The Empty Place Beside the Drum

When Gao Man handed over the twelve cash coins, A-Zhao counted them carefully. Qin Xiaoman watched her hands and suddenly remembered counting her own first earnings from the opera one coin at a time. Her palm had felt damp afterward, but she hadn’t dared wipe it on her clothes for fear someone would see. Now all she wanted was for the payment to be over so Gao Man would stop asking whose name to put beside each little job and she could steal another few minutes to practice singing.

A Zhao and Gu Ming were talking quietly in the courtyard. Gu Ming gestured with half a punting pole, and A Zhao laughed and dodged, as though it were something other than the bamboo tip she was avoiding. Hearing them, Xiaoman first thought how easily young people found happiness, then remembered a lining still unfinished from the afternoon and felt a little aggrieved. She knew A Zhao had done enough today, yet still wanted to tell her not to keep standing in the draft. Before speaking, she herself could not tell whether she feared the girl would catch cold or resented her still having the energy to laugh.

That evening they rehearsed the opening of Reed Blossom Ferry, where the mother has to stop her daughter from leaving the boat. Xiaoman took two steps forward and reached out too quickly. She had Lu Heniang by the cuff before Lu had even turned. Gao Shoucheng tapped the table and called a halt. He said she looked like a mother who really meant to drag her daughter home. Give her room to breathe, he said. She still has to sing after this. Lu Heniang rubbed her wrist and said yes, for a moment she'd almost thought she really had no way out.

The others laughed, and Xiaoman laughed too, a little later. The lines in this act were hard to sing. She had to let the worry come through without just weeping. She'd once tried out for the leading role of the boatwoman. She'd been light on her feet then, and a turn as she struck the water was enough to hold the eyes of the people beside the stage. Now the troupe's busiest days went to the costume chests and her vocal warm-ups kept getting pushed back. If she really had to sing the lead again from the beginning, she knew she wasn't as steady as Lu Heniang after all her practice.

Knowing it and being at peace with it were two different things. Lu Heniang said she wanted to change the last scene a little. Aheng shouldn't throw down her pole the moment she got good news. Lu Heniang had worked so hard on the boatwoman's steps from beginning to end, and it came down to a change into wedding clothes. Gao Shoucheng said the people at a wedding feast loved to see a change into bright clothes. If the characters went their separate ways at the end, who would feel like giving them a tip? Gu Ming broke in to suggest adding a sword dance on his return. They could talk about the ending after they'd given the audience some excitement.

“You can find a way to add a turn of your own to any scene.” Lu Heniang looked at him.

“If it looks good, put it in.”

“First practice getting through the doorway without showing the soles of your feet.”

Gu Ming raised the pole like a sword and made a show of letting everyone see the soles of his feet, drawing a bigger laugh. Xiaoman had meant to say there was more than one way to sing the last scene, but when he cut in she lost her opening. She was suddenly irritated that however serious a thing might be in this courtyard, he could make it seem like nothing for a moment if he chose to joke. She also knew the stage needed that gift. There was room for people who didn’t, like her, grow quieter the more they carried.

The moment the argument was over, Lu Heniang took a new string of beads from her box and asked if Xiaoman could sew it onto the collar so she could see how it looked. The beads were far from light. Xiaoman lifted them and gave them a little shake, and Lu Heniang said it was only a trial. If they looked wrong, they could come off again. She loved that little glimmer. Even the corners of her eyes softened as she looked at it. Watching her, Xiaoman remembered working two extra nights for a single red bead herself, and let her earlier remark about trading the pole for fine new clothes go.

The new drummer, Cai Heng, sat by the curtain and waited for the laughter to die down before striking a beat. The rhythm was different from Lu Zheng’s. Xiaoman came in too early, cut herself off in a hurry, and cracked the end of the note a little. Cai Heng asked whether she wanted to try again. Without thinking she said it had never gone like that before. She saw his hand stop at the rim of the drum and remembered that the old beat was only in her own ears. The man who’d come in to play had never heard it and owed her no such rhythm.

She asked to start again, listening to him finish the beat first. Though the second attempt went smoothly, the small knot of displeasure remained in her chest, especially as A-Sheng beside them bobbed his head along, with no memory at all of how his father had once played. Xiaoman felt on the one hand that this was good, that the child could have new things, yet on the other she wondered why he had not asked even once. As she sang the final line, her eyes nearly strayed toward her son, but she forced them back to Lu Heniang's shoulder.

After rehearsal, Gao Shoucheng asked her to look in the rear wing of South Hall. Two costume chests were crowded up against the old drum stand, leaving nowhere to put the cloth that had just come in. The stand was empty in the middle and the wood was still sound. Taken apart, it would make two low shelves. Xiaoman said at once that the stand wasn't spare. Gao Shoucheng didn't press her. He only asked who would put the cloth out to dry tomorrow if it got damp tonight. He said it mildly, which made her feel more awkward than if he'd pressed.

Lu Zheng's old drum had been sold while he was ill. Someone said the price was low, but he insisted on taking ready cash so Xiaoman wouldn't go further into debt for medicine. The drum went and the stand stayed. At first the idea was to put a new skin on another drum once he got better. After he was gone, the stand was lighter than the drum, yet whoever came to clear up went around it first. Over time it became an empty patch of floor no one wanted to be the first to ask about.

