The Shouzhuo Brush Shop

Yanxi Town sat by the water, and the third house from the lane's mouth was the Shouzhuo Brush Shop. Han Shouzhuo had spent his life making Hu brushes, and his hands knew more than his eyes. Whether a brush would live or fail was decided at the water basin: sorting the hairs, evening the tips, knotting, mounting -- and above all the choosing, when stray hairs were plucked one by one until only the true tip remained. The trade spoke of four virtues in a brush: a sharp point, an even base, a round belly, a resilient spring. Han had handled ten thousand strands and could tell goat-hair's softness, weasel-hair's sinew, rabbit-hair's stiffness with his eyes shut.

Late that autumn a young scholar came to town. He gave his name as Liu and said he lived south of the river and had lately lost his wife. The lady, he said, was a poet; she had walked into the pond behind the house and drowned. From a plain cloth he unwrapped a lock of hair and asked Master Han to make a brush from his dead wife's hair, so that her unfinished poems might at last be continued. He spoke with grief, yet his hands were steady -- steadier than a widower's ought to be.

Han took the lock to the basin and saw at once: the strands were too fine and too even, like a girl's first growth; the ends were cut clean, not fallen. If the lady had drowned, her hair should have been wet, soft, and tangled -- not this neat, dry order. Doubt woke in him, but his face gave nothing away. He only said the work was slow and would take a week.

He made the brush as always, yet into its heart he secretly twisted a single grey hair of his own -- his private mark, a habit of many years. Every brush that left his bench carried one old hair of his; no one could see it, but he knew it by weight and by opening the head. And in his work ledger he wrote: such a day, a Mr. Liu, a brush from a dead wife's hair, its weight, the silver paid, and a sample of the surplus hair kept.

Half a month later two constables came to the west of town to investigate a drowning. Downstream they had pulled a young woman from the south-river Liu household -- a maid who had run, who was with child, and who had been sunk in the pond. About her waist was tied a slender brush, and on its shaft were carved the two words: Shouzhuo.

Han asked for the brush and opened its head. There was his grey strand. He turned to the ledger, took out the saved sample, and laid the two side by side: the grain matched. The lock Mr. Liu had brought as his 'dead wife's hair' was plainly this drowned maid's. There had been no poet wife at all.

He did not go to confront Liu. The next morning Han handed the ledger, the packet of saved hair, and the opened brush to the constables, with one sentence only: this brush left my hand, the grey strand in its heart is my mark, the man I know, and beyond that I will not speak.

The constables went south to the Liu house. Word came back that the family had indeed lost a maid, reported only as runaway; the young master had come to make a brush of her hair, partly for keepsake, partly to hide the truth. Once uncovered, the matter cost him the rod and some years behind walls.

Han returned to his bench and trimmed a weasel-hair brush, again and again. He remembered Liu's words -- to continue a dead wife's poems. A brush can carry a person's words, but not the darkness under their heart. He made brushes; right and wrong were other men's affairs. Yet from that day he kept his ledger more faithfully, and against every brush he set down one more line.