Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  A few deft cuts to the skin of the lower hind legs and Wei’s wife was able to quickly strip the skin off the goat. Hearty blows from her cleaver divided it into manageable chunks. The edible organs were cut out from the intestines which were slopped into a pre-dug pit and covered. The offal was packed into the bottom of the cooking pot on top of the dried beans and vegetables. Then the chunks of the body and the head were expertly packed in above them, the hindquarters last. Extra beans were expertly stuffed into all the openings between the joints. Salt and herbs were spread on top and finally Wei carefully poured water from the opened jar into the pot til it was full.

  With the two gallons to be traded with the other family, their third water jar would be empty. The family had two jars of water left.

  Wei ordered Cherry Blossom to hold some tongs and to pay attention. Otherwise he’d get his wife to whip her.

  Just as they were about to leave Grandfather announced that he needed a shit and asked to be lifted down from the cart.

  ‘You had one only a few hours ago,’ said Wei. ‘Please wait til this is over.’

  He picked up the heavy cooking pot and started to carry it over to the family with the fire followed by his wife carrying the emptied honeycombs and the two iron bands. She also carried a ladle. Wei did not want the blood cakes cooked yet, as he wanted time for the two families to get to trust each other. He also decided not to leave his wife alone with the other family’s wife. In such close quarters, both wives would consider themselves to be on their mettle, and arguments and territorial disputes might easily flare.

  They stopped ten yards from the fire. The father of the other family indicated that Wei’s wife should bring the water and honeycombs and iron bands closer. She put them on the ground five yards from the fire. The farmer examined them. Leaving them on the ground he indicated Wei could come forwards. Wei placed the pot on the fire. The water, honeycombs and iron bands continued to lie on the ground. Wei retreated to them and the farmer indicated Wei’s wife could come forwards to tend the pot. ‘Keep your dignity,’ Wei whispered to her as she passed with her ladle.

  The pot started to bubble. Sweet smells arose. Wei’s wife began cooking the blood cakes.

  Each side watched the other. Wei’s wife and the other farmer’s wife cast swift furtive glances at each other. Their eldest son with the blunderbuss watched Wei’s eldest son with the spade.

  It was when the cooking was over and the hindquarters of the goat started to be lifted out of the pot for the other family that the trouble started. Wei’s wife was taking them out and laying them on the wooden board when the other farmer’s wife suddenly started to demand that they should not only get the meat but the beans which were wedged between those joints and some of the gravy. If you can see starvation ahead of you such fractions loom large.

  At first Wei’s wife did not respond – but did not add beans or gravy in a proffered bowl. The rest of the family, except the farmer, became animated, and the two eldest sons exchanged threats. Wei continued silent but stepped closer to the water, honeycombs and pots. The other wife saw this and started screaming insults. Wei’s eldest son started to shout, the other farmer’s eldest son raised the blunderbuss to his shoulder and fired. There was an enormous explosion which threw the other eldest son several yards backwards onto his back while a shower of nails and bolts – the only ammunition they had been able to find – ascended a hundred metres into the air before showering harmlessly on his body.

  Wei’s wife suddenly screamed ‘Stop!’ Everyone stopped. She put a ladle of beans on the board and a ladle of gravy in the bowl.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the other farmer’s wife.

  ‘I hope you enjoy my excellent food,’ said Wei’s wife, turning and calling Cherry Blossom forwards. A frightened Cherry Blossom ran forwards with the pair of tongs for Wei and returned immediately to the cart. Wei’s wife retreated from the pot and Wei advanced to the pot and, on a nod from his fellow farmer, lifted the pot with the tongs and started back to his cart, avoiding the water, honeycombs and iron bands which lay on the ground. His wife walked beside him with the ladle and the boiled blood cakes.

  ‘Thank you, wife, for your proper and quick-witted behaviour.’

  ‘You are welcome, husband,’ replied his wife, already calculating ways the capital her good behaviour had accrued could be used to her – and the family’s – advantage.

