[BL] The Bachelor Line

The ducks knew the hour before Shouren did.

He heard them from the sleeping room — a low, collective murmur rising from the direction of the ponds, the sound of several dozen birds rousing themselves into the gray before sunrise. He lay still for another moment, staring at the ceiling he had stared at for forty-five years, and listened to them. Then he pushed himself upright, set his feet on the floor, and began another day.

The farmhouse was quiet in the way that houses learned to be quiet when only one person lived in them. Not the silence of rest or peace, but the silence of accumulated absence — the kind that settled into walls and floorboards over time, that made every small sound Shouren produced feel slightly too loud. The scrape of his chair. The knock of the water ladle against the basin. His own breathing in the kitchen, steady and deliberate, filling the space where other sounds had once been.

He built the fire first. The mornings were still warm — it was late August, the heat still sitting thick in the valley even before the sun crested the hills — but the fire gave him something to do with his hands while the kettle came up. He crouched before it and fed in the kindling one piece at a time, an old habit. His father had done it the same way. His father’s father, presumably, though Shouren had no memory of him. The farm had been in the family long enough that some of its habits had stopped having origin stories. They were simply things that were done.

He made tea. He drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the ponds.

The sky over the eastern hills had gone the pale color it turned just before dawn, not quite light, not quite dark, the clouds above the mountains flat and gray and still. The ponds caught that color and held it. From the window they looked like pieces of sky that had fallen into the earth — two irregular shapes of still water, the near one smaller and bounded by the stands of tall grass Shouren kept meaning to cut back, the far one larger, where most of the flock spent their nights on the low bank that curved along the northern edge. He could see the shapes of them from here, his ducks, a pale mass of white and brown shuffling at the water’s margin as the light came.

One hundred and twelve ducks. He had counted them three days ago, as he counted them every few days, a habit born of the years when losing even five birds to a predator or illness could mean the difference between a profitable season and a difficult one. The number was the same as it had always been, as it had been since last spring when the breeding pairs had added their new cohort to the flock and Shouren had made the usual calculations about what to sell, what to keep, what the coming season’s market prices would bear.

He finished his tea. He set the cup on the windowsill and went outside.

***

The morning work was the same every day and Shouren did not mind this. He had long ago made his peace with sameness. The path from the farmhouse door to the near pond ran through a short stretch of yard where the grass grew in patches around the harder dirt, past the tool shed that leaned very slightly to the left, past the old feed storage that his father had built from river stones and that showed no signs of failing despite decades of use. He could walk it without looking. He walked it now in the half-dark, the humidity already close against his skin, carrying the feed bucket in one hand.

The near pond was where he began each morning. He moved along its bank and scattered feed in wide arcs over the water, watching the ducks converge from their sleeping positions on the bank, watching the ripples spread and intersect. They were not beautiful creatures, his ducks, not in the way that ornamental birds were sometimes said to be beautiful. They were practical. They ate and grew and produced and occasionally — this was the nature of things — they were sold. He had stopped finding anything sentimental in this long ago, if he had ever found it at all.

He worked his way around both ponds in the morning quiet. Scattered the feed. Checked the fence stakes along the eastern edge where the canal ran closest and the ground sometimes softened after rain. Looked at the old shelter on the north bank where he’d been meaning for two seasons now to replace the roof timbers — they were not rotted through yet, but they would be. He added this to the list he kept in his head, the running catalog of repairs and improvements and necessary expenditures that the farm generated constantly, that had occupied some portion of his mind for as long as he could remember.

The sun came up.

He stood at the edge of the far pond and watched it clear the hills to the east, watched the light move down across the rice paddies that began where his property ended and ran in green and gold terraces all the way to the road. Harvest was coming. Another few weeks and the village would be alive with it — the sound of scythes and voices, the smell of cut rice in the warm air, women and children in the paddies, old men resting against the field dikes and offering opinions on the quality of the yield. Shouren had always been of the village and apart from it simultaneously; the farm occupied the edge of the settlement, backed against a stretch of bamboo grove that ran up toward the hills, and something in that geography had always suited him.

