It was the yin hour. The moon still hung in the sky, bathing the ground in silver light, but the path beneath He Yi’s feet was hard to make out. One careless step could send him into a ditch.
He Yi walked along the night road. All around him was quiet and still, broken only by the occasional chorus of insects echoing in the wide emptiness beneath the moon.
Before long, the glint of his sickle vanished among the shadows of golden rice plants. The full, firm grains, wrapped in their golden husks, fell with the slender stalks and slowly piled into little ‘mountains of gold.’
By sunrise, looking over those piles of golden stalks finally eased some of the fog in He Yi’s mind and the ache in his back and arms. But when he turned around, an almost endless expanse of evenly ripened rice spread before him. Despair rose anew.
This barely counts as a beginning…
He Yi scarcely had the strength or inclination to lift a hand against the sun. He looked away and let sweat roll down his neck and fall into the paddy water, sending ripples across its surface.
His exhausted body begged for rest, but it was nowhere near time to stop. He had to cut as much rice as he could before the heat became unbearable.
With a long sigh, He Yi gripped his sickle again and began cutting the stalks, one handful after another.
He did not know how long he worked. Eventually he became so numb with fatigue that he sometimes nearly failed to distinguish the rice stalks from his own hand before swinging the blade.
If only he had gone home at dawn to collect and drink some yao dew. He would surely have lasted longer and worked faster. He had miscalculated.
Just as that thought crossed his mind, a crowd appeared in the distance. Each person carried either a basket or a shoulder pole and held a sickle as they came toward him.
Zheng Yuanfeng led the way, grinning brightly. “Tired, are you? Look, there’s actually some white showing in your face! Go and rest a bit. We’ll take over the harvesting.”
Looking past Zheng Yuanfeng’s shoulder, He Yi recognized every face as someone from the village. When he first saw the group approaching, he had wondered whether they might be coming to help. They really were, and there were more than ten of them!
He probably had the advantage of a late harvest. Most other village households had already finished both phases of the double rush, leaving them free to lend a hand.
“Thank you all for coming to help me. I truly can’t express how grateful I am.” He Yi bowed deeply.
“We’re just returning a favor,” the villagers said with smiles. They saw no need for more words. After greeting him, they stepped into the paddy and set to work. They were seasoned farmhands: with quick, practiced movements, their sickles hooked and sliced through the rice, bringing the golden waves down in swath after swath.
He Yi drank water nearby. But watching everyone work so enthusiastically, he could hardly sit still. Before long he went back into the field.
By noon, the cut rice had been carried to the threshing ground to dry, and not a soul remained beneath the fierce sun. It was simply too hot for anyone to stay outside; everybody needed to rest. Some people did ignore the heat to hurry through the harvest, but every year there were cases of heatstroke, sometimes fatal. However desperate the work, the villagers would not gamble their lives, and their wives would do their utmost to stop them.
He Yi could not sneak away and continue harvesting either. Zheng Yuanfeng had declared that if He Yi went back into the fields in this heat, he would follow and work alongside him.
“I still have to keep an eye on you at a time like this! You don’t even have a wife to talk sense into you. Shouldn’t you find someone? Want me to ask my mother to arrange a match?” Zheng Yuanfeng blurted out without a thought.
Zheng Yuanshi glanced from his younger brother to He Yi, blinked, and seemed curious too.
Auntie Liu came over and smacked Zheng Yuanfeng several times on the back. “Must you say everything that comes into your head? You’ve got a mouth and wear it out every day. He has his own plans. Mind your business.” Then she gave He Yi an awkward smile.
He Yi had heard and seen everything. He smiled awkwardly in return. He had not expected an elder to notice his feelings for Xue Ci before the Zheng brothers did. Zheng Yuanfeng used to stare at him and Xue Ci constantly, making He Yi think he had guessed something back then. Clearly he had not.
Yet there had been no progress at all between him and Xue Ci. For now, his feelings were entirely one-sided.