  When they returned to the cart, everyone hungry for the sweet taste of goat’s meat, they discovered yet another crisis. During the drama of the stand-off between the two families, while Eldest Son had been squaring up to his opposite number, Cherry Blossom and Second Son and Spider Girl all staring at the spectacle, Grandfather Wei had disappeared. Gone.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Can’t see him anywhere?’

  ‘He might have been robbed. Bandits might have snatched him.’

  ‘He didn’t have any money.’

  Wei was filled with dread. His dearest father. Who he owed everything to. His inattentiveness had put him in danger. He climbed onto the cart, waking a sleeping Baby Boy Wei, and looked all around him. His father must have gone in the opposite direction to where all the family’s attentions had been focused – on the cooking and the argument. He desperately scanned the hundreds of refugees he could see in the other direction, trudging on through the billows of sand. Where was he? The figure he so loved. He saw some wispy hair. Hair he recognized. He ran towards his father, caught him in his arms, brought him back.

  His wife was ready to spend her capital.

  ‘That old man is a liability to the family. A burden to us on this awful, stupid journey,’ she announced to everyone. Then she addressed her husband. ‘He is old. He is foolish. We have to keep our eyes on him all the time just as we do with the children. He should be tethered to the cart – when he is inside it, when he is outside it.’

  ‘He is my father,’ Wei shouted angrily at his wife. ‘He must have his dignity. You, a wife, should not speak to your father-in-law in such a way. Do not speak again.’

  He stared at her. But where she would once have looked down in respect to him, today she stared straight back at him.

  ‘I know, and you know,’ and how she emphasized that ‘you’, ‘that he should be tethered to the cart. We have too many other things to look out for without having to constantly wear out our eyes watching him. You know I am right.’

  So Grandfather was tethered to the cart. He complained bitterly at the humiliation. Wei avoided his eyes. By way of explanation Grandfather explained he had wandered off because he had needed another shit.

  ‘I haven’t been normal since Spider Girl gave me two senna pods instead of one.’

  This further revelation of Spider Girl’s iniquity gave Wei’s wife another opportunity to rail against her, accusing her of all manner of crimes against the family.

  ‘If we do not cast them off, that old man and this witch will kill the whole family. We cannot afford them eating our food, drinking our water.’

  Wei stood up. He advanced on his wife. She had already won one confrontation and his father was tethered like a beast to the cart. Now she wanted him – the old, old argument – to cast off his beloved Eldest Daughter. Abandon her to die.

  ‘Do you want me to gag you? Do you want the public shame of that? As if you were some madwoman? Stop your mouth or I will.’

  A meal, whose wonderful smells and aromas had once had all their stomach juices dancing and gurgling in anticipation, now tasted like acid. It was eaten in sullen silence.

  Afterwards, to escape the animosity, Spider Girl volunteered to lead the donkey.

  As she drudged through the night she realized her time with the family was almost up. What her blunt-speaking mother had said was true – she was a burden on them all. Despite drinking her own urine she also drank some of their vital water, ate some of their scarce food, and on occasion held them up with her slow walking. If she was her mother she would say the same thing.

>   The ointment she had purchased from the village apothecary had almost run out and her joints, now inflamed and swollen, caused her intense pain as she walked.

  ‘Look around you, girl,’ she told herself, ‘keep your eyes open.’

  8

  The next morning, in the grey of early dawn, Wei looked round at his family. Their faces were uniformly grimy, their eyes were caked with dust, and every so often they emitted short, gruff coughs as they tried to dislodge the dirt and phlegm from their lungs. Exhausted, sunk in upon themselves, but still walking.

  Grandfather and the two tots slept on the cart beside Second Son, who Wei still had not talked with. Spider Girl was trudging along at the rear of the cart, vigilantly looking around for danger, but she walked with the utmost difficulty and her face was distorted with pain. Wei could only glance at her. She was flagging, increasingly unable to keep up, so he was having to slow the cart.

