The hand-tractor jolted along the dirt road for forty minutes.
Accountant Cui drove, saying only one thing the entire way: "There's a pothole ahead." Then he fell silent. He had only taken over for the retired accountant this past spring, and he did everything so cautiously he barely dared to press the accelerator. Zhao Youcai had told him to take Chen Xiulan to the commune. Before they left, he added: "Don't talk too much on the road." Accountant Cui had recited this instruction silently the whole way, until he thought even "there's a pothole ahead" was saying too much.
Chen Xiulan sat in the trailer bed, both hands gripping the side panels. The morning wind swept in from the wheat fields, lifting the pleats of her mended skirt. The stitches were coarse. She had sewn them at dawn by the window, the glass still fogged with condensation.
The wheat on both sides of the road was almost fully ripe-ready for the sickle in three days. On the field ridges, morning glory vines were in full bloom, pink and purple, winding up the wheat stalks.
The tractor rounded a bend. She touched the gauze taped to her temple. An old bedsheet she had cut up-the edges uneven, the loose threads rubbing against the wound.
The health center was on the commune's main street-two rows of red-brick bungalows. White bedsheets hung in the courtyard, billowing full of wind like sails. In the corner, a woman squatted holding a child. The baby cried; she wiped its nose with her sleeve. A broken bicycle stood nearby, bird droppings on the seat.
Dr. Ma was in her forties, wearing a pair of metal-rimmed glasses whose lenses were covered in fine scratches worn in by the years. Her hair was cut to earlobe length, the gray mixed in with the black like frost that hadn't fully melted in the winter fields. She had worked in this health center for fifteen years. She had seen every kind of injury-fights, falls, farm tools, domestic abuse, and the kind she preferred not to write down on the medical records.
"What happened?"
"Fell."
Dr. Ma looked up at Chen Xiulan. She had heard this answer a thousand times. Eight out of ten women who said "fell" hadn't really fallen. But her job wasn't to solve crimes-it was to examine.
"Fell on what?"
"Iron plowshare." Chen Xiulan answered quickly. She had rehearsed this answer the entire ride over. Her tone carried a matter-of-fact steadiness, as if she routinely fell on iron plowshares.
Dr. Ma uncapped her pen and wrote a few words in the register. She studied the woman before her. Gauze on the temple, a bluish bruise on the left cheekbone, but clean clothes, tidy hair, and brand-new sandals with not a speck of mud on the soles.
"Take off your clothes. Lie down."
The examination took about fifteen minutes. Chen Xiulan lay on the leather padding, the cold surface seeping through her thin clothes against her back. There was a crack in the ceiling, snaking from the light fixture to the corner. She stared at it.
Dr. Ma pulled off her rubber gloves and tossed them into the white enamel tray. Clang-the gloves bounced off the tray, the metallic echo buzzing in the consultation room. She walked to the desk, sat down, and uncapped her pen.
"Abrasions-outside of right knee, back of left elbow." The pen scratched across the paper. Every character written with care. "Laceration at temple, approximately two centimeters, superficial, sutures not required."
"And that-" Chen Xiulan sat on the examination bed, her skirt smoothed down, her fingers gripping the iron bar of the bed frame. "Can you tell... that?"
She didn't say "rape." She couldn't get the word out.
Dr. Ma looked at her from above her glasses. Chen Xiulan's eyelids were dry. Her fingers did not tremble.
"There are no restraint marks on your body. No signs of forceful compression on your wrists, ankles, or collarbones." Dr. Ma's tone was flat, like reading a pharmaceutical label. She spoke while observing Chen Xiulan's reactions-a professional habit. She didn't need to look at the wound itself to judge many things. She could read how a patient blinked, swallowed, and answered. "If someone had pushed you down from behind, there would typically be grip marks. Also, the abrasions on your knees and elbows are on the outside and back, not the front. A forward fall would have left marks on the front of the knees and the palms."
Silence filled the room. Outside, Accountant Cui was starting the tractor. The sputtering sound hit the courtyard wall and echoed back.
"You fell sideways?"
"I don't remember clearly. I was panicked."
Dr. Ma screwed the cap back onto her pen. Slowly, turn by turn. She closed the medical record and placed it at the corner of the desk-not in the center, but at the edge, in a position she could easily retrieve and revise.
