by Junghyo Ahn
“No one knows,” Kijun said. “Maybe sometimes their skin turns red or something.”
“We have to see what the Reds are really like,” said Chandol. “We have to go there before it’s too late.”
TWO
The first breath of autumn had begun to blow over the West County. Ollye, Mansik’s mother, felt the early morning chill against her skin as she came out of her room; the sun had not risen yet. A silky veil of mist crawled under the willows along the stream traversing Kumsan village. She listened for a moment to see if Mansik and Nanhi, his little sister, were still asleep in the other room and then stepped down to the yard. Fluffy hopped from behind the chimney and followed her to the kitchen, wagging his tail. She built a fire in the oven hole with dry twigs and leaves. While the breakfast rice was boiling, she went to the back yard and cleaned the hoe and the bamboo rake she had used the previous afternoon on the weeds which thrived outside the fence of Paulownia House. She stood the clean tools neatly in a row beside a sickle against the earthen wall and then went out of the house with a broom and the dog to sweep the footpath leading from the road to her thatched hut. When the morning chores were done, she stretched her back to take a brief rest and looked along the narrow patch of green onions and all around at the golden patterns of the rice paddies. When her eyes reached the road sloping down to the ferry, Ollye quickly turned back to go into the house and sweep the front yard; she was afraid to look at the town beyond the river.
Presently the sun rose over the rolling skyline of the eastern hills. Here and there scarecrows stood guard, sunk in the yellow expanse of rice up to their chests. A soft breeze stirred the endless strings of tin “bells” that had been hung on poles in the rice paddy dikes to scare away crop-stealing birds. Made of crooked nails in empty cans, they clattered as the wind turned them. In these few remaining days of summer, the forsythia around the onion patch looked like a species of bleached death. The dancing cosmos and scarlet salvia blossoming in the back yard of the Chestnut House were signs of autumn.
Mansik’s house, called the Chestnut House because the tallest chestnut tree in West County stood by its twig-woven gate, was located at the end of the footpath lined with rose moss some fifty yards away from the log bridge. It was right next to the ferry. The stream flowed only a few yards in front of it and at night when the whole village turned quiet after the farmers had gone to bed early to save expensive lamp oil, Mansik’s family could hear the gurgling noise of the water. Chestnut House did not have its own well and Mansik’s mother washed almost everything—her face, clothes, the rice—at the stream. She used the well in the Hwangs’ courtyard only for their drinking water.
The well was not the only thing for which Mansik’s family depended on the Hwangs. Three generations of Mansik’s family had been provided for by the Hwangs in one way or another. Mansik’s grandfather had been a servant to Old Hwang’s father until slavery was abolished by the Japanese colonial rulers in the nineteenth century. Even after the social reformation, Mansik’s grandfather lived at the Hwangs’ for quite some time, although he was paid by the month instead of receiving an annual sum and everybody was strictly instructed not to call him “the servant” but “the house manager.” But Master Hwang did not give him any land to sharecrop. He needed to retain at least one of his four servants, preferably the most obedient and diligent one, because he could not shed his habit of keeping someone at hand to run and bring him a toothbrush or deliver a message to a charcoal-maker.
It was Master Hwang who gave Mansik’s father the aristocratic name of Kim Indong instead of a common rustic one like “Pau” (Rocky) or “Tolswe” (Stone and Steel) when Mansik’s grandfather finally moved out of the Paulownia House, got married and had a son. However, Mansik’s father rarely had a chance to use that dignified name (written in Chinese letters) because he also was a servant to the Hwangs most of his latter life and nobody needed or bothered to express any great respect for him; they simply called him “Mansik’s Father” or just “Kim.” Yet when Indong, in turn, became the father of a son, he, too, consulted Old Hwang as to the naming of the boy. The old man told Kim to call the child Mansik, meaning, in Chinese, “Maturity and Solidity.”
