Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his thirty-sixth year
The school was rebuilt twice more in the years after the dinner on the hill. The first time, the flood took the north corner and the children stood in the mud and watched it go. The second time, the children took the old room down themselves, by stone, and raised a new one on the upper bank where the light came in better.
Ning kept the lines plumb. Hu Wanqing mixed the mortar, and her hands grew thick with lime, so that she could no longer thread a needle without swearing at it. She swore at it cheerfully every morning.
Bo Xi grew. She was the tallest child in the school by her twelfth year and the loudest by her fourteenth, and by her eighteenth she was reading the primer’s last twelve pages aloud to the little ones, although those pages had been gone from the book since before he could read. Ning had rewritten them from memory on the backs of the tax rolls, one page at a time, by the stove, while Hu Wanqing kept the rice accounts beside him. He didn’t always get the words right. Bo Xi corrected him.
