10: The Hour of the Boar

The afternoon was the longest afternoon Heizi had lived in his life.

It was perhaps three hours. By the sun, which did not show, by the slow thinning and thickening of the rain, by the small movements of the dog at the doorway, by the slow bending of the smoke from the brazier where, an hour after the noon meal, Mei-er was not there to put the lid back at its even angle and the lid sat where Wang Er had set it — he could measure the time. Three hours. It felt longer than the two days that had come before it.

He used the time the way Old Zhang had told him to use it.

He went, first, to the carpenter's woodshed. Ah Si was there. The boy was sitting on the small pile of split wood with his knees drawn up, eating the half-bowl of millet that the carpenter's wife had set out on the upper step at the noon hour. He was, at first glance, what he always was: a small thin boy of twelve or thirteen with the face of a child who had learned not to attract attention. He had been the village's invisible orphan since his mother had died of the cough in Da-ye seven, and he had learned, in the four years since, the small habits of a child who lived on the edges of other people's households — to come quietly, to leave quietly, to eat when food was set out and to not appear when food was not, to sleep in woodsheds and granaries and lean-tos, to be no trouble.

The boy looked up when Heizi came into the shed. The look was the look of a small animal that had heard a step and had decided, in the half-second of decision, whether to bolt or to stay. He stayed.

"Ah Si."

"Heizi-ge."

"Do you know what happened this morning?"

The boy nodded. He did not need to be told. The whole village knew. The procession of eleven had walked past the carpenter's shed at the hour the boy had been emptying ash from the wood-saving stove.

Heizi sat down on the woodpile beside him. He sat at a distance — perhaps two paces — that did not crowd. The boy went on eating, but slowly.

"Tonight, after the hour of the boar, four of us are leaving the village," Heizi said. "We are going north. Not by any road that has a name. We will walk into the foothills. We are not coming back."

The boy did not stop chewing. The chewing slowed.

"You will be the fourth, if you choose."

The boy stopped chewing.

He held the millet in his cheek. He did not swallow. He did not look at Heizi. He looked at the ash door of the small wood-saving stove across the shed, which was half-open, and which gave out the small smell of cold ash, and which had, on its iron handle, the small worn place where Ah Si's hand had touched the handle four times a day for two years to clean the box.

"Why," the boy said.

"Why am I asking you?"

"Yes."

Heizi thought. He thought about the answer. The answer he had given Wang Er — *He will eat very little; he is fast; if we do not take him, he will be on this road in some other month with no one to take him at all* — was the answer of a man making a calculation, and Ah Si, who had made his living for two years on the calculations of other men, would smell that answer on him in one breath. He thought about the answer he wanted to give: *Because my sister hung from a tree this morning, and I will not pass anyone now, and you are eleven or twelve, and you are alone, and the world has decided what to do with boys like you.* That was true; that was the true answer; but it was not, in this woodshed, the answer that would help.

He gave the simplest one he could find.

"Because we are going. Because if we leave you, no one will come for you in the next bad year. Because I would rather walk a road with a fourth than with a third, and you are the fourth I want."

The boy thought about this.

He thought a long time. Heizi waited. The rain came down on the roof of the shed and drummed. The boy ate the rest of his millet, slowly, finishing each grain before moving to the next.

When he had finished, he set the bowl down beside him on the pile of wood. He looked at Heizi for the first time. His eyes were the particular eyes of a child who had been hungry for two years — large in the small face, the irises a flat dark, the lashes long.

"I have nothing to bring," he said.

"You will bring yourself."

"I have a coat. It is not warm."

"Bring it. I will give you a wadded coat from our house. It was — it was Mei-er's. It will fit you. It will be too long. We will roll the cuffs."

The boy nodded.

"I have a knife. It is small. It does not cut anything."

"Bring it. A small knife is better than no knife."

The boy nodded.

"Heizi-ge."

"Yes."

"What if I cannot keep up."

"Then we will slow down."

"What if I slow you down so much that you are caught."

"We will not be caught. I have a path. The path is not a road. There are no patrols on it for the first three days. I have spoken with Old Zhang and with Old Cui. We have measured the time."

