The Tide-Stilling Drum

Mist Creek Town sits by the water. The water breeds fog, and in the fog people drown every year. The townsfolk say something that listens lives beneath Mist Creek, choosing the rainy nights around the Dragon Boat Festival to drag people down, following their voices, following the sound of drums. In the Tide-Watching Pavilion at the town's mouth stands a great drum, kept for stilling the tides. Each year before the festival the town's last drum-maker, Old Peng, stretches fresh hide over it and drives in new pegs. When the drum sounds, Mist Creek's water grows tame by three parts—an old truth the people of Mist Creek have believed for over a hundred years.

Old Peng has stretched drums for fifty years. In the south, the craft keeps many old rules. He often told people that a drum is not a wooden tub but a mouth—once the sound leaves it, the gods hear, and the ghosts hear as well. His workshop took several kinds of work: the temple drum, thick-hide and deep of voice; the racing drum for the dragon boats, thin-hide and crisp; and most vital of all, the tide-stilling drum, raised in the pavilion to quiet the water. Before stretching it, a layer of tide-settling ash is laid in the drum's belly—ash from the burned hems of those who drowned through the years. When the drum sounds, the water souls that come following the noise are imprisoned inside it; the hide is changed every three years, and the old hide with its ash is sunk in the creek to release the souls. Old Peng said that tide-settling ash is the nest given to the souls; without it, the water ghosts who hear the drum and come find no place to rest, and follow the sound into the homes of the living.

He would not slight a single step of the craft. The drum frame must be old cedar, split into curved staves, boiled in tung oil, dried through, and bound into a barrel; the inner wall is left unplaned, its burrs left to bite the hide. The hide is the back leather of a yellow ox, first tanned, then soaked in lye to loosen the hair, stretched on a wooden rack and shade-dried, never in sunlight. The day of stretching must be a cloudless one without thunder, for the Thunder Lord loves to steal drums, and a drum stretched in rain will sound of itself thereafter. The hide is laid on the frame and pinned all around with bamboo pegs; as he drives them Peng recites an old phrase, to make the drum know its master. Two coats of raw lacquer follow, seven days of shade-drying, and only then may the drum be struck. Old Peng said the first three beats must be his own; no outsider may touch it first, or the drum mistakes its master and beats itself at night.

But the workshop kept one hard rule, cut by his master Peng the Elder into the wood of the drum rack: if the tide-stilling drum's hide cracks, it must never be patched—patch it, and the souls leak. Peng the Elder's words were that when the hide breaks, the souls imprisoned within leak out through the rift; patch it, and what leaks is not only the souls but the drum's own voice, so that thereafter the drum sounds of itself in the rain, sounding until the frame splits and sucks the drum-maker down with it. When Old Peng told this, his right thumb-mound would rub itself without thinking—there, in his youth, a drum cord had snapped as he strained the hide, leaving a scar still hard as a peg.

Peng the Elder, Old Peng's master, had come downstream from Wuzhou as a drum-maker, and in his youth he too broke the taboo of patching. That year a tide-stilling drum he had stretched was cracked open by a flood dragon; reluctant to waste the good hide, he secretly drove three pegs to mend it, and that very night dreamed of many small hands reaching from the creek to pull the drum cord. He moved the workshop to the mouth of Mist Creek by night, and cut into the drum rack the hard rule forbidding anyone to touch the word "patch." Later he took Old Peng as apprentice, and the first lesson was not stretching hide but listening to ash—if the tide-settling ash in a drum's belly knits itself into the shape of a small hand, it is called ash-bond, a sign the soul has not found rest; when met, the drum-maker must open the drum by night and sink hide and ash together in living water, to break its attachment.

After the Dragon Boat Festival, Mist Creek rained for half a month, and the water rose fierce. The town happened to have three funerals at once: at the Zhou household of west-end boatmen a seven-year-old grandson had drowned; at the widow Shen's to the east a tubercular husband was laid to rest; and at the Qin household at the foot of the back hill the old mistress had died in her sleep, a ripe passing. The mourning drums for all three were stretched by Old Peng, the pegs driven with his own hand, and he told each family: if the hide cracks, do not patch it; if it fails, have a new one made.

