The Grave-Master

Zhou Shen had spent his whole life burying the dead, and the one thing he relied on was a single "earth-eye." Not the gilded eye painted on a geomancer's compass, but the eye in his own right socket. His left eye had gone blind long ago—they said it happened when he was young, following his master onto the unmarked mass graves and running afoul of a malignant spirit; black blood had sealed the white shut, and the doctor who came to look said there was nothing to be done. He lost the light in it for good. Yet with only the right eye left, his sight grew keener than it had ever been with two. He could lie flat on rain-soaked mud, press half his face to the ground, close his eyes, and smell out which stretch of earth was loose, which was packed hard, which hid a subterranean stream running beneath, which concealed a termites' nest, which covered a coffin sunk years before and only now beginning to rot. He said the skin of the earth obeyed the same logic as human skin: it had pulses, it had hollows, it had places that should be left soft and places that should be kept tight. Bury a coffin where it was soft, and the descendants would sleep in peace, untroubled by dreams; break ground where it was tight, and within three to five years someone in the family would weep—if not the line cut off, then madness. For thirty years, eight or nine of every ten people who died in these parts had gone into the ground through his hands, and the slopes he had planted were genuinely tranquil; even the wild dogs that habitually dug up graves gave those ridges a wide berth, as if they too could smell which sleepers rested easy and which lay resentful. His master had told him that eye was bought with his life—the deeper he saw, the thinner his own sleep grew, until in old age he heard the drop of a single pin at his pillow. He said the feeling was like pressing an ear to a man's chest: you heard the slow breathing of the earth below, and sometimes, you heard something else. He had learned early that the earth did not lie the way people did: a man could smile and hide a grudge, but the soil only ever told what was true, if you put your face close enough to listen. The villagers called him, behind his back, "Master Zhou the Burier," never to his face, for fear of offending whatever he held taboo; but he cared nothing for the name, only for whether the one beneath the soil was sleeping soundly.

Around his left wrist he kept a strip of bleached, tattered cloth, and beneath it a scar the size of a copper coin, darker than the skin around it. He had earned it damping the grave for the Zhao family at the east end of the village, when water seeping from the coffin had scalded him. The water was unnaturally cold, yet where it splashed his flesh it raised blisters, and took half a year to close. He spoke little of himself. The villagers took him for a queer old loner; he had a son who worked in the county town and came home once or twice a year, and of the grandchildren, only one—his granddaughter A He—would regularly make the climb up the mountain to see him. A He was seventeen, thin and slight, with her grandmother's eyes, and she loved to squat in the yard and watch him brush layer after layer of tung oil onto a coffin. A freshly planed cedar coffin, he would dip the bristle brush in raw tung oil and stroke it on, even and bright, and the bitter, sharp scent could drift half a mile on the air. A He said, Grandpa, the way you brush the coffin is like coaxing a child who won't go to sleep. He never took offense. He only said, A coffin is worth more than a person. A person makes do alive; dead, he can't be made to do with less.

He rarely went out, keeping to the earthen courtyard halfway up the mountain, where planed cedar boards lay curing year-round, the wood-smell and the earth-smell mingling in a scent he had long grown used to. The coffins were made to order: when a family had a death they came for measurements, and he would take the body's length, saw, plane, join, then lay on the tung oil coat by coat. His hands were coarse, the knuckles swollen like the knotted roots of an old tree, yet for fine work they were steady—when the lid was set in place there was not the slightest sound, as if he feared disturbing the one inside. He said a coffin was the last house a person ever lived in, and a house should be built quiet. When A He was little she would do her homework sprawled on the boards, saying Grandpa's coffins were flatter than the desks at school. She would fall asleep from the effort and wake with the grain of the wood pressed into her cheek; he would lift the brush and deliberately go lighter, afraid of waking her. The boards held the warmth of the afternoon sun and smelled of new wood and bitter oil, and in those hours the courtyard felt, for a moment, like a home and not a workshop for the dead. The villagers both respected him and feared him. What they respected was that the families he buried all prospered; what they feared was that single eye of his, which when it looked at a person seemed to see straight through the clothes to the bone.

