IBGSW Chapter 135
Lynching in the Village
This chapter depicts a lynching, contains mob violence, misogyny and a death by drowning, and the scene continues into the next chapter. Please read with care.
Magistrate Pang pondered, thoroughly enlightened:
"Though in the long run we pay out more in salary, in the short run our spending goes down."
Once the people were hired, what would have been three hundred wen advanced per person could be cut to eighty wen per person in the early stage.
Even if the spending kept up afterward, since Wan'an County had ghost cases to begin with, these hands would come in handy, and it would spare them the scramble to recruit help on the spot whenever something happened.
Magistrate Pang had come in worried and left in high spirits with his secretary.
After seeing the two out, Zhao Fusheng told Fan Bisi to prepare blank case scrolls so she could record these two ghost cases from the past few days.
"Two—"
It dawned on Fan Bisi that in a matter of just a few days he had personally witnessed Zhao Fusheng handle two ghost cases in a row.
"You know the Baozhi County case from start to finish. Write it up, and show it to me when it's done."
When she turned to the Wan'an County Ghost Mausoleum case, Zhao Fusheng pondered for a moment:
"As for this one in Wan'an County, let's classify it as below Calamity-tier and above Baleful-tier."
The malignant ghost in the Mausoleum hadn't reached Calamity-tier, but its killing rule this time was peculiar.
It marked victims by the transmission of sound, and had killed seventy-six people in just two days, with ease.
It was lucky Zhao Fusheng had returned in time. If she'd lingered one more day in Baozhi County, the case might have ended in an unmanageable disaster, and the dead would have been far more than seventy-six!
"...Yes."
Fan Bisi's heart trembled at "below Calamity-tier and above Baleful-tier."
But he didn't hesitate for an instant.
Having witnessed the strangeness of this ghost case himself, he was still shaken by the Mausoleum calamity, and even thought Zhao Fusheng's assessment too conservative.
Fan Bisi and Zhao Fusheng spent the whole morning recording the two ghost cases of recent days.
Inside the bureau, everyone was busy, working with great energy.
Fan Wujiu had found workmen and prepared to tear down the shabby, ownerless shops along the street, and the whole day bang-clang sounded from Baoding Road.
The noise even drew the curious attention of some bolder people nearby.
With the danger gone from Wan'an County, people in the county sensed a brief safety.
Over the next few days, perhaps because the sky had resumed its old rhythm of long days and short nights, many people no longer sensed danger. Add to that the bustle of Baoding Road, and gradually people began coming out to walk about.
Some life returned to the county, and even some shops that had been abandoned a long time tried to reopen.
By the start of the ninth month, the weather had grown cooler, and Wan'an County had enjoyed nearly a month of peace.
It was Wan'an County's first peace in a long while, and many people's tightly strung nerves loosened for a time.
...
On a night already turning autumnal, there was a chill in the air.
In Kuailiang Village, under Wan'an County's jurisdiction.
Night fell. In the dark, silent hollow of the hills, suddenly a man's hoarse roar came from deep within:
"Kill the adulteress! Purge the family! Enforce the family rules! Restore its honor!"
The shout rose and carried straight up into the clouds.
The village sat in a hollow ringed by hills on three sides, and the terrain magnified the shout, sending echoes through the woods and startling countless birds hiding among the trees.
Wings flapped on every side, and the hushed woods seemed to spring back to life in an instant.
Then, in the hollow, lights flared, strikingly bright against the night.
And in the firelight, people joined in:
"Kill the adulteress!"
"Enforce the family rules! Restore its honor!"
In an instant, countless points of fire lit up like stars in the night.
In the village in the hollow, a man in a sleeveless gray jacket, barefoot, was striding through the village.
He had a broad, fleshy face, shiny with grease, with a sweat towel wrapped around his forehead. He carried a torch in his left hand and a knife in his right. When he stopped before a tiled brick house, before he could knock, the door was opened from within.
An old man of about seventy, in a blue gown, with a stern face, appeared. Seeing the man's ferocious look, he barked:
"Kuai Laosan, what do you want?"
"Sixth Uncle, if you ask me, just kill the slut with one stroke and be done. Why bother with all this fuss and torment her for nothing?"
Kuai Laosan, torch in one hand and knife in the other, heard the old man in the blue gown and complained:
"Now she gets to live a little longer."
"What's your hurry?!"
The old man, called "Sixth Uncle," glared at this.
"If you hadn't run your household so badly, would my Kuailiang Village have suffered such a disgrace, and would we need to restore our family's name?"
"Who knew the bitch would dare cheat—"
The man with the fleshy face muttered.
