by Ge Fei
As she entered the grove, Zhang Jiyuan finally sighed and stood up. “It seems that death has just visited this family.”
Xiumi stopped. She turned to look at her uncle. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me,” Zhang Jiyuan said as he walked over to her.
“Then how do you know?”
“It’s plain as day,” Zhang Jiyuan replied. “And it wasn’t just one person, either.”
“You’re just making that up. How could you possibly know that someone has died?”
“Why don’t you listen to my explanation, then tell me if it makes sense?”
Now they were walking side by side beneath the bamboo canopy. Dew had already condensed on the leaves; Xiumi waved away the fine, wet branches as they touched her hair. The distraction of talking about something totally unrelated to her instantly calmed her racing heart. Zhang Jiyuan explained: “You remember when Lilypad asked Chen Xiuji why such a nice house didn’t have anyone living in it, and he wiped away a tear?”
“I remember . . .” Xiumi murmured. She no longer felt embarrassed, even when Zhang Jiyuan’s arm bumped her shoulder.
“This afternoon I found a cradle under the beams beneath the hanging gourds. It looked like it was recently in use, which means an infant must have lived in the house.”
“So where did the child go?”
“It’s dead,” Zhang Jiyuan replied.
“How could that be?” Frightened, Xiumi stopped and looked up at her relative.
“Hear me out.” A faint smile passed over Zhang Jiyuan’s pallid face. The two of them continued to stroll.
“There is a well in the middle of the courtyard. I looked at it closely—it’s been filled in completely with stones.”
“But why would they fill the well up?”
“Because someone had died inside it.”
“You mean the child fell in the well and drowned?”
“The outside wall of the well is too high, and there’s a cover that’s weighted down with a stone; a baby couldn’t possibly fall in.” Zhang Jiyuan reached out to push bamboo branches out of Xiumi’s way, knocking her bun in the process.
“So how do you think the child died?”
“Disease,” Zhang Jiyuan replied. “Someone stuck paper talismans against illness on the walls of the room Baoshen and I are staying in. So the child must have been sick enough that Mr. Chen paid for a shaman to perform an exorcism ritual. But the child died anyway.”
“Then who died in the well?”
“The mother—she threw herself in—”
“And Mr. Chen had it filled in afterward,” Xiumi concluded.
“So it goes.”
He stopped unexpectedly and turned to look at her. They were on the verge of passing through the bamboo grove. The moon had been washed clean of its red haze. She could hear the trickling water of a spring somewhere beyond her sight.
“Are you afraid?” Zhang Jiyuan asked softly, his voice muffled as if he had something stuck in his throat.
“I am,” she barely whispered.
Zhang Jiyuan put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be afraid.” She caught another whiff of his body odor, its mix of tobacco smoke and sweat, and then heard her shoulder blade pop. Her breathing got louder despite her best efforts to calm it. The rustle of the bamboo, the limpid shine of the moon, and the murmur of spring water running over stones were suddenly translated into a language that she could comprehend. She had already made up her mind that whatever Zhang Jiyuan asked of her, she would do, and whatever he did, she would keep to herself. She thought about her dream from several days prior: when she asked him where the door was, he slipped his hand into her dress and whispered, “The door is right here . . .”
“Little Sister . . .” Zhang Jiyuan seemed to be in the midst of a momentous decision. Xiumi watched his brow furrow and his expression grow uneasy; the moonlight showed her a face full of pain and anxiety.
“Yes?” Xiumi asked, looking up at him.
“Don’t be afraid,” Zhang Jiyuan finally said with a smile. He patted her shoulder, then took his hand away. They left the bamboo grove and arrived at their courtyard. After a pause, Zhang Jiyuan asked her if she’d like to sit on the doorstep for a while. “Okay,” Xiumi replied.
The two sat side by side on the stoop. Zhang Jiyuan filled his pipe with tobacco, while Xiumi put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. The mountain breeze on her face felt both refreshing and sad. He asked her what books she was reading, if she’d ever been to Meicheng, and why she always seemed so cranky and preoccupied. She answered each question in turn. Yet he did not reciprocate. When she asked where he really came from, why he had come to Puji, what he was doing that day at Master Xue’s home, and why he was looking for a six-fingered man, he either replied evasively or simply chuckled and said nothing.
