Suo

His name was Suo. Once as a child gathering grass seeds in the brush outside his village, he found beneath the stalks a field mouse, prone and torn. Maybe it had wrenched itself free from a hawk’s claws and fallen from the sky – but shredded and bloodied as it was, it was still, barely, unimaginably alive. There was not enough flesh on its bones to make more than a morsel – not worth taking home for supper – but every night Suo’s mother had sang to him the words of Merciful Tual, and heeding those words, he stooped to the ground for a rock with which to put to an end its suffering.

As he knelt by the mouse and raised the rock, he saw its eyes looking to him. Caught by those dark, silent beads, Suo’s arm was stayed. He knew then that as he held the rock over the creature’s head, a rock in another hand was raised above his. Suo was still for the space of three breaths – then swung down his arm.

Now Suo is a man turning the last bend on the path before his village gate, enduring his brother’s pleas. His brother asks over and over if he truly was willing to let his nephews and nieces starve. Suo had just visited his brother’s farm with a sack of bean meal and had to refuse his brother’s implorations for another, having barely enough food to put in his own children’s mouths. His brother had walked out, to stand on his parched field, and Suo, taking leave of his brother’s wife, had left. Halfway home, his brother had caught up with him. Now, just in sight of the village gate, his brother becomes silent at last. Now his brother’s hand digs into his leather pouch and comes out with a flint knife.

Now Suo is white-haired, and staggering in the dark, in lightly drifting snow. He no longer feels the coarse, sweat- and pus-drenched cloak about him. The harvest had been meager, the winter harsh. In the middle of a long night, a stranger had come to the village, squeezed through the village walls between two logs, and died in a barn under a cow’s udders. Boys who came to steal a few mouthfuls of milk stole his shirt, and soon boils were budding in their hands, soon sprouting in villagers’ skins. In time Suo, too, felt ripe little lumps growing in his armpits. He hid in his little hut for days as his flesh was slowly devoured. In the end he did not wait for the headman’s men to come and beat him with their long sticks and drive him out the village gate. Wanting to spare his sons and grandsons the duty of standing by him and being beaten themselves, he stole into the black night, into the desolate plain.

Now Suo is running through the wavering, searing air of his burning village, pitchfork in hand. The headman in desperate rage had ordered torches to be put to the granary, to deny the raiders their prize, and the flying cinders had started the nearby thatch roofs to smoldering. Suo had rushed his wife, heavy with their first child, to the footpath behind the village, there to join the women, children, and half the village men fleeing into the hills. Now he is running to the walls, to take his place on the wooden ramparts with the men who stayed; now he is gazing at the dust cloud in the plain, growing ever larger.

(September 2011)