This was the first time that Lu Beiping had set foot inside the second, larger lodge that huddled against the base of the bluff. Outside in the moonlight he saw Kingfisher sitting alone under the lychee tree, nursing his water pipe, the flame winking in the darkness beneath the tree’s black silhouette. Stump had gone off to “salute the wind,” as they called it—there being no latrines in the hollow, all ablutions were performed guerilla-style. It was said that Stump had the remarkable ability of returning from such missions carrying a clutch of partridge eggs or half a dozen frogs tied to a string. Who knew what succulent prize he’d bring back this evening. As Lu Beiping walked into the lodge, nerves still ajitter from Kingfisher’s menacing speech, he hesitated at the door, asking:
—Is it . . . okay for a guest to come in here? That doesn’t violate your laws?
Autumn lit the small kerosene lamp at the head of the bed and said with a gentle laugh:
—You, a guest? You’re Jade’s new Horn.
—Autumn! said Lu Beiping, marching through the door with a stricken expression on his face: Come on, don’t joke around. Are you trying to humiliate me too?
—Oh . . . no! Of course not! Autumn said hastily, seeing Lu Beiping’s look of chagrin. Four Eyes . . . Bei, you misunderstood me. I only wanted for you to come and keep me company, so we can talk a bit, ease ourselves. Here, sit down.
A log stool sat next to the cot. Probably Autumn perched on it and used the cot as a desk when he practiced calligraphy. Lu Beiping took the seat and looked around. On one corner of the cot lay a wooden crate that had once held soap at a “doler” supply co-op, now serving as Autumn’s footlocker. On top of the crate sat the black notebook and an enamelware cup blazoned with the red slogan of a bygone campaign, out of which protruded a toothbrush tucked in a rolled-up washcloth. On the mud wall at the head of the bed hung two tree branches crowned with dry leaves, looking grand but somewhat incongruous.
—Though . . . you really are a guest, truth be told, Autumn said, rubbing his hands with an awkward chuckle. And look, I don’t even have a cup of tea to offer you.
Lu Beiping opened his mouth, searching for something to say, then pointed at the branches.
—What are those? Why did you hang them there?
—Those are flowering pear branches, Autumn replied automatically.
—Flowering pear? What’s that? Are they . . . to ward off evil?
—There you go again, Autumn said, then he went on, leaving Lu Beiping’s question unanswered: How do you scholars call it?—he gestured at the wicker outer wall against which the cot nestled—My chilly hermitage. Chilly indeed, look, when it rains the water comes right through this wall. It gets downright cold.
Lu Beiping said nothing, staring levelly at Autumn, then glanced again at the branches. He sensed that Autumn was concealing something behind this pointless patter.
—Bei, Autumn said with a humorless laugh, You come in here and rather than asking why Kingfisher got so angry at you, you ask me about those old dead branches?
A sly smile crept across Lu Beiping’s lips, and he continued to stare at the branches mounted on the mud wall. He wasn’t going to let Autumn slither away so easily.
—You’re a hard one to please, Autumn sighed at last, then his deliquescent eyes locked with Lu Beiping’s and he said in a tone that was suddenly fierce:
—Fine, I’ll tell you. Those branches have to do with my dad. This afternoon you kept asking about him and I wouldn’t answer. Now, I will. What do you want to know?
Lu Beiping gazed back at him. What a strange, moody man; his emotions were like warm and cold fronts blowing back and forth across the map of his face. Lu Beiping laughed.
—Autumn, who do you think I am? One of those “down with counterrevolutionaries” types? You think I’m going to demand to see your papers?
—More or less.
Once more Autumn’s expression became downcast. Lu Beiping, still looking at the branches, asked:
—So, what are you willing to tell me?
—My dad’s dead, Autumn said abruptly. Whole family’s dead. Every one of them. They buried them alive, dug them up again, then cooked them and ate them. Even the organs.
—What?
Lu Beiping sprang to his feet as if he’d been burned.
—Autumn, are you kidding me? Is this the truth?