The first night, the Zhou mourning drum stood by the bier; no one touched it, yet the head filmed over with damp, and in the damp there rose a tiny handprint, fingers spread, as if to pat the drum. The Zhou daughter-in-law lit a lamp in fright and looked; the print was cool and clammy, would not brush away, and the small hand seemed to tap the head once, a muffled sound, like a child's laugh.

The second night, at the Shen widow's. The mourning drum rested in the main hall, and she dared not move it. Near dawn she rose and found ash seeping from beneath the drum's belly, crawling in a ring around its rim, a sharp pinch pointing out the door—toward the creek, and yet also toward the Tide-Watching Pavilion at the town's mouth. She said later the pinch of ash seemed to be listening for something far off, and as it listened it moved of itself. She chased it out, but the yard held only fog, and in the fog a very faint drumbeat, near then far.

The third night was the Qin household. The old mistress had died in ripe age and the drum rested steady, yet the little granddaughter woke crying at midnight, saying she heard someone practicing the drum beneath the stove—bum, bum, bum, soft, like coaxing a child to sleep. The adults went to look; the mourning drum was cold, and on its head floated a crooked little figure, head turned toward the pavilion, two ash arms reaching forward as if to grasp something. The little girl pointed at the drum and whispered that it was the one beating, and it had said it wanted to go home but could no longer find the way.

When the three tales spread, the older folk of the town paled. Ash that will not scatter but rises is called ash-bond in the trade, a sign the soul has not settled; yet three households bonding in a single night had not been seen on Mist Creek in twenty years. Old Peng listened, then leaned on the cane whose wood had once strained a drum cord, and went house to house to look at the drums. When he had seen them, he knocked his cane three times on the Zhou threshold and was silent a long while. He knew the shape of that rising ash—in fifty years he had heard of it only in his master's old stories, of a greedy drum-maker long ago who patched a drum for one who died by violence, and from the ash crawled such small hands, night after night, dragging the patcher down into the water.

Old Peng called the three families together and told them: under no circumstance patch the hide, and do not brush the ash; he would attend to it before the festival. But the Zhou daughter-in-law, fearing the small handprint would beat the drum at night and frighten the child, waited until Peng had gone and secretly took three iron nails to mend the crack in the mourning drum, thinking that if she sealed it tight it would fall silent. That night the drum did not stop—rather its muffled rumble turned to a clear bum-bum, beat after beat, knocking into her dreams. At dawn the Zhous found her kneeling toward the mourning drum, both hands pressed hard upon its head, the corners of her mouth curled as if smiling, yet her body long cold, and on the back of her hand a small handprint, fingers spread, the very same as the one she had seen the night before.

The town was truly frightened now. Old Peng hurried over, lifted the hide, and found the small hand knitted from the tide-settling ash had already crawled past the frame and was climbing up the Zhou daughter-in-law's hand toward her body. He opened the drum on the spot, sank hide and ash in Mist Creek, and that same night gathered the drum-ash from the other two households as well.

Back in his workshop, Old Peng took down his master's drum book. It was an old volume in a blue cloth cover, its pages made brittle by tung oil. Tucked in its last pages was a recipe, its ink gone brown, bearing the three characters for the Continued-Drum Formula, and beside it a line in small writing: this formula is forbidden; to patch is for the living to die in another's place, and the drum workshop bears the debt forever—written by the founder with his last hand. Old Peng's fingertips passed over that line, and suddenly he thought of Ling.

