Zhao Duoduo often came by to pass the time. That was the only thing that could get Sui Yingzhi to put down his abacus. He’d come out to pour his guest some tea. “No, thanks,” Zhao would say, “you can keep working.” Yingzhi, put on edge by the visit, would return to his study.
One time Zhao came to speak to Huizi. “Do you have any chicken fat?” he asked with a smile. When she gave him some, he took his revolver out of the holster and rubbed chicken fat into the leather. “Makes it shine,” he said as he stood up to go. But when he handed the dish back he placed it upside down over her breast…Huizi spun around and picked up a pair of scissors, but Zhao was already out the door. The dish crashed to the floor, bringing Yingzhi rushing out of his room, where he saw his wife holding scissors in one hand and wiping grease from her breast with the other.
On another occasion, when Huizi was in the vegetable garden, Duoduo sprang out from behind a broad bean trellis. She turned and ran away. “What are you running for?” he called out. “It’s going to happen sooner or later. Who are you saving it for?” Huizi stopped, smiled, and waited for him to catch up. “That’s the idea,” Zhao said, gleefully slapping his hand against his hip. He walked over, and when he was right in front of her, she scowled, raised her hands as if they were claws, and scratched both sides of his face like an angry cat. Despite the pain, Zhao pulled out his revolver and fired into the ground. Huizi ran off.
A month passed before all the scratch marks had scabbed on his cheeks. Zhao Duoduo called people to a Gaoding Street meeting to discuss whether or not it was reasonable to still consider Sui Yingzhi an enlightened member of the gentry class. Yingzhi was summoned to the meeting, where a heated discussion ensued until Duoduo abruptly held his finger up to Yingzhi’s head like a pistol and said, “Bang.” Yingzhi crumpled to the ground as if he’d been shot and stopped breathing. They picked him up and rushed him home, while someone ran to get Guo Yun, the traditional healer. They did not manage to wake Sui Yingzhi until late that night. His recovery after that was slow; he walked with a slouch and was rail thin. Day in and day out Baopu heard his father’s coughs echo through the house. The meeting had sapped his vitality. He was like a different man altogether.
“We still haven’t paid off all our debts,” he said to his son one day between coughs. “Time is running out. It’s something we have to do.” His coughing fit that night lasted into the early morning, but when the family awoke the next day, he was gone. Then Baopu found bloodstains on the floor, and he knew that his father had ridden off on his chestnut horse again.
The days that followed passed slowly. After a week of torment, Sui Buzhao returned from his wanderings and laughed when he learned that his brother had ridden off again. Just before nightfall, the family heard the snorts of their horse and ran outside, happy and relieved. The horse knelt down in front of the steps and whinnied as it pawed the ground. The animal’s gaze was fixed on the doorway, not the people; its mane shifted, and a drop of liquid fell into Baopu’s hand. It was blood, fresh blood. The horse raised its head and whinnied skyward, then turned and trotted off, the family running after it. On the outskirts of town, the horse ran into a field of red sorghum and followed a path where the leaves were spattered with blood. Huizi’s jaw tightened as she ran, and when she saw the trail of blood she began to cry. The horse’s hooves pounded the ground, managing to avoid all the sorghum plants. Baopu wasn’t crying, didn’t feel sad at all, and for that, he scolded himself. The sorghum field seemed to go on forever, and the horse picked up the pace until it stopped abruptly.
Sui Yingzhi was lying in a dry furrow, his face the color of the earth beneath him. Red leaves covered the ground around him, though it wasn’t immediately clear if that was their natural color or if they were bloodstained. But one look at his face told them he’d lost a great deal of blood before falling off the horse. Sui Buzhao sprang into action, picking up Yingzhi and shouting, “Brother! My brother…” Sui Yingzhi’s mouth twitched. He searched their faces, looking for his son. Baopu knelt beside him.
“I know,” he said. “Your heart was too heavy.”
His father nodded. He coughed, and a thin stream of fresh blood seeped from his mouth. Sui Buzhao turned to Huizi. “The coughing has destroyed his lungs.” Huizi bent down and rolled up her husband’s pant leg. The flesh was flabby and nearly transparent, and she knew that he was dying from the loss of blood. “Jiansu! Hanzhang! Come see your father!” she shouted as she pushed the two younger children up in front of Baopu. Hanzhang bent down and kissed her father, and when she straightened up there was blood on her young lips. She gazed up at her mother with a frown, as if put off by the taste. Only a few minutes of life remained in Sui Yingzhi. He mumbled something and closed his eyes.
Sui Buzhao, who had been holding his brother’s wrist all this time to check his pulse, let the arm drop. Loud wails burst from his throat; his frail body was wracked with spasms of grief. Baopu, who had never seen his uncle cry, was stunned. “I’m a no-account vagabond,” his uncle said through his tears, “and I know I’ll not die well. But, you, brother, you lived an exemplary life, educated and proper, the best the Sui family had to offer, yet you bled to death out on the road. Oh, the old Sui family, our family…”
The old horse’s head drooped, its nose spotted with mud; it wasn’t moving. Holding their breath, they lifted Sui Yingzhi up and laid him across the horse’s back.
“A member of the Sui family has left us,” the old men of Wali were saying. The town’s spirit seemed to have died, and two consecutive rainfalls did nothing to change that. The streets were so deserted it felt as if most of the residents had been swept away. The old man who worked the wooden ladle in the mill by the river said, “I’ve watched the mill for the Sui family all my life. Now the old master has left us to open a noodle factory on the other side, and I should go with him. He needs my help.” He said this half a dozen times, and then, one day, as he sat on his stool, he simply stopped breathing. The old ox kept turning the millstone, uselessly, ignorant of what had happened. The town’s elders narrowed their eyes when they heard the news. Staring straight ahead, they said to anyone who would listen, “Do you still say there are no gods?”
Huizi bolted her gate and refused to open it for anyone, so Baopu opened a side door to let his uncle, whose room was on the outside, into the compound. Buzhao knew that no one could keep Baopu away from him anymore, but then he noticed a somber look on the youngster’s face. When he spoke to him of his adventures on the high seas, the boy lacked the interest he’d displayed in the past, not regaining it until the day Buzhao took the old seafaring book out of its metal box and waved it in front of him.
On days when Jiansu came to Buzhao’s room, his uncle would hoist him onto his shoulders the way he’d done with his older brother and carry him out through the side door, down to the river or into one of the lanes to buy him some candy. He could see that Jiansu was smarter than Baopu, a boy who learned fast. He decided to let Jiansu play with the telescope, and he watched as the boy focused on the girls bathing in the river. “That’s really neat,” Jiansu said with a click of his tongue as he reluctantly handed back the telescope.
Buzhao hoisted him back on his shoulders and sort of stumbled along. “We’re a team, you and me,” he said.
Jiansu spent so much time on his uncle’s shoulders that people called him the “jockey.” Sooner or later, Sui Buzhao said, he’d leave to go back to sea. That is what made his life interesting and what would make him worthy of the town. He told Jiansu to wait for that day, saying he had to find a flat-bottom boat, since the river was so shallow. Not long after that, someone actually came forward with a beat-up sampan, and Sui Buzhao could not have been happier. He fashioned a tiller,