I Am the Clay (17 page)

They worked quickly and in silence, shivering in the merciless wind. The way we gathered wood in the forest when we camped in the winters with Badooki, bend the branches back and forth, break them, pull. Pick the ones with lots of shoots, more to burn. Thin fingers like a girl but he works hard and knows what to do. Fat greasy Choo Kun taught me that, he was good for something. Loose tongue and big appetite. Earth on his tongue now. What will we do with him, he is not of our blood? Perhaps ask the carpenter? Yes, another load for the second fire, you remain with it here, I will return for it. See how many are tearing at this brush. Like locusts. All along the foothills. How much wood is there on this plain? And when the brushwood is gone, what then? Perhaps the winter will end before the wood runs out. But if not? What is the boy doing? Ah, clever boy.

The boy had brought with him the torn pieces of
rope, whose ends he had tied together, and the length of wire left over from the repair of the wheel. These he slipped under the second pile of wood and knotted tight, leaving extended ends which he now used to lift the brushwood to his back and loop over his shoulders in a makeshift A-frame. Together they started back across the plain through masses of huddled people and scampering children.

The woman saw them coming toward her walking slowly beneath their loads. Her heart went out to the boy. Where is his strength from? A few days ago nearly dead and now almost bent double beneath such a load, like the man, but the man has a back of iron, the boy is like grass.

The old man dropped his load of brushwood near the firepit in front of the shanty; the boy took his inside and placed it next to the cart. Leave it behind the shanty and someone will steal it. His stiffened hands burned. He thrust the numbed reddened flesh under his armpits. The fingers tingled and throbbed and curled. This is a foolish boy, Father said, only a very foolish boy exposes his hand in such a way to snow. Mother gently bathing the hand in warm water. Grandfather said, smiling around his pipe, Now that you know what can happen to you with snow, will you try it also with fire? Shall I tell you what the Master said? The Master said, Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change. Which are you? He is a foolish boy, Father said, and I fear for him.

The woman was calling him. He went outside and sat with them at the fire. Before they began eating, the woman offered the rice to the ghosts of the mound.
The flames roared and smoked and crackled in the wind.

After they had done eating, the woman cleaned the bowls and the boy went into the shanty and brought out wood for the rear firepit and then scraped a hole in the softened earth. As he squatted he saw a group of boys about his age running past a nearby shanty. One of the boys extended his arm in a blurred shadow of motion and a shirt left to dry on the roof of the shanty was suddenly gone.

The boy stood up and covered over the hole and went to join the old man and the woman inside the shanty.

In the late morning the trucks came again and the old man and the woman rushed off toward the American compound.

They hurried across grimy snow frozen by the wind into ridged sharp-edged hillocks. Swallowed up inside a surging crowd, they felt themselves climbing a distance of ground and then descending: they had traversed one of the mounds. The woman, fearful of being separated from the man, walked behind as if one flesh with him, matching her every step to his. She thought: It is colder here now than it was in the mountains, there is nowhere to hide from this wind. Will the little house be enough for us? The man thought: If we come late and the food is gone I will die and in the morning I will be the one they will carry away. How they push, like animals at the trough. Do these trucks come every day? See that
little boy, eight or nine years old, how he slips his hand into that man’s pocket. He is stealing his spectacles! Vanished into the crowd. Nothing in my pockets. What will a child do with spectacles? Trade them for food?

A mute shivering mass of people stood near the trucks and edged toward the tailgates, where uniformed Koreans doled out rice from opened sacks. Fifty yards beyond the trucks rose the wire fence of the American compound. Near the gate to the compound stood a small silent crowd of young Korean women.

The old man and the woman held up their bowls.

“Only one bowl each person,” shouted the Korean on the truck.

“We have a boy,” said the old man.

“One bowl each person, Uncle.”

“But yesterday three bowls,” the woman said.

“Not enough today. One bowl each person.”

They turned away from the truck, holding the bowls tightly to themselves, and started back across the plain. The old man was angry and did not know at whom to direct his anger and that made him angrier still.

“I will give the boy from my portion,” the woman said.

“Watch how you walk,” the old man said. “If you fall we will all be eating from one bowl.”

Far behind them a column of black smoke began to rise from the plain but they did not see it.

The boy was sitting in the opening of the shanty near the firepit watching three girls about his age playing the rope-skipping game, when the column of smoke appeared. Intent upon the girls, he did not see it.

The girls were playing outside a shanty about twenty feet from the boy. A middle-aged man and woman squatted near the firepit at the entrance to the shanty. The woman carried a child in a sling on her back. The man, dark hair wild on his bare head, face gaunt and stubbly, kept coughing and wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his winter jacket.

Dancing adroitly among the ropes held taut by two of the girls, the third girl, her coat and skirt hiked above her knees, seemed to float over the ground. She danced with the wind in her face, her high cheeks flushed and her dark eyes shining.

