I Am the Clay (2 page)

The woman walked alongside the cart, feeling through the cloth she held to the wound the moist warmth of the boy’s blood. He lay semi-conscious, burning with fever, and when he began to shake she tore more strips of cloth from her skirt and wrapped them around his chest—he stiffened as she moved him but did not cry out—and then put a quilt over him. She spoke briefly and silently to the spirit of her long-dead mother and to the spirit of the leafy chestnut tree near the veranda of her home in her childhood village and to the spirit of the only child she had borne, who had died in his first year of life. She traced
in the air over the boy the long vertical and horizontal motions taught her by her mother to ward off the demons of death.

Pulling the shafts of the wagon, the old man heard the thump of distant artillery and tried to think only of each next step his feet must take on the torn and dusty road. The middle of the road was clogged with jeeps, trucks, and ambulances. On one side refugees fleeing south; on the other infantry in two lines moving north. Troops on the footpaths and in the frozen fields beyond both banks of the road, strung out in thin advancing lines all through the valley.

Two single-engine fighter planes approached from the south, about fifty feet above the ground. They followed the contours of the valley, vanished below the crests of the nearby range of hills, and reappeared on the other side as if launched from catapults.

The old man turned to his wife in time to see her step away from the cart directly into the path of an oncoming ambulance.

He stared at her in a paralysis of astonishment. All around him he heard shouts. He let the shafts of the cart fall from his hands.

The woman stood in the road. As the ambulance rolled past him, the old man saw through the closed window of the cab the startled face of the Korean driver. He found his voice and shouted a warning to the woman. The ambulance braked to a halt in a swirl of gravel and dust.

There was a moment of silence. Behind the ambulance the long line of vehicles came to a halt.

The driver rolled down his window and put his head
out. “You crazy? You want to become food for worms?”

The old woman pointed to the boy in the cart. “Hurt. Very bad.”

“Get out of the way, old mother, or I drive right over you,” the driver yelled. Behind him there were shouts and horns blared and an American officer climbed down from a jeep and started quickly forward along the line of stalled vehicles.

“A child,” the woman implored. “A boy. Hurt.”

The old man went to her and took her arm. She pulled away.

The driver put his head back into the ambulance and a moment later brought out his arm. In his hand he held a packet wrapped in light-brown material. He threw the packet at the woman, shouted instructions, and rolled up the window.

The old man and his wife stood on the side of the road and watched the ambulance go by. The woman felt the huge red cross brush against her like a benevolent ghost, and she made vertical and horizontal lines in the air with the hand that held the packet.

The old man stared at her. She was opening the packet. Behind him people were shouting. He took up the shafts and brought the cart to the very edge of the road. The line of refugees started past him.

The woman removed the bandages from the packet. With the bandages was a small paper packet containing a white powder. She began to peel away the bloodied cloth from the boy’s wound. The blood had congealed. She pulled gently at the cloth and the boy woke briefly and moaned. She emptied the powder onto the wound and saw the pupils of his eyes roll
upward and slide beneath the top lids. She covered the wound with a bandage and laid the quilt over him.

The old man watched her. Somewhere in the valley artillery thumped. Two silver jets wheeled over a distant hill from which rose columns of dense curling black smoke. The sacred land was on fire.

The old man, who could sense when living things began their slide toward death, knew the boy was dying. He thought they would be rid of him by the next sunrise. A portion of the rice would go to the boy that night. The woman would insist on it. A waste of precious food.

He walked in the line of refugees with his hands tight around the shafts of the cart, feeling in his shoulders and arms and back the mutilations in the road caused by the war machines of the foreigners. A plowing by the devils of death. The boy merely one small death amid all the other dying.

Some steps behind him the woman walked alongside the cart. Once she stopped to scoop up snow in her hands from the ditch beside the road and then rubbed the snow on the boy’s fevered face. The boy woke to semi-consciousness and cried out for his mother, and the old woman felt her heart suddenly beating very quickly. A memory of cold emptiness deep as a waterless well in which only silence and darkness and demons dwelled. How swiftly the snow melted! Rivulets running across the closed eyes and alongside the slender nose and the thin small mouth. Which village is he from? Nine, ten years old. Ah,
my sacred tree, caress him with your healing spirit as you did me in my childhood when I tumbled from your limb and broke a bone in my hand and the village doctor applied the poultice and I sat in your shade and you whispered to me
Arirang, Arirang, O Arirang, The pass of Arirang is long and arduous, But you will climb to the hilltop, Where the sun will always shine
, and the old doctor was astonished at how swiftly the hand healed. She scooped up snow again from the road and held the snow to the burning forehead and the boy cried out again for his mother and fell back into unconsciousness.

