The cord was tied the way it is always tied. Hemp, three strands twisted, twice around the ankles, a hard knot. Old Zhou, who handled this sort of thing in the village, tied it and said: you cut it yourself before she goes out, don't let anybody do it for you.
At half past five on the morning of the burial he lifted the cloth off her feet.
The cord had parted. The break was furred, the fibres splayed outward. It had worn through. It had not been cut.
He did not call anyone. He fetched new cord from the kitchen, wound it twice, knotted it, and then cut it in front of everybody with his mother's dressmaking scissors.
On the seventh night he found a mark outside the gate. It ran from the threshold about twenty paces and stopped at the road. Something dragged. He crouched and looked at it properly: two lines, a foot's width apart.
The next year, clearing out the old house, he came across a tin box with the family's papers in it. One sheet was about the year he was born. He had been born without breathing, and the midwife had handled it the way you handle a stillbirth: the cord tied, the body laid in the side room.
In the morning he cried.
The paper does not say who cut the cord afterwards.
He went to see Old Zhou, who was eighty-seven that year and sitting in his doorway sorting beans. Old Zhou said he remembered it. He said: yours was never cut. You came back on your own. You don't cut it for the ones who come back. It isn't done.