Jade Rooster

by R. L. Crossland

  Cauliflower Ear bowed quickly and effortlessly threw Hobson over his shoulder. At the peak of the arch, Hobson’s feet had chimed eight bells in the evening watch again.

  Hobson got up and started waltzing Cauliflower Ear around to break his balance. He tried several leg sweeps which Cauliflower Ear countered disdainfully and put Hobson on his back again.

  “You know American song, ‘Daisy, Daisy?’” Cauliflower Ear said lifting Hobson off his hip and over his leg onto the mat. Hobson hit cleanly on his back with a resounding, “thwack.” It stung, but strangely did not really hurt.

  “Yes,” Hobson.

  He let Hobson try a few more attacks, and then, when Hobson stumbled Cauliflower Ear rolled him into matwork, first securing a few armbars and then coming just short of choking Hobson several times. He smiled and Hobson noticed several missing teeth.

  “You sing ‘Danny Boy?’” Cauliflower Ear asked roughly.

  Cauliflower Ear began another shoulder throw and Hobson stepped behind him scooping him up by clasping both knees. The mat, really a group of mats suspended from ropes, rippled faintly outward. Cauliflower looked surprised. It suddenly became very quiet in the hall. Hobson had had his moment and waited for retribution.

  “Well, the first verse only,” Hobson said hedging.

  “You play beisu-boru?”

  Hobson, in fact, hated baseball. It was a slow sport with far too many rules, but Cauliflower Ear had just begun a choke.

  “Love it.”

  “You drink biru, eh, beer, liquor, ne?”

  “Been known to.”

  Cauliflower Ear did not understand the phrase, but figured it meant, “yes.” In fact, Cauliflower Ear would not have been able to grasp the suicidal implications of Hobson saying “no” to a senior belt on the subject.

  “After workout you, me, we go to hot bath, then drink, hokay? Maybe we visit kisaeng girls after”

  Hobson was looking for conversation and fussy sailors never picked up the scuttlebutt.

  As he painfully changed into his uniform and turned up the collar on his pea coat, Hobson recalled that overseas diplomacy in the face of brute force had always been the time-honored, though never entirely risk-free, role of the United States Navy.

  That night they did even-thing Cauliflower Ear, whose real name was Matsuda, had promised. They repaired to a public hot bath. Matsuda liked judo, but loved to sing and liked baseball.

  Late in the evening, Matsuda confided that he liked Korea, too, but that the Koreans hated him and his countrymen. He further confided that some of his countrymen deserved the hatred of the Koreans.

  Matsuda was a proud member of the Imperial Japanese Army. He would have been glad to risk anything to defend it or to advance its interests in battle. Garrison duty as a military policeman, however, he found less appealing.

  They eventually found themselves in a small side street restaurant eating pulgogi and drinking makkolli. Matsuda was so wide he had to go through the door sideways.

  “Farmers, we are always throwing farmers off their land.” He said with disdain. The Japanese, in taking over the Korean government, had issued edicts on taxes. Many farmers were told to register their land or lose it. This was such a novel requirement that many farmers never did register their land. A few years went by and they suddenly found themselves being dispossessed. The Japanese handled it in such a way that many were not aware of the edicts at all.

  “Not warrior’s way. My father is a rice farmer. Soldiers should not throw old men on sleeping mats out of their homes.” He swirled makkolli in the bottom of his cup. He pointed to the mountains. “All trees are going to Japan. Mountains will be naked soon.”

  “Bandits in the mountains.” He mulled that over. “Bandits, some good men. They yell ‘mansei!’ They are warriors. If I was Korean…”

  He looked around the table slowly.

  “…I be bandit.

  “I don’t know which better, throwing old farmers off land, or hunting bandits. Ughh.” He made a face.

  “Major Koizumi, he can be very mean man. Much want higher, higher…”

  “He is ambitious?” Hobson offered.

  “Yes, he has ambition.” Matsuda said. “He likes to scare bandits and trick them. Major Koizumi very tricky, very tricky man.”

