One night, Sun Lanfen knocked on the Shi family’s door. “Old Shi! I need your help.”
Shi Wangcai was still working on the day shift at that time so was in bed already. As he was dressing, his wife Lin Guiru yelled out, “It’s not our turn tonight. Can’t you spare him?”
“No, I can’t. Old Shi? You coming or not?”
Sun Lanfen led Old Shi to a house in the outer yard. “I need a witness.” She pounded on the front door. “Dr Xu! Come out to turn off the water valve. Tonight it’s your turn.”
“We’ve done it,” a sleepy voice shouted from the bedroom.
“Really?!”
“Our son Xu Yongcai did it.”
“You have a son?! That’s news. I thought you owned a slave. Come and have a look at him!”
They followed to her house. When Shi Wangcai saw the boy in Sun Lanfen’s bed, he understood her anger. The boy’s parents had sent him to turn off the valve, but Xu Yongcai was too small. When he tried to wedge the long fork into the handwheel of the valve, he had fallen into the well, hit his head on the bricks and lost consciousness. Had Sun Lanfen not gone to check the water main, he would have frozen to death. “You wouldn’t notice his absence and you wouldn’t care!” Sun Lanfen yelled.
Most of the residents knew how lucky they were to have Sun Lanfen in their compound. Last year, when the local government had asked them to elect a compound leader, the thirty-three households had voted unanimously for her.
Now, Shi Wangcai measured the little landing in front of Dong’s house and decided it was too small for an outward-opening door, particularly since the entrance was below ground level. Even a few shopping bags could make it hard to open the door fully. The first thing he did was rehang the door so that it opened inwards. And then he assembled a metre-high plywood gate and installed it at ground level, at the top of the stairs to prevent things falling to Mr Dong’s landing.
He was pleased with his work but Mr Dong remained anxious. “What about the bad omen?” he asked. “What can I do to ward it off?”
“Mr Dong, stop torturing yourself. Good omen or bad omen, they’re all in your head.”
“No, no, Old Shi.” Mr Dong shook his head like a rattle-drum. “You don’t understand. If anything goes wrong in my family, it’ll fall on my poor son, Pingshun. I’m not kidding. I can’t take this risk.” His voice trembled. “Please, please help me!”
Shi Wangcai was astonished. He walked back to his own veranda to get an overview of Mr Dong’s house. He surveyed it from different angles and then an idea came to him. “Okay, Mr Dong. Bring me your ladder and pick up thirty-six bricks and a small bag of cement from the co-op next door. Leave it to me.”
Mr Dong held the ladder while Shi Wangcai clambered onto the roof. Bucket by bucket, he pulled up the materials Mr Dong had gathered and moved them to the middle of the roof. He cleared the snow, removed some tiles, then marked out and flattened a 400 by 600 mm rectangle. He poured out some cement and mixed it with snow before laying the bricks. He ran two bricks length-wise on two parallel sides with one brick joining them up on each of the other sides. He laid six courses and soon a half-metre-tall false chimney appeared on Mr Dong’s roof.
“What’s that for?” asked Mr Dong, peering at it from the Shi family’s veranda. Shi Wangcai gave no answer but signalled him back to hold the ladder. When he came down, Mr Dong realised that the man was nearly frozen. He nudged the shivering Shi Wangcai inside his house and rushed to get a hot water bottle.
“No, not that. My hands, my hands are gone. Cold water, please,” Shi Wangcai groaned.
Mr Dong brought a washbasin filled with cold water but was unsure. “You want cold water, really?”
Shi Wangcai plunged his hands into the basin even before it reached the washstand. It was almost five minutes before he stopped shivering. Meanwhile, Mr Dong poached two eggs in a big bowl of sugared ginger soup for Shi Wangcai to reheat the man’s body.
“Oh, that’s nice. Thank you. I thought I was going to lose my hands. The snow mixed with cement was absolutely ice cold.” Before Mr Dong could ask again, he said, “Now, bring me a piece of paper and a pen and I’ll explain what the chimney is for.”
He wrote two big characters on the paper:
“Thank you!” Mr Dong was convinced. “Mrs Sun is right, you’re the ideas man. Now I can relax,” he said with a cheerful smile. “But how can I pay you back? Stay for lunch, please.”
“No need, we’re neighbours.” Pleased with himself, Shi Wangcai left.
When he got home, he was surprised to see his wife there. “You’re early,” he said, putting his tool box in the back room, where he had his workshop next to Shi Ding’s room. Not hearing a response, he quickly went back. “Are you okay? Has something happened?”
“What do you mean? What could happen to me? If you don’t trust me, that’s your problem!” Lin Guiru erupted, shocking not only her husband, but herself. Seeing his stunned expression, she knew that she had lost control. To cover up, she said, “Sorry, I … I just had a fight with the bus conductor. That woman is a real bitch!”
“What happened? I mean, what did she do?”
Lin Guiru was not ready for the question, so she replied briskly, “Can we not talk about it? You’re so annoying.” She walked off to the kitchen in a huff.
Shi Wangcai gazed at her disappearing figure and shook his head. His wife had become more and more estranged. It was the outside world, this new round of political campaigning that has muddled her head, he persuaded himself. He did not like confrontation.
“I made some dumplings this morning with your favourite mushroom fillings,” he said, changing the subject as he went into the kitchen.
The Shi family’s kitchen was the envy of all the neighbours. While everyone else had just a stove and cooked their meals and boiled water under the eaves in warm weather and inside in winter, the Shi kitchen was a proper six-square-metre room. Shi Wangcai had enclosed one corner of the veranda as a kitchen and then cut a door into their living room. He set the stove and cupboards against the end wall of the veranda, and a dining table, big enough for the three of them to sit around, on the opposite side. Three baskets hung from the ceiling above the table, one for cooked food, one for groceries and one for vegetables.
Lin Guiru was now putting things into the baskets. She replied cheerfully,