The Garlic Ballads

But what about the days to follow? He stopped to ponder the question. He couldn’t show his face anywhere in Paradise County, not with handcuffs dangling from his wrist. He’d go see Jinju after dark, then leave for the Northeast. Once he was back on his feet he’d send for her and the baby.

The stand of trees came to life with the arrival of brightly colored birds. Feeling hungry, he searched out a young eight-foot acacia whose branches were covered with blossoms. He jumped up, grabbed the tip of the tree, and bent it over with all his might. It arched, cracked loudly, and snapped in two. The exposed portions of pale wood oozed a yellow sap, but he was already reaping a two-handed harvest of acacia flowers — fully opened, partially opened, even unopened buds, it didn’t matter — and stuffing them into his mouth. The first few entered his stomach whole, but they were followed by petals that released their unique flavor — an overripe, somewhat bitter tang to the older blossoms and a slight puckery bite to the buds — as he chewed. The newly opened blossoms with their delicious nectar were the best. It took him most of the morning to devour three trees’ worth.

After Gao Ma couldn’t eat another acacia flower, he detected a sweet, slightly tart aroma in the hot, humid midday air; looking closely, he found purple, red, and off-white thorn-tipped balls in the crotches of mulberry branches. “Mulberries!” he shouted joyously. He attacked them just as he had the acacia petals: at first he closed his eyes and gobbled them down, green, red, black, white. But after a while, he grew more selective. Off-white mulberries: hard, semisweet, tart, somewhat puckery. Red mulberries: more yielding, sweeter, only slighdy tart. Purple mulberries: soft, very sweet, with a strong, pleasant aftertaste. He hunted for the purple ones, soon learning that if he shook a mulberry tree, only the ripe ones fell to the ground. By the afternoon he knew his lips were stained purple by looking at his fingers.

The bellyache hit at sunset. After rolling on the sand in excruciating pain until stars lit up the sky, he relieved himself for a good half-hour. The pain vanished. He could only guess at the time.

4.

He would check things out that night, no matter what. He was already feeling the pangs of alienation from other people, even though he had heard women talking as they gathered mulberries, and had watched farmers in the field from a hiding place on the riverbank. A southern wind carried the smell of ripened millet, a sign that tomorrow the harvest would begin. “Silkworms emerge without warning, and millet ripens overnight.” That increased his anxiety: having planted two acres of millet, he had been looking forward to a good harvest. Now that his garlic crop was a total loss, how would he make it through the year if he lost his millet? As he wearily rubbed his face, he noted that his forehead and the corners of his mouth were becoming lined.

He made plans to sneak into the village under the cover of darkness, doubting that the police would subject themselves to the discomfort of spending two nights in his house waiting for him to show up. The first order of business would be to get some clothes and, more importantly, shoes. A pair of new sneakers from his army days lay in a cardboard box in the corner — one of the few items that had survived the Fang brothers’ ransacking. There was also the 470 yuan from the initial sale of garlic — he had been one of the few lucky villagers who had managed to sell any in the glut — which he had stuffed in a crack in the eastern wall. He would retrieve this hidden cache, giving Jinju four hundred to buy food and baby clothes. The remaining seventy would be enough to get him to the northeast, where he would look up his old army buddy the deputy county head and ask him to write to Paradise County for a formal pardon.

The dangling handcuffs gleamed darkly in the murky air. They had to go, that’s all there was to it. He rubbed the thin metal ring digging into his wrist, and knew he could eventually free himself with a hammer and chisel. One more time — he needed to go home just one more time.

As he retraced his steps of the past day, avoiding streets and roads, he stayed alert to the sounds around him. Proceeding step by cautious step, he comforted himself with the thought that the police were on unfamiliar turf and did not enjoy the support of the masses; so even if he came face to face with them, he still had a good chance of getting away. Their revolvers gave him pause — they had fired a couple of shots the day before — but even if they shot him dead, so what? And if they were such bad shots that they’d missed him in broad daylight, he felt even safer at night.