The Bucket at the Bottom of the Well
The old well at the west end of town ran dry, revealing a worn wooden bucket at its bottom. The village head asks Lao Mu, a barrel-hooper with forty years of skill, to descend and re-hoop it. When the bucket is pulled up, it brims with black water that should not be there, bearing the silver bangle of a girl who fell into the well three years before. Lao Mu re-tightens every hoop in his own shop that night—but by dawn, the water at the well is moving again.
Lao Mu had been making buckets for forty years. When a family in town had a newborn to bathe, they came for his cedar tub. When they needed a fat-bellied crock for pickling, or a slop pail for a funeral, they came to him. His craft was solid, and so was his temper; he would not work with the wrong wood, and if a measurement strayed by so much as a finger's width he started over.
That autumn, after two rainless months, the old well at the west end of town ran dry. The mud at its bottom cracked into a tortoise shell, and someone—no one remembered who—first noticed a worn wooden bucket showing at the lip, its mouth turned to the sky like an open mouth.
The village head came for Lao Mu. The well was to be cleaned, he said, and the bucket must come up first; would Lao Mu re-hoop it while he was down there. "Down there it is damp. A bucket loses its hoops and it falls apart the moment you lift it." The head offered a cigarette; Lao Mu did not take it, only tucked it behind the man's ear, shouldered his kit, and left.
A few idlers gathered at the well's edge. Lao Mu tied the rope around his waist and stepped down the footholds cut into the stone wall. The well was not deep—a little over thirty feet—but the lower he went, the colder it got, cold enough to raise the hairs on his neck. At the bottom he crouched to look at the bucket.
It was old cedar, the staves gone grey from long soaking, the iron hoop rusted fast, one band loose. He tapped the seams; hollow, nothing in it. But the instant his fingertips met the rim, something turned in his chest—this mouth was narrower than a bathing tub, deeper than a rice bin, shaped as if to hold a person.
Lao Mu did not traffic in fancies. His was honest work, done by hand. He worked the loose hoop free and fitted a new one, then drew his flint from his bosom and heated the prepared iron band against the wall—the hooper's trick was all in the timing: heat the band to a dull red, slip it on hot, dash it with cold water, and the shrinking iron bites the wood. He moved cleanly; the bucket clinched with a crack and did not budge.
"Haul!" he called up. They pulled; the bucket left the mud. But the rope went heavy in a way that was wrong—the bucket felt empty, yet moments before he had heard a gulp from inside it, as if water had poured in.
When they drew it up, the men leaned close. The bucket did hold a pool of water, black and still, and on its face floated a silver bangle, bright from much wear, engraved with a small lotus. The crowd went quiet for a breath. Lao Mu knew that lotus—three years back, the Zhao girl who fell in the well had worn just such a bracelet.
No one would touch the water. The head had the bucket set by the well to wait on the elders' word. Lao Mu gathered his kit and glanced back once. The bucket sat quiet, yet he could not shake the feeling that it was fuller than when he went down.
That night Lao Mu tossed in his shop. He remembered, when he was young, hooping a similar deep bucket, ordered by Coffin-shop Kang for something to "pickle." He asked nothing, delivered it, and the next day Kang paid him double, his face the color of ash. He had carried that silence in his belly for years.
He got up, lit the oil lamp, and one by one re-tightened the hoops on the tubs and pails he had used for decades. The wood under his hands was familiar; the sound of iron biting wood was one he had heard for forty years, yet tonight something rang hollow, as if behind the boards something answered, stroke for stroke, his hammer.
Near dawn he collapsed onto the bench, spent, and through a haze heard it—from the direction of the well, the sound of water. Not rain. The water in the bucket, turning.
He did not go out to look.
At first light someone came running: the bucket by the well was gone, leaving only a wet print on the ground, round, exactly the size of a bucket's bottom.
Lao Mu shouldered his kit, locked the shop door, and walked out of town. He said nothing of where. From then on no one saw him hoop a bucket in town again.
Years later, travelers passing the old well at the west end spoke of nights when they heard, from down in the shaft, a gulp and a gulp of water, as if someone, stroke by stroke, were dipping into a bucket no eye could see.