The craft had to be upheld, year in, year out. The year Wang Laosi's father died in the floods of early spring, the whole village urged burying him beneath the old locust on the east slope, calling it a blessed plot handed down through generations. Zhou Shen went to look. He pressed his face to the earth a long while, then rose and shook his head: beneath the root on the east end ran a hidden spring; it looked dry, but one good rain and it would rise, and within three years the coffin would float, and the descendants would be wiped out. He pointed to a low hollow at the foot of the west slope, saying, Here—the earth is solid, the water will go around. The Wangs agreed, doubtful but compliant. That year at the Dragon Boat Festival the mountain truly flooded; the east slope washed away three old graves, their coffins floating down with the mud into the fields, while the spot he had chosen stayed bone dry, not even a crack in the surface. After that, for miles around, any family with a death came first to ask Zhou Shen's eye. The families he buried did indeed stay peaceful afterward—some gained sons, some grew prosperous, and not a single uncanny thing befell them. He thereby earned little money, but won a name for "burials that rest in peace," enough to buy him thin wine for half a lifetime. He took no pride in the coins he might have earned; what he cared for was the quiet that followed a burial done right, the way a household would stop seeing the one they had lost in every shadow.

Of the graveyard on the back hill, Zhou Shen could have named every mound with his eyes shut—whose old patriarch liked the high slope, whose young wife was laid beneath the willow for the shade. Only the one beneath the crooked willow on the west slope he never mentioned in front of anyone. It was a cenotaph, no tablet, only a heap of earth man-high, and every year around the Qingming festival the soil pushed itself upward, as if something underneath were shoving, until the mound grew rounder day by day. When others asked, he would say a passing merchant had died on the road, nameless, his luggage empty, and pitying the man's lonely ghost with no place to rest, he had gathered the few clothes the merchant left behind and buried them, as something to remember him by. That was the story he told—and for many years he had believed it himself.

The first year, he hadn't noticed the place moving at all. The night he buried it, a sudden rain came; he heard the water rushing on the back hill through the window and thought the stones would hold, and slept. But when he went up the next Qingming to hang paper, he found the three stones had sunk, and the earth stood a finger higher than before, as if someone had rolled over in their sleep during the night. He cursed the wild dogs and reset the stones. The third year, a thin crack opened between the stones, and wet mud oozed from it; leaning close, he caught a stuffy, earthy stench laced with something sweet he couldn't name. His heart gave a lurch; he said nothing, and took the long way around after that. From then on he deliberately avoided the west slope on every trip up the mountain, as if afraid the mound might recognize him. He squatted to touch it: the soil was warm. Qingming had only just passed, and the other graves were still giving off a chill, yet this one alone felt as if someone had just been warming it under the covers. He told himself it was the sun, or the season, but he knew that even in spring the ground did not hold a living heat, and the knowledge sat in his stomach like a swallowed stone.

Yet a doubt he could never undo remained lodged in him. A cenotaph is an empty grave—a few old garments at most, weighed with stones, and the earth can only settle lower year by year; there is no reason it should swell upward on its own. Yet this mound on the west slope swelled every single year. On the night before Qingming, if a thorough rain had fallen, by the next day a fine crack would surely split the top of the heap, and from it would rise a wet, fishy smell, laced with that same indefinable sweetness, as if someone below had just turned over and rumpled the bedding. He had taken a hoe up to press it down twice; he smoothed the loose earth flat, and the next spring it swelled again, higher than before, the crack wider. So he stopped going, and let it grow. The villagers saw even the grave-master leave it alone, and no one dared touch it; the mound grew rounder with every passing year, and from afar it truly looked like the belly of a woman with child.

One Qingming, a peddler resting at the foot of the slope caught sight of the heap and said offhand, This grave looks like it's breathing. Zhou Shen heard him and said nothing; that night his right eye ached for half the night. He turned to look at the mound, and it did seem to rise and fall faintly, a corner of wet earth lifted by the wind, pulsing in and out. A few years later, the willow's creeping roots reached the foot of the mound; afraid the roots would burrow in and disturb the "guest," he took a knife to clear them, and the moment the blade touched the soil he heard a faint "hiss" from within, like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. He dropped the knife in fright and never went near again. When A He was smaller, only seven or eight, she had asked too: Grandpa, that grave with no name—don't we burn paper for it? He had fooled her, saying, That's an outsider's; it's not our family's. The child believed him and ran off to chase butterflies. He stood where he was and watched the mound cast a long shadow in the setting sun, the tip of that shadow pointing straight at his own courtyard gate, and an unexplained shiver ran through him. He walked that shadow’s length home with the feeling that something beneath the soil had marked his door, and slept poorly for many nights after.