"Where are your old sandals?" she asked abruptly, her eyes on the new sandals on Chen Xiulan's feet.
The question came without warning, like a blade thrust from the side. Chen Xiulan's toes curled inside her sandals, but she controlled her face. She stood up. From this angle, Dr. Ma had to look up to see her expression, and her face was toward the window, backlit, most of its details hidden in shadow. As she walked past Dr. Ma, she stirred a draft that flipped a page of the medical record. She reached out to hold down the paper-the veins on the back of her hand bulged.
"The strap broke."
She pushed the door open and left. The door swung shut behind her, hitting the frame with a thud. The moment it closed, she shut her eyes. Then she walked as fast as she could to the center of the courtyard. Accountant Cui had already started the tractor. Black smoke billowed in her face, but she didn't dodge. The smoke stung her eyes until they glistened with tears.
Dr. Ma sat at her desk, unmoving. She heard the tractor sputter out of the health center gate, the sound fading gradually, merging into the distant clamor of the market. She pulled the medical record back out of the drawer and flipped to the page she had just written on. The pen rotated twice between her fingers. Then she added a line at the bottom. She closed the record and locked it in the drawer.
That morning, Wang Cuiying changed into a clean blue blouse, picked up an empty bowl, and went out.
The bowl was one she had lent to Zhao Youcai's wife for holding tofu yesterday. The tofu was finished. Today she was coming to retrieve the bowl.
But her mind held other things.
She had lain awake all night. Her kang was by the window, offering a clear view of Chen Xiulan's courtyard gate. Before Chen Xiulan had come running from the wheat field last night, Wang Cuiying had already been sitting on the stone roller for over an hour. She had seen Zhao Yunfei ride his bicycle out of the village-heading toward the commune at that hour. But Zhao Yunfei hadn't returned this morning. She had seen Chen Xiulan leave too, heading south toward the wheat fields. Those two had gone out one after the other. Whether they knew the other was out there, she didn't know. But she knew one thing: if Liu Mancang had intercepted Chen Xiulan in the wheat field, then where was Zhao Yunfei? In the same wheat field, how had he not heard her screams?
At dawn, she made a decision-she had to speak. If she kept it bottled up, it would rot inside her eventually. But to whom, and how much to say, required careful consideration. Zhao Youcai was the Party secretary. He was Zhao Yunfei's father. And he was Liu Mancang's landlord-she didn't know where Zhao Youcai stood in all this, but she knew that only Zhao Youcai had the power to handle what she was about to say.
Zhao Youcai's courtyard sat in the center of the village. Blue-brick walls, iron gate, a wooden plaque nailed to the doorframe with peeling paint reading "Model Household." The pomegranate flowers were in full riot, red dots burning among the green leaves.
Zhao Yunfei was squatting in the corridor, eating breakfast. A large porcelain bowl, cornmeal gruel with a pinch of pickled turnip. His chopsticks stirred the bowl without bringing anything to his mouth. He wore a blue cotton Mao suit, the collar buttoned neatly-in this village, few young men could afford a Mao suit. It was a badge of institutional status. There was a faint, scraped blood mark on his face. Wang Cuiying noticed it but said nothing.
"Auntie Cuiying," he mumbled in greeting, without looking up. The tips of his ears were slightly red.
Zhao Youcai came out of the main room holding a tea mug-a white porcelain one printed with red characters: "Grasp Revolution, Promote Production." The characters had nearly worn away, but the two red lines remained, as if will itself had survived the fading of ink.
"Cuiying? Here for the bowl?"
"To get the bowl back. And to have a word or two." Wang Cuiying set the empty bowl on the windowsill in the corridor and shot Zhao Youcai a meaningful glance-a flick of her eyes toward the main room.
They went inside. The door was closed.
"Brother Youcai, something about last night doesn't sit right with me." Wang Cuiying stood beside the octagonal table, not sitting. Her fingers traced a pattern on the tabletop, the thin layer of dust-freshly fallen, evidence that Zhao Youcai had also risen early and sat here a long time. "When Xiulan came running from the wheat field, she didn't come from the south end. She came around from the north."
"Maybe she ran the wrong way in her panic?"
