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Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...! His approach, announced by a growing chorus of wailing and howling dogs, woke me from a fevered sleep. I had been ill for weeks-hot, wheezing, and voiceless-living in a red-tinged world of snakes and demons resistant to both the people's doctor's teas and the moxacologist's fire. I sat up wiping straw from my face and watched my dread-quickened breath flash and vanish and flash and vanish in the banded light that pierced the bamboo walls of our hut. What ghost, I wondered, what malevolent force, could render so craven the fierce and feral dogs of our village? Could it be the Red Guard returning our men, my father among them, their "political correction" achieved in time to till the fields in spring? The thought, I knew even then, was but a winter-hunger wish; for were it the guard, the dogs would be barking in challenge, rather than wailing in fear. I glanced at my mother who, despairing of my survival, was granting me the refuge of her bed despite my age of twelve. She stirred, but did not wake until moments later when a
strong male voice called out from over the hills: "Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...! Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...! Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...!" Perhaps I did sleep, for my next recollection is of seeing my mother and the dog butcher sitting cross-legged at the center of our earthen floor warming their hands over tiny flames that sputtered from a cone of green sticks. The dog butcher was short and thick, with wild black eyes and unruly white hair. He wore a coat of rough-stitched pelts of many sorts and his hat, made of the intact fur of the head of a great white mountain dog, mixed with his hair and made him seem more beast than man. His odor was horrible-so horrible that I tried to run outside to escape it, but, finding myself too dizzy to stand, I sat on the ground and breathed fresh air through a crack in the wall while watching my mother and the dog butcher from the corner of an eye. They spoke quietly, too quietly for me to understand their words, but my mother seemed to be pleading and the dog butcher-who turned from time to time to study me-responded mainly with questions and grunts. Finally, he nodded as if in agreement, and mother, looking greatly relieved, rose and bowed and thanked him at length. He stood up then, bowed in return, and, after coiling his noose-rope around his shoulders, took up his striking staff and left, saying he would soon return. And two days later he did return, his arrival again preceded by the howling of the village dogs. He knocked at our hut, bowed to my mother, handed her a large, sealed crock, and departed without a word. Minutes later my mother brought me a bowl of warm, stewed meat, tender but overly rich and poignant of taste. I ate it savagely, half-starved as I was, and though I regurgitated the first bowl, I ate another later that day, and more in the days to come. My fever abated and I grew stronger and after I coughed up a thick membrane, my voice returned and I rejoined my friends at play. Even at my young age I knew that heavenly stew-which I had only heard of before-was too expensive for all but the very rich. How then had my poor mother managed to procure it? The answer, she explained as soon as I was well, lie in a compact she had made on my behalf. In exchange for the heavenly stew, I was to supply the dog butcher, beginning with the coming thaw, with sufficient firewood to keep his cauldron asimmer during the winter to come. And so, with the advent of spring, I began collecting wood. It was a difficult task, for the trees in our valley had long been cleared for lumber and fuel and farming, but traces of the trunks of a once great forest still protruded from the earth, and underground, wet but well preserved, lay the roots of many vanished trees. I dug and chopped each evening from after school until dark, and on holidays I pulled carts of roots to the dog butcher's hut, a long day's walk from our village. I worked throughout the summer and fall and though few words passed between us, the dog butcher did greatly please me by saying that I gathered wood nearly as well as my predecessor, a certain Quin Yong, whom the dog butcher seemed to revere. When I asked what had become of Quin Yong, the dog butcher simply answered, "It was time for him to go home." Though my mother's contract was fulfilled well before first frost, life remained difficult for us, for my father had not returned-indeed, was never to return-from his indoctrination. So I continued to work for the dog butcher that winter, helping him buy dogs, preparing heavenly stew, and curing pelts. He paid me in fat, stripped from the dogs lest it make rancid the stew, and though the fat made rank the vegetables my mother and I fried in it, it provided us with precious calories in that hard winter following a dry summer and a failed sweet potato crop. Occasionally, the dog butcher gave me small portions of heavenly stew which mother and I shared. Though meager in quantity, that stew must have contained powerful nutrients, for mother and I stayed healthy while many in the village grew ill. What, I often have wondered, makes heavenly stew so salubrious? It is difficult to say, for its secrets are those of time gone by. But consider: The meat, its identity established by preserved bits of ear and tail and paw, is the only part sold, while the broth is carefully retained. So the broth grows constantly richer, is constantly enhanced, by vital elements extracted from each new dog. To how great an antiquity did this apply to the dog butcher's broth, I eagerly asked? At first he did not reply, so I asked him again from time to time until he one day admitted to having kept the broth for decades as, "Yes," had his father for decades before, and as, "Yes," had his father's father as well. When I asked if there had been others before his grandfather, his reply was simply, "Of course." Because of the distance between our villages I often stayed overnight at the dog butcher's hut, but I always slept outside, for I never adapted to the stench of him and his clothes, nor could I long bear the sweet-rich smell of the heavenly stew itself. Sometimes wealthy buyers came to market bearing silver-rimmed, jade jars. The silver was to detect the presence of cat, the consumption of which-as a transitional form that might have been one's mother or might become one's sister-was viewed as aversely as cannibalism. Those buyers, after filling their jars