The line of tanks and trucks and jeeps and troops stretched ahead as far as the old man could see. Even an army of devils could not defeat so many men and machines. We return soon to the village. Before the woman finds another to share our food. Before we begin to starve.

He plodded on, pulling the cart. From time to time, when the road became steep and tortuous, the woman moved behind the cart and pushed. He sensed clearly her presence through the shafts in his hands: an old woman but still strong. Strong in everything except in the bearing of children. Permanent shame covered them. He felt again the darkness and dishonor of early-morning wakings in a childless home and he fixed his eyes upon his feet as they took the road one step at a time, one step at a time.

In the late afternoon they reached the outskirts of the city. The fields and paddies came to an end. Houses now along both sides of the road. The road littered with downed power lines and the scattered debris of broken walls.

The woman had never been to Seoul and she looked around with astonishment at the wide paved streets and the tall stone buildings. The old man had been there once before, when he had inherited the parcels of land upon the death of his father and for some reason the local town administrator sent him to Seoul and he took his papers to the office of a sneering official in a black Western suit, slicked-down hair, and pointed black shoes, who kept him waiting outside his office door for days until he realized that more money than usual would need to be exchanged for the favor of his attention. Arrogant, scornful man. Leech.

He noticed there were fewer foot soldiers and vehicles now on the main road. Damp with sweat beneath his wadded blue coat. Hands and shoulders and back trembling and aching with fatigue. Blood beating in his neck and head.

Some of the refugees were moving off the main road, vanishing into the side streets.

He heard the voice of his wife and turned to her and saw she was talking to a young woman who stood in the open doorway of a house with shattered windows and broken walls. The young woman was pointing up the road. She asked where they were from and the old woman said a village above Dongduchon. The young woman said her parents, two uncles, and grandmother lived in Dongduchon, were the Chinese anywhere near there, and the old woman said one of the sons of their village carpenter had seen Chinese soldiers in the hills just north of the village. The young woman put her hands to her mouth and hurried into the house.

The old woman turned to her husband. “We will go to the river.”

“What is on the river?”

“Perhaps a doctor for the boy.”

The old man looked at the boy. He lay very still beneath the quilts she had heaped on him. Cold snow, warm quilts. Where had she learned such things? Stubborn, crazy old woman. Even in old age she surprised him.

He took up the shafts of the cart and walked, following a line of refugees through the rubble of the main road. A grimy-faced little girl squatted alone on a pile of rubble, crying. He turned to his wife, warning her with a fierce look to leave the girl alone. Here and there bodies lay along the sides of the road. Dark and fetid odors in the air: torn earth, wrecked houses, broken sewage lines, rotting flesh. Starved dogs roamed about and he thought he might catch one but he had little strength for a chase after this day of pulling the cart.

Some time later he saw through the winter twilight the dull sheen of the frozen river.

The riverbank, its mudflat skin frozen to tundra ice, slanted down in a wide brownish scraggly slope from the shell-pocked stone houses along its upper edge. A silent horde squatted upon its surface inside thrown-together shanties and near discarded oil drums in which burned scavenged wood. The flames fed upon the air through holes poked into the drums and roared
upward into the darkness, casting lurid reddish dancing patterns upon the frozen surface of the river.

Beyond the opposite bank of the river was an airfield. Huge aircraft rose and landed, wing flaps extended and wheels down, like giant herons, flying directly over the old man and his wife and the boy. Earth and air trembled at the roar of their engines. Spears of light on their wings pierced the darkness.

Squatting near a blazing oil drum while the woman cooked their rice, the old man gazed at the aircraft and the burning oil drums along both riverbanks and the play of light and shadow on the river, and a memory of childhood returned to him: living men suspended head-down from chains over open firepits. A nightmare from the time when the Japanese governed the land and stories were told of their cruelties to those who resisted their rule. The flaming wood crackled, showering forth a spray of sparks. He felt on his hands and face the pulsing heat of the flames and on the back of his head the glacial air of the night. Beneath him the riverbank had softened in the heat and was oozing mud. He watched as the woman prepared their portions of rice. She squatted near the shack, cooking on the small fire she had made of wood heaped upon three stones. There would be three portions. One for the boy.

Earlier she had bartered a handful of rice for a place in a shack put up by two starving old men from the city. She had spread their pads and quilts and then had left the old man behind to guard their belongings and had taken the boy in her arms across the frozen river. The old man had squatted near the fire outside the shack, and waited.

She was gone a long time. He grew wild with hunger and began to rage within himself. Does she still not know after all these years who comes first?
First
the husband,
then
the stranger. No children from her, no loyalty from her. A curse of a woman.