Waxing Moon

WiDō Publishing
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.widopublishing.com

Copyright © 2013 by H. S. Kim

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover Design by Steven Novak

Print ISBN: 978-1-937178-38-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946684

Printed in the United States of America

“For Bernd”

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.”
—Shakespeare

Part
One

1

Mrs. Wang, the only midwife in the village, had been notified at the onset of Mistress Kim’s labor, but she arrived a day and a half later in a leisurely fashion.

Nani, who received Mrs. Wang, had no chance to break the news to her, because the massive midwife in her late forties began to complain as soon as she stepped into the courtyard: the road condition was miserable, her back ached, and her eyeballs burned from lack of sleep. Besides, the baby she had just delivered was the size of a calf, she added, following Nani, who led the way with a lantern in her trembling hand.

It was a moonless night and quiet except for the occasional hooting of an owl perched on an old pine tree beyond the formidable stone walls that surrounded the property. Mrs. Wang cursed as she tripped over a stone, and she spat on the ground to cast away an evil spirit lurking in a corner, which she thought she almost saw. Her stomach growled, so she slapped her belly and said, “Keep quiet.”

Nani stopped in front of the quarters where two pairs of shoes were arranged neatly, as if they were being displayed for sale. One was made of straw; the other was adorned with embroidery on the front and back.

Mrs. Wang exercised her stiff neck demonstratively. The maid, having not slept in many hours, yawned and began to announce the arrival of the midwife in a habitual manner, momentarily forgetting that only a few minutes before, Mistress Kim had given birth to a girl and then died with her eyes wide open. She started out matter-of-factly, but in the middle of the sentence her voice went hoarse as she remembered her mistress’s final moments. The poor woman had held her and another maid named Soonyi by their wrists for hours until suddenly she let go of her grip, leaving purplish rings, and she had tried to say something, but her immobilized tongue choked her. During the labor her cry had sounded like the howling of a beast, and it still echoed in Nani’s head.

No reply came from inside the room. Mrs. Wang took off her shoes impatiently and ascended to the antechamber, made of a century-old juniper tree. Nani remained behind, arranging Mrs. Wang’s shoes on the stone next to the other shoes, and then lingered there. It was eerily quiet, and yet the air felt stuffy, as though an overcrowded party had just ended.

Mrs. Wang forcefully opened the latticed door. Two candles on a low table swerved in a synchronized motion as the breeze entered the room through the open door. At first, nothing was visible except the area around the low table, but the odor that met Mrs. Wang’s nostrils quickly told her what had happened.

After a few moments, Nani entered with the lantern. Soonyi was sitting in the corner, seemingly as still and lifeless as a sack of grain, her eyes glittering with profound fear.

Mrs. Wang sat to feel the pulse of the woman on a cotton mat in a pool of her own blood. She dropped the still-warm hand of the unfortunate woman. Then suddenly, she shouted, “Bring the lantern close!” A creature between the dead woman’s leg’s squirmed. Mrs. Wang picked it up. She slapped the bottom of the baby, who immediately cried at the top of her lungs.

“Hot water, quickly!” Mrs. Wang shouted again. Soonyi sprang up from her corner and rushed out. Still holding the lantern, Nani trembled severely. Her mistress was still looking at her.

“Put that down
and go bring linens or whatever you have,” Mrs. Wang said sharply.

As she set the lantern down by the low table and left the room, Nani sobbed, her shoulders jerking.

The baby stopped crying when Mrs. Wang gave her a thumb to suck on. Mrs. Wang held the baby a little higher to show the dead woman.

Mrs. Wang felt utterly miserable. She had made a mistake, she thought to herself. Most of the well-to-do people she had dealt with fussed over the smallest signs of labor, so when a male servant, Min, from this house had handed her a letter the day before about his mistress’s “excruciating pain,” she didn’t bother to look in his direction while she tossed millet in the air for her chickens in the yard. He urged her, using his hand gestures because he was mute, to please come with him, but she simply said that she would come when it was time for her to come.

It had happened in the past that, as a less experienced and more sympathetic midwife, she had rushed to the walled households only to find the pregnant mistress resting like a beached whale, hoping for contractions to begin. Mrs. Wang would be guided into a resting area and served meals and snacks and drinks for days on end, sometimes until cabin fever attacked her violently. As a result, she dreaded being summoned by the wealthy: they were predictably unpredictable.

