I Am the Clay Read online

  But the thought of her dying frightened him. How stand alone against the evil spirits?

  He slipped through the row of riveredge houses and walked directly to the cache of wood.

  On the narrow street before the broken wall the wind had turned the snow to ice. It blew as if through a ravine, as if across the shoulder of the hill near the village where they lived. And what of the ox in the shed? Dead by now. In the bellies of the Chinese locusts.

  Near the break in the wall he took from his pocket the cloth and with care laid out the rice in a cone-shaped pile on the ice-covered earth. He gazed up and down the street, and the street, silent and deserted, put to him its mottled face. He shivered in the wind and stepped behind the broken stone wall. After placing within easy reach of his right hand a number of sharp-edged stones and a heavy piece of timber, he squatted on his haunches and waited.

  He did not wait long.

  The little dog entered the street from the far corner, short neck extended, nose sniffing the ground. It hesitated, shivering, and raised its head, tawny skin dull in the pale winter light. Lifting a hind leg, it pissed against the side of a house. He watched it through the break in the wall. Reared in one of these houses? And abandoned? Nowhere to go? Waiting for its master to return? Come, little dog. Come, come. To the rice. Yes. Hunger drives one; caution abandoned. A man who is entirely a starving stomach is no longer a man. Nor is a starving animal an animal. The empty stomach runs the head and makes shit of us all. To the rice, little dog, yes, yes. Ah, yes. Now. Eat.

  The dog, abruptly lifting its head from the rice, saw the old man as he rose to his feet behind the wall. It stood frozen, grains of rice on its tongue. Immediately it saw the motion of the old man’s hand it began to wheel. But it could gain no momentum on the ice and its churning paws slid in all directions and it slipped and skidded. The first stone, hurled by the old man as if from a slingshot, caught it on the front right paw. Yelping, it stumbled headlong onto the ice and tried desperately to regain its balance with its remaining three legs. The second stone struck it on the back and spun it around. Its cries rang through the street. The old man was swiftly upon it but its writhing and the slippery ice made a single well-aimed blow impossible and the piece of lumber descended a number of times. He felt it in his hand each time: the thud, the thump, the breaking bones. Finally the dog lay still upon the ice, bits of rice still clinging to its limp red tongue.

  The old man, breathing heavily, looked quickly around: the street was still save for the icy wind keening among the walls and houses. Much of the rice lay untouched. He spread the cloth upon the ground, gathered up the rice, laid it on the cloth, and once again tied it into a small bundle, which he returned to his pocket. He picked up the dog: warm, limp, light. All bones and air it seemed. He put it down near the pile of wood inside the courtyard, quickly loaded the A-frame, and again concealed the wood beneath stones. He paused briefly to urinate upon the stones, then placed the dog inside his jacket, its head against his neck. With its warmth upon his flesh he walked beneath the load of wood back to the riverbank.

  Inside the shack he gave the dog to the woman, who took it without a word. The two old men looked at the dog and ran their tongues over their dry shrunken lips. The boy lay sleeping beneath the quilts.

  The old man went down to the edge of the river and sat gazing at the wavering line where the frozen bank met the frozen water. The sky had clouded over. More snow? The ice of the river looked black. Skating on the frozen white ice of the pond outside the village. The old carpenter and his four sons. Snow-white clothes on the carpenter; many-colored garments on the children. Back and forth on the wooden skates made by the carpenter with his skilled hands. And when the youngest of the sons is suddenly too cold the carpenter lifts him and puts him inside his wadded jacket and skates with him against his flesh; and the oldest skates proudly alongside his father. Smoothly like the sailing of spirits on sunlit clouds. Smoothly like the movements of love during the three days and three nights after the wedding ceremony and the serving of the parents-in-law by the bride. Smoothly. Not like the ragged killing of the dog. Which his hand still remembered. The thump and crunch of wood and bone. Not enough time to soften the flesh. Not enough time to prepare it properly. Winter a bad season to eat dog. Glancing up, he saw the woman squatting near the shack, working over the dog. The fire leaping and dancing in the oil drum. Light snow beginning to fall: whirling flakes. Demons of cold out tonight. Ice contracting soon with a noise like thunder. More will die on this riverbank tonight. Maybe the boy too.

