I Am the Clay (5 page)

Startled, the old man lay still and heard the loud and rapid beating of his heart. Inside his chest and shoulders and neck a fierce and urgent drumbeat. The drumbeat at the festival of ghosts. Beating, beating. The heart pounding, hammering. How is it possible no one else hears it, this thumping added to the noise of the river and the big guns and the machines and to the moaning of the icy wind?

The cold woke him. He lay with the pad and a quilt beneath him and more quilts above him but the cold wrapped itself around his flesh like a second skin. He slept fitfully and some while later woke again. Opening his eyes, he said to the coming day: Stay far from me! Shame filled him. The rough push suffered by the woman at the hands of the man. Our own people. Savages. No better than the Japanese devils. I thought he would put the bayonet into me. Shame and anger and helplessness. And his bones ached: cold and stiff as iron. Day, stay away!

For a long time he would not move. Slowly he became aware of the odd silence in the shack and he put his head outside the quilts.

The cold air struck his face and eyes. He saw through the spaces in the walls the river and the bank deep in snow and a cold gray sky. The woman, awake beneath the quilts and unable to move for the cold, looked at him helplessly. His heart turned over at her gaze and he was startled by his unfamiliar feeling of
pity. Between them the boy lay asleep, breathing quietly.

He raised himself on an elbow and looked over at the sleeping bag in which lay the two old men. After some while he slid out from beneath the quilts, moved silently on hands and knees to the sleeping bag, and folded back the top.

The two old men lay very still with their eyes open to slits.

He put a hand to their nostrils. Two old men from somewhere in the city. The homes they lived in destroyed. Nowhere to go. Stay near where you live. Like the dog. Where are their families?

He felt the woman beside him. She was shivering. She helped him move the old men out from the sleeping bag. They lay face-up on the frozen earth of the mudflat inside the shack.

The woman put the sleeping bag over the boy and went from the shack to tend to her needs.

The old man stripped the shoes and clothes from the two men, leaving them in their undergarments. Leave them here unburied. Better to rot aboveground than be buried in an improper grave. Bring ruin to their families. Gaunt and wasted: loose bones of men. Like the dog.

He put the clothes and shoes into the cart outside the shack and went up a distance along the riverbank to a low stone wall, where he squatted awhile in the bitter cold.

The woman was in the shack when he returned. The boy lay asleep.

“The burning is gone,” she said. “The boy will live.”

“If he does not freeze to death.”

“You saw his jacket. Padded silk. How is it he wears such a jacket under his coat?”

“Perhaps he stole it.”

“He is the son of a scholar or a yangban.”

The thin arms around his neck; the smooth cheek on his face. “Abuji …”

“This is not a child one leaves behind,” she said.

“I have no wish for this child,” he said. “Do you hear me, woman?”

After a moment she said, “We must have a fire. We must eat. Others have fires. There is brush near the airport.”

“Near the airport there are guards,” the old man said.

The woman gazed across the river.

“I overheard,” he said. “Near the airport they shoot old men and women. Even children.”

She turned to him and he saw in her eyes the same look of defiance he had seen when she stood in the path of the ambulance.

Minutes later she watched without expression as he put the A-frame on his back and started across the snow-covered mudflat and the river to the airfield.

Burning? He smelled it in the dark frigid air. Wood and rubber. Flesh too? Heavy guns. The crackle of small-arms fire. Beneath his legs the river frozen to a depth of—what?—five, ten feet? If the river freezes to its very bottom, do the fish freeze too? Is the ice the grave of the fish? And do they wake with the thaw?
The stream that flowed into the river where we put the goldenrod nets and caught black-and-white minnows. Flopping in the net, roasted on the pit fire along the riverbank. Taste it now: smoky and soft melting flesh. Yi Sung, tall, lost in dreams, his voice a pool of visions, telling us how as a spirit he created our village, this stone here, that tree there. Yi Sung in school in the village marketplace studying to be a scholar. Yi Sung in a Japanese jail. Yi Sung beaten with the big four-edged club. Yi Sung kicked with soldiers’ boots and tortured with water. Yi Sung dead. Chinese, Japanese, Americans. Foreign devils. Burn and burn. Brushwood near the airfield. But will not burn very long. Not like the wood those two took away. Once a man who struck an old woman would be punished with death. What could I do? An old farmer. In the village when someone did wrong, there was punishment. Once he himself had been a punisher: lashing a thief on his exposed bottom in a public punishment. The one with the bayonet, there was a look of madness in his eyes. The thought of plunging the bayonet into my flesh gave him pleasure. What is that? Ah, the tent with the red cross. Near the bridge. The machines come off the bridge with the wounded. So many working there. Which one helped the boy? She pulled out the splinter. She by herself. Grasping it with her fingers. What is happening there near the big tent? So much running about. Machines lining up. The wounded carried out into the machines. Brushwood near the airfield. They don’t shoot if you don’t come too close to the fence. And what for food? Grass. Bark. Rats. Look in the garbage cans near the tents. Tents being taken down. Down?