"No." Wang Cuiying shook her head. "When she reached me, she was gasping for air, her whole body shaking. But the first three words out of her mouth were-'Liu Mancang.' Not a single stutter. Like her mouth had been ready, just waiting until she reached me to release those words. Think about it. A woman who's been raped runs to someone. What's the first thing she says? 'Help me.' Or 'He-' Or at least she'd cry first. She didn't. She reached me, opened her mouth, and three words came out fully formed, like they'd been queued up waiting."
Zhao Youcai held his tea mug, blowing on the floating tea leaves, saying nothing. The rim of the mug hid half his face. But his fingers tapped the mug twice-a detail no one else would notice, but Wang Cuiying had known him for twenty years. She recognized those two taps as a sign that his mind was racing.
"And more." Wang Cuiying stepped closer, lowering her voice another notch. "Before dawn this morning, I went to the pond bank to wash vegetables. I saw a sandal floating on the water. New, plastic, beige, with a plastic flower on the toe. It had been in the water at least overnight-algae had wrapped around it."
"Whose?"
"I fished it out. Yesterday afternoon, I saw Xiulan heading to fetch water. She was wearing that exact pair." Wang Cuiying paused. "Only one was floating. The other is somewhere at the bottom."
Zhao Youcai set down the mug. It landed on the table with a dull thud. He lit a cigarette. The match struck three times before catching-not because it was damp, but because his fingers were trembling. He inhaled. The smoke drifted through the sunlight streaming through the bamboo curtain, forming a gray-blue veil.
"Last month, when you told me about the dates she goes to the commune for meetings-" he exhaled a stream of smoke, his black-bean eyes narrowing behind it, the crow's feet at the corners folding into a fan. "Did you check?"
"Yes. My nephew works in the commune kitchen. I asked around thoroughly. There were only two literacy meetings this year-one in March, one in September. No meeting on the fourteenth."
"Your son-" Wang Cuiying began. She wanted to ask about the wound on Zhao Yunfei's face, where he had been last night, whether Zhao Youcai knew his son was mixed up in this. The words were at the tip of her tongue.
"Don't." Zhao Youcai cut her off. His tone had changed suddenly, like an iron plate dropping from a height, hitting the ground without any bounce. "I'll investigate my own matters myself."
Wang Cuiying looked at him. The shadow of the pomegranate flowers fell across the table through the bamboo curtain, dappled and mottled. She stood up, smoothed the hem of her blue blouse.
"I'll take the bowl, then."
As she pushed the door open, she glanced back at the corridor. Zhao Yunfei's bowl was still on the windowsill. The gruel half-eaten. Chopsticks laid across the rim. The person was gone.
Zhao Youcai sat alone at the table, finishing his cigarette. He stubbed it out in the ashtray, pressing again and again until it was flat.
The fourteenth of last month-his wife's birthday. That night he had drunk two measures of liquor, a bit more than usual, because his wife had made four dishes for the meal. He remembered the sun was especially strong that day. In the evening he ate and fell asleep, deeply. In the middle of the night, he woke to go to the toilet. Sleepily groping his way in the dark, he passed the west wing and saw a sliver of light under the door. The lamp was still on. He called out, "Yunfei, time for bed." The light went out. The next morning he went to the west wing for tools-the bed was neatly made, but not in his wife's way. The corners weren't tucked in, just folded directly. His eyelid twitched at the time, but he didn't think much of it. Actually, the month before last on the fourteenth, he had also vaguely sensed something wrong. He had heard the courtyard gate creak open in the middle of the night, very softly, as if someone had drawn the bolt and gently closed it behind them. He thought it was the wind, turned over, and went back to sleep.
Now, putting the two things together-the gate creaking and the light being on-they weren't coincidences. They formed a thread, stretching from the nights of each fourteenth, all the way to yesterday's wheat field. On one end of the thread was his son's secret. On the other-a web woven by a woman he had underestimated.
He stood up and walked to the corridor. He picked up the bowl from the windowsill. Five fingerprints pressed into the glaze-left by Wang Cuiying. He turned the bowl over. The bottom was clean. Nothing.
But he felt there should have been something. Just as this village he had governed for seventeen years appeared calm on the surface, but a crack had opened somewhere beneath it-and the people and things hidden in that crack were things he had not yet even touched.
A fly landed on the rim of the bowl, rubbed its front legs together, and flew away.