He was not, by nature, a man who required company.

He had told himself this many times in the past two years. He told himself this now, watching the light flatten across the water and the ducks settle into their morning routines, and found he could not entirely tell whether the thought was true or whether it had simply become necessary.

***

He was mending a section of fence along the near pond’s western edge when he heard the voices.

It was past midday by then, the heat at its full weight, the cicadas in the bamboo grove behind the house producing their steady deafening pulse. Shouren worked in the sound and the heat without particular discomfort; he had spent so many decades in both that they had become simply the texture of summer, as unremarkable as the dirt under his hands or the smell of the water nearby. He had taken off his outer shirt and hung it on a fence post. He worked in an undershirt, methodically replacing the rotted lower rail on a section that connected the pond fence to the yard gate, not rushing because there was no one to rush for.

The voices came from the road. Two of them — one he recognized immediately.

He straightened up, pushed his hair back from his forehead, and waited.

Zhixuan came through the gate first. He was taller than Shouren remembered, or perhaps he only stood differently — something in his posture had changed since the new year visit, some quality of how he carried himself that had not been there when he was still a village boy rather than a university student. He was smiling. He was always smiling. This had always faintly alarmed Shouren, who had no memory of smiling so readily even when he was twenty-one, but he had come to understand that his son’s ease with the world was simply how the boy was made.

“Bà,” Zhixuan said. And then, looking at the fence section and the tools spread in the grass: “I was going to write to say I was coming.”

“You could have,” Shouren said.

“I was afraid you’d tell me not to.”

This was probably accurate. Shouren looked at the young man standing behind his son.

The stranger was about Zhixuan’s age, or close to it — younger than twenty-five, certainly. He stood very straight in a way that was different from Zhixuan’s easy confidence, a kind of stillness that Shouren associated immediately and instinctively with military training, with men who had learned to hold themselves in readiness even when there was nothing to be ready for. He was lean and well-built, with the particular quality of physical conditioning that came not from deliberate exercise but from sustained hard work. He held a canvas bag in one hand. He was not looking around the farm the way people usually looked when they first arrived somewhere unfamiliar, assessing and judging. He was looking at Shouren.

Dark eyes. Calm. Waiting.

“This is Song Yanzhou,” Zhixuan said. “He was in my regiment — we did our military service together. He was demobilized in the spring.”

Shouren studied the young man for a moment. “Song Yanzhou.”

“Shū,” the young man said. The address was respectful — the word for a senior male relative, used for men of his father’s generation. His voice was even. “I apologize for arriving without notice.”

“Where are you from?”

A brief pause. “Huaibei. Originally.”

Shouren knew what the pause meant. He had been around enough people in his life to understand what it meant when a person hesitated before answering a question about where they were from, when origin became a complicated thing to explain. He did not press.

“Come inside,” he said. “There’s tea.”

***

They sat at the kitchen table, the three of them, in the particular way of men who are discussing something that matters while appearing to discuss something that doesn’t. Zhixuan had done most of the talking since they came inside, which was usual; Zhixuan had always been the talker of the family, the one who could fill a room with words in a way that Shouren had never managed and had mostly been grateful for. He talked now about Yanzhou — not about the specific content of the young man’s situation in the careful way he’d clearly planned on the road here, but around it, building the case from the edges in.

Yanzhou sat across from Shouren and drank his tea and said very little.

The substance of it, as Shouren gradually assembled it from Zhixuan’s circling: Yanzhou had completed his service and been demobilized in April. His father had died the previous year while Yanzhou was serving — his mother had died years earlier. There were no siblings. There was no family land. There was no family, essentially. He had spent several months in the city after demobilization — Shouren gathered there was a period of difficulty there that Zhixuan was not fully detailing — and the question of what came next had not resolved itself into anything clear.

