The Roofer

When the late-autumn rains came, the old Zhou house at the east end of town began to leak. Old Mrs. Zhou sent word, and Shen the roofer was called to re-lay the tiles.

Shen had spent his life on rooftops; his back was bent as if he had never left the slope of a roof. He slung his bucket of mortar over his shoulder, took his trowel, and climbed. He began by lifting the old tiles at the eaves. The grey tiles here were old, their moss blackened by rain, crumbling at a touch. But at the third row his trowel struck something hard — not lichen, not gravel, but a small tiger sewn from blue cloth, its belly stuffed with year-old buckwheat husks, gone stiff in the damp, though the stitching still held.

He turned the little cloth tiger in his hand and felt a small jolt. The last time he had worked this roof was more than twenty years before, when the house had been full of voices — Old Zhou and his wife, and a little boy. Then Old Zhou had gone out to seek work and never returned; the boy had followed. Now only Mrs. Zhou kept the house.

Beside the cloth tiger, a few tiles showed a newer glaze, laid in a careless hand, and against the decades-old tiles all around them they gave themselves away. Shen was an old hand; he saw at once that someone had climbed this roof before him, hidden something beneath the eaves, and patched the tiles in a hurry.

He said nothing. He tucked the cloth tiger into his coat and went on laying tiles. When he came down, Mrs. Zhou was waiting in the yard with a cup of tea. At the sight of him her eyes flickered toward his coat, then looked away. Shen was a man of his own mind; he did not press her. He only said the roof must be re-laid, that he would need to set up a scaffold in the hall, and would have to stay the night.

That night it rained. Lying on his pallet in the hall, he heard movement from the kitchen — Mrs. Zhou speaking in a low voice, line after line, as if soothing a child. But the kitchen lamp was out. She was alone.

At first light he made an excuse to buy lime in town and turned aside to the home of old Registrar Wu. Wu blew the dust from his ledger: thirty years before, the Zhous had indeed had a little daughter, named Ling, who had vanished at three and was never heard from again. Shen ran his hand over the old book and thought of the cloth tiger in his coat — a thing made to amuse a child.

He hurried back to the Zhou house and, while Mrs. Zhou napped in the inner room, climbed the roof again and lifted those few new tiles. Beneath them lay a small photograph, its corners gnawed by mice; in it a little girl with pigtails held the blue cloth tiger to her chest. On the back, in pencil faded by rain: "Ling, your father is sorry."

Shen gathered the photograph and the tiger into his mortar bucket and asked Mrs. Zhou nothing. He only re-laid the tiles tight and cleared the eaves. As he left, she pressed double his wage into his hand. He did not refuse. He only said, "When the rains come now, this house will not leak."

No one in town ever spoke of Ling again. Yet on rainy nights Shen would sit beneath his own eaves and think of those few new tiles — how a person must climb their own roof in the dark, hide a photograph beneath the tiles, and gather a lifetime of feeling before they dare say that sorry to the edge of the roof.