From Wonso Pond

by Kang Kyong-ae

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  Ch’otchae got up as well, and hand in hand they went into the room across the hall. The boy quickly sank down into the warmest corner of the room, and after tossing his limbs a few times was fast asleep, gently snoring. Looking over at Ch’otchae in the darkness, Yi Sobang thought about what the boy, all smiles, had said to him earlier so innocently. He let out a deep sigh.

  Perhaps someone had already come into the inner room. His ears now seemed to pick up the sound of whispering voices. “I wonder which bastard’s in there tonight?” he mumbled, bending his ear to figure out to whom the voice belonged. But they were speaking in whispers, and no matter how hard Yi Sobang tried to listen, it was impossible to identify tonight’s visitor. All he could make out, from time to time, was the giggling voice of Ch’otchae’s mother.

  He kept his eyes closed in an effort to fall asleep, but the whispering in the next room kept him wide awake, and instead of sleep it was anger that overcame him. He simply had to get out of this woman’s house! What sort of life was this, anyway? Yi Sobang lost his temper almost every night, just as often as he was forced to witness this abomination.

  He jumped out of bed, lit some tobacco, and took a seat by the window. Beams of moonlight streamed through the torn paper window like a rainbow. He took a drag on his pipe and exhaled very slowly. Billowing up through the air, dissolving into the moonlight . . . that smoke seemed just like the bitter feelings surging up inside him!

  Without thinking, he began to gently stroke the wooden crutch he’d placed on the floor beside him. Whenever he was upset he caressed this wooden leg of his . . . this leg with no response! This stiff and heartless crutch! And yet, this wooden crutch was his one and only true companion.

  “The nerve of that girl . . .”

  Yi Sobang turned around in surprise at the sound of Ch’otchae mumbling in his sleep. Could the boy really be thinking about some girl already? he wondered. If he’d had the power to keep the boy from growing up, he would have made sure Ch’otchae remained a child forever. Perhaps it was rather selfish to think so, but he knew Ch’otchae’s future path in life looked no different from the one he himself had taken.

  Yi Sobang moved over to Ch’otchae’s side and stared down at the boy. He was still breathing heavily in his sleep. This moment in time would be the happiest, it seemed, that Ch’otchae would ever see. “I wish I could work in the fields, too,” Yi Sobang remembered the boy saying. He then laid his cheek down on top of the boy’s.

  Oh, the warmth that passed from Ch’otchae’s cheek to his own! And these heaving lungs full of life! If the boy had been made of his own flesh and blood, could Yi Sobang possibly have been more deeply affected?

  Without thinking, he drew his arms around Ch’otchae’s neck and embraced him. “I’m nothing but a cripple, my boy, but from now on I live for you, and for you alone,” he said, repeating the pledge several times over.

  Just then, Yi Sobang lifted his head at the sound of something crashing.

  5

  “You filthy whore!”

  The very pillars of the house seemed to shake with these thunderous words. Yi Sobang went to the door and crouched down beside it.

  “What’s gotten into you? Why say something like that?” said Ch’otchae’s mother.

  “Shut up you tramp, you filthy slut! As if shacking up with that crippled beggar isn’t enough. Now you’re screwing around with this moron. You no-good bitch!”

  Yi Sobang then heard someone spit. But it was the words “shacking up with that crippled beggar” that rang in his ears. The life seemed to drain right out of him, and he lost the strength to lift even a finger.

  “Oh, my, they’re really going at it.”

  He could hear the rough sounds of a scuffle. Yongsu and the new one, the blacksmith, seemed to be at grips with each other.

  “They say, ‘New-born pups don’t fear a tiger.’ Well, they must have made that one up for morons like you. You pathetic fool! Did you really think she was was pure?”

  Whatever happened next, it was followed by a blood-curdling scream.

  “I’ll slice you up into pieces, you bastards!”

  “No, not a knife! Not a knife!”

  Hearing Ch’otchae’s mother scream, Yi Sobang jumped to his feet in alarm, grabbed his crutch, and dashed out of his room. The door to the inner room had fallen into the dirt hallway, but without a lamp on it was too dark to see inside.

