The leaf pile had again grown mountainous and Hector told a few older boys to grab hold of a corner of the tarp, while he took another. They pulled together but their corner didn’t budge and the boys lost their footing and fell down. The children cackled wildly. When they were ready again Hector counted to three and they pulled in unison; the pile began to move, Hector gripping the forward corner of the tarp, and when it looked as though the boys would falter, some of the others, including Sylvie, took hold of the lead sides. Several children stood between her and Hector. He glanced at her bloodlessly but her gaze didn’t waver and he had to look away. She could not give in to him now, let him keep shunning her, for these few days Ames was gone would be the last chance they might freely speak. She had not lied to Ames about wanting him to stay or about how much the children at the newer orphanages would benefit from his visiting, but it wouldn’t be untruthful at all to say that she had hoped for this chance.
Hector counted again and all together they dragged the pile about fifty meters, to the spot near the garden where they collected the compost. Once there, Hector went around to the other side of the pile and then waded through it while pulling the tarp in his hands, crouching and using his weight for leverage to flip the huge load over onto itself; for an instant it completely covered him before he stepped out, his hair and clothes tagged with pine needles and leaves as though he were a wild creature of the woods. The children brushed him off and after a moment’s hesitation he stretched out his arms and even bent down so they could reach his head, letting them pick him clean.
Since the field was cleared, and with no other work for the day, the older children organized their usual afternoon soccer match, the younger ones playing jacks with stones or running about in games of tag. Reverend Kim had not yet come out from the dining hall and would probably remain there until supper, after which he would drive back to Seoul. Hector was now gathering the various brooms and rakes, and when he knelt for a hand broom, the high raft of the tools he was balancing on his shoulder nearly toppled and Sylvie stepped forth quickly and picked it up. She neither moved nor handed it over and without speaking he walked to the garden shed where he kept the tools. He came out and went right past her and she watched him transfer a load of firewood to a wheelbarrow and push it to the main dormitory building; he was replenishing the fuel for the woodstoves in the dorm rooms and the chapel. She waited until he was inside and then made her way over. He was coming back out for more when he saw that she had an armful for him. He took it and went inside the vestibule.
“You’re not going to talk to me anymore?” she said. He didn’t answer and she followed him into the chapel, where he deposited the wood next to the stove in the far corner. He was responsible for preparing the stove in the chapel for services, though now because of the cold weather he was lighting and extinguishing it nightly as well. The chapel was aglow with light from the small window he’d put in the roof, the gray-painted pews, the gray-painted walls, the plain wooden cross suspended by wires attached to the backs of its arms. “Is that it, then, Hector? Is that all?”
He said to her: “You’re leaving the day after Thanksgiving.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you ought to go the day before.”
“Why do you say that?”
“This way we’ll all know the blessing we’re missing when we’re giving thanks.”
“Please don’t be cruel.”
“I’m not being cruel. I’m just saying it like it is.”
“You know I don’t want to leave.”
“I don’t know that,” he said, his voice rising. “How would I know that?”
“You do,” she told him.
“Then you can stay.”
“I want to, yes. But if I did, what would happen? Do you think anything good would come of it? Do you think we could work together like simple colleagues?”
“You mean like you are with your husband?”
“Please don’t be like that. Don’t act like a boy.”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“Please stop.”
“Isn’t that why we were together? Because you wanted someone you didn’t have to be righteous and responsible with, and who gave you a good screw besides?”
“Fuck you.”
She turned to leave but he caught her by the wrist and pulled her in and tried to kiss her and she turned away, covering her face. He persisted and she slapped him. But he held on to her anyway, not even flinching when she raised her hand again. She tried to wrench away, but his grip on her was fierce, unbreakable, as though she were manacled to a rock wall.
