The Mourner

She went by the surname Shen. The young men in town called her Old Crying Woman Shen; the older folk addressed her as Mistress Shen, though there was always something else tucked into that address — everyone in town knew she had never once worn mourning for her own family. When an elder in some household breathed his last and the filial sons and grandsons could not squeeze out a single tear, they would send a man with a paper lantern to knock at her door, pressing into her hands three sheets of spirit paper and two strings of coppers, saying only, "If you would, Old Shen, come weep a while before the hall." She never refused. She rose, pulled on that graying mourning robe — its collar and cuffs frayed to a soft down — soaked a square of coarse cloth in cool water and draped it over her wrist, and followed the guide toward the mourning hall.

She had seen more mourning halls than she could count. Cross the threshold and the first thing to hit the face was the scorched reek of burning spirit money, mixed with incense ash and the smell of old timber, pressing heavy on the chest. White funeral banners hung; candle flames jumped; the wails of the bereaved, some true, some false, and she could tell the portions at a single hearing. When they lifted the banner, she would sink to her knees on the straw mat and begin with a muffled "ai—" drawn up from the very depths of her lungs, then let the tone turn and draw out the long lament. She could not read; her dirges were all gathered from the mouths of the living, and she could compose on the spot to match the family's face — what virtues the dead had accrued, what filial failures the sons concealed. When the feeling took her she wept in earnest; the tears were not feigned but the fruit of years of practice — a furrow of the brow and the water came. The family, hearing it, felt their face was saved, felt the rites were whole, and slipped a few more coppers into the paper packet. She took them, kowtowed, rose, and the robe gained another layer of ash.

The rites of a funeral she knew by heart. The mourning shed was raised in the courtyard, ringed with reed matting, a spirit tablet set within and white lanterns hung without. The long hours of the death-watch were the cruelest — the hall was damp with cold, the straw mat wet enough to wring out water, and after kneeling long her knees ached and her legs were numb when she rose. Yet she never complained; rather she felt the cold was her due — one who weeps for the dead should keep the dead company in their chill. The spirit paper was fed sheet by sheet into the brazier, the tongues of fire licking those thin leaves printed with coins, curling, blackening, turning to ash, and that scorched smell worked into her clothes and would not wash out, however many times she tried. She always carried that smell on her; the townsfolk, catching it from afar, knew Old Crying Woman Shen had come.

She wept a lifetime of other people's kin. The year Old Master Wang at the east end of town passed, she wept three full days until her voice broke and could make no sound; the family, fearing she had wept herself sick, forced a bowl of sugar water on her to moisten the throat, saying, "Old Shen's crying is dearer than a true daughter's." When the young mistress of the Zhao house at the west end died in childbirth, Shen wept from behind the curtain for the unborn child, and wept the Zhao kin into their own sobs, even stilling the newborn orphan with her crying. In good years she worked seven or eight funerals a month; the paper ash on her robe would not wash out, layer upon layer, white gone gray, gray gone yellow, and worn on the body it hung heavy, as though wrapped in all those years of frost.

Hired weeping had not always been hers alone in the town. Years earlier there had been a man who specialized in breaking the mourning bowl and leading the way, until he ran afoul of the law and went to prison, and no one took up the trade after. Among the women, she had worked it longest, and most truly. Others could not learn that grief of hers which seemed to seep from the bone, and said she was born under an ill of death. She only smiled to hear it, but she knew the truth: it was no fate — it was her own mourning, year upon year, wept away into other people's halls until it was gone.

Once, a household in the south of town held a funeral for an unmarried daughter, and the father wept bent at the waist, snot and tears together, grief unmistakably real. Shen knelt at his side to lend her crying, yet her eyes kept sliding toward that father — for the first time in her life she envied a man for weeping without decorum. Walking home she thought: that girl, at least, was cherished, had someone hoarse with weeping for her; her own, not even a decent breath had anyone drawn for her. The town's folk had always used her and nothing more — not kin, not neighbor, only a thing that could weep and be bought with coppers. At weddings and funerals she sat at the lowest seat; no one put food in her bowl, no one asked if she was warm or cold, and when it ended she cleared the dishes herself. She had long grown used to it; only in the deep of night, sitting alone, would she wonder now and then: how many souls willing to weep for you does a life require, to count as having been lived? She could not answer.

Yet she herself was a woman without issue.

Years before, she too had had a daughter. That was the great famine, when the river would not recede and the fields yielded no grain; her husband's family begrudged another mouth and begrudged all the more the untimely birth — a child gotten from a passing peddler who had importuned her, and the family counted it a stain on their name. On the seventh day after the child was born, her mother-in-law thrust the swaddled bundle into her arms and said, "You weigh the face of the Shen house yourself," then turned and left. She held that soft, warm weight and sat through the night in the kitchen, the child pressed to her breast, tiny fingers clutching the lapel of her jacket and not letting go.

