Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River

by Jung Young Moon

  Later, I somehow ended up going to a cowboy church—that is, a church that cowboys attended—with N, who likewise had never been to a cowboy church. The pastor, dressed in cowboy garb from head to toe, repeated throughout his sermon that life as a cowboy was an extremely blessed life, and, in his last prayer, he pronounced a blessing on the cowboys who’d come to church that day, and who were extremely blessed already, and on cowboys who hadn’t been able to come to church, and on healthy cowboys, and on sick cowboys, and on dead cowboys, and on living cowboys, and on cowboys who’d found their way in the Lord, and on stray lamb cowboys, who hadn’t yet found their way, and on the families, livestock, land, and everything that grew on the land that belonged to all cowboys around the world, including the cowboys of Texas and the cowboys of the rest of America, and he pronounced a blessing, too, on ditches and on fences, which are important to cowboys, and then he pronounced the remaining blessings—which seemed scanty—on everyone who wasn’t a cowboy, who, not being so blessed yet, hadn’t become a cowboy, and the blessing I thus received seemed so small that it was like a speck of dust on my head, and it seemed that I would be able to shake it off by shaking my head, and it seemed that it was shaken off when I came out of the church and shook my head, but I wasn’t able to shake off all the dust, and so it seemed that a very meager blessing, invisible to the eye, remained with me; and, a few days later, N and I went to an opry—a performance by bands of cowboys who were raising funds to repair a neglected cemetery in a town—at the invitation of a cowboy I’d happened to meet at the church, and I later went with N to a farm belonging to a very wealthy Canadian, at the invitation of a cowboy I’d happened to meet at the opry, who was the older brother of the owner of the farm, as well as a joint owner and the manager of the farm, and the farm, which was very big, required a truck to go looking around it. He said that other farms in Texas, which were really big, were equipped with runways and hangars, as if his own farm were very simple because it lacked these features, and yet his farm had a forest with hunting grounds. The biggest farm in southern Texas, in fact, was bigger than Rhode Island.

  On his farm, which had a vast amount of arable land, there were about twenty artificial lakes, and there were artificial waterfalls as well, and the farm, which was very well-manicured, looked like an enormous garden, and although there were horses, they were Belgian horses, which were the biggest and the prettiest of horses, and which looked like a kind of decoration; and everything seemed artificial, and there wasn’t a single livestock animal, such as a cow or a sheep. The cowboy showed us around his house on the farm as well, the house whose walls were decked with watercolor paintings he’d done of the surrounding landscape, and he also showed us a lot of old photographs, including ones of his father, when he’d worked as a mail delivery pilot in British Columbia. In one of the bedrooms, which was empty, there was a wardskin with the head intact, laid out flat on a single bed—which looked either like an altar on which a wolf had been offered as a sacrifice, or like an altar exclusively for worshiping wolves—and the wolf looked quite unhappy, as if it were quite offended that someone had made its dead, skinned self lie flat forever, although it didn’t remember how it had ended up that way, and it was clenching its teeth as if to say that although it was, just barely, putting up with things, it wasn’t sure how much longer it would be able to put up with things.

