The Bone-Picker

Lao Zhou had been a bone-picker for forty years, to the month.

When families in town moved a grave, they dug open the old pit where the dead had lain three or five years. The flesh was long rotted to black mud; only a pale skeleton remained, soaking in the seepage water, yellowed and brittle, shedding grit at the slightest touch. The mourners stood far off, handkerchiefs to their noses, afraid to come near, and called for him. He squatted by the pit and rinsed each bone clean with rice-washing water. The blood and grime wedged in the joints loosened at the touch of that lukewarm water, and his two fingers probed the skull-cavity, the rib-cage—the cold went to the bone, as if he had thrust his whole arm into a well in the dead of winter, his heart clenching with it. Rinsed, he dried each bone with coarse cloth and laid them in the new gilded urn in the order of a body: skull on top, jaw closed, ribs gathered to the middle, the small bones of hands and feet tucked at the bottom, not one out of place, for a misplaced bone, they said, would bring the dead unrest. When the work was done his hands were blue with cold, and he had to stand by the lime pit and rub them in its sour, fishy reek before any warmth of the living returned.

Those hands, soaked year on year in ice-water, had long since changed shape; the pads were coarse as sandpaper, yet could feel the finest notch in a joint. Others said his hands knew bone; he knew they knew not the bone but the person within it—how many bowls of rice he had eaten, how many blows he had borne, how that last breath had gone down. The hand knew before the heart.

The lime pit lay at the foot of the back hill, a brick-walled pit that stayed damp all year, raw lime piled white in the corner, steaming up a choking stink whenever it rained. After every job he walked around to the pit and thrust his hands into that smell—he could not have said what it drove out, only that the reek could hold back the cold seeping into his fingers. Only later did he understand: that cold did not come from the pit water. It leaked from his own body.

That reek clung to him for the rest of his life. His clothes carried a layer of grey-white that no washing took out, at the cuffs, across the front, as if the lime pit had grown onto him. While his parents lived they minded the grave-dirt on him and would not let him sit at the foot of the table; after they died he lived alone, and let the smell be, until he no longer noticed it himself. Only lying down at night, when the reek rose from his fingers mixed with the bone-cold, did he know for certain he was alive—the proof of living being a hollow in him that could never be filled.

His skill was known, and three villages called him for every grave-moving. Yet no one knew that for forty years, each time he finished a skeleton, he would, while the family looked away, secretly keep back a small piece. Sometimes a joint of finger, sometimes half a rib, sometimes no bigger than a worn molar, hidden under his tongue and spat into the cloth pouch at his sleeve. Home, and into the blue-glazed jar in the corner of the main room. The jar had once held pickled vegetables, and a ring of salt still circled its mouth. Now it held the odds and ends of bone he had gathered across forty years, and with the years it had taken on a sheen he could not name.

The first time, his master took him. After the master died, the first descent alone, his hands shook so he could not steady the water ladle. That body was the widow Wang's husband at the village head, dead three years, bones still whole. Halfway through the rinsing a foolish thought came to him: if he secretly took a piece, might it not fill the hollow in him? He did take one—a small toe-bone, held under his tongue down the hill, heart beating like a thief's, and yet as if he had recovered something lost many years. Home by the lamp he pressed the toe-bone to the root of his little finger—no, the finger-root was a joint, a toe-bone a toe-bone, they would not meet. He stared a long while, and in the end stored it in the jar. It was the jar's first piece. Only later did he understand: the first piece was never kept for his own hollow, but to leave, for the forty years to come, a token—the token that one day, surely, he would gather complete.

Why he kept them, at first even he could not say. He only remembered his first descent into a pit, when his master crouched in the mud and, with a finger like old bark, tapped the root of his left little finger and said: you were born short a bone here, lacking in your fate; if you don't gather it complete, your road after death will not be steady. He had laughed it off then, thought the old man fussing over nothing. But as the years piled on, he felt it true—the joint at the root of his left little finger went hollow the moment the weather turned, as if something that should have filled it had been quietly taken. And later the hollow climbed, from the joint to the wrist, the forearm, until the whole left side of him carried an unspoken thinness, as if wind blew through his bones. He ran his hands over his own ribs and always felt one short of the others; lying on his side, the row against the mat was missing a rung.

So he began to keep. One piece from each, taken home to measure against his own body. This one fit? That one in its place? Most did not, and he was not vexed, only stored them in the jar. The jar grew heavier year by year, and the bench beneath it took a dent.