She had given the child a name in secret. The husband's family would not put her in the clan register, so in her heart she called her A-yun — yun, the little white flower of the fields that blooms even in bitter cold. She hummed to the swaddled bundle and folded the two syllables into the tune, thinking that if times eased she might keep her. But that hope was thinner than spring ice. The mother-in-law's eyes grew heavier by the day, the rice jar shallower, and she knew: this child would not stay.

Those seven days she boiled what little rice she could steal into a thin gruel and spooned it, mouthful by mouthful, into the child. The child ate little, and mostly only lay with eyes open, watching her, as if to fix her face in memory. At night she held the swaddled bundle to her breast and hummed that tune, her fingers stroking again and again the soft fuzz of the infant's brow. It was not that she never thought of fleeing with the child — but a woman with an illegitimate infant, where could she flee to? Her own family had long disowned her; the husband's house was her sky, and when the sky fell she could only fall with it. She pressed her face to the child's crown, breathing in that milky scent, and thought: enough — one more spoonful, one more hum, that was all she could give.

At dawn the mother-in-law came again, this time carrying an empty rice jar, her eyes colder than its bottom, and said, "Either you go, or she goes." She was young then, and afraid, and hungry, and more afraid still of being cast off back to her own family with not even scraps to eat.

She remembered the river that day. Her mother-in-law led her to an eddy upriver and said to put the child in, the water was shallow, it would not suffer. She knelt on the shoal with the child in her arms; the early-spring water was still bone-bitter, and the infant's small face had gone blue-purple, yet the eyes were open, watching her. She hummed a lullaby, and her hands loosened. When the water climbed past the child's chin, those eyes still watched her, no crying, as if they had known all along.

The wind that day came slanting off the river, rank with its smell, and set her eyelids trembling. She remembered the child's little fingers twitching at the last, as if to grasp at something, but her hands had already loosened in the water. For many years after, half-waking she would see that small hand bobbing in the black water, grasping and grasping, never catching the hem of her jacket. Each time she started awake she would clench her hand in the quilt, as if that could hold something fast — yet all she held was emptiness.

She wept first, wept until the reeds on the shoal trembled — but that weeping, unlike any at a funeral, had no one to hear it, no one to press coppers into her hand, no banner lifted for her. The child was never given a name. The mother-in-law returned to the village saying only, "The bastard sank," and forbade the mention of it ever after. Shen married again later, and widowed again, and her lap stayed empty. Only deep in the night did she sometimes dream the sound of that eddy, and wake to a wet pillow, unable to say if it was sweat or tears.

She grew old. Past seventy, most of her teeth were gone and her throat felt stuffed with bran, the lament not as bright as before, yet the families still came, loyal to old habit, still inviting her. But she felt it herself — the wrongness. Her body grew lighter by the day, as if someone were drawing her out from within. She began to fear: that one day she would slip away without a sound, and the hall before her would be cold and empty, not a single soul to shed a tear for her. She thought of the old folk she had wept for, every one of them surrounded by sons and grandsons, banners white across the hall — and only she, when her own day came, would likely not even have a thin coffin shouldered to the grave.

She had not failed to try to save for her own funeral. A job of weeping earned no more than a few strings of cash, and she put aside most of it, hiding it in a tin box beneath the stove brick. But that little could not outlast bad harvests and sickness — today a handful for medicine, tomorrow a handful to live through famine, until at last only a few rust-eaten coppers lay at the bottom, light as her whole life in her palm. She sighed and pushed the box back under the brick — enough; if no one shouldered it, let it rot in the earth; someone below the hall, after all, remembered her.

She burned paper for the child in secret, a few times. At midnight she would light a stack of spirit paper at the stove mouth, murmuring, "Child, your mother sends you money" — yet the flames leapt and the paper burned faster than elsewhere, the ash falling on the back of her hand and scalding her into a start. She always felt the money never arrived — a child under the water could not receive the things of the living world. She once asked someone to set three sticks of incense at the bank of the eddy, but the incense would not light, blown out by the slightest wind, as if that place would not suffer her offering. So she went no more, and pressed the matter to the deepest part of her heart, like a waterlogged brick, heavy, cold, immovable.