His expression suddenly changed when she mentioned the fisherman she had seen outside the house that day. Now he asked after every detail of what Xiumi had seen, and he noted that if the man had been there to fish, it was strange that he had neither fishing line nor hook.
“Did you see what he looked like?” Zhang Jiyuan stood up and looked at her with startling urgency.
“He wore a black monk’s robe with a felt hat on his head. Hunchbacked. I saw him staring at us through the reeds . . .”
“Damn it!” Zhang Jiyuan hissed to himself. “Could it really be him?”
“You know him?” Xiumi asked. She was starting to feel genuinely afraid.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” Zhang Jiyuan snapped at her. He seemed to have changed into another person altogether. Xiumi said nothing. She realized that this was a crucial matter for him.
“This is no good,” he muttered. “I have to get back immediately.”
“But there are no ferries crossing the river this late,” Xiumi said.
“Damn it, this could be a disaster . . .” He stared at her blankly, seemingly unaware of what to do next.
The sound of talk and laughter reached them through the bamboo grove, followed by the bobbing glow of a lantern on a cart. Mother and Baoshen had returned. Zhang Jiyuan said nothing; he turned and strode inside the courtyard, a black look on his face.
•
What an idiot! What right did he have to get so angry all of a sudden? Feeling abandoned, Xiumi went back to her own room, lit the lamp, and stood by the window. The memory rankled, and the skin on her face still burned hot. She regretted mentioning the hunchbacked fisherman. Lilypad brought in a basin of water so Xiumi could wash her face, but Xiumi ignored her. “Are you going to bed or not?” Lilypad asked. “We’ve been walking all day, and I’m as tired as a dog. I don’t know what you want to do, but I’m getting in bed.” She disrobed and crawled between the sheets.
Xiumi’s hand accidentally touched something hidden under the red cloth on the shelves. Mr. Chen certainly was a strange one: Why cover regular old stuff with red silk? She touched the object again: it was soft and full, like the perfumed sachets women keep with their makeup kits. But when she lifted the cloth, the unveiling of the object gave her such an intense shock that she cried out.
It was a pair of baby shoes, traditionally embroidered with tiger faces on the front.
Lilypad sat up in bed and gaped when she saw what Xiumi had found. After a long pause, Xiumi asked, “Do you think this room gets haunted at night?”
“Haunted? It’s just a room, why would it be haunted?” Lilypad looked at her with startled eyes beneath raised eyebrows.
“A child died in this room not too long ago,” Xiumi replied. Her eyes caught his little shadow in every dark corner. She jumped into bed without even washing her face.
“You can’t scare me.” Lilypad smiled. “Everyone knows I don’t scare easily. Most tricks don’t affect me.”
“You’re not af
raid of anything?”
“Nothing at all,” Lilypad said.
She recounted one evening when she had run off and had to spend the night in a graveyard. Just as she was waking up the next morning, she felt something playing with her hair. Reaching out, she touched something smooth and tubular. “Guess what it was?”
“I give up.”
“It was a huge green-and-black python. When I opened my eyes, its tongue was flicking at my face,” Lilypad boasted. “If it had been you, that would have scared you to death, wouldn’t it?”
“Who gets scared by snakes? If it had been me I wouldn’t have been afraid either.”
“But you’re afraid of ghosts?”
Xiumi considered this for a while. She turned over to look at Lilypad, then turned back to gaze at the top of their mosquito netting. Almost as if speaking to herself, she said, “If it really were a ghost, I might not be scared. But I’d definitely be scared of something like a ghost that’s not really a ghost, or a person who’s not really a person.”
“So you mean Zhang Jiyuan?”
The two of them laughed out loud and cuddled up closer. Goofing around with Lilypad drove the fear from Xiumi’s heart and left her more at ease. After they had laughed a while, Xiumi had another idea. “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said to Lilypad, “and we’ll see if you get scared or not.”
“Any story you want. It’ll never happen.”
