17: The Widow's Well

The widow Shen was older than Heizi had expected.

He had expected, from Old Zhang's note — *sister-by-marriage to my brother's wife* — a woman of perhaps forty, perhaps forty-five; the widow of a younger brother of someone from his foster mother's generation. The woman who came to the door of the small house at the willow well, when he called, was perhaps sixty. She was small. Her hair was grey. Her eyes were dark. She held the lamp she had carried to the door slightly to one side, so that the light fell on Heizi's face and not on hers.

He stopped at the edge of the small clearing in front of the door. He had told the others — Wang Er, Tie-zhu, Ah Si — to wait in the brush at the lip of the descent until he called. He had come down alone. He stood now with his hands clearly empty at his sides.

"Grandmother."

"Lad."

"The old burner sent us. The old burner asks after the cough."

She looked at him for a long moment. The lamp did not move.

"How many," she said.

"Four, grandmother."

"Bring them."

Heizi turned and called, low: "Brothers. Come."

The three came down through the brush — Wang Er first, then Tie-zhu walking with the slow even step of a lame boy who had learned, over a day, to manage a slope, then Ah Si small and quiet. They came into the clearing. They stopped behind Heizi.

The woman looked at each of them in turn. She did it the way Cao Ergou had looked — slowly, taking in the small specific things: the hempen sack at Heizi's belt; the smith's hammer in its sling at Wang Er's back; the bandage on Tie-zhu's foot, just visible above the rim of the straw sandal; the small charcoal-burner's knife on its straw loop at Ah Si's belt. She looked at the small knife last and held her eye on it for a beat longer than the others.

"Cao Ergou's hand made that loop," she said.

"Yes, grandmother."

"He braided one for my husband once."

She did not say more. She turned and held the door open with her free hand. "Come in. The fire is lit. There is room. There is enough."

They went in.

The house was one room. The room was small. There was a low cooking fire at the southern wall, with a small clay pot on it; there was a wooden bench against the western wall, with a folded hempen blanket on it; there was a low square table at the center of the room, with a single wooden bowl and a single pair of chopsticks set on it. The bowl was the widow's evening bowl, half-eaten — she had been at her supper when he had called.

The widow set the lamp on the table. She closed the door. She drew across it a heavy hempen curtain — a curtain Heizi had not, from the outside, known the door had — that fell from a beam above the lintel. The curtain, lowered, made the room dimmer; it also, Heizi understood, made the room more difficult to see into from the clearing outside.

She turned and looked at them.

"Sit," she said. "The bench. The floor. Anywhere. The lame one — the bench. The small one — the floor by the fire. The other two — wherever you can fit. There is millet enough for one more bowl among the four of you. I will make a second pot. It will take a quarter hour. Sit and breathe."

They sat.

Tie-zhu took the bench, with the bad foot up on the wood; the woman, before he could refuse, brought him a small wooden stool to prop the foot on, and the boy looked at the stool as if at a small impossible kindness, and set the foot on it. Ah Si crouched by the fire. Wang Er sat on the floor beside the western wall, with his hammer's sling laid across his knees. Heizi sat on the floor by the door, with his back to the curtain.

The woman brought down a second clay pot from a low shelf. She set it on the fire. She poured water into it from a wooden bucket. She measured millet from a small jar — three small handfuls; she measured it the way Mei-er had measured millet, with a small flat sweep of the palm at the top of the handful — and put it in. She added a pinch of salt. She knelt at the fire and watched the water.

She did not, for several long minutes, speak.

Heizi watched her. He understood, watching her, that she was a woman who had received walkers before. That she had received them, perhaps, this same season — that she had, perhaps, three nights ago made the same second pot for the small boy of thirteen who was now under the overhanging bank in the second valley, and had sent him on with a small bag of millet and a pinch of salt, and had not — until now, when he stood here as the small carving on the flat stone — known what had become of him. The small boy had passed through this house. She had not, this evening, asked Heizi yet whether he had seen him.

She would ask. He had decided already, in the half-hour since the trench, that he would tell her when she asked.

She did not ask for some time.

She let the millet cook. She brought, from a small jar, a piece of pickled cabbage; she cut it on a flat board with a small knife into four small portions, and laid the portions on a wooden plate. She brought, from another jar, a small piece of dried fish — smaller than the piece Old Zhang had given Heizi, but not by much — and cut it into four. She set the plate on the table. The room began to smell, slowly, of millet and of fish and of pickled cabbage and of the small wood smoke of her fire.

Tie-zhu, on the bench, leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He did not sleep; the eyes opened again after a moment; but he kept them mostly closed.

Ah Si watched the fire with the small unblinking attention of a child who had not been warm for a day and a half.