So she took up a habit. Each time she came back from a funeral, in the deep hush of night, she would clear a patch of floor in her own hall, light two white candles, shake out that mourning robe and put it on, and practice weeping before the empty hall. No spirit tablet, no family — she wept for her own ears, and the words changed from "filial sons and grandsons" to "lonely ghost," "a corpse none will claim," "a wrong with no name." The empty hall was large; the moment she opened her mouth the lament struck the four walls and came back ringing, as if several people wept at once, or as if someone lay beneath the floor and took her sound and returned it, muffled, welling up. That returned sound was thicker than hers, with a watery note, as if it held a mouthful of river it had not swallowed.

The first few times she thought nothing of it. Weeping alone in the empty hall was her own private business; an echo louder or softer, she put down to an old house and hollow beams. But as the days passed, that returned sound slowly took a shape — no longer merely the shadow of her voice, but a tune of its own, boring up out of the seam of the stone. Sometimes she deliberately paused a beat, and the sound would hang in the air, waiting for her to rise again before it fell, as if afraid to steal her measure, or as if keeping her company on purpose. She began to count: the first time she felt it wrong was some moonless night in the eighth month; by the ninth the sound had drawn near, near enough that she could hear within it the noise of a small child sniffling; and come the tenth month, whenever she went in to practice she would first glance at that flagstone, as if beneath it crouched an invisible listener waiting for her to begin.

One night she could not hold back, and softly called the name A-yun toward that flagstone. The moment the words left her mouth she regretted them, yet from below there was not a stir — even the returned weeping fell silent, and the hall was so still she heard her own heartbeat. She waited a long while before raising another cry, and only then did the sound slowly take it up, though with more of a choke than before, as if pricked by that one name. Suddenly she understood: the child below the floor was not without a name — it was she, the mother, who had never dared acknowledge it. Withhold it she did, and the child remained forever a wrong with no name.

After that, whenever she called A-yun, the one below would answer. Not with weeping, but with a very faint sound, like an assent — "mm." The first time she heard that "mm," the candle nearly dropped from her hand. She understood then: the child did not want her penance, only her acknowledgment — and that one word was worth more than a thousand white banners at a thousand funerals. Yet her tongue knotted, and the phrase "your mother acknowledges you" stuck in her throat, could never be spoken clean, always dissolving into a choke at the lips. The sound below did not press her; it only returned the tune again and again, as if to say: no hurry, think it over, I will wait — I have waited this many years already.

At first she took it for an echo. But an echo has no breath of its own. That returned sound always met her at the turn of her breath — when she paused it paused, when she rose it rose, exact to the beat, as if someone below the hall were mimicking her. Once she deliberately changed the tune, pressing the lament low and hoarse like an old bellows, and the sound followed low and hoarse, even catching her cracked note, trembling at the tail. The sweat on her back went cold all at once; the robe was already damp and now clung to her skin like a second hide, the chill creeping down her spine. She dared not make a sound, but quietly moved the candle nearer and, by its light, looked at the flagstone at her feet — the seam was dry, nothing there.

Once she steeled herself and, mid-lament, suddenly fell silent. The hall died to stillness; the candle flames held; even the insects outside the window fell quiet. She held her breath and waited, for she knew not how long, and then the sound rose again — not from her throat, but from beneath the earth, seeping up from under the central flagstone of the hall, little by little. It was a girl-child's weeping, thin and high, with the smell of river water in it, and the tune was exactly the one she had just sung. Her knees gave; she sank onto the straw mat, grass stalks pricking her knees, and she felt no pain. She thought of the eddy, of that blue-purple infant face, of those eyes that watched without weeping. Trembling, she asked, "You… what is your name?" No answer from below, only the weeping passed up again, nearer than before, near as if it crouched right in the seam of the stone, by her ear. She leaned close to listen; words were folded into the weeping, blurred, impossible to make out, but when the tail drew long she heard it — the lullaby she had hummed to that child, not one note wrong.

She collapsed entirely. At last she understood: all these years she had wept for a thousand, mourned for ten thousand, weeping other people's kin — and this one alone she had never wept for, never given a name, never lifted a banner for in any hall. The child had never been acknowledged as her bone and blood, never written into the family register, never wept for by anyone, and so had come herself to answer the weeping in the empty hall, returning that tune to her again and again, asking: Mother, when will you weep for me at last?

That question turned thirty years of her mourning robe to water. She understood suddenly that not one of the thousands of laments she had wept had been truly for the dead — they were only the living buying themselves a face, and she, paid, had lent out her grief to perform for others' eyes. This one lament alone had no coppers, no family, no onlookers; the dead came themselves to collect — to collect a mother's weeping, to collect a name. Only now did she know that the mourning she most owed in all her life had never been at any funeral, but behind the banner she had never lifted for herself.

