The Un-Dried Blue

Shen Dehai had run a dye house in Qingxi Town for forty years. Everyone called him Old Shen.

His dye house stood by the river, and a long rack for drying cloth stretched out beneath the eaves. At night, when the wind moved through it, the hanging lengths looked like a crowd of silent people. Old Shen worked the old way—indigo, safflower, gardenia—vat by vat, coaxing the color out slow. He was slow himself, and particular. If anyone tried to slip in cloth treated with chemical dye, he would usually only shake his head.

That autumn the rain would not stop, and the river rose and fell. One evening the sky pressed down grey, and a woman came carrying a bolt of white cloth. She wore mourning, a broad hat hiding her face, her age impossible to guess. She wanted a bolt dyed the blue of the river at night—deep, cold, sinking all the way to the bottom. Old Shen asked what it was for. She did not answer. She left the cloth, set down a silver coin, turned, and walked off along the river, never looking back.

Old Shen put that bolt into his largest indigo vat. The indigo he had fermented himself, soured just right, the water thick as a night that would not break. Three days, lift the cloth, rinse, hang it to dry. That was when the strange thing began to show.

The first night, Old Shen woke and saw the blue bolt hanging low and still—every other length fluttered in the wind, but this one hung dead-heavy, as if something were folded inside it. He went close and touched it; the cloth was wet, cold enough to sting, though it had dried through that very day. He supposed it was the night dew, and thought no more of it.

The second night was worse. The wind was strong, every bolt on the rack whipped about, but the blue one did not move at all, and its color had deepened by three shades, black-heavy, as though swallowing the light. His apprentice Afu was too frightened to sleep, saying a human shape seemed curled within the cloth. Old Shen scolded him for talking nonsense, yet he had seen it too—a rise in the cloth, a knee, a back.

Old Shen was not a man to believe in ghosts lightly. The next day he took the bolt down and laid it in the light to examine. Beneath the weave seeped something else, not indigo but a faint grey-brown, as if old bloodstain had soaked in and been covered by the blue. He remembered an old story the town elders told: more than ten years before, a woman of the Liu family had drowned in the river. Her family was poor; the white winding-cloth was never dyed, and she was rolled in it and sunk, with nowhere to belong. Some said that cloth still drifted at the river's bottom, unredeemed.

Afu urged him, "Old Shen, this cloth is cursed. Burn it, and soon."

Old Shen did not answer. He squatted by the vat and thought a long while, then said only, "The cloth asked for its color itself. That girl never wore a proper blue in her life, and even the cloth that wrapped her went down white. We will dye it through, and give her an ending."

He fired the pot again, made up the indigo full, and soaked the bolt a second time, harder than before—kneading, pressing, drying—for seven days running. On the seventh night, the blue bolt on the rack at last grew light; the wind moved it, and the color had settled into a calm deep blue, no longer black. Old Shen took it down, folded it neat, and alone at night walked to the eddy below the town, weighted it with stone, and let it sink slowly into the river.

On the way back, the rain had stopped. He looked over his shoulder; the river lay flat as a spread-out cloth—and at once he cut the thought short. That comparison was a bad one. He would not think it.

The next spring, along the eddy, in the cracks between stones, grew a blue grass he had never seen—narrow leaves, small flowers, the very color of the bolt he had dyed. No one in town knew it. Each time Old Shen crossed the river he would glance at it from afar, and say nothing.

He kept a corner of that bolt, folded at the bottom of his chest. Some nights he took it out and ran it through his fingers—cool, but quite dry.