7
MOTHER’S HEALTH IMPROVED under the loving care of the lame¹ woman Liu. She and Father hadbeen good friends, but after her rescue from the well they were like brother and sister. ThenGranddad came down with a serious case of typhoid fever, and at times he seemed on the brinkof death. Once, as he lay there semiconscious, he hallucinated that he smelled the sweet fragranceof sorghum² porridge, so Father and the others quickly picked some sorghum, and the woman Liucooked it in front of Granddad until it was soft and pasty. After he ate a bowlful, the capillaries³ inhis nose burst and released a torrent⁴ of thick, dark blood. His appetite returned then, and he wason the mend. By mid-October, he was able to hobble out into the garden to soak up the warmrays of the late-autumn sun.
I heard that at the time a clash between the troops of Pocky Leng and Little Foot Jiangoccurred near Wang Gan Aqueduct, with heavy casualties on both sides. But Granddad was fartoo sick to worry about that – or anything else, for that matter.
Father and the others threw up a few temporary shelters in the village, then scavenged the junkpiles for the odds⁵ and ends they would need to harvest enough sorghum to get them through thewinter and the spring. Autumn rains had fallen steadily⁶ since the end of August, turning the darkearth into a sea of mud. Half of the rain-soaked stalks lay rotting on the ground, where the fallenseeds had taken root and were already beginning to germinate⁷. Tender green stalks crowded theirway through the spaces between the blue-grey and dark-red patches of decay, and the ears ofsorghum swayed in the air or dragged along the ground like bushy, matted foxtails. Steel-greyrainclouds, heavy with water, scurried⁸ across the sky, and cold, hard raindrops thudded into thestalks. Flocks of crows struggled to stay aloft on wings weighted down with moisture. Duringthose foggy days, sunlight was as precious as gold.

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