The Chu Ci is full of fragrant herbs: zhi, lan, duruo, hengwu. My mother named me Zhiruo — she said fragrant herbs grow wild, unwatered, and live on their own anyway.
My husband is a herb-gatherer.
On the sixteenth of last month he shouldered his basket and went into the ravine, saying three days. Today is the thirty-first day he hasn't come back.
For the first seven days I waited at the ravine mouth daily. Then I stopped — not from giving up, but because waiting mustn't be seen. Townsfolk talk. Wait long enough and sympathy curdles into pity, and pity into gossip. By day I dry herbs, grind them, deliver to the Apricot Grove. At night I come home and set one more pair of chopsticks on the stove, always.
The morning he went in, we quarreled. Over what? I can't remember — nothing, certainly. Now every day I think: if I hadn't quarreled, if I'd packed one more strip of cured pork in his lunch, would he —
Enough. That thought is useless.
Granny Tian helped me post a bounty: find the man who went gathering and never returned. His name is on the notice, Caichen. When the bailiff read it to me I said he'd written it wrong — my husband's cai is the cai of herb-gathering, not of letters. The bailiff said that's the very character. Only then did I remember: his father named him hoping he'd study books. He gathered herbs instead.
Bounty-takers: I'm not asking you to bring him back whole. Truly — it took me a month to learn to say that. Alive, I want to see him; dead, I want to see —
Just look for him. Whatever you find, come back and tell me. That pair of chopsticks on my stove is waiting for a straight answer.
And if you don't find him — when you come out of the ravine, bring me a handful of earth from the slope he always worked. I'll keep drying the herbs.