The Echo by the Kiln

Three li west of Qingxi town, past an abandoned river levee, a low earthen slope holds three down-draft kilns. The locals call it the Zhou family kiln. Its keeper, Zhou Defa, is fifty-four, missing half the thumb on his left hand where a young man's fire once licked him. His hands at the wheel are steady, and when any household needs a jar or an urn, they come to him. Zhou keeps a hard rule. He will not fire vessels meant for the dead, he will not take work that comes knocking after dark, and he will not use clay from foreign ground. Earth has its own nature, he says, and to confuse it invites trouble. He has held that line for thirty years, and not even the village head could always bend it. Late that autumn, Qian Xiaokai, the young heir to the Qian winery, came to him. The boy was just past twenty, neatly dressed, smiling, yet beneath the smile lay an impatience he could not hide. The winery needed a pair of large wine jars for an aged vintage, to be collected within half a month, and the price ran thirty percent above the going rate. Qian said, patting the kiln's brick rim, that the clay was freshly dug beside the old cellar in their backyard, good old earth that drew out like silk, and that a master would know quality. Zhou bent, took a handful, and worked it between his fingers. The clay was blue-grey, flecked with fine crumbs that looked like fired, crumbled tile. When he wet it, a murky earthen smell rose, with a sweetness at the tail he could not place. Fine earth, and strange earth. He meant to refuse, but the village head had spoken for the family, and the Qians were the town's great patrons. After a long pause he nodded. They wedged the clay, threw the forms, and let the bodies dry. In little more than ten days the two great jars stood on the rack, round-bellied and narrow-mouthed, not yet glazed. A He, Zhou's apprentice, was fifteen or sixteen, quick but easily spooked. As he passed the clay he felt a cold breath rising off the pair at night, and when he asked, Zhou only said that there was an old thing trapped in the earth, and that fire would cleanse it. On loading day Zhou set the two jars alone at the heart of the kiln, ringed by coarse daily ware to shield the flame. They lit the fire in the afternoon. The first two firings went smooth; the third was for the pair. Through the early night the fire roared, orange light spilling from the mouth, kindling popping. Past midnight, A He, keeping watch, heard something wrong, not the sharp crack of splitting wood but a muffled thud, thud, from inside, as if something were knocking outward, one beat at a time. A He's scalp prickled and he ran to wake Zhou. Zhou dressed, pressed his ear to the kiln wall, and listened long. His face slowly darkened. In thirty years his old teacher had told him that when earth has touched the breath of the dead, the fire cannot hold it, and the kiln will cry. This was no bursting body. This was the earth struggling. A He asked whether they should open it. Zhou said, calm now, that they would not open it while the heat stood, and that at dawn, when it cooled, they would see. At first light, with the temperature barely settled, they lifted the kiln door. Both jars were sound, even blue-grey glaze, no cracks. Zhou leaned close to the larger one and held his breath. Faint as could be, a sound like a woman's sob, throttled, came from within, clear only against the jar's mouth. He ran a hand over the wall and found a damp print inside, five fingers distinct, as if someone had pressed from within, yet the mouth had been sealed tight from the start. A He leaned in, heard it too, and went white as raw clay. When Qian came for the goods, Zhou told him everything and urged him that this jar was wrong, that he should take his money back and leave both with him. Qian laughed outright. He said the fire had addled the old master, that sound jars were no reason to refuse, and that they would lend the vintage a little spirit. He would not be swayed. He had the men load both jars onto a cart and, there and then, sealed the mouths, saying the vintage was cellar-bound and none should touch them. Zhou could not stop him. In the confusion of many hands he scored a hair-thin mark with his nail under each jar's base, for he would know his own pressure anywhere and could name them at a glance. And into the rim of the larger jar he slipped, unseen, a pinch of ash from his own kiln. The Qians carried the jars away, filled them, and sealed them in the cellar. For a month the town lay quiet. Yet Zhou slept ill every night, and whenever wind moved the kiln door, a sob seemed to drift from far off. He took no more work from outside the village, and spent his days crouched by the kiln, wiping again and again a small sample jar he kept. Two days before the winter solstice a man came running from town. The old cellar wall behind the Qian winery had caved in at one corner, and digging the foundation they uncovered a pair of old spirit-jars from years past, two children who had died young in a family long gone, the clay crumbled to powder with age. No one spoke of what became of the wine in the Qians' new jars, and no one asked. Zhou listened, silent a long moment, then turned and gave the sample jar by the kiln a gentle push. It struck the hard earth and broke into pieces. He looked at the shards and said quietly that the earth knows the people, but the people do not know the earth. The kiln fire had not quite died. It lit his grey-streaked beard. And when the wind came up the slope, there was again that faint, smothered sob, against the ear, gone in an instant.