Silver Stallion (27 page)

The onlookers, who had accepted the boy's denial with silence, began to murmur again, a few of them openly sympathetic to Chandol's family. Ollye was tongue-tied. Then a shout rang out from the outer circle of the crowd:

“What a great show you folks are putting on!”

It was Yonghi who had been watching the whole thing for quite some time.

The crowd turned their faces to her and several of them stepped aside as Sister Serpent approached Chandol's mother menacingly. Yonghi stood firmly before her, bristling up like a rooster in a cockpit.

“So you think Ollye is wrong for calling your innocent boy a criminal, ha?” Yonghi said. “You claim that she is humiliating a nice innocent family for no reason at all. I've been watching what's been going on in this village and you really made me puke. Sure, we—Ollye and me—are dirty whoring bitches as you and your angelic child said, but I see a lot more stinking characters around here who are worse—much worse—than Mansik's mother or any other whore.”

She looked Chandol's mother in the eyes. “You're trying to convince these hypocrites that this filthy scum, your son, is an innocent victim of a whore's lies, aren't you? You want to tell the whole world that nothing like what your son did ever happened. But I was there when the shooting started, I was there to see the two boys running away. We caught one of them, a fat boy, and the other boy managed to escape. And I heard what that fat boy said about the other boy who got away—about this innocent child, this Chandol. Yes, I know what the two boys had been doing there. Tell me, why do you think the Yankees opened fire? Do you think they were hunting ducks in the winter night? What do you think they shot at? At your innocent cunt?”

“Listen to that!” Chandol's mother screamed. “Did you hear that, villagers? A whore speaks like a whore. Please somebody do something to shut that bitch up!”

“Bitch? Do you think I am a bitch?” Yonghi's voice became shrill. “All right, I will show you what a real bitch behaves like.”

Yonghi attacked Chandol's mother, her ten sharp enamelled fingernails, like cat's claws, raking across that snub-nosed face. The startled villagers pulled the two grappling women apart, but the damage had been done already; Chandol's mother had several scratches across her face. The two women charged each other again, floundering amid the snatching hands and loud voices. Everybody shouted to everybody else to calm down but nobody calmed down. While the farmers and the village women and the two prostitutes were attacking, pulling, pushing, howling, shrieking, swearing, brandishing their fingernails, raising dust, waving their lamps and tumbling one upon another, someone in the rear said that Old Hwang was coming.

The commotion abruptly subsided. Nobody wanted the old man to see them involved in such an incident. Yonghi and Chandol's mother let each other go and stood aside; Yonghi's hair was in a tangle while Chandol's mother was bleeding from several more new scratches on her dusty face. Groaning painfully, Ollye staggered up from the ground, her whole body trampled by the villagers during the riot.

Old Hwang and his son stood by themselves in the road, a few steps off from the guilty crowd. Sokku checked their faces one by one with his military flashlight.

“What is the meaning of this untimely row?” Old Hwang asked.

But the old man's attitude did not show an intention to pass judgment as to who was in the wrong or who should be punished. Strangely, he no longer sounded like the leader of the community; rather, his reproach sounded like a casual remark, as if he was inquiring about the situation as a mere traveler passing through the village. In response to the detached attitude of the old man, the villagers kept silent. Yonghi, who still hoped to sell the house back to the old man, also became silent. Ollye remained in the center of the crowd, lost, as if she had forgotten her next line and could not think of anything to say instead.

Chandol's mother finally ventured to explain her position. “That—” she said, pointing to Ollye, “that woman came to my house at this late hour and dragged my son out of bed to make a preposterous—”

“I do not want to hear your explanation,” the old man interrupted her. “Go back home, Ollye. If you speak more in anger now, it will only breed resentment and regret in your heart and in others' too. What is the use of all this anger and hatred when every one of us knows only too well that we will soon leave home to take refuge and be scattered. Don't you think this war has brought enough hate and fighting among us? We have had enough of ill feelings for one generation. Now everybody go home. The day will break soon.”

But Ollye was not willing to leave. Her accusation had been stopped short and she wanted to finish what she had intended to say to the villagers. She began, “But Mansik lost two fingers. Chandol is a liar, Kijun is a sneak and a liar. They are both cowards. Worst of all, their parents encourage this, encourage them to bully the weak and scorn the unfortunate. Because of me … because of what happened to me. …” She looked at old Hwang, then at the throng of villagers. “Now you will see, all of you, who will help
you
in your time of need. You will see, soon enough.”

