He Jiu Alters a Coat

He Jiu had kept a tailor's shop on the west side of the city for thirty years. Calluses ridged his fingers and a hard temper rode his tongue; he knew thread and cloth, but not people. When a neighbor brought him a garment he would run his hand over it twice and say whether it could be mended, and not one word more.

On the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month, as dusk settled, a pot of wine warmed on the coal stove and the lampwick burned long. He Jiu was putting away his ruler when a thin woman stepped through the door. She wore a grey cloth tunic and carried an old padded jacket in her arms, its cuffs gone to fuzz. Her husband was leaving town, she said; the coat was too loose, and would he please take it in before the year turned.

The moment He Jiu took the jacket he knew. The fabric was ramie, the kind the funeral shops used, dead-heavy and dull; the stitches wandered like a frightened hand; and beneath the collar lay a few grains of fine red silt, the sort that clings only to the banks of Sha River. He looked at her once, his mouth shaped around a polite smile, and understood well enough.

He said nothing of it. 'Taking it in means undoing and restitching,' he told her. 'Sit, I'll fetch a soft measure from the back.' He lifted the curtain and went in.

On the back wall hung the shop's years of ledgers. He Jiu turned to the previous month and found the entry: a nameless body pulled from Sha River, face eaten past knowing, clad in just such a grey jacket, the cloth gone stiff where the water had soaked it. He knew that stitching. It was the work of Old Cui's funeral shop across the river.

He returned and laid the jacket on the bench, picked out the thread, set it straight, and stitched it close again. The woman sat on the bench without a sound, her white-knuckled hands folded at her knees. The lamp oil popped; the wine pot muttered on the stove.

At the collar he ran a hidden line of red thread, and on the left sleeve he left one stitch deliberately loose. It was the old rule among tailors: when you alter the clothes of the dead, you must not sew them shut; you leave a breath, so the spirit may pass cleanly, and a small thing to hold onto for the living.

She came for it, paid in copper, and cradled the jacket to her chest with her eyes on the ground. Her steps were so light they seemed afraid of waking someone; at the lane's mouth she was gone.

Only after the new year, in street gossip, did He Jiu hear the rest: the woman kept a lone house by Sha River; her husband had broken through the ice that winter and drowned, and when they pulled him out no one claimed him but that grey jacket. She would not have it. Night after night she held the coat and murmured that her man had gone away and would soon be home.

He Jiu said nothing. Of the red thread at the collar, and the loose stitch at the sleeve, she knew nothing.

On the thirtieth, snow fell hard. He Jiu shut the shop and drank half a pot alone. Beyond the door he heard the very faintest step, as of someone lingering under his eaves, neither entering nor leaving. He did not open up. He only set his worn brass thimble on the windowsill, blew out the lamp, and slept.

At first light the snow had stopped. The brass thimble was where he left it, and beside it lay half a length of red thread, damp with the night's dew, soft against the wood.