The Children of This Village Delight in Wildfire and Death
“Father’s Feet” from The Crossing of the Boars by Zhang Guixing, translated by Christopher G Rea and Julie Ming Wang
Guan Ah-fung hanged himself from a jackfruit tree one sundown as wildfire whirled through fields of lalang grass, spewing a dirty haze that choked the jungle and enveloped half of Kampong Krokop, the Village of the Boars. Rays of the setting sun, striated by the smoke and the vapor of the fierce heat, floated like a school of golden carp in a red sea. Hawks, their feathers glowing like embers in the light of the skyward flames, circled low to catch prey fleeing the oceanic blaze. From the brush came the panicked cries of dozens of wild birds, the most strident and piteous cries coming from the greater coucals, which, perched immobile in tree branches or hopping about on the forest floor, watched as their hatchlings and fledglings were consumed by the blaze.
Residents of the kampong went about their business as usual among the vegetable fields and orchards, chicken coops and duck ponds, paying little attention to the fire and its mournful howls, but then the wind shifted to the southwest, and all of a sudden, smoke enveloped the grain crops and the rumah panggung—the several hundred stilt houses that comprised Krokop—sending villagers fleeing in a panic, making the livestock turn color, and even infusing that night’s supper with a smoky, scorched flavor. The children of the kampong, however, were delighted, running about with slingshots stained with bird blood, a stone-filled pouch in one hand and the weapon in the other, drawing back rubber bands to take aim at the wild birds fleeing the smoke and flames and at the furry fruit bats and haughty hawks as they swooped by at lower altitudes. Its wing membrane punctured by a stone, a downed fruit bat would shriek with rage, looking up with its vicious, scarlet face and large ears at the child pinning it underfoot.
Some slingshot projectiles clanked and skidded on the tin roofs of the stilt houses, irritating their inhabitants. Kampong residents swore that these aerial bombardments of stones were harbingers of certain calamity and sure to provoke divine retribution. Their curses, however, did nothing to dampen the children’s high spirits or extinguish their blood lust.
As the smoke enveloping Guan Ah-fung’s garden dissipated, the children, peering through the hedgerows, caught sight of his corpse dangling from the tree.
“Bag-rhong!” hollered a boy with a kingfisher and a dead magpie strung about his neck, “your dad’s hanged himself!”
Bag-rhong was straddling two branches of a rambutan tree, watching the flames gallop like wild horses through the grasses in the distance. Now and then a gust of choking smoke would force him to close his eyes and pinch his nose shut, but no matter how his eyes streamed with tears, he refused to climb down. He had been observing the coucals from that tree for more than ten days now. He had watched as they picked grasses to build their nests and as they hunted insects to feed their young. These coucals had built their nests amid the bushes on a grassy hill beside a solitary boxwood tree. Having caught an insect, a coucal would fly into the tree and strut along its branches. The greater coucal, Bag-rhong’s father had told him, was a cautious bird. When it discovered that its nest was under threat, it would find a way to move house, even if this meant moving eggs and nestlings. Wildfire had already reached the grassy hill, and Bag-rhong watched as the coucals flew back and forth in a dither between the boxwood tree and the bushes, crying in distress.
Just then Bag-rhong saw the boy with the kingfisher and the dead magpie round his neck beckoning to him. Hanging beside the stark black and white of the magpie’s plumage, the kingfisher’s feathers were a riot of hues. The kingfisher had not yet drawn its final breath, and it flapped its wings furiously, calling out as desperately as the coucals.
By the time Bag-rhong and the group of children had arrived at the foot of the jackfruit tree, villagers had already taken his father down and laid him on his back. Smoke still clung to Ah-fung’s disheveled hair, and the noose had cut deep into his throat, leaving a band of flame. In the jackfruit tree, a hemp rope swayed in the broiling southwest wind, trailing a noose. The rope was the same one that Bag-rhong had strung up a year or so ago to hang a tire swing. The tire rim had been removed and the treads worn away, and Bag-rhong would sit his little bottom on the inside edges of the tire as he swung, both hands gripping its sidewall. Occasionally his father would send the tire swing hurtling into the sky with a swift kick, using his feet because he had no hands. If Bag-rhong hadn’t hung up the tire swing on that jackfruit tree, perhaps his father would not have hanged himself. The line the rope had left on father’s neck was like the indelible mark the parasitic strangler fig cuts into a tree, rounding behind his ears as if it were a moat protecting the craggy battlements of his face.
