The Crack-Mender

When the plum-rain season reached the Qingyi River, the water turned as murky as rice porridge boiled to a paste, thick enough to hold an oar. The town of Tongdu stood in a row along the river, all grey tiles and white walls, its foundations perpetually soaking in the water, the wall-bottoms stained with a ring of yellow the sun could never dry. The townsfolk used porcelain for everything — bowls were porcelain, jars were porcelain, even a trifle of pins and thread was kept in a little porcelain casket. When something was chipped, cracked, or broken to pieces, they would not throw it away; they went to Fan Jiu.

Fan Jiu was a crack-mender. The village called him Uncle Nine; strangers called him Fan the Clamper. He was lean and spare, yet his hands were strangely large, his knuckles knobbed like old tree-galls, and all ten fingertips were permanently black — the powder of the diamond drill, seeped into his flesh over decades. He carried an old bamboo shoulder-pole: a bellows and small furnace at the front, drills and hammers, shears and files at the back, and a chest of clamps — yellow brass, white copper, raw iron — sorted by kind. As he went from village to village the pole creaked, and behind him always trailed one or two children bearing cracked bowls, to watch how he turned broken porcelain back into a whole vessel.

He was not originally from Tongdu. Years before, he had studied the craft by the Boyang Lake under a master — a lone old man who in his life had mended the broken wares of seven lakeside towns. On the night he died, he pressed a diamond drill the size of a jujube-pit into Fan Jiu's palm and said: 'This drill was ground from a pearl sunk in the old riverbed; it knows water. Use it well, but heed one prohibition — mend no soul-jar, and take no crack of the leaking-born.' Young and headstrong, Fan Jiu asked why. The old man only shook his head: 'What you mend is the crack, not the porcelain. The crack knows the hand, and the hand knows the fate. Some cracks are opened for the living; mend them, and the living become the jar.' Then he breathed his last. Fan Jiu thought little of it, shouldered his pole, and went down to the south, drifting until he came to Tongdu on the Qingyi, where he took root — and thirty-odd years slipped by.

The townsfolk trusted him, said his hands were steady, that no bowl however shattered could fail to rise from the dead in his grip. Yet some old folk muttered in private that a crack-mender's hands, the more they mended, the easier they grew to 'know things' — wares knew their master, and the master knew the wares, until in time one could not tell whether man mended porcelain or porcelain mended man. Fan Jiu heard this and laughed it off as idle talk.

Crack-mending, to the layman, is repair; to the trade, it is suppression. Finding the shards, matching the seams, fixing the points, drilling the holes, setting the clamps, sealing the leak — step upon step, never to be rushed. The diamond drill is the soul: draw the bow, and the bit turns a fine eye in the porcelain; then a copper clamp bites sideways across the two broken halves, and the crack is held. There were two rhymes the trade kept; Fan Jiu often recited them: 'Without the diamond drill, do not take up the porcelain trade; without a steady hand, do not clamp the leaking-born's pot.' The first everyone knew; the second he had puzzled out himself, from his master's dying words.

Last autumn the Li family married a bride, and the wedding bowl chipped its gilded rim and split in two; the bride wept till her eyes swelled. Fan Jiu took it, matched the seam, drilled, and set seven golden clamps, and on the bowl's base engraved a little plum in the old fashion. The bride held it and said: 'Master, this bowl seems more precious than before.' Fan Jiu smiled: 'A mended vessel holds its bottom. Hold the bottom, and fortune cannot leak out.' He did not then know how prophetic the words were — what he had clamped was far more than a bowl's bottom.

Around Tongdu the floods came year on year. Of those the river drowned, four or five in ten were never recovered as bone. By old custom they raised a grave of clothes and belongings, and set a soul-jar to gather the spirit — within it the drowned one's birth-date, a lock of natal hair, a handful of riverbed silt, the mouth sealed, so as to confine the wandering soul and keep it from coming ashore by night to seek a substitute. This jar the townsfolk called the 'life-settling jar,' never lightly moved, and never to be allowed to crack. A cracked jar leaks the soul — the saying was 'the leaking of the born.' Leak the born, and lightly the household knew no peace, heavily the ill spread to the neighbors. So when any family's soul-jar showed a line, the first errand was Fan Jiu. Of late a third of his work had been mending soul-jars.

