8: The Old Man at the Tree

Old Zhang stood beside him without moving for the time it took Heizi to find his legs.

The old man did not look at his daughter at first. He looked, instead, at the trunk of the tree — at the place where his hand had rested for one moment when he came up — at the bark of the tree, which was old and grey and crossed by the lichens that grew on persimmon trees in this part of Hebei in the third moon. He looked at the trunk the way a man looks at a wall to which he has been brought to be told something he already knows. He kept his eyes there for a count of perhaps twenty breaths. Then he lifted them.

He looked up at her face.

His face did not change. Heizi, watching him sidelong, saw the old jaw set very slightly and saw the old eyes take her in and saw the old eyes move over her, slowly, without hurry — over the indigo robe with the small white knot-work at the collar, over the bound hair with the single wooden hairpin, over the rope at her throat, over the small kicked stone two finger-widths to the side of where it had stood — and he saw the old eyes go on to take in the rain on her bound hair and the way the lowest branch had bent under her weight by perhaps a hand's-breadth and the way her bare feet hung very still and very straight, the way the feet of girls in this village hung when they were sitting on a low wall in summer, swinging their legs, except that these feet were not swinging.

He looked. He took her in.

When he had taken her in, he closed his eyes for one breath. Then he opened them.

"She did it well," he said.

Heizi did not understand at first.

The old man was not addressing him; the old man was speaking to the tree, to the rain, to whatever in the cold morning air would hear him; but the words had been heard, and Heizi had heard them, and he did not understand them. *She did it well.* What was the *it*? What was the well? In what country, by what measure, on what morning could the words *she did it well* have anything to do with what was hanging in front of them?

Then he understood.

The good robe. The bound hair. The clean kicked stone. The folded square of blue cloth on the kitchen bench. The pouch and the second bead set out on the chest. The dried sweet flag laid back between the folds of a robe that would, in the next hour, be folded by other hands. The latch of the back door clicked back softly into place. The gate that did not creak because the old man had oiled it. The hour chosen — the hour after the tiger but before the cock — at which there would be no one in the lane to see her walk past, no one to follow her, no one who could intervene.

She had done what she had decided to do with the small unhurried dignity of a person who had decided it on her own time, and Old Zhang, who had lived in the world long enough to know in detail what was done to girls in canal camps, was telling his foster son — was telling, perhaps, his daughter, in whatever language the dead understood — that this had not been a defeat.

Heizi nodded. He could not speak. The rain came down on his head and on his shoulders and into his collar and down his back, and he thought, without thinking it as a thought, that for the rest of his life rain would smell of his sister.

He sat down on the smooth flat stone she had stood on.

He did not mean to. His legs went without his permission. He sat. The stone was warm at the place she had stood; he sat where the warmth was; the warmth, by now, was nearly gone, but a small remnant of it lay in the center of the stone like a hand's-breadth of summer in the middle of a cold morning, and he sat on the warmth, and the cold of the rest of the stone took the backs of his thighs.

Old Zhang did not say *get up*. He understood. He had outlived his own legs more than once in his life. He stood beside his foster son for one moment longer, and then he sat too — slowly, with the small grunt the bad hip made on a wet morning — and the two of them sat side by side on the smooth flat stone, with the rain coming down, with the old persimmon tree above them holding what it had been asked to hold for one more interval, and the village in the distance going on with the small ordinary sounds of its waking — a cock at last, in some far yard; a second cock answering; a goat; the distant ringing of the smith's morning hammer.

The smith's hammer was Wang the smith. Wang the smith did not yet know.

Old Zhang sat for a long time without speaking.

Then he said, in a voice no louder than the rain:

"In Da-ye three, when my brother went to the canal, my brother had a small daughter. She was four. She was the only child of his that lived past infancy. After he did not come back, the wife went to her father's village in the autumn, and she took the daughter with her, and the daughter lived to ten. The daughter died in the next bad-water year. Her mother sent word, by a cousin, to the village. I was the only one of my brother's family left in this village then. I went. The daughter had been buried in her grandfather's plot in a hamlet I had never been to. The plot had no marker. The grandfather said he would set a marker in the year he could afford a stone. He did not. He died in Da-ye six. The plot has no marker now. I do not know whose ground my niece is buried in."