  Ch’otchae’s mother ran out into the hallway.

  “Take this! Take it!”

  Gasping for breath, she thrust the knife towards Yi Sobang. He took it and rushed into the kitchen, but not knowing where to put it, he shuffled back and forth for some time, finally hiding the knife inside a bundle of firewood. Then he returned to the inner room.

  “Why are you two doing this? You’re both decent men. Please control yourselves!” he shouted, trying to break apart the two men.

  “Stay out of this, you fool . . . Oh wait, you’re the cripple! So maybe you’re just looking for a beating.”

  One of them gave Yi Sobang a powerful kick and he crumpled to the floor. His crutch had flown to the side, and he began searching for it in vain. Only after crawling frantically over the entire dirt floor did he manage to find it. The bitterness that had built up inside him for many years was now at the point of exploding. He did his best to suppress the feeling, grabbed his crutch, and hurried outside.

  Normally, there would have been a crowd of spectators gathered outside, but tonight there was no one, perhaps because it was so late. He made his way over to the woodpile, where he stood staring into the sky.

  There, soaring high above dark Mount Pult’a, was the brilliant moon! Even that moon, it seemed, had come out in order to ridicule his crippled leg.

  “Yi Sobang!”

  He turned around at the sound of Ch’otchae’s voice. The boy came running outside and stopped to relieve himself, squirting a long stream of urine to the side. Yi Sobang thought of Ch’otchae’s bad temper and was suddenly frightened. “What if that boy ups and . . .” he thought, panicked. He rushed to Ch’otchae and managed to grab onto him by the seat of his pants.

  Having finished peeing, Ch’otchae was on the point of running back to the house in a rage.

  “You fucking idiots!” The boy was screaming at the top of his lungs, but Yi Sobang had been quick to grab onto him. The boy responded with several violent blows, yelling, “Let go of me!”

  “Ch’otchae! Ch’otchae! Don’t do it! You’ll get hurt, do you hear me?”

  “I don’t care. Those bastards!”

  This time the boy rammed his head into Yi Sobang’s chest and kicked at him mercilessly. The man tumbled over backwards again. Ch’otchae flew over to his wooden pack, picked up his sickle, and ran into the house.

  “No! No!”

  Yi Sobang saw this was a matter of life or death. He scrambled inside on all fours until he managed to grab hold of Ch’otchae’s ankle. Ch’otchae’s mother, dashed out of the inner room and snatched the crossbar off the front gate.

  “You little brat! Why aren’t you in bed, instead of causing all this trouble?” she shouted at her son.

  “Me? Those bastards in there are the ones causing trouble!” He yanked on his mother’s long hair, pulling her head downwards.

  The crashing sound from the inner room grew more and more violent. Yi Sobang felt goosebumps all over. If the men came any closer, Ch’otchae would likely end up with a broken bone. Yi Sobang vividly recalled how he’d gotten his own leg broken by fighting with the master of the household long ago, and he feared the boy was dangerously close to meeting a similar fate.

  Yi Sobang took several good kicks from Ch’otchae, rolling this way and that on the ground, but he never lost his grip on the boy’s ankle. A trickle of bright blood now ran from his nose.

  “Ch’otchae! You keep this up and I’ll never give you another rice cake again!”

  He’d said the words without thinkin
g.

  “Do you mean it? Yi Sobang!”

  His chest heaving breathlessly, Ch’otchae twisted to face him. Yi Sobang sprung from the ground and swept the boy’s head into his embrace. Within an instant, tears were rolling down the man’s face.

  6

  As she plaited thatch in the backyard, Sonbi’s mother was filling a bowl at her side with grains of rice she’d removed from some straw. Sonbi came bounding toward her.

  “Mom!” she shouted.

  She looked up curiously at her daughter, who ran into the yard short of breath.

  “Don’t tell me you got into trouble again?”

  Sonbi shook her head emphatically, then put her lips to her mother’s ear.

