I Am the Clay (14 page)

Now they pulled and pushed the cart, not caring for the wheels, and soon they had to lean into the cart and hold it back for the steep descent of the path.

Near the end of their descent, the air almost black with night, the cart path briefly paralleled and then joined a wide level dirt road along which a ragged line of refugees advanced slowly toward a vast plain dotted with shanties and firepits and burning oil drums. Trucks went by on the road, heading north, only night lights showing. At the far end of the plain lay a military compound encircled by a concertina-wire fence lit by oil drums and patrolled by armed guards.

The old man and the woman and the boy followed the road as it left the mountains and entered the plain.

Up ahead soldiers stood warming themselves near drums of burning oil at the checkpoint where the road branched off into the plain. Orange flames lit their faces and glinted off the white letters on their helmets. The air was thick with the hot acrid stench of the smoking fires.

As the old man and the woman and the boy approached the checkpoint a soldier called out to them in Korean and the old man and the woman quickly put down the shafts of the cart. The boy came out from behind the cart and slipped between them. He felt the woman’s fingers grip his arm.

The old man looked fearfully at the soldier. Short, thin, a hooded fur-lined combat parka and gloves. Closed, arrogant face, the face of magistrates and bureaucrats, the face of landowners. A rifle slung over his shoulder; a weapon on his hip. He looks at us
knowing our lives are in his hands. Search again? His fingers on my arms and back and chest and crotch and legs. And again search the woman? The boy so frightened I feel him trembling. What will I say if they ask about him? Do not lie to our soldiers, the old carpenter warned us, they shoot anyone suspicious, they think soldiers from the North conceal themselves among the refugees from the South.

Squinting into the firelit darkness, the old man took a rasping breath of cold air and felt a sudden bubbling and surfacing of recent memory. On the road from Seoul, beyond the airfield: jammed with infantry and vehicles. Looking for the woman. The line of refugees along the narrow path between the road and the frozen fields. A man suddenly bolting from the path and starting at a run across the road. Slipping through the line of infantry and dodging between two jeeps, running with a load of brushwood on his back. A single rifle shot, a ringing sound, and he stumbled to his knees and fell on his face. Like a straw sack of grain. Two soldiers dragged him to the side of the road and threw him into the drainage ditch. Why did he run? Suddenly possessed by a demon? A man of middle age, dead face-up in the ditch, his chest a spreading mass of blood, men and women fighting over his wood. I forgot it and remember now. Where do they go when they vanish, memories, and what brings them back? The boy is afraid. I see his eyes. Be rid of him now and not have him as a weight anymore. But the woman will be angry. Stubborn woman. He is talking to me, what is he saying?

“You, Uncle, you.”

The soldier, his flashlight in the old man’s eyes,
was a voice only, his face and form gone in the blinding light.

The old man blinked and squinted.

“Your papers, Uncle.”

“Ah, we have no papers. We left all our papers in our house in our village. Ran very fast from the Chinese and the soldiers from the North.”

The woman closed her eyes a moment. A wave of fearsome memories: the young son of the carpenter running through the village shouting, Chinese in the hills! and the panicky scramble for the cart and throwing into it the quilts and pads and some pots and bowls and food and the box with the spirit of the man’s father and fleeing through the paddies to the main road along footpaths barely wide enough for the cart. Certainly the ox dead now and the village ashes like the village of the boy. And the graves of ancestors on the hill beyond the village? Do they destroy graves?

“What village, Uncle?”

The old man, squinting into the light, gave the soldier the name of their village.

“Near what town?”

“Dongduchon.”

There was a pause.

The flashlight did a quick slide and landed on the face of the woman. She closed her eyes.

“Who’s this, Uncle?”

“She is my wife.”

The flashlight lingered a moment on the woman and then moved to the boy.

The boy stared directly into the light. Small. Very small.

“Who’s this, Aunt, your grandson?”

“Yes, grandson,” the woman answered quickly.

“What happened to him?”

“His parents dead. Village burned.”

“What’s in the cart?”

“This and that from our house,” the woman said.

He ran the light across the cart, letting it linger over the splintered wheel and then brushing it across the quilts. He took his time poking the quilts with the flashlight. The light narrowing and burying itself briefly and reappearing. A diminishing and vanishing and returning of the world.

The old man watched the soldier, and the woman leaned against the cart shivering and gazing at the fires on the plain, and the boy stood very still, feeling on his arm the small bony fingers of the woman.

Behind them the line of refugees stood in silence, dimly visible in the cold starlit night. Vehicles kept on along the road, an endless procession, all going north.

From somewhere in the darkness up ahead a voice called out in a strange language. The flashlight moved away from the cart and shone fully upon the face of the old man.

“Uncle, have you relatives in the North?”

Almost everyone had relatives in the North. But the North was the enemy.

“Ah, yes. An uncle and cousins. Uncle long ago gone to his ancestors. Cousins I do not see since I was a boy.”

“Aunt?”

“No relatives in the North. All my relatives only in the South.”

He shone the flashlight again upon the boy.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Very bad wound,” the woman said.