  “You know I am here looking for a ship.” Hobson decided that exploit the opportunity.”

  “Navy ship? Big guns?” Matsuda made motions that would have been more appropriate to big breasts.

  “No, merchant ship, a barque. One of those canvas mercantileries. A sailing ship.”

  Matsuda struggled to get his tongue around the word, “barque.”

  “Koizumi, he goes on ships sometimes…down south in Cholla.”

  Cholla province. It would be the hotbed of resistance. Hobson’s father’s floating parish had been off the coast of the Cholla province…the baskets in the picture…

  Matsuda suddenly realized he was talking too much.

  The baskets in the picture had a weave that Hobson had recognized. It was typical of baskets woven in Cholla province. It was a double interwoven reed of blue. He thought of the heads, Captain Brewer, Carson the second mate, Hoyt the personal secretary, and the enigmatic Mr. Sato.

  “You know kisaeng? Korean entertainment girls? Like geisha, but not so good?”

  “Yes, I am familiar with kisaeng.” Hobson decided he liked Matsuda.

  Sabatelli was eager to return to Yokohama, but Hobson told him he needed more time. There was a connection between Jade Rooster, Cholla Province, and the Major. They would continue to work the waterfront and Hobson hoped to elicit something of value from Matsuda. For no reason he could think of, Hobson felt he had a personal interest in this puzzle.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Setting foot in Korea once again unleashed memories that pounded over Hobson’s sailor’s heart like seawater over a coastal jetty. He had spent his formative years in the Land of Morning Calm.

  His parents had been missionaries to a network of island parishes in Chosun, as they called it, circuit riding among the herons and egrets aboard an ancient schooner beneath heavily patched tanbark sails. His mother had studied to be an apothecary’s assistant and his father had turned to the ministry when he could find no other outlet for his generous nature, seaman’s skills, and gift for languages. A floating chapel was not so unusual. Christian scripture was replete with seagoing imagery from Noah to Jonah to Jesus, and so without a trace of self-consciousness the missionary schooner set to fishing for men. They liberally distributed the gift of literacy in western languages and familiarity with western health practices, in the hope that an acceptance of the highpoints of western religion and philosophy would follow.

  His father had been a lay missionary for the Congregationalists. More “dedication than education,” his father used to observe with a chuckle in Japan and Korea. “Not much white rice, and poor as church mice,” would be Hobson’s under-breath rejoinder.

  His mother was the potent draw. Spiritual comfort was always a bit hard to measure and observe. The Koreans saw the tangible benefits of Western medicine. Chinese medicine had its uses, but it often missed what Western pills and powders addressed.

  They had come to Korea from Japan just before the Russo-Japanese War. A few years later Hobson had been sent back to San Francisco for schooling. A year later in San Francisco he had learned that his parents were missing.

  Letters from fellow missionaries hinted at foul play. The Japanese were having trouble with some Korean provinces and Western missionaries were sent packing…or disappeared. Cholla Province was obstinate by reputation, and Hobson knew his parents would have obstinately guided their flock in the best way they knew how.

  Hobson had known that he would have to return to Korea someday and seek some form of resolution. Broke and friendless, he enlisted in the Navy. A
ssuming that he would serve in the Pacific, he signed on using another name. He was not entirely sure why he had done that, perhaps as much for a clean break with the past as for protection against his parents’ enemies. The Japanese were everywhere and he wasn’t sure what that might mean to him.

  There was the second part to Hobson’s plan to gather unofficial information from the bottom up. He planned to draw it from the locals out of view of the Japanese gendarmarie. Chemulp’o was under the heel of the Japanese and an anchored barque did not just disappear in Korean waters without someone knowing something about it. Moreover Hobson sensed there was more at stake here than Navy socks and foodstuffs. Atticaris and his ordnance enterprises aside, four heads in a whaleboat was more about anger than about sundries or weaponry.

  Hobson had lived in Korea long enough to know indirect ways of gathering information, especially in a country that valued the indirect. He and Sabatelli discussed their options and formulated a plan. Hobson found Sabatelli’s willingness to take a risk refreshing. It ran contrary to his sense of the man, his job, and the industry he represented.

