9: The Funeral, Such as It Was

The funeral was in the rain. The funeral was small. The headman Old Cui came; the carpenter Lu came; Wang the smith and Wang Er came; the carpenter's wife came; one or two of the older women came with white cloth wrapped over their hair, the small village version of mourning that the poor wore when they could not afford the full hempen mourning robes. The other villagers stayed in their houses with their doors not quite shut. To attend in numbers was to acknowledge, in public, what they had no power to acknowledge in private; and the riders kept records of the public mourning of girls whose names had been on a white-cord slip; and the riders had a way, in their slow careful office, of making such records cost a household later. So the village stayed at its doors. The village would, in its own way, mourn — by silence, by the small sustained absence of laughter from the lanes for several days, by the small extra portions of grain sent quietly to Old Zhang's gate over the next two weeks — but the village would not gather, in numbers, at the lower field.

It was the right thing. It was also the small wrong thing of a wrong world.

Heizi did not feel anger about it. He had, lying on the kang in the dark, thought he might. He found, walking out to the lower field with the small bundle of his sister's body wrapped in unbleached hemp on the carrying board between himself and Old Zhang, that he had no anger to spend. There was no anger for the village. The village had its own losses. The village would lose more this season; six girls would go to the canal in two days; six boys; and of all of them, perhaps two would come back. The village was bracing itself, in the small steady way of villages, for what was coming; and the not-coming-out for Mei-er was part of the bracing.

He was not angry. He was only — there was no word for what he was. The word would come, perhaps, in some later year. On this morning he was a body with hands, walking with the carrying board across the lower field, with the rain coming down, with his foster father at the front of the board and himself at the back, and Wang Er — who had come out of the forge in his blacksmith's apron and had not gone home to change — walking three paces behind, carrying the spade.

The grave was at the eastern edge of the lower field. It was beside the small flat place where Old Zhang's wife had been buried twelve years before. The flat place was marked by a single grey stone, irregular, of the kind one pulled out of a field in the spring, set upright with no inscription; the inscription on a peasant's grave was in the head and the heart of the people who came to it, not in the stone. Old Zhang had set that stone himself in Da-ye three. He had said, at the time, that he would set another beside it when his time came. He had not, today, expected to be setting one for his daughter twelve years before his own.

The ground was wet. The grave was not deep. They could not afford a deep grave; the wet earth slid back as they dug; the cold rain fell into the hole; the spade came up, each pass, with mud heavier by the weight of the water in it. Old Zhang dug for a quarter hour. He stopped, and Heizi took the spade. Heizi dug for half an hour. Wang Er, who had said nothing all morning, stepped forward and put a hand on the shaft of the spade. Heizi looked up at him. Wang Er did not say anything. He held out his hand. Heizi gave him the spade.

Wang Er dug.

Wang Er was seventeen, and he was a smith's son, and his hands and arms were the hands and arms of a boy who had been at the bellows for six years; he could lift the wet earth out of the grave at twice Heizi's pace. He dug for an hour. He did not look up. He did not say anything. The rain fell on his apron and ran down it and dripped from the apron's hem. He moved the spade with the patience of a man at the anvil, the same wide deliberate motions, the same conserved breath; and slowly, at the foot of his work, the grave began to be a grave.

Old Zhang sat on the small grey stone of his wife's grave and watched. He did not weep. He was not going to weep today. He was sixty years old and there were things he had decided, on the path, would and would not happen; and weeping, today, was not one of them.

When the grave was deep enough — not deep, not as deep as a young man would have dug it for a sister he loved, but as deep as the wet earth would allow — Wang Er stepped out of it. He set the spade across the lip. He nodded once, very small, to Heizi.

They lifted Mei-er from the carrying board. They took her in their arms — Heizi at the shoulders, Wang Er at the feet — and they lowered her into the grave. The hempen wrap was wet at the back from the rain. The shape of her under the wrap was small. They set her down. Heizi, kneeling at the lip, saw, for one moment, the small dried sprig of sweet flag where one of the women had laid it on the wrap above her chest; the women, in their washing, had taken the dried sprig out of the folded indigo robe and had laid it where it would go into the ground with her. Heizi looked at the sprig for the space of a breath, and the small old smell of it came up to him through the rain — the dry warm smell of sweet flag in a folded chest, which was the smell of his sister's hands every spring of his life since he had been seven — and he closed his eyes for one breath, and opened them, and stood.

Old Zhang stood from the small grey stone. He came to the lip of the grave. He looked down at his daughter for a long moment. He did not bend; he did not kneel. He stood. The old face was not changed. The old eyes were not weeping. The old hands hung at his sides.

"Mei-er," he said.

He said only the name.

He said it at the level of an ordinary speaking voice, as if calling his daughter for the noon meal across a small courtyard, as if she might step in from the back garden in a moment in her work-stained robe with her hands floury from the morning's bread, as if the saying of her name in this field on this morning were no different from the hundred small daily sayings of her name in every year of her short life.

