The Paper Horse

Baiguo Ferry stands on the You River. Where the current reaches this stretch, it suddenly widens and sinks, its water the color of ink stirred in. Every year at the Ghost Festival, what floats up the river is not lanterns but stacks of paper, white and yellow, pushed along by the waves, as if someone below the water were holding a funeral without end.

Jian Jiu is the ferry's last maker of paper horses. When his master died, he became the only man in all of Baiguo Ferry who could still carve a pearwood block. His shop sits wedged between the dye house and the coffin maker's; the front is narrow, but the back runs deep and damp. Along the wall a row of pearwood printing blocks stands upright like a shelf of books left open. The blocks bear spirit steeds, strongmen, soul-guides, and small likenesses of the city god and the local earth god—all of it the ferry folk call paper horses. By old custom, on the seventh day after a death the family must come to Jian Jiu and buy a stack, to be burned at the crossroads, said to furnish the dead with traveling strength for the road to the underworld. A soul without that strength cannot walk the yellow springs, and so it soaks in the You River, and in time becomes one of those wet, nameless things that drift at the ferry. Thus the people of Baiguo would sooner skip a meal than skimp on the seventh-day paper horses.

A paper horse is not pasted together; it is printed. Jian Jiu first carves the design backwards into the pearwood—a crescent blade, and the wood must be wild pear, fine-grained, unwilling to drink the grit. Once carved, he mixes soot-ink with cinnabar, spreads it with a palmetto brush, lays on the coarse yellow paper, rubs, presses, lifts: and the horse lives. A horse, a strongman, the features no more than a few cuts—yet the vital stroke is the dotting of the horse's eye. Into the cinnabar at the brush tip he must mix a drop of blood from the pad of his own finger. He says a horse without eyes cannot walk, and if the eye holds no warmth of the living, it cannot bear the cold of the dead. Forty years of this have left his right index finger calloused to the first joint, the cinnabar seeped into the whorls, dark-red as a scab that never heals. Each time he dots an eye he first pricks that scab with a needle; blood mingles with years of cinnabar and falls on the eye, and the horse gains its strength. The townsfolk think the red is only cinnabar; they do not know half of it is himself.

The seventh-day work Jian Jiu did all his life without a misstep. Yet early on he noticed a thing he could tell no one. Whenever a household lost someone new, after a few days the face of some strongman or guide on one of his blocks would quietly become that person's, faint, as if water had seeped into the wood. At first he took it for grain drinking deep of the ink; only when it happened often did he note the pattern: every face that appeared was someone lost at the river, in the water. He dared not speak of it, only moved those blocks to the innermost dark shelf, pretending not to see. But the blocks do not honor dark shelves; the faces kept growing. Once, unable to hold it in, he asked a wandering Taoist who passed through Baiguo Ferry. The Taoist studied those blocks a long while in silence, then said: the paper-horse maker's gravest taboo is to dot the eye onto himself. Mix living blood into cinnabar and dot too often, and the block takes a master; after that what it summons is not the guest but the craftsman. Jian Jiu then took it for priestly frightening, and laughed it off. Now he remembered: he could no longer recall the Taoist's face, only that the man's index finger, too, bore a dark-red scab.

Seven days before the Ghost Festival, Wei Shi came. Her son A He had drowned in the You River three years before—that day the timber raft broke its ropes upstream and the boy was gone. No body was recovered, not even his clothes; Wei Shi had nowhere to weep and could only pile an empty grave by the river. She begged Jian Jiu to print a soul-summoning horse—not the ordinary beast of traveling strength, but a forbidden thing that opens a short road and draws a drowned soul up from the riverbed back to the ferry, that his mother might look upon him once more. Only a Taoist at a rite may print such a horse; a common craftsman who touches it summons never only one, often dragging up the wrong floating soul from elsewhere as well. Jian Jiu would not take it. Wei Shi knelt. She said A He visited her every Ghost Festival in dreams, saying he could not reach the shore, his feet empty, no horse to meet him, and the paper horses his mother burned could not bear him and all drifted away.

At those words Jian Jiu's hand loosened. He thought of another matter twenty years past. He had been young then, in this same shop. A woman surnamed Huang came carrying her drowned daughter—a girl of seven, fallen into the You and drowned. Huang too begged for a soul-summoning horse, also on her knees, saying she would die content if only the child could be drawn back for one look. Fearing the taboo, fearing the entanglement, he refused in the end, and palmed her off with an ordinary stack of paper horses, saying it was enough, that burning them would surely draw the child back. Huang believed him and left weeping. The girl was never drawn back. Later the most clinging water-ghost in the You, who every year pulled people under to furnish itself strength, was said by all to be that unsummoned wronged soul. No one knew it was that one refusal that left the girl a thing in the water. Jian Jiu, in the nights, would think of it sometimes and call it fate, and never dare look deeper.

