Please do not repost this short story without permission. Comments welcome to Gerald Tarrant at lordofmerentha@yahoo.com.

A House on a Hill

The wind across the waters of the village docks smelled like sewer water and fish and salt. It breezed past the bobbing fishing boats in its hurry to escape its own stink, swirling up into its bloated body pieces of bone from the late lunch of the Chan family's five dogs and part of Mr. Leung's half-drafted newspaper article manuscript and ashes from the still smoldering cremation oven that squatted ominously in the center of the village square. Far away, the sun set over the dark waters in a mess of orange and red and vivid gold. The last ferry to Hong Kong was pulling away from the pier and the man who stood on the side of the ferry ramp was an insubstantial shadow as he blew his whistle. Once. Twice.

A flock of birds passed over the waters and over the crowded rooftops, fluttering past the two boys on bicycles haggling over the price of some unseen delicacy at the dim sum stand in front of the supermarket. Shop lights flickered on one by one inside windows and around market stalls: bare electric bulbs, swinging lanterns, flickering candles lighting the pot-bellied buddhas who stood dwarfish guard over the piece of dusty dirt around their tiny shrines.

The Tien Hong Teahouse was busiest at this time of the evening, when dusk had not yet turned into nightfall, and the harried waitress at the door was trying to keep people from hurrying past her up the stairs. The roar of conversation was a rush of sweeping tide overpowering the quiet lapping of the waters of the bay upon the sides of the concrete docks. An aroma of fresh-baked bread and cooked fish and spices wafted outside the restaurant, through the windows, towards the noses of the pedestrians outside who pushed through the crowded alleyways, kicking up dust and dirt as they headed towards home.

Mr. Li noticed none of this as he sipped the last of his tea and reached for the teapot again, filled his cup to the brim. Wrinkled hands went to his belly, loosened his belt two notches to the left. Bright eyes below a graying, receding hairline flickered to the side, on the lookout for a cart of food. He was not a fat man, though he had put on some weight after thirty years of working in the meat business. Not fat, just weight, bending over the counter day after day with the butcher's knife in his hand, slicing muscle and tendon and bone.

He did not quite know the other men sitting at his table, though it was a small enough village that he recognized them all. With their conversations a faint disturbance in some small corner of his mind, he fingered the small change in his right pocket. It made a fat bundle, satisfyingly bunching up on the outside of his leg, and he patted it several more times before reluctantly turning his fingers back to the chopsticks and the remaining portion of beef on his plate. Meat and money. Meat was money, in his world; had been since his father and his father before him.

Most of his customers he had known all his life. Some of them had watched him grow up, some of them had been at his father's funeral, some of them had loaned his grandfather money when the family's small meat shop had fallen on hard times during the War. Many of them had been his classmates, men and women whom he had watched while the years passed by and their steps slowed and the wrinkles on their faces grew deeper and their memories grew longer. And he knew they would never buy their meat anywhere else because their fathers and their fathers before them had been buying from his family as long as they could remember.

It was nice to know, thought Mr. Li, that people of his kind could still made a difference in the lives of others. A difference in the smallest sort of way. Though his son didn't think so. His son called the meat business filthy. His son was an educated boy, according to his wife and the local newspapers, destined for so much more than a dirty stall in the center of the dirty wet market, selling dirty beef.

The waitress clattered by with a pot of fresh tea, and Mr. Li pushed his chair back from the table. It was early yet, and there was still beer to enjoy and desserts to snack on, but his wife had promised direly that if he was not home by sunset, there would be consequences.

He picked up the smeared edition of today's newspaper that lay crumpled by his chair and made his way downstairs, flashing a smile at the waitress at the bottom of the stairs. She did not smile back. Mr. Li sighed, fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. The street outside the restaurant reeked of dog droppings and stagnant sewer water. Failing to find a handkerchief in his pocket, Mr. Li pulled out an old napkin, wiped his mouth on a relatively clean corner, and dropped it by the side of the road in the gathering dusk under a crooked, rusting sign that read:

PLEASE DO NOT LITTER

His son didn't want to be a butcher. His son was in Hong Kong, at the University there on the hill, the one that had its name written in big silver letters on the white wall. On those rare occasions when he went to Hong Kong, the public light buses would pass by the University with a roar and he would press his nose to the glass, wondering what was behind the stone and the big windows, behind the animated faces of the students climbing the stairs to class.

All he had was one son, and he wouldn't let himself think of what would happen when he passed on.

Most of the shops were closing, the chubby women in the stained, flowery aprons hanging out of windows and doors to post CLOSED signs on the shop entrances, repackaging unsold merchandise for tomorrow's opening, tugging down the heavy steel doors across the storefront. Mr. Li looked at the sky, looked at his watch, quickening his step. He passed the one-legged beggar that always sat in front of the empty shop space beside Hoi Sum Grocery. The beggar eyed him, thumping one end of a long, knobby stick against the ground, grinning toothily. He thought of the coins jingling in his pocket as he passed and turned right up a long narrow alleyway.

