IBGSW Chapter 137
Eyes That Would Not Close
Sixth Uncle had barely finished speaking, and the crowd was still hesitating, when a white-haired old woman, supported by her family, spoke up too: "Pengju, go and look. It's pitch dark, we've been out a long time, and my Liucai is sleepy. It's time to go home and rest."
"Grandma, I'm not sleepy, I still want to watch—"
The child she held by the hand heard this and hurried to protest, but before he'd finished, Sixth Aunt clapped a hand over his mouth.
Her standing in the village wasn't as high as Sixth Uncle's, but the old woman was kind to others and usually glad to help when villagers were in trouble, so people thought very well of her.
Now that she'd spoken, the others joined in urging Pengju on.
Everyone in the village was watching the three men in the water. Kuai Pengju couldn't stand up to the pressure. He hesitated for a moment, then answered reluctantly:
"Fine."
With everyone's eyes on him, he bent down and put his hand in the water.
Strangely, Kuai Pengju's feet had been standing in the water all along, and earlier his right hand had also been in the water, gripping the cage.
After soaking so long he had noticed nothing. But when his left hand, which had stayed dry until now, entered the water, a bone-deep cold passed through his fingertips straight to his heart and made him shiver.
"Hiss—"
He sucked in a long breath and muttered:
"Why's this water so biting? It's like the dead of winter."
"I think you're just being tender and can't bear to," his wife said from the bank.
Having heard the others tease that he had once lusted after Madam Zhuang, she had flushed with shame and anger and now jabbed at him with a sour tone.
"You wretched woman—"
Kuai Pengju glared at her sheepishly, then set his jaw, slipped his left hand into the cage, and touched Madam Zhuang's head.
A great clump of hair streamed with the current and wrapped around his fingers.
Beneath the hair there seemed to hide some kind of cold malice that made his skin crawl, as if someone were pulling at his hand, trying to drag his body down.
Kuai Pengju trembled in terror and was about to scream, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Kuai Pengcheng, Kuai Laosan, and the others standing not far from him. The chilling sense he'd had was only an illusion.
His heart steadied. He clenched his teeth, gathered his courage, and fumbled to push Madam Zhuang's hair aside.
He didn't dare look at the woman's face in the cage. His hand felt her features.
He had wanted to do this when Madam Zhuang was alive. But touching her now was not the warm softness he had imagined in so many midnight dreams.
What met his hand was the cold face of a dead person.
In less than half an hour, Madam Zhuang's face had lost the elasticity of a living person and carried the stiff coldness peculiar to the dead.
Her delicate nose felt like a knife that would cut his finger.
Would the teeth behind her lips bite his fingers off? Would her eyes open? A thousand strange, terrifying thoughts surfaced in Kuai Pengju's head.
But luckily none of those fearful imaginings came to pass.
He successfully parted Madam Zhuang's hair and touched her face.
She was perfectly still, like a pig stuck through the throat and dead, lying curled up quietly in the water.
The young woman's nose no longer drew breath.
Kuai Pengju slid his hand down from her chin to her neck. Her skin was icy and fine, but he had no mind to feel anything else.
His heartbeat was fast and loud, blood rushing through his body so quickly it nearly drowned out the sensations in his fingers.
After a good while he confirmed that Madam Zhuang's pulse was gone, and only then looked up at Sixth Uncle and the others on the bank and said in a trembling voice:
"Sixth Uncle, she's dead."
How strange.
How could a woman sunk in a pig cage suddenly float back up with her stones? Sixth Uncle felt unnerved, and said:
"Push her back into the river."
The three tried again to push the cage, with the woman's body, into the river, but strangely, no matter how they pushed, the cage just stayed hovering under the surface, the dead woman's body faintly visible.
"..."
At this, all of Kuailiang Village began to feel afraid.
Many people began to lose their nerve. They weren't as excited as before the execution and only wanted to finish up the chores quickly so they could go home and bolt their doors.
"Drag her farther out."
Sixth Uncle ordered again.
Kuai Pengju and Kuai Pengcheng no longer dared touch the pig cage. They stood in the water, and if not for Sixth Uncle's authority, they would have gone ashore at once and kept their distance from the corpse.
In the darkness, torches burned on the bank.