“No more, Ollye, no more. Do not put this burden upon me,” Old Hwang said.

Ollye skipped a breath. Since the unfortunate accident, she had not heard Old Hwang speak her name in such a gentle voice. Was it some sort of new beginning? Might he have decided to permit her to return to what she had been? This thought brought her sadness rather than relief. She knew no return was possible now.

NINE

0
llye and her two children joined the procession of refugees streaming south carrying everything they could load on their heads and backs and shoulders, parents holding their young children's hands. Most of them traveled on foot with only a few bundles and packages, but some others, the wealthier countryside landowners, could take along with them much more family property such as sewing machines and chests of drawers on their farming carts and ox-wagons and the backs of their cattle. Abandoning their houses, hometowns, neighbors, some older members of their families and all the things they had cherished but could not take with them, they ran for their lives, not knowing where they would go or how they would survive. They left their homes hoping the war would pass and they could come back soon, but nobody was sure when the war might end—or if it would ever end.

Ollye glanced back over her shoulder at the northern sky whenever she heard the occasional muffled booms of artillery somewhere not too far behind the refugees. The sounds of war chased them, and came closer and closer as the days passed. Now and then she sat down with her children on the roadside on clumps of dead grass to rest her tired legs and watched the countless men and women, children and old people—all strangers—who were going the same way she went with the single purpose of fleeing from the war. Babies traveled on their mothers' backs, sometimes two babies on one mother, but most boys and girls older than five had not only to walk on their little legs but to carry their own small share of the load, a bag of rice or a roll of quilt. They trudged on and on, night and day, to the south, everything needed for their survival packed into various sizes and shapes of bulging bundles, strapped onto human bodies like giant warts.

Again in her farming clothes of loose pants and
chogori
vest with sagging sleeves, Ollye looked like any other countryside housewife, although she had her hair permanented like a modern city woman. Nanhi, completely covered with cotton-stuffed clothes and wrapped in a baby quilt, traveled most of the way on her mother's back. Mansik plodded on behind Ollye, a large bundle of clothes on his back, holding in his arms the rooster that he once had tried to train to attack.

Ollye had joined the procession of refugees on an icy morning four days earlier. The previous night she packed some clean clothes, cooking utensils, the few valuable things Mansik's father had left her, the Zenith radio and the camera and some other Yankee PX goods left over from black market trading. Ollye knew those
bengko
goods, along with the handful of bank-bills neatly folded into small squares and hidden deep in her bosom, would be of a great help to her in surviving. When she crossed the frozen river the next morning to join the refugees, the war nomads, milling around on the road, she had some consolation in thinking that her family would survive a lot longer than most of these people.

When Ollye left Kumsan, only a few families remained in the village. Old Click Beetle had decided not to leave home because “Nobody on either the Communist or the Yankee side would bother to waste a bullet to kill a worthless old man like me.” Pae, the village chief, and his family were busy packing at the last moment; the Paes did not want to go away leaving their aged parents behind alone, but their decision was prompted by the fearful rumor that the Communists had killed all the families of South Korean policemen and soldiers during the last invasion and that this time even the petty officials like village chiefs would be executed. “We have lived long enough,” Pae's father said. “But you must stay alive to lead the family.” Other families had not yet decided whether they should leave, risking the hard refugee life in a strange place or stay home, risking the possible atrocities of the Communists.

Most families had not thought or argued much as to whether they should go or not. As soon as the word got around that the Hans of the rice mill had left the county secretly at dawn without saying goodbye to anybody, the other families immediately started packing. Soon the village was virtually deserted. Ollye found nothing suspicious about the secret flight of the miller and his family; it was natural for them to be ashamed, for they were the first family to run away, after all. But she could never understand why the Hwangs had also fled secretly like criminals the next night.

Ollye left the village later than most because she had to wait for Mansik's injured hand to heal. Leaving the desolate village behind, she crossed Cucumber Island for the last time. The skeletons of Texas Town and Camp Omaha were dead and buried under white snow. Looking around the ruins of Camp Omaha, looted by the townspeople and the West County farmers after the departure of the Yankees, she had a strange illusion that she was facing her own grave. One whole phase of her life was buried there in the snow and she was leaving for a new beginning, for better or for worse, in a place she did not know.