In the early years he picked the Zhang family's ancestral grave. The old woman had been dead seven years; opening the pit her bones were still whole, only the hip-bone cracked where an earthworm had burrowed through. He rinsed and laid them as was right, and at the last let his fingers linger a breath in the hip-joint, keeping back a small crescent of thin bone. He measured it half the night, pressed it to the root of his little finger—no, too large. He put it away, sulking, into the jar. Later he picked a boat-family's grave, water-people whose ancestral plot lay below the waterline; the bones soaked green, stinking of rotten weed, sharper than the lime pit. He held that light skeleton and kept a back molar, held it to the lamp—the root had a notch shaped exactly like the upper-left tooth he had lost years ago. But it was not his own; held under the tongue it would not take root.

He also picked a child who had died young. The child lay under a pear tree, three years old, bones thin as a sparrow's wing-bones; he held them in both hands, afraid a little force would crush them. He could not bear to keep the child's, and laid them back whole. That night he first felt the hollow in his left hand like a cub with its mouth open, feeding on other people's bone. He was afraid, and left the jar alone for several nights. But within half a month another family came, and he went, and kept again.

Then there was the Li family's grave-moving. The Li old man had drowned in the village pond; pulled up and buried, nine years on his bones were swollen with water, the finger-joints loose, squeezing out a trickle. Lao Zhou squatted at the pit's edge and poured rice-water scoop by scoop; the water went milky, and from the joints washed out a few strands of hair not yet rotted, long and black, that wound about his wrist and chilled him to a shiver. He kept a joint of spine, held it to his own back—too broad, would not sit. But he could not bear to cast it off, for it carried the mud-stink of the pond bottom, and his left-side hollow took a queer liking to it. He laid it with the other fragments, and at night when the jar sounded he always thought that joint of spine the heaviest—as if someone beneath the water, on tiptoe, reaching up, one reach and another.

At night, the jar would sound.

Not loud—the finest, thinnest sound, like someone scraping a fingernail along the glaze, or the small bones at the bottom rubbing one against another, a rustle with a little ring of porcelain. At first only after midnight, when all was still; later it began the moment the lamp was put out, while the lamp-cord still swung. He turned over and listened, and found he was not much afraid—rather it was like hearing his own child turn in sleep, a comfort. His master had set a rule: a bone-picker must never open the bone-jar alone at night, lest the dead take offense at the living and cling, demanding back the piece that was short. Yet he set the jar on the bench by his pillow and let it sound; and in time the sound became the thing that lulled him to sleep.

Once a widow in the next village asked him to move her husband's grave. The man died at thirty; his bones were still hard, his breastbone broad as if he had carried loads all his life. Lao Zhou rinsed and laid them as was right, and at the last let his fingers linger a breath in the skull-cavity—and felt an oddness no other bone had, as if the crown had been short a corner and patched with a thin sliver, old blood-grime still seeping from the seam. He said nothing, only kept that patching sliver, wrapped in three folds of oil-paper. Home, by the lamp, he saw the sliver's curve matched, to the hair, the hollow at the root of his left little finger. His hand shook; the lamp-flower popped, and his hands were all shadow. He pressed it there, and a cold climbed from the finger-root up the forearm, and the hollow seemed filled a thread.

After that he kept more often, and measured more often. He came to understand: what he lacked was not any piece at all, but the very piece that should have been his. A piece borrowed, lent, wrongly set upon another—none of it could fill him; pressed on it was cold, pulled away the hollow grew worse. He was like a man fitting a picture forever one tile short; forty years of bone piled into a hill, yet few indeed could be set into his own body. Some nights he poured all the fragments out onto the table and pinched each one, and the cold at his fingertips was the same as that first descent—and he could not tell whether he was recognizing his own bone, or the bones of a hundred others.

The longer the years, the more fragments in the jar, and he sorted them—not only by shape, but by feel. Some were piercingly cold, taken from those who died by violence; some lukewarm, from the old who died in peace; some trembled faintly in the palm, and he could not say why, only that the person had left words unspoken. Once a mourner's young son, curious, leaned in while he laid the bones and spied the bulge at his sleeve, asking, Uncle Zhou, what've you got there. He smiled and said, a piece of candy. The boy truly reached to dig it out; he rolled his wrist and tucked the toe-bone under his arm, and the boy grasped empty air. Afterward he was afraid half the night—not of being found out, but that the boy might take on the dead's bone-aura and grow a hollow in himself that could never be filled. From then on he kept bone only under the tongue, never in the sleeve.

