The Clam Spirit

There was a clam-diver by the banks of the Huai River, named Tao, called the Second Lad. Simple and diligent, he would sink into the deep each day to gather mussels for the market. In the ninth month of autumn he hauled up a giant clam, wide as a cart-wheel, shut fast and impossible to pry open. Strange at heart, he bore it home and set it in the court. At midnight, when the moon lay upon the water like liquid, the shell opened of its own accord, and within stood a woman in pale gauze, cold and clear of face, as though she had stepped from the waves. The Second Lad shrank back in awe. The woman made her courtesy and said, “I am no spectre; I am the spirit of the clam. In a former life I was a pearl-diver’s daughter, who fell by mischance into the deep pool; my soul has clung to this shell these three hundred years, and now I borrow a shape to appear before you.” With that she drew three pearls from her sleeve and laid them in his palm. “Sell these for rice,” she said, “that your aged mother may live.” At dawn the woman vanished and the shell closed as before. The Lad looked upon the pearls in his palm, warm and luminous. He took one to market and it fetched ten taels of silver; he brought it home to his mother, who rejoiced. Afterward, each night he set the pearls at the window; where a pearl lay there grew a red light, small as a bean, that burned till morning and would not fade. The neighbors thought it strange, fearing a fire, and peered in—only to find the red light issuing from the pearl, wheeling about the room as though to guard it. When his mother fell ill, the red light entered her chamber and shone upon her bed, and her sickness soon mended. Yet the pearls dwindled day by day, and when the three were spent, the red light went out as well. The Second Lad returned to the Huai to seek the giant clam, but found it not; only an empty shell at the river’s bottom, soundless and still. The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: That a fallen pearl should breed red light—this is no treasure, but a single thought of warmth. For three hundred years the spirit of the clam desired nothing more than to keep a man’s mother alive and shine upon his sickbed; how could any mortal attain to such a heart?