Wild Fruit

by Keyi Sheng

  It had been more than six years, but I had never visited my oldest brother in prison. My father had not been to see him either, and my mother only went once a year. She said Shunqiu did not want to see anyone. Like in any other prison, all the things we sent him were swallowed up by a mysterious monster. He was no longer as temperate as before, but answered all my mother’s queries impatiently. He did not bother about the family either, only once asking what year I was in at school. The last several times my mother had been to see her son in his prison uniform, she did not say anything at all. The last time they met was like they followed diplomatic protocol, it was dull and courteous, without joy or conflict.

  After my second brother died, my father burned all the fishing nets in the back garden, sold the old bike to a rag and bones man, and tore his awards off the wall, completely cleaning the place up. Before winter set in, my father quietly cleaned out a room, whitewashed the walls, and replaced the plastic layer on the wooden windowsills. My mother stepped on the mosquito net in the foot-soaking basin until foam splashed. When I chanced to go home and saw that my parents’ life had suddenly taken an enthusiastic turn, I wondered if they also followed the popular trend of injecting chicken blood to restore energy. It was highly unusual.

  The night before the Lunar New Year, when the five-watt bulb in the house had just come on, a ghost suddenly drifted in from the back garden. My father scolded, ‘Fucking thief can’t even come through the front door, has to come through the back door.’

  When he’d finished cursing, he came into the main room and lit a string of firecrackers with a thousand words written down its length, throwing it onto the floor. The sound was ear-splitting. Smoke billowed into the room. In the dim lighting, it was hard to see the shadowy ghost clearly. At this time, our house was full of people. They all knew Shunqiu was to receive an early release, and they had come to congratulate us, and also hopefully catch sight of what someone newly released from prison looked like.

  The ghost was afraid of firecrackers. When they started crackling, it floated out the back door again. At any rate, it never showed up again.

  Everyone was a bit disappointed, but they said they understood. The mothers of several of the concerned parties stood with misty faces and mixed feelings, sighing even as they wiped away tears of joy.

  To my memory, our house had never been this lively before. That was also why our dinner was delayed. I sat beside the stove and lit the fire. When the rice started releasing the aroma of rice crust, I doused the fire and covered it with soot. My mother started to cook, spicy fermented black soybeans, garlic braised bacon, oily, fatty pork, and of course, pepper fried with pork slices. She deliberately cut the fatty pork into slices so thick it was like biting into a radish. It was very tasty. She also prepared a fish soup and a chilli omelette. Grey smoke rose from the chimney, but a portion of it found its way into the kitchen. It smothered my mother, and she lifted the edge of her apron to wipe away her tears. I realised then that tears had always been her favourite means of expressing herself.

  If we say Shunqiu had formerly been like a green date hanging on a tree, he was now like a dried date turning black. I did not know the past life of the dried date, and could not imagine the future of the green date. The seed of the date was now stuck in my throat. My brother stood in the kitchen, asking where I was. I just stood up from my usual place behind the stove and said nothing. With her typical roundabout way of expressing her concern for her children, my mother said, ‘Damned girl can’t even speak up when she’s addressed.’

  Shunqiu was shocked. He had expected to find a little girl less than ten years old, but I was already as tall as my mother. He was overwhelmed.

  My father and brother spent a little time sizing each other up, then found several trivial issues to quarrel loudly over.

  ‘Why would anyone want to set off a bunch of firecrackers when a reformed prisoner comes home?’ Shunqiu asked. He had loitered in town for a few hours, intending to wait until dark so as not to disturb the neighbours. Could the firecrackers have been meant for any purpose other than to embarrass him?

  My father was sure he had the upper hand. He said, ‘This fucking ghost comes lurking in the middle of the night and doesn’t know how to appreciate what’s good. I’ll set off firecrackers any time I fucking please. There’s bad luck all over the house, and I’m going to get rid of it!’ My brother retorted, ‘So I’m bad luck! Don’t worry; I’ll leave in a few days.’

  My father said, ‘You wastrel. If you leave, don’t come back.’

