The Cotton Fluffer

The town of Wuhuang sat where the Qingyi River bent. Water everywhere, mist everywhere; on the nights of the third month the white breath of the river crept down the stone lanes and into the cracks of people's windows. The town was small—a dozen households crowded into stilt houses built above the water. By day you heard oars; by night you heard something else: a humming, hum, hum, like someone pressing a bowstring against a man's bone and kneading it, slowly, slowly, until the back of your neck went cold. That was Tang Jiu, fluffing cotton.

Tang Jiu's shop was called Tang's Warmth Workshop. It stood at the dead end of the lane, its front black with age, and from the eaves hung a faded square of blue cloth, softened and limp from the river wind, like a soul-banner someone had forgotten to take down. The town had an old saying: when a person is about to leave, you must ask Tang Jiu to fluff a burial quilt. The dead, they said, walk a long road to the yellow springs, and without a freshly fluffed quilt of warm cotton wrapped around them, the soul would shiver halfway and turn back to beg for warmth at the living's pillow, troubling the whole household—at best night sweats and fever-talk, at worst the living themselves wasting away, as if something had been drawn out of them. So whenever an elder in the family burned low to the dregs of life, the filial ones' first errand was not the Taoist priest but a kowtow at the Warmth Workshop, to order a quilt, stating the body's measure and the cloth for the "keepsake thread." Tang Jiu would agree and pick a day. No one knew how many generations the rule had stood; only that the Tang family's cotton craft had passed down the same way.

My grandmother, whom I called Ahpo, was at just such a time.

I worked in the provincial city and had not been back in three years. When I left she could still lean on a stick and wash vegetables at the dock; when I returned she was already lying down. My cousin-uncle called to say Ahpo had taken neither water nor rice for seven days and would likely not survive the spring, and that I should come home for a last look. I took leave, rode a boat through the night, and reached Wuhuang at first light. Those three years I had only sent money at festivals, and even the phone calls grew short. She would say on the other end, Don't come back if you're busy, the town's poor, the trip's a bother—but I knew she feared I found the road long, feared I would see how old she had grown. Last winter she took a fall and lay in bed half a month; it was my cousin-uncle's letter that told me. What I owed her was a quilt never fluffed warm in time, and many winters unreturned. Those first two years she walked to the dock every half-month to ask if the mail boat had brought a letter. Later, when letters thinned, she stopped asking and only said on the phone the town was well and told me to mind myself. My cousin-uncle said she kept my photograph pressed under the chest lid and showed it to anyone, saying, that's my grandson who works in the city. Hearing it, my throat closed like a wad of wet cotton—neither to spit nor swallow.

The dock steps were slick with wet moss; I slid down them and already heard the humming from deep in the lane, beat after beat, not like work at all, more like someone kneading another's back, or weeping for them. In the river mist the workshop's dim yellow lamp floated like a single eye on the water. When I was small Ahpo had brought me to the workshop once. I reached, curious, for the bow, and she yanked me back, whispering: Tang Jiu's quilts, the living must not draw near. What he fluffs is not cotton but other families' souls; touch it and someone comes to your pillow at night for warmth. I took it for child-scaring nonsense and laughed at her superstition. Standing at the lane's mouth now, the hum beating against my eardrum, I believed her.

Ahpo lay on a bamboo bed in the main hall, reduced to bone, eye-sockets sunk, breath thin as a thread—yet her hand still came out from the quilt, icy, and gripped my wrist, hard. My nose stung. I remembered winters as a child: the stove burning bright, her wrapping me in cotton, mending clothes by the lamp, the warmth of the fluff lasting till dawn. Back then the town had no road; the year's most important errand was ordering a new quilt from the workshop, for a year's warmth. Now quilts are machine-pressed, but the burial quilt must still be Tang Jiu's handiwork—machine-pressed cotton is dead, the fluffed kind is alive, and the dead recognize the living.

That afternoon I went to order the quilt.

Inside the workshop it was darker than out. Step in and you met half a room of white—cotton hanging on walls, piled on the floor, slung from the beams, new snow-white, old yellowed, mixed, throwing up fine down that stuck to brow and hair and itched in the throat. At the center sat a low wooden stool, and on it a bow of old bent bamboo, a full armspan long, its string a dark color, neither silk nor hemp, smelling of an indefinable earthiness, like grave soil turned after rain. Tang Jiu sat behind the stool, wizened as a burned stick, cheekbones high, the whites of his eyes yellow—yet his brow and neck constantly beaded with sweat though the room was not hot, as if he had just been lifted from a steamer, his shirt damp down the back. He did not rise, only lifted his lids.

