I Am the Clay (23 page)

The old man sat on the floor, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and watching the woman bathe the boy. How thin he is, the bones sticking out from his chest and ribs. The penis and genitals look to be fine though the hair has not yet appeared. The years before the body changed: he remembered them dimly as if through a screen of dark smoke; the times of hunting with his uncle were clear. How gently she washes him. Nearly a grown boy and she bathes him as if he is a child. The child if he had lived would be a comfort now in our old age; grandchildren running about. The spirits decreed no. Angry spirits, we give them offerings all the time, with few results. Stop, wrong thoughts, bring on their anger, stop thinking this. Maybe they gave us this boy in exchange, very strong power in him. See how tenderly she bathes him, his thighs and back and genitals. He lets her, he looks so tired. Singing. What is she singing?
Arirang, Arirang, O Arirang, The pass of Arirang is long and arduous. In the front of the house the young scholar is late at his books, In the rear of the house his neglected bride is weeping
. Old woman’s voice. A good
woman. But stubborn. The spirits were cruel to take away the child. See how she dries him now and puts on him an old shirt of mine and old trousers and rubber shoes and they laugh at the size. Do they play with us, the spirits? Are we their amusement? There is magic in this boy but he also brings with him too much remembering.

The boy slept on a clean pad in the same room with the old man, and the woman slept in the side room. In the early morning, when the old man and the woman woke, the boy was still asleep. They moved about quietly so as not to wake him. When the old man returned to the house at noon after a walk through his fields and rice paddies, the boy was still asleep. He stood a long moment beside the woman, gazing down at the boy, and then went outside to bring more wood for the stove.

The boy slept a great deal in the weeks that followed but woke at odd hours during the night and lay listening to the dry noisy breathing of the old man and the silence of the village. No sound drifted here from the main road; the village lay in a shell of stillness surrounded by its low hills. Once he woke in the cave with furry winged creatures on his face; another time in the shanty on the plain, the air filled with the choking black cloud and the girl in the doorway like a beckoning ghost. He woke bathed in sweat and trembling, his heart beating ominously and the wound in his chest flaming with pain.

He rose late one morning and helped the woman
bring wood into the kitchen and then walked about the village. Babies in the courtyards, girls on their swings, men repairing the paths and sluices in the fields and paddies, women cooking and washing. The village was smaller than his own: about a dozen homes, a single path, sheds, courtyards, trees. There were no boys his age: did they all work for the foreigners? And no animals. No cows, oxen, dogs. No chickens.

In the evenings, when people sometimes gathered in the house of the old man and the women, the boy listened to the talk. It was the talk of farmers. Weather. Plowing. No seed for planting. A lost harvest. Famine. Perhaps food from the government or the foreigners.

When they talked of the war, which was still raging far to the north, they lowered their voices and spoke in tones of fear. Villages all around them had been burned to the ground. Two of the farmers had lost their wives to hunger and sickness in refugee camps. One old man had been killed by an American bomb.

No one understood why their village had been spared. The boy noticed that whenever they talked of it some would glance at the hill beyond the village and murmur quietly words he could not hear.

He climbed the hill one afternoon in early spring and found burial mounds scattered about on the small flat areas of its tranquil slope; the broad shoulder was bare of graves and thick with winter weeds. He walked among the mounds awhile and then to the edge of the shoulder. Some distance below lay the American compound with its tents and long low houses and red crosses. Fine yellow dust floated across the compound
from the traffic on the main road. As he watched, a small single-engine aircraft raced along the runway of the airfield and lifted itself into the air.

That night, as they sat on the matted floor after having just finished eating, the boy announced to the old man and the woman that he wished to return to his village.

The woman blinked and looked down.

“Perhaps wait a little longer,” said the old man after a moment. There had been a promise of seed from the local government and he wanted the magic of the boy for the time of planting.

“With respect, tomorrow or the next day.”

The old man went out to talk to the carpenter.

“So soon?” murmured the woman. “Are you strong enough?”

“The snows are gone, the weather is warm.”

“I thought you would remain longer.”

“If there is no one alive may I come back?”

She nodded gravely. “And if there is someone alive you will not come back.”

“I will come back to visit.”

“How I hoped you would remain a while longer,” she said.

The old man returned with the carpenter. They sat down on the floor at the low table. A few grains of rice clung precariously to the carpenter’s beard.

The old man spoke to the boy. “The carpenter has something to say to you.”

“What I wish to say is this,” the carpenter said in a strange whispery voice that seemed to be only air moving between his dry wrinkled lips. The grains of rice trembled on the wisps of his beard. “I wish to say that
you should not leave the village now. In your leaving now I see much unhappiness.”

The old man said, “The carpenter has been to many places and seen many things. He has been to the Shuotsu valley and the Tumen River in the North and to the great thousand-year-old temple of Buddha near Myokosan. He has climbed the sacred mountain to the Lake of Heaven and descended to the cave at the very center of the earth.”

But the boy had not heard of any of those places and sensed an emptiness in the voice of the old man. Is he repeating words that are without meaning to him?

The woman said, “It is wise to listen to the words of the carpenter.”

“Stay until after the planting of the fields,” said the old man.

“I have seen in dreams the spirits of my father and mother,” the boy said simply.

They regarded him with startled eyes.

“Twice I have seen them.”

“What do they do in the dreams?” asked the carpenter.

“They speak to me but I cannot hear them or speak to them.”

The carpenter shook his head and sighed. He tugged at his beard. Grains of rice fell onto his white shirt.

