16: A Small Pile of Leaves

The thirteen-year-old boy was at the second bend of the small stream, in the lee of an overhanging bank, on the far side of the water from the path Heizi was leading the brothers along.

Heizi smelled him before he saw him.

The smell was the smell, faint at first, of something the country had begun to keep — a sweetness gone wrong, an air with a turn in it that the warm afternoon had brought up from the bank. It was not strong. It came in small drifts when the breeze shifted, and when the breeze shifted again it was gone, and when the breeze shifted a third time it was back. He had never smelled this smell before. He understood it without being told. The country had begun, in the way Old Zhang's brother had been kept in some unknown field in Da-ye three, to keep one small boy somewhere along this stream.

He stopped on the path.

He did not say anything. He held up his hand. Wang Er, behind him, stopped at once. Tie-zhu stopped. Ah Si, smallest, stopped behind Tie-zhu and looked up at Wang Er to know what to do, and Wang Er laid a hand on the small one's shoulder and said, very low, *stay here*.

Heizi went forward alone.

He went forward perhaps fifty paces. The smell came clearer. He came around a small thicket of willow shoots and stopped again at the bank's edge, and looked across the water.

He saw him.

The boy was lying on his side in the lee of the bank, with his head pillowed on his folded arm, in the manner of a boy who had simply lain down to sleep one afternoon and had not got up again. He had pulled some leaves over himself, before he died — pine needles mostly, dry from last year, with a few fallen oak leaves on top — in the small instinctive gesture of a creature making itself a den against the cold. The pile was thin. The pile had not, in three days, sufficed to hide him.

His face was turned toward the water. The face was the face of a boy of thirteen, perhaps less. He was small. The cheeks had begun to fall in. The eyes were closed; whether he had closed them himself, in his last sleep, or whether the lying had closed them for him, Heizi could not say. The lips were parted slightly. There was, on the lower lip and at the corner of the mouth, a small dark stain that was not yet washed away by the rain — the stain of the cough that had come up out of his lungs, perhaps in the last hour before he laid himself down.

He had on a thin coat that was too big for him — perhaps an older brother's, perhaps a father's. His feet were bare. The straw sandals he must have started with had given out somewhere; Heizi could see, by the small cracks in the soles of the small bare feet, that he had walked the last day or two without them. His hands, folded under his head, were the hands of a boy who had not yet grown into his bones.

He had, knotted at his neck on a piece of brown thread, a small wooden charm — a tiger, very small, no larger than a fingernail, the kind of charm a mother carved or a grandmother bought from a peddler for a child against the small fevers of the second year. The thread had darkened with sweat over the years; the small carving had been polished by the small fingers and the small skin of a boy at his own neck for thirteen winters.

Heizi stood for a long time.

He did not, at first, think of anything. He stood, in the bright cool afternoon, by the small running stream, and he looked at the boy who had passed this way six nights ago and had stopped here, and he felt, in his chest, the shape of the choosing the old burner had told him about that morning at the slab.

*You will find bodies. You cannot bury them all. Choose, on each one, by what your bones tell you that day.*

He let his bones tell him.

His bones said: *bury this one*.

His bones said: *you will not bury all of them. You may, in some month, in some valley, walk past three in a single day, and you will walk past them. You will have to. You will hate it. But you will not, in this valley, on this afternoon, with three brothers and a small charcoal-burner's knife and an hour of light, walk past this one. You can afford this one. You will pay for it later, in some hour you do not yet see, with some other choice. Pay it.*

He turned and went back along the path. He came to where Wang Er and Tie-zhu and Ah Si were standing. The three of them were watching him come back. They did not, any of them, ask. They had smelled it now too, in the small drifts that the breeze had carried back along the path; they understood.

"Wang Er," Heizi said, very low.

"Yes."

"There is a boy on the far bank. He has been there three days. We will bury him."

Wang Er nodded.

"Tie-zhu — sit down. Your foot. Ah Si, sit with him. Wang Er and I will cross."

The two younger boys sat. Ah Si did not protest at being kept back, although the small flat eyes had the look in them they had had at the persimmon procession three mornings ago — the look of a child who would not, in any year of his life, ask to be spared what others could see, and who waited only to be told whether he was being spared this time or not. Heizi did not, on this afternoon, want him on the far bank. The boy had been buried once already. He did not need to bury one more.

