Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his forty-seventh year
The first winter after the boy said he would stay, the snow shut the bend for six weeks. It came down in the second week of the cold and did not stop for three days, and when it finally thinned the road below the school had vanished under a white bank taller than a man. The carts stopped coming up. The lowland letters stopped too, and the valley below went quiet in the way a valley does when every chimney is smoking and nobody has anything to carry anywhere.
Bai Tong stayed. He didn’t say so at first. He came up the steps each morning with the snow on his shoulders and went straight to the stove without taking off his boots, and when the small children arrived in a crowd at the door he sat them on the back bench and gave them their letters himself. Ren Zhuo heard him from the window. He was teaching the stroke for water to a boy of six, and his voice was patient and dry, and he corrected the boy’s wrist twice without raising it once.
