The Door at Last

When the last water had turned east, Yu did not rest. He sent riders out to the four quarters of the land, to see what the thirteen years had done. They traveled for weeks, over roads that were still mud, and they came back slowly, with news that was better than he had dared to hope.

In the north, the rivers ran in their new beds, and the hills that had been islands for a generation stood clear. In the south, the lakes had sunk, and the reed beds where people had lived in boats were already green with the grass of dry land. In the east, the riders reached the coast and found the great river entering the sea, not in flood, but in a deep and quiet channel.

They brought back strange small stories. Of an old man, bent before his time, standing on the shore where the water had been, weeping, because he had never believed he would feel dry land under his feet again. Of children who had been born on the hilltops and had never seen a field, who now stood in mud that would, in another year, be wheat.

Yu listened to all of it, and said little. He had expected the water to go down. He had not expected that people would be so astonished by the ordinary. He had lived in the work so long that he had half-forgotten what the work was for. Now he remembered: it was for this. For a man weeping because the ground was dry. For children standing where there had only been water.

He walked back toward his own house. He did not ride. He walked as he had walked for thirteen years, and the laborers walked behind him, and for the first time they did not carry their tools. The villages they passed were empty, waiting for their people to return. The cypress tree behind his roof was still there, growing.

He reached his own door at last — the door he had passed three times, while his wife wept inside, while his son was born, while his boy stood calling his name. He stood on the threshold. His wife was old now, and her hair was white. His son Qi was a grown man, with hands of his own. They stood in the doorway and looked at him, and he looked at them, and no one knew what to say, for too many years had passed.

He went in. He sat at his own table. The wife he had left a young woman set food before him, and he ate it, and it was the first meal he had eaten in his own house in thirteen years. Qi sat across from him, and the two men ate without speaking, and the silence was not an angry silence; it was the silence of people who had too much to say and not enough years left to say it in.

That night, lying under his own roof, Yu thought of his father. Gun had built walls against the water and died for it. Yu had dug channels with the water, and lived. He did not boast of it. He thought only: the old man was not wrong because he was stupid. He was wrong because he had not listened. And the difference between us was only that I listened.

He slept, that night, without dreaming of water. It was the first time in thirteen years. Outside, the new rivers ran quietly in their beds, and the earth, which had been drowning since before he was born, was at last, dry.