The boy looked at him for a long moment. Heizi watched him think. The boy was twelve, possibly thirteen, but the thinking on his face was the thinking of a small old creature that had been making his own decisions for years.

"All right," the boy said. "I will come."

He stood. He picked up the bowl. He set the bowl on the upper step where the carpenter's wife would find it. He went to the corner of the shed where his small bundle was — the bundle he carried with him each evening to wherever he was sleeping that night — and he untied it, and he looked into it, and he tied it again. He had, in the bundle, perhaps three things; he did not show Heizi what they were.

"Where," the boy said.

"Old Cui's gate. The hour of the boar. Wang Er will meet us there. Tie-zhu also."

"All right."

Heizi turned to go.

"Heizi-ge."

"Yes."

The boy looked at him with those large flat eyes.

"I am sorry about your sister."

He said it the way a small child says such things — without the practiced softening of grown people, with the small bare words. He said it once. He did not elaborate.

Heizi did not, on this day, weep. But he felt, at the boy's small bare four words, something move in his chest that had been still since the persimmon tree — a small loosening, a small settling, the kind of small inner motion a man feels when a stone he has been carrying without knowing he was carrying it shifts a quarter-inch toward a different part of the pack.

He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

He went out of the shed.

The afternoon went on. He went next to Tie-zhu's house. He found the lame boy at the back of the carpenter's yard, sitting on a small bench under the eaves with his bad foot propped on a stool. Tie-zhu was a year older than Heizi, eighteen, and had lived in the village all his life with the small lameness that the village had, in its small kindness, never discussed; he was the carpenter Old Lu's nephew, the son of Old Lu's dead younger brother, and he was the carpenter's apprentice in a small careful trade of fitted joints. Tie-zhu's hands were good hands. The bad foot made him slow, but only on long roads; in a workshop, sitting at a bench, he was as quick as anyone in the village. He had cried, yesterday at the woodpile, when Heizi had spoken to him; he was not crying now. He had cried once and was done.

"Tonight," Heizi said.

"I will be at the gate."

"You can walk?"

"I can walk. I have walked all my life. The road will not be easy. I will keep up."

"There will be a stream above the great willow. Gravel bottom. You will need to feel for the stones with your foot. The bad foot first; the good foot is for balance."

"I have crossed streams. I will manage."

"All right."

Tie-zhu looked at him. He had a long careful face for a young man of eighteen, with thoughtful brows. He had watched Heizi grow up alongside him. He had watched, this morning, the procession of eleven walk past his uncle's gate. He had been one of the eleven, at the back, walking in his slow uneven step.

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"My uncle the carpenter knows. I told him at the noon meal. He did not try to stop me. He gave me his old straw rain-cloak. He said it had been his father's." He paused. "He said his father had been on the canal in Wen-di's reign and had come back. He said the cloak had come back with him. He said it would come back, again, with whoever wore it next."

He looked away.

"I am to bring it back, if I can. To leave it on his bench, when I am old, if I am old."

"It is a long instruction," Heizi said.

"Yes. It is."

They did not say anything more.

Heizi went home.

The third visit was not a visit; it was the long slow gathering of his own things. Old Zhang had laid out the things on the kang in his absence. There was the small wadded coat from beside the kang. There was Old Zhang's old knife — not the cooking one; the other one, in the rafter bundle, the one Old Zhang had used in his militia year in the second decade of Wen-di's reign, when he had been a young man and had served three months on a frontier post on the Henan-Hebei border and had come home with the small knife and a small set of things he had never spoken of. There was a sack of millet, perhaps six days' ration for one. There was a piece of dried turnip the size of a man's hand. There was a small dried fish wrapped in oiled paper that Heizi had not known the household possessed; Old Zhang had been keeping it, for some other day; the day had not come; the day would not come now.

There was, beside the things, a small flat object — rectangular, no larger than three fingers, wrapped in a soft scrap of dark cloth.

Heizi did not pick it up at first. He looked at it. He went to the doorway and looked at Old Zhang, who was sitting on the threshold step with the dog's head on his knee.