He aged. His back bent, but his hands stayed steady, the knuckles coarse yet able to feel the finest notch in a joint. Only the hollow at his left grew larger, so large he sometimes wondered whether the left half of him ought simply to come apart, to make room for the bones to return. He counted the fragments in the jar, one by one, and then stopped counting—there was still the last piece short. Which piece, he knew in his heart: a thin, crescent sliver of gristle below the left of the heart, beneath the ribs and before the spine. Of the thousand-odd skeletons he had picked in his life, not one had borne a piece shaped so. He turned the jar inside out, turned over every corpse he could remember, and found none.

He went to look for his master's grave. The master died young; his grave was in the unmarked field on the back hill, long swallowed by weeds, no stone. He parted waist-high wild grass and dug with a hoe for half an hour, and found no master's bone, only a length of someone's rotten wood. He knelt in the mud, his knees sinking, and suddenly understood: the master's words that year were not a scare, but a charge. Every old bone-picker, in the end, must gather his own bones once. And the last gathering he must do—the one he must pick—was his own. But his own bones still clothed his living body. How to pick them?

He went home and lifted the jar onto the table, lit one lamp, and poured out the hundreds of fragments, spreading them across table and floor. He pinched each one, and the cold at his fingertips was the same as forty years before. He laughed suddenly, laughing until his eyes ran—forty years, he had picked a thousand bodies for others, and all along it was for himself he gathered. Gathered complete, it would be his turn to lie in the pit, and with his own hands set the last piece in place. That night the jar did not sound. The silence kept him awake; he heard his own heartbeat, a hollow knock, like a jar without its lid.

Those few days he often sat lost before the two jars. Once neighbor Aunt Chen came to borrow salt and, seeing the two jars in the main room, laughed that Lao Zhou meant to pickle two vats of vegetables. He laughed too and said yes, two vats. After she left he stared at the old jar a long while, then reached to touch the oil-paper at its mouth; his fingertip had barely met it when something rustled inside, as if it knew his hand. He drew back, a thin sweat on his back—for the first time it came to him that it was not he who picked the bone, but the bone that picked him, taking him from himself, piece by piece, and carrying him out.

The next day he prepared a new urn for himself, set it in the center of the main room beside the old one, like two dowry chests. He went to the market and weighed out lime, mixed rice-washing water, and wiped clean, one by one, the copper tongs for lifting bone and the coarse cloth for wrapping. The neighbors asked what he was preparing; he said, moving my own grave. They laughed, said Lao Zhou was growing muddled, a man in his sixties with no grave in sight. He was not muddled. He only lived his days clearer than anyone, even marking the almanac for an auspicious day to break ground, circled in red.

On the day autumn came in, he chose a windless dawn and went alone to the back hill. Beside his family's graves he dug a pit for himself, not deep, just room to lie down. He took off his shoes and lay in it; the earth was cold, pressing his spine, like his mother's hand patting him to sleep, gone cold. He closed his eyes and thought, now is the time. But the hands were his own, the bones his own—how to take that last piece from his own body? He held the copper tongs to his heart and could not bring them down. He lay half a day, then climbed out and filled the pit, tamping it firm, as if afraid someone would see. Going home, the hollow at his left suddenly pained him, a pain that dropped him squatting by the road, unable to cry out, only feeling something in that hollow sinking downward.

At night the old jar sounded again. This time it sounded exactly as on that first night forty years before—fine, broken, unbroken, as if counting something, one count and another, without stop. He lit the lamp to look: the oil-paper over the mouth had somehow come loose, and a reek of the lime pit poured out, mixed with the sour of rice-water left too long, stinging his eyes to water. He reached in and felt a bone he had never kept—thin, curved, a small crescent, stuck to the bottom of the jar, cold enough to burn, as if just peeled from someone and still trembling with the warmth of a body.

He knew its shape. It was the piece below the left of the heart, the one he had lacked for forty years.

He clutched that sliver, his hand shaking so the lamp nearly toppled. He could not understand how it came. Which of the corpses he had picked had kept it for him, yielding it only tonight? Or had these forty years been this: each piece he kept, his own body quietly gave one back, like repaying a debt, until tonight it had repaid the very last? He thought of his master's words before the grave—if you don't gather it complete, your road after death will not be steady—and wondered whether he had long been walking that road, only believing he picked and walked for others.

