The Backwater Kite

Old Cui was seventy-one and had framed kites for forty years. In town they called him Old Cui, and some called him Blind Cui — a bamboo splinter had taken his right eye when he was young, and it stayed shut ever after, yet he could read the river farther off than anyone.

He lived where the Clear Creek bent into a slack backwater, three thatch rooms, his yard always sour with split bamboo and paste. Past the waking of insects in early spring the orders piled up. Swallow-kites had to hold steady, centipede-kites had to run long, and some asked for lady-kites, saying they would charm a daughter into marriage. Cui took all comers. On the back of every kite he pressed a small cinnabar seal, one character: Cui. Across forty years, seven or eight of every ten paper kites that rose over the riverbanks left his hands.

He worked without a ruler. He soaked the splits, softened them in his mouth, then bent them across his knee. The left knee pressed a deeper curve than the right — a mark left by an old hurt in his hand, impossible to copy. Thirty-two joints for a swallow, a hundred for a centipede. The line was always his own white-hemp cord, soaked in tung oil, tough, easy on the hand.

Last winter, Li Dashan from the west end came to order a swallow. His boy, Xiaolu, had just turned nine and was born under the horse. Cui bent the spine with that deeper left-knee curve, counted thirty-two joints, wound the white-hemp line. He painted the face himself: round, grinning, two dimples, rouge on the cheeks. When Xiaolu came for it he lifted it overhead and turned once, saying, Grandpa Cui, you painted me true. Cui laughed and rubbed his head, and thought no more of it.

Three days after Qingming the weather broke. The backwater looked calm but hid an undercurrent. Xiaolu went down with some boys to feel for snails, stepped on a slick stone, and was gone. Old Cui dropped his bowl and ran. He saw only bubbles on the surface and Dashan's arms flailing in the water. They pulled the boy up white, eyes shut, mouth turned down. His mother, Sister Li, fainted with weeping; Dashan squatted on the bank and did not stand all day.

Old Cui had grown up by the water and knew the temper of the backwater. On calm days the current curled inward and sank; nine of ten who fell in were dragged by the undercurrent into the deep pit at the bend's foot and never rose. That night he sat by the river half a watch, listening to the water, and lit no lamp.

Cui took the unused swallow down from his beam and set it in the corner. He thought perhaps the family would want it later.

Two days before Qingming this year, the fisher Zhao the Pockmarked hauled a cut-line kite from the deep of the backwater. Face down in the mud, it showed — turned over — a face the whole town knew: greenish-white, swollen, eyes closed, mouth turned down. The look of Xiaolu dead.

When the word reached Cui he took his staff to Zhao's boat. The cinnabar seal was still there, the character Cui. Zhao said he had taken it for a rotted lotus leaf when the net came up, and only knew it for a kite when he lifted it, the face on it making his hand jerk. Cui asked, And the line. Zhao pointed to the planking: a length of red cord wound in the mesh, softened by the water. Cui picked it up and closed his palm around it, and felt the rough grain of a soul-leading thread.

He laid the kite across his knees and felt it joint by joint.

The bamboo was his. Thirty-two joints, that deeper curve at the third — his left knee. But the painted face turned his palms cold. His grinning boy had been painted over with indigo mixed with lead powder, changed into a dead face. He knew the paint: the undertaker at the south end used it to lay the features on the dead, grey when dry, smelling of earth. He scraped at the grey with a thumbnail and beneath it found a fleck of the old rouge, the cheek he had dotted on Xiaolu. The paint lay in three layers — first to hide the smile, then to draw the dead, and last a thin wash over all, plainly so the boy would know himself.

The line was worse. Where his white-hemp cord should have been, a length of red cotton was knotted on, fine and soft, tied in a woman's double-love knot. Flecks of unburned spirit-money ash clung in the strands, crumbling at a touch, sharp with the smell of char.

Who changed the line, who repainted the face?

Cui said nothing. He unknotted the red thread and held it to the sun. Hand-spun, the strands uneven — the same as the soul-leading cords used at town funerals, a red line the chief mourner held from coffin to the old willow at the village mouth, to lead the dead home.

He took his staff to Sister Li's. The gate stood ajar; she was twisting spirit-money under the eaves and stilled her hands at the sight of him. Cui did not enter. He stood at the threshold and said, The swallow should be mended this year. She answered low, after Qingming. His eye fell on the wall behind the door — a bundled soul-leading cord, once neat, now short by a length, the cut end ragged, plainly pulled away.

Cui asked no more. He remembered: three days after Xiaolu died, Sister Li had come alone to his stall. The swallow still hung on the beam. She stood beneath it and stroked the smiling face a long while, saying, He laughs just like when he was alive. He remembered her hands, thick at the knuckles from years of washing and cooking, the rims black with soap-bean. The day she stroked the kite face her hands were cold, with the damp of the river on them. Cui was pasting a centipede for another house and answered without looking up — did not notice whether thread was in her sleeve, nor that when she left, a length was missing from the beam.

Now he understood. It was Sister Li. In the moment he went down to rinse bamboo in the river, she had untied the living boy's white-hemp line, knotted on the soul-leading red cotton, and repainted the grinning child into a corpse. She meant to send the kite up to tether Xiaolu's spirit, to keep the boy from going too far. But red cotton does not hold the wind; the line broke over the backwater and the kite fell into the river, and there the dead face soaked true, until someone pulled it up.

On Qingming it rained fine. Cui hung a new swallow under his own eaves at the backwater, white-hemp line, the boy's living round face smiling again. He bent the new kite's splits deeper at the left knee, thirty-two joints, not one short. The white-hemp line he soaked again in tung oil and aired three days under the eaves. For the face he used the old box of rouge, thinned, lest the color weigh too heavy and startle the wrong soul. The wind slanted and the swallow turned slowly in the rain. Sister Li passed along the river and looked at it from far off, but did not stop, and did not come near.

Cui folded the old kite, its dead face still on it, and tucked it into the cloth bundle of the dead boy's clothes by the stove. He did not burn it. He kept it. The wind carried the river's fish-stink, and from somewhere down the bend a child's reed whistle for a kite, thin, once, and once again.