Two Chi of Cloth, Still Half Unpicked

On the morning of the thirteenth, A-Zhao went to ask Master Mo about the instrument. His door was still closed, but a paper parcel already lay by the wall. The woman who wanted the trousers patched had heard that A-Zhao was back and dropped them off there, saying tomorrow would do if today was too soon. The child had another pair anyway. A-Zhao felt the cloth. It had worn thin at the knees. The job was small and she could do it, so she was in less of a hurry to turn it down than she had been before leaving.

When Master Mo opened the door and found her standing there, he first said she could pick up the short zither from yesterday before noon. He’d glued the string nut back in place, but the instrument still had to be kept steady. They shouldn’t let the boy carry it on his back and knock it about all the way. A-Zhao said she would tell them and went to the Qins’. At the courtyard gate, the first thing she heard was A-Sheng saying the two marks were bamboo leaves, not horns. He was arguing with his grandmother over the character 笙 again. In the inner room Xiaoman was folding clothes and calling him over to tie his shoes. She had to call twice before he dragged himself to his feet.

Granny Qin held the end of a thread out to her daughter, as though the dinner table had put a lid for the time being on all the harsh things said yesterday. Azhao had no idea what they had said overnight. She only saw Xiaoman accept the needle her mother offered while she folded the clothes, and thought today might go more smoothly. But the moment she finished relaying Master Mo's message, Granny Qin asked whether they really were leaving tomorrow, and everyone in the room stopped what they were doing for a moment.

Xiaoman said it was all the better that the instrument was fixed, so the troupe wouldn’t be held up. She didn’t raise her voice, but A-Zhao could hear how little the few words spoken the night before had done to lighten this one sentence. Holding the trousers, she suddenly wanted to steer them onto another subject and ask Granny Qin if she had a shorter tie. Then she wondered if speaking up would make her the person who had to fill the silence every time someone felt uncomfortable. In the end she only said she was going out to the courtyard to mend a garment. The light was good by the door.

Passing the Qin house the night before, she too had heard the boy arguing over the scallion, with Xiaoman's voice going hoarse amid a burst of laughter. When she got back to the boat, she took out her father's old ledger and finally drew a light line through the entry for the borrowed lantern. Beside it she wrote, “Second month, seventeenth day. Lantern returned.” That was the day she had brought the lantern back to Liuwan herself. She could enter it without waiting for the daughter to come home. She looked at it for a long time afterward, then closed the ledger. Her hands felt no lack of some other task she still owed someone.

Today the lantern was still in the Qin family's cabinet because she'd agreed, separately, to leave it there for a while. She hadn't gone to hurry anyone, and she'd stopped using it to ask for news of the two in the inner room. There were a few places at the worn knee of the trousers where she needed to pick the threads clean first. She sat on the low stool, opened her needle case, and sorted the fine needles and the thick ones onto a corner of the cloth. Granny Qin came out to look, praised the way the patch would lie flat, then asked whether Azhao really meant to go and work for the troupe.

A-Zhao said she wanted to go. The old woman said making clothes was good work, of course, but a troupe was always coming and going. If she found a shop in town, she could use the same skills and perhaps live a steadier life. She spoke without the hard tone she had used when arranging the marriage years ago. She even sounded as if she were looking out for another possible path for A-Zhao. Yet A-Zhao suddenly understood how the message Xiaoman had heard for sixteen years could still make her chest tighten, however gently it was delivered.

She did not use that remark to argue Xiaoman’s case, only said she had not yet looked at the city’s shops, whereas she had actually worked with the troupe for a few days and wanted to try again. Granny Qin pointed at the trousers in her hands and said she could earn money making things like that, so why insist on making stage costumes? A-Zhao lowered her head and finished a stitch. Remembering the patch that had spread open beneath Lu Heniang’s sleeve as she poled the boat, she found herself growing impatient first, thinking that the old woman had never seen them and was already eager to call them all the same.

She kept her impatience in check and said she liked seeing how clothes moved with people. Finding a shopfront out of the wind would only get her so far. Granny Qin seemed about to say more, but Asheng called for his grandmother from inside. One of the lantern ribs was crooked, he said, and he could press it straight with his finger. The old woman went straight in to stop him, speaking much more quickly than she had a moment before. Listening, Azhao was finally spared the task of turning her choice into a string of reasons everyone could nod along to.

There was a commotion inside. The boy hadn't actually damaged the lantern, but he'd spilled half a box of paper scraps on the floor. Xiaoman told him to pick them up. Granny Qin said a few scraps were worth nothing and he could pick them up after he ate. Xiaoman's face fell again. Someone had made the scraps too, she said. He'd spilled them, so he could pick them up. From the doorway Azhao saw him squat down and glance at each of them in turn, as though still looking for the softer option. She held back, only nudging a piece that had slid to her feet into his reach.

Granny Qin went into the inner room for a bundle of old cloth and laid it beside the bed. She said there had been no time to look yesterday. These were the pieces she hadn’t sewn into the curtain back then. She had thought they might still be useful if her daughter wanted to alter an outfit. Xiaoman opened the bundle. Inside were a length of dark red sleeve edging and two chi of blue cloth, with traces of cutting and unpicking along the edges. She held the sleeve edging for a long time. A-Zhao saw only that her grip grew lighter and lighter, and couldn’t tell whether she feared the cloth might crumble or that she might be unable to let it go.