  Guns thumped distantly. A giant four-engine aircraft suddenly overhead with outspread wings and lowered wheels, roaring over the river and landing with a reverberating blare and backthrust of engines. Like the raging Master Dragon of the Eastern Sea. But it brings soldiers. And food. What to eat afterward? No dogs on this riverbank. They know to stay away.

  The snow thickened, swirling.

  The woman squatted near the oil-drum fire preparing the dog. Opened, it steamed in the icy air. The air stung her small brown blood-wet fingers. Scrawny starved dog. Five mouths to feed here. The boy first. Two nights and still alive. I give a special sacrifice to the spirits if the boy lives. The promise of an old woman. A special sacrifice. One child is enough. I will think what to sacrifice. Leave this little one.

  Water boiled in the kettle over the low fire on the three stones. She squatted on her haunches working expertly and ignoring the thick-falling snow.

  She did not see the two men who were moving slowly along the riverbank, stopping here and there and coming to a halt near the oil drum where the woman sat.

  They peered closely at the wood piled on the earth.

  They were of early middle age, short and lithe, brown-skinned and raven-haired, and dressed in dark wool trousers and leather jackets and fur-lined caps and army-style boots. One carried an A-frame on his back, which he lightly slipped off and set on the ground. Without a word the two men began removing the wood.

  The woman saw them and cried out.

  Squatting at the river’s edge, the old man heard the cry and sprang to his feet and scrambled up the mudflat to where the two men were silently piling the wood on the A-frame.

  The old man asked them what they were doing.

  They ignored him and continued loading the wood onto the A-frame.

  The old man said it was his wood.

  One of the men, without looking at him, said, “Shut your mouth, Uncle. I am not yet very angry. You don’t want to make me very angry.”

  “You cannot take my wood,” the old man said.

  “Uncle, it’s not your wood and we’re taking it. You are fortunate that I am not yet very angry.”

  “I will cry thief,” the old man said. “The entire riverbank will be upon you.”

  “Uncle, the thief here is you. But you’re an old man. That’s why I am not very angry.”

  All the time the man talked he kept loading the wood onto the A-frame.

  “The wood cannot be yours,” said the old man. “You steal it and hide it. Do you sell it to the rich?”

  “You are now succeeding in making me angry,” the man said. “It’s not good for your health to do this.”

  “There is a very sick boy inside the shack. He will freeze to death without this wood.”

  “You want this wood for a sick boy? Our sacred land is filled with the sick. Consider yourself lucky I don’t ask you to pay for the wood you already burned.”

  He helped the other man attach the A-frame to his back and get to his feet.

  The woman slipped into the space before the man with the A-frame.

  “You cannot take this wood,” she said.

  The man took a sidestep. The woman again stepped into the space before him.

  The first man said, “Get out of the way.”

  “The boy will die.”

  “Blame the spirits.”

  “Leave us some wood.”

  “Can you pay?”

  “
We have barely enough to eat.”

  “Blame the North and the Chinese.”

  They started up the mudflat. The woman stood in the way of the man with the A-frame. The man looked at the first man, who pushed the woman roughly aside. The old man cried out in anger and stepped forward and found himself looking at a bayonet that had suddenly appeared in the hand of the first man.

  “Now you have succeeded in making me very angry,” the man said. He opened his mouth in a rat-toothed smile.

  The old man and woman stood very still.

  The man looked at them. After a moment he put the bayonet back under his coat.

  “You are lucky I have respect for old people,” he said. “It’s one of the few things I hold from my childhood.”

  The two of them walked off the mudflat with the wood.

  The old man and his wife stood gazing after the two men as they disappeared into the shadows amid the row of houses. Hot anger and shame brought a trembling weakness to the legs of the old man.

  “There is still fire in the oil drum,” the woman said. “There is some food.”

  They returned to the shack.

  The dog was gone.

  On the frozen earth were droplets of bright blood and a scattering of entrails.

  They stood staring at the leaping flames in the oil drum and the simmering kettle on the small fire. Along the riverbank people lay in shacks or squatted around burning oil drums. A middle-aged woman sat motionless near a low fire outside the shack nearest them.

  After a long moment the old woman said, “I will make a soup with what remains of the rice.”

  She squatted near the kettle.

  The man stood looking at the point on the riverbank where the two men had disappeared with the wood.

