The Bamboo Bone

Qingmie Ferry was an old town by the southern waters, its lanes and alleys built leaning against the river, its green-stone landings darkened by long soaking. Everyone in town knew the water, and everyone feared it. What they feared was not the drowning itself, but the drowning that left no body to be found.

The bamboo weaver's craft is a thing outsiders cannot read. Shen Mieqing split his bamboo with a knife passed down the family — a thick-backed, thin-edged blade that, drawn slantwise, split the tube clean along its grain. Then came the sword-gate, a steel edge set in a wooden block, made to scrape away the green skin and lay bare the jade-white flesh within. A true weaver's strips were of one width, thin enough to pass light, and would bend a hundred times without breaking. Shen could name a bamboo's years with his eyes shut: three years rang clear, five years rang dull, past seven it went mute, like an old man's voice. Bamboo has bone, he said; to weave is to follow the bone. Cross it, and the bamboo bears a grudge, and the vessel will split of its own accord in time.

Shen Mieqing was the last bamboo weaver in town. For forty years he had woven bamboo wares — winnowing baskets, sieves, mats, steamer frames, lantern bones — master of them all. Yet townsfolk came to him less for such household things than for another trade: weaving bamboo men.

In the old custom of the southern water country, when a person fell in the water and the body was never recovered, the family must ask a weaver to fashion a life-sized bamboo effigy, dress it in the dead one's clothes, and sink it where they were lost. This was called "filling the river." It was not always so named; earlier it was "returning the body" — returning a body to the water ghost, that it might cease to drag the living down in its place. The years wore "returning" into "filling," much the same in meaning. The elders said a water ghost with no coffin and no grave grows resentful, and will drag a living soul down to fill its absence; with the bamboo man sunk there, the ghost believes it has a body of its own, and ceases to seek the living. For decades Qingmie Ferry had known no trouble of ghosts taking replacements, and the townsfolk believed all the harder — outsiders laughed at their superstition, and they did not mind.

Shen could no longer count how many he had woven. In forty years, thirty-seven had drowned in town and not returned. Thirty-seven bamboo men, sunk into the different bends of the Black Bamboo River beyond the town.

The first bamboo man he had woven from the Thousand Corpses Pit grove was Shuisheng's, seven years back. Shuisheng was only twelve; he dived into the river at the festival to gather snails and never came up. Shen had just taken the shop from his father, and went to the hill grove alone for the first time. That day, too, the bamboo sounded without wind; he finished Shuisheng's man, and on the seventh night after the sinking Shuisheng's mother came to the shop saying she had heard a child laughing in the grove, laughing as her son had in life. Shen went with her and stood at the grove's mouth half the night; they saw nothing, yet in the wind through the tips, beneath the creak, there was indeed a thread of something like a child's tune. He dared not answer, and led her home. From then on, each year he wove a man, he felt a finer voice added to the bamboo, layer on layer, year on year.

He thought of his father's last night, when the old man had called him to the chest and drawn out the old book, saying only: Who weaves for ghosts first weaves his own bone. He had not understood. His father said again: This grove's bamboo feeds men, and eats them. Use it if you must, but never covet it, never trust that it obeys. With that the breath left him. Shen kept the shop forty years — the first thirty coveting its easy weave, the last ten beginning to fear.

He kept a secret in his craft. For ordinary wares he took the tender bamboo by the riverbank; but for the ghost-men he went only to the bamboo grove behind the hill. The grove was his ancestors' legacy, planted upon an old ruin called the Thousand Corpses Pit — long ago a great flood had washed countless bodies downstream, and with no ground to bury them the townsfolk laid them all in that hollow. Later a Shen forebear planted bamboo over the pit, saying it would pin the malice down. The bamboo grew uncommonly well, its joints dense and its flesh thick; the split strips came away unnaturally supple, where bamboo elsewhere cracked the moment it saw the sun. Only this grove's strips stayed unbroken for three years.

All the town praised the Shen family's bamboo. No one asked where that supple strength came from.

Shen's shop stood by the river, and at its door hung a string of little bamboo bells he had woven himself, which went "tick-tick" in any wind, like someone counting. The shop always smelled of damp — bamboo-green, mildew, and a faint sweetness hard to name, like rotting leaves after rain. He had an apprentice called Xiaoman, fourteen or fifteen, thin but deft, who had already learned seven or eight parts of splitting and scraping the green. Xiaoman was an orphan Shen had picked up from the landing years before and raised in the shop as a sort of son. Xiaoman often said his master talked to the half-woven bamboo man at night, his voice too low to catch, like coaxing, like begging.

