My Grandpa's Ledger

The day Grandpa died, he asked Second Grandpa to pass on a message to me: wait until the seventh day after his death to hold the funeral. He said he still had unfinished business. I returned to the village on the thirteenth day of the seventh month. Everyone in the village was welcoming their ancestors, but my family's funeral hall was eerily quiet. Grandpa left me an old ledger that recorded seventy years of history: which families owed funeral favors, which graves mustn't be disturbed, and the year someone was fished out of the river bend. The first page had been torn out. Old Madam He of the He family said, "That page recorded what Naling Village owes." On the seventh night, the lights in the funeral hall went out three times. With my own eyes, I saw a figure in a gray Zhongshan suit walk to the riverbank, set down three sticks of incense, and press a sheet of yellow paper beneath them. A circle was drawn on the paper, with two words inside: Three days later. Then he walked into the river bend and never came out. Second Grandpa told me Grandpa's coffin was empty. All that had been buried was a Zhongshan suit and a pair of old cloth shoes. The last page of the ledger read: Naling Village owes the river bend a life, unpaid for three generations. On the day the debt is repaid, the village guardian will go to the bottom of the river in person. Seventy years ago, an outsider came with a land deed to survey the land, and someone held him under in the river bend. One life, owed for more than seventy years. Now, the three names still unpaid in the ledger are coming true one by one. I am the third generation. It's my turn.