In the early years he had indeed clamped soul-jars for two or three families. Those times the cracks were shallow, the black water thin; he drilled and clamped by the common method, sealed them tight, and for years after not a whisper came. The townsfolk trusted him the more, and he too came to treat the work as ordinary — merely a jar, however fierce the crack, it could not withstand the diamond's turn and the copper's bite. Until the Zhou matter: when he took the jar his hand did not even tremble, never guessing that the peace those earlier jars had held was bought with the disaster of this later one. He did not know that the leaking-born, once it knows the craftsman's hand, only waits for one who will drive the clamps home — and that one was he.

A few days before the Dragon-Boat Festival, Ma the Fourth, who ferried the crossing, caught him at the landing and lowered his voice: 'Uncle Nine, take fewer jobs from the Zhou household. That life-settling jar of theirs — night after night as I ferry I hear water moving inside, like a lad slapping the jar's wall. A crack like that is not for the living to take.' Fan Jiu only laughed then, saying if the living could not take it, would the dead? Ma the Fourth shook his head and said no more.

That year, just past the Dragon-Boat Festival, the river rose in its peach-blossom flood, the waves slapping the town's stone steps till they rattled. Widow Zhou came to his door, her little daughter behind her, a blue-and-white soul-jar in her arms. The jar was the size of a palm, its glaze dulled, the mouth sealed with a layer of tung-oiled hemp, and over the hemp three coats of red clay. Widow Zhou said her son Shuishui had gone to the river for snails three years before and never come back. No bone was recovered; only one straw sandal was found on the bank, and by old custom they raised a grave of his clothes and set this jar to gather his soul. For two years all was well; this spring, the jar cracked of itself.

'Not knocked, not dropped,' Widow Zhou set the jar on Fan Jiu's bench, her voice trembling. 'At night I heard it weep, like wind leaking through a tile-crack. Next day there was a line, from the jar's bottom to its mouth, and black water seeping. I pressed cloth to it, could not stop it. Master, I beg you to clamp it shut — let it leak more and my house is finished.' She said Shuishui was her only shoot, her single thread in ten widowed years; the day he drowned she had shouted from the bank, but the waves were too great and took him, snails and all, not even a hem recovered. Her little daughter leaned against her knee, too young to understand, only fixing Fan Jiu's blackened fingers with bright dark eyes, reaching to touch. Widow Zhou caught the child's hand, as if afraid the black breath might cling.

Fan Jiu took the jar; his palm sank. The crack was truly strange — looked close, it was alive, the line not straight but winding, like the shadow of riverbed weeds cast on the water's face, faintly, still moving. He ran a thumb along it and his fingertip went tight with cold, the chill climbing his nail-clefts as if he touched a stele freshly raised from a grave. His heart lurched; he wanted to set the jar back, but Widow Zhou had already knelt, and the little daughter knelt too, her forehead knocking the flagstone with a dull sound.

In the end he took the job.

The work went slow. First he dipped lamp-wick in warm water and washed the loose mud from inside and out of the crack, and only then saw the black water was no mud but something thick, clinging to the porcelain like a film of oil, smelling of rotten reed-root from the riverbed. Matching the seam was hardest: the soul-jar broken in two would, when closed, always fall short by a thread, as if something were wedged in the gap, refusing to yield. Fan Jiu added three parts of force and heard a very faint 'click' within the porcelain — like something pinched till it hurt. His hand twitched, the bit nearly slipped, cold sweat down his temple. He thought of his master's prohibition against mending soul-jars, yet his palm was already held by that cold, could not withdraw.

His master had said: a soul-jar cracks not in the porcelain but because the soul within wishes to come out. Clamp it dead, and the soul seeks elsewhere to leak. Fan Jiu had not believed it then; now he believed seven parts of it. He gritted his teeth, fixed seven points along the crack's sides, struck the hammer seven times, and seven copper clamps bit tight in turn. As the last was driven in, the jar gave a great shudder, and the cold shot from his thumb-web straight into his elbow, so he shivered and nearly dropped the hammer. The clamping done, the black water truly ceased. Widow Zhou thanked him a thousand times, left half a string of coppers, and carried the jar away looking back at every third step. Fan Jiu stared at his own thumb-web, where a very faint red mark lay, like a line drawn by an unseen thread.

