The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers by Anton Piatigorsky Page B

then again in the fall?”
    Wu stands and scowls, studying the boy. Tse-tung knows that every year, after the harvest and milling, Wu and another temporary worker pack the ox cart with Mao Jen-sheng’s surplus grain and lug it along the bumpy road to Hsiangtan, to be sold on the river for a tidy profit. Tse-tung has been managing the family’s accounts for the past two seasons. He knows the routine. So what’s he doing asking this question?
    “I go every fall,” says Wu.
    “You know many people there?”
    Wu tilts his hat, wipes his brow with his sleeve, and resumes planting at a regular pace. “No,” he says, peering into the muck. “Very few.”
    “A lot of workers arrive at that time, don’t they? All selling their masters’ rice?”
    “I stay two nights, then come right home.”
    “Do you know any Ko-lao hui there?” Tse-tung presses.
    Wu stands abruptly, a rice shoot in one hand and a rusted spade in the other. “I don’t know anyone,” he says. “I keep away from Ko-lao hui.”
    “But there must be lodges in Hsiangtan. Is it difficult to join one?”
    Now Wu steps back in the mud, waving his arms. “I said I know nothing about that. Nothing at all! They’re bad people, those bandits. I pay the
likin
tax for your family and I bring your money home, don’t I? You’ve seen the books. I don’t smuggle and I don’t steal. I don’t want any trouble with Ko-lao hui. You understand? So you tell your father that.”
    Wu resumes planting with a flat expression, as if he had never backed up in terror. The only sign of his distress is that he’s working faster, with performed concentration. Tse-tung blushes and tries his best not to alter his pace. The two men stuff rice shoots in their parallel rows. It was stupid to ask Wu about the bandits. Besides the fact that he’s acquired no new information, now there’s a risk of the labourer gossiping about the eldest Mao son to all his friends, telling everyone in town that impotent Tse-tung is interested in joining Ko-lao hui, news which would certainly get back to Jen-sheng and result in a beating worse than any he’s ever known.
    But the hired labourer Wu is not so concerned with Tse-tung’s ambitions. He couldn’t care less about the boy’s rebellion against his landowning family, and only wonders who gave him away. Could it have been one of his blood brothers, some smuggler savagely tortured into a full confession by the Manchu authorities? It is useless to ask the questions; there are too many potential traitors. Wu knows countless bandits, and they know him, as he is a long-standing brother of one of the largest and most active Ko-lao hui lodges in Hunan. Each year, during his semi-annual visits to Hsiangtan, he engages in elaborate tea rituals with his fellow members, exchanging secret information by hand gestures,cup positions, and other hidden signs. He sells Jen-sheng’s surplus grain exclusively to Ko-lao hui merchants, since they have connections to smugglers along the Xiang river all the way north to Changsha, and thus can avoid paying the hated
likin
tax, which funds reactionary militias aligned with the Manchu government against the Han majority. Wu pockets the money he saves.
    Two years ago, on the orders of his lodge’s chief dragonhead, Wu embarked on the longer journey to Lu-k’ou during the off-season to help run one of the lucrative gambling houses used to fund the bandits’ revolutionary activities. He offered his services as a spy on that trip, informing numerous lodge members of the Mao family’s growing wealth, and of Jen-sheng’s cruelty to Shaoshan’s starving peasants during the famine of 1906, how his master denied them grain in favour of selling the surplus. And on yet another occasion, Wu participated in the roadside robbery of a rich clerk, a plot that involved spiking the porters’ wine, like a chapter from
Water Margin
. The labourer knows that any of the dozens of people involved in those activities could have