No one doubted that Guan Ah-fung had ended his own life, even though he had no hands.
No one doubted that Guan Ah-fung had ended his own life, even though he had no hands. He had climbed up that jackfruit tree, straddled the branch, and with his toes he had removed the tire and tied a noose, then put the noose around his own neck, doing all of this with his own two feet.
When Guan Ah-fung lost his arms at age twenty-one, Bag-rhong was still an infant. By the time Bag-rhong was a toddler, his father’s feet had dexterity to spare. Bag-rhong’s first slingshot was one of his father’s masterworks. Father had squatted on the ground and gripped a parang machete between the two largest toes of his right foot to cut a V-shaped branch from a sapling and whittle a small two-pronged handle. He had then cut two strips of rubber from a discarded bicycle tube and made a sling pocket out of an old leather shoe, and with a handful of rubber bands provided by Bag-rhong, deftly fashioned a slingshot of deadly accuracy. Father had put a stone in the pouch, and holding the slingshot frame between the largest toes on his right foot, he had used his left toes to retract the pouch and send the stone whizzing through the undergrowth. Bag-rhong’s first kite was another of his father’s amazing creations. Lighting himself a cigarette, Father had sliced two long, thin bamboo strips from a broom and used string to tie them securely into a diamond-shaped frame, onto which he had glued shoji paper and then tied on a kite string, and only when showing Bag-rhong how to fly the kite did he finally reach up a foot to tap the ash from his cigarette. Another time, when Bag-rhong was seven, his father had sat on the veranda steps holding a double-barreled shotgun, the stock gripped between the big toes of his left foot, the butt across his pelvis, and his right middle toe on the trigger. A pair of wild boars had been rooting for food in his cassava field in broad daylight, and with two blasts he had spilled the guts of the brazen invaders. From the window, Bag-rhong had watched as the boars’ blood seeped across the field, staining the ground a dull red like sunset clouds scudding across the sky.
Bag-rhong liked to sit on the rack on the back of his father’s cargo bike and feel the smoothness of his pedaling. His father would set off at dawn, sitting astride the saddle with his feet flat on the pedals and his back ramrod straight. Eyes fixed forward, he would weave easily to avoid obstacles, occasionally raising a foot to adjust the handlebars, as they sped toward Gang-rhun General Store in the kampong. As Bag-rhong gripped the springs beneath the seat with both hands and watched Father’s ramrod-straight back and his sleeves flapping in the wind, a mixture of happiness and sorrow would flood his tender heart. The bicycle flew like the wind along the muddy track leading from the Krokop River to the shops of the village, made of wood, ten to a row, each with a residence on the second floor, with a shared covered walkway in front. The bicycle’s spinning spokes would shine in the sun like a silver beard, its rims laden with grassy dew, while the erratically and laboriously revolving chain sounded like an old man hacking up phlegm. Only when Father’s bike was pulling up to his general store would he nonchalantly raise one of his large feet to tap the handbrake.
The dynamo on the imported Raleigh cargo model no longer worked, the headlight was out, the frame was bent and rickety, the kickstand was askew, a spoke had snapped, the chain guard and mud guards were rusted through in a hundred places, and springs were visible through cracks in the seat cover, but whenever he had time Guan Ah-fung would take Bag-rhong on this ancient bike for meandering jaunts through the kampong streets, through the countryside, along the bank of the Krokop River, and along narrow pathways through the lalang grass.