That night, having put the work away, he combed the clamp-scraps from his bench with lamp-wick as was his habit, and rubbed the black stain from his nail-clefts with a damp cloth three times over, yet the cold would not scrub off. He poured himself a bowl of warm wine to press down the unease at his heart, and joked with Old He the watchman next door, saying the Zhou jar was but an ordinary crack, taken hold of in a trice. After Old He left, he watched the man's retreating back a long while, and suddenly felt that back's edge too seemed split with a seam; he blinked, and it was smooth again. He took it for the lamplight's failing, shook his head and smiled — but before that smile reached the floor, the cold had already climbed his spine.

That very night Fan Jiu fell ill. Not with fever, but with cold, seeping outward from the marrow of his bones, three quilts unable to help. He dug out strong liquor and poured it down, but the wine in his stomach was like water thrown on ice, raising no warmth at all. Stranger still, his right hand that held the drill grew a fine line at the thumb-web, red and bright, yet cool to the touch, and the line's course was exactly that of the soul-jar's. He held a lamp to it and saw a point of black congealed in the line — the riverbed oil he could not wash clean that day. He tried to pick it out with a needle, could not; the black had taken root, sunk into the flesh.

After that, strange things came one upon another. His diamond drill rang of itself at night, the bowstring moved without wind, drawing a fine 'creak' from the silence, like someone crouched at his ear grinding teeth. The little hammer he used for drilling split a seam in its wooden haft, and from the seam oozed the same black water; he bound it with cloth, and layer upon layer stayed wet. The tabby cat he kept, which used to love sleeping against him, now arched its back and shrank from his hand, walking round his feet as if he wore a scent it did not know. Worst were the dreams: from his chest always came a ticking, one beat and another, plainly the echo of a drop falling into an empty jar — yet he opened his eyes to a room bone-dry, even the teapot emptied to its base. Once he rose to pour tea and the pot's water was murky black; he bent to smell it — that very rotten reed-root stink, though he had plainly filled it with clear water the night before.

His shadow changed too. Under the lamp, the shadow he cast on the wall no longer had a clean edge, but split into many fine serrations, like a piece of porcelain about to break. He shifted his place and the shadow split with him. Only then did he fear — a broken vessel has him to mend it; a broken man, who comes to mend?

He dared not keep the lamp lit long to look at that shadow; at night he moved the oil-lamp to the corner and slept with his back turned. But closing his eyes was worse — every vessel in the room sounded; the iron sheeting of the bellows and furnace sang a thin note in the stillness, and the chest of clamps too seemed to shuffle in its bed, like someone picking clamps. Once he could not help but lift the chest: the many-colored copper clamps lay in order, only one missing, and though he turned the pole over he could not find it — yet in the small hours he felt that missing clamp pressed to his heart, cold and hard against the flesh. He started up in fright; the clamp was gone again, leaving only a black mark on his chest, joined in a line with the one on his wrist.

He went to ask the old Taoist at the town's end. The Taoist felt his wrist, his face changing color again and again, and in the end spoke but one line: 'Uncle Nine, what you clamped was no jar, but a gap. Clamp the gap to the jar, and when the jar cannot hold it, it clamps onto you.' Fan Jiu urgently asked how to undo it. The Taoist sighed: 'By the old custom of Jiangyou, the bone-less drowned are gathered by a soul-jar; when the jar cracks the soul leaks — this is called the leaking of the born. The craftsman who clamps it by the common method finds the leak traveling down his hand onto his own body; the world calls it the "living-clamped vessel" — you have become the new jar that holds the gap. The deader you drive the clamps, the deeper it bores into your bone-clefts.' So saying he pressed a yellow talisman on him, bidding him sleep with it over his heart, and taught him to mix cinnabar with realgar and paint the line on his hand.

He pasted the talisman three nights; the ticking lessened somewhat, yet when the cinnabar was painted on, the line was like a live snake, swelling outward at the heat, and black water seeped from beneath the cinnabar, soaking the talisman through. He tried glutinous rice paste, tried searing with raw-iron filings — nothing but reversed; the line not only failed to close but crawled out two more, one up the forearm, one around the wrist-bone, like the ice-crack of a glaze opening. The old Taoist came to look and shook his head: 'It cannot be undone. It has known your hand, and so it knows you. All these years you have clamped how many vessels — every seam has borne your sweat; following your hand, it long ago rooted itself in the work of your half-life.'