  On the farm there was also a very cute donkey, which wasn’t interested in the fact that there was a legend concerning donkeys, about how there was a poor farmer who lived near Jerusalem who was about to kill a donkey that was good for nothing, since it was too small and was just eating up food, but the children who loved the donkey said instead of killing it, they should tie it to a tree on the street and let whoever who wanted the donkey take it, and so the poor farmer did as they suggested, and the next day two people came and asked if they could take the donkey, and the farmer said that the donkey couldn’t carry anything, and one of the people said that Jesus of Nazareth would need the donkey, and in the end Jesus, who saw the donkey, patted it on the face and climbed on it and preached the gospel, and the donkey followed Jesus even when he climbed Golgotha, and it turned its head when it saw Jesus nailed to his cross, but it couldn’t leave as it was unable to take a step forward, and the Holy Spirit befell the donkey, leaving the shadow of a cross on its back (without even asking the donkey in the process), which is how all donkeys came to have the shape of a cross on their back; the donkey in Texas wasn’t interested in this legend, but it did like coyotes, and although it liked coyotes what it liked most of all was to chase coyotes away, which it was good at, and in that area there were a lot of coyotes, which of course the donkey liked. The cowboy touched the donkey’s ear, telling me it was the happiest donkey in the world, since it lived doing what it liked and what it was good at, and there was no other livestock on the farm that perhaps the coyotes could hunt, and so coyotes passed by from a distance, and when they did the donkey pretended to chase after them for no reason, sorry that they were passing by from a distance, and the coyotes—passing by so far from the donkey—paid no attention to the donkey at all, but the donkey seemed happy just to be pretending to chase them away.

  Before going to the farm, I saw white cotton all over a field near it, left behind after the cotton had been harvested, and it seemed as if the night before, someone—not in a state of somnambulism, but wide-awake and knowing full well what he was doing, although not why—had come with a cotton-filled comforter, and tore it up and scattered the cotton filling here and there; and now N and I stopped the car and opened the window and looked at the cotton field, and at four coyotes who were running across the field, one of them running with white cotton in its mouth, and it looked as if the coyotes were playing a polo match of their own devising, with cotton in their mouths, and, a little later, the coyote that looked like the leader of the pack—while passing through an area near us—stopped in its tracks and looked at us, with an embarrassed look on its face that seemed to say that his group wasn’t usually that clamorous, and although the coyote couldn’t tell us everything in detail, it was a special day for coyotes, which was why everyone was a little excited, and it asked for our understanding; and then it ran off and I let the seven samurai—who appeared in my mind at that moment, and who still kept getting swept away in a river, as if they’d somehow chosen, in the meantime, to get swept away in a river again rather than float around in stagnant water—see the coyotes running across the cotton field, and the samurai, who were silent as always but who seemed to read my thoughts and take an interest in them, looked at the coyotes even as they were getting swept away in a river, and although they still said nothing about them, they seemed to find them interesting, and it seemed that the cotton field not only didn’t mind coyotes romping on it, but in fact liked it quite a bit, and yet—being aware of the mistaken notion of people who believed it was wrong for a cotton field to let its feelings show—did not show how it felt.

  The farm manager wanted to write a novel about his life as a cowboy, and he seemed to think that he ought to write about it since he’d lived as a cowboy for almost thirty years. But there were many authors who’d once been a cowboy or who were writing fiction while working as a cowboy, and there seemed to be no need for him to become a cowboy fiction writer as well. He’d long been working on a sort of illustrated diary about the rural areas and farms of Texas and it seemed that with a bit of work, it could be published as a book. When I gave him my novel which was translated into English and published by a press in Texas, and said that I wanted to write a novel about Texas, and if possible about the cowboys of Texas, although I didn’t really intend to, he said that I could stay as long as I wanted at his farm working as a semi-cowboy and teaching him how to write a novel. He said that there were too many rooms in the big house on his farm in which he lived alone, and that there would still be too many rooms even if I used several of them, and I felt that I should stay at his farm if only to reduce the superfluity of the ro
oms, and so I had to consider living as a cowboy on his farm, and although being a cowboy wasn’t among the things I’d never done but would have liked to do had I been given the opportunity, it seemed that spending not the rest of my life but instead only a period of my life being a cowboy of all things wouldn’t be so bad.

