Silver Stallion (3 page)

When the bombing started the previous evening, Kijun's uncle had been playing flower cards with three carpenters at the town brewery. At first, he said, they heard that strange hissing sound, the eerie distant
shu-shu
whistle, and then an earthquake-like noise at a deafeningly close range, and everybody in the room instinctively threw themselves to the floor. “It kept coming and coming, explosions, in all directions. Wham! Wham! WHAM!” he went on. “We could not stay in the house any longer because the ceiling fell down on us, with broken tiles and dust and everything. So we ran out to the street. Many houses were engulfed by smoke and clouds of dust, and people were running away, helter-skelter, stumbling and screaming. They were running, running, running with their children in their arms, shrieking and whimpering and calling, their hair all in tangles and their clothes torn to flying shreds. They did not know where they were going, where they should go, or what they were supposed to do. They ran back and forth going nowhere. And I saw a woman whose arm had been just blown off,” he said. “Blood was gushing out of the ragged stump of what was left of her arm. She was digging in a pile of dirt on the curb, sobbing, ‘Where's my arm? Where's my arm?'”

The villagers did not believe everything Kijun's uncle said because he was such a blowhard, but those who found it absolutely necessary to go to town that day planned to leave as soon as possible so that they would not have to risk the dangers of a nocturnal air raid.

The Kumsan farmers were the most nervous among the West County villagers about the continual bombing and what might happen next, because their village was located nearest to town. When the villagers discussed what they had watched from the riverbank or heard in the town, their voices grew shaky from anxiety. Some believers in folk religion said nothing would remain of this earth but piles of dirt and ashes if so many planes kept coming and pouring down so many bombs; they worried that the world was about to end in flames and explosions, before the creation of a new universe, fulfilling the ancient prophecy.

“We have to do something before the war crosses the river and destroys us,” Kangho's father, the miller, said to Young Hwang, watching the burning town from the ferry. “We have to stop such a terrible thing from happening.”

“But what can we do?” said Kijun's uncle. “Shoot down the planes with slingshots?”

Young Hwang said nothing, for he was not supposed to have any answers. Only his father, the county chief, was authorized to have opinions and make important decisions about serious matters involving the whole community. When they faced a big problem like this, it was always Old Hwang who gave them helpful instructions and valuable advice, and the farmers always respected and followed the old man's judgments. But the county chief did not seem to have any ideas as to how to stop fire pouring down from the sky either. Without any guidance, the only thing the villagers could think of was to hide underground. After the air raids continued the second night the Kumsan villagers began to dig bomb shelters in or around their houses. Then they thronged the riverbank at dusk once again to watch the burning town.

When the planes did not come in the daytime nor at night on the third day, the farmers found themselves strangely restless. The lull only increased their anxiety because it might be nothing but a momentary reprieve before a more astonishing event—something totally destructive, fatal. The villagers felt inexplicably relieved when the bombing was resumed.

The five boys and Fluffy met in the afternoon under the tall aspen tree on the hillock behind the ferry and sat down on the grass to watch the town burning again. The planes swooped, flipping their shiny wings, to strafe or drop bombs, and then soared again like hunting kites after snatching their prey, through the patches of white flak smoke. To the boys, the flying machines looked like tiny specks acrobatically scuttling around among kernels of popcorn floating in the air.

“I didn't know there were so many airplanes in the world,” said Chandol with a stupefied expression, pressing his cheek to the aspen bark. “Maybe more than fifty planes have bombed the town in the last several days.”

“Seems
they're
really coming,” said Kangho, his hand patting Mansik's dog but his eyes attentively following the planes.

“Who is coming?” Mansik asked.

“The United Nations Army, of course, who else?” Chandol said with a slight sneer. “Haven't you heard anything about General Megado and his U.N. warriors coming to liberate us?

“You must have heard
something
about the army of many countries, Mansik. People talk about them all the time.”

“Soldiers from sixteen countries are coming to save us, they say,” Kangho explained.

“Really?” said Kijun, who had been standing on his knees to look over the tops of the potato plants at the town. Then he added, disbelieving, “I didn't know there were so many countries in the world. What countries are they, anyway?”

“America, Pillipin, Toiki, Belgi …” Kangho said. “I don't know all the names.”

“Belgi?
That's a very funny name,” said Bong, who had been squatting like a partridge a little distance off from the other older boys.
“Belgi
means fleas, doesn't it? Are they sending flea soldiers to liberate us?”

“But that's the name,” Kangho said, somewhat dubious himself. “And all those foreign soldiers have
bengko,
they say.”

“Bengko?
What's
bengko?”
Bong asked again.

