A Map for the Missing(61)
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They returned to their home for a meal with the guests after the ceremony. Yitian sat in a corner without greeting or speaking to anyone. He did not want to go through these ritual motions with his relatives in order to prove they cared for Yishou and were saddened by his death. He saw his mother glance at him, and then at his father, who sat alone at the table, drinking. The baijiu was meant as an offering and for the guests, but instead his father had grabbed a bottle and begun serving himself without any regard for others.
Second Uncle, who’d been fidgety the entire day, tried to comfort him. “Now, it doesn’t do to act in such a way,” he said. The required solemnity had made his behavior jittery, and he left soon after, with a few customary words to Yitian’s mother.
Most of the guests departed as the afternoon went on. Only a few stragglers stayed past sunset. They had a certain giddiness to them, happiness at the fact that others had a misfortune for them to comfort.
In late afternoon, his father wandered out into the backyard, ignoring the remaining guests. He wobbled as he walked, his drunkenness exaggerating his limp leg. After he’d gone, the room seemed emptied of the central figure. The final guests rose to leave.
Yitian checked on his father in the backyard, his outline shaky as he fiddled with the stacks of kindling. Yishou had collected the last round of wood before they left for Hefei City, and there was hardly anything left now—only the meager twigs that had broken off larger branches. Drunk, his father began to arrange them in a pile on top of the brazier. He ignored Yitian and built the twigs up in a circle, using one hand to keep them together and the other to jab more inside the cylindrical shape he’d built, working methodically in a seeming reverie.
Yitian returned inside, changed his clothes, and helped his mother clean up. He swept the floor and she boiled water so they could wash. He wanted the day to be over, to collect and then dispose of its remnants so that all its evidence was gone.
As he was stripping his clothes to wash, Yitian smelled the beginnings of smoke drifting in from outside. At first, he was confused as to the source of the smell, but then the thought struck him that his father must have lit the kindling on the brazier. The sun had set by now, and all that was left was cold winter air. He could not imagine what his father intended to do outside in the courtyard, alone and drunk.
In a hurry, he shoved his clothes back on and scrambled outside.
Small plumes of smoke were already collecting in the air of the courtyard and uncoiling themselves into the dusky night. On the doorstep, his father stood and watched the fire.
“Ba—what are you doing?” They were the first words that Yitian had spoken to his father since they’d left the hospital.
His father was hugging a large stack of papers to his chest, hunching over them the way a bird might hunch over something just captured. As Yitian approached, his father brought the bundle closer to the flames, so the contents were illuminated. Yitian startled to recognize his own handwriting, jutting and blocky, on notes that must have been written in elementary school. Farther behind in the stack, there were the tightly scrawled characters of his gaokao notes.
He lunged out at his father, trying to grab the papers.
His father, moving with a quickness that Yitian would not have expected him capable of after all he’d drunk that day, shuffled back quickly out of Yitian’s reach.
“Take the rest of your clothes and possessions. You,” he said, turning to Yitian, “are not my son.” In the dusk, his father’s shadow lengthened and merged with the dark shapes of the courtyard, rendering his outline bulky and terrifying in a way that Yitian had not felt since he was a child.
His mother had run out of the home at the sounds from the courtyard. “Don’t do this to him,” she cried. “He’s the only son we have left.”
“Because of him, our son died. If he hadn’t had all these ideas and insisted on going to university, Yishou wouldn’t have contracted that illness.”
“How could we have known what would happen? It’s not his fault. No one can predict what Heaven has in store for us.”
His father turned to Yitian. “Always the same mistakes. You and my father, making the same mistakes. Giving up life for those books,” he slurred. “Do you know what it’s like, to be ten years old and responsible for the entire family? Because your own father doesn’t know how to lift even a finger to work.”
“Please, Ba,” Yitian begged. “I don’t want it anymore. I don’t need to go to college.” He was willing to say anything to stop his father’s words from unspooling further.
The fire, feeding off a sudden gust of wind, released more plumes into the air. His father coughed deeply. “Go. It doesn’t matter to me where you are anymore. You killed your brother.”
“It’s no use to talk about the past this way,” his mother wailed.
He had the sensation that his parents were speaking about him as if he were a stranger visiting their home, already rendered the person his father had abandoned him to be. His father still clutched his papers, sandwiching them now between his arm and his torso as he waved his free hand around in accusation.
The sky was almost completely dark, and the red glow of the flames cast his father’s wrinkles into a deeper etching than Yitian had ever seen before. He thought for a moment that he would be hit. The beatings of his youth had come in his father’s fits of uncontrolled temper—Yitian cowering as the dirty edges of a wooden stake were brought onto his thighs—compounded by drunkenness, but his father’s voice wasn’t like that now. He spoke slowly, controlling his fury.