Any theory about it, you ask me? Well, it could have been Jubal, strong from laboring in the garden, who did it. Or Mother, though weak and in ill-health, might have used poison. But it was Jubal, I’m sure, who buried them there, and said nothing. As I mentioned, servants were loyal then — perhaps not only from love of the family, but also because new positions were hard to find. After all, they had to be practical. A willow will always weep, but a man must eat. And Jubal was nothing if not practical.
The Man Who Wiped Away Footprints
by Allan Lloyd
© 1988 by
“You know something of what happened here?” Ti asked.
“No,” the man said. “I was only thinking that Mr. Keng was surprised halfway through his work. See? Look there. He always moved in the same direction. The proper one. From south to north.”
“But what was he doing?” the magistrate wondered.
The man’s brown hand pointed to the narrow trail, to a line of broad footprints. “Only what he did every day of his life. He was wiping out the footprints.”
Note, those readers who are dyed-in-the-silk detective-story aficionados, that this story, set in China during the T’ang dynasty, makes fictional use of the acclaimed real-life detective, Ti Jen-chieh (630–700), the same magistrate on whom Robert van Gulik based his fictional Judge Dee...
Magistrate Ti Jen-chieh chose to enter the city of Wei through one of the southern gates because this was not an official visit, and because he sometimes felt the need to watch again the crowding colors of the common people.
It was a fine day for it, a light-yellow day in the spring of the first year in the Lin-te reign, A.D. 664. The magistrate had come to the capital of Ho-pei Province with the minimum of mounted retainers in order to help settle a minor death in one of the more distant branches of his father’s family. It was a duty that might have been met by any cousin or uncle, nothing that should have cost Magistrate Ti half a week’s stay in an uncertain saddle, yet, if the truth were told, his visit had less to do with his relation, whom he had never known, than with his own springtime dissatisfaction with the deskbound tedium of his judicial office. He was still an energetic man in his middle thirties, who suffered every time he sensed a peculiar new experience passing him by unappreciated or a missed insight into people and their ways. What good was a judge who knew only the outside of everyday passions and fears? The magistrate yearned to see as much of raw life as he could, and from every level.
This yearning was what had moved him to lead his company halfway around the walled city, even though as an imperial official he would be lodging in the nobler northern sector. It would be among these poorer neighborhoods in the south that he could find some of the noise and stench that his position too often isolated him from — the screaming vegetable hawkers, the itinerant jugglers, the beggars from faraway parts. Nothing, he knew, could ever take the place of the wisdom of basic human experience. Of course, it would never do for a man in his position to be seen too dirtily mixed with the howling people of the street — which was why he separated from his retinue just inside the south city gate and rode by himself toward the house of his relations in the eastern sector. This way, too, he could see the city less conspicuously and spare the family the bother of having to welcome a clumsy band of horses and men.
He rode on slowly, not only to see everything the better, but because he was not entirely sure where he was headed. He guessed the house must be in or near a neighborhood for artisans, because his father’s relation had started his career as a wheelwright. He was said to be very rich now, very proud and powerful — the kind of man to whom the loss of a wife would be as the loss of a well used saw. The magistrate was not expecting any great show of grief, as he was not expecting any honest outpouring of welcome, but he was curious to see something of this isolated offshoot of his widespread family and to make contact with yet another part of his past. And finally, perhaps most importantly, Magistrate Ti knew it was his duty to represent his branch of his father’s family at this grieving house, no matter how many befuddling and exasperating turnings he might have to take to get there.
He and his horse at last managed to reach an eastern ward of the city, where an island of greens and blues shimmered in the midst of yellows and browns. A narrow ridge of land between jumbled streets and the city wall had been given over or abandoned to a tuft of a park, a modest stand of stately bamboo and grass surrounding a slight glimpse of a pond. There were breezes here and cool colors and an unlikely privacy that made the nearby markets seem far away. At the farther end of the park could be seen a suggestion of rising stone, a line of trail climbing up it toward a poor hut made of bound reeds. There, shifting among the emeralds of the day’s light, a low-lying commotion of dust blurred the distance.
The magistrate had just stopped his horse and raised himself to look about when he heard a shuffle of hurrying legs pursuing him from behind. Five or six men were rounding a comer, their sandaled feet churning.
“Is there one among you,” he called out as they passed, “who will direct me to the Street of Ten Thousand Ruts?”
No one answered him, hut there was something in their strained faces that moved him to kick his horse forward into a trot that took him through the park almost at their heels. He didn’t pull up until he had almost reached the door of the small hut.
An uneasy knot of people had clotted together there, the mix of the curious and the cruel and the idle that can be found near any public tragedy. Magistrate Ti lowered himself heavily to the ground and worked his way forward, excusing himself as he went.
What the crowd had gathered to see was a sad shell of a man lying twisted and oddly stiffened in the yellow dust of the path. Short and poor and weak, he seemed to have been caught and frozen in the act of running frantically, but horizontally, along the ground. What seemed most pathetic to the magistrate were the man’s scarred feet, tumbled out of their sandals as if he had been a child just learning to walk. In his right hand he held a broom made of straw tied at the end of a stick. At his head, almost as if it were cradling his head like a pillow, lay a broken earthenware bowl, filling even as the magistrate approached with the flowing color of the dead man’s blood.
“What has happened here?”
The magistrate had no power or connections in Wei, so he bothered to identify himself to no one, but the weight of his voice in the silence of the park was enough to start everyone talking at once.
“He’s only just been found!”
“He must have been struck as he was at his daily work!”
“A man’s passions come back to hound him, to make him pay some back — I told him so myself more than once!”
Magistrate Ti bent down to study the man’s darkened face, then straightened up to question the crowd. “Has no one been sent to summon the ward officials?”
After some confusion, a pair of boys was persuaded to run off for help. The magistrate, suddenly short of breath, found himself wishing they might take forever. “Who is this man, then? Does anyone know?”
A drunken voice separated itself from the mass of the growing crowd. “It’s Mr. Keng, isn’t it? I know his broom. Yes, the man that’s lived in this hut here from when I wasn’t much more than a boy.”
Suddenly, almost magically, everyone found something in the figure curling upon the ground that made it as recognizable as a brother.