I Am the Clay (4 page)

Men and women squatting on the mudflats regarded him with pinched faces. Soon they will begin to follow me. Only in the land of good spirits do such treasures go on forever.

The woman looked at the wood and said nothing: it was not for her to praise her husband for an ordinary
task. The two old men, seeing the wood from their sleeping bag in the shack, squealed with joy.

The boy lay still in the pulsing circle of warmth cast by the burning wood and it was now clear to the old man that he would not die.

The following morning the woman told him that soon there would be no more food.

He squatted at the river’s edge. A pitiless north wind gusted across the river. In the milk-white sky the yellow disc of the sun. Trucks rolling across the faraway bridge. Distantly the thump and thud of big guns. The Chinese like locusts in the fields. A dull heavy dread seized him. He remembered hunger, once from a time of river flood and again from a time of endless sun: firespears in his belly; locusts in his head; tremors in his arms and legs. Dark-circled vacant eyes and sunken faces and rotting gums. The long dying of his grandmother and uncle and others in the village. All turned into shriveled foul-smelling dolls. Hunger he dreaded more than war, more than death itself. A dark and leprous scourge.

He returned to the shack and removed the small square of cloth he kept in his coat pocket and spread it on the ground. From their basket of food he took a handful of rice and placed it on the cloth, which he then tied with care and replaced in the pocket. The woman, squatting next to the sleeping boy, watched the old man in silence, no expression on her small wrinkled features. He settled the A-frame on his shoulders and, bent beneath it as if it already carried its anticipated load, he left the shack.

The snow had hardened to a slippery crust over the frozen mudflats. More refugees had entered the city in
the past two days; both riverbanks were a mass of men and women. No one was fishing the river. He gazed across the river, looking for the tent with the red cross where a doctor had angrily cared for the boy. Was it near the distant bridge? Removing the splinter from the boy’s chest with her fingers. All the early years docile as a cow, and then the death of the little one. A different person after his death. Holding him as he burned. First the village doctor. Then the sorceress. Helpless. Crying and burning. The boy buried on the hill and her first raging anger soon afterward at the plow that broke upon a rock in the field. The words that came from her. Much sense to wear the hat of mourning only for a mother and father: a wife is a stranger one can replace.

But the thought of her dying frightened him. How stand alone against the evil spirits?

He slipped through the row of riveredge houses and walked directly to the cache of wood.

On the narrow street before the broken wall the wind had turned the snow to ice. It blew as if through a ravine, as if across the shoulder of the hill near the village where they lived. And what of the ox in the shed? Dead by now. In the bellies of the Chinese locusts.

Near the break in the wall he took from his pocket the cloth and with care laid out the rice in a cone-shaped pile on the ice-covered earth. He gazed up and down the street, and the street, silent and deserted, put to him its mottled face. He shivered in the wind and stepped behind the broken stone wall. After placing within easy reach of his right hand a number of sharp-edged stones and a heavy piece of timber, he squatted on his haunches and waited.

He did not wait long.

The little dog entered the street from the far corner, short neck extended, nose sniffing the ground. It hesitated, shivering, and raised its head, tawny skin dull in the pale winter light. Lifting a hind leg, it pissed against the side of a house. He watched it through the break in the wall. Reared in one of these houses? And abandoned? Nowhere to go? Waiting for its master to return? Come, little dog. Come, come. To the rice. Yes. Hunger drives one; caution abandoned. A man who is entirely a starving stomach is no longer a man. Nor is a starving animal an animal. The empty stomach runs the head and makes shit of us all. To the rice, little dog, yes, yes. Ah, yes. Now. Eat.