He said it once.

He turned, slowly, and walked away from the grave toward the path.

He did not look back.

Heizi understood. The old man would not be present at the filling of the grave. It was the prerogative of fathers; old men of the village, when they had buried their wives, had often walked away after the saying of the name, and left the filling to the sons and the brothers; the filling was not the father's work. It was the work of the people who would, in their own time, also fill the grave of the father. It was a kind of practice for the work of the next generation.

Wang Er picked up the spade.

The carpenter Lu, who had stood by all morning with his cough held back as well as he could, came forward now. He had brought a second spade from his shed. He stepped to the other side of the grave. He looked at Heizi. Heizi nodded. The carpenter Lu, who had buried two children of his own in this field and who had, on this morning, come out into the rain with a cough that was killing him by quarter-inches, began to fill the grave from the eastern side. Wang Er filled from the western. Heizi stood at the foot. He was not given a spade. There were only the two. He understood that he was not, on this morning, the one who would fill. He was the one who would watch the filling. It was perhaps another small kindness of the village; he did not, on this morning, ask for another spade.

The earth went down on her in slow careful motions. The first turning of earth was the hardest. The carpenter Lu, in his old age, paused with the first spadeful suspended above the shape of her under the wrap, and his cough caught in him for one breath, and he closed his eyes, and he tipped the spade, and the earth came down on the small dried sweet flag and on the wrap and on her, and the small dried smell, which had been with him for one moment, was gone under the rain.

The second was easier. The third was easier still. Within a quarter hour, the grave was filled.

They mounded the earth above her in the small low mound the village used for new graves. Wang Er, with the careful eye of a smith, made the mound even. The carpenter Lu set his spade aside and stood back. Wang Er, when he had finished, set his spade aside as well.

The village that had stayed at its gates began, in ones and twos, to drift away — the older woman with the white cloth on her hair leading the others, with the small tact of people who knew when a family needed to be left at its grave alone. They went down the path toward the village. They did not speak.

The carpenter Lu, before going, set on the head of the mound a small bowl of millet that his wife had given him to bring. The bowl was of plain clay. The millet was the morning's. The bowl had a small chip out of one side — Heizi, for some reason, noticed the chip; he had been noticing chips and small flaws in objects since he had come into the kitchen this morning; the chip was the small mark of an ordinary kitchen, of a household that gave what it had and not more. Old Lu the carpenter bowed at the grave once, very slightly, and went off down the path with his cough catching in him, and his wife at his elbow, holding the back of his sleeve.

That left Heizi and Wang Er at the grave.

They stood for a long moment without speaking.

The rain came down. Wang Er's apron was soaked through. Heizi's shirt clung to his back. The dog from the headman's gate had, at some hour of the morning, drifted up the path on the small old patient feet of an old dog, and had lain down a short way off, in the shelter of a low stone, and was watching them.

"I leave tonight," Wang Er said, at last.

"Tonight," Heizi said.

"You said the second night."

"Tonight," Heizi said again. "There is no longer a reason to wait."

Wang Er nodded. He did not ask the obvious question, which was *and your father*. He had known Old Zhang since he was small, and he had heard already, in the way Old Zhang had said the name at the grave, what Heizi already knew. The old man would not leave. The old man had nothing left to take with him; he would stay with the things he had buried, because to stay with them was the only loyalty he could still pay. Wang Er had a mother who would not leave either; he would, tonight at his own gate, have to make a similar small terrible parting.

"Lu's nephew," Wang Er said.

"He will come. I spoke to him yesterday at the woodpile. He cried, but he will come. I saw him in the procession this morning. He looked at me. He is ready."

"And the fourth?"

"Ah Si," Heizi said. "I have not spoken to him yet. I will speak to him this afternoon. He will come."

"You said yesterday Ah Si is twelve. Maybe thirteen."

"He is twelve, possibly thirteen. He has been eating very little for two years. He sleeps in the carpenter's woodshed; the carpenter is feeding him at the rate of a chicken. If we do not take him, he will be on this road in some other month with no one to take him at all."

"Four is many."

"Four is what we have."

Wang Er thought. He was always thinking. He was always pushing the thought up the small hill before the words came.

"Heizi," he said. "Are we going to be able to do this?"

"I do not know."

"That is not the answer of a leader."

"It is the answer I have."

Wang Er nodded slowly. "All right," he said. "It is the answer that is honest. I will take it. The other answer, when it has come, you may give me later. Tonight I will come because you have said tonight, and because my mother said *do not let the second son be the second loss*, and because if I do not come tonight I will, in three days, walk to the eastern crossroads with my own feet, and I will become, in some far month in some far place I will not see twice, what my brother became in Da-ye three. I am coming. You are coming. The other two are coming. It is enough. We will see what we will see."

