The Sickness

The following pages were recovered from the papers of Song Tao, licentiate of the county. The paper is winter stock of the sixth year of Qianlong; the edges are water-stained; the hand is regular, with not one line crossed out. The gazetteer does not include it. It was kept in a lacquer box by the Song family. Editor's note: no one in Song village recalls hearing hoofbeats outside the licentiate's gate that winter.

On the seventh day of my sickness, I heard hoofbeats.

At first I thought the fever had loosened my head. The sound was soft, so soft it might have come from very far away—except that it did not. It was just outside, on the other side of the yard wall, one step at a time, coming from the direction of the village gate. It stopped at our door.

I was lying on my back, watching the beam above the bed. There were three old scratches in that beam, from the year I tried my hand at carpentry, at twelve. I counted them once, twice, and then I said to my mother, who sat by the bed:

"There's someone at the door."

She set down the medicine bowl and looked at me. She did not speak. She rose and went to open the door.

The door opened. Wind came in and the lamp-flame leaned. Beyond the door was the yard; beyond the yard was the road; on the road there was no one.

"No one," my mother said. She came back, lifted the bowl to my lips. "Drink it while it is hot."

I drank. It was bitter, the way all medicine has been bitter since I was small. I wanted to tell her about the hoofbeats. But I watched her back as she gathered the bowls, and the words would not come. My mother was seventy. My father died early, and she had kept me, her only son, for more than forty years. When I was sick, she sat by my bed. When I was sick, she had nowhere else to be.

On the first day I fell ill, she had gone for Dr. Zhou. Dr. Zhou is the county physician; he rides a grey mule and covers forty li to see a patient. He felt my pulse and said it was a heat sickness—one bleeding, a few doses of medicine, and it would pass. I remember the day he bled me. I was barely awake. He took a fine needle and nicked the inside of my elbow. The blood that came out was black. He looked at it and said nothing. My mother asked him, and he only said: "No trouble. Take the medicine on time." He saw her to the gate, then stopped and turned back to look at me. "If there is no change in seven days, send for me again."

That was the fifth day. The seven-day limit was already two days gone.

On the sixth day, Dr. Zhou did not come. My mother asked Uncle Li to fetch him. Uncle Li came back and said the doctor had gone into the next county on a call and would not return for two days. My mother stood in the kitchen for a while. She said nothing. She turned back to the medicine.

People from the village had come to see me. Two days ago the Wangs' daughter-in-law brought a basket of eggs. She stood by the bed, did not sit. Yesterday Aunt Li stayed longer and talked to my mother for half the day—crops, weather, who in the village was getting married. Mother salted the eggs, saying they were for when I got well. Aunt Li had brought a packet of brown sugar. My mother would not take it. Aunt Li said: "It's not for you. It's for the licentiate." Then she took it.

They kept their voices low, as if afraid to wake me. And I thought then: I am probably not going to get better. I thought it, and I thought: if I go, my mother will be alone. All those forty years will have been for nothing.

That night, the hoofbeats came again.

The second night, and the third. They came around the third watch each time—came, stopped, went away. At first I counted the days. Then I stopped counting days and counted hoofbeats instead, the way I counted the scratches in the beam. The second night it waited the space of a cup of tea. The third night it waited longer, long enough that I thought it would come in. Then it went away. Just as it left, I heard a sound that was not hoofbeats—the breath of a horse. The small, impatient sigh of a horse that has been waiting, and is tired of waiting.

I pushed myself up. I meant to go to the door. My body would not obey—my legs were like lead. I lay back down and watched the door. The window paper bulged once in the wind and sagged back. The lamp-wick had grown a flower. I did not bother to trim it.

A little moonlight came through the crack.

In the crack, under the moonlight, there was a shadow.

It was taller than a man, and thinner, and it stood very still.

I called my mother. She slept in the next room; she is old, and her ears are dull. I called three times before she answered. When she came in, wrapping her coat around her, and lit the lamp, the shadow in the door-crack was gone.

"You heard it again," she said.

I nodded.

She did not go to the door. She sat down on the edge of my bed and tucked the quilt in at my sides. "Sleep. Tomorrow I will ask Dr. Zhou to come again."

The medicine made me heavy, but that night I did not sleep. I lay and listened to the yard, all night. The old hen woke once in the middle of the night and clucked twice, then went back to sleep. Beyond the east wall someone coughed—Uncle Li, who has bad lungs and coughs every winter. Farther off, the village dogs barked for a while and slowly fell quiet. I listened to each sound, one after another, carefully, as if afraid of missing one. There were no hoofbeats.

At dawn, I heard voices outside the gate. It was Aunt Li from next door, her voice neither high nor low, pitched so that the people inside could hear her:

"...yes, a man in a grey robe, leading a white horse. He stood at the village gate for half the day. Asked him who he was looking for, he wouldn't say. Just stood there. Then when someone pressed him, he said: the Song scholar's house. I said the Song scholar is sick in bed. And he said: 'I know. I will come again tomorrow.'"

My mother did not answer. She only ladled another dipper of water into the pot, and steam rose and hid her face.

Aunt Li said: "Do you know him?"

My mother said: "No."

Aunt Li went away. I lay in bed, watching the beam, and turned her words over again. A grey robe. A white horse. Coming again tomorrow.

I turned over, toward the wall. There were ink-stains on the wall from the years I had copied books by lamplight—one shaped like a mountain, one shaped like a man. I had looked at that stain for twenty years and never once seen a man in it. Today, the more I looked, the more it looked like one.

My mother came in with a bowl of rice gruel. She sat by the bed and watched me eat. The gruel was hot. When I had eaten half of it, I asked her:

"Mother—do you think a man hears something, before he dies?"

Her hand stopped. She looked at me a long time. Then she said:

"Don't talk nonsense."

"I'm not," I said. "I'm only asking."

She took the bowl away. At the door she stopped, and without turning around, she said:

"If you hear something—don't answer it."

I was stunned. I wanted to ask her why. But she was already in the kitchen, and the sound of pots and bowls came up, as if to cover those words.

I lay in bed and counted the three scratches in the beam again.

Outside, the sun climbed. The yard was quiet. On the clothesline under the eaves hung a string of dried red peppers from last winter; the wind moved them, and they tapped the wall. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney—my mother was feeding the fire. The wood was wet and the smoke was thick, and she coughed twice. She coughed, then went on feeding it.

And I heard—far off, from the direction of the village gate—hoofbeats.

Soft. But this time, they did not stop.

They were coming toward the house.