In the town she mingled with the countless refugees surging south like a human river. A young boy wiping tears from wet eyes with the soiled back of his frozen hand, a stooped old man carrying six apple crates stuffed with clothes on his A-shaped wooden back-carrier, a woman in her fifties leading five children in a row like a mother duck swimming in a pond with her ducklings, a little girl playing alone with dirt on the road and the grownups hurrying by without even glancing at the lost child, a boy with white scabs on his head, an ancient woman cooking rice in a military mess-tin in a roadside vegetable patch, a baby with a cardboard canopy hooding her face like a box mask to protect her tender skin from cold winds, a boy limping with frost-bitten feet, children with shaven heads, a weeping old woman … Swept along by these people, Ollye walked south day and night with her two children.

“Mother, where are we going, anyway?” Mansik asked her when they were one day away from Chunchon.

“Well, I don't know exactly.” This was the best answer she could give. “Everybody is going south, so I guess we have to go south too, if we want to save our lives.”

Although she was not sure where they were heading, Ollye had an odd premonition that her family would eventually find themselves in Pusan, the port city at the southeastern tip of the peninsula, the only big city that had not been taken by the People's Army during the initial Communist offensive. Leaving for the south with Sundok and two other U.N. ladies of Texas Town before the
bengko
unit moved to Osan, Sister Serpent had asked once more, for the last time, if Ollye would like to join her later in Pusan. “Just come to Bichuku and they'll tell you right away where you can find me. We cannot do any more whoring business together because I understand you're determined not to continue this kind of life, but you surely will need Imugi's help if you want to settle down and get started in Pusan. So, be sure to look for me if you ever set foot in Pusan, okay?” she had said.

White breath steaming out of her mouth like puffs of smoke, one morning Ollye asked her son abruptly, “You hated me because I was a U.N. lady, didn't you?”

Mansik nodded his head yes. He did not need to think because his answer had been ready in his mind for a long time. Mansik had hated not only his mother but the
bengkos,
the neighbors, the Kumsan boys and virtually everything related to that village. That was why he did not hesitate to admit that he had hated his mother. But he realized instantly that something was different now and that he should have thought for a moment or two before giving that spontaneous nod. Plodding in the stream of refugees with the rooster in his arms, Mansik looked back over shoulder in the direction of his home, several days away over so many hills. Mother had not told him definitely where they were going, but he was sure they would never go back to Kumsan. “We cannot return home even if we want to,” Mother had said while crossing the Soyang River. Her voice made him suspect that she still retained some attachment for the land of her birth and young womanhood. Mansik was different. He was happy to be free from the cursed place, and he would never, never go back, even after the war was over. But his feelings had been changing without his knowledge. He had come to believe that all the hatred which had consumed him belonged to Kumsan. Out here in the cold, Mansik did not need his hatred. What was the use of hatred, after all?

His resentments no longer burned in his heart, for Kumsan itself had ceased to exist. The Chestnut House, Dragon Lady Club, Aunt Imugi, Chandol and Toad, Kangho and Bong, the gravekeeper's hearse shed, and General's Hill had vanished from his world. The past was gone. He would never meet his friends again, and he would never fight in another Autumn War with the Castle village boys. Recalling the young boys of the two villages roaring and cheering and throwing stones in the autumn field, Mansik had a queer feeling that he had become a grownup overnight. The Autumn Wars of West County were over for good and he was now in the grownups' war, a war that went on too long because the grownups wanted to fight in all seasons.

If the legendary general had come galloping on his silver stallion in time, there would have been no need for the
bengkos
to come to liberate them. If the
bengkos
had not come to West County, he would have had no reason to hate his mother….

Mansik finally opened his mouth to say, “But not any more.”

“Not any more what?” said Ollye, who had forgotten what she had asked her son.

Mansik did not explain. He did not feel any need to tell her about his feelings.

“Oh, that,” said Ollye, understanding belatedly. And she did not say anything further. She gazed for a moment at Mansik's hand, the hand that had only three fingers left to hold the rooster. Then she turned her eyes to the south again.

They walked and walked, but there was no end to the procession of the refugees. Sleeping uneasily crammed in with strangers in the dirty rooms of abandoned houses, following the flow of the strange faces along the roads and through the villages with unknown names, sometimes mingling with the retreating military vehicles, passing through the ruined towns and streets, listening to the howitzers that sounded closer and closer, glancing at the bodies of those who had starved or frozen to death on the road, watching the dreadful landscape of war, Ollye and her two children trudged farther and farther away from home.