But when his eyes landed on the old man's livid face, he swallowed the rest.
"Is everything ready?" Sixth Uncle asked.
"She's tied up," Kuai Laosan said, nodding.
"And Kuai Changliu?" Sixth Uncle called loudly.
Though old, he was full of vigor.
Kuailiang Village wasn't big, and the night was very quiet. When he called "Kuai Changliu," the sound carried far. Before long, someone answered loudly:
"Sixth Uncle, here."
At this hour the village should have been asleep long ago.
But now, in the dead of night, it seemed everyone was waiting quietly for something.
Hearing Kuai Changliu answer, Sixth Uncle looked satisfied and asked again:
"Is the pig cage ready?"
"Don't worry, it's ready. I called Dezi and a few others to carry it to Third Brother's door."
Everything was ready; all they lacked was the east wind.1
Sixth Uncle's face brightened. He pulled the clothes draped over his shoulder straight and called:
"Let's go."
He pulled open the main door and was about to step out when someone in the house suddenly called:
"Husband—"
Kuai Laosan raised his torch, and the firelight lit up Sixth Uncle's house.
A white-haired old woman stepped from within in small steps.
She was slightly hunchbacked, her face deeply furrowed and full of sorrow.
When she called out, she glanced at Kuai Laosan, who said respectfully:
"Sixth Aunt."
Sixth Aunt gave him a forced smile and nodded, then looked at Sixth Uncle:
"Husband—"
She called to him and hesitated to go on.
Seeing she called him but didn't speak, Sixth Uncle grew impatient and tugged his clothes tight:
"Say it if you have something to say. Don't mumble."
Sixth Aunt glanced at Kuai Laosan again, her hint plain.
Kuai Laosan frowned at once, displeasure on his face.
Sixth Uncle scolded:
"If you won't say it, forget it. Women are always making trouble out of nothing. Kuai Laosan, let's go—"
"Yes," Kuai Laosan answered.
Sixth Aunt sighed:
"Husband, are you really, really going to drown Manzhou's mother in a pig cage?"2
At this, Kuai Laosan's fists clenched.
Sixth Aunt knew he couldn't stand to hear this, but as she thought of that woman, her eyes showed pity, and she was afraid the old man before her would see it, so she forced herself to hold back:
"Death is punishment enough. She did wrong. Kill her, and that's all there is to it. Why put on this show?"
"Sixth Aunt!" Kuai Laosan glared, eyes wide, and roared:
"I'll pretend I never heard that today, or else I'll..."
"Laosan, you know what your younger brother is like. However much she did wrong, she did give him Manzhou. For Manzhou's sake, we should give her some dignity—" Though Sixth Aunt saw Kuai Laosan's face darken, she persisted in saying a few words.
But the words not only failed to persuade Kuai Laosan, they only made him angrier.
His expression was vicious. His broad face was dark, and his arms were bare from the jacket. In his agitation he waved the knife, the veins on his arm bulging, a frightening sight.
"Dignity? Does an adulterous slut deserve dignity?"
He bellowed:
"She married into my Kuailiang Village and still wouldn't keep to her place, and shamed the Kuai family! If Manzhou has any sense, she should know her mother is the kind of slut who deserves to be chopped to pieces!"
His anger still not spent, he added:
"Besides, this bitch dared to cheat, so who knows whether Manzhou is even my fifth brother's seed!"
"Well said!"
Sixth Uncle roared:
"We shouldn't hide this filthy business. We want the whole village to see clearly what happens to women who dare to commit lewdness. Drown her in a pig cage!"
Then, impatiently, he scolded:
"The country has its laws and the family has its rules. You're an old woman, you don't understand, so shut your mouth. For hundreds of years Kuailiang Village's custom has been that a woman who breaks the ban on lewdness is dealt with under clan law3."
He glowered, brows slanting upward:
"Call everyone in the house out. We'll all watch the slut get drowned in the cage!"
"But—"
Sixth Aunt was about to say something more when Sixth Uncle roared:
"Go! Say one more word and see if I don't hit you! Or have you been spending time with that bitch and picked up bad habits too?"
Berated like that, the old woman didn't dare say more.
Although guilt and unease still weighed on her heart, she could only obey the old man and went back into the house.
Before long the whole household had been called out.
It was clear that in this family Sixth Uncle's authority was greatest and everyone respected him.
When all the old and young were out, Sixth Uncle nodded in satisfaction and called:
"Let's go!"
The group set off in a mighty procession and arrived at the door of a low, shabby house.
The door had been taken off its hinges. A young woman, tied up hand and foot, had been forced to kneel on the small yard in front of the broken door.