After that year's Dragon Boat Festival the Black Bamboo River ran wild. Ao Luo, a fisherman's daughter of nineteen, went out in her cormorant boat to gather nets and never came back. Her mother searched three days and pulled up only one shoe. Ao Luo was her only child; the mother fainted on the landing, and waking, her first act was to send for Shen Mieqing. A few days before she was lost, Ao Luo had told Xiaoman that there was a man in the river who knocked at the bottom of her boat each dusk, asking her to go down and keep him company. Xiaoman had taken it for a joke, laughing that she had mistaken a cormorant. Thinking back now, the words turned the blood cold at his spine.

Shen went to the grove behind the hill. That day there was no wind, yet the bamboo sounded of itself — not the rustle of leaves in a breeze, but the grind of joints "creak-creak" against one another. He stood at the grove's mouth and smoked half a pipe before going in to choose. He took seven stalks, the thickest clumps, their joints faintly marked with a dark-green grain like human fingerprints. As he split them, the blade drew a little water from the heart of the bamboo — not fishy, but sweet. Xiaoman watched, dazed, and said, Master, why is this bamboo weeping. Shen did not lift his head. Do not speak nonsense, he said. Bamboo has no tears. It is dew.

The bamboo man took nine days to weave. Shen needed no pattern; with his eyes shut he could weave a man's shoulder-width and leg-length true to the inch — forty years, thirty-seven men, the measure of a body was long since cut into his hands. On the seventh day of Ao Luo's man, Xiaoman rose in the night to relieve himself and saw lamplight in his master's room. He went in: the bamboo man sat upright on the mat, its head not yet finished, while Shen Mieqing faced away from it, adding strip upon strip, humming softly a tune the town's women sing to lull babies. Xiaoman called out, Master — Shen whirled around, his eyes empty and terrible, and only after a long moment knew who stood there. Go back to sleep, he said. We sink it tomorrow.

On the night of the sinking, Ao Luo's mother held the bamboo man, wrapped in her daughter's old blue jacket, weeping until her throat was raw. Shen led a few young men to the landing where Ao Luo had gone under. By custom the mother herself must push it in. She reached out and sent it; the man went "thud" and sank, a string of bubbles broke the surface, then smoothed, as if something had been swallowed in one gulp.

But from that night the town knew no peace.

First the fisherfolk by the landing said they heard, deep in the night, a "creak-creak" from the river, like someone snapping bamboo underground. Then someone saw, at the spot where Ao Luo was lost, strips of bamboo rising at night, knotting into a thin human shape that wobbled on the current and came apart. Ao Luo's mother said she dreamed her daughter had come home, her body all bamboo-weave, and to hold her was to be pricked. Xiaoman dreamed too: he dreamed the string of bamboo bells in the shop shook of itself, and what it shook out was the very lullaby Ao Luo used to hum. He woke; the bells still hung at the lintel, unmoved, and outside there was not a breath of wind.

Yet Shen was calmer than anyone. He wove as usual, only his hands shook badly and he often sliced the strips through. Xiaoman asked, Master, Ao Luo's man is sunk, why is there still no peace. Shen set down the knife and looked at his apprentice, and in that look was a sentence forty years unspoken. In the end he did not say it. Only: Do not ask. Only remember this — weave for the ghosts from now on, and never covet this grove's easy bamboo. Take it from the riverbank.

Xiaoman did not understand. The riverbank bamboo was hard and brittle, ten times the labor to weave a ghost-man, and his master had never taught him so. He asked no more.

In the eighth month the Black Bamboo River took another stranger. As ever, Shen was asked to weave a man. This time Shen did not go behind the hill; he truly went to the riverbank. But the moment the bank bamboo was split open he could hardly breathe, cold sweat on his brow, the knife falling from a hand that would not close. Xiaoman moved to fetch from the grove; Shen seized his wrist, gripping iron-tight, and said, Better not weave at all than let you touch that grove's bamboo. Xiaoman was frightened; he had never seen his master thus.