The dog, abruptly lifting its head from the rice, saw the old man as he rose to his feet behind the wall. It stood frozen, grains of rice on its tongue. Immediately it saw the motion of the old man’s hand it began to wheel. But it could gain no momentum on the ice and its churning paws slid in all directions and it slipped and skidded. The first stone, hurled by the old man as if from a slingshot, caught it on the front right paw. Yelping, it stumbled headlong onto the ice and tried desperately to regain its balance with its remaining three legs. The second stone struck it on the back and spun it around. Its cries rang through the street. The old man was swiftly upon it but its writhing and the slippery ice made a single well-aimed blow impossible and the piece of lumber descended a number of times. He felt it in his hand each time: the thud, the thump, the breaking bones. Finally the dog lay still upon the ice, bits of rice still clinging to its limp red tongue.

The old man, breathing heavily, looked quickly around: the street was still save for the icy wind keening among the walls and houses. Much of the rice lay untouched. He spread the cloth upon the ground, gathered up the rice, laid it on the cloth, and once again tied it into a small bundle, which he returned to his pocket. He picked up the dog: warm, limp, light. All bones and air it seemed. He put it down near the pile of wood inside the courtyard, quickly loaded the A-frame, and again concealed the wood beneath stones. He paused briefly to urinate upon the stones, then placed the dog inside his jacket, its head against his neck. With its warmth upon his flesh he walked beneath the load of wood back to the riverbank.

Inside the shack he gave the dog to the woman, who took it without a word. The two old men looked at the dog and ran their tongues over their dry shrunken lips. The boy lay sleeping beneath the quilts.

The old man went down to the edge of the river and sat gazing at the wavering line where the frozen bank met the frozen water. The sky had clouded over. More snow? The ice of the river looked black. Skating on the frozen white ice of the pond outside the village. The old carpenter and his four sons. Snow-white clothes on the carpenter; many-colored garments on the children. Back and forth on the wooden skates made by the carpenter with his skilled hands. And when the youngest of the sons is suddenly too cold the carpenter lifts him and puts him inside his wadded jacket and skates with him against his flesh; and the oldest skates proudly alongside his father. Smoothly like the sailing of spirits on sunlit clouds. Smoothly like the
movements of love during the three days and three nights after the wedding ceremony and the serving of the parents-in-law by the bride. Smoothly. Not like the ragged killing of the dog. Which his hand still remembered. The thump and crunch of wood and bone. Not enough time to soften the flesh. Not enough time to prepare it properly. Winter a bad season to eat dog. Glancing up, he saw the woman squatting near the shack, working over the dog. The fire leaping and dancing in the oil drum. Light snow beginning to fall: whirling flakes. Demons of cold out tonight. Ice contracting soon with a noise like thunder. More will die on this riverbank tonight. Maybe the boy too.

Guns thumped distantly. A giant four-engine aircraft suddenly overhead with outspread wings and lowered wheels, roaring over the river and landing with a reverberating blare and backthrust of engines. Like the raging Master Dragon of the Eastern Sea. But it brings soldiers. And food. What to eat afterward? No dogs on this riverbank. They know to stay away.

The snow thickened, swirling.

The woman squatted near the oil-drum fire preparing the dog. Opened, it steamed in the icy air. The air stung her small brown blood-wet fingers. Scrawny starved dog. Five mouths to feed here. The boy first. Two nights and still alive. I give a special sacrifice to the spirits if the boy lives. The promise of an old woman. A special sacrifice. One child is enough. I will think what to sacrifice. Leave this little one.

Water boiled in the kettle over the low fire on the three stones. She squatted on her haunches working expertly and ignoring the thick-falling snow.

She did not see the two men who were moving slowly along the riverbank, stopping here and there and coming to a halt near the oil drum where the woman sat.

They peered closely at the wood piled on the earth.

They were of early middle age, short and lithe, brown-skinned and raven-haired, and dressed in dark wool trousers and leather jackets and fur-lined caps and army-style boots. One carried an A-frame on his back, which he lightly slipped off and set on the ground. Without a word the two men began removing the wood.

The woman saw them and cried out.

Squatting at the river’s edge, the old man heard the cry and sprang to his feet and scrambled up the mudflat to where the two men were silently piling the wood on the A-frame.

The old man asked them what they were doing.

They ignored him and continued loading the wood onto the A-frame.

