in hand to chop off a hunk of the still-warm fatty meat, giving my customers the exact amount they asked for, not an ounce more or an ounce less. They’d give me a thumbs-up. “Xiaojia,” they’d say, “you’re quite the man!” I didn’t need them to tell me that. But this was the first time I was to be part of a spectacle with Dieh, one that was a lot more important than butchering pigs. But what about all those customers? What do we do? Sorry, folks, I guess you’ll have to be vegetarians for a day.
I was getting bored now that there were no more stories, so I went up to the stove, where the fire had gone out. There were no ripples on the surface of the glistening oil. It was no longer a cauldron of oil, but a mirror, a big bronze mirror, brighter than my wife’s mirror at home, and so clear that I could count the whiskers on my face. There were dried stains in the mud in front of the stove and on the stand—Song Three’s blood. And those weren’t the only places his blood had landed; some had splattered into the cauldron. Was that why the oil had such a bright sheen? After this business of the sandalwood death is done with, I’m going to move this cauldron into the yard back home and let my wife see her face in it, but only if she refrains from mistreating my dieh. Last night I was half asleep when I heard a loud pop. Song Three’s head was buried in the churning oil, and before they could pull it out, it was about half cooked. I got a kick out of that. Meow meow.
That was good shooting. Who did it? My dieh didn’t know, and the government soldiers who started looking the moment they heard the shot didn’t know. I’m the only one who knew. Gaomi County could boast only two marksmen that good. One was the rabbit hunter Niu Qing; the other was County Magistrate Qian Ding. Niu Qing had one eye—the left one. He’d lost his right one when his gun blew up in his face. A distinct improvement in his marksmanship followed the accident. He mastered the skill of shooting rabbits on the run. If he raised his fowling piece, a rabbit would be on its way to the netherworld. Niu Qing was a good friend of mine. My good friend. The other marksman was the venerable Qian Ding, our County Magistrate. Once, when I was in the Great Northern Wilderness hunting for herbal medicine for my wife’s illness, I saw Qian Ding, with his attendants Chunsheng and Liu Pu, out hunting. Chunsheng and Liu Pu were on donkeys driving rabbits out of the bushes so the Magistrate, sitting astride his horse, could draw his pistol and, seemingly without aiming, send a rabbit flying up into the air to land with a thud—dead.
From where I hid in the brush, not daring to make a sound, I could hear Chunsheng praise the Magistrate to the skies with words like “crack shot,” while Liu Pu sat in the saddle, head down, a blank look on his face that gave away nothing of what he was thinking. My wife once told me that the Magistrate’s loyal follower, Liu Pu, was Qian Ding’s wife’s ganerzi, and the son of some big shot. He was, she said, a wise and talented man. I refused to believe her. What talented man would serve as somebody’s lackey? A talented man would be like my dieh, who lifted up his sword, smeared his face with blood, and—thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack, six heads rolled on the ground.
The Magistrate was no marksman, was how I saw it, just a lucky shot, like a blind cat bumping into a dead rat. He’d probably miss the next. Well, as if he knew what I was thinking, he pointed his pistol into the air and brought down a bird. A dead bird, like a black stone, plopped down right next to me. Would you believe it! A superhuman marksman, meow meow. The Magistrate’s hunting dog came bounding over to me. I stood up with the dead bird, its body heat burning my hand. The dog leaped and jumped up and down, barking the whole time. Now, I’m not afraid of dogs; dogs are afraid of me. Every dog in Gaomi County runs away with its tail between its legs, yelping like crazy,