Volume 1, Chapter 41: Bringing News of Death to the Door

Amidst the overlapping chatter, I finally pieced the whole story together: the plump woman had a younger brother, whose family had a son who had died a couple of years ago.

The young man had died unmarried and his family wanted to arrange a ghost marriage for him, but they were dirt poor and could not afford it. As luck would have it, the younger brother happened to be a carpenter.

God knows where he had picked up some crooked, evil sorcery—he had carved a life-sized dummy out of a locust tree, but it lacked intimate clothing.

The plump old woman dotingly pitied her nephew, so she had sneaked into old Chen’s house to steal some.

That fellow Liang probably had no idea; when he beat his wife, he practically beat her half to death. Watching it made even my own skin ache with sympathetic pain.

Once the master of the house understood what was going on, he didn't say much. With a single shout, a convoy of two flatbed trucks rumbled toward the plump woman's natal village.

Don't tell me that hauling people in flatbed trucks is illegal; in the Northeast rural areas during the early 2000s, if a traffic police officer dared to stop one of these vehicles, he'd get a couple of resounding slaps across the face and wouldn't even know where to seek justice.

Guided by the plump woman, we found her nephew’s grave. Those village men were full of raw strength; once the heavy picks and broad shovels started swinging, it wasn't long before the wooden coffin lid was exposed.

When pried open, it revealed an urn and a wooden puppet dressed in floral pajamas.

Enraged, the master of the house scattered the ashes to the winds. The plump woman howled like a stuck pig, but not a soul felt any pity for her.

Master Ma instructed the master's wife to strip the puppet. Goodness me—er, pfft—the bra and panties were both there, and to make it even more disgusting, inside the underwear was a used sanitary napkin.

No need to guess twice; the plump woman had undoubtedly stolen it straight from someone's outhouse.

Master Ma waved a towel over the puppet several times, muttering a string of unintelligible nonsense to himself. He then handed the towel to the master's wife, telling her to use it as a pillowcase for her daughter when they got home, and after three nights of sleeping on it, to throw it directly into the kitchen stove to burn.

With the soul-calling ritual completed, Master Ma had the master of the house gather peach wood to burn the puppet and its clothes together.

A group of grown men scoured the hills for peach wood, and in the purifying flames of the peach wood fire, everything was reduced to ashes.

Liang was even more ruthless—he drove his wife right back to her maiden home.

While everyone was busy cleaning up, Master Ma lowered his voice and said to me, "Kid, remember this: the Luoban Book must never be touched. It's far too malevolent. Look at this—he studied the Luoban Book, lost his son, and now his little scheme has been busted by us. That carpenter won't escape losing either an arm or a leg within the year. Study that kind of garbage, and you're guaranteed to end up widowed, orphaned, solitary, or crippled—you're bound to claim at least one."

I nodded in acknowledgment.

"Pretty impressive, your master, aren't I? Better study hard under me."

I asked doubtfully, "Master, since you're so amazing, how come old man Dong still looks down on you?"

Without missing a beat, Master Ma gave me a solid thump right on the crown of my head.

***

Once the burning was done, the crowd headed down the mountain. The master of the house invited everyone to a restaurant—a small eatery in the rural township. That was the first time I, yours truly, ever ate out at a restaurant.

Two truckloads of people filled three tables. No exaggeration here: a feast costing two hundred yuan per table was packed entirely with heavy, meaty dishes. Damn, it smelled so good.

In those days, there were fewer food additives. Unlike today, when you eat a bowl of spicy hotpot and the very next day your bowel movements carry the fragrance of street-side cooking oil miles down the road.

At this point, the whole affair was finally brought to a complete close. Master Ma, utterly shameless as usual, had gotten plastered once again. Yet somehow he still retained motor functions, riding his vintage Forever bicycle while belting out the tunes of the *Eighteen Touches* to ferry me home. I seriously doubted he even needed to look at the road.

I finally understood one thing clearly: thank goodness Master Ma didn't have a wife, otherwise I could vividly imagine what domestic life would look like.

*(Ahem, just padding the word count a bit here to paint a picture of what life would be like if Master Ma had a wife.)*

*(Purely a figment of my own overactive imagination, entirely unrelated to the main text.)*

Winter, 3:00 PM.

Master Ma opened the dish cabinet, took out a slab of leftover beancurd from the morning, and hauled out a five-liter white plastic jug of liquor.

