15: The Old Burner's Ledger

He woke in the half-light to the smell of porridge on a low fire.

The smell was the smell of the village's mornings — millet boiling in a small clay pot, with a pinch of salt, with a dried wild onion broken into it, with a slow patient steam coming up through the rafters and out of a smoke-hole — and for the first half-second of his waking he did not know where he was. He thought he was on the kang. He thought, in the half-second, that Mei-er would be at the brazier. He felt, in the half-second, the ordinary morning of an ordinary life he had not, in fact, lived for several days now and would not live again.

The half-second passed.

He opened his eyes. He was on a layer of pine needles on the floor of a hut that smelled of charcoal and pine and an old man's pipe. The old man was at the low fire by the door, with his back bent over the small clay pot. The hut was lit, faintly, by the grey first morning through the chinks of the split-log walls and by the small red light of the fire under the pot.

Wang Er beside him was already awake. The smith's son had laid his head on his folded arms and was watching the old man's back at the fire with the slow careful attention of a man learning a small useful thing he had never been taught before. Tie-zhu, on the far side, was still asleep, with the bad foot wrapped in its bandage, the small bandaged shape of it visible at the end of the hempen blanket. Ah Si, at Heizi's elbow, was curled into a small dark shape under his blanket like a creature in a den.

Heizi sat up slowly. He did not stand. He understood, in the way one understands the small etiquettes of a household one has been received into, that one did not stand in another man's hut before the man had said *get up*. The old man at the fire did not turn. The old man knew Heizi was up. The old man did not, in the small unhurried economy of an old hut, require to acknowledge it.

The old man stirred the pot. He tasted it. He stirred it again. He ladled out, with a small wooden ladle, four small portions into four small wooden bowls — bowls Heizi had not seen yesterday; the old man had brought them out from somewhere — and he set the bowls on the low slab of stone that served as his table.

"Eat," the old man said. "When the others wake, they will eat the rest."

Heizi looked at Wang Er. Wang Er sat up. Wang Er, in the way of a slow honest man receiving a kindness, did not protest. He came and took a bowl. Heizi took a bowl. The two of them sat on the floor by the fire and ate slowly.

The porridge was thicker than the porridge of the village. The dried wild onion in it was a flavor Heizi had not had before — a small sharper thing than the village's chives, with a sweet finish on the tongue. He ate slowly. He tasted each spoon. He understood that this was the kind of meal a man should remember.

After a quarter hour the others woke — Tie-zhu first, then Ah Si, who came up out of his small den with the small startled face of a child who had been in a deep dream and was reluctant to be back. They came to the fire. They took their bowls. They ate.

The old man, while they ate, sat at his stool and smoked the small clay pipe.

When they had finished, he stood — slowly — and said:

"All right. Listen."

They listened.

"I have written nothing on paper for you. Paper is dangerous. The list Old Zhang gave you is dangerous already; you should burn it tonight, after you have memorized it, and you should memorize it tonight. Hear me. After today the list is in your head. It is not in your shirt. The shirt comes off when the patrol asks; the head only when you are dead."

Heizi nodded.

"Today you will go east along the small stream to the second bend. Two pines split by lightning. There is a low place between them. You will go over the low place, north, into the next valley. The next valley has a hamlet. You will not enter the hamlet. You will go around the eastern side, at the height of the old terrace walls — you will see them, they are old, half-fallen — and you will come out, by the third dusk after today, at the widow Shen's well, which is in a small flat place at the head of the third valley. There is a willow over the well, very old, with a forked top. You will know it when you see it. You will say to her: *the old burner sent us; the old burner asks after the cough*. She will give you a bed for two nights. Two only. On the third morning you will go on. By the third name on your list you will be in the foothills proper, and the magistracy's outer arc will be behind you."

He paused.

"After the third name, the list is your own. I have not been further than the third valley in fifteen years. The names below the third are names Old Zhang gathered some years ago from another road. They may be alive. They may not. You will use them as a man uses a piece of rope of unknown strength: you will test each one before you trust it."

He paused again.

"Now. There is a thing I have not said yet, and I will say it now."

He sat down on his stool. He looked at Heizi.

"You four are the fifth group I have seen this month. The first three were eastern groups; they were going to the marshes; that is a different road, and they were on it. The fourth was a single boy. He came at sundown six nights ago. He stayed the night. He was thirteen. He had walked three days on a road I would not put a man on, let alone a boy. He did not say where he was from. He had no list. He went on in the morning, north, into the second valley. I do not know where he is now. He had the cough already in his lungs, lad. The damp."

