Naked Earth by Eileen Chang

militiamen with rifles. Liu also got a battered old musket to carry. They took T’ang out of the dark room in the back courtyard. One of the militiamen held the rope looped around his right arm and leg. T’ang’s clothes were spotted by dust and bloodstains and he hobbled much worse than when Liu last saw him at the Struggle Meeting. His eyes were almost closed in his swollen face. Liu doubted if he had enough wits left to know his former lodger was among the guards taking him to the village.
    As they came into T’ang’s courtyard Liu could hear T’ang’s wife hissing breathlessly inside the window, “Erh Niu! Dad is back!” She came running out of the house. Nobody paid her any attention as they marched T’ang in and the woman seemed afraid to speak to them lest she should say something to make them change their minds and take T’ang back.
    To Liu’s surprise the room seemed much the same as before. Two bundles of fuel-straw lay on the ground before the mud stove. There was T’ang’s long pipe in the little recess in the bumpy wall. Only the room had a flashy and dishevelled look with all the glaring white slips of paper pasted slanting every which way like price labels over the furniture, the kitchen utensils, the doors. Erh Niu stood a little way off, looking at them with her hands wrapped tight in her worn black apron. She made no sign of recognition when she saw Liu.
    “Go get a hoe,” Sun said to T’ang’s wife.
    The woman exchanged a nervous look with her daughter, then turned to Sun with an uncertain smile. She had thought of that time when somebody in the village had done wrong and a kan-pu had hit him on the head with a hoe, killing him with one stroke.
    “Ma, aren’t the hoes and ploughs all sealed up?” Erh Niu said.
    “That’s right,” her mother said quickly. “They’re all sealed up in the shed, Comrade Sun. We dare not touch them.”
    “Nonsense! When I tell you to get it, of course it’s all right. Now go get it! Quick!”
    T’ang’s wife still hesitated. But after one look at their rifles Erh Niu decided that they wouldn’t need a hoe if they had wanted to kill T’ang. She ran to the shed where they kept the grindstone and all the farming implements, broke open the sealed door and fetched a hoe. A militiaman took it from her.
    “Close the door,” Sun said.
    Erh Niu and her mother watched them thrust the hoe into T’ang’s hands.
    “Now dig, and be quick about it.” A militiamen gave him a kick from the back.
    “Take that broom away,” Sun said, and they took the broom from where it stood at the back of the door and threw it across the room.
    “Dig for what— t’ien na , heavens!” T’ang’s wife quavered.
    T’ang lifted his hoe and as it swung down heavily, he tottered forward after it and nearly fell.
    Liu felt he had to do something. “Here, let me have the hoe.” Leaning his rifle against the door he grabbed impatiently at the hoe. “And tell him to get out of the way. It’ll take all day, the way he is digging!”
    Erh Niu must have realized that he was doing T’ang a good turn. Her face became more set in its closed, resentful look.
    T’ang seemed afraid to let go of the hoe. Raising it high overhead he brought it down again blindly, tottering forward with the stroke. Liu would have got hit if he had not ducked and stepped aside. However, T’ang had not been a farmer all his life for nothing. He was handy with a hoe even when he was unsteady on his feet. It did not take him long to dig a shallow hole in the dirt floor behind the door.
    With the door closed the room was darker than ever and the smell of turned earth was strong. T’ang’s wife suddenly went cold with a new fear. Could it be that they were making him dig a grave for himself?
    The loose earth piled in a half ring around the hole rose higher and higher. The militiamen stood around leaning on their rifles, kicking idly at the small lumps of earth. Sun went and sat down on a bench by the