  My mother used her tears to break up the fight.

  We started to eat. My brother wolfed his food down. When he had eaten half a bowl of meat, he asked where Xiazhi was. Clutching her rice bowl, my mother left the table, while my father kicked our yellow dog. I said my second brother had gone to Beijing as soon as he’d graduated and was quite busy at work. Then, I changed the topic and started to talk about my sister, since Shunqiu had heard so little about her in the years he had been locked up. ‘She had a son,’ I said. ‘He died when he was two years old. Drowned. Now she’s got two daughters. Yihua is three, and Yicao is one. She wants to have another baby. She said she wants to bring her son back.’

  My father grumbled, ‘We don’t bother about the Liu crew. If they cannot afford to pay the fine for having too many kids and their house is demolished, they better not come running here to stay with me.’

  My brother slowed his pace of eating, as if he was stuffed.

  I thought of what Xiazhi had said,Wait until Shunqiu’s back and we’ll have a talk with Li Jiaxu, and I started to feel very uncomfortable.

  *

  The chilly wind seeped into our bones on the causeway. The moonlight was pale and ailing. My oldest brother’s figure was still ghostly. He had become careful and agile, as if tentacles protruded from his body and he flinched at the slightest obstacle and changed directions or bounced off it quickly. He did not talk to others face to face or look them in the eye. He was a vigilant hare, focusing only on the world within a ten-metre radius of himself. He sometimes jumped down the causeway slope, circling the jetty where he fished. I said, ‘You were unlucky. There’s nothing wrong with fishing in broad daylight now. It’s a game of cat and mouse.’

  Shunqiu didn’t answer, except to say the water was narrower, and the world of fish smaller. We never inquired about his prison life, which might seem cold or heartless, but it was like we were keeping a secret, bottling the matter up, as if we were accomplices hiding a body after committing a murder. We wanted to bury my brother’s inglorious history a thousand metres underground.

  ‘What do you want to do in the future?’ Shunqiu asked.

  I said, ‘I want to be a lawyer, to defend the innocent.’

  ‘Lawyers are more effective for the guilty.’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘What’s up with Xiazhi. Are you all hiding something from me?’

  I thought about it, then said, ‘He’s dead.’

  Early the following year, the snow piled a foot deep after a blizzard in early spring, and like fat meat, a layer of snow was added to the causeway. The north sides of the trees were wrapped in icy armour, and their leaves turned into onyx stone. The lake wore a shield, and the grass had grown into corals. From under the eaves, luminescent sword-like icicles hung. The whole village was filled with the sheen and sharpness of weapons. My father set a big tree stump on fire in the back garden. In the picture hanging on the wall next to Chairman Mao, the ten generals on their mounts looked like they were rushing to the battlefield. The pictures of the ten generals were hung apart on the eastern and western walls, their mighty horses facing south, orderly and mighty. It filled the back garden with an extraordinary momentum.

  When my sister came back with her family for the New Year, she stayed one night, then left. My father despised Yihua and Yicao, just as much as he hated the plum wine and Torch brand cigarettes. Liu Zhima chewed betel nuts, spitting the juice as he talked about what
he saw and heard on his business errands. He told us which black dogs bit people, which roads had stupid people willing to buy his lousy nets, which folk custom was the most fierce, which widows had attempted to seduce him. . . And finally, he always had to talk about prison, as if it held great charm for him.

  When he was arguing with my sister, Zhima was sure to mention reformed prisoners, then supplement it with ‘Cultural Revolution hatchet men’. When my sister had first got together with Zhima, they used indicting our father as a sort of foreplay when they went to bed. Zhima had loved to listen to Chuntian complain. A suffering woman was easy to please, because all he needed to do was say a few gentle words and she would feel he was the best man in the world, and when she worked, she was like well-fed livestock. But these things had all become Zhima’s offensive weapons now. What he meant was that our family only produced thugs and reformed inmates, nothing good.

