After he finished all the end pieces, he cut out notches for the long boards, which he had sanded as well, and then nailed two-by-fours underneath for the cross-bracing to support blocks in the middle. The back-less benches were somewhat crude, for he was no artisan, but he had skill enough from a summer job as a carpenter’s assistant to construct them to sit sturdily and in balance. He had intended to stain them, but he could get only free paint (no primer) from the base quartermaster and the paint came only in gray, flat, mute gray, and after the first swath the lifeless hue stopped his hand.
“It looks all right to me,” he heard behind him. It was Sylvie Tanner. She wore a billowy cotton dress, the points of her shoulders shiny in the sun. Like everyone else, she had seen him outside building the pews but until now was one of the few people at the orphanage who had yet to come up and make some comment about his work. “I think it’s a good color.”
“You must like rain clouds,” he mumbled. “Or battleships.”
“Maybe rain clouds,” she said, taking the wide brush from him. She dipped it into the can and dabbed the excess from both sides on the inside rim and added three strokes to his, painting a section the width of the board. Her motions were lengthy, voluminous, almost flamboyant. “There. You see, it’s not so bad.”
“I doubt your husband will like it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s not a fan of me. I don’t care, but I’m just saying.”
“I know you don’t care,” she said, surprising him. Her eyes, which she visored with her hand, were remarkably large and dark, even in the daylight, her pupils seeming to push out nearly all the sea green around them. He was trying not to look at her, but he kept failing. “Besides, I wouldn’t be so sure. He admires all the work you’ve been doing, this project especially. As do I.”
“You want to paint some more?”
“Would you mind?”
He told her to keep the brush. He went to find another in the storeroom, and when he finally returned with one she was nearly finished with a first coat. They moved on to the others, and soon they were done and ready to go back to the first bench she’d painted. But it wasn’t yet dry enough for its second coat, so she asked if she could see the work he’d done so far in the vestibule. He had already brought in the salvaged stove, now situated in the rear corner, and shifted and reframed the facing doors of the girls’ and boys’ rooms to be closer to the main entrance so that they wouldn’t be impeded by the benches once they were installed. He had taken apart a pair of broom closets to make as much room as possible and the space was starkly bare. The wooden walls, formerly the exterior of the separate structures, had been long weathered to a dark, silvery sheen.
“It’s dark in here even with the door open,” Sylvie said. “If we were to hold a service now we’d have to use oil lamps, or candles.”
“This wasn’t meant to be anything but another storage room. And a windbreak.”
“What do you think we should do?”
He didn’t know, but he felt as though he suddenly did care, if only because she was here, away from everyone else, within his reach.
She said, still holding her brush, “How much paint do you have?”
“There’s plenty. But it’s all that same color.”
She looked about for a moment, then took some broad swipes at the wall, down and then up. She stepped back. “You know, I think that will be fine.”
“It’s going to look like a concrete box in here.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “We’ll see. But do you mind? It’s a lot more work for you. I can help, if you like. In fact I should, since I’m putting you up to it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can do what you want.”
“Then I’ll help,” she said brightly. They were standing near where the altar would be. Painted or not, this would be like no other house of God he’d ever seen. Above them there was no ceiling, and the bare rafters were strung with cobwebs and pocked by old hornet’s nests. It was quite warm inside and though they were both marked with the pungent oil paint he could still glean faint notes of her, her sweet sweat, the soft, palmy oil of her hair. He could smell himself, too, and it was not good, this dried animal reek, this lower-order tone, but she didn’t seem to mind being this close to him. He had the strange compulsion of wanting to pick her up, to see her high in the cathedral; maybe he was a Catholic after all. But the little light there was flickered and the lanky silhouette of Reverend Tanner appeared in the frame of the main doorway.
“There you are,” Tanner pronounced, though not quite sounding as if he was surprised. “I saw the benches out by the storeroom.”
“Don’t they look good to you?” Sylvie asked.
“Indeed, they do,” Tanner said. He cuffed her waist and leaned to kiss her but she warded him off by flaring her brush, her paintsplotched hands.
“We’ve decided we’ll be painting in here, too.”
“Is that right?” he answered her, though he was looking at Hector.
“Yes,” she said. “We think the same color as the benches.”
“Well, I’m sure that will be fine,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll lend a hand as well.”
“Yes,” Sylvie added enthusiastically. “We can all work together.”
“Listen,” Hector said. “I really don’t need any help.”
“It’s a lot more than painting a few benches,” Tanner said.
“It’s still not a big job.”
“Don’t be silly,” Sylvie said. “Anyway, that’s not the point.”