“I told him about the farm,” Zhixuan said. He had his hands wrapped around his tea cup, his eyes moving between Shouren and Yanzhou in a way that was trying very hard not to look like watching. “About how much work there is. About how you manage it alone.”

Shouren looked at his son. “The farm manages.”

“Bà.”

“It manages,” Shouren said, simply, not defensively. This was true. It managed. He managed. The ponds were not in perfect condition and the shelter roof still needed replacing and the summer’s income would be modest at best, but managing was what the farm did and managing was what Shouren did and he did not see a problem with this that required solving.

Zhixuan set down his cup. He looked at his father with the expression of a young man who had prepared for this conversation, who had rehearsed it on the road, who believed he was about to say the right thing. “He’s a hard worker. The best worker in our unit. He knows how to repair things, build things. He served three years and he’s — he’s a good person, Bà. He just needs somewhere to be for a while.”

A silence. The cicadas outside. A duck, somewhere, registering an opinion about something.

Shouren looked at Yanzhou. The young man had not moved during Zhixuan’s speech. He was not shifting in his seat or looking at the floor or performing any of the visible signs of a person hoping to be found acceptable. He met Shouren’s gaze directly and waited. There was something in that — in the quality of the waiting — that Shouren found unexpectedly difficult to dismiss.

“The farm can’t pay a wage,” he said.

“I’m not asking for wages,” Yanzhou said. It was the most he had said since they sat down. “Room and food. That’s enough.”

Shouren exhaled through his nose, slowly. He looked at his son. He looked at the young man across the table. He looked at the kitchen — his kitchen, the kitchen he moved through alone, the hooks by the door that held one coat instead of two, the single cup drying on the rack beside the basin, the practiced smallness of a life that had arranged itself around one person’s needs.

He was a practical man. The roof needed replacing. The fence needed more work than one set of hands could accomplish before autumn made the ground too hard. He had watched this young man walk through his gate and noted, without meaning to, the efficient way he moved, the economy of it, the particular physical competence that Shouren associated with men who had spent years doing real work in difficult conditions.

He was also not a man who made decisions before thinking them through. He believed in taking time. He believed in caution. He believed in the wisdom of arrangements that didn’t require too much adjustment from either party.

“There’s a room,” he said finally. “The back room. Zhixuan’s old room, from when he was small. It’s used for storage now but it can be cleared.” He looked at his son. “You’re going back to the university.”

It was not a question. Zhixuan opened his mouth, then closed it again, then said: “Day after tomorrow. I have to be back for the fall term.”

“Then you’ll help clear the room before you go.”

Zhixuan looked at Yanzhou. The expression on his face was the expression of a young man trying very hard not to smile with too much visible relief. “Right,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”

Shouren stood up. He looked at Yanzhou one more time. “There’s another feed round at sunset,” he said. “If you’re going to be here, you’ll learn the rounds.”

Yanzhou set down his cup and stood up. “All right,” he said.

Shouren went back outside to finish the fence.

***

The back room, when they cleared it that afternoon, turned out to be smaller than Shouren had remembered. He had used it for tools and extra feed sacks and a few pieces of furniture that had nowhere else to go — two old wooden chairs, a broken rice basket he’d meant to repair, several clay jars whose original contents he no longer recalled. Zhixuan moved these things with the energetic efficiency of a young man working off his nervousness, and Yanzhou helped without being directed, carrying the heavier pieces to the tool shed and stacking the feed sacks along the exterior wall where they would stay dry under the eave overhang.

What the room contained, once cleared, was: four walls of packed clay plaster, a small window facing north, a wooden floor worn smooth with age, and a sleeping platform built against the wall — a kang, made of the same river stones as the feed storage outside, raised about a foot off the floor and running the length of the interior wall, wide enough for one person sleeping alone or two sleeping close.

It was this detail that created the problem, if problem was the word for it.