But now, sitting in the room with the dead woman, she felt thoroughly regretful.

There was nothing she could do now, Mrs. Wang told herself. She then said it out loud to the face of the dead woman, as if to protest: “There is nothing I can do.” She closed the dead woman’s eyes. The tips of her fingers felt moist. She stopped then, not knowing what to do with the moisture on her fingers. The woman’s oval face showed a certain pride, even in death. Mrs. Wang tried not to look at her. She didn’t want to know her more than she already did.

The baby began to cry vehemently.

“I hate it when babies cry,” Mrs. Wang muttered, and then looked about, lest anyone had heard her. She was ashamed, but the only others present were the dead woman and her baby.

The baby Mrs. Wang had delivered earlier was awfully large, and his mother had impressively sized breasts, already engorged, enough to feed twins. Triplets. Maybe she would take Mistress Kim’s baby girl for milk for a while. But right at the moment, Mrs. Wang was too tired to think about the logistics of the arrangement.

The two maids reappeared, carrying a bucket of warm water and linens. Mrs. Wang clucked her tongue. She realized they were hardly older than the newborn they were going to bathe. Nevertheless, she told them what to do.

While the maids performed their duties, breathing rapidly, Mrs. Wang suddenly asked, “Do your people know what has happened?”

The two maids hesitated for a moment, glancing at each other uncomfortably.

“Have you swallowed a stone?” Mrs. Wang asked impatiently. “I don’t mind tales, but I mind silence. Out with it. Now!”

Nani began to explain in an unsteady voice. Mistress Kim was the first wife of Mr. O, whose fortune and prosperity knew no bounds, except that he had no heir.

“Get to the point!” Mrs. Wang thundered.

So the story was that Mr. O was with his second wife at the moment, and when he was with her, he was not to be disturbed for any reason.

“What a pig,” muttered Mrs. Wang.

Mrs. Wang arrived home at dawn. Her shins wobbled and her back was drenched and her head felt light from lack of sleep. As she opened her wooden gate with its missing hinge, it creaked, and her surprised rooster made an unplanned interjection of the loudest
ko-ki-yo-oo.
Her heart leaped and she almost fell on her buttocks. She was beside herself. Clenching her teeth, she strode toward the cage and took down the sickle hanging loosely. It was the tool used to trim bamboos that grew too tall and obstructed her view of the canyon.

It happened not so quickly as she would have liked. She grabbed the rooster who, intuiting the murderous instinct in his owner, struggled to escape. Mrs. Wang finally managed to chop off his head, which flew into the thicket of bamboo stems. The rooster flapped his wings as if he were winding up propellers to fly. The blood began to spurt out of his severed neck, dotting the ground in a chillingly beautiful pattern.

Mrs. Wang didn’t stay to observe her rooster’s last moments. Instead, she hurried to the kitchen to put a pot of water on the clay stove. Because she had been gone for so long, no fire was left. Lighting kindling, she murmured impatiently, “Come on. Get going. Good fire.”

While the water was heating, she cleaned herself of the animal blood and went into her room to change. A piece of petrified rice cake was on a plate in her bedroom. God only knew how old it was. Overwhelmed with hunger, she devoured it, despite the few spots of greenish white mold that resembled certain winter flowers. Then she lay down on the warm part of the floor, under which ran a heating channel that was connected to the clay stove in the kitchen. Her bones melted on the heated floor and her spirit oozed out of her. While counting with her fingers how many hours she had stayed up, she fell into a deep sleep and woke up many hours later.

Smoke filled her room and the burned smell infuriated her. Cursing life and the gods, she ran to the kitchen, only to witness an empty, blackened pot on the kitchen stove.

Standing there in front of it, she was surprised to find herself strangely relieved. The rice cake she had eaten still felt lumpy in her stomach, and she wouldn’t have felt like eating the animal she had killed so impulsively anyway. She hadn’t meant to do that, actually. She had never done that before. In the past, she had always made sure that her animals died in such a way that they did not know about their own end. Why had she been so crass with her rooster? Was she going to cook the bird without depluming it? She took the pot off the stove and set it on the dirt floor to let it cool down.