Autumn’s face was pale in the lamplight. He smiled grimly as he gazed at Lu Beiping.
—Would I lie to you, Bei? You wanted to know the whole story behind those branches, didn’t you?
Lu Beiping’s shock contrasted sharply with Autumn’s cool tone. He watched the moonlight creep under the bamboo door like a spreading pool of blood, and remembered the dark slick he’d seen under the carpet of leaves up in that dusky forest at the heart of the high valley.
(Years later, repeating the story of Autumn’s family to Tsung, Lu Beiping still couldn’t contain his horror. Even today the wave of cannibalism that swept through the backcountry of Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution has the air of an unbelievable tall tale. But it was in a manner strangely calm and devoid of emotion that Autumn laid out to Lu Beiping the details that follow.)
Late one night, in the autumn of sixty-eight, Autumn’s father burst into his mother-in-law’s house, where his son lay in hiding, and escorted him secretly to the edge of the village. He told him that he must leave town immediately, leave the province, find work as an off-register laborer, anything, and in no case should he come back, particularly if the harvest was bad. The next day Autumn’s father was arrested by the local militia. Shortly afterward the vigilantes broke into Autumn’s aunt’s house and took away his mother and two sisters too. A Special Agricultural Workers’ Tribunal was convened; Autumn’s family was tried and denounced; the villagers pushed them into a freshly dug hole, buried them under six feet of earth, and, once they had suffocated to death, dug their bodies out and . . .
—But why, why . . . why would they bury them first, before they . . .
Lu Beiping choked on the word “ate,” unable to form that awful syllable.
—I didn’t learn the reason till years after I ran away, Autumn said, staring at the ground. I was told that in those days there were different popular ways of eating human flesh. Roasting people, burying people alive and then stewing them . . . they said that that gave the meat different flavors—
—Stop! Stop!
Moonlight lay like frost on the ground outside, burning so coldly that Lu Beiping had to avert his eyes.
—Your dad . . . your father, what did he do? Lu Beiping asked, still curious for details even after this dreadful revelation.
—He was an elementary school teacher. He taught at the village school in Tung Ling, where we lived.
—Where’s Tung Ling?
—In Guangxi. Lots of famous men came from Tung Ling, back in the day.
—Why’d they want to kill your father? What crime could an elementary school teacher possibly be guilty of?
—They said my dad was gentry, a landlord. My whole family came from a long line of local noblemen. Back then they were always fixing to . . . what was it, first it was Tearing up Capitalism by the Roots, then it was Exterminate . . . Exterminate All . . .
—Horned Demons and Hidden Serpents.
Lu Beiping shuddered as he supplied the phrase.
—I don’t know much about my granddad, except that he was a learned man, lived in Lau-chow City, and died long before I was born. But I know that way back, my father’s people were one of the most distinguished families in Tung Ling. By the time of the Republic they’d already come down in the world.
Lu Beiping said nothing, studied Autumn’s face silently in the lamplight. Those weather-worn, sun-darkened features, upon closer inspection, had a clarity of contour that hinted at Autumn’s literate upbringing. No wonder Kingfisher and the
others always said that Autumn wasn’t meant to dine at the driftfolk table. No wonder Autumn loved to scribble in that notebook, had memorized poetry by Li Shutong, knew so much arcane lore beyond Lu Beiping’s ken . . .
Lu Beiping gazed at the branches hanging on the wall, truly wanting to know the whole story.
—These branches, Autumn said, taking them down from the wall, a note of excitement entering his voice: They’re from two different kinds of flowering pear tree I found when I was scouting timber. Folks around here call trees with this kind of leaf “yellow flowering pear,” and this other kind “red flowering pear.” It’s good wood for making furniture—some of the best, they say. But Bei, have you ever heard of amaranthine rosewood?
Lu Beiping shook his head. More and more he was discovering that Autumn inhabited a very different world from him, full of things of which he was ignorant.
Autumn spread his palms and opened his mouth, but said nothing. It seemed as if he hadn’t spoken of these things in a long time, and needed to dust off another register of speech more appropriate to the topic at hand. Later, whenever discussing such lofty matters with Lu Beiping, Autumn always began in this groping, tongue-tied manner.