The farmhouse itself had two sleeping rooms. The main room, Shouren’s, was toward the front of the house and contained a proper bed, wooden framed, that he and Lifen had bought the year Zhixuan was born. The back room had always been the secondary space — used by Zhixuan when he was small, used for storage when Zhixuan moved into the main room as a boy, and then used for storage again when Zhixuan left for university. The kang in the back room was intact and structurally sound but it was, in the final accounting, a single sleeping platform in a single small room.

“It’s fine,” Yanzhou said. He had surveyed the room with the practical eyes of someone who had spent three years sleeping wherever the army told him to sleep, and clearly found nothing objectionable about it.

“There’s no bed,” Shouren said.

“A kang is fine.”

“There’s no privacy.” He meant this as a neutral observation, a statement of fact.

“I don’t need privacy.” Yanzhou looked at him. “Shū. I’ve slept in barracks with forty men. This is fine.”

Shouren considered the room. He considered the kang. He considered the logistical reality that the back room was indeed the only available sleeping space that was not his own room, and that he was not, no matter the circumstances, sharing his room with a stranger.

“You’ll need a blanket,” he said. “I’ll find one.”

Zhixuan, who had been watching this exchange from the doorway with the expression of a person trying to be invisible, said: “What about — I mean, is there anything to — you know, divide it? If Yanzhou’s using the room and you need to come in for the feed sacks—”

“The feed sacks are in the shed now,” Shouren said.

“Right, but if—”

“Why would there need to be a division?” Yanzhou asked, looking at Zhixuan with calm curiosity.

Zhixuan’s expression shifted into something that was almost sheepishness. “I just thought — you know, for your privacy—”

“I said I don’t need privacy.”

“No, I know, I just—” Zhixuan looked at his father. Something about the way he looked conveyed a kind of helpless, fond amusement that Shouren did not entirely understand. “Bà, what if you ran a rope? Across the room? Just so there’s a — a line. Between your access and his side.”

Shouren looked at his son.

“For the feed sacks,” Zhixuan added.

“The feed sacks,” Shouren said, “are in the shed.”

“For — any future feed sacks. Or tools. You know.” Zhixuan spread his hands. “It just seems neater.”

There was a pause. Shouren looked at Yanzhou. Yanzhou looked at Shouren. Something passed between them that was not words, that was simply the mutual recognition of two practical men observing a third person exercise himself considerably over a problem that did not exist.

“Fine,” Shouren said. He went to the tool shed and came back with a length of rough hemp cord. He strung it across the back room at about chest height, looping it around a nail in the door frame and another, already present, on the opposite wall. It divided the room approximately in half — one half with the kang, one half containing nothing at all.

“There,” Shouren said.

Zhixuan looked at it. He looked as though he wanted to say something.

“The bachelor line,” Yanzhou said.

Both Shouren and Zhixuan looked at him.

“That’s what the soldiers called it in the barracks.” The faintest pull at the corner of his mouth — the first thing that might have been the beginning of a smile. “When they strung a rope down the middle of a sleeping area. The bachelor line. To show where your space ended.”

Zhixuan made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and relief. “The bachelor line,” he repeated. “Bà, that’s — that works. That’s what it is.”

Shouren looked at the cord. It hung at chest height across the small room, dividing nothing from nothing, a solution to a problem that had not existed until a twenty-one-year-old had invented it for reasons Shouren had chosen not to examine. He turned and went back to the kitchen.

Behind him, he could hear Zhixuan still laughing quietly to himself. And under it, just barely, the sound of Yanzhou’s voice, saying something he could not make out — lower, more even, the voice of a man who was not laughing but who was not, perhaps, entirely unsmiling.

***

That evening the three of them did the sunset feed together.

Shouren had not done the evening rounds with company in longer than he could calculate with any accuracy. Zhixuan had helped as a boy, of course — it had been one of his chores, the kind that children accept as simply the texture of their daily existence without knowing it is teaching them something. But Zhixuan had been at university for two years now, and before that there had been the year of the marriage’s slow dissolution and Lifen’s increasing absence from the farm’s routines, and before that she had done the rounds with him — or not done them, depending on the season of their relationship, depending on what she had decided on any given afternoon about what she was and was not still willing to be.

