The Oil Press Ledger

The oil mill of Qinghe Town stood down by the riverbank, a timber house whose blue-gray tiles had gone heavy with rain. Old Xu was sixty-three and had kept this mill for forty years. The young people had all left the town, and fewer came to have their seeds pressed; most days the mill sat cold, except for the old wooden press in the corner, still gleaming with oil like a sleeping beast.

Three days after First Frost, a fine drizzle fell at dusk. Old Xu was sieving this year's rapeseed when a stranger came to the door. The man wore a gray padded jacket, was in his early forties, thin, with a scar at the corner of his eye, and he spoke with an excess of courtesy. 'Master Xu, might I trouble you to press a small load of tung seeds? Not much, just this one bag.'

Xu's sieve stopped. Tung seeds yielded tung oil, used by lacquer workers and boat builders — not for eating, and no one in town had grown them for years. He looked up. 'Where did you get tung seeds, friend?'

'Left by my forefathers, kept some years.' The man set the cloth bag by the threshold. 'I only wanted the old craft. The machine-pressed stuff has no such flavor.'

Xu said nothing. In his life he had pressed rapeseed, tea seed, sesame, and a few batches of tung, back when boats were still being caulked. But this man's eyes wandered; he was no nostalgic. Xu meant to refuse, then thought the idle mill might as well earn something, and nodded. 'We press at dawn. You must come yourself. I won't weigh the seeds in your absence, and I won't answer for any mishap.'

The man agreed and left the bag. Xu carried it inside, hefted it — heavier than ordinary tung. He untied the mouth and parted the seeds; his fingers struck something hard: a small silver lock, its face engraved with 'Long Life, a Hundred Years,' its back worn bright from long handling.

Xu's heart jumped. He had seen this lock. Twenty years ago, when the boatman Lao Pei's daughter vanished, Pei's wife had wept at the mill, saying the girl had worn just such a lock. The case was never solved; the Pei family moved away, and the town stopped speaking of it.

He tucked the lock back and slept badly that night.

At dawn the man returned. Xu roasted the seeds, crushed them at the millstone, steamed them, then fed the mash into the press. The man stood watching, lending no hand, saying little, only once adding wood to the stove as Xu stirred. Xu noticed an old scar across the back of his hand, horizontal, like a rope burn.

By midafternoon the clear oil ran from the trough, darker than common tung, near black. Xu collected it and handed over the pressed cake. The man took it but did not leave. Suddenly he asked, 'Master Xu, twenty years ago, did this mill have an apprentice named Ade?'

Xu's wiping hand paused. Ade was the boy he'd trained; soon after that year's trouble he'd rolled his bedding and gone, never heard from since. He looked up. 'Why ask?'

'My name is Pei.' The man set the cake on the bench. 'Lao Pei's younger daughter — twenty years ago she went to market in town and was lost on the way. The last sighting placed her coming down toward this riverbank.'

The oil smell in the room seemed to thicken. Xu recalled that autumn: Ade had indeed come in flustered, saying a girl had fallen on the bank and he'd helped take her to the clinic. Then the girl was gone, and Ade could not say where he'd been that night; Xu, per the mill's rule of minding his own business, never pressed him.

'Ade is long gone,' Xu said. 'Finding him would do you no good.'

'I know he's gone.' Pei drew a yellowed missing-person notice from his breast, its corners curled. 'My mother passed the year before last, still clutching this. I'm not here to accuse anyone. I only want to understand that night.'

Xu was silent a long while. Mist from the riverbank drifted in through the window and settled on the cake in a dark ring. He remembered the day Ade left — the same mist, the same light, a cloth bundle on his back, never once turning his head.

'That year,' Xu began slowly, 'Ade did bring a girl in. She'd cut her head open; I gave him herbs. Later he said she'd left on her own, and I believed him. After that…' He let it trail.

Pei waited, then took the silver lock from the bag and laid it on the bench. 'This was among your tung seeds. My sister wore one just like it.'

Xu studied the lock. He understood now: this load was never about oil. It was a probe. Pei spoke lightly, yet twenty years' weight pressed behind his eyes.

'If you know anything,' Pei said, 'tell me, and my mother can rest.'

Xu picked up the lock, weighed it in his palm, set it down. He turned to close the window against the mist. In the mill only the stove's last embers remained, stretching their two shadows long.

'When Ade left,' Xu said with his back to him, 'he left an address with his mother. She still lives at the east end of town, surnamed Zhou. Go ask her. How much you learn is your own fortune.'

Pei pocketed the lock, lifted the cake, cupped a hand in salute, and pushed out the door. The hinge cried once; his figure thinned in the mist.

Xu did not see him off. He sat back at the bench, held up the bowl of black tung oil, set it down. The fire was dying; he threw on a stick, and the flame leapt, lighting the old press songs on the wall, their paper gone yellow.

He remembered years ago, when the mill was busy, Ade still a boy who loved to sing the press songs, his voice bright. Then, from some day, the boy fell silent.

Deep night, and the mist over the riverbank had not lifted. Xu kept the silver lock in his heart and did not write it into the ledger. The mill's books had always recorded oil, never people. Yet some things are kept more faithfully than any ledger.