“Then you must go,” he said.

The woman moaned softly. Give and take away. Cruel heartless spirits. The old man sagged. Fear descended upon him. The power gone. The world flat and empty. Dread of brutish demons.

“Do you know how to travel to your village?” asked the carpenter. A timbre of gentleness had entered his
whispery words. “No? You will tell me when you are ready to leave and I will show you the safest way.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet and the old man went with him outside.

“It will hurt me to see you leave,” said the woman. A hole opening inside her. Cold and frightful darkness.

The old man returned. They sat together awhile on the matted floor in silence.

Two days later the boy left the village, carrying a packet of rice balls and a rolled-up quilt the woman had given him. He walked through the fields and paddies and turned onto the main road and followed it to the tall stone-and-steel bridge over the river. Flanked by muddy pebbled banks, the river ran dark and fast between tall hills. The original side spans were intact but the center had been destroyed and was now of planks that rumbled ominously as jeeps and trucks passed over them. A thin waist-high pipe railing lined the single narrow walkway. He held tightly to the railing and felt a chill weakness in his legs looking down at the water foaming around the bridge piers far below.

On the other side of the bridge the road descended steeply to the floor of the river valley and ran parallel to the riverbank. He passed men coming down from the hills carrying A-frames loaded with brushwood. No one took notice of him.

Months before, on the flight from his village, he had forded the river farther north but the carpenter had warned him the river was treacherous now for the
melting snow. By noon he was sweating and he stopped in the thin shade of a new-leafed tree and ate one of the rice balls. The woman’s eyes dark and moist as she handed me the packet and the quilt. Same quilt we used in the cave and later, but much cleaner now, she said, her mouth in a sad smile. The old man silent and sullen. Angry if I stay, angry if I leave. A strange old man.

Aircraft flew by overhead. Swift silvery aircraft very high; small fragile olive-colored aircraft; aircraft with whirling shadows on top and no wings. Machines on the ground and machines in the air. The foreigners seemed to have an endless number of machines. Do the machines have spirits? Do the foreigners live this way in their own land, machines everywhere?

In the early afternoon he passed a small house on the side of the road and saw three young women lounging near the open doorway and an empty jeep parked nearby. The women wore skirts and one was naked from the waist up. The boy, going by quickly, saw the light-brown rounded flesh and the darker circles with the nipples and felt his heart racing and a turbulent heat on his face and a strange gnawing in his groin. He passed directly in front of the house and none of the women even looked at him.

Later he turned away from the river onto a narrow path that climbed into the hills. Toward evening he found a small glade and spread the quilt and gathered brushwood and made a fire. He sat by the fire and ate another of the rice balls. After a while he fell asleep on the ground with the quilt wrapped around him and woke shivering during the night and heaped more
wood on the embers and slept again until the sun woke him to the stillness of the early morning. He woke thinking he had heard his mother calling him and Badooki barking somewhere among the trees. He washed his face in the cold waters of a rocky stream and continued on along the path.

From time to time he caught a glimpse through the trees of the river shining in the sunlight. Keep the river in sight, the carpenter had said, and on your right. A wise kind old man. At night often drunk and loud. How did he learn so much?

He crossed a long meadow and came to a forest, where the path abruptly ended. A wall of trees. Oaks and larches and elms and pines. An open ceiling of branches and needles and cones and young leaves. The smell of cool moist shade. Soft damp floor of moldy leaves underfoot. Tall trees, gnarled spreading roots, fallen rotting hollow trunks, the scuffing sounds of his footsteps in the leaves.

He kept his bearings by carefully watching the trees. Find a tall tree far ahead, the carpenter had said, and walk to it and then find another tall tree. Watch where moss grows on some trees, it grows facing north. When you come to the end of the forest, turn right and follow the tree line. Soon you will see the pond you describe. Whispery voice. Like wind through a tube. Grandfather’s voice nasal, deep. Mother’s voice soft and sweet. Father’s voice high. There, over there, a flood of sunlight and the end of the forest. Grassy hill running downward. Field mice in the grass and yes the willows and the pond, there, the pond.

Voices.

The pond, lying at the far edge of the broad meadow that bordered the forest, was separated from the village by a row of willows. Men and women along its rim, strangers; and shanties side by side. Stagnant yellow-green scum on the water eerily bubbling along the edge. A stench came from the pond, thick and suffocating, and the boy felt it seize his throat.

No one had seen him emerge from the forest. No one paid any attention to him as he walked slowly past the pond into the village.

Shanties one next to another on blackened earth still clotted with ashes. The ground mucky with urine and clogged with firepits. A babble-voiced hum from squatting men and women. Half-naked children waddling about. Boys about his age gathered in small groups, talking. Girls playing the rope-skipping game in the swirling dirt. The air thick with the stench of filth. He walked back and forth, dazed. Where was his house? Where was the courtyard where his mother and the maids had cut vegetables and mended clothes and his sisters and brothers played? Where was the next-door house of fat Choo Kun? Here and there the remnants of a house as part of a shanty: charred roof tiles and foundation stones; a splintered plank of red pine; a blackened roof beam. Is this my village? Did I take a wrong turn? But the forest is there and the pond. And the meadow. My gang of friends building bonfires in the meadow on the fifteenth day of the New Year. And and kite-flying in the spring and summer. And bathing in the pond under the autumn moon to keep away illness for the year. And and sitting on the bank and singing. And Badooki Three Four Two
Three coming out of the water after a swim and shaking himself. And and and …