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The Crab God

The water country is full of marshes, and those who live by them eat of the water and fear it too. Around Reed-jing village an old custom honored the "Crab God" — no temple, only a three-foot stone niche by the marsh, holding a palm-sized green-shelled crab, carved in stone and mossed year round, with two dry reeds always laid before it. The tale said this crab-god was most efficacious: in drought they asked it for dew, in flood for recession, and nine of ten prayers were answered. The elders said the stone crab was carved by an old fisher long ago after the living crab that had saved his life, and on the night it was finished the living crab vanished.

Ge had grown up soaking in the marsh and knew a crab's temper: the green crab is fierce, the stone crab sly, but only the old crab after autumn is steadiest, unhurried, and even crossing sideways keeps its measure. He often taught Ling: "Catch a crab, never break its pincer; break it and the creature is ruined for life." So when Ling freed the old crab she did not even scrape a flake of shell from its mud, but held it lightly, as one holds a sleeping child.

Ge the Fourth was a fisher of Reed-jing, past fifty, his face burned to sauce-color, three fingers of his left hand lost to a net long ago. He believed in no god, yet he believed in this stone crab: that year of the great flood, he climbed to his roof with his granddaughter Ling, and watched the waves about to tear the house, when suddenly countless great green crabs rose in the marsh and seized the drifting doors and timbers with their pincers, holding the flotsam fast till the waves sank half a foot. When the water fell, Ge set a bowl of fresh rice before the niche and three slender sticks of incense.

Ling was eight, quick-witted, and went down to the marsh with her grandfather. Once at the shallows she caught a particularly large old green crab, its shell as big as a bowl, one pincer corner gone, its eyes cloudy — old beyond reckoning. Ling would have dropped it in the basket; Ge stopped her: "This one's likely the old servant the crab-god sent — let it go." Ling did, setting it gently back. The old crab did not swim off, but crawled sideways to her foot and tapped her toe with its broken pincer, then slowly sank into the weeds.

The next year came great drought; the marsh bottom lay bare and cracked like turtle-shell, half the fish dead, the water-birds gone. The villagers went again to the niche to pray for rain, knocking their heads, and for half a month were not answered. Ge wondered, and one night poled his small skiff to the marsh's heart, where he found the old green crab lying in a cracked mud ditch, its shell near scorched, yet still raking the earth with its pincers, as if seeking a vein of water. Ge sighed: "Old friend, the drought bites you too," and poured the gourd of water he carried at its side.

The marvel came on the third day. A night rain fell without warning — not heavy, but it drizzled the whole night and laid a shallow sheet in the marsh. Stranger still: when the rain ceased, Ge found the low ground ringed by a small dam the crabs had built of mud, holding the rain within Reed-jing's bounds while the outer marsh stayed dry. The village called it the crab-god's manifestation; but Ge spied the broken-pincered old crab crouched at the dam's head, new white scars on its shell, as if spent with labor.

Ling grew and left the water country for school in the city. Each letter home asked: "Is the old crab still there?" Ge wrote back: "He is. He is old, and I am old, and we are both still here."

Last year Ling sent home a city photograph, bright buildings behind her. Ge pressed it before the crab niche and told the old crab: "The granddaughter has done well; may you live long too." Beyond the niche the marsh water drifted; the broken-pincered old crab lay hidden in some clump of weeds, waiting only for the next dry year to rake another dam for men.

The Chronicler remarks: The marsh folk honor the crab not for its power but for its knowing of kindness. One old crab, given a gourd of water, repays with a night's rain and a dam of mud — and is more a "god" than many a man who takes a benefit and forgets its root. Men pray to gods and buddhas, grudging if the answer lags a year; yet when the hard hour comes, the one who will rake a mud-dam for you is seldom the gilded image in a temple, but rather some creature you let live, and never harmed, in the ordinary days.