The hills of the valley had been nearly cleared during the war for fire fuel, or else blasted clean, and once a week he led a group of boys to collect loose kindling and branches. Each time they had to go farther to get the same load. That day was seasonably hot but there was a drying breeze coming from the north and the boys were especially playful and energetic as they combed the hillsides. As usual there was little wood to be gathered to start but before hiking the steep hill to the next valley he let the older ones organize a game of Capture the Flag. They had enough wood back at the orphanage anyway, not even counting a recent shipment of coal, and as winter was still a long way off, it didn’t much matter what they gathered now.
Hector watched them for a while, and when the boys of one side kept losing and cried for him to help them, he finally joined in. To be fair to the other team, he carried the smallest boy, Min, on his back and ran about that way. Min was not the youngest but he was undersized from severe malnourishment during the war. Reverend Hong had found him sitting slumped in an alleyway of Seoul, barely conscious, near skeletal, pocked with insect stings and rat bites. With a month of regular eating he was growing again, but the other boys still made fun of him for being tiny and weak, and then because he was smart. With Min on his back, Hector ran easily, and after a few furious end rushes they won, Min shouting and waving the rag that was the other team’s flag. Hector made sure to win the next game again, the boys crying foul, Min chattering at them from his perch. A small, rocky stream cut through the ground of their play, and afterward they all knelt and drank from it, splashing the cool water on their necks and faces, the boys recounting how the game had gone, teasing and taunting one another with grown-up bravado and bluster. It could have been any summer afternoon back in Ilion, and for a moment Hector forgot who they were and where he was, until he noticed Min idly upturning stones along the bank. The boy was hunting for insects and worms, and when he caught a large water bug in his fingers he seemed to inspect it, not with curiosity but a long, knowing gaze. Hector watched as he brought it to his lips but then stopped just short, quelling a certain habit. Hector called them all then and got them up and moving again.
In the next valley they found a stand of trees tucked back in a shady ravine and Hector was glad that he’d brought along an ax. He set the boys to gathering kindling while he worked on a dead tree. Its thick trunk had been cleaved by lightning. He chopped at it steadily but the ax head was dulled and whenever he struck a dense spot or knot it jumped back at him violently. The tree still had most of its limbs and as he got closer to felling it he kept ordering the boys to move back, which they did, but soon enough they had gathered around him again and were begging for a try. He let some of the older boys take a few swings each and then he took up the ax again and worked steadily, gradually losing himself in the exertion, in the rhythm, the muted chuck s of the blows, and by the time he was near done he was sweating like a draft horse, his hands raw and abraded but alive. Finally he dropped the ax and pushed; the tree groaned once and then cracked and fell in a sudden threshing of dry leaves and dust. The boys cheered him and themselves, clambering upon it as if they’d brought down big game, raising their arms in triumph, with even Hector chiming in.
No one noticed that Min had picked up the ax and was swinging at a root; Min gave it a couple of good hits, but on the third try he slipped and lost his balance and missed and the blade came down on his foot. He screamed as if he were dying. Hector was immediately on him, his own heart bolting, but he couldn’t get Min to move: the heavy blade had gone straight through his foot and was stuck in the wide root below. Hector took the boy’s face in his hands and told him he would count to three but immediately pinched the boy’s ear as hard as he could while pulling out the ax head. Min cried out once more and fainted. The worn canvas sneaker welled instantly with blood. Hector took off his T-shirt but was afraid of removing the sneaker and so bound it all up as tightly as he could. He put Min on his back and ran, trying not to jostle the boy too much, ordering all the boys to sprint ahead and alert Reverend Hong to what had happened. But they had marched a half hour here and he knew he would have hills to cross on the return. Soon Min was awake again and moaning and crying softly, and to his own surprise Hector began singing the chorus of a song that his mother often sang to try to put him to sleep, an Irish famine-era ballad called “The Fields of Athenry”:
Low lie the fields of Athenry,
Where once we watched the small free birds fly.
Our love was on the wing.
We had dreams and songs to sing.