He poured himself a full cup, took a tiny sip first, bared his teeth, and hissed, "Ah, sss..."

After drinking half the cup, Master Ma began hurrying the cooking, his tongue thick with booze as he hollered, "Hey I say, isn't that food ready yet? Hurry it up."

At this point, the old woman would be cursing him out: "Fuck your mother, always whining the second you get some cheap booze in you. Do you think this stuff cooks the moment it touches the pot? Just eat your tofu and shut it."

"Tell me, in all these years of marriage, have I ever done a single thing to wrong you?"

......

For some time following that, Master Ma and I lived in peaceful accord. Outside, the cold wind howled, while inside, the firewood crackled merrily in the stove—a truly harmonious and picturesque scene of a snowy cottage in a mountain village.

Old Man Ma never forgot his original aspirations: two meals a day, three drinks a meal—morning, noon, and night, drinking three times a day.

By the time the Greater Khingan Range welcomed its first winter snowfall, I had also learned to read and write.

The three thousand most commonly used characters were all mastered in just over a month.

Such rapid progress was thanks, on the one hand, to my own innate brilliance, and on the other hand, to the undeniable vigor of Old Man Ma's shoe sole.

Let me put it this way: have you ever seen anyone's shoe sole reinforced with an outer tire of a bicycle, capable of leaving a distinct wavy imprint with every single strike?

Old Man Ma was malicious, too—he exclusively targeted the back of the neck, and damn it, that hurt like hell.

***

During this period, we also went out to handle a few cases, all of them minor affairs—some psychological illusions, some actual physical ailments. Master Ma resolved them with a mere flick of his wrist, not even requiring my presence.

Master Ma had also brought me along on a few money-making gigs. Whenever someone died, we would go and keep vigil over the body. These jobs paid: Master Ma got a hundred yuan, and I got sixty, both net of taxes.

To speak with a slightly guilty conscience, I actually rather enjoyed this kind of work. Not only could I make sixty bucks, but I also got to eat three days of fine food without having to light the stove at home, enjoying hearty meals of fish and meat at every sitting. It wasn't half bad.

As the saying goes: the alternation of cold and warmth is the peak season for dead people.

When an elderly person died in the middle of the night, sometimes they were already stiff by the time they were discovered—so rigid that their burial robes couldn't even be put on. Old Man Ma would step forward, chant a short incantation, and the stiff corpse would soften like ice melting into mud, allowing them to be dressed easily. Eighty or a hundred yuan straight into the pocket—utterly delightful.

One bright, sunny morning after a snowfall, Master Ma was leaning against the stack of bedding by the kang, picking his teeth, while I sat by the sewing machine reading a book. Suddenly, the hurried sound of footsteps crunching on snow echoed through the courtyard.

In winter, Master Ma's windows were sealed on the outside with a layer of plastic sheeting, making it completely impossible to see who was out there. Master Ma showed no intention of looking either, simply continuing to dig at his teeth undisturbed.

I put down my book, preparing to get up and take a look, when Master Ma lowered his eyelids and drawled, "Keep reading. Turn a blind eye to affairs outside the window."

Just as his voice trailed off, an anxious voice rang out from the courtyard, "Is Master Ma at home?"

Immediately afterward, the door was pulled open, a gust of biting cold air swept in, and a man walked in wearing a heavy military greatcoat and a cotton-padded winter hat. I looked closely, but didn't recognize him.

Without another word, the visitor slammed straight to his knees on the ground and kowtowed. No need to guess—some elderly relative back home had undoubtedly passed away.

Master Ma got down from the kang, slipped his feet into his cotton shoes, and went over to help the man up. "Which village are you from?" he asked.
"Master Ma, it's not a death vigil—there's a ghost haunting the place! Please come over and take a look," the man said, his voice laced with frantic urgency.

Master Ma replied, "Don't panic. Come, come, sit down, drink some hot water, and tell me slowly."

I got up to pour some water. Given Master Ma's financial state, hot water was all we had to offer—not even a scrap of tea leaves was to be found.

Forget tea; even the toilet paper in Master Ma's house was that rough, reddish straw paper, which felt like wiping your backside with coarse sandpaper.

Even when he scraped together a bit of money and tightened his belt, he'd still insist on buying an extra bottle of Friendship Snow Cream for the young widow—the kind that cost two yuan a bottle, with a fragrance so potent you could smell it from a mile away.

Thinking of this, I felt the urge to curse Old Man Ma again. Oh well, let's get back to business.