The Bamboo Bones

Qingtang Village sat by the water, and behind it lay a patch of common ground where bitter bamboo grew wild. Zhou Maolin was the village's last bamboo weaver. At sixty-one his back had begun to curve, and his fingers were thick as old bamboo roots, yet when he split a strip the motion was light and exact. The baskets he wove could hold a full load of grain without losing a single seed; his sieves were fine enough to strain the grit from rice. The villagers said his hands held a ghost, but Zhou only gave a short grunt and never defended himself.

Zhou was a man who kept his accounts. He would never weave for the dead — a rule left him by his mother, who said bamboo had a spirit, and to weave for the departed was to weave a living man's breath in as well. He held that line and would not budge. His temper was hard, too; when he was cheated he said nothing, only entered it in a ledger kept inside himself.

The peddler who bought the bamboo wares was called Qian San — a long, thin face, and when he laughed two gold teeth showed. Each time he came he turned the finished mats and sieves over and over, picking faults, saying this was loose, that was crooked, beating the price down without mercy. Zhou squatted under the eaves with his pipe and watched Qian San's abacus beads fly; he understood it all perfectly well, yet never said a word, only split the next batch of strips a little tighter. Everyone in the village knew Qian San was a cheat, but no one dared cross a trader who came and went so often.

Late that summer the river rose and flooded the banks, flattening the reeds along the shoal. The day after the water fell, Qian San came for his last pickup, but he never returned to town that night. The inn said he had left before dark and was not seen again. The village searched three days — the river, the woods — and found no trace of him.

Ahe was nineteen, a restless boy from the house next to Zhou's, and his family too had been shortchanged by Qian San. Ahe would not leave a thing unexplained. He remembered that the evening before, Zhou had carried a load of finished wares into his shed while Qian San stood outside talking to him, their voices kept low. Ahe reasoned that the silent weaver might know more of Qian San's movements than anyone.

On the night of the Beginning of Autumn, Ahe crouched in the bitter bamboo outside Zhou's shed to see for himself. The moon hid behind cloud, and inside the shed a kerosene lamp cast a yellow glow that threw Zhou's shadow wide. Ahe saw that he was not weaving a basket or a mat. He was squatting on the ground, bending strips into the shape of a man — arms, legs, a torso, a head — and little by little raising a frame the size of a living person. As he worked Zhou muttered low, as if settling something with someone. The wind moved through the bitter bamboo with a dry rustle, and Ahe felt the cold climb his back, yet he clenched his teeth and did not move.

The next day Ahe told the village head, Old Zhao, what he had seen. Zhao was a steady man; before deciding anything he went to look at the human frame himself. It stood in the corner of the shed, and on close view the right little finger bent into a strange hook — exactly the deformity Qian San had worn from years at the abacus. Zhao felt a jolt, but he kept it quiet, and only led men to the riverbank in the direction Zhou had named, to look for the lost bamboo knife.

Deep in the reeds of the bend they did pull up Qian San's abacus, sunk in mud, three beads missing. The man himself was never found. When Zhou was questioned he squatted beneath the old locust at the village mouth and after a long while said, 'A man goes missing, there ought to be a shape of him, so people can remember and keep looking.' He said he had found Qian San's knife by the river that night and, since the man was gone, had woven a form to stand in his place — 'the debts he left owe someone a reckoning, and there must be a proof of it.'

The village scholar shook his head at this, yet no one could prove whether Qian San was alive or dead. The matter hung unfinished.

When autumn came Zhou set the bamboo figure among the bitter bamboo of the common ground behind the village, leaving a likeness for the peddler no one spoke of anymore. The frame stood through the whole winter, its strips gone grey under the rain. The following spring Ahe passed the ground and heard the wind pass through the figure, drawing from its gaps a sound very faint, like a sigh or a quiet sob — whether it was the strips rubbing, or something else, he could not say.

Later Zhou grew old, and his hands shook too much to split bamboo, so he passed the trade to a distant grand-nephew. Ahe married and settled, yet on every windy dusk he still walked around that stand of bitter bamboo. He never decided what Zhou had woven that night — a man who had wandered off, or a grief that would not disperse. The people of Qingtang said nothing of it, and left the bamboo shape on the common ground like an unspoken word, standing in the wind, year after year.