Old Ke's Tubs

Old Ke lived at the very end of Locust Lane. His doorway bore no sign; only three old wooden tubs squatted under the eaves—one holding fish, one steeping broad beans, and one empty. That empty one was the rough blank of his own coffin-tub, kept ready. "The day a man goes," he liked to say, "he ought to have a clean tub to carry him."

Everyone in the lane called him Ke the Cooper. He was particular about his craft. He would use only yellowhorn and old cedar, wood air-dried three years out of the sun. He split his staves with an adze, never a saw—one stroke, one shaving curling to the ground. The dangerous part was the hooping: the iron band glowed red-hot, and he clapped it onto the tub with bare hands. A hiss of white smoke, the wood drew tight, and the tub was born.

But Ke's true wonder was not in his hands. It was in his ears. He could tap any household's tub and hear how that family was faring. A tub of clear water rang bright; one pickling salted vegetables, dull; one that had held dregs of medicine, mute. "A tub is honester than a man," he would say. "Whatever it has carried, the wood remembers for you."

He kept two hard rules. He would never hoop a tub meant to puff up a villain—gilded wine vats for a man who watered his wine, never. And he would never hoop for a bully who forced a poor neighbor's tub and would not return it.

On the twenty-third of the twelfth month, the rice-shop master, Zhao, came knocking. He wanted Ke to rush out a pair of gilded wine vats for his son's wedding feast. Ke took no job. He only tapped Zhao's old tub and said, "This has held watered wine—cold, with none of grain's warmth. Master Zhao, I cannot take this work."

Zhao flushed crimson and insisted it was not so. Ke shouldered his adze and showed him the door.

Zhao swallowed the slight and went instead to borrow the old tub that Widow Zhou kept in memory of her late husband. That tub was Zhou's life. Her man had been a coopering old hand; on his deathbed he had hooped it for her, and it still held the new rice of his last autumn's harvest. She kept it locked in the main room and lent it to no one. But Zhao, leaning on the weight of his shop, sent men to carry it off by force.

When Ke heard, he slipped into Zhao's backyard under cover of night. He did not smash the tub. He only loosened, by a hair, the already-weak hoops on those gilded vats—Zhao had hired a rough out-of-town hand to rush the job, and the hooping had never taken. Ke left a word: "If the wine is honest, the tub holds. If it is watered, the tub will spit it out."

On the wedding day Zhao's court blazed with lanterns. At the toast the servant lifted a vat to pour—and with a great clang the hoops flew open, the staves sprang apart, and wine and mud flooded the yard. The guests looked down and saw a thin, watery liquor—more than half well-water by any eye. Zhao's face went whiter than his wine, and the whole company roared and drifted away.

Widow Zhou's tub Ke carried home that same night, fresh-hooped, taking not a coin. He ran his hand along the rim. "Your man's work," he said, "does this tub justice." Only later did Zhou learn that the young Ke had once been apprentice to the very man who made it.

Now Zhou keeps the tub enshrined in her main room, full of new rice, lent to no one. Ke still shoulders his load and walks the lane each day; when he hears a tub sound from some doorway, he knows whether that house's days are tight or easy. People call him a wonder. He only smiles. "The tub does not lie. It is men who do."