Wang Er watched the woman.

The woman, finally, when the millet was nearly done, sat back on her low stool and looked at Heizi.

"Lad."

"Yes, grandmother."

"Whose son."

"My foster father is Old Zhang. The eastern half of —"

"Stop. The old burner told you not to say. He was right. I am not going to ask. Old Zhang. Yes. I do not know him. But Cao Ergou wrote his name on my list ten years ago. The list is here in my head. Old Zhang, eastern half. Yes."

She nodded slowly.

"Six nights ago," she said, "a small boy came to this door. He was thirteen. He had no list. He was alone. He had the cough already. I let him stay one night. I gave him millet and salt in the morning. I sent him on. I have been listening for him ever since. I have heard nothing. The wind has heard nothing. I have asked my son's wife at the next hamlet over, who comes by sometimes; she has heard nothing. The boy is not anywhere I know. Lad, did you find him."

Heizi looked at her.

"Yes, grandmother."

She did not move. The eyes did not change.

"Where."

"At the second bend of the small stream. The far bank. The lee of the overhang. He had — he had pulled some leaves over himself."

"Was he warm or cold."

"Cold, grandmother. Three days, perhaps."

"Was he in pain."

"He was not, when we found him, in any pain."

She closed her eyes for one breath. She opened them.

"Was he buried."

"We buried him this afternoon, grandmother. I and the smith's son. In the bank. Not deep. A small low mound. We — we set a small marker."

"What marker."

"He had at his neck a small wooden tiger, on a thread. Old. Polished. We took it off him. We laid it on a flat stone at the head of the mound. We thought — we thought, for a brother, for a mother. The body is the country's. The carving is for whoever asks."

She closed her eyes again. She kept them closed for a longer moment this time. When she opened them, they were the same eyes; the wetness was perhaps a fraction more visible; she did not let any of the wet down her face.

"His name was Yan Liu-er," she said. "Liu-er. Sixth son. He was the only son left living of his family. They had lost five. He told me. I did not write it down. I did not write it down because he asked me not to write it down — *grandmother, do not write it; if you write it, you keep it; I do not want anyone to keep it; my mother has had enough of names being written and crossed out*. I did not write. I have kept it now, in my head, for six nights. Yan Liu-er. Of —" she paused. "Of a hamlet. He told me the hamlet. I will not say it here. Yan Liu-er. Sixth son. The name is in your head now too, lad. Carry it."

"Yes, grandmother."

"You did right by him."

"I — I did not bury him deep, grandmother. The bank —"

"You did right by him. Hush. The bank is wet. Deep is for towns. Lad, hush."

Heizi did not speak again.

She sat for a while looking at the fire. Then she stood — slowly — and brought the clay pot of millet off the fire. She ladled out portions into four wooden bowls — bowls that had, like the stool for Tie-zhu's foot, come from somewhere Heizi had not seen. She set the bowls on the table. She set the plate of pickled cabbage and dried fish at the center.

"Eat. I am going to sit with the boy in my head for a quarter hour. I will be at the door. Eat without me. Do not save me a bowl. I will eat at the morning."

She lifted the curtain. She went out into the clearing. She sat down on the low stone bench beside the willow well. They could see her, in the dimming light, through the small chink at the edge of the curtain — a small grey shape under the forked top of the willow tree, looking at the well, with her hands folded in her lap and her back straight.

They ate.

They ate in silence. The food was good. The pickled cabbage was sharper than the village's; it had been longer in the salt. The dried fish was sweeter than Old Zhang's small dried fish had been; it had come from a different sea, perhaps; the woman bought from a different peddler. The millet was thicker than yesterday's at Cao Ergou's; she had measured it more generously than her own portion suggested she ate herself.

When they had finished, Wang Er stood and took the bowls to the small basin by the door. He rinsed them in the cold water that stood in the basin, with the small economy of motion of a smith's son who had been raised to leave any room he had eaten in slightly cleaner than he had found it. He set the bowls on the shelf. He did not speak.

After a quarter hour the widow came back in. She drew the curtain. She looked at them.

"Sleep. The bench for the lame one. The floor for the others. There are two more blankets in the chest at the foot of my cot. Take them. I will sleep on the cot. We will speak in the morning of the road."

She paused.

"And lad."

"Yes, grandmother."

"Tomorrow night, late, I will go to the second bend. I will take a hempen wrap. I will rebury the boy properly, deeper, in the upper bank. I will move the small carving with him. I will not move it where someone can find it from the path. I will put it where I will know to look in some other year, if anyone ever comes. You will not come with me. You will rest your foot — *yes, lame one, I am speaking to you* — and you will rest your boy — *small one, I am speaking of you, do not look so worried, it is not for you to come* — and you will sleep. I will go alone. I have done it before."