At the time of Mansik’s birth, Indong lived in a riverside mud hut at Kamwa village, fishing and sharecropping a bit of land provided by Old Hwang. Then, one summer, most of his corn patch was washed away during a torrential rain. Indong also lost his fishing boat. And the roof of the mud hut collapsed. He searched downstream for several days after the swollen muddy river had ebbed only to find the broken half of his shattered boat washed ashore on the shingle at Paegyang village. Having lost land and boat at the same time, Indong had no way to support his family. He had no choice but to move back to Kumsan, build a kitchen and two rooms onto the community hearse shed next to Paulownia House, and settle down there for good.
Since then the Kims had worked virtually as house servants for the Hwangs. They had worked hard enough to be able to buy a little piece of land on which to plant sesame or cayenne pepper. They might have bought even more land and cherished some hopes for the future if Indong had not spotted a cow floating in the flood one fateful summer day. He could not resist this unexpected opportunity. The animal could buy them quite a few handsome rice paddies right away, if he could rescue it. The villagers on the riverbank tried to stop him because the swollen current was very rapid, but Indong would not listen. He swam out into the river in the pouring rain, somehow put his rope around the cow’s neck, and struggled with the animal in the water for about half an hour, until he was completely exhausted and went under.
After her husband’s death, Ollye took over his domestic chores at the Hwangs’. Now Mansik was nine years old and big enough to help her with some work, but she could not find enough to do in the village to feed and clothe her son and daughter properly. Last fall Ollye had been forced to sell her sesame patch back to the Hwangs for three bags of rice because she had nothing to feed her two children during the slack winter season. If Old Hwang had not sent her some free barley or potatoes occasionally, she could never have managed. It had become a habit for her to glance over at Paulownia House first thing in the morning in the vague hope that Old Hwang would call her over and give her some work. This morning she glanced over at the house expectantly because she knew the Hwangs would need some hands to dig potatoes on their large patch near General’s Hill.
Paulownia House, about thirty steps away from Chestnut House, was also called “the Rich House” or “the Scholars’ House.” The name Paulownia came from the huge shade tree that the old man had planted by the northern fence next to the well in the year of Sokku’s birth to celebrate the arrival of a precious son in a family which had had few sons for several generations. This big house with its tiled roof and brass-decorated gate was the only place in the county where farmers could find books, ink slabs, writing brushes and other rare scholarly objects handed down by the Confucian students of earlier generations. Whenever she looked up at the majestic tiled roof of the Paulownia House, Ollye felt hopelessly small. The appearance of the house intimidated her so much that she always winced when she entered it or went to draw drinking water at the well.
When they moved to Kumsan from Kamwa, Indong did not dig a well for his own family because he thought it was not necessary; Lady Hwang told them it was perfectly all right for the Kims to use the Hwangs’ well because they were like her own family. Indeed Indong and Ollye were a part of the Hwangs then; they went over to the Paulownia House almost every day to work and the two houses were located so near each other that Old Hwang would only have to open the door of his room and call to summon anybody at the Chestnut House.
But the situation changed with Indong’s death. Ollye felt it was not proper for a widow from another house to draw the first bucket of water for the day when nobody in the Hwang family had used the well yet. She tried to go to the well as late as possible in the mornings, but she could never be sure that someone in the family h
ad preceded her even if she went almost at noon. Her trips to the Paulownia House were even more uncomfortable after the death of Old Hwang’s wife. Old Hwang offered the main room in the house to his son and daughter-in-law because the biggest room should be occupied by a couple, and moved his quarters to the guest room by the gate. Ollye was afraid that the old man might hear her approaching and open the outside door to see the young widow enter his house early in the morning, perhaps leading a train of evil spirits. She tried to draw water in the afternoons, but sometimes she worked from sunset to dusk. She could not go in the evening either, because a woman was not supposed to visit after dark.
