Rainy Day
It was the people who began clearing the orchard in early autumn. The orchard, which occupied a small patch of the mountain woodland, was enclosed by a square fence. When it was first built, the fence had been intended to keep out the animals from the mountains. It was also common for villagers passing by to ask the person tending the orchard for two pieces of fruit if they were thirsty.
This section of fence blocked the trucks from getting through, so it was the first line of defense to be dismantled.
The trees in the orchard, being mature fruit-bearing trees, could fetch a decent price. The workers were extremely careful when digging them up. Their roots could not be damaged, so that once the fruit trees were moved to new soil, they could continue growing.
It would take around ten days to dig up all the fruit trees in the orchard. Before the rainy season arrived, Zhuyu wanted to make the most of the time.
The foreman saw that the person in charge was a young woman in her twenties, and he kept trying to sell her on a new type of machine. It cost only a little over five thousand yuan, and it could dig through the soil quickly and efficiently, cutting the work period in half.
Sheng Wenbin had originally not wanted to dig up and sell the trees. He felt there was no need to hurry. Dismantling the orchard was like tearing apart your own home. How inauspicious was that? Why undertake all this major construction and destruction now?
But when the foreman sent him a WeChat message explaining the machine's advantages, he began to reconsider. It did sound pretty good.
That was just the way her father was, changing his mind from one moment to the next, without ever having a definite goal.
Zhuyu did not completely reject the foreman's sales pitch. She only said she would think about it and told them to start digging first. She certainly did not want to buy it, but neither did she want to get into an endless argument with someone.
The shovels were driven into the soil in a circle around the roots of each fruit tree. With two or three people working together, it took most of half a day. Once a tree had been completely dug out, they wrapped its roots in cloth, carried it onto the truck, and stacked it up.
The fruit merchants buying the trees had already been contacted. They would pay according to the price list they had provided. Even after selling all the fruit trees and deducting the labor costs, they would only have a little over a hundred thousand yuan left in hand.
She had no idea which hole that little bit of money could fill, but having a hundred-some thousand yuan was still better than having nothing.
They had hired two trucks. Once one truck was full of trees, it would head down the mountain. The fruit merchant's base was in the neighboring district, not particularly far away. It took about an hour to get there.
There were twenty workers laboring here. At noon, Third Auntie brought up twenty boxed meals. The food she gave Zhuyu was cooked by her herself and placed in an insulated food container. The upper compartment held the dishes and rice, while the lower compartment was filled with pig's trotter soup.
Like everyone else, Zhuyu simply sat in the shade beneath a tree and ate.
"A young girl like you, working out in the wind and sun. You studied so much, too. How can you be doing this kind of work... It's all your father's fault." Third Auntie looked at Zhuyu's face. When she had first come back, her skin had been pale and fresh. Now it had clearly darkened, turning a light wheat color from the sun.
"I'm not tired, and I don't mind the sun." She shoveled food into her mouth.
How could any father let his daughter toil in the wind and rain while he hid away somewhere comfortable? This was what Third Auntie resented most about Sheng Wenbin.
But she did not know that Zhuyu actually hoped her father would not come. Every time he did, he had to interfere with everything, spouting a whole lot of irrelevant nonsense and chatting endlessly with the workers. He was simply slowing down the progress of the work.
According to their agreement, the workers worked until five and then finished for the day. The orchard had been full of people coming and going throughout the afternoon. Once everyone suddenly left, the place fell quiet and empty. There were fewer trees now, too.
After the workers had gone, Zhuyu sat in the orchard for a while longer. They had originally called out to her to come down the mountain with them in the big truck, but Zhuyu waved her hand and declined.
She picked up a shovel lying on the ground and experimentally dug into the soil. It was quite heavy.
The early-autumn sky was a transparent blue, and the clouds overhead were white with a lonely stillness. The leaves of the fruit trees were still green at this time, but compared with the height of summer, their branches and foliage had grown somewhat sparser.
Actually, she did not want to sell the orchard either. When the orchard had first been planted, she was still in middle school. Back then, she had eagerly looked forward to the fruit trees growing peaches and large snow pears as quickly as possible. After she went to Canada, whenever she messaged her father, she would ask every few days, Has our orchard grown any fruit yet? Still not? Then when will it? How much longer will it take?
Back then, everything had seemed to be flourishing. The newly planted orchard, her father's business, even the new life she had begun across the ocean. Everything was growing taller and taller like trees, and everything should have been reaching upward like trees. That seemed to be how things were supposed to go.
Who could have imagined that in the end, she would be the one to dismantle the orchard with her own hands?
Sitting beneath a great tree, Zhuyu ran her fingers one by one over the roots of the trees lying horizontally on the ground. In Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Varya's family's cherry trees are eventually cut down to the last, and the new owner will build a new estate on the land.
There was no more that she could do than Varya, but fortunately, her trees would not die. They simply would not die. That was all.
So that afternoon, when a fine drizzle began to drift down from the sky, she went to Uncle Wu's tin shed. There were quite a few tarpaulins inside, and she wanted to cover all the trees with them. The orchard was on low ground, and when the rain came down heavily, water would collect. If the exposed roots sat submerged in water, they would likely rot.
Uncle Wu had already moved down the mountain to live. With the orchard itself about to disappear, there was no longer any need to have someone stay up here and keep watch.
By the time Zhuyu dragged the tarpaulins back, the rain had already grown heavy. The weighty raindrops struck the tarpaulins with a sharp patter. She was soaked from head to toe, and somehow, her mood became a little cheerful.