He paused.

"I have thought of her, many times. I have thought of her at the well. I have thought of her at the harvest. I have thought of her on this bench, in the doorway, in the dark of the night when the wind comes up. I have thought, every time, that I would like to know whose ground she is buried in. I have thought, every time, that I will not know."

He breathed in. He breathed out.

"Mei-er chose her own ground," he said. "She will be buried beside her foster mother in the lower field, where I work every day. I will know whose ground she is in. I will know it tomorrow. I will know it in the year after. I will know it the year I die. The knowing is the small thing she has given me by choosing as she has chosen."

He paused.

"That is what I meant by *she did it well*. She did not let the world choose the ground."

Heizi could not answer.

He understood, sitting on the warm part of the stone, that the words he could not yet speak were the words that would not, in his lifetime, ever come. *I should have told her. I should have known. I should have woken at the latch.* These words were in him; they would always be in him; but they were not, on this stone, the words that needed to be spoken, and Old Zhang, in his slow way, was saying so. Old Zhang was saying: *Heizi, do not begin, today, the long argument with yourself about what you might have done. The argument will go on for the rest of your life if you let it. Do not let it begin today. Today there is a body to take down, and a daughter to wash, and a grave to dig. The argument can wait. The argument will wait. The argument will be there tomorrow.*

The rain kept falling.

After a while, Old Zhang put his hand once on the back of Heizi's neck. Only once. The old hand was cold. It rested for the space of two breaths and lifted.

"Heizi."

"Father."

"We will take her down together."

"Yes."

"You will hold her at the hips. I will cut the rope. You will hold her until I have her shoulders. We will lay her on the ground first, and then we will carry her."

"Yes."

"You will not look at her face yet. There is time for the looking. There is no time today. Today we are working."

"Yes."

The old man stood — slowly, with the small careful unfolding of an old back that did not enjoy being asked to stand from sitting in the rain on a cold stone, but did it, because the work was the work and the work would not do itself. He moved to the trunk of the tree. He drew the small knife from his belt. The knife had a handle of dark wood, smoothed by Old Zhang's grip over forty years; the blade was short and clean and had been honed last week; it was not a knife for cutting rope, but it would cut rope.

Heizi rose. He went to her.

He put his hands on her hips through the indigo robe. He felt, through the cloth, the cold body underneath. The body was the body of his sister. It was not the body of his sister. It was both. He held her as the old man had told him to hold her — at the small inward curve where the hipbones came up under the cloth — and he felt, through his fingers, the slight shifting of her weight as the rope above gave a small tremor, and then the rope was cut, and she came down into his arms.

She was lighter than he had thought she would be.

He had carried her once before, when she was twelve and had fainted in the high field on the day of her mother's burial; he had carried her down the path to the house, and she had been heavy then. She was lighter now. Either she had grown lighter in the four years since, eating rations a girl in this household ate, or she was lighter because the part of her that had had weight had gone out of her sometime in the last hour.

Old Zhang was at her shoulders before Heizi had taken half a breath. The old hands took her under the arms. The old face, now close to her face for the first time, looked at her — only for a moment; only long enough to see — and looked away.

"Down," the old man said. "Slowly. Set her on the ground first."

They set her down.

They set her on the wet earth at the foot of the persimmon tree, on a small flatness between two roots that, by some small mercy of geography, was almost level. The robe spread under her. The bound hair touched the wet earth and the small wooden hairpin held. The hands, which had been at her sides as she hung, went to her sides on the ground. Old Zhang, kneeling, took one hand and laid it across her stomach, and laid the other beside it, and arranged her arms in the way of a woman laid out for a wake, and Heizi, watching, understood that the old man had done this many times before — that he had laid out his wife in this same way, and his wife's mother, and his brother in some far village, and the niece whose ground he did not know, and that the old hands had a memory in them for this work that the rest of the body did not need to consult.