Unwilling, Fan Jiu slipped that night to Widow Zhou's house, and while the household slept lifted the blue-and-white jar from its altar. He remembered his master's words: a soul-jar cracks because the soul within wishes to come out — then let him draw these seven clamps and set it free to the river, better than clamping it dead within himself. He gripped the first copper clamp with pincers and had but exerted force when a most muffled sound came from within the jar, like a bubble bursting in a cavity, and black water burst from the clamp-hole, spattering his sleeves. He would draw the second, but his fingertips seemed soldered to the pincer, would not loosen. In the deadlock the tung-oiled hemp sealing the mouth came loose of itself, and a stink of rotten reed-root rushed at his face; his eyes went black, he staggered and sat, and when he looked up the jar stood properly in its place, all seven clamps intact, as if what passed had been only a nightmare.

The Taoist said further: 'The calamity of the living-clamped vessel is recorded of old. A previous dynasty's notes tell of a craftsman who clamped a leaking-born jar; after three months his whole body turned to porcelain, and combing his hair at dawn he shed a floor of porcelain shards, yet lived, only he could no longer drink hot broth, for at a sip smoke rose from his seams. Though this is a tale of the strange, the principle accords — having held the gap, you share one body with it.'

Only then did he truly understand his master's words. The thing in the soul-jar had never been willing to rest. He drove seven clamps to press it back into the jar; the jar held it, yet the thing had known the hand that drove the clamps. Following the drill-bit, following the hammer-haft, following the fresh crack at his thumb-web, it had moved bit by bit onto his body. Now he was the new jar, the old crack. Shuishui, three years un-settled, his grievance long steeped swollen, wanted not a palm-sized blue-and-white jar but a body that could walk and breathe and stand once more at the river's edge. Fan Jiu's old bones, clefted every way, suited it exactly.

He turned over and over his master's phrase, 'a gap opened for the living,' and at last understood its meaning — all his life he had clamped the cracks of half the town; those cracks should have stayed upon each family's vessels, but were gathered and claimed by his two hands, and all flowed into this one body of his. He had not clamped porcelain; he had clamped the whole town's leaking into himself.

On the seventh night after the Dragon-Boat Festival the rain fell without end. Fan Jiu dreamed he stood at the river's heart, water to his chin, and from the opposite side floated a blue-and-white jar, its mouth opening toward him, and within sat a naked boy of some seven or eight years, his face white and transparent, asking: 'Uncle Nine, you nailed me inside; I cannot breathe. Let me out, just for a while, just to stand at the river's edge.' Fan Jiu started awake to find his pillow-cloth wet — not sweat, but cold, and bending to smell it, that rotten reed-root stink.

He could sit no longer. Before dawn he took up his pole and groped through the dark to the grave of clothes by the river where Shuishui rested. The grass before the grave had grown so thick it nearly buried the stone. He set the soul-jar straight, took out seven new clamps, and thought to clamp the line on his own wrist in the same fashion — to drive the thing back from his body into the jar.

But the drill-bit had scarce touched the line on his wrist when he heard a 'crack' in his heart, fiercer than the jar's shudder that night. He saw the ice-crack on his forearm spreading at a visible pace, from wrist-bone to elbow, from elbow to shoulder, and beneath the skin the black water raised fine close bubbles. He understood suddenly: to clamp it back was impossible. He had clamped more than one jar — all these years, clamping bowls and jars for half the town, every clamp had passed his hand, every seam had borne his sweat. Those cracks he had 'suppressed' had never truly closed, only shifted place, and now all returned, gathered in the clefts of his one frame.

He was still dazed when footsteps sounded behind. He turned: it was Li's wife, hugging a cracked bowl he had clamped the month before, her eyes straight and blank, a smile on her face, yet her feet stepped in the water unaware. Seeing Fan Jiu she said in a husky voice: 'Uncle Nine, I went to the river's heart last night too; the lad took my hand — cold. He said the bowl was your clamping, and bade me thank you for him.' Fan Jiu went cold through; he reached to snatch the bowl, and a former clamp on its rim suddenly burst open, black water spattering his hand's back, and at once a new line.

Then came Old Woman Zhao, hugging her pickled-vessel jar that he had clamped, her look wooden, saying water had sounded in the jar last night; she lifted the lid and found it empty, yet heard a lad laughing at the jar's bottom. After her, Young Sun, whose mended broken urn at night ran water of itself, flooding the floor, and in the water-stain floated fine porcelain grit, as if someone ground something within. One after another they came, all who had taken clamped vessels from Fan Jiu's hand, and now the gap had come to each of their doors.