  Not that the cart was going that fast. During the night the donkey had also visibly flagged. At first Wei had whacked him hard on his rump with his stick but after a while not even that hurried him on. He needed water. As the humans dehydrated they peed less and less and the little donkey dehydrated even faster.

  What should he do? They were now down to less than two jars of drinking water. Give some to the donkey? On the dusty plain there were no signs of rivers or lakes. They did cross streams, but, because of the hordes which had already passed through them they were trodden-down mires, filled with mud and faeces and piss. Not even the donkey would drink that. After every stream they passed desperate people who had attempted to drink the water, now rolling around vomiting and shitting diarrhoea, or at last in the wrap of death.

  Wei thought they could gather some of the water and boil it before trying to drink it – or at least give it to the donkey – but that would cost them valuable firewood.

  The solution they arrived at was to help the donkey with her load. On each side of the cart, before they left home, Second Son had attached leather straps. Now Wei and Eldest Son pulled hard at them and took some of the weight. This hurried up the cart and cheered the donkey, which was being led by his wife, but it added to the difficulties of Spider Girl.

  Eldest Son, pulling on the other side of the cart, brought Wei some comfort. He was strong, like an ox, but with a face so gentle and unperturbed. He never made any fuss. Just accepted a task, however difficult, and got on with it. Wei was so proud of his son. Of course, he was not the sharpest, most quick-witted of people. To be a farmer you not only needed strength, you also had to have your wits about you, to be aware of everything that was happening on your farm. If, pray to the gods, Eldest Son ever became the farmer of the family’s lands, he would have difficulties, but for now he was everything a father, a family, needed.

  On they slogged. His wife had fallen back slightly, letting the rein lengthen out, and she and her beloved Eldest Son were talking softly. Wei was half listening. She was speaking to him in a low soothing voice, almost crooning as she had when she was lullabying him in his wooden cot. She was telling him about how their life would be when this madness, this evil was over, when they were all once more safely returned home, living on their land. How, when she was in old age, he would be the owner and farmer of the land, she and his father, the grandparents, looking after the youngest grandchildren while he and his wife and his older children farmed the land and ran the household.

  But while he listened, suddenly Wei was gripped with horror. With a jolt he understood what was actually going on right before his eyes. As she spoke his wife was quietly, surreptitiously, slipping her son something. He would take it and then quietly, calmly, place it in his mouth. No wonder she had recently started to look so thin, so worn, so manic. It was not just because she had just given birth. She was secretly feeding her beloved eldest son. She was deliberately, repeatedly starving herself that he might live. Wei always checked portions of the food as it was handed out so there would be no arguments. Last night she had given fair shares to all. So what she was now feeding Eldest Son was certainly out of her own bowl.

  He turned his face away in agony. What should he do? He could remonstrate with her, demand she ate more food, but he could not force her to. She would just point out that in doing what she did she was doing what he himself should be doing – preserving the life of their eldest son. She was being forced to starve herself by his refusal to do the necessary, moral thing in defence of his family and casting out its weaklings. She would say it was her iron will that was standing between the family and extinction. It wasn’t that she didn’t love all her children – except Spider Girl. It wasn’t that she didn’t love and normally show full respect to her father-in-law. It was just that she loved her eldest son most.

  Awful decisions were facing Wei. He was not unobservant. Families were reaching these impossible decisions all about him. Casting off the oldest, the youngest, the weakest. Again and again abandoned little toddlers and children came running towards them crying out for food and water, holding out their arms for warmth, but they had to walk right past them as though they did not exist. Old people stumbled and zigzagged towards them, pleading for help, a ride on their cart. They ignored them. These deserted old folk formed groups where they embraced each other for comfort. Round their feet and legs clung the young who had also been abandoned. The living had to navigate their way around these islands of the dying.

  I am becoming a murderer, he thought. Do I, against all my sacred and familial obligations, cast off and condemn to death members of my own family? Do I, whose sole purpose in life is to protect, cherish, keep my family together, now plan how to murder them? So I choose Spider Girl – who then – my father? And then, as conditions worsen, one by one Baby Girl Wei, Cherry Blossom, Baby Boy Wei, Second Son, followed by…?

