Old Rui's Incense
Old Rui kept an unmarked incense shop at Locust Lane's end. His nose read a family's fortunes in its ashes, and his sticks burned straight while others' choked. He made no life-prolonging incense and no fine funeral incense for the unfilial. When Sun, who starved his mother in a woodshed, staged a grand funeral, Rui gave only the poorest sticks; Sun's bought incense died and shamed the house. Rui gave fine incense if Sun mourned forty-nine days. Lit, the smoke stood straight and mourners wept.
Deep in Locust Lane stood an unmarked incense shop; a bundle of dried mugwort hung on the doorframe served as its sign. The keeper's surname was Rui, and everyone called him Old Rui. He had rolled incense for forty years, and his hands, steeped in the scent of cypress and wormwood, could never be washed clean of it.
Old Rui had a gift no one else could match his nose. With his eyes shut, he needed only to smell the ashes from a household's old incense burner to know the warmth or chill that family had known over the past half year: whether a child had been born or a coffin carried out, whether fortune had risen or the roof had fallen in. The townsfolk whispered that Old Rui's nose was sharper than the magistrate's court gavel.
What was stranger still was the incense he made. Cypress, wormwood, sandalwood bark the same stuff any man could buy yet in his hands the stick burned with a straight, true thread of smoke and a clean scent, never sputtering out, never cracking at the end. Others' incense either died or choked the room. The soul-leading incense for funerals and the union incense for weddings he never mixed, and he wrote no character on the paper wrap; the faithful knew his work by the smell alone.
Old Rui kept two iron rules. First: he would not make life-prolonging incense. When a man, taken in by some wandering quack, came begging for incense to extend a living life, Old Rui drove him out without a word: Incense is for honoring the dead and quieting the living heart not for fooling the breath still in your chest. Second: for a household that had wronged its parents, no fine funeral incense.
At the lane's mouth stood the Sun family silk shop. Master Sun had packed his eighty-year-old mother into the rear woodshed, feeding her two bowls of thin gruel a day, while he himself went clad in silk before the counter. That twelfth month the old woman died. The Suns meant to stage a grand funeral for show, and sent a clerk to buy the finest soul-leading incense. Old Rui opened the door but took no silver. He only sniffed the whiff of camphor from the silk still on the clerk's sleeve, then asked, In which room did your old mistress live? The clerk hemmed and could not answer. Old Rui pushed the silver back. None of the fine kind. Take the poorest bundle. Ask for more, and don't bother.
Master Sun, stung, bought incense elsewhere. But that incense, once lit, either died or sent its smoke sideways to sting the mourners' eyes; guests coughed through the whole rite, the funeral fell to pieces, and the neighbors laughed for half a month. In the end the Suns came back, faces thick with shame, to beg Old Rui.
This time he gave them the fine soul-leading incense, with one condition: The incense I give; the rule you keep. Carry your mother's tablet from the woodshed to the main hall, keep the full forty-nine days of mourning, and light three sticks yourself each day. For the sake of face, Master Sun obeyed to the letter. Strange to tell, once Old Rui's incense was lit the smoke stood straight, the courtyard fell still, and the mourners' tears turned, somehow, real.
Afterward some muttered that only Old Rui could ever make his incense burn that the three-stick rite he taught held a secret, and an untruthful hand would tremble and shorten the breath and the stick would die. Old Rui only smiled. Incense does not choose the man; the man chooses the incense. What I roll is no incense at all it is a steelyard for weighing the human heart.