Rain Through the Old Drain

On the night of the twentieth day of the second month, rain forced its way through the gaps in the tiles. The first thing Gu Qing heard was the clack of the board beside the well as the water lifted it, ahead of any thunder. She threw on a robe and went outside. The moment her shoes touched the stone paving, icy water washed over the tops of her feet. The wooden platform where the paper basket had once stood had tilted. Loose sheets left underneath had soaked through and caught against a thin bamboo strip at the foot of the wall. The water swirled along the wall, refusing to go down the old drain.

She woke her grandmother, moved the two boxes of materials onto stools, and went to open the courtyard gate herself. The water in the lane was still only a thin, shining layer; the water in her own courtyard was deeper. A lamp had been lit in the Wen family’s courtyard too. A-Chun came running from the south with a wooden rake, shouting that the drain opening was blocked again. Gu Qing first asked whether it was hemp scraps dropped while unloading goods over there. Halfway through the question, her foot struck something soft.

She bent down and felt the old paper they had wrapped flowers in. Soaked through, it clung to thin bamboo strips packed with mud and dead leaves, wedged right in the narrow opening at the foot of the curved wall. A month earlier she had moved the paper basket indoors and left the platform down, without clearing away the stray paper and bamboo strips that had fallen through. Later, once the surface water had receded, she had only probed the mouth of the drain and never looked under the platform. Now the paper had swollen and the strips were holding it ever tighter. The water pushed against her hand as if some unseen hand insisted on coming back into the house.

Xu Tan came around from the other end, her trouser legs rolled to her knees and a short spade in her hand. Before asking whose it was, she told A-Chun to catch it at the lower end of the ditch, so the whole mass wouldn't wash into the narrower outlet. When Gu Qing heard that the outlet was outside her own gate where the ditch bent south, she finally made sense of the route He Fengqiu had traced with his finger. She crouched, water pouring straight into the hem of her clothes, and felt for the bamboo strips, drawing them out inch by inch.

Wet paper fell apart easily and was hard to get out cleanly. She hooked it with a finger and came away with only a little wad. The rest was still caught in the crevice by the tree root. She thought of getting an iron hook, but Xu Tan stopped her. “Don't go prying at the root. Lift the board first.” Gu Qing had added the board later so she could set down another basket, nailing it across the crossbar of the low worktable. They would have to move the table to uncover the whole tangle under the water.

Gu Qing stood and tried lifting one end, and the trays of flowers drying on the table tilted. She rushed to steady them as the water rose again. Her grandmother stood in the doorway with a lamp and told her to get the flowers inside. Gu Qing glanced at the forty new stems she had just finished drying, her throat tightening for a moment. She took two trays and stacked them on a stool indoors, past caring if the petals touched. Auntie Chen heard the commotion and came over under an umbrella. When she saw the water at the door, she folded it and helped Gu Qing carry the third tray in.

The three of them moved the table aside. More than paper had collected beneath it. There were burlap fibers that had strayed from the Wens', grit left from the old wall, and twigs fallen from the tree. Gu Qing lifted out her layer of bamboo strips first and scratched the back of her hand. She bore it and kept her hand where it was. Achun caught the debris at the lower end and hauled it away bucket by bucket. The short shovel scraped against the hard bottom, and at last the first rush of water drew past their feet with a soft sucking sound.

Xu Tan turned sideways. Her cuff dropped into the dirty water, and her whole sleeve got wet. Gu Qing said, “I dropped the paper scraps.”

Xu Tan gave a little grunt and went on scraping. Gu Qing added, “Last time I only moved the basket. I didn’t clear underneath.”

“Then clear it properly this time.” Xu Tan handed her the shovel by its handle and turned to see whether Achun had let the dirty water run toward Granny Liu's door.

Saying it aloud didn't get anyone out of the work at hand. Gu Qing took the shovel, scraped out a channel a hand's breadth wide, and felt her way around every bend in the drain. It took half her body pressed against the wet wall and a knee braced against hard stone for her to understand what she had asked for in the eleventh month when she said to keep the drain. They had kept a channel someone would always have to crouch down to clear.

The rain eased in the latter half of the night. The water receded into the cracks between the stones, and her grandmother brought out hot water and dry cloths and told everyone to wipe their hands first. Auntie Chen saw the dry cloths she'd brought get muddy and swore that half a night at Gu Qing's made a bigger mess than a whole day washing clothes. Gu Qing wanted to laugh but couldn't manage it. She said she'd wash the cloths herself. Auntie Chen wrung one out and draped it over her shoulders. “Change your clothes first. If you start coughing, who's going to wash them?”

The next morning, Gu Qing carried the table back into the courtyard. She tried it in three positions, and every one still crossed the line the drainage channel had to follow. When they built the curved wall in winter, she had only pushed the table back under the eaves. On fine days it could stand crosswise, but when the rain came, two of its legs blocked the turn. To keep the drain clear for good, she would have to take off the half of the work rack that ran along the wall. She measured once with her hand. The space she was keeping would fit two shallow trays, where she used to spread out four.

She went to borrow a saw from Zhou Jiping and decided herself how to take the rack apart. He came over to lend a hand, steadied the half they were removing, and asked whether she wanted to keep the old wood. Gu Qing said it couldn't stay by the wall. The sound pieces could go to the kitchen and the rest could dry for firewood. She was done propping things against that wall. He put a brick beneath the cut and caught the sawdust in a basin. At the last inch he stopped so she could hold the half that was coming off. The cut showed pale white, as if the old table had suddenly lost a familiar arm.

