by Ge Fei
Baoshen rubbed his hands together and asked what ought to be done about the mistress now.
Xiumi pursed her lips and replied, “Bury her.” And added, as if finally remembering something crucial, “Oh, that’s right, where were you planning to dig the grave?”
“In the daylily field, west of the village.”
“No,” Xiumi shook her head, “you can’t bury her there.”
“The mistress picked the place herself,” Baoshen said. “She gave the order a few days ago, and hired a yin-yang geomancer to assess it.”
“That’s not my concern,” Xiumi replied as her expression darkened. “You can’t bury her in the daylily field.”
“Then where do you suggest we bury her?” Baoshen asked obsequiously.
“It’s up to you. Anywhere is fine, as long as it’s not in the daylily field.” With this, Xiumi turned and went back to the academy.
Tiger saw Grandma Meng give Hua Erniang a nudge and a meaningful look. She whispered, “Erniang, did you see her waist?”
An ambiguous smile creased Hua Erniang’s face as she nodded.
What about her waist? Tiger looked at Hua Erniang, then back at Grandma Meng. Turning his eye to the door, he watched snowflakes dance across the lid of the casket. The Principal was already gone.
The snow fell harder on the night of the wake. Dry gusts of snow turned to softer, heavier flakes, like goose down, that blanketed the earth with a piling thickness.
In Ding Shuze’s opinion, this unseasonable blizzard represented the anger of heaven above. He circled the coffin, tapping on the skywell floor with his cane, and cried, “Flagrant immorality! Most flagrant immorality!” Everyone knew whom he was talking about, but no one paid any attention to him.
Baoshen’s mind wandered. Why wouldn’t Xiumi let them bury the mistress in the daylily field? He repeatedly asked himself the question out loud as he turned it over in his mind, his muttering irritating Magpie to the point of her correcting him.
“Do you even need to ask? It’s obvious!”
Baoshen walked around to where Magpie stood on the other side of the coffin, tapping his temple in confusion. “Tell me, then. What does it mean?”
“Someone else is already buried in the daylily field,” Magpie said. “You really are an idiot.”
That someone was Zhang Jiyuan. Ten years earlier, when they found his body locked in river ice, the mistress had publicly thrown herself on top of it and cried. Afterward, she hired an oxcart and transported his corpse back to the village. Baoshen had to tell her that ancient custom prohibited them from holding a wake or funeral for the corpse in their residence, because he was not a member of family, and had died violently in the wilderness. But Madame Lu stridently refused to listen.
She went so far as to threaten to fire Baoshen and kick him and his son out the door that same day. Baoshen was so frightened he kneeled down and knocked his head until it bruised. She paid no attention to Grandma Meng’s earnest pleas, nor to Ding Shuze’s long-winded pontifications—the black predictions from the fortune-teller also fell on deaf ears. When Magpie tried to add her voice to the chorus of protests, the mistress snapped, “Bullshit!”
Only Xiumi moved her to change her heart. She said nothing, merely curled her lip and snorted derisively, and the mistress’s cheek turned gray. She ordered a bamboo funeral tent set up outside the house by the fishpond, burned incense by the coffin for twenty-one days, and hired Taoist and Buddhist priests to recite sutras for the dead soul. She had the coffin interred in the daylily field at the west side of the village.
Magpie’s explanation inspired a faint glimmer of understanding in Baoshen’s brain, but he scratched his head and admitted, “I still don’t quite get it.”
“If you still don’t get it that’s too bad. Honestly, what an idiot.”
Magpie’s words brought Tiger back to that one evening many years ago when he had climbed the studio steps in pouring rain, lamplight darkened to yellow smudges. He recalled seeing the mistress’s naked ankles hanging over Zhang Jiyuan’s shoulders. Her moaning had mixed with the moans of the wind outside.
Tiger lowered his gaze to the icy coffin below him. His heart felt empty. After all these years, he could still recall the sound of her breathing.