His son, Zhou Mutou—A He's father—had asked about it once too, as a boy. Ten-some years old, following him to tend the graves, he pointed at the west slope and said, Dad, that one with no tablet, don't we kowtow to it? Zhou Shen hadn't lifted his eyes then, saying, An outsider's guest; no relation. The boy believed him, grew up, went to the city, and never asked again. Sometimes he thought that lie had deceived his son, had deceived the unasked question on Liu Shi's lips as she died, had deceived even himself—but it could not deceive a mound of earth. A lie told to men could hold for a lifetime; a lie told to the ground was heard at once, and answered.

The first time A He asked about that grave in earnest was last Qingming. She hung a bamboo basket on her arm and followed behind burning paper money, then suddenly stopped and stared, spellbound, at the freshly swelled earth on the west slope. She said, Grandpa, did you really see the person in that grave? Zhou Shen said he had, a man in grey cloth, carrying a shoulder-pole, a stranger. A He asked again, Then did you give him a name? He said no name, a nameless guest, no tablet to be set. A He fell silent and squatted to dig at the soil with her hands, pulling out a corner of rain-soaked cloth, grey and dusty, its original color long gone. She lifted it to her nose and sniffed, then looked up suddenly and said, Grandpa, this cloth smells of blood. Zhou Shen went white in the face, snatched it from her, shoved it back into the earth and tamped it down with his foot; his expression changed and changed again, his lips trembling, but in the end he did not scold her. On the way back down the mountain that day, for the first time, he felt a throbbing pain in his right eye, as if a needle had driven straight from the socket into his brain, and he had to lean on a tree and gasp for a long while.

These past two years his body had grown heavy, and he had to rest three times climbing a slope, so he began to think the craft must pass to someone. His son had made a home in the city and would not return; the only one he could count on was A He. He taught her to read earth, to read pulses, to read where softness hid water and where hardness pressed down a resentment. The girl was quick and learned at once—only the mound on the west slope he never brought her near. Not that he begrudged the teaching, but that he feared her clean eyes might see the panic he had hidden for thirty years. He had begun, without meaning to, to watch her more closely, as if measuring how much of the truth a girl her age could be made to carry.

Qingming came early this year, and the rain was thick. A He came again, this time bringing a new hoe, polished bright, saying, Grandpa, teach me to read the earth-eye; I've always wanted to know what's buried under that grave. Zhou Shen meant to put her off with a few words, but the girl was stubborn, squatting under the eaves and refusing to leave, while outside the rain clattered on the tiles. The string he had kept taut for thirty years suddenly went slack in his chest. He said, When the rain stops tomorrow, I'll take you up to see. But he knew in his heart that what he would dig tomorrow was no lesson for her—it was himself going down to ask a question of the lie he had told himself half a lifetime.

That night he tossed and could not sleep. In the main room stood a newly made cedar coffin, waiting for the Li family from town to come for it; the tung-oil smell was bitterly thick, mingling with the rain's dampness and burrowing up his nostrils until his head swelled and ached. He gazed at the dark coffin and remembered the first time, young, he had learned to read the earth from his master, who had stepped over the broken porcelain and rotten tiles of the mass graves and said, Shen boy, the earth-eye never reads earth—it reads the human heart; what lies buried beneath the soil is always what the living could not bear to let go. He had taken it then for mystic talk, but now at nearly seventy he slowly tasted its bitterness. What lay beneath that empty grave on the west slope he had always taken for someone else's clothes—yet A He's one sniff of blood had pinned him fast to a rainy night thirty years gone, and he could not move. The smell of blood on that cloth had been faint, almost gone, yet it had reached him across thirty years as if the night were yesterday, and his body remembered the cold of it before his mind did.

