The Tanner

At the end of Riverside Street stood a leather workshop, its front facing the river, damp that never cleared all year. Old Yan had tanned hides on this street for sixty years; his fingers were thick as old roots, and his nails always held a stain of tanbark he could never wash out.

The year my grandmother died, I came back to the town to keep her house. With time on my hands, I went to help Old Yan, turning the old hides that hung on his bamboo poles to dry. Each hide had its temper: cowhide stiff, sheepskin thin, pigskin coarse. Only one roll he never let me touch.

That roll came from Xiao Zhao of the demolition crew. Halfway through tearing down the old ancestral hall, they found an oilcloth bundle wedged in a crack of the wall, and inside it this hide — the color of long-steeped tea, soft beyond reason. Xiao Zhao said, make me a satchel, it is a pretty thing. Old Yan took it, turned it over and over, said nothing for a long while, then kept it after all, but stored it in the back room, never hung it out.

There were marks on the hide. Not cuts — faint prints, the size of a small palm, as if a child's hand had pressed there long ago, and beside them a row of thin, orderly lines. I brought a lamp close; the lines of that palm were still clear.

For a few days nothing happened. Then came the plum rains, half a month of steady downpour, the workshop thick with mildew and the sour breath of tanbark. One night I could not sleep, and walked to the river with my key. From far off I heard the stretching frame in the back room creak — slow, as if someone were drawing the hide open, little by little.

I pushed the door open and went in. The lamp was off; only the river's reflected light came through the window. The frame stood empty, yet the hide lay on the bench, swelling faintly, as if something beneath it breathed. The air held a smell that was not hide — wet river stone mixed with old incense ash, a coolness I could not name.

I remembered then the town's old talk: in years past, a family had hidden from soldiers in that hall, and walled their little son into a narrow space; the wall was sealed, and the child never came out. The hall was the one Xiao Zhao tore down.

Old Yan's shadow slid in from outside. He did not scold me. He lit the lamp and smoothed the hide. "Girl," he said, "leather remembers longer than people. Some hides, tanned a lifetime, never forget what they once were."

He told me that in sixty years he had met this kind of hide a few times. He would not sell it, nor destroy it. Each Qingming, when no one watched, he carried the hide to the heart of the river and let the water take it — a way, he said, to give those who never left somewhere to go.

Near dawn I helped him carry the roll to the river steps. He crouched, spread the hide like a small mat, and let go. It turned once on the surface and sank without a bubble.

"Is it over?" I asked.

He watched the river. "The river has taken it. Now it belongs to the river."

I went back to the empty workshop. The frame still stood, wet with the night's damp. I reached out and touched it — and there, on the wood, lay a small print, the size of a palm, fingers spread, as if a hand had just left, pressed once, and said goodbye.

I told no one. Only since then, my coat has carried the smell of river stone and incense ash — a scent I cannot wash out, and will not.