Old Zhang reached up with a small soft motion and closed her eyes.

They had been open. Heizi had not let himself see. The old hands, the way they passed across her face, did the closing in one slow motion that Heizi only half-saw, because his eyes were on his sister's bound hair and on the wet earth at her cheek and on the small white knot-work at the collar of her robe.

Then Old Zhang sat back on his heels.

He did not weep. He had not wept under the tree and he was not going to weep now. He had done his weeping in some other year, in some other rain, and he had told himself, on the path down from the threshing floor, that he would not pay it twice. The face was the face of a man who had decided what the morning was going to be, and who had decided it on the path, and who was now executing it.

"We will carry her home," Old Zhang said.

Heizi nodded.

"You will take the shoulders. I will take the feet. Walk slowly. The path is wet. You will not slip."

"No."

"If you slip, Heizi —"

"I will not slip."

The old man looked at him. The old eyes held him for a long beat — a beat that was not gentle, that was the beat of a man taking the measure of another man's promise, that was the beat of a small first acknowledgment that the boy in front of him was no longer a boy he was carrying through a household but a man he was, on this wet morning, working alongside.

"All right."

Heizi knelt at her shoulders. He lifted her — one hand under each shoulder blade, the way a man would lift a wounded comrade by the upper body. Old Zhang lifted her at the calves. Together they raised her. Her weight was small between them but real. The bound hair fell back against Heizi's wrist. The single wooden hairpin held.

They began to walk.

They walked slowly, as the old man had told him. They walked across the lower field, between the wet rows where Old Zhang's millet would, in two months, be sprouting; they walked past the threshing floor; they walked up the path toward the village. The rain came down on them. The rain ran off Heizi's hair and into his eyes. He did not blink it away. To blink was to disturb the careful even pace of his walk, and he had told the old man he would not slip, and he was not going to slip.

They came to the edge of the village.

The first person they met was the headman, Old Cui, who was standing at his own gate in his old grey rain-cloak with his hands folded inside his sleeves. He had been waiting. He had been waiting since some hour Heizi could not measure, perhaps since dawn, perhaps since before. He saw them coming. He stepped out into the lane. He did not say anything. He fell in behind them, three paces back, in the manner of a man falling in for a procession.

The next person they met was Wang the smith, who was at the door of his forge with a black-streaked rag in his hand and the morning's first iron still cooling on the anvil behind him. He saw them. He did not say anything. He took off the rag. He let it fall to the earth at his feet. He stepped into the lane and fell in behind Old Cui.

The third was the carpenter Lu, with his cough already starting. The fourth and fifth were the carpenter's wife and his lame nephew Tie-zhu, who, Heizi noticed with the small distant part of himself that was already calculating, looked at Heizi as he passed with a face whose expression said, *I will still come tonight*. The sixth was a woman from down the lane whose name Heizi could not, in this moment, summon, although he had known her since he was small. The seventh was Wang Er, in his blacksmith's apron, with his hair wet from the rain, who had come out of the back of the forge as soon as he had seen the procession from the door, and who took a place behind his father, three paces back, with his head bent.

By the time they came to the gate of Old Zhang's house, eleven of the village were walking behind them.

None of them spoke.

The procession came into the courtyard. The dog at the doorway raised its head and lowered it again. The dog had been a dog for sixteen years, and it had seen this household through most of its losses, and the dog laid its head back on its paws and watched the procession cross the courtyard with the patient old eyes of an animal that no longer asked the world to be other than the world.

They carried her into the back room.

They laid her on her own sleeping mat. Old Zhang knelt beside her, and Heizi knelt beside him, and the women who had come — three or four of them; Heizi did not turn his head to count — gathered at the edge of the room and waited. Old Zhang looked up at them. He did not have to ask. The oldest of them, the widow of Old Lu's brother, with the dry voice of someone who had not laughed in a long time, came forward with a basin and a cloth, and the others stepped in behind her, and Old Zhang and Heizi rose and went out of the room.

