Dahe went to the mountain god’s shrine so often that even Third Aunt began to grow suspicious. She wondered whether he was keeping some animal up there, perhaps even raising a wolf cub as a dog. One day she caught him secretly putting aside some sweet potatoes, and that settled it in her mind. She shouted and beat him so loudly that the whole village could hear, then dragged him by the ear to the clearing outside the village committee office. “Thief! This stupid little brat is a thief! I thought he spent all day doing nothing but stuffing his face and grinning like an idiot! Turns out he’s stealing food to feed some ungrateful mutt! Of all the rotten luck, why am I the one who has to suffer?”
One side of his face was bright red from the beating, and yellow mud was smeared across his forehead. Filthy and disheveled, he staggered under Third Aunt’s rough handling, his head lowered and his lip caught between his teeth, without saying a word.
The village Party secretary came hurrying in from outside, his bushy beard bobbing. “Goodness! Why are you hitting a child? Comrade Hongping, you can talk this over! What sort of way is this to treat a child?”
The bearded secretary rescued Dahe from Third Aunt’s grasp, wiped his face clean, and straightened his clothes. Then, putting on a kindly expression, he asked, “Dahe, tell me, where were you planning to take those sweet potatoes?”
Dahe kept his head down and said nothing. Third Aunt cursed from behind him. “Where else? Up the mountain to feed a dog! Or to feed that dead grandfather of his! Stupid brat! Curse his ancestors! Taking my food up the mountain to feed ghosts!”
Dahe lifted his head and glared at her. The mountain god was a deity, not a ghost!
“Comrade Hongping! Let’s talk this out properly! Don’t frighten the child! There are no ghosts in the mountain!” The secretary tried to calm her while coaxing Dahe. “Come on, Dahe. Tell me honestly where you put the sweet potatoes.”
Hearing the commotion, the secretary’s daughter, Xiuxiu, peeked out from the doorway. When she saw Dahe standing behind her father, she pulled a face at him and smiled, her eyes crinkling adorably. Xiuxiu was the same age as Dahe. Raised by the village secretary, she was the only child in the village who never bullied him, although they were not especially close. Dahe was not close to anyone.
The secretary coaxed him for a long while. Dahe was a child without guile, and when the secretary said it was wrong for children to lie, he understood. Grandpa had told him the same thing when he was little. So in the end, he admitted honestly that he had taken the sweet potatoes to the mountain god.
The secretary accordingly led Third Aunt, Dahe’s younger brother and sister, and a whole crowd of curious villagers and children up to the mountain god’s shrine halfway up the slope. A cluster of wild rapeseed flowers bloomed in brilliant gold before it. Dahe had rubbed the earthen altar clean with his clothes every day, and it was covered with roasted sweet potatoes and little things woven from bamboo leaves. Some of the sweet potatoes, having sat there for several days, had shriveled a little, but none had gone moldy or sour. Dahe had buried any that had been left too long and started to rot.
At the sight of her family’s sweet potatoes wasted like this, Third Aunt’s neck and ears flushed crimson. She grabbed Dahe and made to beat him again, only to be stopped by the secretary. Dahe ran ahead with his arms shielding his head, while the three of them chased and grappled around the shrine. The adults and children watching from outside roared with laughter.
“Curse all your ancestors!” Third Aunt shrieked as she struggled. “Mountain god, my ass! What’s the point of worshipping some rotten old shrine? You little bastard, wasting food! Stupid brat!”
“There is! There really is a mountain god!” Dahe shrieked back as he dodged her blows. Third Aunt caught his cheek with one swipe, leaving red finger marks, and his clothes were pulled all out of shape.
“That’s enough! Comrade Hongping, calm down and talk properly! Dahe, hurry up and apologize to your aunt…”
The forest rang with nothing but their quarrel. Even the birds had been frightened away, and the cicadas had fallen silent. Everything was still apart from the wind stirring the bamboo leaves. The mountain god did not appear before the others. Even Dahe could not see him.
At last Third Uncle came back from the fields, caught hold of his wife, and slapped her in front of everyone. Third Aunt sat down in front of the shrine and refused to get up, wailing that Third Uncle was taking the side of an outsider’s child. She accused him of perhaps being Dahe’s real father: a few months before Dahe’s mother became pregnant, Third Uncle had come home very late one night, so he must have been fooling around with that man-chasing, cursed woman…
Third Uncle gave her another resounding slap. Half her face swelled up, just like Dahe’s, and she finally shut her mouth, unable to say anything more.
The village secretary hurried over to intervene again. These days, he said, men and women were supposed to be equal. It was wrong for a woman to beat a child, and just as wrong for a man to beat his wife. Wasn’t it all over a few sweet potatoes? Surely everyone could settle things peacefully.
The secretary had someone throw away the sweet potatoes, bamboo mantises, and bamboo crickets from the earthen altar. Then he took Dahe, Third Uncle, and Third Aunt back to the village committee office and spent the entire night counseling and lecturing them. Dahe said nothing. Third Uncle did nothing but puff on his dry tobacco pipe, and Third Aunt, half her face swollen, could only cry.
Eventually the three of them went home, taking along the younger brother and sister, who had been sticking their heads through the doorway to watch the spectacle. Third Uncle went straight to bed without a word. Third Aunt tried to keep muttering to her son and daughter, but when her husband slammed his tobacco pipe down, she had no choice but to go to bed too. Dahe crawled into his own bed and pulled up his heavily patched quilt. His eyelids were drooping with exhaustion, and he had barely closed his eyes when he heard footsteps beside the bed.
After Third Aunt’s beating, he was frightened of being struck again. He instinctively jerked aside, and a whole basin of cold water came splashing down over his quilt.