with heavenly stew and seeing that the silver did not discolor, would seal the jars, pay, and carry the stew away, holding it close to their breasts like a treasure too great to display. Other, less wealthy customers, shocked by the dog butcher's prices, engaged him in arguments that sometimes grew fierce. But he never reduced his price-not even for those who, unable to pay, went away crying, bereft of what hope they had had. Some of those were mothers intent on saving a child, much as my mother had saved me. It was terrible for me to witness such apparent selfishness and lack of compassion on the part of a man whom I had come to cherish for his generosity to my mother and I. Surely, I thought, his profit was sufficient to share. I wanted to run away at those times-to leave him forever-but I remained for three more years, partly from need and partly from loyalty, until I left for the University at Nanking. During my last winter with the dog butcher, he asked me to accompany him to market at Anyang. Excited at the prospect of visiting a big city for the first time, I quickly agreed. On the first day we sold no heavenly stew, though we did sell a number of pelts. Then, before dawn of the second day, the dog butcher had me help secure his sealed cauldron to a donkey cart. Saying he was going to service a customer, he instructed me to stay at our stall and sell fur pelts until his return. I did as he said, and when he returned on the morrow, I helped him unload his cauldron, which I found surprisingly light. When he broke the seal I saw, to my amazement, that the cauldron, full of stew when he had left, was now half-empty. Had he really, in a single day, sold the half of the year's heavenly stew?! Who could have a need so great?! Who could be so rich?! These and other questions crowded my young and curious mind, but I did not ask, for I knew the dog butcher would not reply. After four more days at market, with only the broth of the stew remaining, we departed Anyang for the dog butcher's village. On the way we passed a blooming Jantze tree-known in China as the burial tree-whose blossoms, always the first of spring, signify that the earth is finally ready to receive the winter's dead. To the dog butcher and I, Jantze blossoms also meant the end of the season of heavenly stew, for warmer days meant thinned fur and quick decay of meat. And so, when we arrived at the dog butcher's hut, we heated the stew to boiling then capped the cauldron and sealed it with wax. Thus isolated, the heavenly stew would keep until winter returned. I continued to supply the dog butcher with fuel during that final summer then I left for the university to study English and Western Letters. I heard no more of the dog butcher until I went home to visit two years later, when I was told that he was ill. Knowing he had no family, I walked to his village and found him emaciated, bedridden, and lying in a pool of dark red urine. I stayed with him for nine or ten days, feeding and cleaning him, changing his straw, and making him teas. Though it was summer, I offered to break the seal of his cauldron in the hope that the broth might help his condition, but he replied, "It is too late, for I see the separation of earth and sky, and am already passing between them." I held him for the rest of that day, repeatedly alarmed by pauses in his breathing, and in the evening he pulled me close by my collar and in a voice as thin as the wing of a fly, told me of the origin of his heavenly stew. It had been started two thousand years earlier by his ancestor, Fen Kuai, himself a dog butcher who went on to become General of the Armies of the Emperor Liu Bang, peasant founder of the glorious Han dynasty. I was anxious to hear more-to learn the details of the lineage of the broth, but the dog butcher was too weak by then to utter more than these, his final words: "Meng Dian, I am about to enter the bardo again, leaving behind no thing but the heavenly stew, which I entrust to you. You must give half of each year's stew to the Orphanage at Anyang, for such has always been done." The dog butcher died that night, and in the morning I carried his withered body to the mountains and entombed him in a cave which I sealed with rocks and clay. Unsure of how to proceed, I stayed in the mountains practicing Chan meditation, and as I meditated, I came to understand that the dog butcher-who had sometimes seemed the harshest of men-was in fact a boddhisattva, an enlightened being who, forsaking the delights of The Pure Land, had chosen to return to the human realm in order to be of help to others. My goal-to honor the dog butcher's bequest to the orphanage at Anyang was clear-but the path to that goal was not. I did not, myself, wish to become a dog butcher. Instead, I fervently wished to become a professor and a writer; wished to dedicate my life to making the stories of the Orient known to the Occident by the telling of them in English. Still uncertain how to proceed after days of meditation, I sought the advice of the master of the orphanage, an ancient man of evident wisdom and compassion. He demurred from advising me directly, though that was my request, and instead introduced me to his helper, Quin Yong. He was, to my surprise, the same Quin Yong who had preceded me as the dog butcher's assistant. He had been, I learned, himself a ward of the orphanage, who had returned to Anyang to help his master in his declining years. At twenty years of age, Quin Yong was only a little older than I, and we talked easily and quickly reached agreement: He would become the new dog butcher, using his gains to support the orphanage, and, should I die before my mother, he would provide for her. I seldom go home during these my middle years, for my time is taken with teaching and writing here in Nanking, but I sometimes call my mother on the village telephone. Though very old now, she remains well and seems to hear most of what I say. She reports that Quin Yong comes to our village each winter, his approach announced, first by the dogs and then by the ancient call of "Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...! Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...! Daa Gou BAAAAaaa...!" Wuan (The End)
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Copyright© 2000, 2008 by George Simone or Monte Fowler All rights reserved. |
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Note: Meng Dian is a Chinese translation of the name
George Simone, which translation was graciously provided by the author's adoptive brother, Zidong Zhao, a mainland Chinese who has himself been a dog butcher's assistant.