Heizi did not answer. He did not need to. The conversation had been done.

He looked back down at the grave.

The mound was small. The millet bowl, on the mound, had begun, in the last few minutes, to fill with rainwater. The bowl was nearly full. He did not move it. The rainwater, he thought — without thinking it as a thought — was a kind of offering; the bowl had been put out for her; the bowl had been allowed to fill; the millet would, in the bowl, in the rain, in the days to come, sit and slowly rot, and the rotting would feed, in some small way, the new growth that would come up from the mound by midsummer; and in some way that he could not have spoken, this seemed correct, seemed true to the manner of his sister, who had never wasted a thing in her life.

He knelt at the head of the mound.

He laid his hand on the wet earth. The earth was cold. The earth was hers.

He was fifteen.

He made, with his hand on the earth, the only promise he would make in his life that he would keep without exception. He did not say it aloud. He said it in the inside of his mouth, where the words had been sitting like pebbles for two days. He did not need to say it aloud; the saying was complete in the inside of his mouth; the saying was, in its small careful interior way, more binding than any spoken oath he would ever, in the years to come, be asked to swear.

*I will not leave a girl to that camp. Not one. Not while I am alive. I will not pass a girl on a list and walk on. I will not stand at a gate and not speak. I will not be the brother of any sister who has no brother. I will not be slow again. The slowness has cost what it has cost. I am paying, today, with the small slow filling of a grave by another boy's hands, and I am paying with the rest of my life. I will pay. I will not be slow again.*

He took his hand off the earth.

He stood.

The promise he had made was the founding promise of his life. It was the promise he would keep through every road and every camp and every court he would ever walk into. He would, in coming years, fail many other things — he would fail to kill men he should have killed; he would fail to warn brothers he should have warned; he would fail to save the wives he loved; he would fail, in the end, to save Lu Jingzhi; he would fail more times than he would, in his fortieth year, be able to count. But he would not, in any year of his life, in any field or any town or any palace or any frontier, pass a girl on a list and walk on. He would never come to be told of a girl in a camp who had been within his reach, and not have done what he could. The promise was small; the promise was specific; the promise was a small low fence around a small private piece of his soul; and he kept it, all the way to the end.

He did not know, on this morning, that this was what the promise was. He knew only the words he had said in the inside of his mouth at the head of his sister's grave. The understanding of what the promise was would come later, slowly, through forty years of doing it.

He stood up.

He looked at Wang Er.

"Tonight," he said.

"Tonight," Wang Er said.

They walked back across the lower field, past the persimmon tree — past it, not toward it; he did not look up at the lowest branch; the cut rope was gone, and the smooth flat stone had been moved by Old Cui's eldest son back to the place it had stood for thirty years, in some small unobtrusive act of mercy that would, in years to come, be one of the things Heizi remembered about the village without being able to say why — past the threshing floor, past the well, past the silent row of houses with their doors not quite shut, and into the courtyard of his foster father's house.

Old Zhang was at the threshold.

The old man had not gone inside. He had been sitting on the threshold step in the rain. His coat was wet through. He looked up as they came in. He looked at Heizi. He looked at Wang Er.

"Wang Er," Old Zhang said.

"Yes, sir."

"Eat with us at the noon hour."

"Yes, sir."

"There is millet. There will be a small piece of dried turnip. There will not be anything more. You will eat it because to refuse it is to refuse a kindness, and we have no other kindness to give today."

"Yes, sir. I will eat it."

Old Zhang nodded.

He stood up — slowly, with the small grunt of the bad hip — and went into the house. The dog at the doorway lifted its head and lowered it. Heizi and Wang Er stood for a moment in the courtyard, in the rain, side by side, with the wet apron of the smith's son slowly drying against the body's heat under it, and the wet shirt of the foster son clinging to his back, and neither of them spoke.

They went inside.

The noon meal was the smallest meal Heizi had ever eaten in this house. There was millet. There was a single small piece of dried turnip cut into three even portions. There was no salt; the salt jar, on the bench, sat with its chipped wooden lid turned the wrong way, the chip facing out for the first time in nine years, because the daughter of the household who had always turned the chip away had not been there to turn it. Heizi noticed the chip. He did not move the lid. He let the chip face out.

The three of them ate slowly. They did not speak. The rain went on outside. The dog lay across the doorway in its old patient way. Mei-er's mat, in the back room beyond the curtain, had been smoothed by the women into the way it would now be left, and the chest at the foot of the mat had been closed for the last time, with the indigo robe folded on top of it, and the small wooden comb beside the robe, and the small finished indigo pouch and the second wooden bead, which had been laid out on the chest for him to find, were no longer on the chest.

They were in the inside pocket of his shirt, against his ribs, where he had put them when he had come back into the house an hour ago, and where they would remain, both of them — the small finished pouch, the second bead — for forty years.