“You’ve taken pity on all of us, haven’t you?” he said, tugging her closer. “I’m talking to you now! I want you to listen to me now! Before you came this place was no better or worse than any other orphanage in this damned country. Which was just fine for the kids and the aunties, and even for me. There’s enough food and a roof and no more killing, and so what else is there to want? But you’re leaving, and what do we have now? You know what I found one of your girls doing after your husband announced you were leaving?”
“Just let me go-”
“It was Mee-Sun. She was at the well pump, drinking water straight from it like she was dying of thirst. I passed her twice before I noticed she wasn’t stopping. She was just drinking and drinking, getting her sweater soaked, and I had to pull her off it. I thought she was going to drown herself. I asked her what the hell she was doing, and she said she felt funny inside, because you weren’t going to be here anymore. For some reason she felt like she was hungry again. She said she used to do it during the war, so she wouldn’t feel so empty inside.”
“What would you have me do? Don’t you think I want to take every one of them?”
“Then take them!” he said, grabbing her other wrist. She resisted him and he pushed her against the shed wall with enough force that for a moment she thought he might hurt her. And if he did she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t fight. “Did you think you could come and go so easily? Is this what happens in that precious book of yours? I want to know. I thought it was about showing mercy to the helpless, to the innocent. But I think that book of yours is worthless. In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s a lie. It’s changed nothing and never will. That battle he describes, when did that happen?”
“A long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Almost a hundred years.”
“A hundred years! How many people got slaughtered in that time? Got ground up to nothing? How many went up in smoke? I’m not even counting us leftovers. But you, you do your part, don’t you? You offer us hope and goodness and love. You’re indispensable. But no one can help you. Isn’t that right?”
“No.”
“So you have to help yourself. Finally I know why. I’ve figured it out. Because you know in your heart that once you’ve come here you can’t give up anyone. Because when you do, you leave every last one of us.”
He let go of her then but she held on to him, afraid all at once of his absence, of being left alone, and though she turned her face away, he pulled off her knit cap and tightly clasped her hair and kissed her roughly on the face. Then he kissed her mouth and she turned but he held himself against her and when her own mouth softened all of his fury seemed to find her, his hands running over her as if she were difficult clay and he was desperate to remake her. But there was no need. She pulled him against her on the wall and she kept her mouth on his while his hand pressed her from beneath, rocking her, anchoring her on its hard seat, and after the days of unwinding wretchedness her body came wholly awake, alive. She didn’t wish it but it was true. She was cured.
EIGHTEEN
THE HUNGER. It had come for June again. Yet this time, unlike on the road, when she was marching with her mother and her siblings and with the twins and then finally alone, it was not a lurking angel of oblivion. An angel of death. None of them had succumbed to hunger itself but it had driven them to exhaustion and carelessness and ultimately to peril and she always believed it would do thusly to her. Push her to the precipice. But this time, she wasn’t hiding or running from it; she was inviting it along in a kind of dance, as a partner, a companion that would mark her every move. She knew that hunger would clarify her mind, strip away all extraneous thought, and leave her with the focus of pure, unswerving will.
She was eating almost nothing. The first couple of days were difficult; she could not have a thought that didn’t involve breaking off from whatever she was doing and sprinting to the kitchen where the aunties were stirring the pots and push them aside and plunge her hand into the large cast-iron vat of rice porridge as if she were a bear reaching into a beehive. Fill herself to bursting. But after the second full day the panicked tremors began to subside, and on the third and fourth diminished enough that the chasm inside her was not of any need unrequited, nor a body forlorn, but a version of herself that she did not know until now existed, this June in quiet thrall. It wasn’t an emptiness at all. It was the truer sculpture of her, the more deeply worked shape, and rather than feel her strength drawn down she was girded as she went forth about the orphanage, the ground hardly apparent beneath her feet.