“Bengko
means ‘big nose,'” Chandol explained.
“Bengko
are foreign soldiers with their noses this big.” He pressed his right cheek to his shoulder and stretched out his arm at its full length to imitate an elephant's trunk.

“That big?” said Bong, frightened. “How can people have such big noses:

“I don't know because I've never seen them,” said Chandol. “But there's no doubt they do have huge noses, because that's what all the town folks say.”

“Did you hear it yourself?” Bong asked.

“No. But Jun's uncle did. Right, Toad?”

“Yes, that's what my uncle told me,” Kijun said.

“They must be a mighty army, anyway. The U.N. Forces, I mean,” Mansik said. “Look at all those planes. The Reds certainly don't have a chance against them.”

“The town will be very crowded when all sixteen countries of them arrive,” said Bong, blinking his eyes, puzzled.

“I guess the Reds will start running away soon,” Mansik said, wetting his dry lips with his tongue tip.

Then, frowning with sudden fear, Chandol said, “If all of them run away to the north and the war ends today or tomorrow, we may never have a chance to see a Red.”

As if on cue, the four boys stared tensely at Chandol. They knew what their captain meant. Ever since the first days of the war, the boys had been wondering what kind of persons the People's Army soldiers were; they had never seen a Red because they had not been permitted to go to the town after their school had closed down. The villagers said red flags flew on the roofs and at the gates of all important buildings in the town and the Communist soldiers armed with Chinese rifles and Russian submachine guns drove around in splendid automobiles magnificently decorated with vines and leaves. Chandol had been hoping that some day they could go to town and watch all the exciting war stuff going on there. And now the National Army was coming back with all the armies in the world to drive away the Reds! There would be a great battle on Phoenix Hill or somewhere by the river between the Reds and the
bengko
army, no doubt. Chandol was determined to see that fight.

Two airplanes zipped down to the river upstream, red smoke and fire mushroomed up near the Soyang Bridge. The boys could hear a distant boom a moment later. Chandol, biting his lips, narrowed his eyes to scan the remote world beyond the rivers.

“We must go there,” Chandol murmured as if to himself. “We must. If we don't go there now, we will never see a war.”

“My parents won't let me go to the town. But I really want to see the Reds,” Kijun said, obviously frightened but trying to convince the others that he was the second bravest boy of them all. “Don't you want to see what the real Reds are like, Bong?”

Bong winced. “Not really,” he said. “They must look like a sorcerer's monster. Red all over, you know.”

“My father says they aren't actually any redder than we are,” Kangho said, swatting a fly on his sweaty neck with his palm. “My father saw several of them when he went to town.”

“Why do they call them Reds, then?” Mansik asked.

“No one knows,” Kijun said. “Maybe sometimes their skin turns red or something.”

“We have to see what the Reds are really like,” said Chandol. “We have to go there before it's too late.”

TWO

T
he first breath of autumn had begun to blow over the West County. Ollye, Mansik's mother, felt the early morning chill against her skin as she came out of her room; the sun had not risen yet. A silky veil of mist crawled under the willows along the stream traversing Kumsan village. She listened for a moment to see if Mansik and Nanhi, his little sister, were still asleep in the other room and then stepped down to the yard. Fluffy hopped from behind the chimney and followed her to the kitchen, wagging his tail. She built a fire in the oven hole with dry twigs and leaves. While the breakfast rice was boiling, she went to the back yard and cleaned the hoe and the bamboo rake she had used the previous afternoon on the weeds which thrived outside the fence of Paulownia House. She stood the clean tools neatly in a row beside a sickle against the earthen wall and then went out of the house with a broom and the dog to sweep the footpath leading from the road to her thatched hut. When the morning chores were done, she stretched her back to take a brief rest and looked along the narrow patch of green onions and all around at the golden patterns of the rice paddies. When her eyes reached the road sloping down to the ferry, Ollye quickly turned back to go into the house and sweep the front yard; she was afraid to look at the town beyond the river.

Presently the sun rose over the rolling skyline of the eastern hills. Here and there scarecrows stood guard, sunk in the yellow expanse of rice up to their chests. A soft breeze stirred the endless strings of tin “bells” that had been hung on poles in the rice paddy dikes to scare away crop-stealing birds. Made of crooked nails in empty cans, they clattered as the wind turned them. In these few remaining days of summer, the forsythia around the onion patch looked like a species of bleached death. The dancing cosmos and scarlet salvia blossoming in the back yard of the Chestnut House were signs of autumn.

Mansik's house, called the Chestnut House because the tallest chestnut tree in West County stood by its twig-woven gate, was located at the end of the footpath lined with rose moss some fifty yards away from the log bridge. It was right next to the ferry. The stream flowed only a few yards in front of it and at night when the whole village turned quiet after the farmers had gone to bed early to save expensive lamp oil, Mansik's family could hear the gurgling noise of the water. Chestnut House did not have its own well and Mansik's mother washed almost everything—her face, clothes, the rice—at the stream. She used the well in the Hwangs' courtyard only for their drinking water.