The stranger's man was patched together from riverbank bamboo after all, crooked and lopsided, and at its sinking Shen did not go, sending Xiaoman in his stead. Xiaoman returned to find his master sitting at the shop door, the bamboo bells ringing in the wind, staring toward the hill behind — as if waiting for something, or fearing it.

The ninth day of the ninth month, the Double Yang Festival. That night something broke.

Xiaoman woke past midnight to a sound — not wind, but ten thousand bamboo joints creaking at once. Barefoot he ran out, and saw the Black Bamboo River's whole surface covered with things: bamboo men rising from the bends of its bed, dense as shoals, more than all the living in town. They did not sink. Joint by joint their bamboo bones swelled and lengthened in the night, and a sweet water seeped from between the strips, running down the seams. In the moonlight Xiaoman saw the men were not empty — in the hollow of every one curled a tiny black shadow, like an unborn child, like a soul drawn tight into a ball. Behind Ao Luo at their head, he recognized the twelve-year shape of Shuisheng, and the stranger's lopsided face.

They came ashore.

From the landings, from the shoals, from every bend where a man had been sunk, the bamboo men stepped on feet of woven bone, climbing the green-stone steps one slow pace at a time. Joints creaked — as if the whole town were aging, or waking. Xiaoman pressed to the door-crack and watched them file toward the grove behind the hill, and watched the one at their head — shorter than the rest, scraps of a blue jacket still hung on its bones, its head patched on in haste, yet its outline was unmistakably Ao Luo. Shuisheng's shape followed at her side, still as in life, on tiptoe, swaying as he went.

Near dawn the river emptied at last. The townsfolk rose and thought only the mist was heavy; no one had seen. But Xiaoman had. He went to find Shen Mieqing. The shop door stood open, the bamboo bells still ringing, but the man was gone. On the mat lay a half-woven bamboo man, barely begun, its bones scattered, as if the hands that wove it had been snatched away mid-stroke. Xiaoman called out; only the bells answered.

Behind the shop Xiaoman turned up an old book Shen had pressed under a chest, its fine characters recording every bamboo man of forty years — name, sinking-place, the grove it came from. On its last page were words left by a Shen forebear, and Xiaoman understood their meaning: the planting of bamboo to pin the malice had been a lie; the locking of souls was the truth. The drowned of the Thousand Corpses Pit had no coffins to enter, so the Shen forebear made living bamboo their coffins, joint by joint, locking the souls into the nodes — sparing the town the ghosts' search for replacements, and gaining the finest bamboo under heaven. The town's present prosperity, its wares sold a hundred miles round, rested wholly on the un-scattering souls within the bamboo, holding it supple. The forebear's last line: Who weaves for ghosts first weaves his own bone. The men that fill the river never filled the ghost's body — they filled the town's peace, the Shen family's trade; and the souls locked in the bamboo, year on year, made the bamboo their bone, and became the bamboo's soul.

Xiaoman closed the book, his hands gone cold. He understood at last his master's look that night, and why he had forbidden the hill's bamboo — not that it was bad, but that it was already full of people.

He took the shop. Townsfolk came as before to ask him to weave men, and he wove as before, only never again taking bamboo from behind the hill, preferring the riverbank's hard wood, weaving until his hands ran with blood. The next year's festival took another young man; Xiaoman wove as ever, his fingers swollen half a month before the pain eased. Strange, though — the bamboo wares in the town's shops grew daily more supple, as if without the hill's bamboo they were the stronger for it. He dared not think why. Only at night, when he went now and then to the landing and saw a bamboo shadow flicker on the river's heart, would he hurry back and nail the door of the hill grove shut. Yet where the wind passed, the bell-like sound still leaked from within the door, one stroke, then another, like someone counting.

Only on the nights after the great waters he always heard, in the grove behind the hill, a girl humming — softly, the lullaby the town's women sing. And where the wind passed, the bamboo bells went "tick-tick," like someone counting, joint by joint.

Editor's note — The southern water towns once kept the custom of "filling the river," using a bamboo effigy as the drowned one's surrogate grave-clothes, to settle the soul. Yet bamboo has joints, each a gate, and folk custom often borrows the node to lock and pin what must not wander. The matter of the bamboo bone is invention; its logic is not. Whatever takes a living thing for its bones, the finer the vessel, the sadder the bone.