I Am the Clay (20 page)

The old man and the woman returned, their faces flushed and their voices high. The woman prepared a soup and rice balls. They slept little that night and the next morning shook out the quilts and the sleeping bag and rolled up the strips of canvas and put into the cart whatever pieces of the shanty it could carry. They looked around and saw the emptying of the plain. The woman left an offering of rice in a bowl inside what remained of their shanty.

At noon they began the journey back to their village.

BOOK THREE

In the mountains the air was cold, the dirt road still hard, but runnels trickled in the drainage ditches from the hours of high sun warming the snow. Straggles of refugees on one side of the road, foot soldiers in single file on the other, jeeps and trucks and half-tracked vehicles, and ice and snow on the headwalls and slopes above the timberline.

And once a long convoy of ambulances.

The woman looked at the red crosses on the ambulances and the old man saw her begin murmuring to herself but was unable to hear her words. They helped us, these spirits of the cross, together with our own, how does one give them an offering? Is it enough to sing their song?
Have thine own way Lord have thine own way.
What do they mean, these words made by the foreigners? Mother said the man who taught the words did not explain them clearly. Rare to teach
a song in the language of the foreigners. The good spirits who like those words should receive an offering of thanks. I will think what to give them. Now see where we are. Strange, this was not the road we took when we came through these mountains. I didn’t see the place where we slept. How did we miss this road when we left the valley? Were we so weak and sick we didn’t even see ourselves take a wrong turn? And there were footsteps on that other road. Whose?

She shivered with a cold that was not from the air and together with the old man continued pulling on the shafts of the cart.

The boy pushed from behind. He kept looking around, thinking he might find the girl and her mother amid all the others. He thought they might come up behind him and he would turn his head and they would be there, the girl and the mother and the child. The girl still wearing the gray wool gloves. Sometimes he walked some steps with his eyes closed and formed a picture of her and was certain she would be there when he opened his eyes. He tried walking longer and longer with his eyes closed and her picture inside, and once he fell and skinned his palms: he had given his gloves to the old woman. In the late afternoon, after looking at the faces of many girls her age, he realized she reminded him of his little sisters and the girls of their chronological group with whom they would play on the swings. Up and down and up and down and very high and higher still and laughing. He saw the faces of his little sisters dead in the earth of his village and he shuddered and leaned forward into the cart and pushed hard and the old man called to him to ease up. This old man does not want me to live with
them, he sees me as trouble, I don’t know why, the woman wants me to live with them but she cannot win against the old man, I will return to the village, someone is alive, surely someone is alive, it is a dream sent by bad spirits that they are all dead.

The road climbed slowly into the mountains and the ice on the summits flashed white and blue in the late-afternoon sunlight. To the right the side of the road fell away in a steep drop and the old man, glancing at the narrow valley and frozen stream below, remembered the hawk soaring across hills and valleys after the dog had startled the pheasants into flight and the echoing calls of his uncle and cousins as they kept the hawk in view and raced to get to it quickly after the kill because if it gorged itself it would not hunt anymore that day. They would let it eat a few mouthfuls before putting the pheasant into the hunting bag. We caught five pheasants that day. The steep sides of the hills and how we ran up and down them sweating in the November air. Chasing the hawk chasing the pheasants. This is better than sweating behind a plow, Uncle said as we all sat in the warm hut eating two of the pheasants. Tell me, what do you think, will your father let me make his little boy into a hunter?

Glancing down the hill, he saw the gutted remains of a vehicle among ice-covered boulders below and now and then what he thought was a body crusted and frozen into an odd shape and fused with the ice of the slope and once all that remained of a pony. Some time before sunset the road began to run level and then descended sharply and the old man and woman felt the cart sliding downhill and pulled back hard on the shafts. Hurriedly the boy moved between
them and angled his back against the cart. The wheel slid perilously close to the edge of the road and sent shards of frozen earth and snow down the slope. An ambulance passed and then a jeep, slowly, in whining low gear. Then the road leveled and ran on, embowered with murky air between the walls of towering hills. A while later they entered a narrow valley where people were making fires and setting up their shanties for the night.

They found a small flat rectangle of space near a tree and the old man tried to clear away the snow but found it frozen. Strange, on the plain the earth has begun to soften but here it is like iron. He and the woman spread strips of canvas on the snow and then he hoisted the A-frame onto his shoulders and went off toward a stand of pines to gather wood.

The boy helped the woman set up the pieces of metal for the shanty and began to dig a firepit with the stone tool. His fingers and hands smarted under the icy touch of the stone and snow: the old man had taken the gloves. He scraped frenziedly at the snow, feeling pain again in the region of the healed wound. The air was cold but without the burn of weeks before. All around him were fires and shanties and the smells of cooking food. Children roamed about in small shadowy groups. Slowly he shaped the shallow pit. When the old man returned the boy made the fire and the woman cooked the last of the rice and offered it to the spirits of the cross and the valley and after they were done eating the man sat near the fire sucking on his pipe and drinking slowly from his bowl.