It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry.
He got Min to hum along and for a while it was as though they were a young father and son on a Sunday hike as they ascended the hillside, making music together in a sentimental key. But it was warm, and with Hector sweating and shirtless the boy began to lose his grip; twice he nearly fell off and Hector had to slow down. Soon he was crying and the sopped bandage was dripping blood again and after a while the boy’s frame went limp around him and Hector realized he was drifting in and out. He was losing too much blood. Hector laid him down and tried to rebind the bandage, but when he loosened it the blood only seeped out faster, so he tied it up as tightly as Min could bear.
“Ah, ah!” he moaned sharply, the pain sapping him. He began to cry weakly again. “It hurts, Hector. It hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” Hector replied, breathless, “I know.”
But Hector didn’t know. It was amazing, but through all the battles and firefights and skirmishes, he’d never been seriously injured: he’d been knifed and shot, even hit by shrapnel, but they were always superficial strikes, glancing off him as if he were shielded by the harder steel of some mysterious fortune, the only drafts of his blood drawn by the nurses for the blood and plasma reserves, or else coming from his bloodied noses after the tussles outside bars and whorehouses. Then his wounds always healed with miraculous swiftness, as if his corporal self existed apart from everything else in a bounding, lapsing time. And in the same way that he could not feel true drunkenness he felt no true pain, either, just the cold report of impact, his nerves disconnected from the necessary region of his mind, if never quite his heart. Looking at Min, he felt a dense, sharp lump knocking in his chest; he knew if he didn’t get him to a hospital soon the boy might die. So he lifted him over his shoulder and set his head low and started to run, run as fast as he could bearing fifty pounds of child, trying not to remember how he’d futilely done the same for a soldier with his foot blown off by an errant friendly shell, applying a tourniquet and ferrying him back to the HQ only for the medic to declare him dead after discovering a perfect half-dollar-sized hole in the back of his head.
When he appeared in the central yard the entire orphanage descended on him, Reverend Hong and the kitchen aunties and all forty or so children, even June, who like Hector typically kept her own company, leaning against the corner of the dormitory building, watching all with her sullen glare. But she was right up front now. Hector put Min down gently, the boy’s eyes half open, his mouth slack. His foot was a bright, sopping mass. Hector was shirtless and slick with sweat and smeared blood, one pant leg soaked crimson all the way down to the cuff. Reverend Hong, ever-suffering Hector, made a great pained face of resignation but said nothing. Sterner of expression was the thin, bespectacled American kneeling beside him, square of jaw and formally dressed in a black woolen suit. He was in his mid-forties, the minister from the States they’d been expecting for several days now. The man immediately began working on the boy, carefully removing the bloody bandage of the shirt and the sneaker to reveal that the ax blade had cleaved off his smallest three toes. He picked the little nubs out as if they were stones and gave them to Hong, who gingerly wrapped them in a handkerchief. But Min was awake now, wailing on seeing his own foot and the horror in the onlookers’ eyes.
“Have you got it yet?” Tanner called sharply up into the air. “We need it now!”
“Here it is,” a
woman’s voice answered. “It was in my bag.”
It was Tanner’s wife. She appeared above the gathered mass and passed him a first-aid kit over the children crowded about him. In the strong sun her wheat-colored hair and pale skin shone almost too fiercely for Hector’s eyes, her face obscured by the brightness. Tanner opened the kit and from a smaller metal case lined with slotted rubber he removed a syrette of morphine and without warning stuck the boy behind the knee, leaving it in for less than a full second; the boy’s size apparently made the anesthesia dangerous. Min gasped but then went slack in his limbs, his fists slowly opening. Meanwhile Tanner was completely focused on the task, sweating heavily in his tie and suit jacket but not bothering to remove them while he re-dressed the foot. His hands were unhesitating and this seemed to calm the boy and everyone else. While Tanner attended to Min, Reverend Hong directed the taxi driver who had just brought the Tanners to retrieve his own bags from his cottage and load them into the car. The Tanners had come to take over for Reverend Hong, who was tasked by the church offices in Seoul to go to America to begin making contacts for future adoptions of the children.
