The Well-Digger

The first thing Old Yin taught me was to press my ear to the well rope and listen.

"A well has a temper," he said. "It stays quiet, but what's down there - which layer of earth is loose, which water runs fast - the rope tells you. A man who can't hear it shouldn't pick up a shovel."

I was twenty-six that year, fresh off a construction site, and I followed him to Hewan Village to dig wells. The place was small, a dozen-odd households scattered halfway up the mountain, all drawing water from the old well. In early March, the widow Aunt He's old well ran dry, and she hired Old Yin to sink a new one in her yard. The pay was by the foot, eighty a day with two meals thrown in. I was glad to take it - the mountains were quiet, a relief from the cement dust that burned your throat on the site.

The first three days went smooth. Yellow loam, then red clay, then broken gravel. Old Yin crouched at the rim, rubbed a fistful of soil between his fingers, and squinted. "Live water down there," he said. "And it's in a hurry." A rare smile crept onto his face.

On the fourth day something came up. At two fathoms the blade struck something hard. We hauled it up: a wooden bucket rotted down to its frame, hooped with raw iron rusted beyond any telling of its age. I went to toss it aside; Old Yin stopped me and set it by the pit. "Keep it," he said, offering nothing more.

Half a foot deeper, the blade brought up a little shoe. Cloth, with a lopsided lotus stitched at the toe, the sole packed tight with stitches. A child's, no more than three or four years old. Wet clay filled the hollow where a foot should have been.

Old Yin studied that shoe a long time. Then he tucked it into his shirt and told me to knock off for the day.

I kept watch over the rig that night. The March mountain wind was cold, and a draft rose out of the pit, climbing my ankles. Half asleep past midnight, I heard a sound from down in the shaft - not wind, but the noise of wet cloth being wrung, a slow creak, creak, as if someone below were washing something. I dropped to the rim and peered down. Blackness, and the cold air against my face. The sound stopped.

On the fifth day Old Yin wouldn't let me take up the shovel. He carried the little shoe to Aunt He. When he came back his face was the color of ash, and all he said was: "Three more feet. Hit water, stop. Not one spade beyond."

I couldn't let it go. I asked old Liu next door. Liu puffed his pipe a long while before he spoke. "Thirty years back, a mother and child drowned in that well in this yard. The woman came from another town, with a little girl. One flood year the well overflowed; they pulled the woman out, but the girl's body was never found. Later they filled the well, the old owner moved away, the house stood empty a few years, then Aunt He bought it."

"How old was the girl?" I asked.

Liu held up a hand. "Three, maybe four."

I didn't dare repeat this to Old Yin. But he already knew - he'd seen too many wells like it. He'd told me once that what the earth fears most isn't emptiness but filling. Someone shoves what shouldn't stay down there, then lays a skin of soil over it and calls it flat ground. But water knows the road. It finds its way back to where it was.

On the sixth day we reached bottom. Three fathoms and two feet, water clear to a blue. Old Yin ladled a gourdful, didn't drink, passed it under my nose. A sweetness I couldn't name, like rotten roots after rain. He sank the old wooden bucket into the new well, weighting it over the spring.

"The well's made," he told Aunt He. "Draw water by day only. At dusk, lay the stone slab and keep clear of it."

Aunt He murmured yes. She didn't ask why.

The day we left, Old Yin pressed the little shoe into my hand. "Keep it," he said. "Remember - dig a hole in the ground, and what's under it may not be empty."

I brought it back to the city and set it on the windowsill of my rented room. Nothing for months. Then one dusk in early autumn I came home to a sky gone gray, the room colder than the street. On the sill, the lotus at the shoe's toe was wet, a dark ring soaked around it, as if just pulled from water.

I reached out to touch it. My fingertips went numb with cold.

Downstairs the tap still ran, water rushing through the pipes - but I knew that wasn't the same thing at all.