  My wife would insist it was her. She would kill herself to put it beyond all argument. Just let my ancestors try to keep her out of their afterlife after she’d done that!!!

  On their journey different people, different groups, talked to each other, exchanged news and information. Always, of course, from a safe distance. Wei had heard rumours of mass suicides. Of men who’d dug a hole, killed their family and laid them in the hole, then laid down on top of them and killed themselves. All so that, even though they could not be buried among their ancestors, they would not die and lie individually, doomed to be lonely, perpetually wandering ghosts. But instead they would all still be one family together in the afterlife.

  *

  Then things got worse. At a brief stop for a midday meal – a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft droning lazily above them – Spider Girl had passed Grandfather a bowl of water and Grandfather had fumbled and dropped it. Precious family water. Wei’s wife, with a righteous tremble in her voice that was not to be contradicted, blamed both at once and demanded that, forthwith, these two wasters and malignants were a threat to the survival of the family and should be cast out from it immediately.

  Cherry Blossom and the two tots just stared. So did Grandfather, too bewildered to fathom what was going on. Eldest Son was very embarrassed and went to the front of the cart to feed and guard the donkey. Second Son went to stand beside his father to show he supported him. Spider Girl looked at the ground.

  Their journey resumed. But Mrs Wei’s rage did not lessen, it grew. The folly of it all. The wickedness. And as she shouted and denounced him, Wei did not have the strength to gag or silence her, his dear wife, because, in his deepest heart, he knew she was right. He would have to expel from the family either his father or his eldest daughter. If he expelled one he would have enough power over his wife to insist the other stay. Which one? He could not throw out his beloved father for the reason of filial piety. There was no more foul or loathed crime than a son murdering his father. Quite rightly. He owed everything, everything to his father. Which left only his most beloved child, his eldest daughter. Wei could feel his own elder sister, who had been cast out and died in similar circumstances, moving inside him
, writhing with the pain. But there was no choice. The family must survive. As though he had heavy lead in every bone in his body weighing him down, he turned slowly, with great difficulty, towards where Spider Girl had been walking. ‘My dearest Spider Girl,’ he said, and looked up at her. But she was not there. He could not see her. Everyone in the family looked around. No one could see her. From the rear of the cart where she had been walking she had disappeared. In the midst of their murderous argument, unnoticed, she had simply vanished.

  Wei stopped the cart and jumped on top of it. He had last seen her feeding Grandfather, who sat on the right-hand side of the cart. So that was the direction in which she had probably headed. Wei looked back and forth for her. He couldn’t see her anywhere. How could Spider Girl, with all her walking difficulties, disappear so utterly?

  ‘Hah,’ said his wife triumphantly, ‘so she is an evil spirit. She can disappear at will!’

  Wei could not afford to leave the cart himself to find her. He must send someone else. And out to the right of the cart, where the crowds thinned and the bandits and criminals ranged, was not a safe place to send anyone.

  ‘Father,’ said Second Son, ‘I will go and look for her.’

  ‘You will not.’

  ‘There is no one else to do it, Father. I can do it just as when we first left home and I went ahead in the night to see if there were bandits.’

  Wei’s wife, the realist, pointed out drily that as Spider Girl had done what he was just about to do – throw her out of the family – what was the point of risking Second Son’s life going out to look for her when all he was going to do was throw her out again?

  Wei gagged his wife, tied her hands behind her back, and sat her on the cart. People passing them mocked her for this.

  ‘Father,’ said Second Son, ‘I want to go and find her. I love my eldest sister more than anyone.’

  Before his father could stop him Second Son ran off to the right of the cart. At least, he trotted off. No one in these conditions – being short of food and crucially water – could manage more than a quiet trot. But that applied as much to the bandits as to the honest folk – though the line between the two of them was rapidly eroding.