The Mourning Staff

On the night of the seventh day of the twelfth month the snow fell wrong. The wind did not blow so much as whip—drawing streaks of snow-grit across the window paper, scratch, scratch, like someone standing outside, scoring it with a fingernail.

Old Master Li had breathed his last at the hour of the rat. He had labored three days and at last did not outlast the winter. The coffin stood in the middle of the hall, head turned in, feet out, its pine smell mixing with the smoke of mugwort incense, trapped and thick. The mourning curtain hung half-drawn, cutting the coffin into a strip of light and a strip of dark. The eldest son, Li Shouren, wrapped in hemp and white, knelt on the rush mat before the coffin, clutching the mourning staff in both hands.

The staff was of willow, as thick as a thumb, wound with three feet of white cloth, a strand of hemp cord tied at the top. By the Li family's old rule, the filial son keeps the staff through the wake and never lets it go—it is the cane for the dead to lean on crossing the Bridge of Helplessness, and the prop the living son leans on so he does not fall. Shouren's father had been unsteady on his legs in his last years and could not take two steps without his cane; this staff had been turned after that very cane.

Shouren had quarreled with his father on the third night of the month. The old master meant to mortgage the ancestral house to a city pawnshop; Shouren would not hear of it, saying it had come down from his great-grandfather and that to pawn it was to cut the Li line at the root. They struck the table; the old master pointed at the door and told him to get out. He did not get out in the end, and they never made peace. The fourth, fifth, sixth—Shouren hid outside. On the seventh, at night, someone knocked him home, and stepping through the door he found his father already gone, mouth half open, as if a word still waited to be said.

The seven nights before the first seventh-day rite, Shouren kept watch every one. His mother had died young, of a hard labor that took her in a flood of blood when Shouren was nine. Now his father too was gone, and the Li household was down to a single shoot. The quiet was so complete he could hear the three sticks of incense in the brazier pop as they burned down their cores; the lamp-oil jumped in the bronze saucer, throwing the curtain's shadow onto the wall, swaying, as if something moved behind the coffin.

The dog was the first to go wrong. The yellow dog Shouren had kept five years, who normally followed him everywhere and had lain at his feet through the wake, had drawn back to the stove that night, body pressed to the wall, throat rumbling, eyes fixed on the hall's door to the courtyard, all four legs trembling, not daring even to bark. Shouren's heart gave a lurch. He looked back at the staff in his hand—still there, still in his palm—yet he felt a coldness, not the cold of the room but seeping out of the willow itself, straight into his fingertips.

Toward the end of the second watch the night-watchman's clapper sounded from the lane's mouth, hollow, hollow, hollow, three beats dragging their tails. And at that very moment the staff moved in his palm.

Not his hand trembling. The length of willow leaned, of its own, toward the door; the white cloth at its tip brushed the mat with a faint rustle. Shouren went rigid, breath held. Then, on the hall door, came a knocking.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Even, unhurried, three times. The hairs on Shouren's arms stood one by one—he knew that rhythm too well. When his father lived, mounting the step with his cane, it was left foot, pause, right foot, pause, cane on the flagstone, knock, knock, knock, exact to the beat. But beyond the door lay a courtyard snow-locked at the third watch; who could be there.

He tried to cry out; his throat was as if gripped, not a sound would come. A second round of knocking did not come. In the wind he heard footsteps on the snow, very light, crunching the broken snow, from the courtyard gate all the way to the hall door, then stopping. The weight and pace of those steps were the very same as the way the staff had just leaned.

The ash in the brazier collapsed at one corner, though no wind stirred. The lamp-oil jumped again; the flame leapt and lit the coffin behind the curtain, lid nailed fast, his father lying quiet inside.

But from that moment the mourning staff never warmed again. The willow was cold, the white cloth was cold, as if fished from a snow-hole; held long enough, the cold crept along the lines of his palm into the bone.

Through the small hours the yellow dog made not a sound. Just before dawn, Shouren heard the footsteps outside begin again, still three, going from near to far, stepping into the snow, fading. He crawled to the door and peered through the crack—the courtyard lay white, fresh snow pressed flat and even, from the hall to the gate not a single footprint.

He lowered his eyes to the staff. The white cloth had loosened a turn somewhere; the hemp cord at the top had come undone and hung limp, as if someone had taken it up in the night and tied it again for him.

Shouren did not open the door.

He drew his hand back, gripped the staff anew, and sat down on the mat. When full daylight came, his maternal cousin came to help and, seeing his face green as if papered over, asked if he had caught a chill; Shouren only shook his head. The cousin said the room was stuffy and went to open the door for air; Shouren put out a hand and stopped him. "Don't. Outside—the snow isn't swept clean yet."

The cousin laughed at him for being book-learned and foolish, believing such things. But at noon that day, when Shouren took a broom to clear the courtyard, three paces from the hall door he swept something out from under the snow—half a strand of hemp cord, damp with melted snow, the same color and thickness as the strand that had come loose from the staff.

He tucked the cord into his breast and told no one. From then on, through the seven nights of the wake, he never let the staff leave his hand, and he forbade anyone to go near that door. Only, each night at the third watch, the lamp-oil in the bronze saucer would jump for no reason, and the curtain's shadow would sway once on the wall, as if something stood outside the door, leaning on a cane, neither entering nor leaving, only waiting.

The Midnight Record: The mourning staff is meant to guide the dead across; but if the road is walked the wrong way, it comes back to knock at its own door.