"No! Don't!" Xiulan was held by the arms by two of her sisters-in-law. Her whole body sagged, knees dragging two muddy streaks across the ground. Her trousers tore, the flesh of her knees scraped raw, blood mixing with mud into a dark paste. She felt no pain. All her senses were fixed on the body atop the pyre—the body that was still breathing. "He's still breathing! Look, his chest is still moving! Wangtian—Chen Wangtian! You are his father, say something!"
Chen Wangtian did not look at her. He stared at his son lying on the pyre, at the face soaked through with lamp oil. The oil trickled down Nian'an's temple and into his ear. The boy did not react. A trace of oil, coughed up during the pouring, lingered at the corner of his mouth, congealing into a thin film on his skin. The rise and fall of his chest was faint but real, pressing against the oil-soaked clothes—once, and again. That was not the semblance of a dead man.
But the nail on his left pinky finger was gone.
Not broken. Not shattered. The entire nail had been pried away. The nail bed lay exposed, slightly concave, the edges as clean as if carved out by the sharpest blade. Chen Wangtian stared at that hollow and suddenly remembered when Nian'an was three, learning to trim his own nails for the first time. The boy had snipped a tiny piece of skin and wailed in pain. Chen Wangtian had held him and soothed him for half the day, finally coaxing him quiet with a piece of malt candy. The clipped nail, small as a grain of rice, he had carefully picked up, wrapped in red paper, and tucked under Nian'an's pillow. Xiulan had taught him that. She said it was a custom from her maiden home—a child's clipped nails must be wrapped in red paper and placed under the pillow. They must never be carelessly discarded. If something unclean picked them up, the soul could be borrowed away.
He had thought it was superstition then, and paid it no mind. Now he stood here, looking at his son's bare nail bed, and Xiulan's words drove into his skull like a nail.
"It will be dark soon." Old Wu's voice was neither soft nor heavy, as if speaking of something unrelated to life or death. "Half an incense stick's time, and the sun sets. If we don't burn him now, he will stand up on his own."
Xiulan suddenly wrenched free from the grip on her right. That sister-in-law was the wife of Chen Wangtian's elder brother, a woman accustomed to farm work with a grip as strong as any man's. But Xiulan's struggle carried a desperate, reckless force, and she threw the woman off balance. Xiulan lunged forward and clutched Chen Wangtian's leg, her ten fingers digging into the fabric of his trousers, knuckles white. "Do you hear me? He's breathing! That's your son, your own flesh and blood—look at his face, he's still here!"