  In my life thus far, I have received, in a similar way, a somewhat unusual job offer of sorts, and that was to be a yogi. Long ago, I was passing through an area near a crematorium in a west-Asian city with my traveling companions when three yogis, who’d been congregating and drinking tea, called me to a halt and invited me, who at the time had long hair, to come and sit with them, and so I went and sat with them. My companions watched us for a little while and then went off somewhere else. The yogis poured some tea into the filthiest teacup I’d ever seen—which, having never been washed since it had become a fire-baked teacup, probably couldn’t get any filthier—from a lidless teapot that was on a little wood-fired brazier, a teapot that had been blackened for so long by fire, from the time that it had somehow been born as a teapot, that it couldn’t get any blacker; and then the yogi gave it to me, and I drank it, not having the heart to refuse; and then I had a momentary hallucination, as if the tea included something that induced hallucination, and, in the hallucination, the teapot looked like a dead black star, in a galaxy tens of thousands of light years away, a dead black star that, interestingly, looked like a teapot, and that had an extremely high mass even though it was small in size, and the three yogis looked like planets that interestingly looked like yogis, and that revolved around the teapot star, and that were much lower in mass than the teapot star, and the yogis—who had long hair, and were wearing filthy clothes, and who, perhaps, hadn’t washed their bodies in decades, after a final dip in the Ganges, and who seemed to have been waging a bet for decades, with great perseverance, to see who looked filthier, and who seemed to be demonstrating with their entire bodies that one of the best things about being a yogi was that you didn’t have to wash yourself, and who looked like yogis from head to toe as if they were afraid that someone might say they weren’t yogis—as I was saying, the yogis all seemed a little silly and a little jaded and a little scampish, and so it looked as if planets that were a little silly and a little jaded and a little scampish were revolving around a teapot star with an extremely high mass.

  Among the yogis was a Caucasian yogi who’d nearly lost his Caucasian appearance, and who seemed to have been a hippie in the past, and had ended up there at the end of the hippie era. Suddenly, I heard a sound coming from the crematorium across a stream nearby, where dead bodies were burned over a pile of woods, a sound like that of a little cannon being fired, and one of the planets next to me said that it was the sound of the skull of a burning body exploding, unable to bear the pressure that had risen due to the heat. We were speaking in English, and although I couldn’t tell if what the planet was saying was true, it didn’t seem so terrible for a dead person to finish his destiny as a corpse burning up and making a sound like a cannon salute.

  It felt so natural to sit among yogis drinking tea, and to hear a cannon salute by a corpse, that I felt as if I’d lived to that very moment just to sit among them and drink tea. Steam from the black teapot—in which tea was boiling that wasn’t black as well, but which seemed infinitely generous and benevolent, yet mischievous—was strangely rising without soaring straight up, but instead seeming to dawdle and spread out, making it seem as if something magical were about to happen; and as I watched it, I thought that the black teapot or the steam rising from the teapot might be gods worshiped by the yogis, and although I didn’t know how they ranked they seemed much lower in rank than Ganesha, the elephant god, and much higher in rank than sponges, which were usually found in kitchens, but sometimes in other places as well; but it seemed that you couldn’t necessarily say that, and I caught myself wondering how the ranking of so many gods in the Hindu religion was determined, although they said that in Hinduism nothing was above anything, and I also caught myself wondering if the gods decided the ranking among themselves, and then informed humans of their decision, or if humans made the decision at their discretion, and I also caught myself wondering if the ranking, once determined, couldn’t be changed, but I couldn’t find out; and I regretted for a long time afterward that I never found out, while I was with the yogis, how the god of springs or the god of gasoline ranked; and it seemed that teapots—blackening day by day, in the furnaces in the kitchens of many houses of Asia—black teapots that were perhaps deemed more spiritual the blacker they were, as well as steam rising from teapots, would rank quite high even among Hindu gods, and in spite of myself I bowed to the gods of the yogis while holding my hands together and lowering my head, and although I’m not even sure if I was bowing to the black teapot or instead to the steam rising from the teapot, I felt as if I were entrusting myself or unloading myself to some god, and at that moment one of the planets asked me how I felt about joining them and being a yogi, and although I wasn’t sure whether or not the planets were teasing me it seemed that they were both teasing me and being serious at the same time, and the thought that it was something to consider was instantly spurned by the thought that such a thing wasn’t even worth considering, and so while caught in a strange mood after drinking a strange tea I thought that the yogi’s suggestion was right, and that it would be right for me to do as he suggested, and that it wouldn’t be so bad to become a new planet and live a life revolving around the teapot star with them, no, that in fact I must do so, no, that I was, in fact, a planet that had been revolving around in the wrong place, but now I’d finally come to revolve in the right orbit; and yet of course I wasn’t sure if my head was working properly at that moment.