Hong motioned to Hector, for a word. Hong was ten years older than he, in his mid-thirties, but with his slight, short frame he appeared almost adolescent beside Hector’s broad bulk. And yet Hector seemed callow and shrunken before him now, his head dipped down as Hong spoke quietly to him in his fluent, quite formal English. Hong knew Hector had been considering leaving as well, but he reminded him again how much the orphanage needed his labors, asking him to promise to stay on until he returned from his trip to the States.
“Will you do so?”
“I don’t know.”
“No one blames you for this. I am sure the boy will be all right. Reverend Tanner and I will take him to the hospital at the base, and then I must go on directly to the airport. Reverend Tanner will return and administrate the orphanage. You will help him and his wife, Hector, the same way you help me. Agreed?”
Hector didn’t answer. Hong clapped him on the arm and said he hoped he would do the right thing. Hector didn’t want to lie to him, for the reverend had always treated him with an everyday decency. He’d wait until they were gone and go back to Seoul tomorrow, to one of the rooming houses in Itaewon, where he could blend back in again among his kind, to whom he could do only superficial harm. Meanwhile, Tanner had lifted Min in his arms and laid him out on the backseat of the taxi. He told his wife he would likely be back later tonight, and said he was sure she would be all right; there was no room for her in the car. She answered there was nothing for him to worry about, that he should just take care of the boy, waving him off with a smile. Tanner got in beside Min, and Hong went around to sit up front. Reverend Hong waved goodbye to everyone and shouted, “I shall return!” and the whole camp bid them off as the driver accelerated down the dirt road, kicking up a dusty reddish cloud.
Hector immediately went to his quarters at the far end of the orphanage’s supply building. Soon after he came to the orphanage Hong let him convert part of the storage room for his quarters, framing out a door on the rear, hillside face of the building, but not bothering with a window. Inside it was still and hot, with the only light coming through splits and cracks in the single-sheath panels of the walls. He stripped off his bloodied trousers and found his hands were caked with dirt and blood. Outside he’d rigged a simple gravity shower, a round tin wash-tub that he had affixed to the roof eave and fitted with a short length of pipe and a hose bib. Of course it would be useless in freezing weather, but he had no other private spot to wash himself. He washed only his hands at first, but then decided to clean the rest of himself. The water was tepid but fresh, for he’d filled it that morning, and he let it run freely, not bothering to save it for another day.
As he scrubbed his forearms and chest and legs with the bar of green laundry soap he wondered if Min was crying again in pain in the back of the taxi, or else gone that ill shade of gray. The thought of a small coffin being lowered into a hole at the orphanage graveyard made him shiver. It was a grave that he should have to dig, but he was sure he couldn’t do it; he’d dug scores of graves during the war, and a few afterward, but he couldn’t bear to dig this one. His flanks were smudged with dried blood and he scrubbed them harshly until they were raw, doing the same everywhere else the boy had marked him with blood, now using an old hairbrush (as he had learned to do after a long day of handling bodies after a battle) against his skin until the last of the water ran out. As he reached for the towel he caught a flash of reflected light disappearing around the corner. He thought at first it had been a falling leaf or a bird but there on the ground was his torn, blood-soaked shirt. He peered around the building and saw the children running and playing in the central yard of the compound and the aunties observing them from the shade of their lean-to but then just beyond them the new reverend’s wife stepping quickly up the stoop of Hong’s cottage.
