I Am the Clay (7 page)

He put his head out of the quilts and the sleeping bag and saw an expanse of dull-gray twilight sky and the back of the little woman who was pulling the cart and the old man bowed beneath the laden A-frame. Who are these old people? How did I come to them?

The cold wind forced him back beneath the quilts. He lay there remembering the village and cried himself into a dark sleep.

The cart came to a halt and he woke. The pain in his chest and stomach: all the center of him hot with pain. Inside the darkness of the quilts he curled himself into a ball. Small, make myself small. Small saved me from the guns of the soldiers from the North. Small saved me from the anger of uncles after games of mischief. Small brought me into the arms of Grandmother after scoldings from the stern mouth of Father. Small, small, a bird held lightly in the hand. He fell into a dazed half-sleep. Sounds came to him as though filtered through water or high wind.

The quilt was lifted from his face. Cold air surged against him and he shivered. Opening his eyes, he gazed up at a looming shadow that peered down at him from a vast early-evening sky.

The shadow drew closer. He stifled a cry.

The shadow leaned forward and a part of itself slid beneath the boy’s head and he drew back cringing and cried out. Small, very small. The dragon will disappear. Spirit of Grandfather, protect me!

He was being lifted, the quilts still around him. An
odor rose to his nostrils, sour and fetid, and his stomach tightened and lurched toward his throat.

Seated now on the cart, propped against one of its sides, he opened his eyes and looked into the face of an old woman. Diminutive, brown, wrinkled; kindness shining in dark eyes set in valleys webbed and serried like earth in drought; her lips cracked, a sore in one of the corners; her nose flat; her chin pointed; her head covered with a dirty white scarf knotted in the back; in her bare hands a bowl from which rose the steam of hot food.

He grasped the bowl and heard her murmured warning, “Slowly, eat slowly,” but could not heed her and gulped the soup, feeling it course down scalding inside him and his stomach momentarily recoiling—and then he remembered this woman had fed him before and he had vomited—and then he remembered she had carried him in her arms, yes, across an expanse of ice and snow to a place with a red cross—and then he remembered lying with his head upon her in snow somewhere—and then he remembered the bursts of earth as he had fled through the valley from the Chinese and the soldiers from the North and the odd thudding sensation of being struck in the chest; and stumbling along the road and the warm slippery trickling of the blood into his clothes and down his belly and between his legs.

The soup had a strange but not unpleasant flavor. Rice chaff? Pine nuts? And there seemed to be some kind of meat floating in it; he chewed it down greedily.

Another shadow appeared and stood beside the woman. This shadow too had a face, that of an old
man: brown wrinkled features; dark angry eyes; wisps of graying beard on his upper lip and chin; a long-stemmed pipe held between clenched teeth. His body small, thin, wiry, even in the wadded coat. A small ugly old man, head covered by a cap with ear flaps. A large mole on his left cheek.

The boy drew back from this shadow. It had about it the dark radiance of the evil snake, the dragon, in the pond beyond his village: moist, cold, reeking, and merciless to little children fishing alone on the pond’s edge. Never never fish there alone, Mother had repeatedly warned. He fished there often and had sneaked away in his special jacket from a family celebration and had been there alone fishing through a hole in the ice the day the soldiers from the North came. He slid behind the trees and lay very still and small, listening to the gunfire and the screams. He thought he saw the dragon in the water, swimming slowly back and forth, its huge form a dark shadow beneath the ice. This old man an evil dragon. This old wrinkled angry evil dragon who had earlier in the day shouted, “Nothing but the knife for soldiers like that!” The boy handed the empty bowl to the woman and slid beneath the quilts until they covered his face and head. Small, small. If the evil dragons don’t see you they go away. Good dragon, help me. Small. Like a bird in flight. Like a butterfly. Like a grain of rice. Small.

The old man had set up the pieces of scrap metal that had been their shelter on the riverbank and they slept
that night in a field somewhere between the city and the sea. He woke during the night to put the last of the brushwood on the fire and saw parts of the city burning, long flames flickering red upon the low clouds. A cold wind rose from the fields and blew past him with soft moans. Scattered fires dotted the darkness, revealing dim squatting figures. He took comfort in their presence. Stay with people, the carpenter had warned. Where were they now, the carpenter and his wife and sons? Along the road vehicles moved like shadows toward the sea, only their night lights visible: the slitted eyes of evil spirits. The sounds of war distinct. What will we eat tomorrow? The boy eats for two. Suddenly stubborn as a pony, this woman. The boy will bring trouble, I feel it. Shadowy forms—starved dogs?—flitted along the perimeter of dim yellowish light cast by the flames. He called out a warning. There was a brief skittering, and silence.

His legs and back aching from the burden he had borne much of the day, he returned to the shack and slipped beneath the quilts. Between him and the woman lay the boy, breathing softly. He is nothing to me. A stranger from another village and clan. Whose son? A landowner’s? A scholar’s? Let them care for their own. He takes my food and my strength. How the woman clings to him. What devil pushed us into that ditch with this boy?

From the dark road came the clatter of tanks. The frozen earth trembled. After a while the old man fell asleep.

All the next morning they walked toward the sea through fields and paddies that inclined gently downward
toward an increasingly wide and vacant horizon. The old man and woman pulled the cart together. Once the boy poked his head out of the quilts and saw a vast gray sky untouched by mountains and an expanse of frozen fields across which straggled masses of refugees. The immensity of the sky awed him. He smelled the brine-scented air. Incense to appease the spirits of the water? He watched the old man pulling at one of the shafts of the cart. He does not want me with them. He will send me away. Trembling, he slid back under the quilts.