  I didn’t know how a typical yogi’s daily routine went, but what took up a large part of the days of the yogis before me seemed to be sitting still, drinking tea, and joking around, and I felt that when it came to something like that I could be better than anyone, and my future seemed to lie in becoming a yogi and therefore it seemed I wouldn’t have a future if I didn’t become a yogi here. But my thoughts seemed to be getting too far ahead of me and I turned them back for a moment, and then it occurred to me that the yogis might demand something of me whose judgment was clouded, and I thought about what kind of demand I wouldn’t comply with, but I felt that I would be able to comply with any demand, and I wondered what I could do for them—even though they didn’t demand that I do anything for them—but I couldn’t think of anything suitable. They didn’t seem to need anything and I waited for the yogis, who didn’t need anything, to levitate or something, but they didn’t do any such thing simply because, it seemed, things like levitating were no big deal to them. As I went on sitting with them it seemed somehow that the white steam would turn orange in color, and that I would be able to understand what the steam, which spoke like someone speaking, was saying, but the steam didn’t turn orange or say anything which was natural but still seemed extremely marvelous. It seemed that something quite incredible would arise from the teapot from which the steam was coming out but the only thing that arose from it was the steam, which seemed more incredible than anything I had ever seen before, and it seemed that even if I saw an asteroid colliding with the earth, which was something I’d never seen before, I wouldn’t find it more incredible.

  The yogis gave me another cup of the tea that caused strange hallucinations, and when I drank it I seemed to revolve around the teapot star at a faster rate and I felt fantastic, and even the yogis’ grubby things scattered around us looked fantastic, and the only thing that bothered me was that the teapot star didn’t have a lid but the steam coming out of the lidless teapot star looked so enchanting that something like a lid in turn seemed quite immaterial. As I watched it coming out of the teapot the steam seemed to change something essential in me, and if my life changed dramatically because of the steam coming out of the teapot it seemed like quite a good thing as well as something inevitable, and so I made up my mind
to live as a yogi, and at that moment two of my companions who’d been off somewhere else returned and had to take me away, almost dragging me against my will, but if only they hadn’t I could be living a good life as a yogi, like a planet revolving around a teapot star. A yogi and a cowboy, that was all. When it occurred to me that I’d received only two job offers of sorts in my life, and that they were to be a yogi and to be a cowboy, it seemed that something was terribly wrong with my life, but I thought there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to think of something in common or a point of contact between a yogi and a cowboy, but nothing came to mind, and so I put a fiction writer between the two, but still it seemed that there was nothing in common and no point of contact among them.

  The cowboy manager seemed quite keen on having me stay at his farm, as he said that it was no big deal to have another person stay. But you couldn’t drive a herd of cattle on the farm as there were no cattle there, and when I expressed my regret at the fact the manager said that if I wanted to learn to do something that real cowboys did, like drive cattle, he could introduce me to cowboys in the area or hire me out. He said that I could come live as a cowboy at his farm anytime as long as his farm was there. Afterward, I thought both seriously and in jest about living as a cowboy, and I thought that I could live as a cowboy for a year or for shorter or longer. And if I did spend a year or shorter or longer I could perhaps think of myself as a cowboy or as someone on his way to becoming a cowboy. I could thus end up becoming a real cowboy or stop midway but it didn’t matter either way, and it wouldn’t matter if I became an awkward cowboy and thus become a laughingstock for cowboys, and perhaps someday I would find that I’d turned into a cowboy before I knew it.