“I’m not being silly,” he told her, with an edge that seemed to deflate her. “It’s not a big job, and if you want me to do it, I will. Look, I better get a second coat on those now.” He held out his hand to Sylvie and she handed him the brush. Outside, the benches were dry and he pried open a fresh can of paint and stirred it and began applying a second coat, not looking up. He didn’t see when the Tanners left the vestibule. It bothered him that her enthusiasm didn’t seem to wane when her husband appeared. But who was he, to care about such a thing? He was being a child. As he painted he was surprised at how tense his hands were, not realizing until it was too late how fiercely he was pushing the brush against the surface, enough so that he marred the first coat beneath. He had ruined all of the first pew, and a good part of the second, before painting the others properly. He had to wait until the first two were completely dried before stripping them down and starting all over again.
FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS he tried to steer clear of her. It was easy to avoid Tanner, who was busy giving sermons and teaching history and math and regularly leaving on day trips to tour and inspect other orphanages. Sylvie was busy herself, teaching English and sewing and sometimes helping the aunties with the cooking. She worked along with the children in the large gardens of the orphanage, harvesting the last of the summer peppers and tomatoes and preparing the plots for lettuces and cabbage. But she would appear in the most casual of manners, coming around to where he was working bearing a glass of iced barley tea or skillet corn bread, invite him to come down from the searing rooftop and try what she’d made. He hadn’t yet started painting the chapel. Or at dusk, if he had forgotten because of working straight since dawn, she might knock on his door with a supper tray. She never came to him alone, for June accompanied her now almost everywhere. He’d hardly meet Sylvie’s eyes and nod and take the tray inside. She’d go away with the girl’s hand in her own, arms swinging easefully as if they were sisters.
Sylvie had originally taken her up because June could not play with the other children without a resulting argument or fight, her counterpart invariably ending up the more injured party. June was moody and aggressive and when she wished could be unrelentingly cruel, as harsh to the youngest ones as she was to those nearer her age. Her main chore at the orphanage was to help the aunties with the laundry, and she once made a boy who chronically wet himself take off his underpants after an accident and wear them on his head. She w
ould often bully other girls when she found them too girlish or weak, especially when it came to standing up to the boys. Hector himself had broken up several of her fights-the last one found her crouched in the middle of a gang of the oldest boys, who were taking turns punching and kicking her, shouting at her to go away, that she was ruining the orphanage. She was trouble enough that Reverend Hong had quietly attempted to place her in another orphanage, or in a job-training program. And yet because he knew there was only misery and degradation in store for most family-less girls, he had at last decided he must try to keep her on even after she turned sixteen, to delay her entry back into the world for as long as possible.
But after Sylvie took an interest in her, she visibly softened; before, she was always quiet and kept to herself when not fighting, but now she sometimes helped the smaller girls carry the clean folded laundry back to the dormitories, or worked extra hours in the garden, and was particularly helpful in translating for Sylvie and the students during English classes, where she was easily the best speaker. Soon she was working a couple of hours each day in the Tanners’ quarters, sweeping and dusting and making the beds. There was always some group of children naturally clinging about Sylvie, but in the off-hours, well after supper or very early in the morning, when only Hector might catch sight of them, it was always just June who was with her, the two of them sitting on the stoop gently brushing each other’s hair, or else coolly whispering to each other like a pair of thieves.
One afternoon he saw Sylvie reading a book while he was clearing the underbrush as preparation to trench the new sewage pipe. She sat on a large rock that overlooked the lowland where he would install the septic piping and field. June was not with her. Reverend Tanner and the aunties had taken most all of the children, including June, on a trip to a waterfall and swimming hole. They had been gone all morning. When Sylvie saw him pause in his work she quickly waved to him, but then returned to her reading. He had no pretext for doing so and didn’t know what he would say, but he dropped the machete and hiked up to her. When he said hello she stood up and simply replied, “Hello there,” and to his relief didn’t ask what he wanted. She simply shut her book without marking the page and put it down on the rock. It was a slim blue volume that he’d seen her often reading and not always sequentially, as though she had read it many times over and could pick it up anywhere.
“I see you’ve started to dig for the pipe,” she said. She peered down the line he’d freshly cleared of brush, which easily ran over fifty meters. “Are you actually going to do the whole job by hand? Isn’t there a machine Ames can get to help you with it?”
“Not out here. It would cost too much, besides.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“You could help me.”
“I thought you never needed help with anything.”
He didn’t answer.
“Well, I’m glad you changed your mind.”
“It’s not going to be easy work. Not like the painting. The ground is mostly stone, and where it’s not stone, it’s hard-packed clay. Or maybe it’s all the same thing.”
“That almost sounds like a koan.”
“A what?”
“A koan. It’s a kind of a riddle, but one you keep saying to yourself. Buddhists use them to focus the mind.”
“You won’t want to focus, for work like this.”
She smiled at him. “I do feel like doing something difficult. Something strenuous. It’s been awfully quiet today. And, frankly, you look kind of lonely down there.”
“I’m all right,” he said.
“I’m sure you are. Shall we try it, then?”
“Okay.”
They went down to the head of the trench that he’d begun earlier. He had a pickax and shovel with him and held them out to her.
“Your choice.” She took the shovel and followed him down to the mouth of the trench; they would work from the empty new cesspool back up the slope. He hopped down into it and gestured for her to step clear, and he began working it, raising the pickax directly over his head and hammering it down on the dry, rocky ground. Once he warmed up he kept a steady cadence, the muted tremors of the blows lifting them imperceptibly off their feet. After he’d broken up a meter or so Sylvie stepped down and shoveled out the loosened earth and rock. The pile was denser than she expected and she had some trouble at first. Hector went to help but she told him she was fine and she speared furiously at the gravelly dirt. After she cleared it they switched, alternating several times until during her turn she suddenly stopped shoveling. She turned up her hands; several blisters had welled up on the pads of her palms and on one hand an especially large, angry blister bridged the space between her thumb and index finger. Hector told her she should stop and she nodded, but instead of going back to her cottage for a bandage she simply pinched the mass until it broke. She picked up the shovel again, wincing as she hefted it, and attacked the pile as before. She didn’t complain or hold back.
They worked for the better part of an hour in the high afternoon heat, the sweat completely soaking through Hector’s denim work shirt. Sylvie was flushed about the neck and cheeks, the delicate tendrils of her hair matted to her temples. The fabric of her blouse was a gauzy linen and with the angle of the sun he could see clearly her tan-colored brassiere and the dark nook of her arm and the smooth line of her torso as it led down to the spur of her high hip. She cleared as much as he loosened and they would each unconsciously extend their turn slightly and Hector finally had to tell her she should quit for the day when he saw the condition of her hands, several new blisters split open on each, the loose skin shredded and curled back to reveal the raw underlayers of her palms. She might not have agreed, but they heard the heaving clatter of a big diesel motor in the distance; it was the old transport truck the children had piled into this morning.
“I should go,” she said, pushing him the handle of the shovel. For a second he was sure she was going to lean up and kiss him on the cheek, but she simply touched his arm and then hurried up the gentle slope. When she just reached the top he saw that in her haste she had left her book on a nearby rock, but he didn’t call out, letting her disappear past the buildings to greet the children and her husband.
Sylvie worked herself hard every day. Reverend Tanner was on the road for a good part of each day, making visits to Seoul and other orphanages, and she was tireless in his stead, teaching and leading services and gardening and playing with the children until suppertime, when she’d disappear into the cottage without having eaten. The kitchen aunties whispered comments to one another about how she was losing weight and looking ragged. She’s going to get sick, one said. He expects too much of her, another replied.
But there’s so much to do! Can you blame him if he has a big heart?
His heart is big enough for everyone but his wife.
It was a hard-edged statement but once said it seemed true enough: Tanner was by any definition an admirable man, but one could see how his utter devotion to his missions-which obviously Sylvie had given herself over to completely-might leave none of their passions unspent. He wondered if this was the reason they didn’t have their own children, or if they now slept together at all. She had indeed grown thinner with the change in diet and the constant work, but it had seemed to Hector that there was a certain weathering in her eyes from the very first day, this eroded sheen. Hector had begun to linger outside his quarters, waiting for her to come out for a while before her husband returned in the mid-evenings. But she didn’t, never emerging until dawn. Whenever he worked on the trenching he kept checking the crest of the hillside for her. He kept on with the digging now, alternating between the pick and the shovel himself, loosening as much of the rocky earth as possible so that for long stretches he could toil in the belief that there was something of her sloughing off on him, this phantom print of her hand.
Before bringing it back to her that evening he had done the same with her book, pressing its rough pages against his cheek, smelling th
e tattered cloth cover, the nook of the spine. It was titled A Memory of Solferino, a translation from the original French. The author was a man named J. H. Dunant, a young French-Swiss banker who was traveling in northern Italy, a “mere tourist,” as he described himself, when he happened upon a massive conflict fought near a tiny hill town called Solferino. Hector flipped through the volume but it was dry and airless in the beginning, thick with names of foreign places and generals, and he was going to put it down when he came upon a passage well inside the book. It was the author’s account of the aftermath of a battle between two immense armies totaling 300,000 men, fought on the 24th of June, 1859, one army comprising the allies of France and the other the allies of Austria; the scene was a description of the wounded, crowded among scores of others in a church:
The Surrendered Page 14