The Third Money Pouch

On the twenty-second day of the fourth month, Gu Qing set three money pouches on the table. The household pouch was the oldest, its bottom corners worn shiny. The one for working capital had two turns of thread around its mouth. The travel pouch was still new, sewn separately by Grandmother from gray cloth. Before emptying any of them, she unfolded the paper with the figures she had gathered at the wharf. The tip of her brush lingered beside the words “round trip.” Having enough to get there was only part of having enough to go.

The two round-trip fares on the passenger boat came to six hundred and forty cash for the inside berths they had chosen. Extra fares for changing boats along the way went into the reserve. There would also be the cart between Nanpu and Heze, food and lodging along the way, hot water, and any extra days they stayed. A few words about coming from the same hometown could hardly be counted on to cover any of it. Gu Qing wrote down twelve hundred. Shen Su couldn't make out a large number written all together and asked her to count it out by hundreds. When Gu Qing finished, she said all those little expenses could eat up more money than two people taking a boat.

Gu Qing thought it was too much as well. She meant to cut eighty cash from the reserve and drew a line through it, then remembered the hot water and the hard boards that night at Luwan. Her grandmother said they needn’t spend it all. Whatever they brought back would still be money. So she rubbed away the tentative line and kept the original figure. When she reckoned what the household needed, she set aside three hundred cash for rice and the first batch of materials after they got back. That would stay off the boat. If they ran short on the journey, they would shorten their stay first and leave that packet alone.

At the end of the second month the household had nearly four hundred cash on hand. Gu Qing had written down everything that had come in and gone out since the third month on more than a dozen scraps of paper. The characters varied in size and the figures often crowded the needle holes. There were two hundred and forty cash for the last forty sprays for the Yao shop, six hundred for the three batches delivered to Luo Yi, two hundred and twenty for the first batch for the headwear and sash maker, and separate payments for camellias and hat flowers sold one at a time. She deducted materials, labor, design fees, three days' rent, rice and vegetables, and lamp oil and fuel item by item. She separated what had been paid from what was still due. The four hundred for Luo Yi's two undelivered batches and the two hundred and twenty for the remaining batch for the headwear and sash maker had yet to join her strings of cash.

Grandmother helped her count. Her eyes couldn't see clearly, so she felt the rims of the copper coins and threaded every fifty onto a short string. Halfway through, Gu Qing realized she had counted a credit for returned materials as income and quickly took it out. Then she stared blankly at the missing string of cash. Shen Su made no attempt to make up for it. She simply moved the string back beside the slip for unused materials and said that less to pay for materials was one thing, and having the money in hand another.

The last few batches had yet to be settled, and for now there was indeed too little money. Gu Qing left the four-hundred-cash job with the Wens alone and took the smoky purple and moonwater silk to Sister Ji first. Sister Ji quoted what she could resell them for now. The old purchase price counted for nothing, and old acquaintance earned no generous rounding up. Gu Qing thought the offer low and took the silk home again. She laid it out for half the day, wanting a better price and worrying she might keep a buyer waiting. Grandmother left her to decide and simply suggested asking at another shop.

The second shop thought the colors dated and would only take the smoky purple out of the bundle and price the rest as scraps. Gu Qing heard them out at the cloth shop door and realized that Sister Ji hadn’t been trying to drive her price down. She went home and told Grandmother. Shen Su laughed and said that if Gu Qing judged how much people cared about her by the price they offered, it was easy to decide who was mean. Gu Qing took issue with that and asked if Grandmother had lost money when she sold her piece of Moonwater all those years ago. The old woman said she had, but it had bought her what she needed to get by. What she remembered now was the relief of having it out from under everything at the bottom of the chest.

On the twenty-fifth, Gu Qing handed over three pieces of silk she hadn’t been using and took in 198 wen altogether. This time she didn’t keep back so much as a little piece as a sample. Sister Ji asked her to measure for herself so she could see that if she held back a cun from any piece, she would be paid for one cun less. She measured as required. The cloth passed through her fingers, the gray, the smoky purple, and the light brown with the cool cast, each rolled up the way someone else would need it. The money took up less room in her hand than the cloth but weighed much more once it was in her travel bag.

On the way home, she bought a small strip of pale green silk she needed right away, paying only for what she would use that day. Selling old stock and then buying new looked like a lot of bother for nothing, but this time she cut the pale green as soon as she got it home. She had made no promise of it to some big customer who might come along one day. She cut slowly, and when there was a finger's width left, she folded it by size and put it back in its original paper. She still had two batches to deliver before leaving, and excitement alone would never get them done.

Gu Qing collected the payments as agreed for the fourth batch she delivered to Luo Yi on the twenty-third and then for the second batch of hatband flowers she delivered on the twenty-sixth. Each time she paid Xiaoman for that batch first. The preliminary work, settling on the colors, sewing on the clasps, and testing that they could be taken off all had days of their own. She no longer tried to do everything from start to finish in a single day. When Xiaoman wasn’t there, Grandmother sometimes made a few rough stems, and Gu Qing paid her for her share. When the old woman went to the Chen house, the rough stems waited another half day, leaving the hours under the lamp for fine work. There were two days when they worked longer than usual to keep up, and Gu Qing’s wrist ached. The next morning she only sorted things, allowing that she could tire even if the bamboo stems couldn’t.