He looked at Heizi for a long moment.

"You will not see him alive. I am telling you this so that, if you find him on the road today or tomorrow, you will understand. You will not be the first to see him. Some other party will. Or no party will, and the spring rain will take him, and the brush will close over him, and the country will keep him, and his mother in some other valley will never know whose ground her son is buried in. There is a great deal of this, lad. There is more than there has ever been. You are not the only ones, this year, the world is moving."

He paused.

"I tell you this because you are the eldest. You are fifteen and you have three brothers who are not as old as you. You will be the one who decides, on this road, what to do when you find a body. You will find bodies. You will find them in the next month and in the next year and in the next twenty years, lad. There will be many. Each one will ask you to stop. Each one will ask you to bury it. You cannot bury them all. You will have to choose."

He paused.

"Do not bury all of them. You will bury yourself with them. Do bury some of them. If you bury none of them, you will become a man who has stopped seeing them. That is worse than dying yourself. Choose, on each one, by what your bones tell you that day."

Heizi did not answer. He could not.

The old man held his eye for one beat longer. Then he turned away, and reached up to a small shelf above his cot, and brought down a small folded square of dark cloth, and unfolded it. Inside the cloth was a small portion of millet — perhaps three days' for one — and a small piece of the dried pork they had eaten last night, no longer than two fingers, and a small twist of paper containing what Heizi recognized, by the smell at the door, as salt.

He folded it back into a small bundle. He set it on the slab beside Heizi's empty bowl.

"For the road. Take it. Do not refuse it."

"I will not refuse it, grandfather."

"Good."

He stood again — slowly. He went to the corner of the hut where his small charcoal tools hung from pegs. He took down a small iron knife — older than Old Zhang's old militia knife, with a blade no longer than a finger, and a worn handle of dark wood — and laid it on the slab beside the bundle.

"This."

"Grandfather, I have a knife."

"You have an old militia knife. It is a man's knife. It is too big for the small one."

He looked at Ah Si.

"This is a charcoal-burner's knife. It is small. It cuts kindling. It cuts a small piece of meat off a piece of dried pork. It cuts a small thread from a coat. It does not cut a man, although in a hard moment it can be made to. It is a knife for a small one. Take it for the small one. Tell him to keep it on him."

Heizi looked at the small knife.

He looked at Ah Si.

He took the knife.

"Thank you, grandfather."

"Hush."

The old man went to the door. He lifted the hide flap. He looked out into the morning. The morning was clear and cool. The smoke from the charcoal mound was rising in its same slow patient column. He stood at the door for a long moment. Then he turned and looked at the four boys on his floor — the four small wooden bowls on his slab, the four hempen blankets folded back along the wall, the four pairs of straw sandals at the door's edge.

His eyes were wet, in a way that was not the usual wetness of his old wet eyes.

"Lads," he said.

They looked up.

"I had a son once. He was on the canal in Da-ye three. He was twenty-two. He did not come home. I have not — until the boy six nights ago, until you four this week — had four boys in this hut since that summer. I will not see you again. I want to see you, in this hut, on this morning, for one moment longer. Sit down. Sit with me one more cup of the soup before you go."

They sat.

The old man brought, from a small pot in the corner, four more small cups of the *yu-ma* soup. The soup was warm. They drank it slowly. The old man drank his too. He sat on his stool and watched them drink. The morning came in thin and grey through the chinks of the wall and lit, on the slab, the small knife and the small bundle of provisions and the four empty wooden bowls.

When they had finished, Heizi stood.

He bowed to the old man.

The old man did not bow back. The old man laid one hand, briefly, on the top of Heizi's head — once, light, gone — and then on Wang Er's, and on Tie-zhu's, and on Ah Si's. He did it the way Old Zhang had done it on the threshold three nights ago, and Heizi understood, with the small inward catch in his chest he was beginning to recognize, that the old man had done it deliberately, in the manner of Old Zhang — that the old burner had once watched Old Zhang lay a hand like that on the head of a younger man at a frontier post, in Wen-di seventeen, and was paying the gesture forward also.

They stepped out of the hut into the clearing.

The old man did not come out with them. He stood at the door, in the hide-flap shadow, and watched them go.

