The rain came on the fourth day, and it stayed.
It rained on the roofs and the carts and the market street. It rained until the gutters ran brown and the awnings sagged with the weight of it. Customers came in wet and left wetter, shaking themselves in the doorway like dogs.
Ren sold from the front room, and kept the shutters half closed, and thought no more about it. Rain in spring was only rain.
On the third day of it, he went into the back room for a jar of dried root, and stopped in the doorway.
The smell was wrong.
The back room had always smelled strong. That was its nature. Leaf and root and camphor, close and warm. But under the strong smell, today, there was another one. Sweet and sour at once. The smell of fruit left too long in a closed box.
He stood still and breathed through his mouth the way she had taught him, so the nose could think.
The back wall was weeping. Water had come through somewhere above, slow as sap, and run down inside the plaster. The wall was dark with it, from the beam to the floor. The low shelf stood against that wall.
The low shelf held the pots he had counted sound, a week ago, with his own hands.
He lit the second lamp and carried it close.
The first pot he took down had a white bloom on its wax seal, soft as the skin on boiled milk. The second had green fur at the rim. The third smelled sour through the seal, without being opened at all.
He did not say anything. There was no one to say it to. He set the lamp down, and rolled his sleeves, and began.
Pot by pot, he went along the low shelf. Then along the shelf above it. Then the floor crates. Lift. Look. Smell. Twice over, the second time slower, because hope is a poor inspector and grief is worse.
The floor crates gave him back a little of what the wall had taken. His grandmother had kept every crate up on wooden slats, two fingers of air beneath, all her life, and grumbled at anyone who set a pot straight on a floor. The crates had drunk the damp from below and complained about it in their wood — but the pots inside them, lifted on her slats, stood clear of the worst. He checked them twice like the rest. Every one was sound. Her habits were still working in the room, a week into his keeping of it, whether he thanked them or not.
It was the shelves against the weeping wall that had paid. Shelf by shelf, pot by pot, he made the two piles: the sound, and the gone.
Some pots had only a touch at the seal's edge. A bloom no bigger than a fingernail. On those, the smell underneath was still true — but a seal that had bloomed once had breathed damp, and damp in dried leaf did not stop where you could see it. Mold ran through a pot the way rot ran through a beam. The part you could see was the smallest part of it.
His grandmother's rule had no soft corner in it. If you would not feed it to your own house, it does not leave this shop.
By the middle of the afternoon, the spoiled pots stood in a row on the back-room floor.
Eighteen of them.
He counted the row twice, because he did not want it to be eighteen. It was eighteen both times.
Someone knocked at the shop door while he stood there, with rain dripping off the knock into the bargain — a carter, sheltering under the awning with his hat in his hands, who had heard Ren moving pots and come to see.
He looked at the row on the floor. He was not a fool. He knew mold when he smelled it.
"I'll take those off you," he said. "For the pig pens, down at the gate farms. Herbs are herbs. Pigs don't read labels." He named a price for the lot, careless, the way a man names a price for firewood. "Two hundred. Saves you the burning."
Ren looked at the row. Two hundred ryō was two hundred ryō. It was salve money and powder money. It was a step — a small step, but a real one — toward the number at the top of his day book.
It was also eighteen pots of mold.
Mold in dried leaf was not a thing you could see the end of. A pot that looked sound at the rim could be spoiled at the heart. Fed to animals, it could sicken them. Sold on cheap, pot by pot, out of a cart at some other market, it could reach a child with a fever, in a house that could not afford the true price, and the mother would trust it because it smelled almost right.
Almost right was how people got buried.
"No," Ren said.
The carter shrugged, not offended. It had been worth the asking. "Your loss, herb man."
"Yes," Ren said. "It is."
The carter went back out into the rain. Ren barred the door behind him and stood a moment with his forehead almost touching the wood.
What left this shop carried his name. With the label on, or with the label off. That was the whole of the rule, and there was no weather in which it changed.
He carried the eighteen pots out to the yard, two at a time, through the rain.
The brazier in the yard was an iron bowl on three legs, where the shop burned its refuse. He got it lit under the eave, where the rain could not quite reach. Then he emptied the spoiled pots into the fire, one by one.
The smell that rose was sweet and wrong, and then it was only smoke. Fever cures. Salves. Powders his grandmother had sealed with her own hands, in the last autumn of her life, meaning them for people who would be sick this spring.
He burned every one. He stirred the fire down to ash, the way he had with the thirty-one, so that nothing in that brazier could ever be gathered up and sold as medicine by anyone, anywhere.
The jars, he kept. Jars were dear, and glass and good clay did not spoil. He scalded each one in the big kettle, in water at a rolling boil, and set them mouth-down on clean cloth to dry. Eighteen jars, washed of what they had held, standing in a clean row like soldiers after a lost fight. Empty jars were not a loss. Empty jars were next season, waiting.
Before he touched the sound stock, he walked the front room with the lamp, slow, the way he had walked the back. He lifted lids. He smelled seals. He ran a dry hand along the wall that the two rooms shared, high and low. The front room was dry. The damp had kept to its own side of the house, like a neighbor with the decency to stay home. He wrote that in the day book too. A thing checked and found sound was a thing you could stand on.
Then he did the rest of the work, the part no one would ever see.
He carried the sound stock off the low shelf, and off the shelf above it, and set it in the front room, on the high shelf, where the floor's damp could not climb. He carried the books after it — the recipe book, the day book, the cracked old account book — and set them on the counter's dry end, wrapped in oilcloth. Paper was stock too. A recipe that rotted was a remedy the shop no longer had, and some of what was written in those books was written nowhere else in the world.
On a clean page of the day book he wrote the back room's sentence, in order, so that no spring hurry could talk him out of it later. Air the room seven days. Tar the seam where the water comes in. Then store nothing there until the wall has stayed dry through one full week of rain. A room, like a patient, was not well because it looked well on a fine morning. It was well when it had stayed well under weather.
He wedged the back-room door open with the wooden wedge, so that when the rain stopped, the air could get in and do its slow work. He found the place above the wall where the water came through, and marked it with chalk, to be sealed with tar when the roof was dry enough to climb.
On the stock board, in his chalk hand, he wrote the state of the shop, plain for anyone to read.
Front room only, until the back wall dries.
In the day book, under the hospital's entry, he wrote the loss the way she would have wanted it written. Not hidden. Not softened. The kinds, and the count, and the reason.
Mold, back room, rain week. 18 pots burned. Nothing sold.
And under that, because the book was where the truth of the shop lived, he wrote the number that had not moved.
The debt: still 72,000.
Outside, toward evening, the rain thinned at last. Water ran off the awnings in bright lines. The market street steamed gently in the low sun, and the tea stall next door lit its lamp, and the light fell across the wet stones the color of weak tea.
Ren counted his sound pots on the high shelf, once, by eye, the way you count your own fingers.
One hundred and sixty-five.
One hundred and sixty-five sound pots, a wall to dry, a roof to seal, and a spring still young.
He hung the open sign for the last hour of the day.