Near the perimeter of the medical battalion, outside a scattered line of burning oil drums that gave off the hot smoky odors of waste fuel, he stopped and stood watching soldiers scurrying from tent to tent, loading supplies onto jeeps and trucks, and wounded men into ambulances. He heard orders barked and saw vehicles pulling away. Behind him there was a strange keening like the wind in the street where he had killed the dog. It grew louder and he turned and saw a scurrying of people, men and women pouring from the shacks along the riverbank, disorder and frenzy and the lament of a thousand voices raised in terror. On the airfield aircraft engines roared into power, whining awhile, then gearing into full power, and a huge aircraft rose from the ground and flew toward the east and banked and disappeared into the clouds. Immediately two other aircraft rose one after the other and were gone. The bridge was crowded with jeeps and trucks and tracked vehicles, all moving south.

He started back across the river.

Lying with the boy beneath the quilts and the sleeping bag, the woman felt him curled warmly against her, his knees drawn up, and heard his uneven breathing. The quilts and sleeping bag over their heads, she saw whenever she opened her eyes a vague whitish liquid light. The sleeping bag was smooth and silken upon her eyes. Vague waves of sound came to her through the quilts and the sleeping bag, sighing noises she chose to ignore. She listened instead to the murmurings of the boy: words she could not make out
breathed through troubled sleep. But the fever was gone: he smelled of returning health. From time to time a trembling seized him; he lay against her and she put her arms around his light thin frame and held him. All bones. Like the dog. And the two dead old men. And soon like them dead of cold and hunger if the man does not return with brushwood and something to eat. Dead old men unburied and rotting on the ground. No proper graves for them, no ancestral worship, gone from the earth and from memory forever, like an insect, a fish, a dog. Dead dog. Best to eat in summer. Who stole? The two men and the way they pushed an old woman. Death to them! May they be beggars! Dragons of the mountains, consume them! And protect the boy. A sacrifice to you if you protect the boy. A doctor to protect and heal the boy with a poultice upon the wound. Or a sorceress to whirl about with cymbals and drum to frighten off the hovering devils. A scholar’s son? Good fortune to have in the village a scholar’s son. Good harvest. Food. Octopus and dried squid and eggs and batter-fried vegetables. And rice and fowl and steamed chicken. And long life.

Light fell upon her face, and a searing cold. She opened her eyes to a dim white world and saw above her the face of her husband and heard beyond the flimsy walls of the shack a tide of wailing.

She said fearfully, “What? What?”

“The Chinese!”

She rose to her elbows and swayed dizzily. He helped her to her feet.

The boy woke and looked about with unfocused eyes and cried, “Amuni!”

The old man and woman stared at him. Ashen beneath the brown skin of his emaciated features, eyes dark and rolling with terror; drawing away from them, looking wildly around, seeing the two dead old men, shrinking back, and crying out.

The woman spoke softly, soothingly.

The boy tried to climb out of the bed of quilts, lay back in exhaustion. He tried again, fell down in a faint.

Murmuring an unbroken stream of comforting words, the woman wrapped him in a quilt. The man lifted him and carried him outside; like the dog the boy’s head and arms and legs limp and flopping. He placed him in the cart and the woman covered him with quilts and the sleeping bag. Quickly they took apart the shack and put on the cart the bits and pieces of flattened waste metal.

The two old men lay in their undergarments, vacant faces turned to the winter sky. Beneath them the frozen earth had begun to melt. Muddy streamlets trickled from below their rigid heads and shoulders and stiffened legs.

The riverbank was emptying: people eddied back and forth, scurried in frantic flight across the river. Deep ruts scarred the frozen mudflats and black ice.

The old man and the woman each took one of the shafts of the cart. Pulling the cart and the boy, they started across the mudflats and the river toward the airfield and the main road.

They were near the outskirts of the city. Houses began to fall away; barren winter fields now on both sides of the road. Military police kept the refugees off the road, on a path between the fields and the drainage ditch. Along both sides of the road trudged foot soldiers, weary, blank-faced, heavy with defeat. Down the middle came jeeps and trucks, very fast. All were headed toward the sea.