Before him Wei Shi knelt, and with the Huang woman of old she became one shadow. He took the work.

He pulled out an old soul-summoning block. It had borne a soul-guide, lantern in hand, leading the way. He leaned close to the oil lamp, and his heart dropped—the guide's face had become, he knew not when, the likeness of A He, faintly there, as if soaked in the wood a long while, even the boy's youth still on it. He reached out to touch; the wood was flat, yet the face was plainly there. He understood then: the block had long since printed for him the one it would summon; he was only to lay the final drop of blood and finish the road.

On the eve of the Ghost Festival, at the hour of midnight, Jian Jiu went with Wei Shi to the landing on the You. The wind was cold, the water-smell wrapped in rotting grass. By the old method he pulled a soul-summoning horse, dotted its eye with his own blood, and Wei Shi burned it at the water's edge. The fire rose; the paper curled, and the horse's body stood up in the flames as if truly about to bear something, its four hooves treading the air, inching toward the heart of the river. The wind pressed down from the water, damp and cold, flattening the flame to the ground. The paper spent, the fire died, and at the edge of the water only the waves remained. Wei Shi kept watch the whole night; A He did not come. Near dawn Jian Jiu said: the soul-summoning horse has opened the road, but what comes may not be A He—the water-road chooses its own. Wei Shi understood nothing, took it for failure, and went home weeping.

That night he returned to the shop and lit the oil lamp, and with one look saw the row of blocks along the wall. Every paper-horse block he had ever carved now bore, in the place of the god's face, the same single person. Not a faint shadow, but clear—even the cinnabar scab on his index finger, even the creases at his eyes, were cut in. He passed his hand block by block, from the oldest city god to last month's new strongman: every face was Jian Jiu's. Then he understood. Forty years of dotting eyes—what he had dripped into the blocks was not the warmth to lead the dead, but himself, seeped little by little into every block, every paper horse. The strength the horses bore had always been his own living breath; and at the far end of the underworld road a horse had long been prepared for him, saddle empty, waiting for him to dot the final eye and mount.

He suddenly recalled the drowned of Baiguo Ferry over these years. A He; Huang's girl; Old Zhou who fell from the timber raft; Sister Sun who slipped into the water washing clothes—one by one, all said to be floating souls lacking traveling strength, unable to reach shore. But how were they lacking strength—beneath their feet the paper horses had always borne Jian Jiu's breath, and it was he who pulled them back, pressed them down into the water. Every stack he sold had, in the You River, held a soul for him, that his own horse might gather its strength. Those years he had taken for a craftsman's wear: growing colder each year, more forgetful, his shadow thinner—when all along his strength had been borrowed away, lent to the road of the dead.

On the night of the Ghost Festival Jian Jiu sat alone in the shop, lamp unlit, only listening. From the direction of the You came the sound of hooves. Not a real horse, but paper, climbing the waves onto shore, one step, then another, damp and light, as if someone beneath the water were turning a stack of wet paper. He pushed the door open; at the landing a field of paper horses floated, pushed by the waves, each bearing the drowned souls of the ferry's years, all turned to look at his shop. A He rode the first; Huang's girl the second; Old Zhou, Sister Sun, in a row—all the unsummoned of the town. The last horse had an empty saddle, its eye dotted with cinnabar, exactly the drop he had laid the night before. The horse lifted its head, and he saw himself seated squarely in the saddle, the scab on his index finger dark-red, smiling at him.

He stepped back inside and blew out the lamp. Yet the room filled with the smell of wet paper and river water that would not disperse, as if water were seeping in beneath the door. Outside, the hoofbeats reached the step—one, then another—treading the broken tiles, from the east end to the west, exactly the few paces he walked in the shop by day. He felt for that soul-summoning block; his face on it was now wholly carved, lacking only the final cut—the horse's eye. He understood at last: the final cut had always been his own to make. Dot it, and the soul-summoning horse knows its master, the rider takes his place, and no other need summon him, no other stack need be awaited. He gripped the block; the scab at his fingertip grew warm again, and beyond the door came a whinny, like someone calling his name backwards, again and again, calling him out, to mount.

Note of the Midnight Record: what the paper-horse maker dots with his blood is never the dead man's road, but his own homeward one. Year after year the You floats its paper, and what floats is never traveling strength for the dead, but the saddle the living have prepared for themselves. Every stack you burn holds a soul for you in the water, against the day your own horse comes, saddle empty, to receive you.