Her phone had been left in the tin shed, so she did not receive the messages from her family. Seeing that she still had not come home so late and that it was raining outside, Third Auntie made a string of voice calls. No one answered, so she had no choice but to send a message to another person's phone.
There was only one household near the orchard. So when Liu Sizhao received Third Auntie's message and came to Zhuyu with an umbrella, this was the scene he found.
A girl drenched like a drowned rat, spreading tarpaulins over the great trees in the rain.
"Please tell Third Auntie I'll come home later!" Zhuyu waved at him. "Goodbye!"
He stood in the rain beneath a black umbrella without moving.
"You're soaked through."
Zhuyu brushed the wet hair clinging to her cheek aside and walked toward him. One of them was neatly dressed, fresh and dry. The other was drenched by the downpour, looking as though she had just crawled out of a lake.
She came closer and closer, pure delight on her face, then stopped just beyond the shelter of the black umbrella. "I know."
"Thank you for coming to find me. I'll be fine." Her eyes were bright as the evening stars.
He shifted the umbrella, trying to shelter her a little, but she took a step back and remained standing in the rain. “Do you like sunny days or rainy days?”
“Never thought about it...”
“I like rainy days.” She held out her palm, and before long, a handful of water had gathered in it. “Just like now.”
The rain was simply too heavy, washing over her eyelashes and forcing her to squint. At the time, Liu Sizhao did not think about it. Perhaps the torrential rain had arrived, and the curtain of rain had created a world of emptiness. Compared with the real world, this moment allowed them to exist beyond the jurisdiction of reality, just for a little while. That was all they needed.
He reached out and wiped the heavy rainwater from her eyelashes. Zhuyu smiled faintly, then pointed to the tip of her nose. His finger moved downward, as though lingering over a sheet of soft xuan paper. Caught completely off guard, Zhuyu raised her hand and clasped his finger.
“If the two of us weren't Xiao Zhao and Xiao Yu, but had happened to meet in some bar in New York, you as Mr. Liu and me as Norma, I would buy you a drink.
“That day, I wasn't very kind to you. Please don't hold it against me. We were simply standing in the wrong positions.” She spoke loudly in the rain, struggling to make herself heard over the roaring downpour.
They were adults who understood everything. Their feelings were held in their gazes, in the touch of their fingertips, in their quiet laughter and conversations. They moved toward each other, stopped, moved forward, retreated, until now, when at last they had touched one another.
“I don't understand.” When he moved toward her again, trying to take her hand, she let go.
“Isn't it better to be Xiao Zhao and Xiao Yu?”
She shook her head. “Let's go, Brother Xiao Zhao. Let's go home.”
They were both so young, clever, and beautiful. How could they not look at each other a little longer when they met? After talking at length, how could they not come to admire each other? Yes, perhaps it was a little more than admiration, the kind of liking that existed between a man and a woman. But it was nothing extraordinary.
Feelings like this could happen anywhere in the world. Especially in cities, even between complete strangers. They were not unusual, nor could they be called precious. They could control these feelings and keep them from flowing any further. The boundary should not be broken between Xiao Zhao and Xiao Yu.
With her back to the truck, she bent down and crouched, wrapping the last corner of the tarpaulin on the ground around the tree's roots.
He let go of the umbrella and walked into the pouring rain. Zhuyu felt someone standing behind her, bending down and pressing against her. A heavy force was transmitted from the person behind her into her body, and she was startled.
The workers had left early, not knowing that it would rain today. So they had not tied down the trees stacked on the truck with ropes. Under the force of the strong wind and torrential rain, one of the trees rolled down from the top and nearly struck Zhuyu.
“Are you all right?” She abruptly turned her head, realizing that Liu Sizhao had taken the blow for her.
Fortunately, it was not some towering tree, only a fruit tree as thick as a bowl. It certainly had to hurt. He was not made of iron, after all. But Liu Sizhao said nothing. He simply closed his eyes and endured the pain. Mud had even splattered across his handsome face. He had fallen into a puddle in the rain, and the umbrella had long since been blown away by the wind.
Zhuyu knelt beside him and felt the back of his head, afraid that he had been struck there. Then she tried to lift his shirt to see whether his back was bleeding.
“All right, I'm fine. No need to look. Don't lift it...” He pressed down on the hand she had been fussing over him with for quite some time, and, having no choice, changed the subject. “You like rainy days. Do you like getting rained on?”
Once Zhuyu knew he was all right, she stayed beside him and looked at him. Just as he had wiped the rain from her eyelashes, she used the pad of her finger to wipe the flecks of mud from his cheek.
“Getting rained on is nice, isn't it?”
Their clothes were soaked through as they looked at each other.
“It really is special. If someone asks me again next time, I'll say that I like rainy days too.”
She tried to keep her face composed, not to let herself show him any more emotion, but it was difficult.
“Don't say ‘too.’”
“What?”
“If you say you ‘too’ like rainy days, people will ask who else likes rainy days. Explaining that would be troublesome.”
“Not troublesome. I'll say the first person to like rainy days was Xiao Yu.”
“Who is Xiao Yu?”
“Xiao Yu is a girl I've known for a very long time, and now, she is the woman I have been watching all this time.”
She pinched her middle finger with her index finger, like a tiny orchid, and flicked it lightly in front of his eyes. “No. You are not allowed to keep watching me.”
He flicked a little splash of water in front of her eyes in return. “That'll be difficult. Tell me, what way do you have of keeping me in check?”
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