  “Guess what, Mom . . . Sinch’on Taek and the Missus up at the big house got into a huge fight, and Master scolded them something terrible.”

  Sonbi’s breath tickled her mother’s ear, and the woman cocked her head slightly to the side.

  “Those two are at each other’s throats day and night. Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Remember how Master used to beat up his wife? Well, this time he beat Sinch’on Taek just horrible. I felt so sorry for her.”

  Looking rather sad, Sonbi stuck her hand inside the rice-filled gourd without thinking and swished the kernels of grain.

  “A concubine needs a good beating now and then, you know. Is it fair for his wife to get it all the time?”

  The woman stared at the face of her daughter, who seemed somewhat distant. There was a pink hue to Sonbi’s cheeks, which had blossomed with the arrival of spring.

  “But Mom, Sinch’on Taek told me that she didn’t even want to come here. She said her father sold her for a lot of money and that she had no choice in coming here.”

  “Well, I do remember hearing that . . . Just goes to show, money’s the most frightening thing of all.”

  Sonbi’s mother pictured Sinch’on Taek sitting on the floor in tears, and once again she began worrying about the future in store for Sonbi, this beautiful bud just beginning to flower.

  “Now, you get on back to work. What are you doing just sitting there, anyway? You’ve got laundry to starch today, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  Sonbi reluctantly rose to her feet at her mother’s words, then took another look inside the gourd. She smiled.

  “Hey, Mom! If you hull all this rice, I bet we’ll get a good quarter bushel.”

  “Okay, enough from you. Now go on!”

  Sonbi put down the bowl and headed out of the yard. Her mother watched as she walked away. How fast time flew by, she sighed. She realized with a broken heart that she couldn’t keep Sonbi living with her for much longer.

  The woman let out a deep sigh, stuck out her hand to grab another bunch of thatch, then stared at her hands for a while absentmindedly. Her fingers had been scraped by the straw and were covered with tiny red scratches. Thoughts of her husband immediately came to mind.

  As poor as they were while he was still alive, she had never done outdoor chores this like before, whether it was plaiting thatch or rebuilding reed fences. She had gone about her own business unconcerned with these repairs, which she’d assumed were somehow naturally taken care of by springtime.

  But after losing her husband, she’d had to do everything with her own two hands. Not only did it take her twice the effort to complete the chores, but she was never satisfied with her handiwork.

  The housework was, well, housework, and even in a small two-room hut, the tiniest stone had to be returned to its proper place, and not a single husk of grain could be wasted.

  While her husband was alive, she had never appreciated the gray loam with which they used to plaster the walls or the brooms with which they swept out the backyard; she had used them as necessary and then thrown them away. But these little things she had once taken for granted, she now could not use as she pleased. She had nothing unless she made it with her own two hands.

  With so much on her mind, Sonbi’s mother worried herself no end trying to figure out whose help she could enlist to climb up her roof and rethatch it. She had stayed up for several nights to make the straw rope she would need, and she had only just managed to finish four coils of it. By tomorrow she would be finished plaiting the thatch as well, but she still needed to ask some of the men in the village to help her. The ridge thatch placed along the center of the roof had to be cut in a special way; the thatch itself had to be laid out over the roof; and then all of it had to be tied in place with rope.

  She’d gone over and over in her mind whom she might get to come help her. But in the end, she reconsidered. Oh, hell, expert or not, I’ll just try doing it myself, she thought, glancing up at the roof once again.

  She had neglected the job the previous year, which explained the green tufts of grass she saw sprouting here and there where the thatch had given in.

  “Why did he have to go and leave me all alone?” she said softly, jumping to her feet. She spun her head around and looked out at the other houses around her. Well-kept houses, all around! Big or small, each of them was neatly thatched with brand new straw!

  The sunshine now bathed them in a brilliant, yellow light.

  7

  Roof after golden roof, glowing in the brilliant spring sunshine! How soft and lovely they were!

  She closed her eyes tightly, but the roofs appeared even more vividly in her mind. And then among them appeared an image of her husband’s rugged hands, followed by the face of the dead man himself. He had refused to close his eyes on his family even as he gasped for his last bit of air.

