Sect Year 2 · fourth month · day 4 · the rim of Sallow Basin · the unnumbered life, seen from the rim: a river village, her eighty-first year
The rim showed Lin the woman at eighty-one, and she still hooked the bucket on the rail every morning.
Lin felt that her hands were steady now. That surprised her a little, because for years they had shaken over the rope and then over the cup, and now they held still on the iron. The ring where the bucket hung had been worn so thin that she could find the place with her thumb without opening her eyes. She found it now, hooked the bucket, and let it drop into the shaft.
The shaft was dry. It had gone dry the spring the girl’s cart went down the valley road, and she hadn’t drawn a drop from it since. She hooked the bucket anyway. She had never been able to say why, not to the girl and not to anyone, except that the rail was hers. A rail with nothing on its hook looked like a thing that had been given up.
The cord at her waist was no longer heavy. It was the shawl’s thread, twisted into a short length, and it carried a single knot, the last one she had tied. She touched it in the mornings with her thumb, the way she once counted eggs in a basket before market. She didn’t count anything now. Her hand only…