  The following night Hobson headed south toward Cholla Province in the attire of a Korean day laborer. He wore a fur hat, carried a wooden “A” frame pack, a chige, and spoke Korean, only when he had to. His accent and appearance at close quarters would betray him as a foreigner, but he never lingered and he had left Sabatelli behind in Chemulp’o. A Chige was the Korean answer to a wheelbarrow and he loaded it up with produce, a mat, a blanket, and a razor. He zigzagged along the coastal roads behind pony carts and driven oxen. Early red peppers dried by the road. Tendrils of morning mist lay low in the mountain valleys and yellow squash blossoms draped over hedges and walls. During the warmest part of the day, he would see old men seated on straw mats near the road, smoking long-stemmed pipes around a pot of incense.

  Following an unending procession of women carrying bundles on their heads, he noted that baskets of rice, millet, and common vegetables were not as plentiful as he had remembered. Goats, pigs, and chickens were closely watched and kept far from the road. He wondered at the unusually large number of men and women dressed in hemp and wearing straw sandals, the traditional dress of those in mourning.

  Late in the first day he spotted a checkpoint in the distance. Checkpoints meant requests for documents that Hobson did not have. He looked back to see a drover with a herd of oxen leave the road down a ravine and followed. He had heard the Japanese were encouraging “voluntary contributions,” especially of livestock. Voluntary contributions were made at gunpoint when the Japanese took what they wanted at a price they set unilaterally “to serve the Imperial cause.” It was not petty pilferage, but a part of a systematic program.

  Hobson approached the drover’s fire after sunset. The drover eyed him sharply and asked in Korean, “Russian?”

  Hobson noticed that he seemed to grow, almost uncoil, to his full stature. Dark and leathery, the drover to Hobson’s surprise was taller than Hobson, and Hobson noticed for the first time that he had a lop eye.

  “Yankee,” Hobson responded in the same language.

  The drover seemed to relax slightly.

  “Missionary?”

  “Once.”

  “Well, I was part of the Korean Army—once.”

  “You must be very prosperous to have these many oxen.”

  “Not mine. I run them past the Japanese, away from the Japanese. Can’t get the best price in Cholla, but at least we are putting them in Korean stomachs.

  “They are slow, contrary beasts though. I could use some help. Looks like you could use some company. You are traveling light for a foreigner…”

  He did not complete the thought, but offered Hobson some radish soup.

  “I think you might want to avoid the Japanese, too.”

  Hobson only nodded

  The next day, after shaking the frost from their bones, they plodded on and some miles later, they rejoined the main road.

  The road was muddy and the oxen contrary. Several times, without explanation, the drover herded the yoked oxen off onto a byway. Hobson followed his lead and once or twice they convinced an ox to move along when he was disposed to graze. Sometimes an ox would get stuck in the mud and they would hitch others to pull the stricken oxen out.

  The second night, the drover looked toward the mountains at sunset and sighed. “Our island brothers have brought darkness. I was a soldier once. Not much of a soldier, taught to look like a soldier, and to respond to direction like a soldier, but little more. Our new lords, the Japanese, have fought two wars in one generation and we have fought none. Their leaders can put together a course of action; ours have been deadlocked into inactivity. I have seen how the Japanese work here and on the Manchurian border. We have been a shrimp crushed among whales, the Chinese, the Russians, and the Japanese. We survive, but badly bruised and in a stunned state.

  “Our empress they killed, and the Prince has been taken to Japan to be made Japanese. Our royal line was hamstrung…like an animal.

  “Before that the Chinese from whom we sought protection occupied the palace and provided the royal bodyguard. They too have suffered from the sickness of inaction and they were weak. The Japanese out maneuvered them with palace tricks and now the Japanese are here to stay ‘to help us protect ourselves’ from whom I am not sure…the Russians or perhaps the Chinese. Who is to protect us from the Japanese?”