Guan Ah-fung first took his son up the grassy hill when Bag-rhong was only five. The hill was covered in small yellow and white flowers and surrounded by shrubs, ponds, marshes, craters made by artillery shells, stately evergreens, and boundless fields of lalang grass that concealed the remains of both humans and beasts. A vast emptiness by day, at night the landscape teemed with flickering will-o’-the-wisps. Father had stopped with Bag-rhong at the top of the hill, pursed his lips, and gestured with his chin toward the back of the hillside where ferns, vines, and a pile of sticks camouflaged a wild boar den. Eleven years ago, he said, he and Bag-rhong’s mother had slaughtered a sow and six piglets in that den. That very same spot was also where, six years ago, he had ambushed the leader of the devils who had terrorized Krokop. Father had told Bag-rhong to close his eyes and listen carefully to the sounds of the land and all its creatures, to the varied calls of the natural world. Bag-rhong had done as he was told. With a beaming smile, he had faced the summer monsoon winds from the southwest and welcomed the winter monsoon winds from the northeast. For a good five minutes he had stood on that hill with his eyes closed. When he opened them, his father had asked: “What did you see?” Bag-rhong shook his head, so his father had told him to close his eyes again. Five minutes later his father had asked, “What did you hear?” Bag-rhong had heard dogs barking and roosters crowing in far off Krokop, the shouts of the roughnecks in the oil fields, the cries of hawks and other wild birds, the lalang grasses rustling with the regularity of ocean waves, the explosive reports of rifle shots in the jungle, the sound of Father farting. His father had then pursed his lips and gestured with his chin toward a pond overgrown with reeds and wild orchids and said, There’s a child squatting in those reeds, fishing for tenualosa with a homemade rod and using grasshoppers as bait. In the rattan basket by his bottom he’s got one tenualosa that’s still alive and flopping. Turning his gaze toward a khaya tree, his father had continued, There’s a western marsh harrier perched in that tree, watching the water monitors plying the swamp. With a toe on his right foot he had indicated a stand of shrubbery and said, Behind those shrubs is a crater from Allied bombing during World War II in which a male porcupine has made a nest. Surveying the wild landscape, his father had gone on, Near this hill there are three coucals building grass nests and a pair of bearded pigs foraging for worms and insect larvae in a dried-up creek bed. Bag-rhong had frowned and looked up at his father’s solid physique and solemn fortress of a face, fondled the parang hanging like a hand beside father’s waist, and asked, “How can you tell?”
Using a knee as he might a hand, father had patted Bag-rhong’s shoulder and told him, Bag-rhong, you’re young. Someday you’ll be able to tell, too.
Opening the lid, they discovered a jumble of Japanese fright masks and toys.
In 1952, the durians ripened by June and their aroma wafted through Krokop, attracting hungry boars. Bag-rhong and a group of children climbed into trees and other high places and ambushed the wild pigs with their slingshots. A tumult of whizzing stones and squealing pigs startled the collared doves and wild green pigeons nesting under the sunshade roof of Guan Ah-fung’s stilt house, and hundreds of them flew out and disappeared among the bushes and evergreen trees. After eating a few durians, Bag-rhong and the other children went exploring in the crawl space under the sunshade roof, where they came across a crate the size of an ox’s belly bound with a hemp rope. Opening the lid, they discovered a jumble of Japanese fright masks and toys. Under the jackfruit tree the children roasted pigeon nestlings, each child wearing a mask of a different yōkai—a bird beak paired with a pig snout, a long-tongued cyclops, a monster with red hair and ferocious fangs, a red-faced creature with upturned nose, an evil-eyed seductress with cherry lips and a malicious smile, a hideous bloodthirsty demon; they played with air poppers, wire mandalas, clay figurine whistles, three-dimensional wooden puzzles, and kissing pigs; windup toys such as chirping cicadas, a hopping chicken, a drumming rabbit, a Spanish snowman with a broom, a monkey with a suitcase, and elephant on a ball clicked and chirped as they hopped and tumbled about on the ground.
The children played from noon till dusk, oblivious to the passage of time. Grass fires blotted out the heavens, the surging heat and smoke enveloping the summer sky and changing the appearance of all below. The setting sun burned like a red candle, seemingly paralyzed on the horizon, smearing the white clouds with every color imaginable. Overhead circled dozens of hawks, flicking out flamelike tongues like feathered, winged snakes. The towering evergreens seemed to be hanging upside down with their roots fissuring the parched, blackened sky. Hundreds of stilt houses clustered by the gradually extinguishing sun like a consortium of phototactic crabs scuttling toward their own immolation. Millions of glowworms illuminated the black Krokop River, turning it into one vast, magnificent firefly lantern.