"Ordering a burial quilt?" His voice was sandy, like cotton rubbing sandpaper.

I nodded, gave Ahpo's measure, and added that it should be warmer, she was afraid of cold. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile: the warmth of a burial quilt is not added for the living. Since you ask, I'll twist in an extra keepsake thread. He took a bamboo tally from a drawer, clicked it on a polished abacus, named a price, then said: one more thing—the keepsake cloth. Bring an old jacket off your grandmother; I'll twist a thread of it into the new cotton, the keepsake. The dead know their own cloth and will lie docile in the quilt, not turn back to beg the living for warmth.

I went back and found in Ahpo's chest an old padded jacket, dark-blue outside, lined with a still older white undershirt, its collar frayed to fluff. She had told me it was what she wore when she married in, kept sixty years, the stitches an old child's-comma seam, so fine the thread vanished. I carried it to Tang Jiu. He took it, ran his fingers over the cloth, and said very softly: this cloth knows its person. I did not catch it; when I asked, he had already hung the jacket on the beam, taken scissors, split the seam, picked the softest thread of the lining, twisted it to an inch, and slipped it into his sleeve. The rest he folded and returned: keep this jacket, don't burn it. One thread of keepsake is enough; more and the dead clings to the old thing and will not go.

The next night Tang Jiu began to fluff.

I watched once, and remember it still. He spread new cotton thick on the board, scraped it even with a bamboo ruler, laid the bow across it, gripped the neck with his left hand and raised a jujube-wood mallet in his right. The mallet fell on the string; the string hummed and vibrated against the cotton, and the cotton below woke as if startled, bursting up in snowy waves, fine down flying in the lamp's light, dusting him white. Strike after strike, the bow lived in his hands; the string traveled the cotton and the cotton loosened, softened, inch by inch, from a packed lump into a cloud that could hold a whole winter. Half done he had me pass the "lead-threads," a few strands of white cotton line; he stretched them in a grid across the fluffed mass, a fence for the cloud so the cotton would not shift or knot. The threads pressed in, he fluffed again, then laid a round wooden roller, sat on it, and slowly ground the mass firm yet soft, and finally bound the edge with big needle and coarse thread. A burial quilt was made.

But that night, past midnight, crouched at the door, I heard something wrong. Inside the cotton, very faint, a sobbing. Not wind, not rats—human throats stifling cries, too fine to hear, yet in masses, as if many mouths were pressed under one quilt, all holding breath and humming. Tang Jiu's bow paused an instant; a thread of dark red rose on the string, like blood soaked in or a far fire reflected, then dimmed. He turned and glared, his yellowed eyes bright: watched half the night, go sleep. Cotton knows the living and the dead; stare too long and it remembers you, and you'll not sleep easy—don't blame me.

I slunk off; at the lane's mouth I looked back and saw on the workshop's paper window his bowed fluffing shadow, up and down, like someone kowtowing to someone.

The quilt was delivered on the third day. Neatly folded, snow-white, yet heavier in the hand than an ordinary quilt, and close up it carried a damp earthiness mixed with the soap-bean scent of old cloth—not foul, but it hollowed the heart. Tang Jiu handed it over, the back of his hands shining black, the black under his nails impossible to wash out, his sweat denser than usual, as if lifted from water. He said: once it's on, don't lift it again. The warmth a burial quilt takes on is meant for the dead; if the living looks twice, that warmth divides into you, and you too will fear the cold.

That night, just past the midnight hour, Ahpo passed.

The family wept in a knot and, by custom, moved her from the bamboo bed onto a door plank. I shook out the burial quilt and laid it gently over her. The cotton was freshly fluffed and should have been dry and springy, yet within half a stick of incense the surface gave off a damp heat, as if just lifted from a steamer—touch it and it was wet and scalding. Ahpo's face beneath should have been grey and calm, but it slowly flushed; fine sweat beaded her brow; her lips moved; from her throat came a muffled sound, not like the dead at all, more like one smothered in sleep, struggling to breathe. A smell spread through the room—wet cotton and rotten mud, with an indistinct sweet rankness that turned the stomach. The cousin-uncle keeping watch was first to leap up, retreating three steps, white as paper: she's come back! Ahpo won't go, something's living in the quilt! The other relatives panicked too, dropped their vigil candles, and fled in a swarm to the outer rooms, leaving only me, kneeling by the plank.