—Amaranthine rosewood . . . Autumn said, gazing down at the branches, the leaves rustling crisply as he rolled them between his fingers: How can I . . . put words to such a thing? My dad said, true amaranthine rosewood trees have long gone extinct from this world. Already in the days of the Ming and Qing emperors it was hard to find them, even in Jiaozhi, even in their native reaches beyond the South Sea. Jiaozhi’s what they used to call Vietnam. My dad said they grew so slow, amaranthine rosewood trees, that no tree younger than a hundred years old was fit to be hewn.
Autumn spread his palms again and went on, gesticulating as he spoke:
—Nowadays, red camphorwood’s held to be the finest of woods. But in the Qing court ledgers, amaranthine rosewood was priced at twice, three times, ten times the price of red camphor! Unbelievable, no? So, starting in the time of Kangxi and Qianlong, it was illegal for anyone outside the imperial house to own amaranthine rosewood furniture, and any pieces the commoners owned the emperor bought back. Later on plenty of vain, self-glorious officials and merchants got in the habit of claiming that their own furniture, camphorwood, teak, mahogany pieces and the like, was amaranthine. Ah, those base creatures—what did they know from amaranthine rosewood?
Lu Beiping gazed at Autumn in mild surprise. Base creatures. How strange it was to hear a backwoods drifter like Autumn dismiss in such lofty terms the worldly pretensions of the human race.
Autumn looked up at Lu Beiping, his eyes shining.
—I kid you not, Bei, my family owned three pieces of amaranthine rosewood furniture. A censer, an armchair, and a desk. My dad told me that one of my long-ago ancestors brought them down with him from the Forbidden City when he was demoted to the prefectship of the Jiaozhi Commandery. When I was a boy, my family’s fortunes were thin as pot likker, but my dad cherished those rosewood pieces like there was nothing more precious in this world. Me and my sisters, only on our birthdays and New Years would he grant us to sit in that rosewood chair. And every student in my dad’s classes knew that whoever got the best marks, at the end of the semester my dad would invite him over to his house to sit in the Master’s Greatchair and eat a bowl of sweet dumplings in longan coulis.
As Autumn got deeper into his story his speech grew swifter and more self-assured. Now, abruptly, his tone changed:
—Then came the Movement. First thing they did was confiscate my family’s rosewood furniture, said it was evidence that my dad had monarchist leanings. Then they arrested my dad and put the chair itself on trial, like they’d seen in that movie, The Case of the Landlord’s Armchair. After the struggle meeting was over, they told my dad to light a match and set fire to the rosewood furniture he’d inherited from his ancestors.
—What happened? Did he burn them?
—Burn them? Autumn laughed bitterly. You’ve got to understand, Bei—amaranthine rosewood doesn’t burn! They used up a mountain of firewood trying to burn that furniture, but in the end that desk and chair just sat there, black and gleaming, on top of a huge heap of charcoal. My dad rushed into the ashes, threw his arms around the red-hot rosewood chair and wept, saying: You people go ahead and burn me too! Then the villagers crowded round with hoes and hatchets, hacked up that unburnable rosewood furniture, then took the pieces and threw them in the Ebonwater.
All this Autumn said with unusual calm, as if he were telling someone else’s story.
—Thing is, amaranthine rosewood doesn’t float either. When they saw those pieces of black wood piled in the shallows like hunks of iron, not floating or getting carried away by the current, the villagers said they were witched, and wouldn’t dare touch them anymore.
Lu Beiping stole a glance at Autumn. Now his friend’s emotions were beginning to show on his moonlit features.
—I was still working in the fields at that point. The Movement had just started, they hadn’t yet killed or eaten anybody. I wanted to go to the river in the middle of the night and haul out the pieces of wood, but my dad urged me not to. He said, If that wood sees the light of day, it’ll just die another death. There in the river, it’s got some life to it yet. Leave it be.