“If you go to the toilet . . .”
“Why would I do that? I don’t have to pee.” Lilypad looked at her, suddenly confused.
“I’m not telling you to go now. I’m saying that at some point you’ll get up to go to the toilet. Now, besides you and me, there’s nobody else in this room, right?”
“Isn’t that obvious? Who else could there be, other than me and you?” Lilypad glanced around the room as she spoke.
Xiumi continued: “In the middle of the night, you get up to use the toilet. You know that, other than me and you, there’s nobody else in the room.”
“Just tell me what it is.” Lilypad gave her a shove. “My heart’s already beating like a drum. Let me ask you this first: Are the lights on?”
“If the light’s on, it’s even scarier. If it’s still dark it won’t be scary,” Xiumi said with a smile. “You wake up in the middle of the night and need to pee. So you get out of bed and put on your slippers. You see that the bathroom lamp is already lit, just like now. You pull back the curtain and someone is there, sitting on the toilet, grinning at you.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“How should I know?”
“Father.”
Lilypad dove under the covers and whimpered audibly before sticking her head out and saying, “How could such a little girl come up with such a terrifying story? You’ve scared me half to death.”
“I’m not trying to frighten you; he really is out there. Go look if you don’t believe me,” Xiumi replied gravely.
“Stop it, please, I’m begging you, I’m frightened enough as it is. Uncle!” Lilypad panted for a long while before calming down. “Tonight, neither of us is using the toilet.”
•
They went early to the shop the following morning, so that they might meet the monks when they arrived to pick up their rice. Baoshen said that Zhang Jiyuan had left before sunrise, agitated and in a hurry, though Baoshen didn’t know what the big emergency was all about. Mother didn’t respond to this, but peered over at Xiumi. After a pause, she said, “I heard the two of you whooping and screaming all evening. Heaven knows what the ruckus was about.” Lilypad and Xiumi repressed laughter with tight-lipped smiles. Chen Xiuji sent an employee over to them with a bowl of roasted pine nuts to help make the wait a little easier.
Yet the family waited from dawn to dusk without seeing the slightest trace of their quarry. As the sky darkened, Mother had no choice but to lead the party home. Chen Xiuji implored them to stay, saying, “The monks live up in the mountains, quite a distance from here. It’s not an easy trip to make. And you’ve come a long way out here, too. Why not stay for a few days? If nothing else, I’ve got more rice here than you all could ever eat. What if they come back just as you leave?”
To this Mother politely replied, “Our visit has already caused tremendous inconvenience to you and your house. We are sincerely grateful to you, Mr. Chen, for such an expression of integrity and compassion, and we do hope you will receive our paltry gift of silver as a token of that respect, and a scant attempt at compensation for the trouble. Should you ever find it convenient in the future, I do hope you and your good wife will grace us with your presence in Puji.”
Mother’s mention of “your good wife” immediately aroused Xiumi’s suspicion. Hadn’t she died already? Baoshen took out the tael of silver once more, and went back and forth with Chen Xiuji until the other had no choice but to accept. Seeing that Mother was resolved to go home, he gave up trying to argue, and instead accompanied the family with a couple of his employees as far as the main avenue to the ferry before waving goodbye and turning home.
Once Mr. Chen’s silhouette had vanished in the distance, Xiumi began to prod Mother indirectly about his wife: “Yesterday evening, he said she had taken their son back to her parents’ house to help with the cotton harvest, and that’s why we couldn’t meet them.” But if that were the case, she thought, neither his wife nor child had died. Xiumi asked Baoshen if he had noticed the well in the middle of their courtyard.
“Certainly,” Baoshen replied. “I drew a bucket of water up this morning and last night to wash with. Why?”
11
BY THE time they got home, Magpie had long since been in bed and had to be woken up to answer the door. As she let them in, she whispered urgently to Mother that something horrible had happened in Xia village, words sputtering out in no logical order: When they cut the head off . . . the blood spewed everywhere . . . it started in the morning . . . they came along the riverbanks . . . imperial soldiers running everywhere through the village . . . some rode horses and others didn’t, while some had spears and others had scimitars . . . they shouted and swarmed around like a hive of angry wasps. She mentioned Tiger: “As soon as the kid heard someone had died in Xia village, he started to pester me to take him to see the dead body. I wouldn’t, so he had a fit and cried all day until I put him to bed.”