I reached out and touched the quilt's surface. The cotton, beneath the cloth, rose and fell.

Not the wind. The cotton inside was breathing, beat after beat, as if something were wrapped within, holding its breath, or as if many people crowded together, all fighting for that bit of warmth. Ahpo's hand hung from the quilt's seam, still cold, yet the body under the surface grew hotter and hotter, burning my palm. I suddenly understood Tang Jiu's words—that warmth was not the dead's traveling money but the rope that hobbled the dead to the world of the living. Ahpo's soul had not left; something in the quilt had entangled her, kept her too warm to dissolve, forcing her to curl in the quilt, begging warmth generation after generation.

I ran to the workshop.

The lane was thick with black; river mist flowed along the ground; the humming had stopped, and the silence was frightful—not even a dog barked. The workshop door stood ajar, lit by a single oil lamp; Tang Jiu was not fluffing but bundling his tools into a pack. Seeing me burst in he was not surprised; he only tied the pack's cord and sighed. In the lamp's shadow his face was transparent yellow.

"I knew it," he said. "That quilt—something went wrong in the fluffing."

He pulled me onto the stool and told me why. That batch of cotton was no ordinary stuff. The cotton-seller, Old Ma, was a peddler from north of the river, who sold astonishingly cheap, and his cotton was stiffly white, like frozen snow. It came from the North Bank—in the years of great drought the North Bank had been a mass grave where over a hundred starved dead were buried shallow, bones exposed by a single rain, rotten cloth visible after a dog's two scratches. When the famine passed, cotton was planted on the waste, its roots driving into the seams of bone, drinking the resentment below; the cotton looked snow-white but every wad held a soul that would not scatter, cold to the touch, clinging to any living warmth. Tang Jiu should never have used it, but Old Ma's price was too low and he was greedy; he had mixed it into a few quilts with no trouble and grown careless, and this time mixed it in again.

"My bowstring," he raised his hand for me to see the dark string, "is neither silk nor hemp but the hair of seven generations of Tang widows, twisted together. Our craft passes father to son, but every generation's men died young; the widowed wives twisted their hair into the next string, one generation feeding the next, and I am the seventh. My mother was one of those strands. My father died young; she kept her widowhood till her hair was all white, and on her deathbed she cut a lock, saying, keep it for Jiu, so the string won't be lonely when you think of your mother fluffing. I understood only later that what she left was not a keepsake but a debt she took on for me—a widow's "keeping" is, in truth, the way to tether the living for the dead, and generation after generation twisted into the string, the fluffer carries a whole village's dead upon his own back. A widow's string breaks early, and in the hair gathers a longing to keep—when I fluff, it draws wandering souls back into the quilt and lets the dead sleep peaceful, not turn back to the living. That was the good of it. But the string can be greedy too—draw too much and the cotton houses something else, heavier and heavier, as if you'd stuffed one more person who cannot leave into the quilt."

He paused and told an older tale. Years back a woman west of town died in childbirth; her family ordered a burial quilt, also mixed with North Bank cotton. After the burial the husband heard a baby cry in the quilt each night, and the woman's lullaby; he grew thin, by day staring and raving that the quilt was too crowded and he must go in to keep her company. Half a year later he died too, and on his deathbed wrapped himself in that old quilt and clutched it tight. When Tang Jiu later went to collect and fluffed it open, twenty or thirty black strands fell out, impossible to tell human from cotton. That man, he said, was dragged down by the warmth-ghost to keep her company.

"This time," Tang Jiu looked at me, "the North Bank holds no fewer than a hundred resentful souls; my string woke them all from the cotton and crowded them into your grandmother's single quilt. They are cold and want warmth, so they entangled her and kept her too warm to leave. A living person under a warm quilt is blessed; a dead one, if warmed past bearing, clings and will not scatter—becomes a warmth-ghost, begging warmth in the quilt all its days and dragging a living one down to keep it company before it will rest. The rising and falling you felt—that was them fighting for the warmth."

My scalp crawled; I asked what to do.