The last ten boxed flowers wouldn't be picked up until the twenty-ninth. In the meantime their small sales from home went on. Neighbors bought on others' behalf and old customers from the West Market came back. It took days to make up a little string of coins, eight or ten-odd at a time. In the third and fourth months together, she sold dozens of ordinary flowers one by one, many of them made between time in the courtyard, tending the stove, and going back and forth on errands. They came with no handsome big order, but little by little they paid for rice, vegetables, and the extra charcoal. Only then did Gu Qing realize that if she had kept her eyes fixed on a slip of paper promising a thousand copper coins, her everyday living would have slipped through the cracks long ago.

On the night of the twenty-seventh, Shen Su took out her little bundle. This time she emptied it out instead of just letting Gu Qing feel it. There were more than sixty old coins, along with what she had lately earned winding thick stems and what she had saved from buying beans and vegetables, making eighty in all. She said that if those eighty cash were going on the journey, she would spend them herself. When they reached Nanpu, she would ask the price before deciding where she wanted to stay or what she wanted to eat. She would neither let people talk her into buying something nor hold out her hand each time and wait for Gu Qing to decide for her.

Gu Qing had meant to tuck the pouch away again as a little money her grandmother could keep for reassurance. As the words reached her lips, she remembered the bamboo blind’s pull cord, which the old woman could reach herself, and set the pouch beside their travel money. “We’ll keep track together of what you pay for on the road. If there’s some little thing you want to buy, use this pouch first.”

Shen Su nodded gravely, then picked one of the eighty coins out. This one was cracked at the edge, she said. Leave it and put in a good one. Gu Qing laughed at her for caring how the money looked on the road, but the old woman said a cracked edge could cut the string. They set the cracked coin aside and threaded the good ones securely. Shen Su kept the little pouch close to her body, separate from Gu Qing's larger one.

On the twenty-ninth, Luo Yi collected the final batch. All fifty flowers in five deliveries were now paid for, a thousand cash in total. One fastener in the last batch was a little tight and had to be rethreaded then and there before the flower went into its box. The four hundred and forty for the twenty ornaments for hats and sashes had also come in. Gu Qing paid off the materials and labor, made sure there was enough rice and vegetables until they left, and checked all the slips again. Apart from the money set aside from selling silk, the household had one thousand two hundred and twenty-two cash available for the trip. The old silk brought another hundred and ninety-eight, and her grandmother added eighty, making exactly fifteen hundred. Three hundred would stay at home, leaving twelve hundred for the two of them to travel on.

Those 1,222 wen hadn’t all been earned just now. Some of the money had been set aside back in the eleventh month, some had accumulated through small sales, and some was left over from the large orders. There was no getting back what had already gone on spoiled flowers and delays. Gu Qing wrote two lines on the back of the sheet, one for the silk she had sold and one for Grandmother’s contribution, so that in some happy moment later on she wouldn’t take it into her head again that the last order alone had carried them south. She wrote slowly. By the time the two lines were done, the oil in the lamp had dropped a notch.

Gu Qing picked up the strings of cash for the journey, and her wrist sank at once. Those few words for travel expenses on paper had turned out heavier than a whole box of finished flowers. She had meant to sew them all into her clothes. When she tried the clothes on, the hem knocked against her legs after two steps. Shen Su laughed and said she looked as though she had hung a ring of little scales around herself. Gu Qing unpicked the stitching. She kept some small change handy, set aside the boat deposit on its own, and would settle the care of the tree before going to the wharf. She wrapped the remaining heavy strings in two separate places so they wouldn't get tangled with the dry clothes and medicine packets in one mass she couldn't pull free.

Her grandmother retied her packet of eighty wen too, replacing the old thread. She lifted it herself, decided she could manage the weight, and kept it for herself to carry. They tried putting the money, dry clothes, footrest, and thin quilt into the luggage in that order. As it turned out, the thick mattress they had picked earlier wouldn't go in. Gu Qing took it out with a little reluctance. Shen Su substituted the soft cushion she used to sit on, and only then did the bag close. No bag could carry away all the comforts of home. Gu Qing took it to the door and walked back and forth twice, then wound another layer of cloth around the rope loop that cut into her hand.

After testing the luggage, they put everything back one piece at a time. The washed knee warmers needed drying, and the money could not lie spread on the table all night. Shen Su placed the light brown hat over the little gray-lotus box, saying this would keep it from being crushed during packing. Gu Qing measured with her hand and left a fist-sized space. For the first time, she did not think about fitting two more flowers to sell into that gap.

Once the three bags were sorted, one coin of change from buying vegetables remained on the table. Gu Qing used it to hold down the itinerary as the wind lifted it. Shen Su suddenly said that in a few days the tree would need more water, and they must remember to tell Qingniang. Gu Qing said she would ask about wages tomorrow. The old woman glanced at the money pouch and did not say again that they could only think of leaving once care of the tree was arranged. It was as though a little boat already existed in her mind, and the money and luggage were slowly being loaded aboard.

They put their bags away. The first silk plum blossom under the window was still a faint white, though the tips of its petals had yellowed. Gu Qing fetched a soft brush, dusted it once, and put the brush away without touching up the color. They still had to arrange for someone to look after things, then go to the landing to pay the boat deposit. When they got back, there would be a stove to light and silk to cut. The old flower had no need to prove the journey would be worth it. It could stay in its old corner by the window. The thread at the end of its stem had loosened a little. Gu Qing wound it tight, then stopped.