She opened her mouth to answer, to acknowledge, to make up the banner decades late. But her throat clenched and no sound came. The weeping below stopped too. A white candle went out with a soft pop, and half the hall went dark; the lone remaining flame jumped. She groped to light it, struck the flint several times before it caught, and looked down again at the flagstone — and from its seam water was seeping, cool and clammy, spreading a small dark patch across the stone, exactly like the river on the day at the eddy. She reached to touch it; her fingertip went cold, and the water was gone, the stone dry and smooth, as if she had only imagined it.

She dared not weep again for the rest of the night. She took off the robe and folded it neat, but the hem too was stained with water, damp to the touch, smelling of river mud, mixed with the scorch of spirit paper. She held the robe and sat on the hall's threshold until first light, listening to the first cock's crow outside, and somewhere inside her a hollow opened, and the wind passed through it, cold to the bone. She thought perhaps it was not water but the sweat of her own fear — yet the tune she remembered clear as day, the one she had sung only to that child.

From that night on she no longer wept alone in her practice. Sometimes she deliberately sang another tune, other lament-words, yet the sound below would always find the melody again, stubborn as if afraid she might forget. So she let it be: night after night before the empty hall, the mother hummed a line and the one below answered it, an old voice and a young entangled, and it seemed more a true funeral than any she had wept for pay. Only this funeral had no guests, no offerings — only a child who would not leave and no one willing to take her in, and a daughter who dared at last, in old age, to listen.

Once the neighbor's wife got up in the middle of the night and heard weeping from Old Shen's hall; through the window lattice she saw the candle shadows swaying, yet only the old woman was on her knees. The wife told it as idle gossip the next day, and the town took it for another job Shen had taken on, no one thinking deeper. But Shen knew: that night she had plainly not opened her mouth — it was the one below who had begun it for her. She even felt a loosening in her chest — if even another had heard it, then she was not losing her mind. Only she would rather keep the sound to herself; and listening long, it came to seem the empty hall had all along been meant to have a child keeping it company, and that a little noise was only less empty than silence.

The days after, she went on weeping at other people's funerals as before. The families praised her, said she only grew more moving with age, that her crying could hook the grievance out of a man's belly. She only smiled, and the smile held a bitterness only she understood. She knew that when her own day came the hall before her would likely still be empty — no one to lift the banner for her, no one to press coppers, no one to shed a single true tear — for in all her life she had not kept half a soul willing to weep for her. Yet now she was not afraid, but felt instead a dread that was almost, strangely, a kind of settling. She knew someone waited below the hall, and that thin, high weeping with the river's smell would fill the empty hall for her. Only that weeping asked of her, not of the family; and what it filled was not face but a debt she could not repay in this life. Each time she practiced before the empty hall, the sound came to meet hers — and what it met was the one cry owed across decades. Sometimes she wondered: when she truly went, would the child still come? Would she reach from the seam of the stone those blue-purple little hands, and lift the white banner for her, and with that tune weep a funeral no one would hear?

Often afterward she thought her mourning robe would likely be left for that child to wear. When she closed her eyes, no one would change her into grave clothes, no one would light the soul-leading lamp for her — only the sound below the hall would come, and piece by piece complete the filial rites she had left undone. She was not afraid of dying; she only feared the child's second question — Mother, did you ever love me? That one she could not answer even at death, because the water of that shoal had drowned her small share of love along with everything else.

Once she asked the sound, "Do you hate your mother?" From below there was no answer for a long while, so long she thought she had asked wrongly. Then the tune rose again, slower than usual, as if weighing its words. As the tail fell she made out a phrase folded into the weeping, very faint — something like, "Not hate. Only cold." She thought suddenly of the river at the eddy that day; the water had indeed been cold, cold enough to blue the child's small face. So the child did not hate her, only the water — and yet it was she who had put the child into that water. This one turn she could not get around, not even at death.

From then on the smell of river mud never left her. Not on the robe — it came out of her own skin, could not be washed or dried away. The townsfolk, catching it, took it for the ill luck of funerals and stepped two paces clear of her. She did not mind; she even found the smell good, as if the child stood pressed to her, a hand on her shoulder, saying nothing, keeping her company through the days that remained.

She dared not think further. Outside, day broke; she hung that damp robe on a bamboo pole to dry, and the wind came and the hem fluttered, like someone standing before the hall. She looked back once at the empty hall; the flagstone lay quiet, saying nothing. But she knew that when the night deepened, when the candles died, when she opened her mouth again, the sound below the hall would answer.

Note of the Midnight Record: The old custom of the town: the hired mourner weeps for the face of the living, not the grievance of the dead. Old Shen wept a lifetime, and owed only the one cry beneath the hall. The child under the water remembers no name, bears no surname, remembers only that tune — and at its first note she comes to answer. Men say a ghost comes for a debt; I say she comes for a mother's single word: acknowledged.