“There is no stink in this valley,” the woman said after a while.

“It is to keep warm,” he replied sullenly.

“How many more bottles did you steal from them?”

“Hold your tongue, woman. We are returning home, where women know when and how to speak.”

She turned away from him.

The boy sat in silence, staring into the fire. He felt the old man’s eyes scrape his face and kept his eyes on the flames. I am nothing to him. He speaks to the woman as if I am not here. Father never spoke that way to Mother. Not when I was near. Look at him, he is going to become drunk again and the woman will not be able to wake him, and she and I will once more have to share his turn at the fire.

The woman sat thinking: The war has changed him, he was never this way before, a little rice wine in the town with his cronies but never night after night like the carpenter. How his eyes shine in the firelight. What does he see? The village? The ox? What memories? Foolish old man, if the war does not kill him, the drinking will, and his eyes will soon see the color of cold wormy earth.

The old man sipped again from the bowl and felt the hot liquid inside him and wondered why he was still so cold. He shivered and saw clearly the glide and swoop of the hawk and the brief struggle of the pheasant. A cry of triumph burst from his uncle’s lips and echoed through the valley. Do you hear that echo, asked his uncle. Do you hear it? From his mouth vapor plumes rose into the brittle November day. I have given this valley a special name. Echoland I call it. All the sounds of this valley run together into one great echo, a song that is sung by all the spirits of
this valley. Only a hunter hears it. The spirits of this valley are happy when they see a hunter who loves the animals he hunts. A truly great hunter is grateful to the birds and animals he kills, he takes their spirits into himself. See all the things you can learn from me if only your father will let you.

He remained squatting by the fire drinking and after a long while he thought: I see the boy’s eyes, he is clever and crafty, I have seen how crafty he is. It might be useful to have him in our home but not for too long, because he will begin to think that one day he will take my place, take my land and my inheritance and replace my name with his and perhaps not bring offerings to my spirit, because he is not of my blood, and make of me a shadow, a melting snowfall, a fading echo.

He fell into a drunken sleep by the fire and the woman and the boy carried him into the shanty and covered him with the quilts. The boy saw the shame and resignation on her face and looked away. After a while she lay down silently beside the old man.

The air was very cold but still. Squatting inside his quilt by the fire, the boy was thinking of the girl with the woolen gloves. If I find her will she and her mother come with me to my village? He could not remember the paths he had traveled across the hills and paddies to the main road and he wondered how he would find the village. The woman will help, yes. He pulled the quilt tighter about himself, suddenly frightened. Vague echoing sounds rose from the darkness. Hungry dogs? The furry spirits of the cave in this valley where he and the old man and woman had lived?

He sat watching the fire and from time to time tossed fresh brush onto the flames.

Crossing the valley the next morning, the woman looked for the cave but there were so many caves she could not be certain which one it was. The boy, pushing the cart from behind, squinted in the sunlight and thought he recognized the screen of brushwood they had placed in front of the cave opening: it lay covered in snow and ice with thin black fingers of brambles protruding from it. Walking beside the woman and breathing with difficulty as he pulled the cart, the old man had no interest in the cave: his head ached, his tongue felt gritty and swollen, there was a taste of cold metal in his mouth. He heard the boy calling from behind the cart: Could they stop and see the cave?

The old man said morosely, “I do not want to stop.”

But the woman said, “Can it hurt us to see the cave?”

“Woman, I do not want to see the cave. Why should we stop for the cave?” Anger and warning filled his voice.

Still the woman persisted. “A visit to the spirits of the cave. An offering of thanks.”

The old man thought: See how he delays us. He thinks the longer he is with us the safer he will be. A clever boy.

Without waiting for his response, the woman began to pull the cart to the edge of the path. The old man,
raging within himself, felt it unseemly to resist her in front of the boy. They turned off the path and went on some yards over rocky terrain. A newly risen wind blew against the towering walls of the valley. They left the cart near the brushwood screen and approached the cave.

The woman stepped inside. Cold earth-smelling dimness and the silence of a tomb. This was almost our grave. She murmured softly to the spirits of the cave. Standing beside her, the boy saw in memory the pond and the fish and the three dogs and the old man dying on the cart.

The old man stood shivering in the entrance to the cave and would not enter. This was a place of weakness and shame for him: he had almost died here. He turned to go back to the cart and saw two boys, dirty-faced urchins, lifting out of the cart a rolled-up strip of canvas and a quilt.