  If Zhima spoke ill of my father, my sister was not angry. But if he spoke ill of Shunqiu, she would retaliate. She said, ‘What’s so great about your family? Your father stammers and your mother is cross-eyed.’

  What she said was true, but Zhima could not accept these facts. Or, to put it more accurately, the facts were there, but they were not there to be dragged out and talked about. So Zhima slapped my sister. She always felt no one in the world was allowed to slap her, except my father – and him only – because she had come from his seed. Zhima was not qualified to slap her, so she slapped him back, but her aim was bad, and she ended up putting two long bloody scratches on his face with her nails. This riled Zhima up. He struck back, and the pair started to scuffle. Finally, Chuntian picked up a cup and smashed it on her forehead. The one who shed more blood had the right to make the judgement call. Such was the pattern of their marital life.

  Zhima was always in a good mood in our home, without showing any signs of his love for hitting others. When he talked to my brother, he was especially nice. Shunqiu acted as though he had long lived in darkness and was now finally let out into daylight; his eyes had not even fully adapted to the light yet. In order to protect his eyes, he would look down, or sometimes hide in the corner to be able to talk to people.

  When Chuntian came back and saw how Shunqiu looked, her resentment towards my father grew another layer. She felt everyone at home had been ruined by my father. Xiazhi had gone to Beijing, but it was in rebellion against my father. I was taken aback by the thoughts going on in the skull that had spent so many years eating matchsticks.

  I secured glutinous rice cakes with tongs and grilled them over the red-hot burning wood, not saying much. I turned each cake over several times until it finally turned golden brown and aromatic. Yihua stood leaning against me. She was quiet, instinctively quite sensible, unlike other children who were always clamouring to eat this or that. Yihua also liked to squat beside Shunqiu and watch him organise the fishing nets, asking many questions. Shunqiu liked Yihua, and she liked him. In the spring he brought her to the riverbank to put out the nets. Yihua was as lively as a fish, and so was Shunqiu.

  In previous years during the spring, we would still have preserved fish and preserved meat left over at home. This year, we had eaten them all by early February, and even the cats meowed in disbelief as they saw the empty hooks where the preserved meat used to hang. When my father’s mouth, which was usually shut tightly like he was biting a seed, loosened up, it was like a machine gun extended from the fort, sending bullets flying in Shunqiu’s direction. ‘Good for nothing’, ‘sit idle and eat’, ‘fruitless commodity’, sometimes he lumped my grandfather and brother together in his cursing. As soon as the spring seedlings took root, my father’s dislike of Shunqiu was magnified. He hated gluttons, especially the bottomless pit released from prison who could not be filled to satisfaction with even a hundred pigs.

  My brother stumbled out of the house to the Township Enterprises to do some odd manual jobs. My father got him these jobs. Shunqiu had no social resources, nor skills of any kind, and had only spent his time in the reform prison farm developing his physical strength. There was a screw factory in Lanxi Town, about five miles from our house. Shunqiu left home early and came home late, appearing and disappearing on the causeway like a thief, coming and going under the inky black sky.

  When about a month had turned on time’s wheel, the matchmaker had found an older woman for Shunqiu. My brother’s left knee suddenly started to hurt. It was so painful he was hopping about on one leg, and he could not go to work. Instead, he sat at home, resting his ailing leg on a stool, watching it as it gradually swelled and turned as pink as a baby’s flesh, shining like the skin of ripe fruit.

  Before he had started earning any wages at all, his medical expenses started to come in. My father saw that his condition was not getting better, so asked his childhood friend, a rural village doctor, to come see him. This helped create some business for the doctor and kept expenses low for my father. Most importantly, he could delay payment. My father’s friend was called Wang, balding and red-faced. Smoking and half squinting, he rambled to my father as he poked my brother’s knee like he was inspecting a treasure. Wang said that it was septic arthritis and the inside had rotted. He drew a few tubes of blood and pus from the knee with a syringe, making the skin above collapse. He hung an infusion bottle beside Shunqiu and said it would be fine in a few days.

