tiger which, the older families of the village told their children, still came from the forest once a year to collect its toll. The cadre took a damp cloth and ran it over the metal.

  ‘I’m in no hurry to use you again, but you can’t be too careful. Especially these days.’

  He had developed a habit of talking to himself when alone in his two-room hut at the top of the village, in order to counter the quiet emptiness that threatened to envelop his rooms. He had never married, not even looked at a woman that
way since the comfort women who offered themselves on the Long March, back when he still had a full head of hair and a lean stomach.

  ‘You’re still good for a while, you little bastard. Still good.’

  A couple of months before, back in the middle of one of those long, sweaty summer nights that rose up from the depths of the paddies to torment everyone but the fat bumbling mosquitoes, he had led a group of men down to the forest, where he had shot one of the villagers. That was the bit he hated; not the condemned man shaking and staining his handed-down trousers, but the staring eyes of the village men, studying the cadre’s every move to see if he had the balls to go through with it. Although he had stood only twenty feet back, his clammy, shaking hand had twitched and sent a bullet past the condemned man and into the tree behind him. Aware that he was losing face and authority, the cadre had marched up to the man and thrust the gun so far into his throat that the criminal’s sobs and howls had suddenly become retches. Neither the cadre nor the onlookers were much impressed when, a moment later, they found their clothes stained with blood, skull, brain and other lumpy bits of crimson gunge that had come whirling and splattering from the dark blossom of the condemned man’s head. Despite this, the villagers had insisted on waiting there for more than ten minutes before carrying the messy body back to its family, to see whether or not he would get up, shake himself off and scratch the itch caused by the fresh hole in his skull.

  ‘I’m not doing that again. I wouldn’t have had to, ten years ago. But now the peasants need to know their place, what with all these bourgeois come down to study them. If anyone causes any trouble round here, it will be me that gets the blame.’

  The Central Committee had sent him to that particular village as it was only a hundred li from his hometown, and yet after all his years away with the PLA he was a foreigner to the locals, with his rules, his mannerisms, his accent and his anger. The previous summer had been so hot that the villagers had thought their clothes were on fire, and the cadre had had two rapes to deal with. Following reports of the first, he had set up a private meeting with the accused, using only the brunt of his pistol. From the way the accused had limped awkwardly from that meeting, the cadre had been sure that it would not happen again. Yet barely two months later, it did. She was asking for it though, all the local men agreed, and after they had watched the cadre shoot the rapist, they warned that his ghost would return and avenge himself on the village.

  Chairman Mao smiled down from the huge picture draped across the wall – his mole blown up to the size of a peach stone – and whispered words of encouragement that no one else could hear. The cadre put down the pistol and was reaching for cigarettes when he heard the shouts carried across the fields. He grabbed the pistol and began to run, only remembering as he reached the door that he ought to rebutton his trousers.

  Even the elderly dog that spent its days padding round and round the village had halted its circumnavigation to howl and wag its tail as the crowd gathered. The cadre elbowed through the ring of noisy farmers and their squawking wives, shoving his way to the arrivals from the city, who parted hastily when they saw him. He spotted Jinyi, cap in hand and bent down over a moaning man.

  ‘Get up! Now! Get away from him.’ The cadre yanked Jinyi up by his shoulder and pushed him away to reveal the outstretched body of Lard, shaking and foaming on a bed of grass and frost. The cadre stared down contemptuously, and then shook his head. ‘You city lot are all the same. Wouldn’t know real work if it slapped you in the face. He’ll just have to get used to it, like everyone else. Now, the lot of you, get back to work!’

  However, the crowd showed no sign of dispersing. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Turkey said, and saw from the cadre’s bared upper gums that this was perhaps a mistake. He continued nonetheless, ‘I think he’s having a heart attack.’

  ‘You’re new here, aren’t you, Turkey?’ the cadre spat back. ‘Fresh from the city and thinking that you know how everything works, is that it? You’re an intellectual, right? I suppose you think you know better than even Chairman Mao. Well, let me tell you something. You know nothing. China is big, and you are small. The people’s will is enormous, and you will bow to it or be crushed. All of you traitors here will learn that you are nothing if you are not working for the people, with the people.’

  The cadre paused and looked down at Lard to see his hair matted with sweat, his eyes rolling and air rushing noisily in and out of his flaring nostrils. ‘And if you have to be broken down completely and put back together again in order to learn this, then so be it. You, Turkey, will be on night duty, cleaning the latrines.’