She also felt guilty visiting the Hwangs for free drinking water now that the Paulownia House had practically stopped giving her any domestic chores. Ollye and Indong used to take care of most of the housework for the Hwangs because the old lady had suffered from a chronic lung disease. She would gasp, wheezing painfully, if she did so much as mop a room or move the mortar a yard, so she had needed Ollye for many hours a day. Ollye had pickled their cabbages and turnips every kimchi-making season, boiled beans to make soy sauce or hot pepper paste, peeled the skin off the persimmons to dry for winter snacks, and washed and mended clothes, while Indong had removed the thorny burrs and packed chestnuts in straw bags, collected twigs and leaves in the woods with a rake to store for use as tinder during wet weather, twined straw ropes until his palms were cracked and done hard labor in the fields as well. Sometimes even Mansik had been summoned by the old man to be given such minor tasks as keeping the chickens out of the vegetable patch.
When the lady of the house passed away about six weeks before Indong’s drowning, Old Hwang had wanted his son to get married quickly, for there should be at least one woman in a family to bring warmth to the house. A county matchmaker soon found a very healthy young girl from Toktuwon village for Young Hwang’s bride; both Old Hwang and his son deeply appreciated the virtue of good health in a woman, for they had gone through enough unhappiness and inconvenience on account of Lady Hwang’s weakness and constant illness. The Toktuwon Woman was certainly healthy. In fact, she was so healthy and strong as to distress Ollye. This young woman worked so hard and fast that Mansik’s mother lost almost all employment from the Paulownia House. The Toktuwon Woman single-handedly took care of the domestic chores as well as a large part of the field work, and rarely, only when she was too busy to do all the work by herself, did she ask Ollye to come over to help her for an hour or two. That was why Ollye was so worried about the coming winter.
As Ollye was going back to the kitchen after disposing of Fluffy’s droppings in the onion patch, Mansik emerged from his room, rubbing his eyes. With a loud yawn the boy entered the kitchen, sucked his index finger to wet it with spit, pressed the finger on the small pile of salt in a cracked little saucer at one corner of the cooking board, and brushed his teeth with the salted finger.
“Do you have any work to do for the Rich House today?” Ollye asked routinely, opening the lid of the cauldron to check the boiled rice.
“Today, I have,” said Mansik cheerfully, taking the towel hanging on the kitchen wall to go down to the stream to wash. “Old Hwang told me to go to Charcoal village, take his ox to carry the load of charcoal and graze the animal on the way back home.”
“It may take the whole day if you have to make the trip with the ox.”
“Not more than a half day, Mother. I am leaving after noon.”
Fluffy hopped back and forth playfully circling around Mansik as the boy walked out to the footpath. “I see Chandol’s mother coming,” he called to Ollye in the kitchen as he went down to the stream.
Old Hwang sent his son for Kangho’s father and told the miller to go to Chunchon and find out what he could about the progress of the war. These days the old man sent Han to town for information more and more often; Kim Indong had run such errands when he was alive, but the miller did them now. Han spent all morning in the town and came back late in the afternoon to report what he had observed to Old Hwang.
When he returned home, the miller told the same story to his wife, who showed no interest at all in the gory tale of dead bodies and gutted buildings along the downtown streets, until he mentioned in passing the destruction of the National Grange storehouse located next to Chunchon Railroad Station, where the incoming grain from the nearby counties was kept until it was shipped to the big cities.
“You mean the granary was bombed, too?” Kangho’s mother asked, suddenly alert.
“I already told you about it, didn’t I? I saw the building on my way down to the town ferry.”
“Was it on fire?”
“No, it wasn’t burning, but half of the roof and the walls had collapsed.”
“How about the rice?”
“Rice?”
“When I went to Castle village the other day, I heard some farmers talking about the truckfuls and truckfuls of rice that the People’s Army had confiscated. They took rice from every village in South County and piled it up in the Grange storehouse. If the granary was destroyed by bombing, what happened to that rice?”
“Oh, that,” the miller said. Bags of rice and barley had rolled down and burst open on the ground, the grain spilling out all over the place, he explained. Some townspeople had gathered with baskets and sacks to take away the abandoned rice, but did not dare to go near the collapsed walls because Communist soldiers armed with submachine guns were standing guard around the ruin to protect their military provisions.
“The Red soldiers?” she said doubtfully. “But you said they had started to run away to the north early yesterday evening, didn’t you?”