Yesterday one of the aunties had regarded her suspiciously and kept glancing her way after she took her bowl of rice mixed with soup. After that, June made sure to eat a couple of bites whenever the old woman was looking her way but then would quickly spoon her food into the bowl of whoever was beside her (she made sure now not to sit off by herself), some younger boy or her mouthy bunkmate So-Hyun, who made no fuss or complaints about getting an extra helping, even though there was plenty of food. Orphans never declined.
Otherwise she was still mostly avoided or ignored, which suited her. She was no longer doing chores at the Tanners’ cottage-an auntie had informed her that she should not go there anymore-and as no other job was assigned to her she could simply slip off after classes and meals where attendance was noted and wander in the hills. The foliage of the bushes and young trees had mostly fallen to the ground so that she was wading through puddles of brilliant color. She would have liked to pick up the pretty little leaves or even lie down in a pile of them but the strange thing was that she had to keep moving, for when she kept still she grew dizzy, this wild ball of a storm twisting within her like a gyroscope. She gagged if she stopped for too long. So she took to running, running fast in her too-tight shoes, the raw throbs of the blisters marking the distance on the deer trails that the boys and Hector used in their forays to gather firewood. With each step the grating pains flashed up into her chest and throat but she didn’t whimper or even grimace and she swallowed them as if they were sweet sustenance.
The other day, after English class, Sylvie had offered a wave and a smile and though June was desperate to rush forward and press her face into the woman’s chest she knew Reverend Tanner might see them. And even if he couldn’t, she would show Sylvie her resolve. So instead she just nodded and scurried away. Since rousing Reverend Tanner out of bed a week earlier she had not spoken to Sylvie at all. Not a word. She knew earlier had been wrong to be so stubborn that morning and she would do what she could to get back into his graces enough so that he’d let his wife adopt her, and if that meant denying herself and Sylvie for a brief time, then so be it. June had faith: if he loved his wife, he would yield. She had never known anything like faith before but she was quite certain she knew what it was now, at least the bodily expression of it, the privation in her belly paradoxically convincing her of her way.
And the way, she realized, included Min. She had become his friend. It hadn’t been at all her intention. She was keenly aware of him, yes, she couldn’t keep from thinking about him, seeing the scarf he’d given Sylvie, how she always wore it now around her neck. On one of her wanderings down near the main road of the valley she’d found the rusted, broken-off tip of a bayonet in the dirt and she couldn’t help but think of him darkly, pressing the edge against her own scabbed palm to test how sharp it was, drawing fresh blood. But the other day she had gone to the dormitory to retrieve a book and while in the space of the new chapel heard some scuffling coming from the boys’ side. She cracked open the door to see four boys standing about a cot in the middle of the room. Min, undersized anyway, cowered amid them, trying desperately to slump down into his cot. He looked as small as a toddler. But he was being held up on either side, while one of the boys stood in front and grabbed Min’s hair with one hand and with his knuckles of the other ground down hard at his scalp. The boys sometimes did this to one another, as it could be very painful but showed no marks, and Min cried out with each slash. “You think you’re clever, don’t you, you little bastard?” the next boy snarled at him. His name was Byong-Ok. He was one of the bullies in the orphanage, older and already very pimply. “You think you’re going to go away with the Tanners so easily? Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”
“I’m not going away!” he pleaded. “I’m not going anywhere!”
“That’s not what I heard Reverend Kim telling one of the aunties,” Byong-Ok said. “He said you were going to get all new clothes and shoes from the church office in Seoul. And maybe some spending money, too.”
“Why would I get anything, if the Tanners were adopting me?” he cried. “It doesn’t make sense! The Tanners would just give me whatever I needed!”
“Shut up, you bastard,” Byong-Ok said, and knuckled him viciously. Min groaned sharply. Byong-Ok said, “How would I know why? Maybe that’s the way they do it. Maybe the Tanners don’t have as much money as those other people who were here. All I know is you’re going to give us whatever you get. All of it. You hear me?”
Min murmured something.
“What?”
“I think you will be eating…” Min said.
“What? What are you saying? Speak up, you little bastard.”