"Father."

"Take it. Open it on the road. Not before."

"What is it?"

"Take it."

Heizi took it. He put it inside the inner pocket of his shirt, beside the small finished indigo pouch and the second wooden bead that were already there, against his ribs.

He laid the things — the millet, the turnip, the fish, the small knife — into a hempen sack he had used, in lighter years, to carry firewood. The sack was small. The things fit. He tied the sack at the neck. He laid the wadded coat over his arm.

He went to find a smaller wadded coat for Ah Si. There was one in the chest at the foot of Mei-er's mat — the chest that had been closed, this morning, for the last time, and that had on top of it the indigo robe folded by the women, with the small dried sweet flag taken out and laid in the grave. He stood at the curtain of the back room. He did not enter. He could not, today, enter. He turned and went, instead, to the small lean-to at the back of the kitchen, where a second wadded coat — older, smaller, the one that had been Heizi's at twelve and that Mei-er had repatched two winters ago — hung from a peg. He took it down. He folded it under his arm.

The afternoon thinned.

The rain went on. The light, never strong, began to go from grey-bright to grey-dim. The dog at the doorway got up once and stretched and lay back down. The hour of the chicken was being called, in the village beyond the courtyard, by the small distant ringing of the smith's evening hammer — Wang the smith, who would work until very late tonight, banking the forge in his own slow practice of grief, beating an unnecessary length of iron the way other men, in other houses, did not beat their grief but only sat still and let it move through them.

At the hour of the boar, Old Zhang stood up from the threshold step.

He came into the main room. He came to the kang where Heizi was sitting with the things by him. He sat down on the kang beside him — slowly, with the bad hip — and he looked at the things, and he looked at the boy, and he did not say anything for a long moment.

"Heizi."

"Father."

"You have the millet. You have the turnip. You have the fish. You have the knife. You have the bead at your neck. You have the bead and the pouch in the inner pocket. You have the cloth I gave you, in the inner pocket, against your ribs."

"Yes."

"You have everything. Do not take more. More is weight, and weight kills boys on roads."

"Yes, father."

"You will go down the lane to Old Cui's. The dog there will not bark. I have spoken with Old Cui this afternoon when you were at the carpenter's. Old Cui's middle son will, tomorrow morning, walk the path north over the ridge and will, by midday, scuff out the small marks of your passing on the bean fields. The patrols will not find your prints. They will not look in the foothills."

"Yes, father."

"You will cross the small stream two stones above the great willow. The gravel is good there. The bottom is sound. The water is cold. Tie-zhu's bad foot first. Do not let him hurry."

"Yes, father."

"After the stream you will sleep three hours in the brush of the lower slope. You will sleep at the place where the three small pines lean together. There is a hollow under them. The hollow is dry. I slept there once, in Wen-di seventeen, when I was a young man on a road of my own. Sleep three hours and no more. The hour of the rabbit, you will rise. You will walk through the day, low, by the brush along the old stream. You will not show yourselves on the ridges. By the third night you will be eight or nine *li* into the foothills proper, and you will have left the magistracy's sight."

"Yes, father."

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"You will not turn back."

Heizi did not answer.

"You will not turn back. Whatever you hear, on the road behind you, in the days ahead — whatever you hear about this village — you will not turn back. Do you understand me."

Heizi nodded.

"I want to hear you say it."

"I will not turn back, father."

The old man looked at him for a long beat. The old eyes were not weeping. They were holding a thing very carefully — the way a man holds, in the palm of his hand, a small living animal he is about to release.

"There is one more thing," Old Zhang said.

He reached into the inner pocket of his own shirt. He drew out a small folded piece of cloth — a different cloth from the one he had given Heizi already, paler, very old. He unfolded it on his knee. Inside the folded cloth was a small piece of jade — no larger than a man's thumbnail, plain, cloudy, of the green that was almost grey — wrapped in a thin braid of black hair.

The hair was Heizi's foster mother's. Heizi had never seen it. He had not known Old Zhang had kept it. He understood now.