  Kim Minsu had been such a good man, so gentle and honest. Though he’d worked under Chong Tokho for close to two decades, he was the sort of person who had never pocketed a single copper. And no matter how tired he was, if Tokho gave him an order, he would rush off to work, be it rain or shine.

  Everyone in the village, came to trust Minsu, even Tokho. And that was why Tokho entrusted to him, and him alone, any jobs that required the collection of large amounts of money.

  Eight years ago this fall Tokho had sent him on just such an errand. Sonbi at the time was seven years old.b

  That morning huge snowflakes had been falling gently from the sky since dawn. Minsu rose early as he always did, and went to Tokho’s. He had just swept out the house and the courtyard and was boiling feed for the cows when Tokho came up to him.

  “Can you go over to Pangch’ukkol for me today?”

  Minsu bowed his head submissively.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, come inside then.”

  Passing through the cauldrons of cow feed, Tokho made his way into the living quarters, with Minsu following. Tokho rummaged through a stationary chest placed in the warm corner of the room, took out his account book, and looked through it for a moment.

  “This idiot in Pangch’ukkol owes me a good fifty won . . . I wonder if you’ll get much out of him, though. He’s a tough one.”

  Minsu said nothing, his head still bowed.

  “So you’ll go? If you can’t get anything out of him, I’ll have to send Kkoltchi’s father over. Come on now, speak up!”

  Minsu didn’t know what he should say; he just sat there hesitating as the color rose in his face.

  “Why do you have to be such a fool? Just go, will you? Oh, and another thing. Make it perfectly clear that if he doesn’t pay up this time, I’m pursuing legal action. And shake him up a bit, will you!”

  Tokho stared at Minsu with bloodthirsty eyes.

  “Stop by Myongho’s house, and Ikson’s, too, on your way over there.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Be sure to go today.”

  Having pressed Minsu one last time, Tokho put his account book back into the chest and stood up. He cleared his throat a couple of times and then went outside. Minsu followed right behind him. The pleasant smell of the cow feed boiling in the work kitchen had already filled the air. By the time Minsu had scooped out all the feed from th
e cauldrons and carried it into the stalls, the cows had already caught a whiff of it. They were gently lifting themselves off the floor and moving to the side of the feeding troughs. Among clouds of warm rising steam, they happily chomped away at their meal.

  After shoveling all the feed, Minsu headed outside. The snowflakes were still falling heavily, without even the faintest sound. He looked up at the sky anxiously.

  “In this snow . . ?” he mumbled.

  When he arrived home, Minsu scraped the snow from his shoes. Sonbi’s mother looked at her husband with a questioning eye.

  “You’re not going out again, are you?”

  “Yes. To collect some money.”

  “What? On a day like this?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about. When the flakes are this large, it means it’s warmer outside.”

  Sonbi had been staring at her father, bright-eyed, but at this, she jumped up and ran into his arms.

  “Daddy, can I go too?”

  She looked up at him imploringly. Minsu gave his daughter a hug, then sat in front of his dinner tray. He made a gesture of eating some food, but then stood up again.

  “I’ll be gone for a few days, so keep a good eye on Sonbi. And keep the fire going so it’s nice and warm.”

  “What is he doing sending you out on a day like this? Does he think the rest of us are built of iron?” muttered Sonbi’s mother, picturing Tokho before her eyes.

  “Watch what you say in front of . . .”

  Minsu glared at his wife. Her face colored and she took her daughter’s hand into her own. Then Minsu stroked Sonbi’s head a few times, opened the door, and went outside. His eyes were blinded by the brilliant white snow.

  “Come back safely, dear.”

  He could just make out his wife’s farewell as he set out with long strides. With his eyes cast to the ground he walked for a bit, but then turned suddenly at the sound of Sonbi crying. She was running to him through the snow.

  8

  Minsu unconsciously took several steps toward Sonbi, before her mother grabbed her from behind. Minsu signaled with his hand for them to go back inside, then turned around.