The Clam Maid

The village of Lijiang sat upon the eastern sea, and eight or nine of every ten of its people lived by the catch. Beyond the beach the reefs stood like teeth, and the tides were fickle, so the boats went out and came home by the sky's leave. There was a young fisher named A-Liu, orphaned early, who kept house with his mother, blind these seven years, in a broken thatched hut at the village's end. A-Liu was kind and slow, his nets coming home empty more often than full; the neighbors laughed at his dullness, yet he would never set the killing net, and whatever breeding mother-fish or inch-long fry he hauled up he unhooked and returned to the water. His mother groped by the stove to lay on sticks, her fingers seared black with soot; A-Liu saw it and his heart was cut, but he had no coin for a physician, and could only bathe her eyes each day with warm water.

In the autumn tides the sea turned a sallow yellow and the fish fled south. A-Liu took his little skiff alone past the Black Reef to cast his net. When he hauled, it was heavy beyond reason, near to snapping the thole-rope; up came a great clam, its shell wider than a foot, a faint green light sleeping in it, as if it held the moon, and from its seam a thread of clear slime. Ma San the fishing bully, moored nearby, licked his lips and said the pearl within would be worth a thousand pieces, and tried to buy it at half, or else take it by force. A-Liu refused; Ma San snatched the clam and raised a stone to smash it. A-Liu gave up half his basket of fresh fish and forced a smile to win it back, then in the night tide rowed it out to the deeps of Black Reef, whispering, "Go now, and let no man see you."

A month passed. The village spoke of a woman who came at night to wash cloth at the Lijiang ferry, her dress pale as frost, her face of a clean and lonely beauty, her hair unpinned, known to no one. Each night A-Liu returned to his boat and saw a figure at the ferry, and thought nothing of it. One stormy night his painter broke and the skiff drifted onto the reef, near to splintering, when it seemed someone from the water bore the boat up and carried him to shore. He looked back from the bank: only a white wave, and a wisp of pale cloth, gone in a breath.

Some days later his mother fell ill, her eyes the worse, hardly able to eat. A-Liu was helpless and wept at her bed. At deep night a knock came; a woman entered, saying she had fled famine from a neighboring county and, seeing the old mother's plight, would stay to tend her medicine. A-Liu was struck by her face — it was the woman of the ferry. She did not shrink from suspicion, but stayed three days, brewing herbs, pressing warm cloths to the old eyes. On the seventh day the mother could tell candle from shadow; in half a month she saw the sky again, and wept for joy.

The woman called herself Pearl, spoke little, spun at night and kept the house by day, took no wage, and called A-Liu brother. The hemp cloth she spun was fine as water's grain, and when taken to market all contended for it. A-Liu's heart turned toward her, but he dared not speak, only tended her in secret. The next spring the sea turned lean and the boats came home empty for months; rice grew dear. Pearl would slip out at midnight and return at dawn with a basket of fat clams and crabs, and the widowed and the old of the village were fed. A-Liu asked where they came from; Pearl said only "gathered where the tide falls," and her face was at peace.

That autumn at the village boat-race a neighbor spoke for A-Liu to a well-suited girl, of a comfortable house. A-Liu told Pearl, and she only smiled and asked no more; he put off the match gently, and his mother did not blame him, saying only the boy's heart had its own master. Though the village whispered now and then, the two kept the old mother as before; the gate was poor, but warmth was often there.

So three years went by. A-Liu saved to send a matchmaker, and Pearl knew his mind. At midnight she took his hand and sighed: "I am the clam of Black Reef. I felt your mercy that day and took a shape to repay it. Now your mother sees, and you have a house and a trade — the debt is paid. A clam long from the water splits its shell; I cannot stay." A-Liu wept to keep her. Pearl shook her head and slid from her wrist a small bright pearl onto the table. "This for you, tempered in the sea, worth a few mu of poor field, enough to keep your mother all her days. Tend the lives of the sea, and I am gone."

She pushed the door and went. The wind and rain rose; from the step the water-mark ran down, straight into the Lijiang. A-Liu followed to the ferry: only the churning gray wave, no pale cloth. On the table the pearl lit the room, mild as the moon.

After, A-Liu took no wife, and kept his mother to her end. Each year when the autumn wind rose he sailed to Black Reef and dropped a few fresh fish into the water, standing silent a while before he left. The village says to this day that at the Lijiang ferry, on moonlit nights, a pale figure sometimes shows, her sleeves wet with dew, as if one stood by the water in thought — and no man may come near.