The Woodpecker Spirit
Old Ge, a carpenter at the east end of Qingtang Town, reads his timber by the woodpecker in the old camphor behind his yard: quick drumming means a hidden crack, a slow tap sound wood. The bird came the spring after his father, a carpenter, died, and never left. When a new road threatened the tree, Ge kept nightly watch with a bamboo pole until the route bent aside. On opening day the bird pecks a melon on his table, then flies off, and the wind in the leaves sounds like someone answering him.
At the east end of Qingtang Town stood a carpenter's shop kept by a man everyone called Old Ge. Past fifty, he had spent his life making just three things: camphor-wood chests for brides, eight-immortal tables for old folks' birthdays, and tiger-headed chairs for babies at their first grasp.
Old Ge had a way of choosing timber that no one else could copy. He paid no mind to the timber sellers' talk; he listened instead to the old camphor behind his yard. The tree had been planted by his father when young, older than the shop itself. In its branches a woodpecker had nested for near ten years. The town's children passed on their way to school and craned their necks to watch it drum the bark, as if it were a hen they kept themselves.
Ge came to know its habits. Where the bird rattled quick and urgent, the wood inside hid a crack or a worm-track; where it tapped twice, slow and easy, the timber was sound. After that, before he set his saw, he would stand in the yard a pipe's length of time, count its taps, and only then swing the axe. The townsfolk laughed that he had struck up a conversation with a bird. Ge did not mind. What ails a tree inside, he said, the bird knows before the saw does.
The bird's coming was strange, too. Ge's father had been a carpenter, dead early, his hand still clutching the plane at the last. The spring after the old man passed, this woodpecker appeared, and never left. Ge always felt its eye knew people and knew wood alike — the very look of his father.
Last autumn the town planned a new road, and the line cut straight through Ge's yard; the old camphor was marked to fall. The man who came bearing a red envelope said the tree's removal meant two thousand yuan, enough for half a yard of new timber. Ge pushed the envelope back. The tree stands, the bird stays. Cut the tree, and where does it roost?
They laughed at his foolishness. Ge said nothing, and for nights on end he kept watch in the yard with a bamboo pole, shooing off the surveyors who climbed to measure. He sent word to the forestry station, and an officer came to certify the camphor as the town's oldest tree, a protected antique that might not be felled. After more than a month of trouble the road was rerouted around the yard.
On the day the road opened, Ge set a small table under the tree and cut a red-fleshed watermelon. The woodpecker slipped down from the crown, lit on the table's edge, pecked a morsel of melon, looked up at him once, and flapped away. Ge smiled and muttered, Old friend, you tapped soft today — glad for me, are you?
The wind moved through the camphor leaves, rustling, like someone answering him.