He and Wang Er crossed at a low place upstream, where the bottom was good. The water came up to their knees. The cold of it was the cold of the second valley's small stream, which ran out of the higher hills.

They came around to the lee of the bank.

Wang Er, at his shoulder, looked at the boy in the leaves for a long time. Wang Er was seventeen and had buried his own brother in spirit, if not in fact, in Da-ye three; he had the slow steady face of a young man who had decided not to be unsteadied by what he saw. He laid a hand once, briefly, on Heizi's shoulder. He did not say anything.

"The bank," Heizi said.

"Yes."

The bank was sandy. They had no spades. They worked with the small charcoal-burner's knife and Old Zhang's old militia knife and with their hands. They cut a shallow trench in the bank — not deep; Heizi had learned, at his sister's grave, that wet bank earth slid back; he made the trench wider rather than deeper, the width of a small boy and a little more. They worked for perhaps an hour. The sun moved a quarter of its breadth across the western sky.

When the trench was ready, they went back to the boy.

Heizi looked at the boy's face one more time. He did not let his look linger. He had learned, this morning at the slab, the difference between looking and lingering, and he applied the lesson now. He bent and lifted the boy at the shoulders. Wang Er lifted at the legs. The boy was light, the small light weight of a child who had been thinning for many days before the end. They carried him across the small distance to the trench.

They set him down.

Heizi straightened the small coat over him. He folded the small thin hands over the chest, in the way Old Zhang had folded Mei-er's hands in the back room three mornings ago. He smoothed the hair away from the forehead, very lightly, with the back of one finger. He did not weep. He did not, on this afternoon, weep for any boy in any field — the weeping, when it came, would come in some other hour, and he understood, even now, that it was being held for that hour by a part of himself he could not yet locate.

He looked at the small wooden tiger at the boy's neck.

He thought, for a moment, of leaving it.

He thought, for a moment, of taking it.

He chose.

He untied the brown thread, very carefully — the knot was small and old; it took him several breaths to undo it — and lifted the small carving out of the soft place at the boy's collar. He held the tiger in his palm for a moment. It was a small old polished thing.

He folded the boy's collar back over the empty place at the throat.

He laid the small carving on a flat stone at the head of the trench. He thought: *for whoever is looking. For a brother who has not yet given up, for a mother who has not yet stopped asking. The body is the country's now. The carving — if anyone in the years ahead comes along this stream looking for a small boy with a tiger at his neck — the carving will tell them what they need to know.*

He stood up.

Wang Er, beside him, had already begun to cover the boy with the loose sandy earth from the bank. Heizi joined him. They covered the boy slowly. The earth was wet enough to hold but loose enough not to crush. They mounded a small low shape over him, no taller than a hand. They patted the mound smooth.

They stood at the head of the small low mound.

Heizi did not know the boy's name. He had not asked the carving.

"Lad," he said, into the air above the bank, into the cool quiet afternoon. "We do not know your name. We have not earned the right to ask it. We are leaving the small carving for the people who do. We are going on. We are sorry to leave you. We will not — we will not forget."

He paused. He thought he should say something else. He could not think what.

Wang Er, beside him, said, very low:

"Sleep."

It was a peasant's word. It was the word said over the dead in the village when there was no monk and there was no scholar. It was the word Old Zhang had not said over Mei-er, because Old Zhang had said only her name; but the word was an honest one, and Wang Er, slow and honest, had brought it out of his throat at the right time.

Heizi nodded.

They turned. They walked back along the bank. They crossed the stream at the low place. They came up to where Tie-zhu and Ah Si were waiting.

The two younger boys did not ask. They saw, by the wet at the older brothers' knees and by the small smoothed expressions on the older brothers' faces, what had been done. Tie-zhu nodded once, slowly, and stood up — the bad foot taking the weight a little gingerly, but holding — and Ah Si stood too, and the small boy reached up, very briefly, with one small hand, and touched the small charcoal-burner's knife at his belt with the gesture of a child reassuring himself of the only solid thing he had.

"Brothers," Heizi said.

They looked at him.

"There will be more of these. You heard the old burner. We will not bury them all. Today we buried one. We had the time. We had a knife each. We had each other. Some other day we may not have any of those. We will have to walk past."

