Naked Earth Read Online Free Page B

Anybody know where they’ve gone?”
    They began to wander off nonchalantly as if they had not heard him and the children started to run. Again Liu had a baffling sense of racial and language barriers between them.
    But then one of the men turned and pointed down the road. “They’re at the co-operative,” he said.
    The girl with the baby said worriedly, as if he had uttered some indiscretion, “Let’s go home, hai-tzu te tieh , child’s dad.” She stood watchfully with the baby in her arms, waiting for the man to get safely in front of her. The frightened baby burrowed into the dark nest of hair piled on her shoulders.
    Liu turned quickly away from them and strode down the road between darkening fields. Here and there a hut with walls of kao-liang stalks tied together stood by the wayside. But the co-operative store was built of bricks. He could see the little one-roomed building from afar. The lamp had already been lit inside. He wondered what the drivers were doing there. What could they buy in a poky little place like this? Besides, they would be going back with the truck to Peking tomorrow.
    He walked up to the little folding door and pushed it open. Two red-eared men with their backs to him stood drinking at the counter that cut across the cozy, yellow-lit room. Inside the counter there was a chimney-stove used to bake sesame cakes and a kneading board and a board for chopping meat, each perched on its own tall stand. Bolts of cloth and bars of soap lined the wall. The clerk was dipping wine out of an earthen jar with half of a dry gourd. He poured it into the men’s blue-rimmed, pea-green bowls.
    Liu went up and slid an arm about the shoulders of both the driver and his assistant. “Come along. Dinner’s ready,” he said. “You people certainly know your way about around here.”
    “Have a drink with us, comrade,” said the flushed driver. “You need something to drive out the cold, after getting soaked to the skin the way you have.”
    “No, no danger of catching cold in this weather,” Liu said laughing “You about finished? Dinner’s ready.”
    They paid and drifted out after him.
    Right after dinner they made ready to sleep, the men and girls in two separate schoolrooms. Floor space had been cleared for little heaps of kao-liang stalks arranged in orderly rows. Liu was grateful for his soft pallet though the kao-liang stalks weren’t too fresh and smelled a bit moldy and ratty. The darkness was loud with the longdrawn squeaks of night insects in the courtyard and the squawks of frogs after rain. Moonlight coming in through the carved latticed window fell on the stone-paved floor in little patterns like old coins of white jade, round with a square hole in the middle.
    Liu was kept awake by his thoughts and the veteran mosquitoes of autumn. The stone floor under him was pressing harder and harder against his back and as the night wore on, the moist cold breath of stone seeped through the straw. Rats scuttled along the beams and chased each other over the floor like a brood of puppies, scattering the men’s shoes.
    He heard the first faint cockcrow. The loud snoring around him seemed to have died down as if the sleeping men were now far away from him. Their rafts were well over to the other shore of the night while he still had endless darkness ahead of him. He was filled with impatience with himself. The kao-liang stalks under him rustled incessantly with his turning. But what woke up Chang Li was probably his clapping his hands to kill mosquitoes.
    He saw Chang sit up and then walk out of the room, dragging his shoes, probably to relieve himself in the courtyard. After a while Chang returned to his pallet and sat yawning audibly. The shadowy white of his undershirt stood out against the moist darkness.
    “You aren’t asleep, Comrade Liu?” he asked. “Not used to this kind of accommodations, eh?”
    Liu was going to say that he couldn’t sleep because of the mosquitoes. But the hint of