Autumn’s voice was rising now, carried upward on a swell of emotion. Lu Beiping, fingering one of the pearwood leaves, decided to change the subject.
—So . . . you said that people often mistake camphorwood and mahogany for amaranthine rosewood. How do you know that these pearwood branches are true amaranthine? That’s what you think it is, right?
—Here, take a look. Folks here call both of these flowering pear, but they’re not at all the same kind of wood.
Autumn handed him both branches, and Lu Beiping examined them in the lamplight. Sure enough, the leaves were quite dissimilar. One kind was pointy, the other was round, and they both had different textures.
—The one with the round leaves, that’s yellow flowering pear. It’s a precious wood too, they call it amber rosewood, but you won’t find it anywhere on Mudkettle Mountain. This one, though—Autumn shook the pointy-leafed branch, which gave off a crisp, metallic rustle—this is from a rare tree alright. It’s mighty old, with small leaves, and so covered in creepers it was hard to tell what kind it was. Bei, I’ve explored every nook and cranny of this mountain, but it wasn’t till yesterday that I found this red flowering pear tree. Old as the gods, it was—oh, what a tree!
Autumn opened his notebook and flipped to a page where he’d sketched a map of Mudkettle Mountain.
—It’s fearful hard to get up there. You have to climb up over this treacherous pass—Autumn indicated a spot on the map, and as he spoke his voice was now charged with excitement—My dad said there’s three kinds of amaranthine rosewood. The censer we had was starry amaranthine, the chair was cockblood amaranthine, and the desk was rippled amaranthine. Rippled amaranthine rosewood’s sometimes called amaranthine pearwood, and that’s what you’re looking at, people here call it red flowering pear. The grain’s wavy on every side, that’s how you can tell. See?
Lu Beiping took the pointy-leafed branch and turned it over in his hands. The wood was a deep reddish purple, and just as Autumn said the grain was wavy no matter how you turned it. The dense, rippled growth rings glittered a faint, dull gold. Small as the branch was, it weighed heavy in his hand, as if it were cast out of metal. The thin, sharp leaves had already dried out, but they were quite thick and had a jade-like luster. The joints where each twig budded off from the branch were firm as knobs of solder. The wood was pliable but tough; it must have been hard to break off.
—What do you think? A rare thing, no?
Autumn took the branch and hung it carefully back on the wall, then stood for a moment, his head tilted to one side, admiring it. He laughed quietly to himself.
—I
’m certain of it, that red flowering pear tree is amaranthine pearwood. Amaranthine rosewood trees haven’t gone extinct—sky’s my witness, it’s not true! And I’ve had the luck to see one!
A thin line of sweat shone on Autumn’s right temple, its faint glimmer outlining the dark contour of his face. Autumn had sunk deep into his world of rosewood. As if no one else were present he muttered to himself:
—One amaranthine tree on all of Mudkettle Mountain . . . and I found it!
A slanting shaft of moonlight lay across the floor.
—Good heavens, why have I been prattling on like this? Autumn said with a chuckle. I’d only meant to sit a minute, give you a chance to rest, hear what’s new with you.
He threw a glance out the door and said in a hushed voice:
—Did that scare you, what Kingfisher said?
—Scare me? It’s just you people’s taboos, Lu Beiping replied nonchalantly, his mind still on other things. I’m not really one of you. Kingfisher can’t do anything to me.
—Yes, Autumn said, smiling grimly: But you’re Jade’s man. You and her made good, that makes you as much her man as Kingfisher and Stump.
Lu Beiping turned quickly to look at Autumn.
—What, and you’re not?
—Nope, Autumn said simply.
—How come?
—Can’t rightly say, Autumn said, curling his lip and looking at the floor. I don’t fancy being her man, that’s all. I’m just . . . like she says, I’m her adopted kid brother. Her ward, her houseboy.
—Her houseboy? Lu Beiping stood up abruptly, outraged at this blatant display of self-scorn: Autumn, how can you say that about yourself? You sweat as hard as anybody else around here. Why do you pretend like you’re some kind of slave?
The Invisible Valley Page 24