Granny Qin said the old cloth was just sitting here with her anyway. Xiaoman could take it if she wanted, and if she didn't, Granny Qin would put it away herself. This time she seemed to mean to give her a choice, but her daughter asked why she still wanted her to take it away. How could something she'd refused to wear back then possibly fit her now? The old woman faltered, then said she wasn't asking her to wear it. It belonged to her from before. The longer they talked, the closer they drew, as though they were still arguing over whose hands an old garment properly belonged in.

A-Zhao suddenly thought of the brass plaque on the bow. If someone told her now, what good is a piece of old brass, take it and melt it down, she certainly wouldn't like it. Yet whenever Granny Qin kept those two chi of old cloth, A-Zhao felt sure she still wanted to keep someone tied to her. She swallowed the advice she had been about to give. Seeing the difference in how she judged them did not make her ready to give the old woman's motives a blameless name. Knowing how to keep an old thing was harder than watching someone else decide whether to keep it at all.

In the end, Xiaoman took only a short length of the dark red edging, saying she would patch the ear of A-Sheng's little clay dog with it because the original cloth had worn through. She put the rest back in the bundle and tied the knot herself, refusing to let her mother tuck it into her luggage again. Granny Qin looked down at the scrap in her daughter's hand, disappointment on her face, but she did leave the bundle where it was. Seeing that the boy had finished picking up the papers, A-Zhao asked him to come with her to collect the instrument, leaving the room a little time in which nobody had to answer.

Master Mo told A-Sheng he could look, but couldn't touch. The string rest on the little instrument had only just set, and poking it now would make a whole night's wait go to waste. The boy asked why grown-ups always wanted children to carry their things but wouldn't let them touch. That made the craftsman laugh. He said a grown-up had to check it was safe to carry first, too. If nobody was looking after it, he shouldn't carry it. A-Zhao had been about to explain on Xiaoman's behalf that the boy had asked to carry it himself. On hearing that, she held her tongue. Once they were out of the shop, she picked up the instrument bag herself.

Asheng protested, so she let him carry the very end of the strap. That way the bottom of the case stayed off the ground and he could help too. In the lane he suddenly asked whether his mother would stay here from now on. Azhao said they were going back to Lanting tomorrow. He said he knew that. He meant after. She couldn't tell which place he hoped for, so she asked whether he missed the wooden door at South Hall. The boy thought about it. He missed his little clay dog, he said, and the clapper Uncle Gu owed him. Then, as though afraid of leaving out the other side, he added that Grandmother's fish was good too.

When A-Zhao returned to the Qin household, they were no longer discussing the old cloth. Xiaoman was helping her mother sew a section of the door curtain securely again. Her stitches were finer than A-Zhao remembered, but she had not taken it upon herself to fix everything else. Granny Qin held the curtain's lower edge. The two had not spoken for a long time. That little length of dark-red edging lay on A-Sheng's bundle. Keeping it had not turned everything else into gifts they ought to take away.

That afternoon A-Zhao finished mending the trousers and collected eight cash. When the woman came and caught sight of Xiaoman, she asked if she was the Qin girl, then said it had been years and she still looked just the same. Even A-Zhao couldn't think what to say to that, though the woman seemed to mean it as a compliment. Xiaoman rose to answer her, while her mother busied herself getting the lamp from behind the cupboard and made no effort to keep the visitor there talking. Only after the woman had gone did Xiaoman sit back down and wind the thread ends she had just clipped into a very tight coil.

Before they left on the fourteenth, Granny Qin got up early to make porridge and wrapped up a little packet of dry cakes. She stopped short of filling two baskets. She still asked whether things got so busy in Lanting that it was hard to get a hot bite to eat. Xiaoman said there was always something when it was busy. On quiet days she had to find her own. The old woman didn't quite understand and was unwilling to ask more. In the end she just told Asheng to put his shoes on properly. They'd been made fresh for his visit, and he shouldn't tread the heels flat after two days' walking.

A-Sheng walked a couple of steps holding the little clay dog with its mended ear, then ran back and slipped a piece of bamboo with no holes into his grandmother's sleeve. He said he'd find her a good one when he'd learned to play. Granny Qin stood taken aback for a moment. The boy had already turned away, plainly without any intention of making a grown-up cry over a piece of bamboo. He'd simply figured he had two more, so he could leave this one. Then he hurried off to see who would carry the instrument bag.

At the door, Xiaoman turned back and said that next time she'd ask A-Zhao to pass on her travel dates first. If A-Zhao wasn't there, she'd ask with one of the boats that ran the route in stages. A next time like this was smaller than a promise to come for certain at the Shangsi Festival, but it could actually be set in motion. Granny Qin nodded. There was too much she wanted to say, so she just pointed out where the cakes were in the bundle and told her not to put them under the instrument.

A-Zhao poled mother and son to the east bank and took the fare as usual. As Xiaoman stepped off, she told A-Zhao to get on with her own affairs now that the errand was done. There was still work in Lanting, and if she wanted to come, she ought to get her boat at home settled first. A-Zhao said she knew. Just as Xiaoman had told her at their first meeting that she couldn’t go home in her place, the place A-Zhao now wanted to go had to mean something more than carrying messages between these two households.

The passenger boat departed, while her ferry still headed back west. Far away at Liuwan, someone waved from the ferry slope. A Zhao recognized Old Tao Six's crooked hat and raised her sculling oar in acknowledgment. The bronze plaque lay dim in the reflected light, and the repaired seam at the stern had not opened. She pushed the small packet of ferry money somewhere dry and went first to collect this passenger, who was crossing the river simply to sell vegetables.