  A week later there was a rotted wound on my brother’s knee, open and exposing the bone. The air flowed through the exposed bone, bringing out the fishy smell of pus. As soon as Wang saw this, he knew something was not right and felt he was betrayed by the knee, so he recommended an amputation of the rotten thing.

  I have said my father was very calculative. When he started adding up the cost of amputating a leg, he realised that the burden of a disabled person was worse than that of an amputation, so he gritted his teeth and borrowed and gathered enough money to send my brother to the hospital in Changsha for recovery. As soon as he arrived at the hospital, he was taken in for surgery. The doctors there said it was a very dangerous situation, and that if he had been any later there would have been no way to save the leg. My father breathed a sigh of relief. It had been quite some time since he had done something that made him feel this proud, so he went around boasting about his wise strategy. Every time he and my brother clashed after this, he always brought up this instance, using it like an ace up the sleeve to quell the other party.

  When Shunqiu was discharged, he was recuperating for a while. He sat admiring his bad leg every day, paying close attention to its development and changes. The doctor said that post-surgery rehab depended on the patient’s initiative. If the muscle atrophied, there would be a relapse and he would lose the leg. A person who has broken a bowl before will naturally take special care with the porcelain he holds in his hands. Gritting his teeth, my brother started walking on crutches, spending the late night hours walking up and down the causeway every night. When summer had passed, his skin had turned pale and he had rid himself of extra flesh. His illness and pain had reduced him to a ball of crumpled paper, but he now looked more like his old self, before prison had interrupted his life.

  My sister kept her hair long after giving birth to Yicao, adopting the fashion of pulling her hair into a bun, like the people in the city. Hers was nothing like theirs, only creating a messy hairball and exposing her narrow forehead, and since her fringe had always covered her forehead, it was whiter than the rest of her face. On this particular day, my sister was coaxing Yicao to sleep. The village director of women’s affairs, Auntie Cui, was ploughing her way in with her thick legs, laughing even before she came near. Her hair was naturally curly, like African hair, fluffy around her whole skull. Auntie Cui’s ample flesh shook loosely all over her frame. When she sat, she looked like a hen hatching eggs, spreading her wings over the bench where she perched. She stared at Yicao for a while, then praised her for being obedient and looking good.

  My sister put Yicao back in the cradle and rocked it as she said, ‘She sees y
ou, so she won’t be naughty, but she torments us in the night.’

  Auntie Cui said, ‘Now she’s a torment; in future she’ll turn into quite a little padded jacket, pulling her family in close to keep them safe and warm. Look around, see which naughty boy does not forget their mother after they have taken a wife.’

  My sister did not pick up the thread of the conversation.

  Auntie Cui went on, ‘I really have no luck with giving birth. I had two sons one after the other, and I really want a daughter, but I have to respect the family planning policy, right? So I went to the hospital to get my tubes tied. Getting a ligation is a trifle. After a couple of days, I was healthier than ever.’

  When Auntie Cui finally got started on this topic, she looked quite happy, as if having a tubal ligation was some wildly enjoyable thing. My sister did not tear her story apart, knowing that Auntie Cui was married to the younger brother of the village secretary, a position of real power and prestige. Auntie Cui had gone to the hospital with an air of importance and pretended to have her tubes tied, and was carried home in a wooden cart, moaning and groaning. Later, somebody noted with a furtive glance that there was not even a scar on her belly.

  My sister nodded and grunted perfunctorily, saying she would go to the hospital when her menstrual period was over. Looking like she had won, Auntie Cui went joyfully on her way. My sister touched her belly. She was already four months pregnant. It would soon begin to show, exposing her intent. If it was discovered, she would be bound and taken to the hospital, and the child would be aborted. She would then be neutered, like an animal. At least if she walked into the hospital of her own accord, she would be left with some measure of dignity.

  When Zhima came home, my sister discussed the matter with him. He said to check and see whether it was a boy or girl. If it was a boy, they would keep it; if a girl, they would abort. My sister said whether it was a boy or a girl, this was their last chance. She did not want to keep sneaking around, living in fear. It was such an inhuman life.