At the edge of the clearing Heizi turned, in spite of his promise to himself at the top of the ridge that he would not turn back. He turned not toward the village but toward the hut, which was a different turning. He bowed once.

The old man, in the shadow, raised one hand — once, light — and let it fall.

They went on east along the small stream.

They walked an hour. The morning was bright and cool. Tie-zhu's foot, after a night's good sleep on dry pine needles in a warm hut, walked easier than it had walked the day before. Ah Si had on his belt the small charcoal-burner's knife, hung in a small loop the old man had braided for him out of straw, and the boy touched it now and again as he walked, with the small absent gesture of a child given a first knife.

At the first hour Heizi called a small halt.

He sat them down on a flat rock by the stream. He took out the folded paper from the inner pocket of his shirt. He unfolded it, slowly, and laid it on the rock.

"Brothers," he said. "We will memorize this list now. All of us. Not only me. If anything happens to me, the next one carries the list. Wang Er next. Then Tie-zhu. Then Ah Si. Each of you will read each name in turn until all four of us know all twelve."

Wang Er looked at him.

"Heizi."

"Yes."

"I cannot read."

Heizi paused. He had, in the half-day he had spent with Wang Er at the forge, never asked. He had assumed. He had assumed, and the assumption was wrong. Wang Er had been a smith's son, not a clerk's; Wang Er had been at the bellows since he was eleven; nobody had taught him to read.

"I will read each name aloud," Heizi said. "You will repeat it after me, three times. Tie-zhu — can you read?"

"A little. The carpenter taught me numbers. I do not know all of the characters."

"All right."

"Ah Si?"

"No, Heizi-ge."

"Then we will memorize by hearing. Each name three times. Each note three times. By the third hour, we will all four know all twelve."

He read the first name aloud, slowly: *Cao Ergou. Charcoal burner. Northern slope of the second valley. No woman. Will share a hot stone.*

The brothers repeated it after him: once, twice, three times.

He read the second.

They repeated it.

He read the third, with the deliberate omission of the name as Old Zhang had written it — saying instead only *the watched man, foothill of the third valley, do not go to him, go around.*

They repeated it.

They went down the list in the morning, sitting on the flat rock by the small stream, with the bright cool light coming through the bare pines and the small running of the water at their feet, and they made of themselves four young men who would, by the third hour, each carry the list the old burner had updated in his rough low voice — each one able, if any of the others fell, to keep the road open.

When they had finished, Heizi took the paper.

He folded it into a small square. He laid it on the flat rock. He took out the small charcoal-burner's knife from Ah Si's belt — the boy had given it without asking — and he struck a small spark off the back of the blade with a small piece of flint Wang Er had taken, last night, from the old man's hearth at his offer. The flint caught a tinder of pine needles. The pine needles caught the corner of the paper.

The paper burned.

It burned slowly. It curled at the edges. The small fire on the flat rock made no smoke worth seeing. Heizi watched the names blacken and lift, one after another, and become a small drift of ash that the morning's breeze took up off the rock and scattered downstream.

When the paper was gone, Heizi struck out the small flame with the heel of his sandal. He scattered the ash with his hand into the running stream.

He looked up at the brothers.

"In our heads," he said.

"In our heads," Wang Er said.

"In our heads," Tie-zhu said.

"In our heads," Ah Si said.

They stood. They went on along the stream.

At the first bend they saw, on the far bank, in the wet earth near a small sandbar, the print of a small bare foot.

The print was not large. The foot had been the foot of a young person, a boy or a small woman. The print was old — perhaps three days. The water had not yet washed it out, because the bank was sheltered by an overhang.

Heizi looked at the print for a long moment.

He thought of the old man's words: *you will not see him alive.*

He thought: *the boy of thirteen who came at sundown six nights ago, who walked three days on a road I would not put a man on, who had no list, who had the cough already in his lungs.*

He looked downstream.

He looked at the brothers.

"We go on," he said.

They went on.

But he marked the print in his head. He filed it. He understood that the boy had passed this way. He understood that the boy was somewhere ahead of them on this road, or somewhere off to the side of it, or in the brush, or in the stream, or already, by some quiet hand of the world, under a small pile of leaves the spring rain had begun to cover.

He understood, in the small inner register that was teaching him the country of his own attention, that the old burner had been right: there would be many, in the years ahead.

And he understood that the burner had been right also about the choosing.

He kept walking.