Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his sixtieth year
Thirteen years went by in the unrushed rhythm of the school, and Ren Zhuo let them pass without counting. The school grew. A second room was added at the back for the younger children, with a stove of its own that smoked in every wind. The two boys who had come up the road as small children learned their letters on the back bench and went down to the lowland in turn, and came back up with their own slates.
One of them took the morning class when the other went south to keep a shop. Bai Tong kept the accounts and the bench roll in the small black book he carried inside his coat. He wrote the fuel and the bread into it. The names of the families who had paid in eggs and in cloth, and the names of the families who had paid nothing and been let stay.
Ren Zhuo’s hands slowed on the brush. The strokes came more slowly now and held their shape longer on the paper. The children who watched him make the stroke for road said it looked like a thing that had already happened and was only being remembered. He no longer sat down on the bench to correct a grip. He stood at the window and let the children come to him, and they did.