  He ate in silence the soup and doughy paste the woman had made with the last of the rice. A faint savor of meat tinged the soup and objects floated in it that were not rice. The woman fed the boy, who swallowed and did not vomit. The two old men ate noisily and greedily and then lay back in their sleeping bag and closed it over their heads.

  Outside the shack the fire in the oil drum smoked and died away. A night of wind and snow descended upon the riverbank. Up and down the river the ice drew deeper into itself with a crunching and thundering that seemed to echo the distant banging of the artillery and the noise of the jeeps and trucks and tanks rolling across the bridge.

  The old man slept and once again dreamed the woman had opened her jacket and blouse and given the boy her breast to suck. He heard distinctly the boy’s drysucking sounds. He woke with a start and lay very still in a darkness so cold it seemed a ponderous weight. He could see nothing. He listened to the woman’s deep slow dry breathing. But the boy lay so still the old man thought him surely dead and he raised a hand, seeking his nostrils in the darkness. With a shock of surprise he felt the boy’s breath brush with warm tickling lightness against the palm of his hand. Alive! And his cheeks smooth and cool. Abruptly the boy stirred and lifted his arms and encircled the old man’s neck and clung to him. “Abuji,” he murmured, his cheek against the old man’s face. “Abuji …” Then his arms slackened and fell back limply and he was again asleep.

  Startled, the old man lay still and heard the loud and rapid beating of his heart. Inside his chest and shoulders and neck a fierce and urgent drumbeat. The drumbeat at the festival of ghosts. Beating, beating. The heart pounding, hammering. How is it possible no one else hears it, this thumping added to the noise of the river and the big guns and the machines and to the moaning of the icy wind?

  The cold woke him. He lay with the pad and a quilt beneath him and more quilts above him but the cold wrapped itself around his flesh like a second skin. He slept fitfully and some while later woke again. Opening his eyes, he said to the coming day: Stay far from me! Shame filled him. The rough push suffered by the woman at the hands of the man. Our own people. Savages. No better than the Japanese devils. I thought he would put the bayonet into me. Shame and anger and helplessness. And his bones ached: cold and stiff as iron. Day, stay away!

  For a long time he would not move. Slowly he became aware of the odd silence in the shack and he put his head outside the quilts.

  The cold air struck his face and eyes. He saw through the spaces in the walls the river and the bank deep in snow and a cold gray sky. The woman, awake beneath the quilts and unable to move for the cold, looked at him helplessly. His heart turned over at her gaze and he was startled by his unfamiliar feeling of pity. Between them the boy lay asleep, breathing quietly.

  He raised himself on an elbow and looked over at the sleeping bag in which lay the two old men. After some while he slid out from beneath the quilts, moved silently on hands and knees to the sleeping bag, and folded back the top.

  The two old men lay very still with their eyes open to slits.

  He put a hand to their nostrils. Two old men from somewhere in the city. The homes they lived in destroyed. Nowhere to go. Stay near where you live. Like the dog. Where are their families?

  He felt the woman beside him. She was shivering. She helped him move the old men out from the sleeping bag. They lay face-up on the frozen earth of the mudflat inside the shack.

  The woman put the sleeping bag over the boy and went from the shack to tend to her needs.

  The old man stripped the shoes and clothes from the two men, leaving them in their undergarments. Leave them here unburied. Better to rot aboveground than be buried in an improper grave. Bring ruin to their families. Gaunt and wasted: loose bones of men. Like the dog.

  He put the clothes and shoes into the cart outside the shack and went up a distance along the riverbank to a low stone wall, where he squatted awhile in the bitter cold.

  The woman was in the shack when he returned. The boy lay asleep.

  “The burning is gone,” she said. “The boy will live.”

  “If he does not freeze to death.”

  “You saw his jacket. Padded silk. How is it he wears such a jacket under his coat?”

  “Perhaps he stole it.”

  “He is the son of a scholar or a yangban.”

  The thin arms around his neck; the smooth cheek on his face. “Abuji …”

  “This is not a child one leaves behind,” she said.

  “I have no wish for this child,” he said. “Do you hear me, woman?”

  After a moment she said, “We must have a fire. We must eat. Others have fires. There is brush near the airport.”

  “Near the airport there are guards,” the old man said.

  The woman gazed across the river.

  “I overheard,” he said. “Near the airport they shoot old men and women. Even children.”

