They tried to take Guan down to the doctor the next day, as the doctor had demanded, but by the time they got to the village from their farm, the boy was dead.
Guan’s little sister, Leihong, was next. Despite her mother’s efforts to isolate her from her sick brother, she succumbed to the disease three days before her second birthday. That left the youngest son, Rubai, and the eldest, Iloh.
And, just like that, Iloh’s schooldays were over.
If it had not been for his father’s act of charity towards the widowed sister and her child, everything would have gone according to the original plans – but now the farm itself was in jeopardy, the family’s very livelihood. Rubai was four, far too young to do any but the most rudimentary chores – and, even if he had been older, his mother had begun guarding him like a dragon, protecting him from every little thing that could bring him harm. Iloh was all that was left. His father’s edict was pragmatic and uncompromising. The urgent need for an extra hand at the farm outweighed the potential future requirement for an educated farm manager.
The village teacher actually wept when Iloh came in to say goodbye.
‘Of all the boys, why you?’ the teacher said. ‘You had the will and the energy and the enthusiasm. All the rest…they would not even miss it. But you…’ He had been holding a couple of the novels that Iloh had been particularly fond of, and which he had borrowed from the teacher – for perhaps the fifth time – and which he had come here principally to return, since he would not have the opportunity to give them back to the lender any time soon. But the teacher seemed to have other ideas, because he suddenly put the two shabby books back into Iloh’s hands and closed the boy’s rigid fingers around them. ‘No,’ the teacher said, ‘you keep them. In your hands they are a far greater treasure than they would ever be in mine. And if you ever have the chance…’
‘Thank you!’ breathed Iloh, staring down at the books as though he had been given gold. He would have loved one of the beautiful old poems, too, but he was practical enough to realise that he could not care for that as it should be cared for. He was grateful for what he was given.
The two books were all he had by way of reading matter. Very quickly he learned both books by heart, but he clung to them with a fanatical zeal, and read them and re-read them constantly. The stories were fiction, but both were based on some tenuous historical facts, and it was easy for Iloh to think of them as though they were real history, that the events they depicted really happened. One of them was a tale of ten thousand brigands, no more than a collection of episodic stories – but the other, a tale of an ancient kingdom of his own land, powerfully gripped his imagination. He was learning lessons from the tattered novel that its creator had never dreamed he had placed in there.
Iloh grew taller still as the next few years dragged by in endless farming chores, and so did his little brother. Some of Iloh’s lighter chores around the house evolved to be his brother’s duties before he had turned seven. That meant that greater duties, and field work, the tending of the rice paddies and the narrow sorghum fields cut into the hillsides, began to fall to Iloh.
One of the most important and perhaps the most onerous of the chores was the constant need for fertiliser – and fertiliser was no more than farm muck, the manure of the family’s few animals and the nightsoil of the family themselves. By the time he turned twelve, Iloh was charged with carrying balanced buckets of this ‘fertiliser’ from its origins in the house and the farmyard to the paddy fields. It was hard, backbreaking work, and Iloh escaped from it into his own head, letting his body tread the well-worn paths it knew well while his mind roamed across the landscapes of his imagination, dwelling in the worlds of his novels, extrapolating his reality and weaving it with fiction and wondering what kind of a world that would make – even putting together tenuous poetical lines of his own while he shovelled the farm manure in the rice paddies.
The work was necessary, and Iloh understood this – but still he would often snatch a break from it, laying the wooden yoke he carried on his shoulders, on whose ends the two manure buckets were balanced, by the well-beaten path he trod between the house and the fields, and sneaking off into the welcoming shade of an ancient willow tree that trailed concealing tendrils on several crumbling tombstones belonging to forgotten ancestors, long scoured bare of any identifying marks by the years of exposure to the elements. The tombstones were strategically scattered in a way that concealed Iloh from anyone taking the path to the paddy fields. They provided the boy with a solitary and secret place to which he could retire and snatch the time to read a few pages of his precious books, which he always carried in a pouch at his waist, and he would escape for a few moments from the drudgery of his daily life into the glittering world of the history that never was.
The fact that his pair of malodorous buckets, abandoned by the side of the path, would be a telling clue to his whereabouts had not even occurred to him – but it was thus that his father, who had noted his son’s frequent absences, discovered him happily poring over one of his beloved books.
‘And do you think that the work will do itself?’ Iloh’s father demanded.
‘But I have already carried some fertiliser to the fields this morning,’ Iloh said, looking up, still half-lost in his other world, only barely registering his father’s fury.
‘How many? How many have you done?’
‘Four, I think. Or perhaps even six. I don’t recall.’
‘And who is supposed to recall? I cannot stand over you every moment of every day. You are nearly twelve years old. You are practically a man. It should be your responsibility to take care of this job that you have been given to do! Four buckets! Pah! That is barely enough for a quarter of that field!’
‘But the house is so far from the field, Father,’ Iloh said, still dreamily.
‘So I should move the house to the paddy fields so that it is more convenient for you?’ his father demanded.
Iloh blinked several times, closed his book, and rose to his feet. Already he was as tall as his father, and showed signs of growing even taller – but somehow his father still managed to give the impression that he was talking down to the boy from a great height, the height of patriarchal authority. ‘So how many buckets should I bring?’ Iloh asked, his voice clipped and precise.
‘I don’t know! Ten buckets! Sixteen!’ his father said, transported beyond the realm of the reasonable to the extremes of the ideal.
Without another word Iloh bowed his head a scrupulously measured fraction that denoted just enough of the respect due to a father from a son and not an ounce more. He stowed his book back into his pouch, and walked past his father without a backward look, to hoist his yoke and its two empty buckets onto his shoulders and head towards the farmhouse. Somehow curiously deflated, his son’s immediate obedient response having taken the wind out of his sails, Iloh’s father followed him out of the shelter of the old willow, shaking his head.
Towards the end of the day, with the sun already low and golden and almost ready to vanish behind the hills, Iloh was missed again. This time the father knew precisely where to look – and that was exactly where he found his wayward son, reading the same book he had been reading that morning.
‘Once already I have spoken to you, and here I find you back again wasting your time!’ his father shouted, standing before his son with his feet planted wide on the earth of his ancestors, his arms akimbo.
Iloh lifted his head, a lank strand of his straight black hair falling over his face. ‘You said I should do my chores before enjoying my reading, Father,’ he said quietly. ‘I have done them.’
‘What? What have you done?’
‘Those