Chapter 2: What the Ledgers Say

The Choi baby died an hour before dawn.

She had been three months old, born in the dead of winter when the rice jars were already scraping bottom, and she had never been strong. The measles found her on the fourth day after her older brother broke out in spots, and by the time Ja Young was summoned, the tiny body was burning so fiercely that no decoction could reach it. So Hee had held her through the last of the night while the mother rocked on her heels beside them, making a low, endless sound that wasn’t quite weeping, and when the small chest finally stopped moving, So Hee had gone on holding her for a while longer, because there seemed to be nothing else worth doing with her hands.

Now she stood in the Choi family’s yard in the grey half-light, the bundle wrapped in a scrap of hemp cloth against her shoulder, while the father sat on the edge of the wooden porch and stared at the ground.

“I can’t,” he said. He had said it three times already. “I can’t carry her up there. I carried my father up that hill last spring, and my brother the spring before. I can’t carry her.”

“Someone has to, Choi-ssi,” Ja Young murmured. “It’s better done early, before the neighbors wake.”

“Then let someone else.”

So Hee looked over the low mud wall into the lane. The ragged young man was there, of course, sitting against the same wall he’d slept against, his knees drawn up and his arms folded over them. He had been there when they arrived at midnight, and he was still there now, and something about that made her obscurely angry.

She stepped over the straw rope and stopped in front of him.

“You want to be useful?”

He looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, as though he hadn’t slept either. “Yes.”

“There’s a spade leaning by the gate. The burial ground is on the hillside above the pine grove, where the ground is soft. Dig a grave, a small one, about this deep.” She held her free hand at the height of her knee. “Then come back and carry her up.”

She watched his face as she said it, waiting for the flinch, the excuse, the sudden memory of urgent business in the next county. She had seen men twice his size go pale at the thought of carrying a dead child. It was the kind of test that sorted the curious from the serious, and she fully expected him to fail it.

He stood, brushed the dirt from his trousers, and went to fetch the spade without a word.

The pine grove stood on the slope above the lower village, and the burial ground lay just beyond it, a hillside of low grassy mounds, some so old they had nearly sunk back into the earth and some so new the soil hadn’t yet grown a skin of moss. There were eleven of the new ones now. Soon there would be twelve.

So Hee sat on a flat rock at the edge of the grove with the bundle in her lap and watched him dig.

He was terrible at it. He held the spade as though it might bite him, drove it into the earth at the wrong angle, and threw the soil in the wrong direction so that half of it slid back into the hole. The ground was soft from the thaw, the easiest digging of the year, and still it took him far longer than it should have. Twice he stopped to shake out his hands.

When he finally climbed out and came to take the bundle from her, she saw his palms.

They were raw. Blisters had risen across the base of each finger and burst, and the skin beneath was pink and weeping, streaked with dirt. They were the hands of a man who had never held a tool in his life, who had never hauled water or split wood or worked a field, and they looked all the worse for being attached to a body dressed in rags.

“Give me those,” she ordered.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s an open wound full of grave dirt, which is not nothing. Give me your hands.”

He hesitated, then held them out. So Hee set the bundle gently on the rock beside her, took a small flask of wine and a roll of clean cloth from the pouch at her waist, and began to work, not especially gently.

“You’ve never dug anything in your life,” she observed.

He winced as the wine touched the torn skin. “I’ve dug a few things.”