As the children gathered firewood and fed their campfire beneath the jackfruit tree, Guan Ah-fung pushed open the fence gate with his foot and silently walked over. The children had always been afraid of this handless boss of the general store, and terror immobilized them like quicksand. In the campfire’s flickering light, Guan Ah-fung’s face was as taut as a drumskin. Then all at once, his expression of stony fortitude drained to an ashen pallor. As he turned his gaze on each child, a girl holding a windup deer burst into a wail, wah! Guan Ah-fung walked up to a masked child and roared:
“Take off those masks! Scram! Go! Get the hell out of here!”
The children tore off their masks and fled. In the subsequent half year that remained of Guan Ah-fung’s life, Bag-rhong’s childhood companions never again came anywhere near the Guan house. In that last half year Bag-rhong’s father became like a stranger to him. Ah-fung would ride his bicycle to the Gangrhun General Store in the morning and sit at the counter until closing time, as silent and immobile as a sentry. Villagers said his eyes had the cold gleam of blades, as if they harbored some uncontrollable urge to kill that had outlasted the war. After dark he would sit silently on the porch of his stilt house and smoke a hundred or more cigarettes in succession, staring intently into the jungle until midnight, or even dawn. Ten days after the children’s campfire, he set a fire of his own under the jackfruit tree and ordered Bag-rhong to burn all the masks and toys. After his father’s suicide, Bag-rhong and the children returned to the foot of the jackfruit tree and dug through the ashes, turning up the remains of the metal Spanish toy. Their delight mounted when they discovered that over half of the metal toys had working springs and could still click, chirp, hop, and skitter about like a mischievous pack of reincarnated imps.
After he burned those toys and masks of unknown provenance, Bag-rhong’s father would often wake him in the dead of night, open every window of his stilt house, and shine his flashlight in all directions as if hunting something. Dad, what is it you’re seeing? Bag-rhong would ask. Guan Ah-fung would pause for a long interval before replying. I see a headless man circling the jackfruit tree and playing a Japanese folk song on a charred harmonica. I see a white-haired crone whirling a scythe and chasing after a flying disembodied head. I see a bicycle squadron of Japanese soldiers riding over a pile of children’s corpses, the spokes and rims entangling their limbs and guts. And each time Bag-rhong would shine the flashlight into the gloom surrounding the stilt house, provoking packs of roaming nocturnal dogs to furious barking.
Three days before he hanged himself from the jackfruit tree, Father took Bag-rhong up the grassy hill one last time. Surveying the surrounding wilderness, he suddenly nudged Bag-rhong with a toe and said, A rōnin with a dirty face and unkempt hair is coming through those grasses, approaching this hill step by step, katana in hand. A man with skin paler than pale is crouching in the branches of that khaya tree, with a parang and a quiver of poison darts hanging from his waist. Resting on his shoulder is a long blowgun fixed with a gleaming bayonet that would freeze your blood. That chirp-chirping sound is his metal cricket-caller. A woman with a parang in one hand and rattan bands on her arms is leaping down into the bomb crater to kill a pregnant boar sow, and stalking her heels are a black dog with paws of smoke, a headless rooster, and a long-tailed macaque.
Bag-rhong peered at his surroundings in silence, but all he could see was the haze of the wildfires, the wheeling coucals and hawks, the intertwining, denuded branches of the wildfire-ravaged evergreens, and the luxuriantly green lalang grasses meekly and plaintively awaiting the licking flames.
Bag-rhong glanced up at his father’s solemn fortress of a face and then lowered his head to regard his father’s massive feet.
Father’s feet were covered in stubbly black hair and rippling veins, with thick heels, the soles deeply arched and cracked; the left big toe sported a corn like the eye of a dead fish, and half of his toes extended beyond the ends of his sandals, their nails far longer than average.
Bag-rhong would never forget how his father used to put on shadow puppet shows on the faded and cracking plank walls of their house, using his toes like fingers in the light of the kerosene lamp.
On feet held high, his father’s toes would transform into ten spirit snakes emerging from their burrows to dance and slither on that wall, or into any of several dozen birds and beasts. As Bag-rhong’s eyelids grew heavy and he drifted off to sleep, he saw a pair of skeletal hands grow out of Father’s blood-soaked arms and play out on the wall a shadowy scene of the sulfurous fumes and flashing weapons of a military campaign that had left the jungle strewn with corpses.