The boy watched in a trance. The girls in our village did not play like that in front of boys. Fat Choo Kun once said only peasant girls played like that. Stockinged legs showing bare above the knees. In our village the girls never wore bathing suits or went swimming during the day. No matter how hot the air. Nor would Father or Mother. Only the barbarous Japanese and pale-skinned foreigners did such things, showing their flesh to strangers. On hot nights some girls would bathe in the pond outside the village where the trees overhung the bank and sometimes two or three in my chronological group would steal out to watch them. Naked in the dark night, pale and wonderfully beautiful with the soft blue starlight on their satiny skin. Whispering and giggling as they floated and kicked and swam about quietly in the still water. And one night fat Choo Kun without warning any of
us suddenly coming out with the snarling hissing roar of a leopard, so real my skin turned cold and the hair on my head stood up, and the girls screamed and scrambled wildly for their clothes and fat Choo Kun could not stop laughing, not realizing he had frightened them away from the pond forever. Fat greasy stupid Choo Kun.

The boy sat watching the girl dancing among the ropes. He did not notice the sudden dying of the wind as though a door leading to the plain had been abruptly shut. The girl danced on a while longer and then another of the girls took her place and after a moment slipped on the snow and fell backward. They all laughed and the boy laughed too.

Suddenly coughing uncontrollably, the man staggered to his feet and disappeared into the shanty. The woman quickly went in after him, the baby’s head swinging forward and back with her movements. The boy could hear the man still loudly coughing inside the shanty.

He looked at the girl. She stood listening to the man coughing. The light had gone from her eyes and her face was stiff with fear. After a moment she followed the woman inside and the two other girls sauntered off.

The boy put more wood on the firepit in front of the shanty and then checked the fire in back. An odd smell hung in the air and he wondered what it might be and experienced a momentary dizziness and a sudden stabbing vision of the little dog licking at his wound.

Where are they? Haven’t they been gone a long time?

He shivered and squatted down by the fire. Lost in the dance of the flames, he thought he heard someone call his name.

He raised his eyes and saw only the girl sitting in the entrance to the nearby shanty. The man had stopped coughing and she sat now gazing open-mouthed at the cloud-filled sky.

The boy heard his name called again and got to his feet and saw the old man and the woman walking carefully toward the shanty with the bowls of rice. He went to the woman and took her arm and helped her into the shanty.

The smell was inside the shanty too.

For a while the man squatted near the fire, warming his hands. Then he put his long-stemmed pipe in his mouth and closed his eyes. The boy went to the rear of the shanty to add wood to the fire.

The woman was filling a pot with fire-softened snow when she noticed people standing about gazing silently into the distance. She turned her head and saw the smoke.

The dense jet-black greasy cloud boiled into the air from the distant point on the plain where the nearly perfect circle of hills parted abruptly to open out into a narrow pass that led through a pine forest and a valley to mountains hidden in mist. The black smoke climbed, churning, to the low-hanging snow clouds and, its passage blocked, curled in upon itself like a huge dark angry flower and then opened and spread wide and drifted slowly over the plain.

At first the smell was odd and startling. Those who, like the old man and the woman and the boy, were seeing and smelling it for the first time stared in disbelief: what on this plain could be giving off such an odor?

The boy had come to the front of the shanty and stood near the fire staring up at the cloud. He saw the man and woman in the nearby shanty staring up too, the girl next to them. The old man sucked on the pipe and the woman turned away and began to busy herself with the rice. Then she put down the bowl.

The smell had changed.

Suddenly acrid, the smell entered the mouth and throat and nostrils and washed across the mucous membranes and lingered, leaving behind a coating that could be tasted.

Some put their hands over their mouths and noses and others covered their faces with cloth but the stench could not be staved, it penetrated and remained long after the cloud had gone. It clung to the rice the old man ate and the brushwood the boy heaped on the fires and the quilts with which the woman covered herself in the afternoon, when, feeling a weight of fatigue, she lay down to rest.

By then the old man and the woman knew what had been burning. But they said nothing of it to the boy.

The old man sat covered in a quilt beside the woman inside the shanty and the boy stood near the entrance, which he had covered with a quilt, watching the girl, who was again playing the rope-skipping game with her two friends. How she skipped and danced over the ropes! She saw him watching her and hesitated a moment, then turned her back to him and went on
with the game. After a while they tired of it and the girl went inside.

In the evening it began to snow.

All night it snowed and through much of the next day, forming drifts that buried some shanties and toppled others. Those who had died during the night were carried away in the morning through the snow. The food trucks did not come and the old man and the woman and the boy ate the rice balls the woman had prepared and stored from the ration of the day before. There was no black cloud that day, and no stench of iodine and roasting meat.