The Boat to Redemption Read Online Free Page A

the water and felt that I’d been bound to the river for eternity. Then I looked at the
     levees and houses and fields on the banks and felt that I was bound to them as well. I saw people I knew there, and others
     I didn’t; I saw people on other barges, and couldn’t help feeling that they were the ones who had bound me to the barge. But
     when we sailed at night, when the river darkened, when, in fact, the whole world darkened, I turned on the masthead lamp and
     watched as the hazy light cast my shadow on to the bow, a tiny, fragile, shapeless watermark of a shadow. The water flowedacross the wide riverbed, while my life streamed on aboard the barge, and from the dark water emerged a revelation. I discovered
     the secret of my life: I was bound to the barge by my shadow.
    Traces of the martyred Deng Shaoxiang criss-crossed the towns and villages on the banks of the Golden Sparrow River. The year
     I came to the fleet, my father’s view of his bloodline was unwavering; he was convinced that the investigative team had viewed
     him with enmity and prejudice, and that their so-called conclusion was nothing more than murder by proxy, a crazed incident
     of persecution. The way he saw it, he was in the bosom of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang as he sailed the river with the other
     barges, and that invested him with an enormous, if illusory, sense of peace. Once, when we sailed past the town of Phoenix,
     he pointed out a row of wooden shacks – some tall, some squat. ‘See there?’ he said. ‘The memorial hall, that one with the
     black roof tiles and white wall, that’s where your grandmother hid the weapons.’
    I gazed out at the town and at the building with the black roof tiles and white wall, which I’d never seen before. ‘Memorial
     hall? So what!’ I said. ‘What about the coffin shop? Where’s that?’
    He erupted angrily. ‘Stop that nonsense about a coffin shop. Don’t listen to people who just want to smear your grandmother.
     She was no coffin girl. She relied upon coffins to smuggle weapons and ammunition to serve the needs of the revolution, that’s
     all.’ He pointed insistently at the ruins. ‘It’s there, behind that row of buildings. Don’t tell me you can’t see it!’
    Well, I couldn’t, and I said so. ‘There’s no memorial hall!’
    That infuriated him. After swatting me across the face, he said, ‘Your grandmother fought a battle for that place. Now do
     you see it? If not, you must be blind!’
    My father moved his commemoration of Deng Shaoxiang to the river. Each year, at Qingming – the fifth day of the fifth lunarmonth – and on the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, he unfolded a banner on our barge with the slogan:
THE MARTYRED DENG SHAOXIANG WILL
LIVE FOR EVER IN OUR HEARTS.
    Several months separated the two dates, and as I recall how the seasonal winds snapped at the red cloth on those holidays,
     I am visited by disparate and unreal visions: autumn winds billowing Father’s banner cover our barge with a heavy pall, as
     if the martyr’s ghost were weeping on the river’s surface; she reaches out a moss-covered hand and grabs our anchor. ‘Don’t
     go,’ she says. ‘Don’t go. Stop here!’ She is, we can tell, dispirited as she tries to prevent our barge from sailing on, so
     that her son and grandson can stay with her. Spring winds, on the other hand, like all spring winds, blow lightly, carefully
     across the water’s surface, laden with the smell of new grass, awakening the name of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang, and I invariably
     sense the presence of an unfamiliar ghost as it nimbly climbs aboard from the stern and, dripping with water, sits on our
     barge to gaze tenderly at Father.
    I was perplexed. In the autumn I believed what others were saying – that my father was not Deng Shaoxiang’s son. But when
     spring rolled around, I believed
him
when he insisted he was.
    Whatever the truth, Father’s one-time glory had vanished like smoke in the wind, and