Old Tao's Bow
For forty years Old Tao has fluffed cotton at the mouth of Sunward Lane, judging its age and honesty by ear alone and keeping three hard refusals. When a childless old woman in the lane lies dying, the man who will not touch a funeral quilt breaks his own rule in secret - and the lane learns that his gruff rules were never about hardness, but about warmth.
Old Tao, at the mouth of Sunward Lane, has been fluffing cotton for forty years.
His tool is a bamboo bow, five feet long, strung with a cord of ox sinew. In his left hand he grips the bow; in his right he lifts a little wooden mallet. The mallet falls, the string trembles, and drawn along the cotton pad it gives a low boom - and the packed, lifeless wadding blooms open as though it had met the spring sun. The sound carries far down the lane, and the children know it by heart: when they hear it, they know Old Tao has opened for the day.
Old Tao has one strange gift: he fluffs not by sight but by ear. The moment the mallet strikes and the string turns within the cotton, he knows how much of the batch is new and how much old, whether last year's padding has been secretly worked in. If someone brings a quilt pulled from a pawnshop to be re-fluffed, he bends close to the string and sniffs, and his brow furrows. "This cotton has seen a coffin board. It carries a chill. I won't touch it." Plead as they might, he only lays the bow across his lap and says no more.
He keeps three hard rules: no funeral quilts, no old padding that has passed through a pawnshop, no rushed jobs. The neighbors call him an odd one, and a hard-hearted one.
In the twelfth month, the only daughter of Shopkeeper Wang, who runs the rice store at the lane's end, was to be married. A man came carrying eight catties of new cotton to be fluffed into a wedding quilt. Old Tao agreed, and shut his door for three days. When he emerged, the quilt was snow-white and light as air, its four corners even, and the bride rode to the wedding chair beneath it while the whole lane praised his magic hands.
On that same day, Granny Sun, a widowed soul with no children, fell gravely ill at the lane's mouth. Sister Wang from the residents' committee came to Old Tao and said quietly that the old woman would not last; might he fluff a burial quilt, so she might at least leave this world warm? Old Tao's hand stilled on the bow's shaft. After a long moment he said, "I have my rules." Sister Wang's eyes reddened; she did not press him, and turned to go.
That night the snow came. Old Tao finished the rice store's work, lit an oil lamp, and from a corner pulled out a bundle of his own good cotton. He laid it out and strung his bow. The string that night sounded lower than usual, as if afraid to wake someone. When he was done he said nothing, but sewed a small cloth pouch into the corner of the quilt and filled it with roasted rice - Granny Sun's one delight, even after her teeth were gone she loved to smell that scorched, nutty warmth.
At dawn Sister Wang came for it. She felt the corner bulge, opened it, and found the roasted rice; she stood stricken. Old Tao only said, "She lived alone forty years. She was cold."
On the day Granny Sun passed, she was covered by that quilt. Later the neighbors learned that every twelfth month Old Tao quietly fluffs a quilt for the lane's friendless elders, and asks nothing for it. Someone teased him: "Your 'three refusals' - yet here you fluff a funeral quilt." Old Tao gave his bow a shake, the ox-sinew string boomed once, and he smiled. "Cotton knows warmth and cold. My rules keep out those who spend a dead man's money to show off - not the living."
Old Tao at the lane's mouth still lets the mallet fall and the string sound each day. White fluff settles on his frosted brows and his beard like snow on an old immortal - and no one in the lane dares call him hard-hearted anymore.