Why had Xiumi not allowed them to bury her mother in the daylily field? Magpie suggested the answer was hidden in events that had transpired more than a decade earlier. As subsequent events would prove, though, her answer was mistaken.*
*In August 1951, the first list of revolutionary martyrs from Meicheng County was officially published. Zhang Jiyuan’s name was on it. His remains were thereby ordered to be relocated to the Puji Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. Zhang Jiyuan had originally been buried in a daylily field on the western side of Puji village, but years of negligence as well as several severe floods had flattened the grave mound completely. As the location of the coffin could not be accurately identified, the excavation team dug up the entire field. In addition to Zhang Jiyuan’s coffin, the team also discovered three wooden crates, which turned out to be filled with German-made Mauser repeating rifles. Upon excavation, the firearms were already rusted and unsalvageable. They eventually joined the collection of the Meicheng Historical Museum.
10
THE FUNERAL procession took place the morning of the following day.
A new grave site had been marked out in a cotton field not far from the daylily field. Baoshen planted a Himalayan cedar tree, an osmanthus tree, and some swallowtail bamboo along its borders. He patrolled it nightly after the burial, setting out every evening with a hurricane lantern and an ax, and coming home to bed only after first light.
Preparations were under way for his move back to Qinggang. Baoshen’s sadness was visible and unremitting; sometimes he cried alone in his office.
Should he take Little Thing with him? He couldn’t decide.
Baoshen declared he would watch over Madame Lu’s tomb for the forty-nine-day mourning period, then head back to Qinggang. He didn’t dare wait any longer. Each time Magpie heard him say it, she would hide in the kitchen and cry. Tiger knew she had no place to go.
One evening Baoshen went to guard the grave, but returned early. Magpie asked what brought him back so soon. Deep distress twisted Baoshen’s countenance, and he swore nonstop, as if profanity were the only thing that could relieve his agitation.
“Fucking motherfucking ass-fuck, someone was there, fucking scared the shit out of me.”
“Who was it?” Magpie inquired.
Baoshen sighed. “Who could it have been but her?”
He said that after arriving at the grave, he had filled his pipe and lit it. Before he finished the plug, he saw a shadow flicker by on the far side of the grave site. “I thought I was seeing a ghost at first!” he exclaimed. Then he figured it was a trick of the eye, until the silhouette advanced toward him. It had long, unkempt hair and a darkly yellow face, and said to him in a rough voice, “Don’t be scared, Cockeye. It’s me, Xiumi.”
Xiumi walked to Baoshen’s side and sat down next to him. “Will you let me have a drag of your pipe?” she asked.
Baoshen passed her the pipe with a trembling hand; she took it quietly and began to smoke. Her posture suggested she had plenty of experience smoking. Baoshen recovered from his shock and asked, “So you’re a smoker, too?”
Xiumi smiled. “I am. I’ve even smoked opium before, if you can believe it.”
After she finished the plug, she knocked the pipe against the sole of her shoe and passed it back to Baoshen. “Fill me another, will you?”
Baoshen refilled the bowl. When Xiumi lit it, he saw that her hands, lips, and body were trembling.
After one long pull, she asked him, “Is the deed for the estate with you?”
“The mistress kept it,” he replied.
“Find it for me when you get
home and send Tiger over to the academy with it tomorrow.”
“What do you want the deed for?” Baoshen asked.
“I’ve sold the family land,” she said tranquilly.
“Which land did you sell?” Baoshen asked in surprise, as he jumped to his feet.
“All of it.”
“Xiuxiu, you . . . you . . .” Baoshen couldn’t hide his distress. “If you sold all the land, what’ll we all live on?”
“What do you care?” Xiumi retorted. “Besides, aren’t you and Tiger going back to Qinggang anyway?”
According to Baoshen, the sight of her as she stood up terrified him. He once again suspected he was talking to a ghost, and he walked around her a few times in blind confusion, and asked softly, “Young lady, young mistress, are you really Xiuxiu? I’m not talking to a ghost, am I?”
“Do I look like a ghost to you?” Xiumi laughed.
Her laughter only confirmed Baoshen’s suspicions. He backed up a few steps and fell to his knees in front of the mistress’s grave, knocking his head on the earth in supplication. After his second bow, he froze—a pale hand had descended on his shoulder, and a husky voice said, “Turn around and look at me carefully.”
