The Peach Demon

Behind the Shen mansion, south of the city, stood an old peach tree. The old great-aunt who planted it had long since passed, yet the tree grew lustier with every year — thick as a bowl's mouth, its branches gnarled and bent, and when it bloomed it was a pink cloud that bowed the boughs with its weight.

Lady Shen, called A-qiao, was wife to the second branch of the house. In the third year of her marriage her husband, Shen Yan-zhi, went north to sit the examinations; his boat crossed Dongting Lake and met a storm, and after that no word of him came. The yamen later posted a notice: the boat had sunk, no body recovered. A-qiao would not believe it. Yan-zhi, she said, swam like a fish; surely someone had pulled him ashore, and he wandered somewhere far off. Day after day she leaned against the garden peach and waited — counting its flowers in spring, its fruit in summer, its leaves in autumn, the snow on its branches in winter.

Each morning A-qiao rose and combed her hair before a corner-chipped bronze mirror, always pinning in it the wooden hairpin Yan-zhi had given her at parting. The face in the mirror grew thinner by the day, but she minded not at all. "Thinner is well," she said. "When Yan-zhi comes home he'll scold me for being fat."

The peach tree seemed to pity her. Peaches elsewhere fade within three or five years; this one only endured. Stranger still, each night a faint light leaked from its trunk — a pale red, like a lamp-wick dying but not yet dead. A-qiao would sit spinning beneath it, and the light would follow her, warming the square of blue brick before her wheel.

On the third year's Clear-and-Bright day she wept under the tree till midnight, and in a daze saw a woman step out from the heart of it — a top-knot coiled like a ingot, a faded peach-red gown, her brows and eyes oddly like A-qiao's own. "Little sister," said the woman, "the one you wait for will not return. Not that he forgets you, but the river-water is too cold and the road too long." A-qiao wept. "I know. Yet I cannot bear to leave this garden, or this tree — it has kept me company these three years." The woman smiled. "Then it is well. Since you cannot bear to leave, I shall keep it for you. Half your soul has scattered; I shall gather it, lest the wind blow it cold."

After that A-qiao's body stayed frail, but her spirit mended. At night low laughter drifted from the back garden, like two girls trading secrets. A maid reported seeing two figures seated beneath the peach — one in white, one in peach-red, heads leaned together. The steward would have summoned a Taoist to bind the spirit; A-qiao stopped him. "Do not startle her. She harms me not; she is my companion."

That autumn A-qiao caught the seasonal fever and sank. At the last she bade them carry her to the peach tree. A wind passed and all the leaves rustled, like a send-off. She gripped the maid's hand and laughed. "I see Yan-zhi. He stands on the far side, and says — stop waiting." The words done, her hand went slack.

After A-qiao was gone the peach tree in a single night shed every blossom, pink and white covering the ground like snow. The year after, the light within its trunk dimmed, and its flowers came sparse. The Shens said the peach-demon was A-qiao's devoted soul made manifest; she had left half a soul upon the tree to keep the garden for her, and now that the woman had gone home, the soul went with her.

The Chronicler says: the world mocks a woman's devotion — "foolish, to wait for one who will not come back." Yet without that foolishness the garden would long since have gone to weed, the tree to wither, and there would be nowhere left to lay a single thought. The peach-demon is no demon; it is a warmth not yet gone cold, borrowing an old tree to carry a life onward. Where the heart is given, even grass and wood take spirit — and this "demon" is, against many a cold-hearted man, the more living thing.