The town calls me Granny Tian. People come to me for two things: stories, and bounties.
Stories, I've told for fifty years. Where the monkeys of Flower-Fruit Mountain came from, what lies inside Water Curtain Cave, how a stone monkey sprang out of a crack three hundred years ago — it all rolls off my tongue. The children love it, crowding round on their little stools. At the havoc in Heaven they clap; at the mountain of five elements they go quiet. When I reach the night the stele cracked — I stop. One more word and this old woman would cry herself.
People ask: Granny, where do you keep all these stories? I say: they're not in my belly, they're saved up in my ears. My grandmother told me when I was young; her grandmother told her. A story passes through seven or eight mouths before it reaches me, and I pass it on to you. Stories need many mouths. That's the whole trick.
Gan Bao's Soushen Ji collected hundreds of tales of the strange. Let me tell you a secret: nine out of ten of the old spooks in that book are leftovers from our town's grandmothers telling tales by the stove.
The bounty business — that's the part that aches.
Old Zhao's daughter-in-law, out west of town, has been blood-weak since her miscarriage; she needs the three herbs of Water-Curtain Ravine. Tutor Mengzheng's cough needs the second of the same three. But the hills are haunted by xiao this year, and the herb-gatherers won't go in. I went to Bailiff Xu. He said: Granny, why not post a bounty? I said: post it. Who pays? He hesitated. I said: I will.
It was my coffin money, saved over four years.
People called me a fool. I said: a coffin delayed two years kills nobody; medicine delayed two months does. I'm sixty-nine. I can do sums.
And the herbs really were gathered, in the end. That night I slept well. I still sleep with the lamp lit — this old woman fears nothing except the dark. Why the dark?
Ah. That's another story. Bring a little stool one of these days, and I'll tell you.