When he was a child, there had been a tree growing at the top of the bare hill on the next turn, massive trunk too short and knobby for the impossibly willowy branches that flung their limbs out from the top beneath the sky, curling down towards the dusty ground. He could still smell sometimes in the gathering dusk the perfumes of the incense that had burned at the foot of the great tree, a prayer to whatever fearsome spirits dwelt within the peeling bark of the aged giant. Protect us. Shelter us. Give us peace.

The tree was gone now, only another dim memory of the world that had shifted, changed, passed by while he had stood faithfully in the door of his meat stand, growing old.

His son said that he was too old to understand. His son said that when he was out of college, he would be a doctor, and have a practice in one of the shops in the city where the lights were steady burning neon instead of bare electric bulb, and the women wore skirts and high heels that clicked along the smooth pavement, and the traffic rumbled around the modern high rise skyscrapers that jutted into the sky like needles. His son said that he would buy a house on the hill looking out over the city which never slept but during the night burned even brighter than the starlight.

Mr. Li was a simple man who liked the comforting smell of the harbor water in the air and the scent of fresh-steamed buns and the familiar rattling of the carts of the ladies next door going out in the morning to buy the groceries of the day. He liked his tea hot and his meat spicy, and he hadn't bought a new shirt in more years than he could remember.

I'm old fashioned, he thought woefully to himself as he trudged up the hill towards the small, squat house that teetered on one of the ledges above the harbor waters, where the light in the window was burning still and the flickering behind the curtain showed that his wife was watching television. Mr. Li didn't mind the television. His son complained, whenever he came home, that the television was too small. His son didn't come home often.

He stuck his hands inside his worn pants pockets, feeling the loose gravel pebbles roll under his shoes and down the hillside. The hill leveled out and he heaved a sigh, stopping for a bit to rest his tired legs and smooth back the hair away from his forehead. The sun dipped lower, setting behind the prow of the hill, and he started walking again.

The gate was locked, and he fumbled in his pocket for the keys when he realized he had not brought them out with him this morning. Rattling the gate, he hoped his wife had the television turned down so she could hear him. He saw the shadow behind the curtain move and the front door creaked and swung open and she trotted down the path to meet him. She still had her apron on. The smell from the open door was of onions and soy sauce.

They didn't say a word as he followed her inside, shutting the door behind him and scooping out the pile of coins from his pocket, pausing only to slip off his shoes. She wasn't the type of woman to say anything about him forgetting his keys. It was his own fault, and she knew he knew that, and it was not necessary to speak of it further. The television murmured in the background, the immaculately dressed woman behind the news counter reporting the day's trivial mishaps in her perfect Hong Kong Cantonese accent. She wasn't even a woman yet, Mr. Li observed as he deposited the coins on the kitchen table with a clink. A girl, really. Her smile was too innocent, too open.

He'd always hoped his son would marry a girl from the village. Maybe the daughter of the Tangs, who lived two houses down on the other side of the hill. She was a nice girl, well brought up, and her father's store brought in a tidy profit. Or maybe one of the girls in the Wong family at the bottom of the hill around the curve in the road, the ones he would see every day in the wet market buying the day's groceries for their parents, smiling at him like he had just sold them the world on a golden platter instead of a few kilograms worth of bloody beef.

His wife emerged from the doorway of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dirty towel from the towel rack just beside the refrigerator. Mr. Li dropped down onto the couch, propped his feet on the table in front of the television. The news was showing pictures of students passing through the gate of the University. He watched intently. Maybe his son would be among them, one of the young ones that walked with a spring in their step as they greeted each other on the way to the school on the hill.

Hong Kong was too loud, too large for him. This small house in the village his family had owned since the War, and when he looked out across the water at night he imagined he could see the lights of the Hong Kong ferries gliding through the dark water, their prows cutting through the ebony waves without a sound.

A house on a hill, his son said. A light on the hill.

He was growing old. The newscaster chattered on merrily in the background and he looked out the window, feeling melancholy, watching the last rays of the sun vanish behind the hillside, the last streaks of light fading over the water. The last ferry to the city was long gone, even now rolling through the dark waters towards its destination, the neon lights that would still be burning bright, the streets which would still be lit like day after the lights in the village had long gone out.

He watched his wife's shadowed back as she poured the coins into her hand and stacked them neatly against the pile of old newspapers on the fraying lace tablecloth. The wedding band she usually wore on her left hand was missing, signaling that she had just finished doing the dishes and had forgotten to put it back on. She did that often. Mr. Li didn't mind.

He pushed himself up from the couch, turned the television off and listened to the breeze flow in through the open windows, rustling the frayed curtains. The streetlights outside on the dirt path drew smudges of pale dimness across the night sky and he paused for a second, looking down over the hill and the sea, thinking of tomorrow's business and the shipments coming in by ferry early in the morning. Thinking of his son asleep or awake inside the white school on the hill and a thousand things that they could both have done to make things right again.

Thinking that maybe if he strained his eyes hard enough, that something would shine from hilltop to hilltop, across the waters, and bring them all together in an arc of light.
 

18 September 2001