Xiaoman wiped the dust from the crossbar of the stand, and her fingers found a notch worn shallow. Lu Zheng had cut it to mark the tension when he tied down the drumskin. As a little boy, A-Sheng used to pick at it with his fingernail and say it looked like a bug. A mark like that couldn’t justify taking up room the whole troupe needed, but she couldn’t let someone take the stand apart until no one recognized it just because there was cloth to put away tomorrow. She folded and refolded her dust rag and heard A-Zhao outside asking which lantern was for everyone’s use.

A-Zhao came for the old bamboo lantern and said she'd bring it back in the morning, after wrapping it up well for the night. Xiaoman had her bring it to the table so she could mend a split corner of the paper. The lantern was unlit, and its brass clasp caught the light of the other lamp, the clay one in the room, more clearly than when the lantern itself was burning. She suddenly asked how long He Huaizhou's final illness had lasted. A-Zhao said he'd gone downhill quickly in the twelfth month. Before that he'd kept saying it was just the cold and he'd be fine after a few days' rest.

Xiaoman nodded without saying how like Lu Zheng that sounded. Toward the end of an illness, people always said some of the same things, and those left behind were no wiser about what to do. She wanted to ask A-Zhao if she truly meant to give up ferrying for good. Then it struck her that Master He’s absence gave her no right to hold his daughter on the boat. All she asked was whether A-Zhao would still come if the sewing over the next few days turned out to be different from what she’d imagined.

A-Zhao didn't answer immediately. She felt the clasp on her trunk and said she'd come back, but she wouldn't go ahead and sew places no one had told her to sew. Xiaoman heard a little defiance still lingering in that and couldn't help smiling. She said there was no need to become someone who asked permission for every move from then on. If she was busy, she might not explain everything properly. When in doubt, stop for a moment and ask who was going to wear the clothes. There was more to look at than her own stitches.

Only when she'd finished did she realize she was giving lessons again. A-Zhao took the lantern and quietly asked whether she should carry a message back this time. Xiaoman looked at her. In the courtyard she could hear Cai Heng putting the drum away, with A-Sheng at his side asking over and over why he couldn't play the empty stand. She suddenly didn't want to send this young woman back carrying a lantern again without so much as a word she could actually deliver.

“When this run is over,” she said, “I'd like to take A-Sheng across the river.”

A Zhao looked up, her eyes brightening for a moment before she quickly checked herself. She asked when. Xiao Man said it was not settled yet. Lanting's current run was expected to continue into early March, and if the venue changed afterward, she would first have to hand over the sewing work she had in hand properly. She was saying she wanted to, not that she definitely would. A Zhao nodded and, surprisingly, did not press her about whether it would be the Shangsi Festival, or say how happy the old lady would be to hear it. Xiao Man felt a little more at ease instead.

That night she washed her son's feet. Only one of the new shoes was finished, and the sole of the other had already been pressed. A-Sheng asked whether he could ride in the little boat inside the lantern tomorrow. When he heard she wanted to take him back to Liuwan, he asked at once whether Grandmother had a boat, whether she had a courtyard, and whether he could bring the little clay dog. Xiaoman answered a few of his questions and then told him that was enough for now. She didn't know herself what day they'd go. As the boy stuck out his lower lip, she recognized in herself the impatience she'd seen in her own mother.

She didn’t soften all at once. She still held her son by the ankle to keep him from kicking water onto the bed. Only after she’d dried his feet did she tell him there was a lantern shop over there with lots of lanterns, and he wasn’t to play with them like toy boats that went round and round. A-Sheng said he was already big and asked why they’d never gone before. Xiaoman set the other shoe by the bed and said there were roads even grown-ups hadn’t found their way along. The boy didn’t understand, so he lowered his head and gave all his attention to which of the two shoes was wider.

After Azhao left, Gao Man came for the wooden tally to collect some cloth. Seeing the drum stand still there, she didn't ask again whether it was coming apart. She found two bamboo poles herself and laid them across the chest. When she left, though, she had to turn sideways at the doorframe, and the bolt on her shoulder picked up a streak of dust. Xiaoman saw it and grew more irritable. She waited for Gao Man to go before picking up a little strip left over from the planing. She thought she could prop up the old stand for now, at least enough to keep its wooden feet from scraping the floor.

She was holding the stand steady when Asheng poked his head out from beside the bed and asked if she was saving a place for a drum for him. Xiaoman was about to say yes, but what came out was that they'd leave it there for now. The boy said he'd like to put his bamboo flute on it too. The stand was so big it could hold a whole row of them. Looking at it, she suddenly thought it seemed a good deal less narrow through her son's eyes than it did through hers.

Someone next door was boiling noodles, and the smell of scallion oil drifted through a gap in the wall. Only then did she remember that she'd eaten just half a bean cake that evening. Her stomach felt cold and empty. When Lu Zheng was alive he often forgot to eat too, but when he caught her busy he'd scold her and say that if the costume chest really could eat people, it ought to start with someone who had some meat on them. Remembering the face he'd pull, she let out a breath of laughter. Then she thought the boy might hear and ask why, so she turned to fetch a bowl and buy a serving of hot noodles next door.

The noodle seller asked whether to add scallions. She said yes, paused, then asked for just a few. A-Sheng tugged her hem from behind. When she turned, he said he wanted a few bites too, without scallions. Xiaoman picked them out for him with her chopsticks and was halfway through before it occurred to her that she didn't even know whether that old pot in Liuwan was still there. She divided the noodles into a small bowl and handed it to her son first, then sat beside the empty drum stand and finally finished the half bowl that was left.