Tie-zhu opened his mouth.

"Hush, lame one. Sleep."

She turned to her cot. She lay down on it slowly. She did not blow out the lamp. She lay on her side, with her face to the wall, with her grey hair against the wood. Her breath, after a few minutes, did not deepen; she did not, on this evening, sleep at once. She had a small boy in her head with a name she had not written down, and she would be sitting with him for some hours before she went out, in the dark, with a hempen wrap and a small spade.

Heizi lay down on the floor between Wang Er and Ah Si.

He did not, on this night, lie awake to listen for any sound on the slope. The widow was at the door's curtain in his place — she would, even with the boy in her head, hear what came up the slope — and the widow's listening was a finer listening than his own; she had had decades to practice. He could let his own listening go. He could sleep.

He did not sleep at once.

He thought, lying on the floor in the dim lamp-light, of the small boy at the second bend with the leaves pulled over himself; of his sister in the back room six mornings ago with her hair bound for a journey; of Old Zhang with the wadded coat across his shoulders in the empty house, with the dog at his feet; of his foster mother, whom he had not known, whose hair perhaps was the small lock in the indigo pouch at his ribs. He thought of the small old polished thread of a wooden tiger now in some other hand than the one that had carved it — Yan Liu-er's mother's hand, perhaps, in some other valley, in some other year.

He thought of the fact that this was the second time in six days he had buried a person.

He thought: *If I am to be of any use to my brothers on this road, I cannot count the burials. I can carry the names. I can keep them in my head. But I cannot count. The counting will break me. The names will not.*

He filed the thought.

He filed: *Mei-er; Yan Liu-er.*

Two names.

He slept.

He woke, late in the night, when the widow rose from her cot.

He did not move. He lay with his eyes closed. He heard her go to the chest at the foot of the cot. He heard her take out a hempen wrap; he heard her lay the wrap, folded, on the table; he heard the small heavier wooden sound of a small spade taken from where it had hung at the wall. He heard her move to the door. He heard her lift the curtain.

He opened his eyes a fraction.

He saw, by the light of the small lamp, the back of an old woman in a coarse hempen coat, with a hempen wrap over her arm and a small spade in her hand, going out of her own door at the hour of the rat to walk a *li* and a half across the country to the second bend of the small stream of the second valley, alone, in the dark, to rebury a boy whose name she had agreed not to write.

He did not call out to her. He did not offer to come.

He understood, with the small inward catch in his chest he was beginning to recognize as a thing his life would, from now on, be made of — that there was a kind of kindness in this country he had been given a glimpse of, in two days, from two old people, that the magistracy did not know existed and would not, if it knew, be able to do anything about. The country was full of it. The country was full of small ledgers in old heads — Cao Ergou's, the widow Shen's, Old Zhang's — that ran on debts forty years old, on names not written down, on small spades carried at the hour of the rat in the dark.

He understood that he was, in some way, being entered onto these ledgers as he traveled.

He understood that he was beginning to keep one of his own.

The curtain settled. The widow was gone. The lamp burned low.

Heizi closed his eyes.

He slept the second good sleep of his life on the road.

In the morning, the widow Shen was back at her cot, with the small spade hung again on the wall, and the hempen wrap put back into the chest, and her grey hair against the wood, and her old face turned toward the wall.

She did not speak of the night.

Neither did Heizi.

But when, in the late morning, after a thick porridge with a small piece of dried fish in it and a long slow conversation about the names beyond the third valley and the small dangers of the fourth valley's path, the four boys took their leave at her door — when she pressed into Heizi's hand a small folded piece of white cloth with three days' worth of millet in it and a small pinch of salt and a single piece of dried pork — when she said, only: "Go. Walk slow. Carry the names. Come back if you can. Do not come back if you cannot." — when he bowed to her, and she did not bow to him, but laid her old hand once on the top of his head, the way Old Zhang and Cao Ergou had laid theirs — when he stepped back out of the clearing into the cool clear morning of the fifth day on the road, with the willow's forked top behind him and the third valley opening ahead —

He understood, in a way that had been dimly present since the burial yesterday afternoon and was now clear, that he had begun to be made into the thing his foster father had told him he would be made into.

He had begun to be a man on whom, at small and large doors all the way to the end of his life, old people would lay their hands once, light, and let go.

He carried the cloth in the inner pocket of his shirt, against his ribs, beside the indigo pouch and the second bead and the wrapped jade with his foster mother's hair, and the small marker at the second bend of the second valley fell behind him with each step.

The third valley opened.