Changshun
Forty-three and unmarried, Changshun is a 'bare branch' in his village of Houliuzhuang. His father died in a mine; his mother married off two daughters and never saved a dowry. A back injury ended his labor, and village brides now marry into town. The matchmaker's price, a county flat and one hundred and eighty thousand, he cannot meet; the one woman who almost stayed fled before dawn. When his mother dies begging pardon, Changshun is left alone beneath a moon laying his floor white as frost.
The dirt road of Houliuzhuang turns to mud with every rain. Changshun is forty-three now, and still he lives alone.
His mother, Zhou, is sixty-eight, her back bent like a plow. Thirty years ago Changshun's father went down the mine and never came back; the mine handed over a thousand in consolation money, and Zhou married off her two daughters one after another. The dowries she paid out ran deeper than what came in, and she never kept a coin to arrange a wife for her son.
Changshun left for work with the other villagers at sixteen. On the building sites he mixed mortar and shouldered cement until, at thirty, his back gave way; now on damp days it aches as if packed with ice. Back in Houliuzhuang he became what the men at the well-head called good for nothing.
The village girls no longer marry within the village. The year before last the secretary's grandson bought a flat in the county and took the supermarket owner's daughter; thirty tables of feast. Changshun's two cracked-brick rooms are not even a pretext for a bride price. The matchmaker, Widow Wang, was plain about it: your son, no looks, no house, can he raise the hundred and eighty thousand? Zhou saved the white flour from her own meals and sent Wang a jug of oil and a basket of eggs, begging her to find him even a widow with a child, anything. Wang took the gifts and was never heard from again.
Changshun is not without a heart that once stirred. At thirty-eight he met Xiuzhi on a county building site, another day laborer, and they spoke of going back to the village and keeping house together. Xiuzhi came to the door once, saw Zhou coughing unable to straighten, saw the chipped bowl on the stove, and was gone before dawn, without a word.
He learned, slowly, to hide himself. At the village weddings and funerals no invitation ever reached his hand; at the New Year feast he was set at the side table with the children. Someone laughed to his face: Brother Changshun, looks like you'll never taste soup brewed by a wife. He gave a sheepish chuckle and jabbed his chopsticks to the bottom of the bowl.
Zhou's sickness worsened last winter. Lying on the kang, she still murmured, while Mother draws breath, she'll keep arranging for you. Changshun watched the yards by day and the fish pond by night; every coin went to medicine. But a disease of the lungs is not stayed by herbs. On the eighth day of the twelfth month Zhou passed. At the end she gripped his hand and did not say the word marriage, only mumbled, Mother has wronged you.
When the rites were done, Changshun was alone again.
In spring the neighbor Chen gave his only son a wife; firecrackers roared from one end of the village to the other. Changshun squatted on his own threshold shelling peanuts, and no one came to call him to the feast. Deep into the night, when the noise had spent itself, he heard a rat cross the beam, and suddenly remembered his mother's words, at his thirtieth year she had said, when you are settled with a family, Mother will close her eyes. Now he is forty-three, Mother has closed her eyes, and he is still alone.
Moonlight falls into the leaking hall and lays the floor white, like a fall of frost.