The Garlic Ballads

“Okay, have your baby now,” he said with resignation. “Shall I go get Qingyun?”

“Not her,” she replied. “She charges too much, and she’s not very good. I’ll go to the clinic. I think it’s a boy.”

“Give me a son and I’ll buy you a nice, plump hen. I’ll even carry you on my back if you want.”

“I can walk. Just let me lean on you.” By then she was lying facedown on the ground.

“We’ll use the wagon.” After unloading the garlic, Gao Yang pulled the wagon through the gate, hitched up the donkey, then went back to get a comforter for the wagon bed.

“What else do we need?”

“A couple of wads of paper … everything’s ready … blue cloth bundle at the head of the kang.”

Gao Yang went inside, fetched the bundle, then carried his wife piggyback out the gate and laid her gendy in the wagon. Xinghua, awakened by the commotion, was screaming. Gao Yang walked back inside. “Xinghua,” he said, “your mother and I are going to fetch you a baby brother. Go back to sleep.”

“Where are you going to get him?”

“In a burrow in the field.”

“I want to go with you.”

“Children aren’t allowed. We have to be alone to get one.” The moon still hadn’t risen as he drove his rickety wagon across the bumpy bridge, his wife moaning behind him. “What are you groaning about?” he asked, irritated by the sight of garlic-laden carts on the paved road. “You’re having a baby, not dying!”

The moans stopped. The wagon smelled of garlic mixed with his wife’s sweat.

The health clinic was located in a clearing by a graveyard. A cornfield lay to the east, a field of yams to the west, and a recently harvested field of garlic to the south. After reining in his wagon, Gao Yang went to locate the delivery room. He was stopped from knocking by a hand attached to a man whose features were unclear in the dark. “Someone’s having a baby in there,” the man said hoarsely. The glow of a cigarette dangling from his lips flickered on his face. The smoke smelled good.

“My wife’s having a baby, too,” Gao Yang said.

“Get in line,” the man said.

“Even to have a baby?”

“You stand in line for everything,” the man replied icily.

That was when Gao Yang noticed the other carts parked outside the delivery room: two ox-drawn, one horse-drawn, and a pushcart over which a blanket was draped.

“Is it your wife inside?”

“Yes.”

“Why’s it so quiet?”

“The noisy part’s over.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Don’t know yet.” The man walked up and put his ear to a crack in the door.

Gao Yang moved his wagon up closer.

The dark red, blurry moon had risen above the yard, where datura plants bloomed at the base of the wall, their flowers looking like ethereal white moths in the murky moonlight. Their pleasant medicinal odor vied with the stench from the outhouse, neither able to overpower the other. Gao Yang moved his wagon up next to the three carts: pregnant women lay in each, either faceup or facedown, their men standing nearby.

As the moonlight brightened, the other carts and their occupants became increasingly visible. The two oxen were chewing their cuds, glistening threads of spittle suspended from their lips like spun silk. Two of the men were smoking; the third was waving his whip idly. Sure that he’d seen them somewhere, Gao Yang assumed they were farmers from villages in his township whom he’d met up with at one time or another. The expectant mothers were a fright: grimy faces, ratty hair, scarcely human. The one in the westernmost cart filled the air with hideous wails that had her husband storming around the area and grumbling, “Stop that crying — stop it! You’ll have people laughing at us.”

The delivery-room door opened and a light beneath the eaves snapped on. A doctor in white, a woman, stood in the doorway, her hands encased in elbow-length rubber globes that were dripping wet— blood, most likely. The man pacing the area ran up to her. “What is it, Doctor?” he asked anxiously.

“A little girl,” the doctor mumbled.

Hearing that he was the father of a little girl, the man rocked a time or two, then fell over backwards, cracking his head resoundingly on tile, which he apparendy smashed.

“What’s that all about?” the doctor remarked. “Times have changed, and girls are every bit as good as boys. Where would you males come from if not for us females? Out from under a rock?”

Slowly the man sat up, trancelike. Then he began to wail and weep, like a crazy man, punctuating his cries with reproachful shouts of “Zhou Jinhua, you worthless woman, my life’s over, thanks to you!”

His shouts were joined by sounds of crying from inside: Zhou Jinhua, Gao Yang assumed. The absence of infant sounds puzzled him. Jinhua hadn’t smothered her own baby, had she?

“Get up right this minute,” the doctor demanded, “and take care of your wife and baby. Other people are waiting.”

Rising unsteadily to his feet, the man staggered inside, emerging a few moments later carrying a bundle. “Doctor,” he said as he paused in the doorway, “do you know anyone who’d like a little girl? Could you help us find her a home?”