The Gurgle in the Tin Pot

Old Xi had kept a tinkering stall by the riverbank for the better part of his life. He had a hard temper, and the work under his hands was harder still. When a neighbor's tin pot leaked, a tin lamp leaned, or a tin lock jammed, they all came to him; seams no one else could solder, he closed with two flicks of his iron. He had a rule: small as the job was, it had to earn his eye before he would take it. Work that fooled nobody, he would not touch, not for any price.

That spring a young man in a grey cloth gown came to the market carrying an old tin pot, its body darkened by years of lampblack. The young man said the pot had been his father's. The father had fallen into the river the year before and never come up. On her deathbed his mother had clutched his hand and told him to keep the pot, as a keepsake. But the thing was cursed, the young man said: it leaked whatever you put in it. Fresh water poured in would seep out through a seam in the base before you had turned around. He wiped it, patched it, patched it again — it would not be cured.

Xi hefted the pot. It was an old double-bottomed piece, weighty in the hand, its seam once watertight. He turned it over to look at the crack — not on the outside, but in the inner wall, thin as a hair, and yet it would not close. He scraped it with a fingernail; the inner wall was cold, but the moment his fingertip touched it, the seam seemed to stir, like something alive.

He said nothing of it, only told the young man: "Come back at first light."

That night he lit his oil lamp and set to work. He heated the iron red and fed solder into the seam drop by drop; as the tin bubbled, the seam closed meekly. He let out a long breath and set the pot on the windowsill to cool, then went to rest.

But past midnight a sound of water woke him.

It was not rain. It came from inside the pot: a gulp, and another gulp, as if someone were pressed to the wall of it, sipping water mouthful by mouthful. He got up barefoot and felt his way over. The pot was ice-cold, yet something inside was gently pressing against that seam, once, and again. He held it to the lamp and looked close: in the seam shone a dim red, as if someone within had quietly opened an eye.

In half a lifetime Xi had soldered a thousand tin vessels and feared nothing. But now the hair at his nape stood tight. He steadied himself, pinned the pot to the table, soldered the seam once more, tapped it firm with a small hammer, and wound three turns of fine copper wire around the outside. "Sealed," he muttered. "Let's see you leak now."

The next day the young man came for it. Xi thrust the pot into his arms and charged him half a string of cash extra, for the added labor. The young man left beaming.

That night Xi slept deeper than usual. Before dawn a sharp stink of spoiled wine woke him. On his stall, the pot sat squarely atop his toolbox again — the young man had plainly carried it off, yet here it was, and the seam at its base had opened once more into a hairline, weeping yellow water, a film of old wine-foam floating on the surface, rocking softly.

Xi's temper flared in earnest. He seized the pot, built up his furnace in the small hours, flattened the vessel with one blow, and threw it into the crucible to be melted. The flame licked the tin; the pot gave a very faint pop, like a sigh, or like someone swallowing a last mouthful of wine. When the tin ran liquid he ladled it into a mold and cast a small tin lock, which he sent across the river to the young man, as a keepsake.

At daybreak, tidying his stall, he noticed something wrong: his soldering iron, his hammer, the callus on his palm — all carried a faint smell of wine that no washing would remove. He looked down at his hand; in the lines of it, he did not know when, a thread of cold tin-light had worked its way in.

From that day Old Xi would take no work left behind by the dead. Only, every midnight, he hears from the corner of his stall a very soft gulp. He does not light the lamp. He turns over, and lets it sound.