She opened the boy’s jacket and shirt. He gasped as the cold air bit his flesh.

In the harsh beam of the flashlight the healed wound had the look of violated flesh.

The soldier turned his face away and waved them on.

The old man bent to pick up the shaft of the cart.

“We have no food,” he heard the woman say.

“Trucks come in the morning with food.”

“We have no food for tonight,” the woman said.

In the darkness up ahead the voice called out again in that strange language. The soldier replied and the voice answered.

“Move,” the soldier said to the old man.

“We will die without food,” the woman said.

“Tell your woman to move, Uncle.”

“Come,” the old man snapped.

She picked up the shaft. The boy pushed from behind.

As they passed through the line of burning oil drums a soldier stepped out of the shadows and held up in front of the woman a small paper packet of rice. Without a word he dropped it on the quilts in the cart and then vanished back into the shadows.

They rolled the cart off the main road onto the narrow dirt path that ran through the plain. Its broken wheel now perilously tilting, the cart jounced and squeaked along the path and the boy tried to keep it raised so
the wheel would not touch the ground. But after some while he thought his arms would come loose from his shoulders and he set the cart back on the wheel and pushed from behind. Then the old man came over to the wheel and lifted the cart and the boy took the other shaft and pulled together with the woman.

On the plain was a vast shantytown. Firepits and oil drums and makeshift shacks on the frozen ground and shadowy figures squatting or moving slowly about. Dark arctic-cold moonless air with currents of smoke and heat from the fires. Patches of brushwood humped and dwarfish beneath capes of snow. An odd noise over the plain: a low sighing and moaning ascending toward the black sky and pierced now and again by sharp clanging sounds from the military compound.

A patch of uninhabited darkness amid the surrounding fires: they left the path and settled the cart on it.

All around them shanties and huddled figures.

Quickly the old man shook snow from nearby brushwood and with the help of the boy loaded the A-frame while the woman with the last of her strength cleared snow from a section of ground near the cart and dug a shallow pit with the same stone tool the boy had used to make the hole in the pond near the cave. Digging, she wondered briefly why the ground was not frozen to stone. She put snow into a pot and when the old man and the boy returned built a fire and busied herself preparing the rice.

She thought: Who was he, the silent soldier with the gift of rice? One of the pale-skinned ones with the upside-down eyes? Sometimes kind and sometimes
cruel creatures. Mother told me this how when she was a servant once in the house of the provincial governor and saw with other servants through finger holes poked in the paper doors and screens the governor dining with a pale-skinned man. Odd how he removed his hat when he entered the house. Ill-mannered creature. Mother said she learned from her grandfather that different kinds of creatures eat different kinds of foods, some eat stones, some wood, some grass, some water, some air, and the highest creatures, humans, eat rice and pork and raw fish, and the pale-skinned creature ate rice and pork and was clearly human even though his eyes were upside down and he removed his hat upon entering the house when it is known to all that a hat is put on to show respect not taken off what good is a hat as a sign of respect when it is not on the head where it belongs. Mother said that perhaps everything is upside down where they live, because they live on the other side of the world. Ah, look at the boy, my heart aches for the boy, he is so tired, he sits leaning against the cart exhausted, patiently waiting for his rice. And my man with the pipe in his mouth, hungry for his food. How will we sleep tonight? It is less cold here than it was in the mountains but it is still cold enough to kill us.

She offered the rice to the spirits of the plain and then served it and they crouched near the fire huddled in quilts, eating. Along the distant main road vehicles kept moving like squat yellow-eyed creatures, blacker than the darkness of the night, all heading north.

When they had eaten, the woman put the snow-cleansed bowls and pot back in the cart and returned to the fire.

“We will take turns again at the fire,” the old man said.

“I will take my turn,” the boy said.

“Are you too tired?” the woman asked the boy.

“I will go first,” he said.

“Then you will wake me,” the woman said.

“As you wish,” said the old man.

“And I will wake you.”

“I hear what you are saying.”

“How will we sleep?”

“We should make walls of two of the quilts and sleep under the cart. And if we die, we die.”

“We will not die,” the woman said. “That is not a way to talk.”

“What the spirits decide to do, they do,” the old man said.

The boy helped the old man spread the pads and quilts and unroll the sleeping bag on the ground between the wheels of the cart and then drape two of the quilts over the four sides of the cart.

“You are sure you can take a turn?” the woman asked the boy. “Because if you are too tired you should not.”

“I am not too tired.”

“Remember to wake me.”

The old man was putting more wood on the fire. Flames leaped in the windless air. He gazed out across the plain. Flat, treeless. Prickles of cold dread crawled along his back. Something here.

The woman moved into the space beneath the cart and slid into the quilts. She lay back and felt a sudden rush of iciness pass through her. From what? A creature of piercing cold residing in the ground? She shivered
and began to rise but her fatigue held her like a stone weight and she was asleep before the old man slipped in beside her.

He thought: This wall of quilts will not help us much against the cold. How bitter if death comes tonight after all we have been through.

The boy sat by the fire inside a quilt wondering what the old man would have answered had the soldier asked him instead of the woman, Who’s this, Uncle, your grandson?