"This was your mother's," Old Zhang said. He did not say *your foster mother's*. He said *your mother's*. He had never, in fifteen years, called her that to Heizi. He called her so now. "She gave it to me on our wedding day. It was her grandmother's. It is the only piece of jade this house has ever had. Take it. If you are ever — in any year, in any town, in any place of difficulty — in a need for which money will solve it, sell it. Do not sell it for less than four bolts of silk. It will be worth more, but four bolts will keep four people alive for a season. Sell it for that, if it must be sold. If it does not need to be sold, do not sell it. Carry it."

He pressed the jade and the braid of hair into Heizi's palm.

Heizi closed his hand on it.

"Thank you, father."

"Hush. I am not done."

The old man took Heizi's free hand. He put it on his own forehead — the forehead of an old man, lined, cool with the rain that had been on it through the morning. The jade and the hair were in the other hand, against his palm. The old man held Heizi's hand to his forehead for the space of three breaths. He let it go.

"Go now."

Heizi rose.

He took the wadded coat from beside the kang — Old Zhang's coat, the one the old man slept under in the cold — and he laid it across his foster father's shoulders, where the old man sat on the kang. He did it slowly. The old shoulders did not move. The old man did not look up.

"Father."

The old man did not answer.

"Father, the dog."

"The dog will stay with me. I have spoken with him."

Heizi laid his hand once on the dog's head, in the old way. The dog did not lift its head. The dog had, in the last hour, understood that its boy was leaving and that the leaving was permanent, and the dog had laid its head on its paws in the way old dogs laid their heads when they had decided to wait the way old dogs waited. The dog would stay with the old man until the old man, in some month or year, stopped also; and the dog would, in that month or year, not long survive him.

Heizi went to the door.

He turned. He looked at his foster father one last time.

The old man, on the kang, with the wadded coat across his shoulders, with the dog at his feet, in the grey dim light of the room he had built thirty-seven years ago and would die in — the old man had laid his head down in his hands, with the fingers laced at the back of the neck, in the small private posture of a man who has, for one moment, in the absence of his children, allowed himself the smallest unobserved permission.

Heizi did not stay to watch.

He went out of the door, into the courtyard, into the rain. He laced his straw sandals at the gate. He picked up the small hempen sack, the small wadded coat for Ah Si, and the long oilskin Old Zhang had laid for him beside the gate without saying so. He did not look back.

He went down the lane.

The lane was empty. The rain was light. The hour of the boar had been called by the smith's hammer twenty minutes ago. The village's doors were not quite shut. He passed Wang the smith's. The hammer was still ringing — slow, deliberate. He passed the carpenter's. The shutters were closed but the lamp was lit; he saw the small thin line of yellow at the bottom of the door. He passed Old Lu's brother's widow's house — the old woman with the white cloth on her hair this morning — and her shutters were closed and her lamp was not lit, and he understood that she was in the dark on her mat in her one room saying, in the dark, the words that women in this village had been saying for a hundred years on nights when the village was losing four of its own to the road.

He came to Old Cui's gate.

Wang Er was there. Tie-zhu was there. Ah Si was there.

Wang Er had his father's hammer in a sling on his back, and a small sack at his belt, and the carpenter's old straw rain-cloak — Old Lu had given him one too, Heizi understood — over his shoulders. Tie-zhu had his uncle's straw rain-cloak. Ah Si had a small bundle the size of a cat and was carrying it as if it were heavier than he was.

Old Cui was at the gate. He did not speak. He bowed once to Heizi — the small careful bow of an old headman to a young man who, on this night, had become something in the village's small unrecorded reckoning — and stepped back.

"Brothers," Heizi said.

It was the first time he had used the word aloud.

The three nodded.

He turned, and they went down the lane after him, four boys in straw cloaks in the rain, with the village's doors not quite shut and the village's lamps not quite lit, and the smith's slow hammer ringing in the small cooled metal of the evening forge somewhere behind them, and a single dog — Old Cui's — making the small short bark, once, that meant the gate had opened for someone known and had closed again behind them.

The dog's bark was the last sound of the village he heard.