The well was not the only thing for which Mansik's family depended on the Hwangs. Three generations of Mansik's family had been provided for by the Hwangs in one way or another. Mansik's grandfather had been a servant to Old Hwang's father until slavery was abolished by the Japanese colonial rulers in the nineteenth century. Even after the social reformation, Mansik's grandfather lived at the Hwangs' for quite some time, although he was paid by the month instead of receiving an annual sum and everybody was strictly instructed not to call him “the servant” but “the house manager.” But Master Hwang did not give him any land to sharecrop. He needed to retain at least one of his four servants, preferably the most obedient and diligent one, because he could not shed his habit of keeping someone at hand to run and bring him a toothbrush or deliver a message to a charcoal-maker.

It was Master Hwang who gave Mansik's father the aristocratic name of Kim Indong instead of a common rustic one like “Pau” (Rocky) or “Tolswe” (Stone and Steel) when Mansik's grandfather finally moved out of the Paulownia House, got married and had a son. However, Mansik's father rarely had a chance to use that dignified name (written in Chinese letters) because he also was a servant to the Hwangs most of his latter life and nobody needed or bothered to express any great respect for him; they simply called him “Mansik's Father” or just “Kim.” Yet when Indong, in turn, became the father of a son, he, too, consulted Old Hwang as to the naming of the boy. The old man told Kim to call the child Mansik, meaning, in Chinese, “Maturity and Solidity.”

At the time of Mansik's birth, Indong lived in a riverside mud hut at Kamwa village, fishing and sharecropping a bit of land provided by Old Hwang. Then, one summer, most of his corn patch was washed away during a torrential rain. Indong also lost his fishing boat. And the roof of the mud hut collapsed. He searched downstream for several days after the swollen muddy river had ebbed only to find the broken half of his shattered boat washed ashore on the shingle at Paegyang village. Having lost land and boat at the same time, Indong had no way to support his family. He had no choice but to move back to Kumsan, build a kitchen and two rooms onto the community hearse shed next to Paulownia House, and settle down there for good.

Since then the Kims had worked virtually as house servants for the Hwangs. They had worked hard enough to be able to buy a little piece of land on which to plant sesame or cayenne pepper. They might have bought even more land and cherished some hopes for the future if Indong had not spotted a cow floating in the flood one fateful summer day. He could not resist this unexpected opportunity. The animal could buy them quite a few handsome rice paddies right away, if he could rescue it. The villagers on the riverbank tried to stop him because the swollen current was very rapid, but Indong would not listen. He swam out into the river in the pouring rain, somehow put his rope around the cow's neck, and struggled with the animal in the water for about half an hour, until he was completely exhausted and went under.

After her husband's death, Ollye took over his domestic chores at the Hwangs'. Now Mansik was nine years old and big enough to help her with some work, but she could not find enough to do in the village to feed and clothe her son and daughter properly. Last fall Ollye had been forced to sell her sesame patch back to the Hwangs for three bags of rice because she had nothing to feed her two children during the slack winter season. If Old Hwang had not sent her some free barley or potatoes occasionally, she could never have managed. It had become a habit for her to glance over at Paulownia House first thing in the morning in the vague hope that Old Hwang would call her over and give her some work. This morning she glanced over at the house expectantly because she knew the Hwangs would need some hands to dig potatoes on their large patch near General's Hill.

Paulownia House, about thirty steps away from Chestnut House, was also called “the Rich House” or “the Scholars' House.” The name Paulownia came from the huge shade tree that the old man had planted by the northern fence next to the well in the year of Sokku's birth to celebrate the arrival of a precious son in a family which had had few sons for several generations. This big house with its tiled roof and brass-decorated gate was the only place in the county where farmers could find books, ink slabs, writing brushes and other rare scholarly objects handed down by the Confucian students of earlier generations. Whenever she looked up at the majestic tiled roof of the Paulownia House, Ollye felt hopelessly small. The appearance of the house intimidated her so much that she always winced when she entered it or went to draw drinking water at the well.

When they moved to Kumsan from Kamwa, Indong did not dig a well for his own family because he thought it was not necessary; Lady Hwang told them it was perfectly all right for the Kims to use the Hwangs' well because they were like her own family. Indeed Indong and Ollye were a part of the Hwangs then; they went over to the Paulownia House almost every day to work and the two houses were located so near each other that Old Hwang would only have to open the door of his room and call to summon anybody at the Chestnut House.