Ling was Old Peng's only daughter, born in the seventh month when the water chestnuts bloomed, named for them, and in life she loved nothing so much as beating the drum, able to find a tune by the age of three. Thirty years before, on that Dragon Boat Festival, Ling went with the boatmen to gather chestnuts on Mist Creek; the boat overturned and she was lost. Peng had taken over the workshop less than a year, and grief turned his head; behind his master's back he secretly added a strand of Ling's baby hair and the ash of her clothes to the tide-settling ash of that year's tide-stilling drum—he wanted to keep his daughter's voice inside the drum, and not let her go to the hills. The drum was stretched and raised in the pavilion; for the first three years only a muffled rumble was heard, but from the fourth year the creek's tide-sound mingled with a little girl's drumming tune, fine and thin, like Ling tapping for her father in the pavilion as a child. Night after night Peng crouched by the pavilion and saw a wisp of white breath rise from the drum head, and in the breath seemed a small figure reaching to be held, yet when he reached out the breath scattered. He broke the old rule of changing the hide every three years and kept that drum ten years, until its hide split of itself, and only then did he reluctantly sink it. But that strand of Ling's founding ash had long since been mixed into the tide-settling ash of every tide-stilling drum since.

When Peng the Elder learned of it he did not scold, only sighed half a breath and said: "The one you patched was never only her. The tide-stilling drum's lead is a net of sound; once you added to it, the net would not close, and all who drowned beneath Mist Creek follow the drum's voice back to the living, year after year. Every tide-stilling drum you have stretched carries the root of that strand of Ling; the old ash you could not bear to throw away has kept them all, one by one, inside the drum." Young then, Peng took it for an old man's scare and tucked the recipe into the book as a lesson noted, and in the end could not bear to burn it.

Now he understood. He gathered the drum-ash of the three households into an earthen jar and carried it back to the workshop, setting it before his master's drum rack. Strange to tell, when the ash reached the old cedar frame it burrowed of itself into the wood's seams, like returning home, and no amount of slapping would disperse it. Peng studied it by the lamp and saw at last that the tide-stilling drums he had stretched these years all carried the root of Ling's founding ash—yes, what he used each year was the leftover old ash from that one jar, and without knowing it he had kept the water ghosts of Mist Creek, one by one, inside the drum; and as the years deepened they learned this drum's voice and followed the sound to lodge, household by household.

On the night before the festival the fog came unusually thick, so thick the town's dogs stopped barking. Old Peng barred the workshop door from within, and carried out the drums stored through the years, all the drum formulas, and his master's rack, sinking them one by one into Mist Creek. The water bit cold into his hands; he took off his shoes and stepped into the creek until the water reached his waist. From his bosom he drew a palm-sized little drum—the very one Ling had beaten at three, its head seeped with the blood from the scar on his right thumb-mound—and he lit it. Not with fire, but with a very soft drumbeat: bum, bum, bum, traveling straight down into the riverbed, not scattering, like a pillar grown up out of the water.

He looked at the black creek surface and said: "Ling, your father is closing the net for you. All of you go back now; do not know this drum's voice anymore."

Mist Creek's water sounded through the night, as if countless people walked home along that beat, their footsteps fine and scattered, impossible to tell from water or from voice. Near dawn the sound ended, and Old Peng lay facedown in the water, and did not rise again. At daylight the townsfolk came to fish him out; he bore no wound, no mark, and in his hand he still clutched that little drum, its head soft, like a tiny hand.

Mist Creek Town has had no drum-maker since. After the three funerals, no one dared speak of the ash-bond. Yet every year, deep in the night of the Dragon Boat Festival, from the direction of the Tide-Watching Pavilion comes a very faint drumbeat—bum, bum, bum—lying upon the water's surface, like someone crouching in the waves, continuing that beat, the drum not yet finished. If the town's children ask where the drumming comes from, the adults cover their mouths and say only that the water ran high, the workshop flooded, and the wind struck the old drum into sound.

Subnote to the Midnight Record: The river towns of the south keep many drum-makers, and the tide-stilling line forbids above all a single word—patch. The old folk say, never mend a drum's hide, for to mend it is to leak the soul, and it lingers un-scatered in the living world. The matter of Old Peng recorded here the townspeople still will not speak of; they say only that in that year the water rose high, the workshop stood empty, and no one could stretch a drum anymore. Yet each Dragon Boat Festival the drumbeat above the creek still sounds at midnight, and we set it down to warn those who come after.