Father turned red all the way to his ears. Words failed him.
I was about to shred the man with my razor-sharp wit when I heard shouts coming from the ‘meat-cleansing’ station. When I turned to look, I saw the so-called goat-seller racing down the path to the main gate, followed by a posse of plant workers. He kept shooting them glances over his shoulder and they kept shouting: ‘Grab him—don't let him get away!’
Something clicked in my head, and I blurted ‘Reporter!’
When I looked at Father, I saw he'd turned ashen white. I grabbed Jiaojiao's hand and took off running to the gate. I was excited, pumped up, as if I'd spotted a dog running down a jackrabbit on a humdrum winter day. Jiaojiao was slowing me down, so I let go of her and ran as if my life depended on it. The wind whooshed past my ears. There were chaotic shouts behind me—barking dogs, bleating sheep, grunting pigs, lowing cows. The man stumbled on a rock and thudded to the ground, his momentum carrying him a good three feet on his belly. His bulging canvas bag flew off and an inhuman ‘oof!’ burst from his mouth, like a toad getting squashed. He'd taken such a fall that I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. We'd built the path with a mixture of old bricks, gravel and cinders, all unforgivingly hard. At the very least, he had to have a bloody nose and cut lips, maybe even a lost tooth or two. Broken bones weren't out of the question. But he scrambled to his feet, staggered over to his canvas bag and picked it up. Ready for another run, he froze when he saw—as did I—Lao Lan and my mother, two formidable opponents, standing like sentries and blocking his way. By then his pursuers had caught up with him.
Lao Lan and Mother were in front of him, Father and I were behind him and the plant workers all round him. With a wave of his hand, Lao Lan dismissed the workers. The hapless fellow turned round and round, looking for a way out of our human cage. I think he assumed that I was the weak link in the chain but then he noticed Jiaojiao and the knife she clutched in her hand. His next avenue of escape was past my mother but her expression changed his mind. Her face was red, her gaze unfocused, the quintessential look of distraction. But it made him lower his head in defeat. Father, on the other hand, suddenly looked the picture of dejection. Turning his back on the reporter and ignoring the queue of animal-sellers, he headed to the northeast corner of the plant, to a rebirth platform made of pine. That had been Mother's idea. She said that a platform was needed to perform regular Buddhist rites in order to help the sad ghosts of all those creatures that had served mankind move ahead on the wheel of life after we killed them. I didn't think that Lao Lan, a lifelong butcher, believed in ghosts and spirits, and so I was surprised when he accepted Mother's idea. We'd already performed rites on the platform—we'd invited a senior Buddhist monk to recite sutras while several lesser monks burnt incense and spirit paper and set off firecrackers at the base of the platform. The senior monk was a ruddy-faced man with a booming voice and high moral airs. Listening to him chant the sutras was a deeply spiritual experience. Mother compared him to the Tang monk in the Travels to the West TV series. When Lao Lan jokingly asked if she wanted to feast on the Tang monk's flesh to achieve immortality, she kicked him in the calf. ‘What do you think I am, some kind of demon?’ she'd grumbled.
My father was a regular visitor to the platform, which stood ten metres tall and gave off a pleasant pine smell; he sometimes stayed up there for hours, not coming down even at mealtimes. ‘Dieh,’ I once asked, ‘what do you do up there?’ ‘Nothing,’ he said woodenly. ‘I know,’ Jiaoajiao said. He rubbed her head, looked glum and said nothing. She and I climbed up there a few times to look round and breathe in the scent of pinewood. We saw distant villages, the river, a misty line of riverbank scrub brush, uncultivated land and all sorts of vapours snaking skyward on the horizon. The vista emptied us of our emotions.