Tonight all of Kuailiang Village had come to watch the execution. The people lined up along the bank, a great row of them, and the torchlight formed a long dragon that lit half the shore.
In the shadows of the trees along the river at night, the water looked a sinister, forbidding black.
And beneath the black water, the dead woman's skin was so white it seemed to give off light, and against the black water it carried an inauspicious pallor.
Her long hair, like supple water snakes, wound along and wrapped her body.
Splash... splash... The water rippled, and the long hair swayed back and forth beneath it.
The dead woman's naked body was plainly visible.
Kuai Pengju finally couldn't bear the strain:
"I'm going back up on the bank—"
He turned to go, but Kuai Laosan suddenly said, "Let go, you two. I can swim. I'll take her out to deeper water. I don't believe she'd dare make trouble!"
"Good!"
Hearing this, Sixth Uncle shouted "good!" loudly. "Laosan is right. The Zhuang woman did wrong, so what face does she have to turn into a ghost? Even if she did turn into one, we'd still ask her how she dared to shame Kuailiang Village."
At these words, the villagers, who'd been terrified a moment ago, regained their confidence:
"That's right. The Zhuang woman cheated, so even if she died she deserved it. What face does she have to become a ghost?"
Kuai Laosan's courage surged. He shouted to Kuai Pengcheng and Kuai Pengju:
"Let go!"
After they let go, he gripped the pig cage with both hands and pushed it forward with all his might. Using the momentum of the push, his whole body shot out like a fish, his legs kicked hard, and he slid out with the cage and body more than a zhang.
When he reached the middle of the river, he let go. The cage with the corpse and stones did not sink to the bottom as everyone expected, but strangely floated on the surface.
Glug, glug!
The bamboo cage bobbed up and down on the surface like a float on a line cast into the water. Madam Zhuang's body was swallowed by the black water, then reappeared, chilling everyone watching.
"Sixth Uncle—"
The villagers who had just worked up their courage grew fearful again at this sight.
Someone called to Sixth Uncle and said quietly:
"This won't do."
Madam Zhuang had been sentenced to death by the village for adultery.
Though the villagers felt righteous about it, a woman's affair wasn't anything to be proud of, and if word got out, all of Kuailiang Village would become a laughingstock in nearby villages and towns.
"This river is a branch of the Shangjia River. If we let Madam Zhuang's body keep floating like this and it drifts downstream and someone finds it, our faces will be completely lost. How will the village's young men find wives then?"
Most villagers were close relatives, and had to marry outside.
Good news stays home, bad news travels a thousand li. If outsiders learned what had happened in the village, many young men would be bachelors for life.
Sixth Uncle also knew how serious it was.
"It seems even the river can't deal with this slut!"
The old man ground his teeth and said:
"The bitch wouldn't behave while she was alive, and even dead she's making trouble. Drag her back."
After grumbling a few words, he suddenly called:
"Laosan, bring her back. Since we can't sink her, bring her back, and we'll think of another way to handle her."
By now it was very late.
On an ordinary night, the villagers would have been dreaming long ago, but tonight this business had kept them up.
The riverside was damp and cold, and with Madam Zhuang's body refusing to sink, the villagers gradually grew edgy and anxious to leave.
Hearing Sixth Uncle's words, some realized tonight would not end easily and asked worriedly:
"Sixth Uncle, how do we deal with it?"
"Are we going to have to find a plot and bury her?" someone asked.
"A filthy slut like that doesn't deserve burial—"
"Then what do we do?"
They all talked at once.
Sixth Aunt, who hadn't said anything since speaking earlier, suddenly sighed.
She looked at the body in the river with some pity and said again:
"The dead are to be respected. She's dead already. What's the use of bringing up old grievances—"
"For all her faults, she gave Laowu a daughter, Manzhou."
At this, the old woman started, and turned to look around:
"Hey, where's Manzhou?"
At her cry, the crowd, who'd been so worried a moment ago, froze.
Several people backed away and looked at each other:
"I haven't seen Manzhou—"
Sixth Aunt's heart sank. She shouted: "Laowu! Laowu! Where's your Manzhou?"
"Where's Laowu?"
After she asked, the crowd searched with torches for a long time, until someone called out, "Laowu's here."
Kuai Laowu, who had been pushed forward with a sullen, cringing look, had his hands crossed in his sleeves. His wife was dead, and he was watching as if it were a play. Sixth Aunt felt displeased.
