The Death Shoes

The autumn rain fell on Tanjiang Town for a full half-month. The flagstones of Blue Stone Lane turned black with soaking, and slick moss crept into the cracks. Midway down the lane stood a low house without a number board; from its eave ran a bamboo pole hung with finished straw sandals that, when the wind passed, swayed like a row of dried fish. Old Zhou had braided straw sandals in that room for forty-two years. To his face the townsfolk called him Master Zhou; behind his back they named him Zhou-Who-Reads-Feet--for he never looked first at a man's face. His eyes went to the feet.

The skill he had learned from his master. In the poor early years a pair of straw sandals was worn two or three years; the foot shaped the shoe, and he could name the owner by the feel of the sole alone, eyes shut. A living customer sat on his low bamboo stool, slipped off a shoe, and he wrapped an oiled hemp cord around the foot, thumb pressed to the highest point of the instep, dictating to his granddaughter A-Ling: so many inches long, so many fingers wide, did the big toe splay, how many calluses under the heel, any scar at the back. The death shoes for the dead obeyed another rule--those were buried with the corpse, and Old Zhou never measured a dead man's foot, only braided to the size the family read off the old pair. His master said a dead man's foot knows a stranger; copy it for the living and your own soles blister, and you stumble on the night road. Old Zhou believed it, and feared it. A dead foot is cold; his hands would tremble, and a trembling hand braids crooked.

Late in August a small thing happened. Zhou San the tofu-seller limped in, saying the sole had worn through and needed a patch. Old Zhou only glanced at the foot Zhou San had set on the stool and said, "Your left little toe rides over the ring toe--that's the tendon you wrenched lugging loads last year." Zhou San grinned. "Master Zhou, your eye's sharper than the household register." Old Zhou smiled and said nothing--he could read a foot, not a heart.

He was just as particular about his materials. The straw had to be glutinous-rice straw cut at midsummer, dried in the sun through nine full noons until it turned golden without going brittle. The hemp cord he twisted himself, three strands wound tight and passed once through tung oil before he would use it. A copper basin held the straw soaking, and the room kept, all year, a bitter perfume of straw mingled with tung oil; outside it rained, but inside stayed warm.

When he braided, the room held only sound. The hemp cord biting into the straw gave a long thin creak; the straw snapped with a small crisp note; his tobacco pipe tapped the stool edge, duk-duk. His left hand gripped the straw, his right drew the thread; his knuckles were gnarled as old tree roots, yet for this fine work his hands stayed steady.

On the afternoon of the tenth of the ninth month the rain eased. A gaunt, tall man in black rubber shoes lifted the curtain and stepped in, his sole leaving a wet smear on the threshold. He said the first body to drift up on the river shoal was his distant uncle, childless, and he had come to do his filial duty--a pair of death shoes for the burial. Old Zhou asked the size; the man opened his mouth and gave it at once: "Twenty-seven inches long, a broad instep, the left big toe splayed, a scar at the heel." Old Zhou wrote it line by line on the last page of his ledger, never raising his eyes to the man's feet--for the dead, you do not measure the living; that was his rule for forty-two years. The man paid the deposit, left a false name, Sun De, and went. A-Ling, tidying the basin beside him, glanced once at the man and said nothing.

Seven days on, the seventeenth, another came. Short and stout in a blue cloth jacket, an out-of-town accent too. He said the second body was his cousin, and he wanted death shoes as well. Old Zhou asked the size; the man answered without thinking: "Twenty-seven inches, broad instep, left toe splayed, scar at the heel." Old Zhou's hand on the hemp cord paused. He lifted his eyes and, in the light through the curtain gap, swept the man's black rubber shoes set by his feet--the toes that showed splayed left as well. He said nothing, and with his head bent drew a stroke in the margin of the ledger.

On the twenty-third came the third. This time a pale young fellow with frayed cuffs, who said the third body was his uncle-by-marriage. The size he gave, Old Zhou could have recited in his sleep: "Twenty-seven inches, broad instep, left toe splayed, scar at the heel."

That night, closing up, A-Ling leaned over the oil lamp and turned the ledger. Suddenly she said, "Grandfather, how can these three pairs all be the very same size?" Old Zhou did not answer. He turned to the front, to the foot records of regulars he had kept for years. He Lao-si the fisherman of Tanjiang Town, lost at sea one winter, pulled up downstream the next spring and claimed by his family--that page read: He Lao-si, twenty-seven inches, broad instep, left toe splayed, scar at the heel. Further down, Old Cui the butcher at the west end, drunk and fallen into the pond the year before, the same number; Old Dong the granary watchman, lost when the dam broke years back, the same again.

Old Zhou closed the ledger. His old eyes read a foot truer than a ruler. These three "relatives" who came to order shoes--he had measured none of them--yet each time he had swept their feet. Three men, three different faces, three pairs of feet, length and splay and scar, not a hair's difference. And those three pairs matched, to the mark, the townsmen in his ledger who had died in the river, the pond, the far outside.

The rain fell again. Old Zhou recalled his master's words: a dead man's foot knows a stranger. He suddenly understood the half his master had left unspoken--it is not the dead foot that knows strangers; it is the living mouth that lies, and the foot that does not.

In the late afternoon the militia chief, Old Mo, led men carrying the three bodies into the charity mortuary at the lane's end. Old Zhou saw through the window the three corpses laid side by side on door planks, feet all pointing out. He told A-Ling to wait outside, went in himself, knelt, and in the dim lamplight looked at those three pairs of feet: twenty-seven inches, broad instep, left toe splayed, scar at the heel. Word for word as his ledger, and word for word as the feet he had swept when those three "relatives" stepped into his shop.

Old Zhou stood, brushed the straw dust from his knees. Old Mo asked what he was looking at; he said, whether the shoes would fit.

He braided the shoes anyway. Three pairs, glutinous-rice straw, twice soaked in tung oil, the soles stitched dense. On the day he handed them over, none of the three "relatives" showed; Old Mo came instead, saying the bodies would be cremated and the shoes buried with them. Old Zhou passed the shoes over, took the money, and turning back saw the row of dried sandals at the lane mouth swaying gently in the wind.

That night he could not sleep. He lit the lamp and read the old ledger from first page to last. At the end he set his own old feet on the low stool and wound the hemp cord around once: twenty-four and a half inches, right toe splayed, no scar at the heel. He looked a long while, then put the cord away in the drawer.

The next day Blue Stone Lane smelled as always of straw and the bitter tung oil. A neighbor came to mend a shoe; Old Zhou bent to his braiding and did not look up to see whose feet they were.