Eight stones are set around the ancestral grave, one to each direction, standing a hand's height out of the ground. The old rule is that the eight positions answer to the eight branches of the family, and when a stone goes over, that branch has trouble.
He had looked after that grave for thirty years and righted stones a dozen or more times.
Each time he did, that branch of the family did have something — an illness, a divorce, a business gone under. He did not take it very seriously. Nobody goes thirty years without something.
One stone had never gone over. The southwest.
In the thirty-first year, at Qingming, he finished righting another one and crouched down to rest, and happened to look properly at the southwest stone.
It was not standing.
It was lying flat, long face up, half sunk into the soil with the grass grown over most of it. For thirty years he had taken it for upright — from the front of the grave, at that angle, it looked it.
He scraped the earth back with his hands and turned it over.
The underside had been dressed flat and cut with characters. A name. It was his. The strokes were deep, and the dirt packed into them had set hard enough that he had to get it out with a fingernail.