Her hair was disheveled and her head was covered in blood. Her clothes had been torn open, exposing her white chest.
The small yard, usually empty and quiet, was now full of people, men and women, young and old, jostling and packed, as lively as New Year's, all watching this scene.
The woman bent her back as far as she could, trying to cover her torn clothes.
But the more she squirmed, the wider the torn clothes ripped.
"Now she knows shame."
A woman sneered:
"Why didn't you know shame when you were having your fun?"
The speaker was a woman of about forty, whose eyes fixed on the woman with disgust.
She could feel that many of the young men around were secretly eyeing the woman out of the corner of their eyes.
Though everyone on the surface spat on this woman who had broken the "ban on lewdness," behind it the men's eyes were like wolves and tigers.
The woman's mouth had been stuffed with wood to keep her from biting her tongue and killing herself. Hearing the abuse, she only arched her back and whimpered, gasping.
The woman clenched her fists, a vicious look on her face. She stepped up, grabbed the woman's hair, and forced her face up. She raised her hand to slap her when someone shouted:
"Sixth Uncle's here!"
At "Sixth Uncle's here," a look of disappointment crossed the woman's eyes. She let go of the woman's tangled hair, and the woman slumped to the ground like mud, and then the crowd went to greet Sixth Uncle's party.
"Laosan's here too, good, we can do it all together."
"Changliu, Changliu—"
Someone called, and from outside the crowd came an answer:
"Coming, coming! Make way, the pig cage is here."
Hearing that the pig cage had come, the crowd packed tight as a wall opened a passage.
A man with a head of messy hair and a face full of tangled beard, along with several young men, carried in an elongated bamboo cage shaped like a cocoon and appeared before the low shabby house.
The villagers grew excited at the sight of the cage.
Sixth Uncle looked up and swept his eyes around. Seeing familiar faces on every side, evidently the whole of Kuailiang Village had come, he looked pleased:
"Since everyone's here, let's all see what becomes of a woman who is unfaithful to her man!"
His prestige in the village was high, and when he spoke no one dared make a sound.
When he finished, Sixth Uncle looked coldly at the woman lying on the ground like a dead dog.
This Fifth Madam Kuai, her hair covering her face, seemed to have stopped breathing.
He gave a cold laugh and said:
"Strip her clothes off and put her in the pig cage."
At that the woman, who had been so quiet and still, began to struggle fiercely, whimpering through her gag.
The crowd was thrilled.
Everyone rushed forward, and in an instant they'd stripped the woman bare and stuffed her into the bamboo cage like a piglet.
"Carry her up, to the river!"
Sixth Uncle gave the word.
Several strong young men lifted the cage with the woman inside, and the crowd, shouting slogans, set off, the cage swaying.
Outside it was very lively. The woman who'd been about to slap the young woman had somehow gone into the house.
Inside it was extremely dilapidated, with no decent furniture. In the outer room were a broken earthen stove, a water vat, and a few sticks of firewood piled in a corner.
A ruined bed board stood in the room, with mosquito netting hung from a few bamboo poles, grimy and worn. A barefoot man lay stretched on the bed, his feet sticking out, still caked in mud.
Seeing this, the woman tried to comfort him:
"Kuai Laowu, don't take it too hard. A woman who won't keep her place and hooks up with men outside, what kind of good woman is that? When the old goes, the new comes—"
As she comforted him, a few more people came in to coax the man.
As they talked, Sixth Uncle's voice came from outside:
"Kuai Laowu, hurry up and come out. We're going to the river."
The women who'd been consoling the man heard this and, afraid and thrilled, got to their feet.
The man who'd been lying on the bed scrambled up too:
"I'm going to see what happens to that slut."
They all went out together. Seeing them emerge, the people outside carried the pig cage on.
"Kill the slut! Purge the family! Enforce the family rules!"
"Drown her in the pig cage!"
"Restore its honor!"
The shouts and footsteps gradually faded into the distance.
In front of the dilapidated door, which a moment ago had been crammed with people, the people were suddenly gone and the house was empty, leaving only a ground full of messy footprints.
The woman's whimpers were gone. The consoling voices, the chanting, the shouts and curses were gone too.
Before long, in the room so quiet one could hear a pin drop, a rustling sound came from under the broken bed board, and a small shadow crawled out from underneath, clutching a withered sprig in her hand.
The child, hair loose, crawled left and right in the dark a few times, her nose making whooshing sounds as she sniffed.
After a long while, apparently not smelling the familiar scent, she called very softly:
"Mama—"
There was no answer in the room.
