Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his fifteenth year
By the time Ning was fifteen the school had forty children on its roll, and the roll was a lie in one small way. Forty children came to the bench in the mornings. Another twenty came when the weather was dry and the granary work was slack, and sat on the wall outside the shed with their feet in the lane and listened through the open door. Ning did not count the twenty, and the district clerk who came on the first of each month looked at the forty and never asked about the rest.
The spring flood came up the river in the third week of the rains. It came up over the granary steps and over the bottom stones of the wall and into the lane, and the lane was empty for four days. Ning sat in the shed with the water at its door and the primer on its nail above him. He wrote the letters on the clay floor with his finger, over and over. Meanwhile, the river went past outside.
The tax men came on the fifth day, when the water had gone down to the step.
