Xiju

Xiju was seventeen that year. In the first month of the lunar year the matchmaker stepped across her family's threshold for the first time, snow from the far bank of the river still caked on her shoes. Matchmaker Song had been sent by the Chens across the river: their son was thirty-two, worked in a mine in the south, and his first wife had died, leaving a five-year-old girl. The bride price was set at sixty-eight thousand yuan—half paid up front, the girl to cross the threshold after the harvest.

Father said nothing, only puffing his dry tobacco. Mother sat behind the stove peeling garlic, and her hands stopped mid-peel. Xiju stood in the doorway with her bowl, hearing her own heart knock, one beat at a time, like the rusted old bell at the village entrance. Sixty-eight thousand—an impossible sum in their house. Her younger brother, Xiaozhu, three years her junior, had just been promised to Juanni from the next village; the bride's family wanted the same amount, plus a down payment on a flat in the county town. Her parents had done the arithmetic in secret: marry Xiju off, and the price they received would exactly fill the hole Xiaozhu had dug. A daughter is raised for another family anyway, Father said; she must marry sooner or later, so what does it matter when.

In these parts, ten miles around, a daughter's bride price was the only hard currency a poor family could lay hands on. The villagers all understood it in private, and simply never said so aloud, as if this match, like the harvest, were simply the way of the world.

Xiju did not make a scene. She had finished the second year of middle school and knew a few hundred characters, and she knew there was nowhere to take a scene. At night she lay beside Mother and asked, Mother, must it be me. Mother dimmed the lamp and said, Ju, if your brother doesn't take a wife, his whole life is ruined. This family has one narrow bridge, and if you step aside, everyone gets across. When Mother finished, the tears came first. Xiju suddenly remembered that Mother too had been traded to this village at seventeen, for three hundred catties of wheat, by her own father. Xiju had never once been to Mother's natal home; she had heard only one line about it—that there had been a younger sister there too, whose marriage no one ever heard of again. The lamp went out, and neither spoke, but the arithmetic stayed the same.

From then until the eighth month Xiju went on working the fields, feeding the chickens, heating water for Mother. Only she woke often at night, listening to the insects outside the window and storing each sound in her heart. She asked Mother nothing more, and Mother said nothing more; the two of them swallowed their words, and counted the days away as they always had.

In the eighth month the Chens came for her in a borrowed van. The thirty-two-year-old man sat in the passenger seat, dark-faced and quiet, missing half his little finger on the right hand—a mine blast. He handed Father a red cloth bundle with thirty-four thousand inside, saying the rest would come after the harvest. Father took it; his hand trembled once and then did not let go. Xiju stuffed two changes of clothes into a woven sack. Mother combed her hair and pinned a red velvet flower into it, saying, dress yourself up nicely, don't let them look down on you over there. Xiju meant to say I won't go, but the words came out as, Mother, I'm leaving. Mother answered, go, go, and write when you arrive.

As the van pulled out of the village, Xiju watched through the back window: Mother still stood under the old locust tree, the red flower so far away it had shrunk to a single mole. She thought, however long Mother stands, that long I will remember.

The first year, Xiju sent home two thousand yuan, saying the mine fed her and this was what she'd saved. The second year, Xiaozhu's wedding was held in the renovated front room, red couplets pasted across every wall, guests drinking and saying the Chens' money had been a godsend, since it both sealed Xiaozhu's match and put a down payment on that flat in the county town. Xiju did not come back, saying the mine couldn't spare her. The third year she sent money again, with a photograph: a grey mining sky behind her, the Chen girl in her arms, smiling in a way no one could read as true or false. She never spoke of the mine in detail, only writing at the foot of each letter, all is well, all is well.

Of the days in the mine Xiju let slip one line, later, in a letter: the lamps underground burn all year and you can't tell black from white on a face, until knock-off, when you see the red in each other's eyes. The Chen girl called her Mother, and she answered, then turned to boil a pot of gruel. After the man went lame he spoke even less, sitting on the threshold at night with one cigarette after another, the tip glowing and dying, like the snow at the village entrance the year Xiju left.

The fourth spring, Father hired the township carpenter to tear out the old door of the front room and hang two new leaves, painted red three times over. The carpenter asked, that's fine timber, isn't it. Father said, earned by my daughter. Villagers passing by all praised the old couple for their luck—a daughter worth half a son. No one asked how Xiju fared in the mine. The day the new door was hung, its first swing startled the swallows from the eaves.

The fifth year, Mother said on the phone, Ju, your sister Zhaodi is seventeen now too, and Matchmaker Song came by yesterday. Xiju was silent a long while on the other end, then said, Mother, let her study two more years. Mother said, study what—a girl who reads too much gets ideas, better to settle her early. Xiju said no more. The line went dead, and the busy tone left behind sounded like the old bell still swinging.

After that Xiju rarely called. She sent word by others that the mine had blown up again, that the man was lame now and she could not get away. Her parents sighed and turned to fuss over the new grandson in Xiaozhu's house. Life went on as before, except that the front room now had a freshly painted red door, built from Xiju's bride price, and when it opened and shut it sounded brighter than the old one. Zhaodi passed through it every day, the red paint casting her face, year by year, more and more like Xiju's.

Sometimes Mother stood by the new door and rubbed the red paint with her sleeve, as if afraid the colour would fade. She told the neighbours, Ju's fine in the mine, she wrote. The letters had long since stopped coming, but the words reached her mouth and came out the same. The neighbours nodded and turned back to their own lives, and no one asked again.

One Qingming, Xiju sent back a small packet of tea and a slip of paper that read: Mother, when the door sounds, listen for me. Mother could not read, so she pressed the paper under the shrine and took it out to wipe clean each Qingming. The red door swung open and shut several times a day, and Mother listened, but in the end never told which year of Xiju it held inside. Wind slipped through the gap under the door, cool, like the snow that blew from the far bank of the river the day her daughter left.