  They built a small fire concealed behind a hill, boiled greens, and brewed barley tea.

  “We are in a sad situation. Korea needs leaders—until now they have been determined by birth. Korea needs guns—who is it to give weapons to strangers? Korea needs money, for revolutions need supplies and those who sacrifice for a cause should not sacrifice more than their share

  “Tomorrow we must separate. I cannot let you know where I am going. I can take risks for myself, but not for others.” “Troubles are the seeds of joy.” He muttered the old Korean proverb without conviction and gave a mock salute.

  They regained the road one last time the next day and separated with the customary Korean exchange of salutations. Hobson placed several Mex coins into the drover’s hands.

  The pines and junipers arched over the road and the maples were starting to lose their leaves.

  Sadness and resolution hung in the air like the advent of winter. An unusual number of families with all their possessions were trudging northward on the long road to Manchuria. Extensive property holdings were posted with the signs of the Oriental Investment Company. OIC was a Japanese colonial exploitation company that put money into the Japanese government’s coffers. Everywhere there were old people; rarely did he see young men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. Several churches and mission schools had an abandoned look to them. Periodically he would run across road crews and railway crews that bore an uncanny resemblance to chain gangs. He took time to sleep, some Manchuria-bound families, however, labored on through the night taking turns sleeping atop their rickety carts. To Hobson, it brought to mind church school recollections of the Book of Exodus.

  Eventually he arrived in the chain of villages he had known as a youth in southern Cholla province and took the ferry to an island known as Chindo. He went to the Christians about Jade Rooster. He sensed the villagers knew something, but they would not talk to him.

  As he passed the totems at the entrance of a second village, the spirit poles reminded him of something. In the second village, he sought out the local mudang, the shaman.

  Around the communal well there were several women pounding their wash. Several men examined an ox.

  He would ask politely and then be handed off to someone who would act uncomfortable. Nonetheless, he persisted, he would be politely handed off to someone else. No one ever said “no,” but no one wanted to make the introduction to the mudang. He must have been passed among a dozen people who smiled painfully, but seemed
incredibly vague. Then he was left standing against a wall and told to wait. Four hours passed and he knew this was a good test for a foreigner, since no foreigner could wait like a Korean. He waited with the patience of a foreigner who was almost Korean.

  Then an old woman walked straight out of a paddy headed directly to him. The round-faced, high-cheekboned woman must have been very beautiful once and she now held herself as erect as a queen. The epicanthic fold in her eyelids made her eyes look as if they were shut and she was sleeping. Hobson sensed a very strong personality. The culture attempted to push strong women into the background. Woman mudang were like salmon swimming against the current. She would be impulsive and intuitive, and have the gift of what Koreans called nunchi, eye-measure.

  She was taken aback by the fact he could speak Korean so well. Then she scolded him for a dozen small things in quick succession as if he were a schoolboy and tapped the chige at his feet with her foot. She held both his hands, then asked him if part of his heart was in Korea. He thought for a moment, then said, “yes.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Hobson.”

  “No, that is not your real name, is it?”

  “Does it matter? No, it is just a name. Like Korean people, and unlike Yankees, I do not mouth my name freely.”

  “Your ancestors rest here in Korea?”

  Hobson paused, startled, “I don’t know, but I think so.”

  She never once asked him what he was seeking.

  She looked him straight in the eye and said he could attend the ceremony to be held that evening. She turned around and walked purposefully straight back across the paddy. Behind the paddy was a wildly wooded mountain.

  That evening, a fisherman led him up a mountain encased in an ancient stand of trees which swirled menacingly around them. The night was moonless and the stars of the Big Dipper, Chilsong or Stepping-Stones as the constellation was known in Korea, shone brightly. Just below the crest in a stand of ancient forest was an immense white birch with colored ribbons tied in its branches. Somehow, the stand had survived the depredations of the charcoal burners and the Japanese lumber companies. On one side was a cleared grassy hollow and it was filled with villagers and a brightly dressed old woman, the mudang. This must be the “front” of the hollow.