She stepped outside. The sun was high in the sky, and her hens were cooing and flapping their wings, ready to get out of the cage. As soon as their door was unlatched, they rushed out into her yard. She hoped none of her creatures had seen what she had done to the rooster. A sickle wasn’t the right tool to use to kill an animal in the first place. But then the brains of chickens were so small. What did they know, anyway? Now she regretted that she had no soup. It would have been good to have something hot. The thought prompted her to go to her vegetable garden in the backyard. She pulled out a few white radishes and shook the dirt off them.

While chopping the radishes, she felt her arms ache. She should make two entries in her journal about the deliveries she had just performed, but she decided to stay near the pot and keep vigil.

When the radish soup was ready, there was a knock on her gate. As she walked toward it, she could see the head of a young man above the gate, as if the head had grown out of the door while she slept.

“What is it?” Unlatching the gate, she asked, annoyed by his blank face.

He made no reply but motioned with his head toward the girl behind him. She was holding a little bundle in her arms. When she saw Mrs. Wang, she smiled broadly, as if seeing an old friend after a long time.

“What is it?” Mrs. Wang inquired once more, but then she realized that the girl was one of the two maids who had assisted her the night before, and the young man was the mute servant who had come to fetch her the other day. The baby must be the unfortunate offspring of the deceased woman. Mistress Kim. Was that her name?

“What now?” Mrs. Wang opened the gate and let them in.

Nani advanced and bragged that the baby hadn’t cried at all, sounding like a proud mother.

Min stood in the front yard, gazing at the mountains on the other side of the valley. Nani brought out a letter written by Mr. O, the father of the baby.

The gist of the letter, apart from his excessive apologies for the inconvenience, was that because Mrs. Wang might know a wet nurse, he would let her decide what was to be done with her. He added a postscript: Nani is delivering the fee for the nursing mother.

There were two pouches, one for Mrs. Wang’s services of the night before, and the other containing compensation for a wet nurse.

Mrs. Wang took both pouches in her hands. The one for the wet nurse was heavier than the one for herself. Maybe three times heavier. But she said nothing.

“Would you like some soup?”

Nani welcomed the idea. But Min made a gesture, which only Nani understood.

“He thinks we should get going for the sake of the baby,” she interpreted for Mrs. Wang.

“I need to take care of my stomach first.” The rice cake, she told herself, was hardly food: it was petrified and gave her only flatulence. She had worked hard and the chicken soup was what she deserved after all that work, except that it had vanished. So at least she would have radish soup before she did anything else for other people.

She invited the visitors to sit on the outdoor bench. The maid sat holding the baby, and the young man stood awkwardly, shooing away flies with his hands.

Mrs. Wang brought out three bowls of radish soup with cold rice and kimchi. They ate ceremoniously, without words.

The meal put Mrs. Wang in a much better mood. So she asked, smiling, “What’s his background? Who are his parents?”

“He is an orphan. Was found at the gate, bundled up in a basket when he was only a few months old.”

“He is a good soul,” Mrs. Wang said quietly. Good looking too, she said to herself.

Nani blushed and offered another piece of information about him. “Min wants to go live in a big city. But he will have to get permission. Actually, he wants compensation from our master for all his work before he goes.”

“If he gets to leave with only Mr. O’s blessing, he’ll be lucky.”

Nani said nothing but stared at her young man. Her eyeballs moved rapidly, as if she were dreaming, and then suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears.

Mrs. Wang wasn’t a sentimental woman. So she said, “Are you all right? Do you want to lie down?”

Min put down his bowl by the well, sat down next to Nani, and clumsily rubbed her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me, you idiot,” Nani grumbled, her voice hardly audible.

“What’s the use if he can’t hear you?” Mrs. Wang didn’t like this outpouring of emotion in her front yard. As if there weren’t enough tragedies in this world!

“Oh, he can hear better than the creatures in the wild. That’s for sure,” Nani said.

The young man wiped Nani’s eyes with his sleeve. And he moaned and groaned in his throat in an effort to soothe her. Abruptly, Nani stopped crying and spat out, “Idiot!”

“Let’s go,” Mrs. Wang commanded.