A man named Li of Huai’an and his wife were deeply devoted. He died in his thirties. He had already been coffined, but the wife could not bear to have the nails driven, and she wept at it morning and evening and lifted the lid to look at him.
Now the custom is this: on the seventh day after a death comes the receiving of the sha, and every relative, however close, keeps out of the way.
This wife would not. She put the children in another room and sat inside her husband’s bed-curtains to wait.
At the second watch a cold wind came up and the lamp flame went green. She saw a ghost ten feet tall, with red hair and round eyes, carrying an iron fork and leading her husband in on a rope through the window.
It saw the wine and food set out before the coffin, dropped the fork and loosened the rope, and sat down and ate enormously — every swallow made a gulp in its belly.
Her husband went round touching the tables and chairs he had used, and sighed and sighed, and came to the bed and pulled the curtain.
His wife caught hold of him, weeping. He was cold — cold as a drift of cloud. She wrapped him in a quilt.
The red-haired god rushed forward to pull him back. She screamed, and the children came running, and the red-haired god staggered off.
Between them they put the wrapped soul into the coffin. The body gradually drew breath. They carried it to the bed, poured in rice water, and at dawn he woke.
The iron fork it left behind was the paper fork people burn for the dead.
They were husband and wife for more than twenty years after that.
When she was sixty she happened to pray at the City God’s temple, and in a daze she saw two bowmen leading in a prisoner in a cangue. She looked — and the prisoner in the cangue was the red-haired god.
It cursed her.
“Because I was greedy and stopped to eat, you got the better of me, and I have worn this cangue for twenty years. Now I have found you. Do you think I will let you go?”
The woman got home and died.