But the situation changed with Indong's death. Ollye felt it was not proper for a widow from another house to draw the first bucket of water for the day when nobody in the Hwang family had used the well yet. She tried to go to the well as late as possible in the mornings, but she could never be sure that someone in the family had preceded her even if she went almost at noon. Her trips to the Paulownia House were even more uncomfortable after the death of Old Hwang's wife. Old Hwang offered the main room in the house to his son and daughter-in-law because the biggest room should be occupied by a couple, and moved his quarters to the guest room by the gate. Ollye was afraid that the old man might hear her approaching and open the outside door to see the young widow enter his house early in the morning, perhaps leading a train of evil spirits. She tried to draw water in the afternoons, but sometimes she worked from sunset to dusk. She could not go in the evening either, because a woman was not supposed to visit after dark.

She also felt guilty visiting the Hwangs for free drinking water now that the Paulownia House had practically stopped giving her any domestic chores. Ollye and Indong used to take care of most of the housework for the Hwangs because the old lady had suffered from a chronic lung disease. She would gasp, wheezing painfully, if she did so much as mop a room or move the mortar a yard, so she had needed Ollye for many hours a day. Ollye had pickled their cabbages and turnips every kimchi-making season, boiled beans to make soy sauce or hot pepper paste, peeled the skin off the persimmons to dry for winter snacks, and washed and mended clothes, while Indong had removed the thorny burrs and packed chestnuts in straw bags, collected twigs and leaves in the woods with a rake to store for use as tinder during wet weather, twined straw ropes until his palms were cracked and done hard labor in the fields as well. Sometimes even Mansik had been summoned by the old man to be given such minor tasks as keeping the chickens out of the vegetable patch.

When the lady of the house passed away about six weeks before Indong's drowning, Old Hwang had wanted his son to get married quickly, for there should be at least one woman in a family to bring warmth to the house. A county matchmaker soon found a very healthy young girl from Toktuwon village for Young Hwang's bride; both Old Hwang and his son deeply appreciated the virtue of good health in a woman, for they had gone through enough unhappiness and inconvenience on account of Lady Hwang's weakness and constant illness. The Toktuwon Woman was certainly healthy. In fact, she was so healthy and strong as to distress Ollye. This young woman worked so hard and fast that Mansik's mother lost almost all employment from the Paulownia House. The Toktuwon Woman single-handedly took care of the domestic chores as well as a large part of the field work, and rarely, only when she was too busy to do all the work by herself, did she ask Ollye to come over to help her for an hour or two. That was why Ollye was so worried about the coming winter.

As Ollye was going back to the kitchen after disposing of Fluffy's droppings in the onion patch, Mansik emerged from his room, rubbing his eyes. With a loud yawn the boy entered the kitchen, sucked his index finger to wet it with spit, pressed the finger on the small pile of salt in a cracked little saucer at one corner of the cooking board, and brushed his teeth with the salted finger.

“Do you have any work to do for the Rich House today?” Ollye asked routinely, opening the lid of the cauldron to check the boiled rice.

“Today, I have,” said Mansik cheerfully, taking the towel hanging on the kitchen wall to go down to the stream to wash. “Old Hwang told me to go to Charcoal village, take his ox to carry the load of charcoal and graze the animal on the way back home.”

“It may take the whole day if you have to make the trip with the ox.”

“Not more than a half day, Mother. I am leaving after noon.”

Fluffy hopped back and forth playfully circling around Mansik as the boy walked out to the footpath. “I see Chandol's mother coming,” he called to Ollye in the kitchen as he went down to the stream.

Old Hwang sent his son for Kangho's father and told the miller to go to Chunchon and find out what he could about the progress of the war. These days the old man sent Han to town for information more and more often; Kim Indong had run such errands when he was alive, but the miller did them now. Han spent all morning in the town and came back late in the afternoon to report what he had observed to Old Hwang.

When he returned home, the miller told the same story to his wife, who showed no interest at all in the gory tale of dead bodies and gutted buildings along the downtown streets, until he mentioned in passing the destruction of the National Grange storehouse located next to Chunchon Railroad Station, where the incoming grain from the nearby counties was kept until it was shipped to the big cities.

“You mean the granary was bombed, too?” Kangho's mother asked, suddenly alert.

“I already told you about it, didn't I? I saw the building on my way down to the town ferry.”

“Was it on fire?”

“No, it wasn't burning, but half of the roof and the walls had collapsed.”

“How about the rice?”

“Rice?”

“When I went to Castle village the other day, I heard some farmers talking about the truckfuls and truckfuls of rice that the People's Army had confiscated. They took rice from every village in South County and piled it up in the Grange storehouse. If the granary was destroyed by bombing, what happened to that rice?”