The old man said it was his wood.

One of the men, without looking at him, said, “Shut your mouth, Uncle. I am not yet very angry. You don’t want to make me very angry.”

“You cannot take my wood,” the old man said.

“Uncle, it’s not your wood and we’re taking it. You are fortunate that I am not yet very angry.”

“I will cry thief,” the old man said. “The entire riverbank will be upon you.”

“Uncle, the thief here is you. But you’re an old man. That’s why I am not very angry.”

All the time the man talked he kept loading the wood onto the A-frame.

“The wood cannot be yours,” said the old man. “You steal it and hide it. Do you sell it to the rich?”

“You are now succeeding in making me angry,” the man said. “It’s not good for your health to do this.”

“There is a very sick boy inside the shack. He will freeze to death without this wood.”

“You want this wood for a sick boy? Our sacred land is filled with the sick. Consider yourself lucky I don’t ask you to pay for the wood you already burned.”

He helped the other man attach the A-frame to his back and get to his feet.

The woman slipped into the space before the man with the A-frame.

“You cannot take this wood,” she said.

The man took a sidestep. The woman again stepped into the space before him.

The first man said, “Get out of the way.”

“The boy will die.”

“Blame the spirits.”

“Leave us some wood.”

“Can you pay?”

“We have barely enough to eat.”

“Blame the North and the Chinese.”

They started up the mudflat. The woman stood in the way of the man with the A-frame. The man looked at the first man, who pushed the woman roughly aside. The old man cried out in anger and stepped forward and found himself looking at a bayonet that had suddenly appeared in the hand of the first man.

“Now you have succeeded in making me very angry,”
the man said. He opened his mouth in a rat-toothed smile.

The old man and woman stood very still.

The man looked at them. After a moment he put the bayonet back under his coat.

“You are lucky I have respect for old people,” he said. “It’s one of the few things I hold from my childhood.”

The two of them walked off the mudflat with the wood.

The old man and his wife stood gazing after the two men as they disappeared into the shadows amid the row of houses. Hot anger and shame brought a trembling weakness to the legs of the old man.

“There is still fire in the oil drum,” the woman said. “There is some food.”

They returned to the shack.

The dog was gone.

On the frozen earth were droplets of bright blood and a scattering of entrails.

They stood staring at the leaping flames in the oil drum and the simmering kettle on the small fire. Along the riverbank people lay in shacks or squatted around burning oil drums. A middle-aged woman sat motionless near a low fire outside the shack nearest them.

After a long moment the old woman said, “I will make a soup with what remains of the rice.”

She squatted near the kettle.

The man stood looking at the point on the riverbank where the two men had disappeared with the wood.

He ate in silence the soup and doughy paste the woman had made with the last of the rice. A faint savor of meat tinged the soup and objects floated in it that were not rice. The woman fed the boy, who swallowed and did not vomit. The two old men ate noisily and greedily and then lay back in their sleeping bag and closed it over their heads.

Outside the shack the fire in the oil drum smoked and died away. A night of wind and snow descended upon the riverbank. Up and down the river the ice drew deeper into itself with a crunching and thundering that seemed to echo the distant banging of the artillery and the noise of the jeeps and trucks and tanks rolling across the bridge.

The old man slept and once again dreamed the woman had opened her jacket and blouse and given the boy her breast to suck. He heard distinctly the boy’s drysucking sounds. He woke with a start and lay very still in a darkness so cold it seemed a ponderous weight. He could see nothing. He listened to the woman’s deep slow dry breathing. But the boy lay so still the old man thought him surely dead and he raised a hand, seeking his nostrils in the darkness. With a shock of surprise he felt the boy’s breath brush with warm tickling lightness against the palm of his hand. Alive! And his cheeks smooth and cool. Abruptly the boy stirred and lifted his arms and encircled the old man’s neck and clung to him. “Abuji,” he murmured, his cheek against the old man’s face.
“Abuji …” Then his arms slackened and fell back limply and he was again asleep.