Baoshen didn’t move. “One question will tell me if you are a ghost or human.”
“And what’s that? Ask me.”
“You said you sold all the family land. Do you know exactly how much land we have?”
“Thirty point eight-five acres.”
“The family’s land stretches from here to as far as eight miles away. How could you know its boundaries if you’ve never been concerned with the planting?”
“Lilypad knows. She took me around to see it all the day we sold it.”
“And may I ask what family within twenty miles of here could possibly afford to buy it?”
“I sold it all to Long Qingtang, in Meicheng. It won’t be long before he sends someone by for the deed.”
“Have you signed it over yet?”
“I have.”
“Why are you selling it, anyway? The land has been passed down through your family for generations.”
“I need the money.”
“How much did you sell it for?”
“That’s none of your business,” Xiumi said emphatically, her tone suddenly sharpening.
Baoshen broke out in a sweat despite the winter chill. He knew that the man Xiumi referred to, Long Qingtang, was the head of the Anqing Brotherhood, and a first lieutenant to the overlord Xu Baoshen. He controlled the black market salt trade and the brothels from Yangzhou to Zhenjiang. How could such a man be acquainted with Xiumi?
•
After that night, Baoshen lost his will to speak. He left the house before the dew evaporated, and returned after it had formed again in the evening. With his hands clasped behind his back, he walked every inch of the family’s land. When he finished, he locked himself in the office and didn’t come out.
The sight of Little Thing brought him to tears. He would hold his small face in his large, calloused hands and lament, “Puji, Puji, you’re as broke as a beggar now.”
On the day of the sale, three palanquins crowned with green velvet arrived in Puji. Long Qingtang’s majordomo, Feng Mazi, showed up at the estate with two able-bodied assistants. Baoshen stacked the account ledger, tenant-farmer list, and deed neatly before them, and it was done. Feng looked through everything while grinning so broadly he hardly closed his mouth. His task completed, he looked at the dispirited Baoshen and said, “Conventional wisdom says that ‘a field will know ten farmers in a hundred years, and every sale renews it.’ Even oceans change to mulberry fields; that will always be the way of things. But don’t allow yourself to feel too depressed. As you have done such a beautiful job of handling the accounts, I hope you’ll consider bringing your family to my master’s household in Meicheng and continue to oversee this land for us.”
Baoshen stood, tears brimming in his eyes. “I am extremely grateful for such a generous offer. But your servant has spent fifty years following Minister Lu from Beiping to Yangzhou to his final abode in Puji. Now that the family’s fortunes have turned and its integrity ruined, a servant as withered and worthless as myself cannot hope to serve such an august person as your master. I only wish to return to my old home to live out my final years in . . .” Before he could finish, he broke down in sobs.
Feng replied, “We remain responsible to those who afford us our livelihood. If the steward wishes to refuse a second master’s meat, I wouldn’t dare force the matter. There is one more thing, however—a small favor I hope you will grant me.”
“If it’s in my power, I’ll do whatever I can.”
Feng turned the heavy ring on his finger and said, “I’ve heard that the Lu family owns a rare treasure, an object called a ‘Double-Phoenix Crystal Basin’ that supposedly can tell the future. Would it be possible to bring it out, so I can see it with my own eyes?”
Baoshen replied, “Ever since the head of the house first ran away, the family’s fortunes have only declined. The few pieces of jade jewelry he owned were pawned off long ago, and the silver pieces broken up for spending money while he was still here. Now that the land is changing hands, all that’s left is a run-down house, never mind any valuable antiques.”
The majordomo pondered in silence for a moment, then stood up and smiled politely. “Before setting out for Puji, I overheard the governor, Long Qingtang, say that the Double-Phoenix Crystal Basin was an exceptionally rare object in the possession of your estate. Curiosity spurred a hope that I might see it for myself while I was visiting. But given what you have said, I think it’s time for me to take my leave.”