He did not think about this now. He walked the pond banks and scattered the feed and watched the ducks and showed Yanzhou the points of the routine without narrating it as instruction — simply moving through it and letting the young man observe, which seemed, based on how Yanzhou moved, to be all the instruction he required. He was attentive in the particular way of people who have learned that information missed in the first pass is not generally offered again. He watched Shouren’s hands on the feed bucket. He watched the way Shouren moved along the near pond’s bank where the ground was softer and required a different step. He said nothing but Shouren was aware, without looking, of exactly where he was at each moment.

Zhixuan walked behind them both, more interested in talking about everything he’d missed in the village than in the mechanics of duck feeding. He had, apparently, a great deal to say about his dormitory, his classes, a professor he found both impressive and impossible, a girl in his year whose name he mentioned once and then did not mention again in a way that suggested she was in fact the thing most on his mind.

The sun was going down behind the western hills. The light across the paddies went gold and then deeper, the green of the unharvested rice catching it and holding it for a long moment before the shadows came. Shouren stood at the edge of the far pond and watched this in the way he always watched it — without sentiment, but with the particular attention of a man who has watched the same view change with the same light at the same hour for so many decades that it has become something close to intimate. The mountains at the valley’s rim went purple and then dark. The sky above them was still pale, still holding the last of the day.

He was aware of Yanzhou standing nearby. Not close — a few feet away, also watching the light. Also quiet.

Zhixuan was still talking. He had moved on to a description of the university dining hall and its shortcomings, which were apparently both numerous and strongly felt. Shouren half-listened and looked at the mountains and thought about the roof on the north bank shelter, and about the fence section he’d finished today, and about the section that still needed work farther west. He thought about the season’s accounts. He thought about nothing in particular, which was how he usually thought in the evenings — the mind moving lightly over the day’s work and the next day’s work and the work after that, a kind of planning that was also a kind of resting.

He did not think about the cord hung across the back room. He did not think about the young man standing three feet to his right, watching the same mountains with the same quality of attention. He noted these things and did not think about them.

“I should have written ahead,” Zhixuan said, having apparently arrived at some conclusion about the university situation that satisfied him. “But I wanted to come. I wanted to — check in.”

Shouren looked at his son.

“You’re all right?” Zhixuan asked. It was a careful question, the question of a young man who has learned to ask carefully.

“I’m fine,” Shouren said. He meant it. He was fine. He was always fine.

Zhixuan looked at him for a moment with the expression that he sometimes wore — an expression that Shouren found both touching and faintly exasperating — of a child trying to see his parent clearly and being uncertain of what he found. Then Zhixuan looked at Yanzhou, briefly, and back at his father, and then at the mountains.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

They finished the rounds and went inside. Shouren cooked rice and a simple dish of greens he had grown in the small kitchen garden behind the house, and they ate together at the kitchen table — the three of them, which required bringing out the third chair from the back room because the kitchen table only kept two. Zhixuan talked through the meal with the stored energy of a person who had been holding his words for a long journey and was now releasing them. Yanzhou ate and listened. Shouren ate and occasionally responded to the things his son said with the minimal commentary that Zhixuan had always been able to work with, had learned as a child to read the whole intention of a conversation from his father’s brief answers.

After dinner Zhixuan helped clear the table, which was not something he had done as a child and which Shouren noted without comment as evidence of the university’s influence. Then Zhixuan said he was tired from the journey and went to wash up, and suddenly Shouren was standing in the kitchen with Yanzhou and neither of them was talking.

It was not, precisely, uncomfortable. Shouren wiped down the table. Yanzhou stood and then, without being asked, went to the door and checked the latch on the duck yard gate, which was something Shouren did every evening and which he had not mentioned. When Yanzhou came back inside, his glance at Shouren was brief and practical, saying only: it’s latched, and Shouren nodded.