Her grandmother moved her little stool in toward the window to give her another foot of room. Gu Qing put the stool back, then used the leftover wood to nail up two narrow shelves high on the wall, one shallow tray above the other. She would have to make less on overcast days and rotate the trays one by one when she set them out to dry. She hadn't turned the loss into a clever way to make more flowers. The high shelf was hard to reach and the lower one got less light. The only thing she could do about the forty stems she'd promised Yao's shop was start earlier.

On the twenty-second, the rain stopped, and Auntie Chen brought over two thick mattress covers that needed washing. Gu Qing carried water for her, washed the cloth and clothes that had got dirty while they were helping that night, and finished the washing she had promised to do. Auntie Chen scrubbed another piece beside her and asked whether she finally understood that holding back water was more trouble than holding back people. Gu Qing said people would at least listen to a word or two. Water wouldn't. They laughed for a good while, their hands still working away at their own washing, neither getting the better of the other.

The Wen household invited He Fengqiu to inspect the drain. The mason scraped the remaining sand from the outlet and confirmed that the new wall had neither collapsed nor developed a leak. He laid two thin stones where soil was most likely to fall, leaving them unsealed so they could be lifted for inspections later. Since the labor and materials were for drainage shared by several households, the Wens paid first, and Gu Qing and the Chens contributed according to the short sections each occupied. Gu Qing paid twelve wen, but she had not bought freedom from ever touching dirty water again. He Fengqiu had her try lifting a stone on the spot. Bending down to raise it, she found that there really was still room underneath for a hand.

It was only on the second night after taking down the rack that Gu Qing realized she still had nowhere to put a whole bundle of wide offcuts she had never had the heart to cut. She thought of sliding it under the bed, but the winter quilts and Grandmother’s outdoor shoes were already there. She went round the room with the bundle in her arms and finally had to undo it. She picked out some pieces to take to Sister Ji, who would credit them at the going rate for offcuts against future purchases. She rolled the remaining narrow strips tight again and put them on a high shelf. She lost the ease of spreading everything out whenever she wanted to choose a color, and with it the little feeling of plenty she got from seeing a whole bundle of good silk.

Shen Su helped her tie the last roll and asked if she wouldn't keep the pale gold piece. Gu Qing felt it, kept a palm's width to test colors on, and handed over the rest. Once the paper package was gone, the room felt as if a corner had been emptied. She sat at the table with half of it gone and waited a long while before taking up her scissors. Only when the dripping in the courtyard slowed did she turn over a flower that had already dried to see if the layer underneath was dry as well. In the narrow space they'd cleared, light fell on the wet stone, and she could see the water flowing out.

Qiu Shen the gardener happened to come to the Wens' to collect payment for the pots, and they asked him to stay and look at the plum tree. It had no flowers, the buds were swelling, and a ring of mud around the wet roots had been trodden hard. He told Gu Qing to stop walking back and forth over the same spot and loosen the topsoil a little. As long as water could run down the drain, there was no need to dig up the roots every day for fear of flooding. Gu Qing asked if the tree would suffer this year. He looked up at the tips of the branches and said they would have to wait for the leaves to come out. For now nobody could answer for it.

She had heard an answer like that once before and this time let it stand. She brought out the old wastepaper basket that had been ruined by the water and took it apart too. The bamboo strips she could save went outside to dry, and she cleared away the rest that day. Torn petals from old flowers lay mixed with the mud, the red ones already turned brown. She moved them with the pads of her fingers and picked them up bit by bit into an empty bowl. Grandmother sat by the window watching her, the bundle of coarse thread still in her hands, making no move to pass it over and hurry her back to work.

On the twenty-fourth they finally had a long enough stretch of sunshine to rotate the trays four times. When Gu Qing went to lift the last one, she scraped the skin off her little finger on the shelf and stamped her foot in anger. Zhou Jiping was passing the door. He heard her curse the rack and turned back to ask if she wanted a hinged lip put on it. She said yes, but asked for the price first. He gave her the cost of labor and materials and said she could save half by doing the nailing herself. He would cut the thin wood. She thought for a moment and said she would do the nailing. She had nothing to prove about what she could do alone. She simply needed to save those few coins right now.

She delivered all forty stems on time on the twenty-fifth. At the Yao shop they bent the petals and shook the stems in front of her, accepted thirty-nine, and sent one back because the seam at its base was loose. She fixed it and brought it back that same day, and by evening she had collected two hundred and forty cash. On the way home she bought two pieces of tofu. She hardly dared say everything would go smoothly from now on. The broken edge of the table was still by the door after the rain. She nudged the tofu gently into the soup and asked her grandmother if she wanted some spicy radish with dinner.

On the twenty-sixth it rained again. Gu Qing covered the flower trays with thin paper and went out with a short shovel. Auntie Chen was already at the lower end of the drain, and Xu Tan stood over there with a lantern. This time the three of them let the old argument over who had blocked whose way rest. Water ran under the thin stone slab. They each checked a stretch and went back to their own work. Inside her own gate, Gu Qing rinsed the mud from the shovel and hung it on a peg she could reach easily, clear of the cupboard.