After seeing off the majordomo, Baoshen stood in the skywell and wondered aloud to himself, “Feng said something about a priceless antique, but I’ve been here for years and have never heard anything . . .”
Magpie, who was hanging laundry out to dry, overheard Baoshen’s musings and replied, “Was he talking about that old enamel basin? I heard that the master bought it off a beggar years ago.”
“What basin?” Baoshen asked.
“A beggar was using it as his begging bowl. The mistress said the master fell in love with it at first sight and set his heart on buying it. But the beggar wouldn’t give it up. That is, until the master forked out two hundred taels of silver for it. The master used to admire it every day up in his chambers. The mistress used to say that buying that basin might have been the beginning of his sickness.”
“Where is the basin now?” Baoshen’s expression changed dramatically.
“Probably still up in the studio.”
“Bring it down for me, and be careful. I want to have a look at it.”
Magpie dried her glistening wet hands on her apron and went upstairs. Moments later she came back carrying something that looked like a salt crock. Two phoenixes, glazed green, were carved into its enameled-copper surface. Years of disuse had left it dusty, with cobwebs covering the lid and mouse pellets stuck to the base.
Baoshen wiped it clean with his sleeve and set it down in a sunny spot to inspect more closely. “This is just a common begging bowl. I don’t see anything special about it at all.”
“If the master adored it, he must have had his reasons,” Magpie said.
“Well, there are two phoenixes, just like Feng Mazi said. But where does the ‘Crystal’ part come from?”
“Who’s left to tell you, now that the both the master and the mistress are gone?” Magpie asked.
“But how could Long Qingtang know that we had a thing like this here?” Baoshen pondered. “I fear there’s a story behind all this.”
Over the next several days, Tiger often found his father sitting in the sun, his gaze focused on the basin.
“Looks like you’re going crazy, too,” Magpie snapped, after Baoshen’s behavior finally exhausted h
er patience. She snatched the bowl from him and took it into the kitchen, where she used it to pickle cabbage.
•
In those days all kinds of rumors spread through the village about Puji Academy. Meanwhile, during days of heavy snow, the organization started to fall apart. Tiger heard someone say that Xiumi had intended to use the money from selling the family estate to buy guns, but her overseer at the academy, Xu Fu, simply ran off with the money without completing the purchase. Someone saw him climb onto a raft and set off down the Yangtze. Later, some boatmen passed along information that Xu Fu had opened an apothecary in the city of Nanjing and had taken three wives.
Xu Fu’s escape inspired several new developments. Walnuts Yang and Ms. Ding visited the garan late one night to announce that they were leaving. It came as an unpleasant surprise to Xiumi, who asked in disbelief, “Zhonggui, you’re leaving too?”
Walnuts told her that when he joined her, his life hadn’t been worth a damn; he was a bachelor without a roof over his head or a pot to piss in. Then the Principal was good enough to marry him to Ms. Ding, and they built a little house and tilled an acre of abandoned farmland. Though they weren’t rich, it was enough to live on. But now that she was pregnant, messing around with guns and swords wasn’t such a good idea, especially with frequent news of the court sending the army out to suppress rebellions. So the two of them discussed it and decided they would set down their swords for plowshares for good. They hired someone to write a statement for them, and here they were, ready to cut all ties to the academy.
Though their statement was unpleasant to hear, it was also the naked truth. And it revealed by contrast why Zhang Jiyuan the revolutionary had listed “those who possess hereditary estates” as the first of his ten targets for execution. Xiumi had puzzled over that issue for years after reading the diary, and understood it only now.
Soon Baldy also left the Academy. He had been one of the staunchest supporters of the Self-Governance Board back in the early days, and his oath of entry was by far the most lyrical, composed of quoted opera lines about his head being smashed, meeting the sword with his neck, yellow sands covering his face. The harshness of his words made it sound like the real thing. So his unannounced departure hurt Xiumi deeply, while also waking her up to the severity of her situation. About a week later he returned, but as no prodigal son. He marched happily into Xiumi’s room, much to her surprise, with a pig’s head and its large intestine. When Xiumi asked him where he had been, he replied as if performing an operatic soliloquy: