I Am the Clay (16 page)

They were the only ones encamped on the mound.

The path through the plain briefly touched the rim of the mound and then wound on. Along the other side of the path and from the rim of the mound as far as the eye could see stretched shanties constructed from the wreckage of military vehicles.

The old man thought to wake the boy and move the cart.

At the far end of the plain four trucks left the road and began to move toward the American compound. Instantly all up and down the plain the air stirred and there were shouts and cries. Figures emerged from the shanties and hurried toward the compound.

The old man went over to the cart as the woman woke the boy.

“We are going for food,” she said. “Stay with the cart.”

“Hurry, woman,” the old man called.

The boy came out from beneath the cart, blinking.

The old man and the woman, carrying bowls and pots, rushed off in the direction of the compound.
The boy stood leaning against the cart, staring open-mouthed at frantically moving swarms of people.

He threw brush onto the dying embers and as the wood caught he turned and saw the rise of the mound behind the cart. Then he looked again across the plain and shivered. After a while he squatted near the cart inside a quilt, trying to make himself very small, and waited for the old man and the woman.

Before they returned two other families moved onto the mound, not far from the cart.

The old man thought they should eat first and then search for a new location, and as the woman cooked the rice three new families appeared. They were coming in off the main road from the region of a distant battlefield, hundreds of new refugees, speaking a dialect the boy found difficult to understand. He watched them set down their possessions on the mound. There were children among them, boys and girls about his age.

The woman called him and the old man to the fire. She offered the food to the ghosts of the mound.

“I have thought about it,” the old man said. “Here it is less crowded. Why should we move? Did you see what is out there? Worse than the mudflats on the riverbank.”

He took up his bowl. The woman looked away.

“This is a time of war, woman, and besides others are here now too.”

They squatted by the fire, eating, and glancing from time to time at the mounds on the plain.

The old man was thinking: Many villages of the land may be here soon. Perhaps the boy will come upon someone from his village and go off with them and we will finally be rid of him.

The woman thought: This is a terrible place. Is it not forbidden us to stay here? And if we stay, can we calm the ghosts?

And the boy: There are boys and and girls here of my chronological group playing in the snow. There are no dogs here and and why do those birds keep flying in circles overhead?

All that day new refugees entered the plain and for lack of space settled on the mounds.

The old man and the boy scoured the plain and found the site where the battle had been fought: an area of about one square mile filled with the debris of shattered vehicles. They made three trips and brought back with them scraps of metal and a strip of filthy canvas pitted with tiny shrapnel holes and they built a shanty around the cart a little more than double its length. A stink of muck and grease and fire clung to the metal. The fourth wall of the shanty had a space in its middle about the width of a man and faced out on the firepit.

The boy had found a length of frayed rope and he and the old man worked together trying to repair the wheel of the cart. But the rope snapped.

In the afternoon the boy went off alone and was gone a long time. The woman sat by the fire with the winter sun on her wrinkled face and the man, his pipe in his mouth, squatted near the shanty. When the boy had not returned by sunset, the woman rose and stood silently, watching, and the old man brought a quilt
and covered her shoulders and stood next to her, staring out at the plain.

The boy returned at twilight. They saw him emerge from between two shanties waving over his head a length of thin black wire he had found in the earth amid the wreckage. The old man was surprised at the surge of relief he felt. Together he and the boy repaired the wheel while the woman cooked supper.

They slept that night in the shanty. The boy woke the woman for her turn at the fire.

Alone by the fire in the early hours of the morning the woman boiled water and cooked rice and set out the rice in a bowl as an offering to the suffering dead of the plain.

She bowed her head. No peace ever for the soldiers who lie in these mounds, a kindness to feed them. No roast pig to offer them as we sometimes did at the yearly ghost worship in our village. Only this rice. Let it calm your suffering. I will offer it to you again each night for as long as we are here.

She sat through her hours of the night.

The fire burned low. She heaped on brushwood and got to her feet and went to the shanty to wake the old man.

The old man squatted by the fire and noticed the bowl of rice. He shivered and drew the quilt tight about him.

Closing his eyes, he listened to the night and was certain he could hear echoes of the battle once fought on the plain.

He remembered his relief at seeing the boy emerge from between two shanties at twilight and was astonished to discover that he liked his memory of the day spent with the boy building the shanty. Warm in the shanty under the sleeping bag and the quilts. The boy curled close, reaching out in sleep. Wispy touch and weight of his arm, a thin bony arm resting with floating lightness on my chest. A small boy, and clever. Smiling and waving the wire over his head. Helping repair the wheel, helping return the cart to life. Good spirits in him.

The old man squatted by the fire watching the dawn come to the plain.

Before he woke the woman he ate the rice in the bowl by the fire. Her offering: but by now the ghosts have surely eaten. He chewed slowly the glutinous ball, tasting it on his tongue and feeling it slide down his throat and into his stomach. Gone for a while the stabbing pain of hunger; and strength to collect brushwood for the fire. Two fires, we need another fire to soften the ground in back. The woman and the boy will not go hungry, the food trucks will come again.

He scratched at his chest and crotch and then, holding the bowl in one hand, reached beneath his cap with the other and searched through his hair. The itching on his scalp grew so intense he thought to bring his head close to the flames. But it subsided under his furious scratching and he sat back on his haunches, eating with pleasure, his scalp and chest faintly tingling.

A wind began to blow from the north, shaking the flames. He shivered: cold air burrowed through his clothes. Odd wind-borne sounds came to him: cries of children, women wailing, pebbly tire noises from the vehicles on the road. A sudden acute memory of dissimilar morning sounds. In the village the birds would set up a clatter of song and the dogs barked and the cows and oxen lowed. Sometimes the old carpenter would have come back from a night of drinking in the marketplace with his cronies and the old man could hear him moaning and his crippled wife talking to herself and to their pig about the life she might have led had her father agreed to marry her off to the smart young student from the nearby village instead of to this carpenter, the son of her father’s old friend. Good with his hands, the carpenter. Wise about many things. But too often drunk on warm rice wine.

Through the gelid air a dull-gray light began to inch across the plain. Squatting by the fire, the bowl in his hands nearly empty, the old man thought he heard whispers and snow-crunching footsteps and he looked up and saw the night dead being removed from some of the nearby shanties. Men and women and even children silently carrying their dead wrapped in cloth or canvas. Moving cautiously through the melancholy light. From one an arm dangling. Where do they take them?

He finished the rice, slipped quietly into the shanty, and put the bowl into the cart. Warmer in here. Let them sleep. The boy like a little child. Not long ago nearly dead. Saved by the dog. Young smooth face, a baby’s face. Maybe a dog might have saved ours. No
dogs anywhere on this plain. Maybe the boy’s magic will bring us another dog.

He took the stone tool from the cart and quietly went with it outside, behind the shanty, where he scraped away the snow and dug a shallow pit. He put wood into the pit and built a fire. Then he returned the stone tool to the cart and woke the woman and the boy.

Trembling with the pain and fatigue in her arms and legs, the woman went outside and stood still a long moment, gasping for breath in the wind. She walked carefully on the frozen snow to the back of the shanty and squatted down near the new firepit.

The old man slipped the A-frame over his shoulders and went off with the boy.

Squatting, the woman saw them moving between fires and shanties toward a distant line of brush and scrub oak along the near foothills bordering the plain. As she watched, two helicopters flew with fearful suddenness low over the main road on the rim of the plain. She could see clearly their large red crosses and she raised her arms in vertical and horizontal motions. To bring on good spirits, Mother said. One this way and one that way. Good spirits of the earth and sky, good spirits of the valleys and plains. Up and down, and then this way and that. Mother learned it from the pale man with the upside-down eyes who ate in the great house of the governor. Many learned it from him. And songs too.
Have thine own way Lord have thine own way thou art the potter I am the clay.
Mother taught me.

She stood and went to the fire in front of the shanty and filled a pot with snow. She caught herself humming
the song as she put the pot on the fire.
Have thine own way Lord have thine own way.
The wind blew stiffly across the plain. Low dull-gray clouds threatened snow.

With their bare hands they shook snow from clumps of brush and tore off branches and piled them on the A-frame, which sat on the snow beneath a low oak. From where they stood they could see much of the plain: its three mounds now mostly covered with shanties, and the American compound with its perimeter of wire fence and fire, and the hills that enclosed the plain in a nearly perfect circle.