The women would wash her.

The women would unbind her hair and comb it and bind it again, with a different binding, the binding for the dead; they would lift the indigo robe off her and would wash her body with the small careful patience of women who had washed many bodies; they would dress her in a clean robe of pale unbleached hemp; they would lay the indigo robe folded at her feet, with the dried sweet flag still in its folds, and the small white knot-work at the collar facing up. They would do this work without speaking, the way the village's women had done this work in every house of the village for a hundred years, and Old Zhang and Heizi would sit on the threshold step and would not speak either, because the work that was being done in the back room was women's work and was not for the eyes of men, and the men's work had not yet begun.

The men's work was the grave.

Old Zhang sat on the threshold. He did not pick up the hoe. He sat with his hands open in his lap. Heizi sat beside him. The dog, at the doorway, settled its head between its paws and watched the rain.

Out in the lane, the village had gathered. They did not come into the courtyard; they did not need to. They stood at the gate and a little way down the lane in both directions, with their heads bent, and they waited. They had waited at this gate before, for other dead, in other years. They knew what was needed. They were the village. They would, in their own time, in their own ways, do the small unshowy work that villages did when one of theirs went under.

Wang Er, at the gate, looked at Heizi once across the courtyard. Their eyes met. Heizi nodded — only once, only very small — and Wang Er nodded back. *Tonight*, the nods said. *Yes.*

The rain came down on the courtyard, and on the gathered village, and on the persimmon tree at the edge of the lower field, where the cut rope hung still from the lowest branch, and where the smooth flat stone sat at the base of the trunk two finger-widths from where it had stood for thirty years, and where, by midmorning, Old Cui's eldest son would come quietly and would gather up the cut rope and would coil it and would take it away — because some things were left in fields, and some things were not, and the cut rope from a daughter's tree was not a thing the tree was asked to keep.

Old Zhang sat on the threshold with his hands open in his lap.

After a long time, he spoke once, in a low voice that was almost not a voice.

"I will dig the grave," he said. "You will help me."

"Yes, father."

"You will not dig it alone. You are not yet a man who digs his sister's grave alone."

"No, father."

"In a few years, you will be. Today you are not."

He closed his hands. He opened them again. The rain dripped from the eaves into a small puddle at his feet.

"In a few years," Old Zhang said, very softly, "you will be a man who digs many graves. I am sorry to tell you so. But I am too old to lie to you, and you are too old to be lied to. I have watched you for fifteen years. I know what you are. I know what is coming. The world does not waste boys like you on small lives. I have not been able, all these years, to tell you so. I am telling you so now, on this morning, because today is the day you will believe it."

He paused.

"You are not a boy who can kill," he said. "You will be made to. The world will require it of you. You will fail it sometimes. The failing will cost you, Heizi. The failing will cost you more than you can imagine yet. But you must, all the same, live anyway. That is the only instruction. Live anyway."

He turned, finally, and looked at his foster son.

"I am old. I will not see what you become. I am telling you this now, on this threshold, on this morning, because there will not be another morning on which I can tell you this and have you hear it. Hear it. Hear it once, and carry it."

Heizi heard.

He heard it once. He carried it. He would carry it for forty years, into Wagang and out of Wagang, into Luoyang and out of Luoyang, into the inner court of Tang Taizong and out of it, into the foothills of Songshan and into the doorway of a small village house in his own retirement, and the sentence — *live anyway* — would sit in him, unwearing, the way a grain of millet sits inside a closed jar through a winter without losing its weight.

He nodded. He could not speak.

The old man laid one hand on the top of his head. Once. Light. Gone.

Inside the house, in the back room, the women washed his sister.

Outside, in the lane, the village waited.

The rain, which had been owed for three weeks, fell at last on the village and on the lower field and on the persimmon tree, and the world that had taken what it had decided to take did not, in the falling of the rain, give any of it back.