Granny Wu who sold tofu used his clamped bean-vat; the soy within turned green overnight, and those who drank it dreamed each night of groping for snails at the river's bottom. Ma the Fourth the ferryman, whose mended boat-floor after rain always pooled a patch of black water, in which fine glints moved, like someone with eyes open. All had taken vessels from Fan Jiu's hand, and now the gaps within those vessels had opened onto their bodies.

Even Master Shen, who kept the herb-shop at the town's east end, came — the blue-and-white jar in which he kept medicines, clamped by Fan Jiu last year, had in recent days grown a layer of white furry mold in the seam at its bottom, and bent close one heard a faint breath. Master Shen said that at night, as the mold swelled and flattened, he too could not catch his breath, as if someone blew through his lungs from beyond the porcelain. And a schoolboy brought the inkstone Fan Jiu had clamped, saying the water in its pool stirred of itself and reflected not the master's face but the back of a naked boy's head. Hearing this, Fan Jiu felt the line on his wrist burn a degree hotter — the households he had clamped were more even than he remembered, and vessel after vessel queued to pass what they held within onto the living.

The news spread through the town; everyone turned out the clamped vessels in their homes to look, yet under which one was there not a little black pooled, a little cold congealed? None dared go to Fan Jiu to clamp again, and none dared smash those vessels either — smash them, and the gap fell into the smasher's hand. So they stood there, seeping and leaking day by day, like a well beneath the town that could never be mended.

Only then did Fan Jiu see clear — what he would clamp back was far more than a single line. The hundreds of vessels he had handled these years, each had become an eye of the leaking-born. The denser he clamped, the more the eyes; and now this leak, following his hand, had seeped into the bowl-bottoms, jar-bottoms, urn-bottoms of half the town.

The old Taoist too came, propping an oil-paper umbrella, and stood by the grave to watch him. 'Uncle Nine,' the Taoist sighed, 'your body now is Tongdu's life-settling jar. Hundreds of mouths in the town, the leaking in their fates all gathered by you; hold it and they rest; fail to hold it and it all flows out from your bone-clefts at once.' Fan Jiu looked up; through the rain-curtain the Taoist's shadow too was cleft, no different from his own. He suddenly understood: this was no calamity of his alone — he had borne the town's cracks for thirty years, and now the reckoning had come.

He sat before the grave, drenched through by the rain. The river water rose and roared at his feet, and the cold bored into his cracks from every side. He struggled no more, but laid his hands open on his knees and watched the lines bloom in his palms, one flower and another, like ice-blossoms under glaze. In the distance the lamps of Tongdu lit one by one, and he suddenly remembered that tomorrow still waited the Zhao family's cracked jar, the Sun family's broken urn, for him to clamp. He could still clamp. Only henceforth every vessel he clamped would inevitably seep from its seam a little cold, a little black, a little of that rotten reed-root stink from the riverbed. Those who ate from those bowls would hear a ticking rise unbidden in their chests by night; those who hugged those pickle-jars would hear someone laughing softly at the jar's bottom; those who used those urns for water would find fine porcelain grit floating on the surface. They would all walk in dreams to the river's heart and see a white-faced boy ask across the water: let me out, to stand a while.

Fan Jiu did not return to open his shop in town. Some said he had moved upriver to Mist Creek; some said he drowned in that year's flood. Only the old Taoist knew he still lived, living as a vessel that had been clamped — its cracks held, but its soul not held, and something within, following his hand of many years, had leaked into the bowl-bottoms of half the town, past gathering. Henceforth, when the folk of Tongdu saw a clamp on a bowl's rim seep black water, they knew: that was Uncle Nine's hand, clamping once more for someone the gap of the leaking-born.

Midnight Records note: The craft of crack-mending, of old ranked among the 'nine fine trades,' uses the diamond drill to bore and copper or iron clamps to mend broken vessels, taking the omen of broken-yet-rejoined as auspicious. Yet by the old custom of Jiangyou, the bone-less drowned are mostly gathered by a soul-jar; when the jar cracks the soul leaks, commonly called the 'leaking of the born.' If the craftsman clamps it by the common method, there are many tales of the affliction of 'bearing the leak for the jar' — the whole body rises in ice-crack lines, cold seeping to the bone-clefts, the world calling it the 'living-clamped vessel.' Of old by the Boyang Lake there was a saying: 'Without a steady hand, do not clamp the leaking-born's pot.' This account of Fan Jiu is recorded from the oral telling of Tongdu's old Taoist, and many townsfolk bear witness; though its truth cannot be fully established, the intent to warn the craftsman suffices as law for those after.