“The feed rounds start before sunrise,” Shouren said.

“I’ll be up,” Yanzhou said.

“I don’t usually wait.”

“You won’t have to.”

Another silence. The frogs had begun outside — the evening chorus from the near pond, the sound that had come in through the kitchen window every summer night for as long as Shouren could remember. He dried his hands on the cloth by the basin and looked at the back room door, which was standing open, the hemp cord just visible in the lamplight.

“Sleep well,” he said.

“You too, Shū,” Yanzhou said.

Shouren went to his room and closed the door.

***

Zhixuan left the following afternoon.

He was efficient about it — his bag already packed, his goodbyes already composed into the measured warmth of someone who has learned to leave without making it a production. He embraced his father, which was something Shouren did not resist and did not return with any particular demonstrativeness but did not pull away from either, because he was not a man who required performance in either direction. He shook Yanzhou’s hand. He stood in the gate for a moment and looked between the two men standing in the farm yard, and whatever he was looking for or looking at, he seemed to find something that satisfied him, because the expression on his face in that last moment was almost peaceful.

“I’ll write,” he told his father.

“Write,” Shouren said.

Zhixuan smiled at him. Then he shouldered his bag and turned onto the road and walked away in the late afternoon sun, growing smaller against the paddies until the road curved toward the village and he was gone.

Shouren stood in the gate for a moment longer.

Then he turned back to the yard, where the tool he’d left out that morning was still waiting, and Yanzhou was standing by the near pond fence looking at the section that needed work — not offering, exactly, just looking at it with the quiet attentiveness of a man making a practical inventory.

“The post is the problem,” Shouren said, coming up beside him. “The post and the lower two rails.”

Yanzhou crouched down and looked at the post’s base, where the wood met the earth. He pressed his thumb into the grain. “How long has it been like this?”

“Since spring.”

“You’ll need new wood.”

“I know.”

Yanzhou stood up. He looked at the rest of the fence line, then at the pond, then at the sky, which was beginning its evening change. He rubbed his thumb across the knuckles of his other hand — a brief, almost unconscious gesture. Then he looked at Shouren.

“Tell me what you need done first,” he said.

Shouren looked at the fence. He looked at the young man standing beside him, the dust of the road still on his shoes, nothing to his name but a canvas bag and whatever had brought him here to this particular farm in this particular valley at the end of a summer that was almost over.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

***

That night, Shouren lay awake and listened.

The frogs. The ducks settling and resettling on the far bank. The small sounds of the house — the beam above his head contracting slightly in the cooling night air, the distant sound of something in the bamboo grove. These were the sounds he always listened to. He knew them the way he knew the fence line in the dark.

From the back room, through the closed door: nothing. No sounds at all.

This was, in its own way, a sound. The particular quality of stillness that came from a space that contained a person rather than the usual stored objects. Something about it registered differently in the house — he could not have explained why, but the silence from the back room was not the same silence as when nothing was there.

He stared at the ceiling. The heat was still present, even with the window open, the night air moving barely enough to be felt.

He thought about nothing in particular. He thought about the fence post, the new wood it would require, the afternoon tomorrow when he could get the cart to the market and back before the heat peaked. He thought about the season’s accounts, about the roof timber, about the way the far pond’s eastern bank had begun showing signs of erosion in the spring rains that he would need to address before winter.

He did not think about the cord hung across the back room.

He did not think about the young man who had arrived that afternoon with a canvas bag and nowhere to go, who had looked at a deteriorating fence post and said tell me what you need done first with the simple practicality of a person who understood that work was a language, and that sometimes it was the only one that mattered.

The frogs were very loud tonight.

Shouren closed his eyes. He breathed slowly, in the way he had always breathed when sleep was still some way off and the mind needed settling, a long exhalation through the nose that he had done every night for as long as he could remember without knowing that anyone had ever noticed it.

The night held him. The farm held them both.

Tomorrow the work would begin.

***

End of Chapter One