Embers of the Broken River

Chapter 8 The Son's Name

Today, when Chen Tongfu wrote the two characters "农时" (farming season), his brush paused.

The carving on the bamboo slip stopped abruptly. The last stroke of the character "农" (farmer) was only half-carved, flicking out and then returning, leaving a hesitant scratch on the bamboo surface. The ink seeped at the break, like a drop of blood being choked. He did not continue carving.

He placed the carving knife on the corner of the table and stood up. The returned letter was placed on top of the stack of bamboo slips, which he refused to take down. Each time a new stack was added to cover it, he would take it back and put it on top again. Ah Heng would only take the letter down and read it at night after he had fallen asleep. She didn't know many characters, but she recognized the four characters "no such person found".

She recognized the horizontal and vertical strokes, the character "安" (ān), the character "北" (běi), and the character "人" (rén). She turned the letter over; on the back were her husband's engraved questions. She couldn't understand them either. She simply put the letter back, placing it on top of all the bamboo slips.

The snow was still falling outside the window. A thin layer of white had accumulated on the locust tree branches. The tree was planted by his son. When his son was five years old, he picked up a locust sapling from the riverbank, its roots still covered in mud. He held it tightly, saying, "Dad, when will it grow as tall as me?" Chen Tongfu spread his arms to show him, and his son stood on tiptoe, but couldn't reach it. He himself couldn't reach it either.

The son asked again, "Dad, when do we plant wheat?" He said after the first frost. The son asked why after the first frost, and he couldn't answer. He had only learned this time from his father, who had learned it from his grandfather; no one had ever asked why. The son asked. That year, the North suffered a severe drought, and all the wheat planted after the first frost died.

The day her son left, he was there to pay grain taxes for their neighbor, Old Man Wang. Old Man Wang's husband had died at the construction site of the border wall, leaving her to raise three children alone, the eldest only nine years old. Officials came to collect the grain taxes, saying the payment for the crops was due and they would seize the land if it wasn't paid.

Grandpa Wang knelt at the village entrance and cried for a long time, but no one answered. His son went over and said, "Grandma, I'll carry one shi (a unit of weight) for you." He was only supposed to carry one shi, but when he put it on his shoulder, he realized it was two. The constable from the yamen said that with interest and losses, one shi had become two. The son didn't argue. He put the carrying pole on his shoulder, and his waist bent. It wasn't a cracking sound, but a dull thud, like a wet stick splitting open from the inside, the outer layer still attached, but the core broken.

He stood there for a while, waiting for the pain to subside. Then he picked up the carrying pole and walked towards the village entrance. He didn't look back as he walked. It wasn't that he didn't want to, but his back hurt so much he couldn't turn around. He was afraid that if he turned around and saw his mother standing at the door, he wouldn't be able to walk anymore.

His back never got better after that. He walked with a limp, couldn't carry heavy things, and could only write letters and carve wooden signs for people at the village entrance to earn a few coins. He didn't tell his father that every time he came home to visit, he would force himself to stand up straight, saying that the work on the wall wasn't tiring, that the yamen provided meals, and that his father shouldn't worry.

One winter, he came back, and Aheng cooked a table full of dishes. He ate half a bowl and then put down his chopsticks. Aheng asked him why he wasn't eating, and he said he had eaten on the way. Later, when she was cleaning up the dishes, she found a small pool of blood under the table. He had rubbed it with the sole of his shoe, but it wasn't completely clean.

He died on the construction site of the border wall in the north. Not in battle, but from exhaustion. The wall had to be built across the mountains, and the stones had to be carried up from the foot of the mountains. The straps of the baskets dug into his shoulders, chafing his skin, flesh, and even bone. The foreman said each person should make ten trips a day. His back was bad, and by the eighth trip, he couldn't straighten up. The eleventh foreman said it was a rule set by the founding emperor, and the progress of the border wall couldn't be delayed. By the thirteenth trip, he leaned against a stone and sat down, never to stand up again.

A character was missing from the overseer's roster. Chen Anbei was written as Chen An. Perhaps it was a matter of accent; the overseer from the north was from the south and couldn't understand the Guanzhong dialect, confusing "north" and "not," and his pen slipped, omitting the character "north." Or perhaps it was intentional, as missing a character meant missing out on a pension. No one knew. The old clerk in charge of returning letters searched the roster for a long time, checking hundreds of names one by one, but Chen Anbei was not found. He couldn't bear to write "dead," so he wrote four characters: "No such person found."

Chen Tongfu remembered all of this. He remembered every single detail. He just never wrote it down. He never wrote his son's name on the bamboo slips, not because he didn't want to, but because he dared not. His pen would pause when he wrote "farming season," and his hand would tremble when he wrote "border wall," but he never carved the two characters "Anbei" on the bamboo slips. He hid the name in his heart, in the handkerchief his sister embroidered in his sleeve, in the knife mark on the window frame polished by his fingers, and in his dreams. He didn't write it down.

He placed the returned letter on top of the stack of bamboo slips. Each time a new stack of bamboo slips was added, he placed it back on top. The letter had been there for a long time. He didn't need to write his son's name; those four characters watched over him every day from the top of the bamboo slip stack.

Aheng knew. Every night after he fell asleep, she would take down the returned letter and read it. She couldn't write much. Later, she placed a bamboo slip in front of her son's cenotaph; she had carved it herself. She didn't ask him to write it, nor did she ask Zhou Xiaoshi. She used his old carving knife, which he kept on the corner of his desk, to carve three characters on the scrap bamboo: Anbei Leng.

The carvings were shallow and crooked; the last dot of the character "cold" was crooked, leaning to the right as if blown askew by the wind. She placed the bamboo slip before the cenotaph; the soil was freshly prepared, mixed with grass seeds and broken locust leaves. She knelt down and pressed the soil down the bottom of the bamboo slip with her hands. Then she stood up, without crying, and turned to go into the kitchen. The stove was cold. She squatted down to try and light it, finally getting it to fire on the fourth try.

Chen Tongfu knew nothing of these things. He didn't know how many times she had taken down the returned letter to look at it, nor did he know what words she had carved in front of her son's cenotaph. All he knew was that the window covered with a rebuttal-like pattern had a hole in the paper through which one could see the locust tree outside, and an empty bird's nest swaying gently in the wind on the branches of the locust tree, its bark gnawed bare by locusts.

He stood by the window, his hand resting on the window frame. The frame bore the marks his son had made with a carving knife when he was little; the edges were worn smooth by repeated rubbing. He didn't know if he had touched them himself or if Aheng had. Outside, the snow was still falling. A layer of white had accumulated on the locust tree, filling the character "安" (An, meaning peace/peace). The returned letter sat on top of the pile of bamboo slips. He hadn't written his son's name.

Chen Tongfu stood by the window until dark. The letter on the pile of bamboo slips that read "No such person found" was slightly lifted and then fell back down by the wind. Aheng squatted in front of the stove and tried to light it on the third try. The firelight made the wrinkles on her face look like deep grooves. She turned the fire down to the smallest setting, leaving only a wisp of charcoal to simmer the pot of water.