"At the midnight hour I'll fluff it once more," he stood and brightened the lamp. "Move your grandmother, plank and all, to the center of the hall; I'll re-lay cotton, set the bow, and draw those resentful souls back into the string one by one. When it's clean I'll burn this string and let them go. Your grandmother will cool and can pass in peace. Only—" he looked down at his shining black hands as if at someone else's—"the drawn-back resentment enters the fluffer's body. These years I've dried myself out load by load; each fluffing adds a layer, which is why I'm so withered and sweating, as if a stove burns inside me. This time the cotton holds many souls; when it's done, I likely won't hold up either."

He spoke lightly, as of an account long since reckoned.

At the midnight hour the town was so still not even an insect sang. I carried Ahpo and her plank to the hall's center; Tang Jiu came in shouldering the bow, sweat running in threads from his brow, his shirt already soaked through. He sent everyone to the courtyard and kept only me at the doorframe, saying one more person would divide the warmth and the souls would not draw clean.

He re-laid a layer of North Bank cotton over Ahpo, set the bow, raised the mallet. The first fall: the string sang, hum—, and from the cotton rose a spread of grey-white, not down but face after face, cheeks sunken, mouths open, the starved dead of the North Bank lifted out of the cotton by that one vibration, dripping wet. Tang Jiu did not falter; strike after strike, with each a sob was drawn from the cotton into the string, and the string's dark red lit thread by thread, like red-hot wire moving under skin. Ahpo's face beneath went from red to white to calm; her brow slowly smoothed, as if she had at last fallen asleep and stopped struggling.

I went cold all over, nails dug into my palms. The faces bobbed in the cotton waves, hands clawing at the sky, yet each time the string drew them they went soft and shrank back into it, like snowflakes falling into fire. Tang Jiu struck faster and faster, sweating rain, drops from his chin pitting the cotton with small wet marks; his hands shone black as if soaked in ink, yet his motion never faltered, mallet rising and falling like kowtowing in penance for a whole village. The lamp's light jumped on his face, yellow, transparent, like a sheet of paper nearly burned through.

For the last strike he raised the mallet high in both arms and brought it down hard—

The string snapped.

The instant the broken string sprang, all the room's resentment, as if it had waited for this, flooded backward into Tang Jiu's body. He tipped back, slid from the stool, and did not move. The lamp was shaken out; the hall went dark a breath, then was lit again by candles brought from the courtyard. I threw myself over—Ahpo's quilt surface was already cool, light, clean white, no damp heat, no rising and falling, an ordinary new quilt. Ahpo lay there, face peaceful, as if she had at last fallen into deep sleep, a small smile even at the corner of her mouth, the kind by the stove as a child—warm, reassured.

Tang Jiu died under the fluffing stool, still clutching the broken string, a faint smile also at his lips, as if he had set down a thousand-jin burden carried all his life; even the sweat was gone, and at last his body was cool. Next day the townsfolk heard of the trouble at the workshop and gave it a wide berth, only muttering behind walls that Tang Jiu had after all dried out, string broken and man dead, the end of the craft. None dared enter to fetch the body; I carried him out on a door plank myself. From a corner I picked up a scrap of cotton fallen from the quilt's lining—snow-white yet heavy in the hand, and in my palm it still carried a trace of Ahpo's soap-bean scent. I sewed it into the handkerchief I carried, and took it with me to the city.

At dawn Ahpo was laid in the coffin under that same quilt, clean and warm, and went with dignity. The town pooled money for Tang Jiu's funeral; he had no children, so I burned the bow for him. From the fire rose the scent of warm cotton and old cloth, with a trace of soap-bean, and at the last a very faint hum dispersed into the river mist, like someone pressing a string against bone, kneading once, slowly, and letting go.

Come autumn the workshop opened again. A strange young man came, saying he was from downstream; he set up a fluffing bow too, hung a square of blue cloth too, and at night the humming sounded again. The first night I heard it from the lane's end, beat after beat, unable to tell river wind from a real hand at the bow. I looked down at my own hands: the nails of my right index and middle fingers had somehow taken a line of black that no rubbing would remove, and they were always faintly warm, as if just drawn from someone's bed. Sleeping at night I sometimes hear a very faint sobbing under the quilt; I turn to feel, and there is nothing—only that warmth, stubborn, remaining in the cracks of my fingers.

Note from the Midnight Record: In southern custom the burial quilt must be freshly fluffed, for warmth's sake, that the dead on their long road to the yellow springs may not take cold. Yet cotton is apt to absorb, and old matters and old souls alike may hide within it. The cotton-flaffer leads the living with one hand and ferries the dead with the other; what is wound upon his bowstring was never only cotton.