Liu Shi, in life, had been a weaver, her fingers fine and deft; the spinning wheel hummed when it turned, like a drowsy bee. She was frail of body but always smiling, and said that when the child came, if it were a boy they would call him A Liu—"stay"—and if a girl, A He, because rice shoots are easy to raise. She had said it with her hand on the round of her belly, smiling as if the child could already hear. because rice shoots are easy to raise. She had secretly sewn a tiny pair of tiger-head shoes and hidden them under the bedding; once he turned them up and she snatched them back, red-faced, saying, Don't you touch—a man's breath on them and they won't work. Those shoes he never saw again, probably rotted away with her in the passing years. What she left him was only that grey, dusty old apron cloth—the one she had tied on for cooking, its corners gone to fuzz, which she couldn't bear to throw away and had folded at the bottom of the chest. He never imagined that the cloth which would finally wrap their child's body was this one. A faint mole sat between her brows, and when she smiled the mole seemed to move with her; even now, eyes closed, he could still trace its place.

That night he had not yet lost the left eye; both were bright. Liu Shi, seven months with child, was seized in the middle of the night by a pain in the belly, and blood soaked through the mattress, through to the straw mat, dark red, bleeding the shape of a person. He groped his way out in the dark to fetch the midwife three miles off; panic turned his legs to water and he pitched headfirst into a drainage ditch, mud and water flooding his mouth, and by the time he struggled up and reached home, the child had already fallen onto the straw paper—small, barely larger than his palm, never making a sound, the body still soft, the eyes unopened. He had seen, in the lamplight, the small perfect fingers, and looked away before he could count them. The oil lamp in the room flickered in the wind, throwing that spot of dark red on the paper into light; he squatted down, his hand hanging in the air, wanting to touch and not daring, only feeling that warmth travel from his fingertips into his bones, so cold it set his teeth chattering. The cold of that room stayed in his bones long after, and every winter since he had felt it return, exact and punctual as a clock striking the hour of that night. Liu Shi's voice was hoarse, her breath a thread, saying, Bury it, bury it tonight, don't let anyone know—our family can't bear such ill luck, our name matters. He took an old grey cloth and wrapped that blood-smeared bundle in it, then in the night groped his way to the west slope of the back hill, dug a shallow pit by moonlight, and buried cloth and child together, setting three stones on top for fear the wild dogs would dig. He came back and told Liu Shi, Buried, a stillborn, no name, no tablet; we'll still walk straight afterward. Liu Shi closed her eyes, and the tears ran down her temples into her hair. Her body was afterward utterly spent; two years later, on a spring night of rain like this one, she coughed up blood and died, still clutching in her hand a corner of that old grey cloth she had never gotten to return to him. That night he held her and heard her last, slurred word, which sounded like she was calling a child. He answered nothing, only held her tighter, and the word—if word it was—went down with her into the ground and was not spoken again in that house.

After that, the house never spoke of that rainy night again. Liu Shi locked the remaining corner of that grey cloth at the bottom of the chest, and he pretended not to see. The two of them, as if by agreement, held one thing in a silence until it went mute. But what went mute was not the matter—only the voice; and every Qingming after, that faint sound from the west slope spoke for them, pushing up out of the ground, word by word, all that had gone unspoken.

Yet he remembered clearly: the pit dug that night was too shallow, the earth too thin, and afraid it wouldn't pack, he had gone to the slope for more stones. He remembered his hands shaking badly; remembered the rain on his face, unable to tell rain from tears; remembered that when the earth was filled back, his fingertip brushed the corner of the cloth, and the cloth was warm, and the thing it wrapped was warm too, as if it still couldn't bear to go cold. He remembered even more keenly the lightness in his chest when, the next day, he spun the tale of the "passing merchant's clothes" to the village—the relief of having called his own child someone else's guest, of having given his own flesh a name that meant "no name."

At dawn the rain stopped and the mist broke. He took A He up the west slope. The mound stood a notch higher than last year, the old crack still split at its top, and from it fresh earth crumbs had pushed out, damp, carrying a warmth he could not dissolve against his finger. A He lunged to do it herself; he held her back and took the hoe. The first stroke went in, and the earth was strangely loose, as if something beneath had long since hollowed it out. The second stroke, the blade met cloth with a soft thud—that same grey, dusty corner A He had dug out last year. He knelt, threw the hoe aside, and scooped the earth out handful by handful, until he pulled free a ball of rain-soaked old grey cloth. What it wrapped was no garment at all, but a small clump of earth and cloth-fluff gone shapeless and hard-with-damp, tangled so you could not tell one from the other; and deeper in, his fingertip suddenly touched something tiny and round and hard, cold through and through, like a bone that had never properly grown, soft still at the tip. A scent impossibly faint, like years-old milk turned to ferment, crept from the seam of the cloth; his nose stung and he nearly toppled into the pit. He knelt in the mud, unable to rise for a long moment; A He at his side dared not make a sound, only offered her sleeve to wipe his hands, and what was on those hands he could not tell—mud, or rain, or some other hot thing. He pressed the sleeve to his face and breathed it in, and for one terrible moment he thought he knew exactly what that heat was, and why it had never left the cloth.