Toward afternoon the woman caught a glimpse of the sea: an enormous sheet of dull-shining metal shading off into a blurred and fragile horizon. The unbounded watery expanse frightened her. Mountains and hills offered a contained and comforting world, a sense of solid place; this endless space brought dizziness and a sense of dislocation. Here the earth comes to an end. If we are not careful we will fall off into nothingness or into an underwater cavern of ghosts and demons. How will I protect the boy?

The old man too had never before seen the sea. He thought it a hundred rivers set side by side across which the spirits sent angry winds. He saw mudflats up ahead, a barren landscape descending to the sea. The scattered line of scrub brush and trees ended at the mudflats. The old man slipped the A-frame over his shoulders and went off toward a clump of brush where others were gathering wood. Taking hold of both shafts of the cart, the woman went on alone.

Later they entered a city by the sea and together with hundreds of others encamped in early twilight near a stone jetty that extended far into the water.
Putting up the sides of the shack, the old man watched as the woman carried the boy to the edge of the jetty and set him down so he could with her support relieve himself. How tenderly she held him, the quilt over his shoulders. Building a fire, he saw her talking to the boy, observed the gentle movements of her hands as she helped him urinate into the lapping waves. He felt again a rising of anger. This stranger, this stealer of food and loyalty.

The sea was murmurous in its rise and fall. Gray and dark and fringed with foaming muddy water. Waves washed across the desolate shore. The horizon, blurred by clouds and the coming evening, grew more and more indistinct, and the sea seemed to be expanding without end, while behind him the houses of the city, veiled by the dusk, were beginning to disappear. The vast and endless plain of evening. He stood at the edge of the sea and listened to the darkness and imagined the waters, driven by a sudden gusting wind, rising and washing over them all: advancing like a wall and crashing down upon them and sweeping them back out into that world of water, that engulfing emptiness. Yet so many lived here. An entire city. But deserted now. Only soldiers moving in and out of the buildings and along the bridges and roads. Earlier two South Korean soldiers had emerged from behind some trees, carrying rifles.

The old man had felt their rude hands on him. He looked away as the soldiers turned to the woman.

“What’s in the cart?” one of the soldiers asked.

The woman answered quickly, “Things we took from our village. Quilts, mats, pots. And this and this and that.”

“What’s under the sleeping bag?”

After the briefest of hesitations, “A boy.”

“What do you mean, a boy?”

“Our son,” the old man heard her say.

“Pull down the sleeping bag, old mother. Very slowly.”

The old man kept his head turned away.

“What’s wrong with him?” the first soldier said.

“A terrible wound in the chest.”

“He stinks like a shit bucket.”

“Hey, Uncle, you got any money?” the second soldier asked.

The old man turned to him but did not respond.

“Hey, you hear me, Uncle? You got any money?”

“No money, no money,” the old man said.

“I’ll break your head if I search the cart and find money.”

“No money, no food. Only this for food.” He held up the tiny field animal he had found half dead in a clump of brush and saw the soldiers looking at him and then at each other, astonishment and disgust on their faces. They had motioned him forward and he and the woman dragged the cart past them and walked without a word through the darkening seaside city to the mudflats near the jetty.

Here the water was not frozen. Here it kept sighing all through the night and moving like a restless spirit back and forth across the cold wet shore.

Bursts of automatic-weapon fire woke them in the early dawn light.

The old man leaped from the quilts into a wall of freezing air and ran to the cart, ignoring the pain in his muscles and bones. The woman scooped up the
boy and the quilts. All up and down the mudflats were the sounds of firing and pandemonium.

Soldiers came running across the mudflats shouting and firing their weapons into the air.

The old man started to load the metal pieces of the shack onto the cart.

A soldier ran over to him. “You get out of here now, Uncle.”

The old man pointed to the partially dismantled shack, his hands making the motions of pleading.

“You move, Uncle! Move! Americans are exploding the city!”

The woman took up the shafts of the cart.

They fled across the mudflats, the pale-gray dawn sea to their right, and went along a stretch of sandy soil and then through scattered brush and more mudflats. From behind them came a low rumbling noise that grew into a heart-numbing roar and they turned and saw the entire city erupting in smoke and flame. Huge tongues of fire leaped into the air, followed by boiling clouds of dust and debris. A vast dirty brown-red cloud began forming over the city. The old man and the woman felt the ground trembling; dense waves of air struck at them and sucked breath from their lungs. The boy brought his head out from beneath the quilts and stared at the city and the old man saw upon his thin face a look of horror. Then he was emerging from the quilts and scrambling from the cart. Names and words poured from him. The old man heard “pond” and “fishing” and “dragon” and “soldiers” and “village burning.” The boy ran staggering through the icy dawn, away from the destroyed city. He stumbled and fell and rose and fell again and
the woman ran to him with a quilt and covered him and brought him back to the cart, murmuring to him softly, and the old man took up the shafts of the cart and walked on, the woman now alongside the cart, soothing the boy, who lay trembling beneath the quilts.

All that day they walked southward and the city could be seen burning, dusty clouds churning over it like a horde of raging spirits.

Toward evening the boy was feverish again.

Fearful, the woman put her left hand on his face and with her right hand made vertical and horizontal motions over his head. Spirit of Grandfather, protect him. Spirit of my tree, protect him.

The old man stood gazing at the boy. This burning is not from the wound. The wound is healing; its edges are sealed. Soon the woman will have to remove the threads.

From what is this burning? Perhaps from the demons of memory. They attach themselves to a person and that person wastes away. He had seen that happen before in the village. The old carpenter’s brother, who lost a son one year to the flooding river: the demons of memory had eaten him to a shadow before the eyes of the entire village.