The rest of the afternoon he worked, waiting for Reverend Tanner to return with Min. He stacked the kindling and filled five-gallon water cans from the well and ferried them in twos to the dormitories and the women in the kitchen; from around the buildings he cleared high weeds and dead leaves and brush, to lessen the fire danger; he patched a leaky spot in the dormitory roof; and he began digging a deep, narrow trench for a permanent run of pipe that would finally connect the outhouse to a small pond-sized cesspool he’d been digging for the last month. The water plumbing was already in. By the time dusk fell he had trenched five meters (it was in fact a lot, given the hard-packed, rocky soil), and the children were eating their supper at the tables outside with the kitchen aunties. He asked one of the aunties if the new reverend’s wife had come out yet from the cottage and she shook her head and mumbled something that he didn’t understand. He had learned enough Korean for basic communication but could rarely comprehend past the first phrase. He asked her to repeat herself and she said it was no matter, saying the woman was probably tired and that he should not bother her. He said he wouldn’t bother her, but the auntie drifted away without hearing him. She and the other aunties liked him well enough and certainly appreciated his help fetching firewood and water, but he’d always sensed that their enthusiasm for him was limited, that they’d learned certain lessons from the war and that he, as a former GI, could only ever be provisionally trusted. If anything, they’d warmed to him because of Reverend Hong’s obviously sanguine feelings for him, which was another reason why he thought he should be leaving now. But he never finished packing his satchel, instead emptying it and hanging it up over the exposed rafter, his guilt over Min at least the primary reason, though he kept checking the cottage door from wherever he was working for any sign of her.
When night fell, candlelight briefly illuminated the front window of the cottage. Hector was sitting out front of the supply room, leaning back against the support post on a cut-down stool, drinking steadily from a bottle of warm whiskey. Reverend Tanner and Min had still not returned. The candlelight went out and for the rest of the bottle he waited for the panes to be lit again, to catch a glimpse of her moving through the rooms. But there was nothing. The more he drank the more restless he grew, his limbs bristling with the inaction, aching to push back against the calm. He got the Willys to start and drove it fast into Itaewon, his knuckles alive with anticipation. He went to a bar where no one would know him and proceeded on his typical late-night program, his modus bibendi (as his father, Jackie, liked to say), casually winning enough money in drinking contests (the first always leading to another, and another) to more than pay for his tab at night’s end. But one of his earlier opponents, a thick-lipped, sour-faced sergeant who watched him submerge all comers, decided he was a trickster or a hustler and called him out as he left, and Hector, wide-eyed as a full moon, let the drunken, angry sergeant swing wildly at him before stepping in close to trade blows. Without any grappling or pushing they struck each other, locked toe to toe, for a good three minutes. The man had surprising stren
gth but he soon flagged, and then the contest tipped, as it always did. It was cruel of Hector, surely, for he knew it would have to come to this, the sergeant soon just another ambulant dreamer, held up only by the alley wall, his thick lips split top and bottom and petaled out horribly into four. Hector’s last blow was simply to nudge him sideways, the man crumpling down slowly to the gutter, set forth now on that bruised, booze-soaked slumber that never quite mollifies.
Hector went on to a rooming house where the proprietress knew to have two women from the adjoining brothel sent to his room. It was how he preferred it, never hiring just one if he could afford two, a satisfaction and habit that had grown out of those first ministrations with his older sister’s girlfriends, though on this night it was a craving not so much libidinous as a want of continuous labors, an intense need for usage on his body. But when they stripped for him he could see they were girls, and young ones-hardly sixteen, if that-and rather than send them back down to someone else, he just had them lie with him in the bed. It was four a.m. and they were tired, too. He had not been so valiant in the past but his heart was sodden with the unhappy sights of the day, and though he had no desire to go home to the States he realized he ought to leave Korea soon. It was true he had little sentiment left for his ex-comrades-he could bait any poor bastard like the sergeant into a harsh and probably undeserved realm of pain-but seeing for three long years these destitute people and their children serve as handmaidens in their own wrecked house had finally begun to vanquish him. It had not seemed a problem at first, for it was nothing compared to what he had witnessed in the war, but he sensed that he was being replaced, cell by cell, with bits of stone. Even in regard to Min his guilt was as much conception as feeling. And he still wanted that feeling, at least for the natives. In the morning the girls stood above him in their too-colorful dresses and the older one politely asked him if he would pay them extra for staying the night, which he did, knowing that they would otherwise get docked of their pay, or even beaten.
The Surrendered Page 12