Her scatterbrained answers put an end to Mother’s patience. “Why do you never give me anything but worthless chatter? Who was it that died in Xia village?”
“I’m not sure,” Magpie replied.
“Just tell us slowly; no need to rush,” Baoshen comforted her. “Where did the soldiers come from? Whose head did they cut off?”
“Don’t know,” Magpie said, shaking her head.
“Then why did you say that blood spewed everywhere when the head came off?”
“That’s what I heard someone say. Imperial troops from Meicheng surrounded the village. They cut the guy’s head off right there, then chopped the body into a few pieces and threw it into the pond, and stuck the head on the big tree out in front of the village. Wang Badan, the blacksmith’s apprentice, told me about it. He and his brother went with a few other brave souls from Puji to see what happened. The kid kept screaming about wanting to go with them, but I didn’t let him, and heaven knows I didn’t dare go myself.”
Her report sent Baoshen immediately into the house to check on Tiger.
Lilypad snorted. “And here I thought something important had happened. People die every day in this country, and besides, why should we care if someone in Xia village dies? I’m starving, so let’s just drop it and put some food on the table.” She started to drag Magpie off to the kitchen.
“Wait . . .” Mother stopped them, her gaze focused on Magpie. “Have you seen your uncle Zhang today?”
“He came back at noon. I asked him why he’d come back
alone and where you were, but he just scowled and said nothing. A little while later I saw him carry something down from the studio and shove it in the woodstove. When I asked what he was burning, he just said, ‘It’s over, it’s over.’ ‘What’s over?’ I asked. He said, ‘All of it.’ Then he ran out again. I don’t know where.”
Mother had no more questions. She looked at her own shadow on the wall, then looked at Xiumi. She said she would go to bed now, no need to call her for the meal.
•
Xiumi didn’t sleep that night. She stood stubbornly by the window, as if she were fighting herself, and stared out at the dark mass of trees surrounding the studio. No light emanated from those chambers all night. Xiumi stayed in bed until daybreak. She considered whether or not to go to Mr. Ding’s house for news, but as she descended the stairs she heard her teacher and his wife speaking with raised voices to Mother in the front courtyard.
They moved behind locked doors in the grand hall; Grandma Meng and Hua Erniang followed on the heels of Ding Shuze and his wife; moments later they were joined by the owner of the pawnshop, Mr. Qian, and the Puji government clerk. Xiumi couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but the conversation lasted until almost noon. Mother saw them off one by one. As Ding Shuze was leaving, he turned in the doorway and said to her, “I have to say, Xue Zuyan deserved it! A few days ago, I sent Xiumi to his house with a letter urging him to turn back and abandon the foolish path he was taking. But he thought his father’s position in the capital made him untouchable, so he ignored me, and started assembling his own seditious band of rebels here in the countryside to plot against the government. And what do you think happened? The ax comes down and he goes belly up . . .”
From this, Xiumi learned that it was Master Xue who had been beheaded.* Later on, she heard that government spies had been on to him for a while; only his father’s influence in the capital had delayed the inevitable. On the Double Ninth festival that September, imperial palace guards sent the old man a full jug of expensive wine as a gift from the emperor. Minister Xue knelt and knocked his head on the ground with thanks until his forehead bled, but the guards would not leave; hands on their swords, they told him they had orders to watch him drink before they could return. The old man then knew what kind of wine they had brought him. He tried faking insanity, weeping and crying out, refusing to drink. But the guards’ impatience finally got the better of them, and they held him down, pinched his nose, and poured the wine down his throat. The minister’s legs flailed and his orifices bled before he could take another breath. When news of the father’s death arrived, provincial officials immediately deployed troops to capture his son. A brigade of mixed cavalry and infantry surrounded Xia village, forced its way into his home, and blockaded him and his concubine, Peach Pit, in his bedroom.