He paused. He looked at each of them in turn — Wang Er, Tie-zhu, Ah Si.

"When that day comes — when we walk past — we will not pretend we have not seen. We will see. We will see, and we will keep walking. The seeing is the only honor we will be able to give. Do you understand."

Wang Er nodded.

Tie-zhu nodded.

Ah Si looked up at him for a long beat. The small flat eyes were steady.

"Heizi-ge," he said. "Yes."

Heizi nodded.

"All right."

They walked on along the path.

The smell of the bank thinned with each step they put between themselves and the small low mound under the overhanging bank. The afternoon stretched out. The breeze, which had been carrying the smell back to them in small drifts, now carried it forward instead — out into the brush of the second valley, out into the small open places where the wind turned, out into the country that would, in its own slow way, keep the boy.

A long way along the path, at the third hour, Heizi reached into the inner pocket of his shirt and took out the small finished indigo pouch his sister had sewn him. He held it for a moment. He had not, in four days, looked into it; he had carried it against his ribs without opening it, because to open it was to confirm that it was now a thing made by hands that no longer made things, and he had not been ready to confirm.

He opened it now.

Inside the pouch were three things: a small folded square of pale yellow silk — a piece of his foster mother's old wedding robe, perhaps, the same robe whose lining had been cut up to patch his shirt at the elbow when he was four, with a single small embroidered character in dark blue thread on it that he could not read; a single grain of millet, dried hard and dark; and a small lock of dark hair, tied with a single thread at one end.

He did not know whose hair the lock was. He thought, perhaps — although the lock was small and had been kept in a pouch for some time — that it was Mei-er's. He thought it might also have been his foster mother's, kept in some other pouch in some other year, given to him now by his sister at the last as a small inheritance of women that the household had not, in life, been able to give him. He thought it might be both — the lock might have been Mei-er's mother's, kept by Mei-er, given by Mei-er to Heizi at the last — and the not-knowing, the small ambiguity of which woman in his foster family had given him this small piece of herself, was itself a kind of inheritance.

He folded the pouch back together. He put it back in his shirt against his ribs.

He walked on.

He did not say anything to the brothers about what was in the pouch.

The sun moved further down the western sky. The path bent eastward away from the stream and began to climb the low place between the two pines that had been split by lightning some years ago, just as the old burner had said. They came to the pines an hour before dusk. The pines were tall and old; the lightning had taken the upper third of each one, and the bare splintered tops stood against the western sky like the hands of a man holding up something he could not name.

They went over the low place between them.

The third valley opened below.

The third valley was narrower than the second. It had, at its head, a small flat green place — a place that had once been worked, perhaps, in some better year — with a single old willow tree bent over a small stone-rimmed well at the western edge. The willow had a forked top.

"The widow's well," Wang Er said.

"Yes."

The smoke from a small chimney was rising, thinly, from a small house just beyond the willow. The smoke was the smoke of a cooking fire. The smoke was, in its small ordinariness — the smoke of an evening meal, of a household that was in its house, of a woman who was preparing what one woman alone prepared at the end of a working day — the most welcome smoke Heizi had seen in his life.

He stopped on the lip of the descent.

He looked at the brothers.

"Tonight we will sleep in a bed," he said. "If she is there. If she is who Old Zhang said she was. Two nights. Three is too many. We will not stay three. The road is the road."

Wang Er nodded.

They began, slowly, to descend toward the willow well, with the bright clear afternoon light falling at last toward the western horizon, and the small dark of the third valley beginning to gather along its eastern slope.

Behind them, at the second bend of the small stream in the second valley, a small low mound under an overhanging bank held a thirteen-year-old boy with his hands folded across his chest, and a small wooden tiger sat on a flat stone at the head of the mound, in the way of a small marker placed by hands that had not known the dead boy's name and had not, on this afternoon, earned the right to ask it.

The small carving would, in the spring rain to come, be washed slowly off the stone, and would tumble down the bank into the small running water, and would be carried — over weeks — down the second valley to the wider stream beyond, and from there to a wider one, and from there to a river none of these boys would ever see, and would be lost in it, and would not, in the country's long forgetting, ever find a brother or a mother who had been looking.

But it sat now, on the stone, in the failing light of the third afternoon, where Heizi had left it.

It was the first marker he had set on a road. It would not be the last.