Everyone knew, in fact, that the straw hat had been tattered and broken from way back.

Seeing as he'd planted so many seeds of bitterness, it's not hard to imagine how the villagers responded to Benyi's cry to "liberate Taiwan" by the hundreds, charging onto the battlefield, particularly Wanyu's dad, who not only ran onto Maogong's fields to trample the crops, but also shredded the melon creepers planted at the side of Maogong's field. Afraid Maogong wouldn't hear them, some of the young men yelled and hooted in deliberate, ear-splitting unison, making a racket that terrified all the chickens and dogs in the village.

Not surprisingly, Maogong did hear and hurried over, wheezing away. Pounding the ground with a stick, he cursed: "You good-for-nothing Benyi, stealing my grain in broad daylight, I hope you die horribly…"

Benyi raised his arm and shouted: "Liberate Taiwan!"

Law-abiding members of the commune shouted with him: "Liberate Taiwan!"

"What happens to opponents of the cooperative?" he shouted.

Again came the deafening roar in response, "Reap their grain, eat their crops! Take what you can! Reap their grain, eat their crops! Take what you can!"

Maogong's eyes went bloodshot with fury: "Fine, fine, take what you want, take all you want, but when I starve to death and become a hungry ghost, I'll come and stab you to death!"

He turned to shout at his sons Yanzao and Yanwu to go back and fetch knives. The two brothers were just little kids, already paralyzed with fear by this scene, and just stood there on the hillside, not daring to move. Maogong cursed his sons a while, spittle flying everywhere, then went back himself, leaning on a bent stick; not long after, he returned carrying a bunch of firewood and set fire to the edge of the field. His fields had long been deprived of water and the crops were very withered; with just one gust of wind the fire crackled into a huge blaze. He cackled raucously as he watched the fire, cursing and stamping his foot: "I can't eat this, you bastards, so help yourselves, help yourselves, hahaha-"

In the blink of an eye, his own grain had turned to ashes.

A few days later, Maogong failed to catch his next breath, and died.

People said that Maogong's ghost didn't scatter. One full moon, after Benyi's family had been cutting millstones, the journey back home from the quarry took them past Maogong's gate. Benyi had put down his carrying pole and taken a few steps up the mountain in search of some wild chicken nests, when he was frightened out of his skin by a sudden great rumbling noise behind him. Practically everyone in the lower village heard the strange noise too, and first children then men hurried over to see what was happening. When they arrived on the scene, everyone was so astounded they just stood, stunned, like petrified chickens, completely unable to believe their eyes: Benyi's two new millstones were locked in battle with a stone mortar in the doorway of Maogong's house-

At this point in the story, Fucha asked me if I knew what a stone mortar was. I said that I'd seen one, it was a tool for threshing ordinary or glutinous rice, shaped a bit like a bowl. I also knew there were two sorts of threshing: hand threshing and foot threshing. Hand threshing was when someone held the threshing pestle and pounded it up and down. Foot threshing was slightly more labor-saving, a bit like a see-saw: someone stood on one end of the seesaw and stamped down so that the pestle on the other end rose very high; once the foot was released, the threshing end pounded down heavily on the stone mortar.

Fucha said he didn't believe a stone mortar could fight either, but the old-timers insisted they'd seen it with their own eyes, swearing on their eyes and noses. A stone mortar had pitted itself against the two millstones, jumping here and there, breaking out to the right, to the left, causing such thunderous collisions that the very stars seemed to tremble in the heavens, pounding a series of holes in the ground, as if tamping the earth down as densely as it could. At that moment, it seemed that all the birds from all around had flown over to spectate, forming a dense, cawing mass that filled every single tree.

Two or three of the strongest men came forward to intervene, trying to separate the bitterly embattled parties with a rod, but failed to separate them, their faces sweating profusely from the effort. The rod pressed against the stone mortar actually snapped with a crack and the stone mortar jumped up again in fury, lunging crazily at the millstone, while onlookers darted to either side to dodge its grinding. They were entwined in a blinding struggle: if one retreated, one advanced, if one dodged, one blocked; in the end they moved off the terrace, fighting on to the edge of the ditch, to the bridge, before twisting their way up the mountain, the din resounding across the grassland. Stranger still, a kind of yellowish blood actually flowed from these stones onto the ground and onto the blades of grass. When their corpses lay in pieces on the peak, with only the odd fragment stirring, struggling listlessly, blood flowed and burbled from the broken sides of all the pieces, winding its gurgling way down the mountain for half a It, before staining yellow a whole embankment of bamboo.

After gathering up the shattered corpses, which had scattered far and wide, people used them to block up a gully in a paddy field. The mill-stones filled the Three-Peck Field of Benyi's family, the mortar stone filled Maogong's field; thus the dispute was finally settled.

Because the owners' families had been enemies, the old-timers said later, the grievance extended to their stones, who also became enemies. In future, enemies had better be a bit more careful not to lay down their things any old how, any old place.

From this time on, although Benyi would badmouth and curse Mao-gong from time to time, he never again walked in front of Maogong's door or came to Maogong's field. Maogong's wife and two sons finally joined the cooperative, but Benyi said he didn't want the cooperative to have anything to do with their family ox, and took it away to be sold in town. There was also a plough and a rake that Benyi didn't dare keep either, and he got people to carry them off to the ironworks furnace.

I burst out laughing when I'd heard all this; I didn't believe such a thing had really happened.

"I don't believe it either, they're just spirit-talking (see the entry for "Spirit"). They've got no culture." Fucha chuckled, then turned over, "but you just relax and go to sleep."

He turned his spine to me, and fell still; I didn't know whether he was asleep or not-he may have been asleep but his ears were still pricked up in all directions. I also kept my ears open, listening to my own breathing, listening to the sound of little water pockets springing out of the muddy porridge in Maogong's field.