He brought the sliver to the root of his left little finger and pressed it on; the hollow there truly warmed. Warmth welled in his eyes, as if a man frozen half his life had touched fire for the first time. But past the warmth he heard the other fragments in the jar begin to sound again. One sound and another, not a reunion but a shortage still—the piece now short was no longer the one at the heart. What was short was the "self" that should lie in the pit and set the last piece in place with his own hand. He understood suddenly: that sliver had never been on another's body, nor among the thousand he had picked; it had always been on his own, and these forty years he had, little by little, quietly broken it from himself and stored it in the jar.

No sooner had the thought landed than the sliver in his fingertips burned a moment, so he nearly dropped it. Only then did he see that around the edge of the crescent thin bone ran a ring of his own old blood-grime, fine as a thread, plainly the same mark as the master's words, 'lacking in your fate.' So he had not been borrowing from others; he had been moving himself, piece by piece, outside his body. Forty years of moving, until the left hand emptied, and when the left emptied he moved from the right; when the left side emptied he moved from the right. When there was no more to move, he would become the jar itself, waiting to be picked from, piece by piece, by another.

He was afraid.

Not of death. But of understanding: what he had gathered these forty years was never to complete himself, but to recognize "himself" bit by bit from the bodies of others. Once recognized near enough, it would be his turn to fill another's hollow—just as every corpse he had picked had quietly been short a piece, taken by him, and now demanded back. He touched the warmth at the root of his little finger and suddenly felt that even the warmth had begun to hollow.

In the small hours he sat in the main room holding both jars, old and new. The old held forty years of his gathering; the new stood empty, waiting for himself. Wind rose outside the window and set the oil-paper over the jar-mouths rustling, like someone scraping glaze at the window. He listened, and it was as if he heard the thousand-odd whose bones he had picked, asking him across earth and water and forty years of rice-smell and lime-stink, all at once: Lao Zhou, have you brought my piece back?

He clutched the warmth in his hand, no sound from his throat. The wind outside tightened, the oil-paper sounded finer, like many hands scraping at once upon his jar-mouth. He could not count the voices outside, only felt that each corresponded to some piece short in the jar—and those short pieces were now, one by one, hollowing out from his own body.

He could not answer. He looked down at his left hand; the root of the little finger was warm, yes, but above it the wrist, the forearm, the whole left half of him, was still hollow, hollower than before, so hollow he could see his own shadow missing a side upon the wall. At last he understood his master's words—the trade of bone-picking was never fuller with the gathering, but emptier. You gather another's bones complete, and your own go short one by one, until the fingers can clutch nothing, until the left hand is hollow enough to pour wind through. When the shortage can go no further, you become the next corpse, waiting for a later bone-picker to quietly keep a small piece, carry it home, and set it in the blue-glazed jar.

Near dawn he blew out the lamp. Both jars still sounded, old and new, rising and falling, fine and broken, like someone at his ear counting, bone by bone, how many of his he had left to lose. He closed his eyes and heard the count reach the root of his left little finger—there, warm, and yet beginning, little by little, to hollow again.

The next day he rose early as ever, lit the fire, simmered half a pot of thin gruel, filled a bowl and set it on the bench in the main room, and laid a pair of unmoving chopsticks for each of the two jars. He went out, and as ever a family called him to move a grave. He squatted, poured the rice-water, and let his fingers into the skull-cavity—the cold was as it had been forty years before. Only this time, keeping the bone, he lingered a breath longer—and suddenly thought: once these too were gathered into the jar, would not the empty one waiting be the turn of another to pick? He looked down at his left hand; the warmth at the little-finger root was still there, but the whole hand was a notch hollower than the day before. Wind rose from the pit's mouth, carrying the lime pit's reek, and he heard, far off, a jar sound one fine, broken note.

Zi Ye Lu notes: The old custom of bone-picking, called "secondary burial," still exists in parts of Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangxi and Hunan. The body is earth-buried for some years; the pit is opened, the bones gathered and re-sealed in a gilded urn, for the peace of later generations. Yet folk also keep a taboo: a bone-picker must never open the bone-jar alone at night, lest the dead take offense at the living and cling, demanding back the piece that was short. Whether Lao Zhou's case was truth or taboo, the recorder dares not judge. Only this is known: the pit he dug and filled on the back hill stands empty to this day, and on windless clear nights a faint sound comes from within, as if someone inside were counting his own bones, one by one, and at the root of the left little finger would pause, then go on counting.