  She turned to him and he saw in her eyes the same look of defiance he had seen when she stood in the path of the ambulance.

  Minutes later she watched without expression as he put the A-frame on his back and started across the snow-covered mudflat and the river to the airfield.

  Burning? He smelled it in the dark frigid air. Wood and rubber. Flesh too? Heavy guns. The crackle of small-arms fire. Beneath his legs the river frozen to a depth of—what?—five, ten feet? If the river freezes to its very bottom, do the fish freeze too? Is the ice the grave of the fish? And do they wake with the thaw? The stream that flowed into the river where we put the goldenrod nets and caught black-and-white minnows. Flopping in the net, roasted on the pit fire along the riverbank. Taste it now: smoky and soft melting flesh. Yi Sung, tall, lost in dreams, his voice a pool of visions, telling us how as a spirit he created our village, this stone here, that tree there. Yi Sung in school in the village marketplace studying to be a scholar. Yi Sung in a Japanese jail. Yi Sung beaten with the big four-edged club. Yi Sung kicked with soldiers’ boots and tortured with water. Yi Sung dead. Chinese, Japanese, Americans. Foreign devils. Burn and burn. Brushwood near the airfield. But will not burn very long. Not like the wood those two took away. Once a man who struck an old woman would be punished with death. What could I do? An
old farmer. In the village when someone did wrong, there was punishment. Once he himself had been a punisher: lashing a thief on his exposed bottom in a public punishment. The one with the bayonet, there was a look of madness in his eyes. The thought of plunging the bayonet into my flesh gave him pleasure. What is that? Ah, the tent with the red cross. Near the bridge. The machines come off the bridge with the wounded. So many working there. Which one helped the boy? She pulled out the splinter. She by herself. Grasping it with her fingers. What is happening there near the big tent? So much running about. Machines lining up. The wounded carried out into the machines. Brushwood near the airfield. They don’t shoot if you don’t come too close to the fence. And what for food? Grass. Bark. Rats. Look in the garbage cans near the tents. Tents being taken down. Down?

  Near the perimeter of the medical battalion, outside a scattered line of burning oil drums that gave off the hot smoky odors of waste fuel, he stopped and stood watching soldiers scurrying from tent to tent, loading supplies onto jeeps and trucks, and wounded men into ambulances. He heard orders barked and saw vehicles pulling away. Behind him there was a strange keening like the wind in the street where he had killed the dog. It grew louder and he turned and saw a scurrying of people, men and women pouring from the shacks along the riverbank, disorder and frenzy and the lament of a thousand voices raised in terror. On the airfield aircraft engines roared into power, whining awhile, then gearing into full power, and a huge aircraft rose from the ground and flew toward the east and banked and disappeared into the clouds. Immediately two other aircraft rose one after the other and were gone. The bridge was crowded with jeeps and trucks and tracked vehicles, all moving south.

  He started back across the river.

  Lying with the boy beneath the quilts and the sleeping bag, the woman felt him curled warmly against her, his knees drawn up, and heard his uneven breathing. The quilts and sleeping bag over their heads, she saw whenever she opened her eyes a vague whitish liquid light. The sleeping bag was smooth and silken upon her eyes. Vague waves of sound came to her through the quilts and the sleeping bag, sighing noises she chose to ignore. She listened instead to the murmurings of the boy: words she could not make out breathed through troubled sleep. But the fever was gone: he smelled of returning health. From time to time a trembling seized him; he lay against her and she put her arms around his light thin frame and held him. All bones. Like the dog. And the two dead old men. And soon like them dead of cold and hunger if the man does not return with brushwood and something to eat. Dead old men unburied and rotting on the ground. No proper graves for them, no ancestral worship, gone from the earth and from memory forever, like an insect, a fish, a dog. Dead dog. Best to eat in summer. Who stole? The two men and the way they pushed an old woman. Death to them! May they be beggars! Dragons of the mountains, consume them! And protect the boy. A sacrifice to you if you protect the boy. A doctor to protect and heal the boy with a poultice upon the wound. Or a sorceress to whirl about with cymbals and drum to frighten off the hovering devils. A scholar’s son? Good fortune to have in the village a scholar’s son. Good harvest. Food. Octopus and dried squid and eggs and batter-fried vegetables. And rice and fowl and steamed chicken. And long life.