Suddenly it all came back to him. Not a merchant—his child. Liu Shi's, his. The one he had never given a name, never in his heart truly acknowledged, the one who should have been called A Liu, or A He. He had rather believe it was someone else's clothes than admit it was his own flesh, because to admit it he would have had to weep, would have had to confess that the fall into the ditch had lost him a son, had collapsed every hope Liu Shi would ever hold after. For thirty years he had sealed the matter tight with those three words, "nameless guest," and deceived even himself.

A He squatted beside him and watched him tremble as he tucked the cloth back into the pit, and said softly, Grandpa, what this cloth wraps—it's family, isn't it? Zhou Shen did not answer. He buried the cloth again, but this time set no stones. He gathered the loose earth back, handful by handful, and halfway through, he suddenly heard from beneath the soil a sound impossibly faint, like something pushing, or like a child pressing a small hand flat against the wall of earth, once, and once more, slowly, trying to reach the surface. His hands stopped. He had heard that sound for thirty years and always taken it for rain, for wind, for insects turning in the soil.

He dared not gather any more. Slowly he rose and stepped back two paces, and gazed at the mound. The Qingming sun was white and glaring, lighting the grave that grew taller every year beneath the crooked willow. He suddenly understood what A He had meant by "like a woman with child"—not that the grave resembled a belly, but that what was inside it had never stopped growing, year after year, inch by inch, climbing toward the earth above, wanting to reach the light, to reach the living man's feet, to reach a name someone was willing to call it.

On the way back to the village, A He held the cuff of his sleeve and asked in a small voice, Grandpa, will that grave keep growing? He said, It will. A He said, Then shall we come every year and press it flat? He shook his head and said, Don't press it. It can't be flattened. A He didn't understand; she looked up at him, and he offered no further explanation. Only in the sleepless nights after did he remember that faint sound from the west slope, and remember the time he had pressed his right eye to the earth and smelled, clearly, not the stench of soil but the faintest, faintest scent of milk—like the warmth off a newborn's body, drifting from beneath the earth straight to his face, impossible to brush away. It was the smell he had last known on the night Liu Shi’s child was born and died, and he had spent thirty years pretending he no longer recognized it.

Now and then he would climb up in the dead of night, no lantern, and squat by the mound, pressing his right eye to the earth to hear that sound beneath, one and one again, slow enough to set the heart racing. Once he finally opened his mouth and, very softly, called "A Liu"—the name Liu Shi had wanted for their son. The name spoken, the mound gave no answer; it swelled a thread higher instead, as if it had heard, and would not stop. He understood then that the naming had not freed it but woken it, and that it had been listening all along. Then he understood that some things are not settled by being named; what it wanted was never a name, but someone willing to take it, truly and completely, up out of the earth. He sometimes thought that in his life he had buried miles of white bone, and it was this empty grave alone that had buried him. Yet he was old now and could not lift it; and the only one in the world willing to lift it was A He. He had not dared tell her outright, but only taught her: every Qingming, come stand before this mound, even if you do not kowtow, so the one beneath knows there is someone above who remembers. He did not tell her that he himself could no longer climb the slope without the earth seeming to lean toward him, warm and patient, waiting for the name that had been denied it.

Later, when the villagers still asked him as usual about the cenotaph on the west slope, he answered as before: a nameless guest, only clothes, nothing worth the telling. No one knew that each time he gave that answer, his right eye would ache for no reason, as if the small hand in the earth had crept up again to scratch at his eyelid, once and once more, as if begging for the name it should have had.

Editor's note: A cenotaph holds no clothes; an empty grave swells with new earth each year because the unborn begs the living for a name. The grave-master can bury miles of white bone, yet cannot bury the single handful he could never bear to acknowledge. The earth-eye sees three fathoms down through the soil, but can never see through that thin layer of the human heart.