He Yi slept fitfully until the shen hour, then went to the threshing ground. Before long, the villagers who had helped that morning gathered again.
They spread the sun-dried rice stalks across the stone paving and beat them with flails, swinging the bamboo striking sections down heavily against the ears. Kernels broke free and scattered over the ground.
Threshing was even harder than reaping. Everyone had to take turns. When someone grew too exhausted to lift the flail, they collected the loose grain and put it through a winnowing fan, separating light chaff and dust from the plump, heavy kernels.
However much rice they cut, they had to thresh it too. Leaving the cut stalks stacked for too long could make the grain turn yellow or grow moldy.
Even with so many people helping, the harvest still took two and a half days. Reaping, carrying and threshing were all performed by hand, with methods that were primitive and laborious, and there were six mu of paddies to finish.
Looking at the heaps of rice spread across the drying ground, He Yi finally understood the joy of a good harvest.
He had transplanted this crop late and expected a poor yield. It had not yet been weighed, but judging by the full ears and the small proportion of empty husks, the harvest was surprisingly good. Every villager who helped praised his farming and wanted to know how he had done it.
He Yi suspected that the additional fertilizer had made the difference. The river mud he had dredged and spread provided enough nutrients to compensate for the late transplanting and for the second round of fertilizing he had missed later. His hard work had not gone to waste, nor had Xue Ci’s and the Zheng family’s help. Farming really was difficult. He Yi looked up at birds passing across the blue sky and let out a long breath.
Fortunately, the next several days were brilliantly clear, so nobody had to repeat the frantic grain-collecting they had done when rain threatened before.
The straw left after threshing was useful once dried. He Yi burned some into ash and laboriously carried the rest home, storing it in the woodshed.
Rice straw could serve as fuel, fertilizer, thickening material, or weaving material. For He Yi, perhaps its most important use was making straw balls. A certain someone loved them so much that he used to wear one at his waist as an ornament even when going to school. Now there was no academy to attend, only military service, and He Yi did not know whether Xue Ci could keep one with him in camp or might lose it. He decided to tuck a couple of newly woven balls into his next letter, just in case.
With straw occupying the woodshed, there was no room left to lie down. He Yi moved his sleeping mat into the east wing and laid it across the bed boards.
The canopy bed was enormous and felt rather empty with only one person sleeping in it. When he first commissioned Carpenter Zhou to build it, he had secretly been pleased to order only one bed, hoping it might bring him and Xue Ci closer…
Who could have foreseen that things would not go according to plan? Even the mat beneath him no longer carried Xue Ci’s cool fragrance…
Fortunately, sleep soon overcame him. His body was too exhausted for idle thoughts, and he fell asleep before long.
The following day he plunged straight into the second half of the double rush, planting. As before, he intended four mu of indica rice and two mu of glutinous rice.
He first needed to plow deeply and prepare the ground. But after cutting the previous crop, the paddy had been drained and left to dry only briefly, so its soil was still muddy as slurry. It was easy to sink into and hard to pull free of.
Stubs from the previous rice crop also remained in the earth, making plowing even harder. The neighbors had helped so generously that He Yi did not feel right asking them to do more.
Only three families in the village owned oxen. He Yi could not borrow one, and the Cen family’s ox had to carry passengers, so he did not ask them. In the end he had to work by himself.
Luckily the midday sunshine dried the field considerably, leaving more patches firm enough to stand on. At the seedling-nursery stage he did not have to allow for spacing between mature plants, saving land and reducing the ground he needed to till.
Zheng Yuanshi found time to lend a hand. They plowed for an entire day before finally preparing half a mu of nursery ground.
Next came the plant ash. The ash He Yi had saved after burning some of the rice straw was put to use now.
Spreading the ash was quick, but he still had to sow the seed, cover it with earth and admit irrigation water. The water had to form only a very shallow film over the soil. Once all that was done, he could only wait for the seeds to sprout.