“Stupid brat! Your mother’s a whore!” His little brother, two years younger, hissed the insult at him while holding the empty basin. His sister stood beside him, hands on her hips, glaring fiercely. They were only little children themselves. All they understood was that this stupid brat was hated by everyone and had caused their mother to be beaten.
Dahe tumbled out of bed and ran, without even putting on his shoes. Water had soaked his clothes through. Although it was a summer night, the temperature dropped sharply after dark in the mountains, and he shivered with cold. Barefoot, he ran out of the village and into the black forest. He knew every fallen leaf along the mountain path. No matter how dark it became, he could always find his way.
He ran until he was gasping for breath. At the shrine, the mountain god stood beside the empty altar, his emerald robe shining like water in the moonlight, his face pure as jade. Dahe did not look at him or stop. Instead, he went to the grave mound a short way behind the shrine. Under the god’s care, the grave was covered with thriving wildflowers; in the moon’s shadow they looked black, trembling in little clusters.
He knelt wordlessly before his grandfather’s grave. Only after a long while did he lift his filthy arm and wipe away the tears that had been streaming silently down his face.
The mountain god crouched before him, his long green robe trailing over the ground. With the red cloth Grandpa had left behind, he wiped Dahe’s face until it shone dark and clean.
The mountain god gently drew him into his arms, letting Dahe’s tears soak into the cold green fabric.
“Grandpa didn’t want me anymore. They all hate me. Nobody wants me.” Dahe buried his face against the mountain god’s chest.
The mountain god tenderly stroked his hair, smoothing the matted strands. He did not tell Dahe, You still have me. I still want you.
Dahe spent the night at the shrine. The mountain god sat on the large rock behind it, holding him, his broad robe shielding him from the night wind and dew. Stars filled the sky, peeping through the gaps between leaves. The birds and insects were asleep; the forest was quiet except for the rustle of foliage.
But the mountain god asked him, “Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Dahe tilted his swollen eyes upward and saw the god’s pale, water-colored lips.
“Listen. The grass is sprouting,” the mountain god said. “Can you hear the flowers opening?”
Dahe strained his ears. The forest was still and hushed. There was clearly no sound at all.
But if the mountain god said there was, then there must be.
Bewildered yet excited, Dahe lifted his head and listened with all his might. The mountain god smiled, patted his head, and said softly, “Silly boy.”
Dahe could not sleep all night and listened instead to the mountain god’s stories about the forest. Long, long ago, the god said, the mountains had been so lively. Roe deer and deer ran everywhere. Wild goats came in spring and moved on to warmer places in autumn. Once in a while, an old tiger that had strayed from its group to live alone would wander out of the deepest mountains. The hunters would surround and kill it, then sing and dance in front of the shrine, sprinkling its blood as an offering to the mountain god. They would take the tiger skin home as a gift for the bride they hoped to marry. There had been wild rabbits too. One year, a mother rabbit dug a burrow not far behind the shrine and gave birth to a litter of kits, pink and soft, with fine white down. When the hunters were gone, she sometimes sneaked over to steal offerings from the mountain god.
“And then?” Dahe asked.
“And then a wolf carried off the mother rabbit, and all the little ones starved to death in their burrow.”
Dahe sat stunned for a long while before asking, “Why didn’t you share your offerings with them?”
The mountain god shook his head. “The offerings were right here, but they were too young to know how to come and eat them.”
Dahe stared at him, dazed. Then why didn’t the mountain god put the food into their burrow himself? Was that another of the mountain’s rules that he couldn’t understand?
“You didn’t like them?”
The mountain god gently stroked his head. “I did.”
Dahe continued to stare blankly. The mountain god asked him gently, “Are you afraid of me?”
Dahe shook his head.
The mountain god touched the red marks on his face. “You were beaten today, and I didn’t come out to save you. I stood here and watched you being beaten. Don’t you resent me?”
Dahe shook his head again.
The mountain god smiled, rubbing his hair. “Silly boy.”
When the sun rose, Dahe went home as usual. Third Aunt, whose eyes were red from crying, treated him as if he did not exist. Despite her half-swollen face, she made breakfast, but when she set the corn buns on the table, she gave him none, as though he were not sitting there. He reached for one himself, and she slammed a bowl down with a sharp crack. Dahe flinched. Third Uncle glared at his wife, and she turned her face away. Dahe silently reached for a bun again. This time, he did not take more than his share.
Life went on in this crumpled, miserable fashion. When Third Uncle went out to work in the fields during the day, Third Aunt would not give Dahe so much as a crumb of a bun. He did not dare tell his uncle. Instead, every noon he crouched outside the village secretary’s door. The secretary, smoking his tobacco pipe, would invite him in, and Dahe would stand on a stool beside Xiuxiu and wolf down his food.
“Dahe, are you still going up to the mountain god’s shrine?” the secretary asked.
Dahe swallowed a great mouthful of bun and nodded.
“You’re not taking food up there for the mountain god anymore, are you?”
He shook his head. He barely had enough to eat himself, so there was no way he could spare anything for the mountain god. He had explained that to the god, who had generously allowed him to owe the offerings until he was grown and could plant his own sweet potatoes. Then he could pay back everything he owed.
The village secretary nodded in satisfaction. The child was all alone and the other children did not like him. It was probably good for him to have somewhere to go by himself. Yesterday, the secretary had seen how skillfully Dahe made those little bamboo insects at the shrine. Perhaps he could turn that into a trade someday. Having a hobby was better than learning nothing and going around provoking cats and teasing dogs. So long as he did not waste food, there was no harm in it.