But this was no time to scold him.
"Laowu, where's your Manzhou?"
"Who knows."
Kuai Laowu answered indifferently.
His hair was unkempt and his face was smeared with dirt from somewhere. His clothes were tattered, and he looked wretched.
Sixth Aunt was nearly choked by his answer, and he added:
"That little wench was always with her mother. She's probably hiding somewhere."
"You..."
Sixth Aunt was so angry she couldn't speak. Just then Sixth Uncle said impatiently:
"Stop arguing. Is this the time for that?"
He said in a vexed tone:
"Manzhou's a big girl now. She won't get lost. Settle the business in front of us first, and then the whole village will search for Manzhou together!"
He settled it with one word, and the others stopped talking.
Sixth Aunt, though worried, had spent most of her life with the old man and knew his temper well. If she insisted on asking again, she'd only enrage him.
She sighed:
"Poor Manzhou, a child without a mother now."
...
With this small interlude over, on the other side, Kuai Laosan had pushed the woman in the cage out to the middle of the river, and then heard Sixth Uncle's order to drag Madam Zhuang's body back to shore.
He was tired, cold, and a little afraid. He kept feeling that beneath that mass of long, tangled hair there was a pair of eerie eyes watching him.
But Sixth Uncle was right. He couldn't just leave Madam Zhuang's body naked in the water. What if someone saw? How would that look?
Then not only Kuailiang Village but his whole family would lose face!
Thinking this, he clenched his teeth again, swam over to the cage, and grabbed it.
At the grab, perhaps because he'd been in the water so long and his body had lost heat, Kuai Laosan felt the cage was colder and heavier, and he couldn't push it alone, so he called Kuai Pengju and Kuai Pengcheng to lend a hand.
They had not wanted to agree, but Sixth Uncle's eyes were on them, and the longer this dragged on, the stranger it got, and nobody wanted to stay.
Sixth Uncle had said he'd think of a way to deal with the body once it was dragged ashore. That was much better than leaving it soaking in the water, neither up nor down.
The three worked together and dragged the body ashore.
Water streamed out of the cage and down the bank, and Madam Zhuang's curled-up body lay quietly in the cage like a shrimp.
"S-Sixth Uncle, what now?"
Kuai Laosan dragged his heavy body ashore too.
He was usually strong and full of energy and rarely fell sick, but after soaking in the water for a while he felt his strength failing.
A great stream of water poured from his clothes down his trouser legs, making him stagger back, nearly falling into the water.
Kuai Laosan steadied himself and managed to plant his bare feet in the mud on the bank. Bending over, he gripped his trouser legs and wrung them hard. Splash, the water was squeezed out, and he felt much lighter.
The other two villagers who'd gone into the water were in similar shape. They had to hold each other up to stay on their feet and avoid falling in.
On the bank, the crowd gathered around a corpse in a pig cage, discussing what to do.
"If you ask me, chop her up and feed the dogs."
"Light the sky lantern."1
They all offered suggestions.
Sixth Aunt's face showed distress, and her eyes fell on the woman in the pig cage.
Squelch, squelch.
Two strange sounds came.
Perhaps Sixth Aunt was old and had misread, but she felt the woman's water-soaked black hair had moved.
"Ah, is Manzhou's mother still alive?"
She cried out.
The words terrified everyone around her.
"What? Not dead?"
The villagers who'd been discussing what to do with the body backed away quickly, and a large clear space opened around Madam Zhuang's body, leaving only messy footprints on the ground.
Sixth Uncle, in his panic, also backed away, but the riverside ground was slippery and he was old and nearly fell.
If the villagers hadn't caught him at the last moment, he'd have been shoved down and trampled.
Still shaken, he shouted: "Don't panic, everyone! After being drowned so long, how could anyone survive? You probably misread!"
Sixth Uncle had high prestige, and his word calmed the scene at once.
Those who'd been about to flee slowly stopped.
"Sixth Uncle is right. The Zhuang woman's no three-headed monster. How could she not die after being drowned so long—"
Having stopped, they slowly turned their heads.
The crowd drew near again and stared at the corpse in the cage.
...
In the hush, the only sound was the water from Madam Zhuang's hair trickling down her body with a faint rustle.