“Some of them did, but there are still quite a lot of them left in the town,” the miller said. “I saw a dozen soldiers guarding the storehouse until their trucks come to take away the rice. But the townspeople are waiting, hoping that the People’s Army may leave at least some of the spilled rice behind.”
“If the World Army is really arriving in a day or two, the Reds will have to leave tonight,” said Kangho’s mother, as if to herself, calculating. “Or tomorrow morning at the latest.”
Realizing what his wife was scheming, the miller warned, “Don’t even dream of going to town to get that free rice, woman. The Reds are now as mad as rabid dogs because they are losing the war, and at this very moment, they say, they’re killing everybody in sight in many towns, out of sheer anger. If you hang around the storehouse, they might just start shooting and. …”
She had experienced too much poverty in her childhood, surviving on nothing but potatoes and corn for months, to give any heed to his warning. Now the Hans were quite well off, running the only rice mill in West County, and some villagers suspected that the miller had secretly bought rice paddies and vegetable patches here and there, and the Hans were even richer than the Rich House these days, but she would never be rich enough to overlook any morsel she could get for free. At least she had to see the granary with her own eyes.
Without telling her husband, Kangho’s mother sneaked out of the mill about an hour later, went over to the widow who lived with her six children next door, and briefly explained about the free rice piling up in the street. The two women headed for the town. They came back so late that although they shouted and screamed for more than half an hour the boatman, sound asleep on the opposite shore, did not hear them. They might have spent the whole night on Cucumber Island if the worried miller, suspecting his wife had gone for the rice after all, had not come to the ferry around eleven o’clock to check with Yom.
Both women, of course, wanted to go back to town for more rice but Kangho’s mother had to stay home; the miller beat her with a broken piece of old conveyor belting until she foamed at the mouth for ignoring his warning and swore that he would kill her if she left the mill by so much as one single step. The neighbor woman went back to the ferry at midnight and woke the boatman up to take her across the river again, but Yom refused. A woman without a husband was a half person, and few people r
espected a widow’s wish. The widow had to wait until daybreak.
Chandol’s mother found out about this when she went to the ferry very early to take a dozen bamboo baskets she had made to her sister-in-law, who ran a general store at the Central Market, so that she could return home before the day’s work began at the rice paddies. She met the widow at the bench before the boatman’s cabin and they waited together for a male passenger to arrive. Yom, like any other boatman, never took a woman as the morning’s first passenger because it would bring him bad luck; shops, inns, bathhouses, and all other public places never served a woman as their first customer for the same reason. While they waited for the boatman, the widow told her what had happened the previous night, and Chandol’s mother hurried back to the village to deliver this good news to some of her friends.
“The widow said rice is abandoned in heaps and piles on the street for anyone to take, but it won’t last too long if everybody swarms there,” Chandol’s mother said. “Don’t you think we should hurry and take our share before it’s too late?”
Ollye glanced over at the rice jar buried in a dark corner of the kitchen. The rice remaining in the jar was only one knuckle deep. What would she feed Mansik and her three-year-old daughter Nanhi during the long cold season?
“Mansik,” she called. “You go into the room and tie Nanhi to the door handle. I’ll put away the cooked rice so that we can have breakfast when we come back.”
“Come back?” Mansik said.
“We are going to town. Hurry.”
“I guess I’ll take my boy along with me, too,” said Chandol’s mother.
The word that the miller’s wife and her widowed neighbor had brought rice from the granary got around among the Kumsan villagers. By the time Ollye, Chandol’s mother and the two boys went to the ferry, a small throng of villagers was waiting for the boat to come back from the island. The crowd increased as time passed and the boatman had to skip his breakfast because of the women constantly howling at him to hurry. More than twenty Kumsan women had brought rice home from town before breakfast, and by this time the news had reached Hyonam and Castle, too. The boatman was furious because nobody listened to him when he shouted that it was dangerous for them to rush into the boat all at the same time, that the boat would capsize and sink if anybody else came aboard, that he had to stop to take a breath for five minutes, just five minutes.