Ben Er's Cleaver
Ben Er, the pig-slaughterer of Locust Lane, can read a pig's whole life in its dying squeal and keeps one iron rule: he never kills a stolen beast. When the rice-shop master drags in a hog Ben recognizes as a bullied widow's, he refuses the blade and returns it by night. The reason lies in his own childhood - a pig stolen from his grandmother, who never saw another spring. A quiet tale of a butcher whose cleaver answers to conscience.
The busiest trade in Locust Lane come the twelfth lunar month is Ben Er slaughtering the New Year pig.
Ben Er's given name was Ben Shouren, but everyone on the lane just called him Ben the Second. He was broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, in a leather apron gone black and glossy with years of use, and at his back he carried a heavy-backed cleaver he had swung for thirty years without ever changing its edge. When a family on the lane wanted their New Year pig killed, they did not send for a butcher; they sent for Ben Er - not because he was cheap, but because he had a gift no one else possessed.
Ben Er, before he killed a pig, first looked at it, then listened to it.
When the pig was brought to the block, he would run his hands over its back fat, knead the sinew of its hind leg, and last of all crouch down and blow a soft breath into its ear. Startled, the pig would let out a great squeal. Others thought the beast merely feared death; Ben Er cocked his head like a man savoring an opera singer's voice. "A pig knows a human heart," he said. "That last cry before dying hides nothing. One raised at home on husks and vegetable scraps wails with grievance; one stolen or beaten wails with a kind of defiance; one taken from a widow or cheated from a neighbor wails in a way that breaks your heart."
He had set himself one iron rule: he would not kill a stolen pig.
Earlier that month, a gambler from the lane's end had led in a spotted pig, claiming it was his own. At its cry Ben Er's face darkened. "I know that voice," he said. "It is Old Sun's pig, gone missing from the west end last month." The gambler slunk away and never returned.
On the morning of the twenty-first, the new master of the lane's rice shop, Zhao Yougui, came with two helpers dragging a two-hundred-pound white hog to be killed for his shop's opening feast. The hog was trussed and laid on the block; Ben Er did as always - felt the fat, kneaded the sinew, bent to blow in its ear. The pig threw up its head, and there, on the left ear, was a small crescent bitten from the rim. Ben Er's hand froze. He knew that notch; Granny He had cut it with her shoemaking awl.
Granny He lived alone at the lane's end and had fattened that pig for over half a year, meaning to keep it for her son home from his labor for the New Year meal. A few days before, Zhao had come with men, saying Granny He owed three pecks of old rice to the shop, and taken the pig as payment. Ben Er had seen the debt note; the ink was barely dry - plainly forced from her.
"Master Zhao," Ben Er straightened, the blade pointing at the notch in the ear, "this pig, I will not kill."
Zhao's face fell. "Ben Er, do not meddle. The debt is written clear as day."
"Debt is debt, pig is pig," Ben Er drove the knife into the block. "I, Ben the One-Cut, have killed pigs all my life and never once laid blade to a stolen or robbed one. If you want a feast, there are butchers at the lane's mouth. Do not soil my block."
Zhao spat a few threats and had the hog hauled away.
That night it snowed. At the second watch, Ben Er wrapped his padded coat tight, slipped alone to Granny He's yard, climbed the wall into the pigsty, loosed the trembling white hog, and shooed it back into her house. Granny He lit a lamp and came out; seeing it was Ben Er, her eyes reddened, and all she said was: "Shouren, you will make enemies doing this."
Ben Er waved a hand and trudged back through the snow to the lane's mouth.
He did not say that when he was nine, the only New Year pig his grandmother had fattened for half a year was also taken by the steward of the town's great household, to spread a banquet. His grandmother chased the men halfway down the lane through the snow, came home and took to her bed, and did not survive that first month of the year. On her deathbed she pressed into his hand a little pig molded of clay. "Second Son," she said, "remember: the pig is a poor man's life. Whoever touches a poor man's life is no man at all."
That clay pig still sits beneath Ben Er's block to this day.
As dawn neared, Ben Er crouched once more before the block and, with a tile dipped in water, honed his heavy-backed cleaver stroke by stroke - the cleaver that in thirty years had known no blood but the honorable kind. Snow had fallen thick, a white hush covering the lane's mouth, and covering too the one cut he should have made that day.