A Map for the Missing(10)

This was the most significant event they named in their clan history, etching this story upon steles and storing it in their ancestral temples. The stones kept the tale safe for hundreds of years, until the campaigns came, whose mission was to erase the old history and make a new one for their own use.

Yitian listened to his grandfather’s cautionary stories of the dangers facing the books and felt an urgent need to save them. He wanted to leap out of bed and build a fortress to protect them. His approach became more practical as he grew older: he listened carefully to every word his grandfather spoke so that he would not miss a single one. On the long walk to school and when he worked alone in the fields, he repeated the stories to himself under his breath. He would keep the tales safe; he would not let his grandfather down. He had ample opportunity to memorize—by the time of his grandfather’s illness, they’d traveled through history together four and four-fifths times over.

He’d often heard from other villagers that his grandfather did not look like a farmer. He was so thin, and folded his arms behind him and grasped his elbows in both hands as he walked, not at all like the strides, both forceful and meandering, of people on their way to work. Once, a village woman had found a padded scholar’s robe deep in some forgotten corner of her home and given it to his grandfather as a joke. After he slipped his arms through the sleeves, however, he had such a look of authority that no one dared to laugh. Only Yitian privately said, “You look like you belong in the universities in Beijing!” But he was glad that his grandfather was here in their small village, even if it meant the failure of the dreams his grandfather had held in his own youth, of being a scholar in the capital. Besides, he did not think it was true that his grandfather didn’t have the traits of a farmer. At night when he looked at his grandfather’s body, he could see the lean of it, sinew fitting into muscle that covered bone. But after months of sickness, even those wispy tendons had dissolved into nothing.



* * *



—

When Yitian laid his palm on the bony chest and found it still, his first thought was how much time had passed since his grandfather’s last breath. It had gone unnoticed, a common leaf falling against a full October pile. He reached out to touch his grandfather’s palm, finding it already ice-cold. I have sat here, he thought, but what is the evidence of my care?

He did not call his mother or brother. Instead, he got under the blankets and lay next to his grandfather. He put his head near his grandfather’s feet, as they’d always slept. His mother and brother found him like this when they came to check on him. The top blanket had been a wedding gift to his parents, years ago. His tears had made a damp spot right at the place where the character for prosperity was stitched in shiny red thread.

His mother checked his grandfather’s body, while Yishou lifted Yitian up from under the covers.

“Come,” Yishou said.

Yitian felt the gentle tug of his brother’s hand on his wrist, then another firm hand holding up his back. He allowed himself to be pulled by his elbow and guided into the home. Yishou seated him at one of the wooden benches. Yitian sat in a daze as his brother collected and boiled water from the barrel. He did not realize how cold he was until the steam rose from the red bricks of the stove and warmed the room—but he couldn’t have been shivering from the cold, because he’d been lying under the covers all this time. He was shocked when he felt the hot rag over his face, then Yishou’s hands rubbing through the fabric at his eyes and nose to soften and dissolve the snot that had collected there.

Yishou finished washing his face and left quietly. Yitian felt grateful, for both the gentleness and the leaving afterward. He wanted to experience his sadness alone. Yishou hadn’t cried at their grandfather’s death, and he would not have understood how strongly Yitian felt—no, the only person who truly understood him in his family had been his grandfather, whose stories had told Yitian of a world beyond this small one. Yitian thought of the stories with a stronger sense of resolve than any he’d felt since the very first night he’d heard them. Keeping them alive was his responsibility to his grandfather, the only thing Yitian had left of him now.





Four



All afternoon, Yitian had waited at the embankment on the highest point of the slope, watching hopefully for Hanwen down the horizon line. They usually met here Friday afternoons, but the last week was his grandfather’s death. He’d missed her all the following week and wanted nothing more than to talk to her now, but sometimes in the busy season she wasn’t able to leave the production team.

He looked down at the sacks of peanuts he’d brought, his excuse when his mother had asked him where he was going—“I’m going to finish my work outside,” he’d said, hoping that his grandfather’s recent death might allow him more room for decisions his mother would find strange. They’d observed the traditional mourning period after the death, and today his mother had given him the burlap bag of peanuts straight from harvest and said it was time to return to work.

It was sunset now, and he realized with a start how little he’d done. He began to work hurriedly, pulling at the clumps of veiny peanuts in his hand, not stopping to edge out the dirt that gathered under his fingernails or to shake off the excess loam that lingered in the crevices of the shells. Had his mother seen how he was working, she’d surely have scolded him. In his father’s absence, she and his brother taught him how to work; she the one who checked over the dung he gathered every morning to make sure he’d gone far and collected enough, she who looked over the buckets he brought back from the well to see if he’d walked steady and hadn’t spilled any water.