  Lard’s twitches began to lessen, his moans shrinking to mouse-like rasps. The cadre turned to leave once again, but this time there were murmurs from the villagers.

  ‘We can’t leave him here.’

  The cadre sighed. ‘When he stops fucking around, he can get up and walk back to the dorm. Until then, he stays where he fell. No one’s going to pick him up as if they were his bloody servant.’

  ‘No.’ An old man raised his hand. ‘We cannot let a man die here, on the fields. The crops will stop growing, and then we’ll starve. This is well known.’

  Others nodded and added their voices to the protest. ‘The fields will dry up and the rain will avoid this very spot – it has happened before.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. We can’t let him die here.’

  The cadre was beginning to feel red-faced himself. Superstition, as he well knew, was dangerous and proscribed; but there were also quotas to meet, expectations that could not be dashed.

  ‘Fine. But he’s not to be taken inside till he can get there himself – I don’t care if he has to drag his fat face through the mud to do it.’ And with that the cadre marched back towards his hut.

  The sinewy old man bent and gripped Lard’s right leg, yanking it into the air and producing a sudden moan from him.

  ‘Come on then.’ The old man encouraged the crowd, and more stepped forward; a stocky woman with a broken nose gripped an elbow, a short man hoisted up a shoulder, and a strapping teenager yanked up the left leg. Jinyi, seeing that he did not have time to argue with them or debate the merits of this idea, quickly darted forward to cradle Lard’s lolling head as his body was wrenched up to waist-level.

  Lard’s breaths came quicker, shrill wheezes sending spittle dribbling from his tightly scrunched lips.

  ‘Get a move on, he’s too fat to lug around for long,’ the old man snapped, and the group stumbled awkwardly to the left, in the direction that the old man had thrust his head. They pulled and tugged the body between them, drawing low moans as they staggered across the uneven ground, avoiding patches of ice, toe-crippling lumps of rock and the last unhardened rivulets of rainwater snaking to the paddies. Jinyi kept his hands round Lard’s fleshy neck, supporting the heavy head as the body was jostled between slipping hands, and he was reminded of the way he had held each of his children, plump and pink and newborn and so fragile he had been afraid to even breathe on them.

  ‘Wait!’ The stocky woman suddenly shrieked and stopped, sending the rest of the group toppling forward, fighting to retain balance while keeping a grip on Lard, whose eyes had now closed completely. ‘We’re not going towards our house! Oh, no! We don’t want a city spirit hanging round us, giving the jitters to all the sows. Turn him around.’

  They wheeled clockwise and set off in the opposite direction. The rest of the villagers were still standing by the converted grain stores in which the bourgeois visitors from the city now slept, and were watching the wobbling procession.

  ‘Where are we taking him?’ Jinyi asked, noticing that they were moving further away from the line of stilted houses and shacks that might, if he stretched his suspension of disbelief to breaking point, have contained someone with a vague understanding of medicine or resuscitation. When he was a child, after all, there had been a blind man in a nearby village who could tell a person’s ailments simply by squeezing their pulse from their wrist, and
would recommend herbs and grasses accordingly.

  ‘To the dried up riverbed in Dead Man’s Valley, of course!’ the old man answered impatiently, enunciating each character in the patronising tone the villagers had unanimously adopted when imparting seemingly obvious bits of wisdom to the backward strangers now working among them.

  ‘But it’s deserted down there, isn’t it? There’s nothing but rooks and slate. We won’t find a doctor anywhere near there.’

  ‘A doctor? He doesn’t come till Sunday. A doctor! Ha! You city folk haven’t got a brain to share between you. Whatever next?’ the stocky woman laughed.

  ‘Wake up, boy,’ the old man said, bewildering Jinyi, who had not been called boy for at least the last twenty years of his life. ‘Of course it’s deserted. That’s where we make all the pyres these days.’

  Jinyi looked down at the head clasped in his hands, and gave thanks that the eyes were completely closed. ‘But he’s not dead yet!’ he whispered fiercely.

  ‘Just a matter of time. You don’t want to have to make two trips, do you?’

  Jinyi realised that there was nothing he could do. He kept his curses firmly under his breath, and the dying man’s head in his grip.

  They descended in a cloud of slate dust and skidding gravel, each face whitened by the smoky spray as they fumbled quickly down the beaten path. As soon as they had side-stepped their way past tree stumps and rabbit warrens to the bottom, the group slumped the body onto the ground and squatted down around it. Jinyi felt Lard’s wrists, his neck. He wanted to ask whether any of them knew his real name, but could already predict the answer: they neither knew nor cared.