I Am the Clay

  The chattering women on both sides of her and on the opposite bank of the stream had noticed nothing of her brief discomfort.

  Before they entered the building the Korean soldier asked the boy, “Do you have the money?”

  “I will give it to you from my first wages,” the boy responded. The soldier seemed satisfied.

  Inside the building was a long low-ceilinged room with many tables and chairs and a large end room with sinks and stoves and cabinets and boxes of food. A middle-aged Korean man in a white apron and a white cap stood at a table with a long-bladed knife in his hand. Lounging against a pile of potato sacks was a boy in his mid-teens, also wearing a white apron and a white cap.

  “This is your new boy,” the Korean soldier said to the man.

  The boy lounging against the potato sacks made a low disagreeable snorting sound.

  “You be quiet,” the man said to him. “You shut your mouth, lazy bedbug.” He turned to the boy. “You work hard?”

  The boy nodded, his throat tight and dry.

  “You work hard, you can work here. You don’t work hard, out you go.”

  The other boy yawned.

  “When you going to get rid of him for me?” the man asked the Korean soldier, pointing the knife at the teenage boy.

  “I got you another boy,” said the soldier. “Don’t make trouble.”

  He went out.

  The man looked at the boy. “Do you know what this place is?”

  The boy shook his head.

  The man said, “Listen, I’m the cook here, when I talk to you, answer in words.”

  “No,” said the boy.

  “This is a medicine-and-doctors battalion, where they bring the wounded and the sick. And here is the place where the officers eat. What is your name?”

  The boy told him.

  “What is your village?”

  The boy told him.

  “You are far from your village.”

  “My village is burned. Everyone is dead.”

  The cook and the teenage boy regarded him in silence.

  “Everyone dead,” the boy said. “Grandfather and Mother and Father and sisters and brothers and and uncles and aunts and friends and Badooki my dog is gone and and and everything is gone.”

  The cook and the teenage boy were very still.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore about my village,” said the boy.

  The cook closed and opened his eyes. After a moment he said, “All right, I will talk to you about cooking. Perhaps you will learn something. This lazy bedbug over here refuses to learn.”

  The teenage boy grinned.

  “Do you know how to peel a potato?” the cook asked the boy. “I will teach you.”

  “Teach him how to peel an onion,” the teenage boy said.

  “Get out, get out,” the cook said, waving the knife. “Go take care of your dirty business.”

  The teenage boy laughed and went from the kitchen.

  “He is worthless to me,” the cook said to the boy. “But for certain reasons I must keep him. Now we begin. Are you well? You look sick. Where do you live?”

  “The village on the other side of that hill.”

  “With whom do you live?”

  “Farmers, an old man and a woman who found me when I was hurt.”

  “They feed you and let you live with them? Very kind people. The kind ones you can count on the fingers of your two hands and your toes. I will give you something to take home to them. But you must work hard for me and not be like that lazy bedbug of a thief.”

  The boy peeled potatoes and onions and shelled peas and learned to set the tables and that evening served the meat platters, moving invisibly among the officers, and at the end of the day the cook seemed satisfied and gave him a gift. When the old man saw the gift he stared at the boy in astonishment and when the carpenter smelled the smoke of the gift he came hurrying into the house and the old man gave him a piece of the gift and they sat chewing and eating and looking at the boy from time to time, and the old man said to himself: This boy must not leave me, this boy is touched by the spirits, this boy has good power.

  As the woman savored and slowly chewed and swallowed she wondered if the meat would remove the discomfort and heat inside herself. In the morning to her joy she felt well and as the boy walked to the compound she went off to the fields with the old man.

  The boy worked for some weeks in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and learning to cook eggs and vegetables and meat and serving meals and every morning mopping the floor of the officers’ dining room. On occasion the teenage boy would show up and the cook would send the boy from the kitchen and the two of them would talk quietly. Sometimes the cook would raise his voice at the teenage boy and call him a bedbug and a nest of lice and the teenage boy would laugh as he scurried from the dining room.

  In the late spring the surface of the main road was an inch of yellow dust that traffic kept plowing and throwing into the air; it coated the buildings and tents of the compound and crept like dry mist into noses and mouths. Storms of dust rose and fell with the arrival and departure of hospital helicopters. The teenage boy appeared one day and offered to sell the boy a face mask that would protect him from the dust and the lung sickness, only the boys who got their jobs through him could obtain the face mask, did the boy want shadows on his lungs and not to be able to work. The boy bought the mask for a week’s wages and wore it whenever he walked to and from the battalion compound but it did little good and he still tasted the dust on his tongue and deep in his throat.

  The planting was done but the rains were late and the water in the channels was not enough for all the fields. The woman felt a curse was now blanketing the land: the fiends of war and drought had been set loose and were slaying the just and the unjust alike. Dust without end and the rising shimmer of heat over the fields and strange hot winds from the south. A shadow covered the sun and sometimes took the form of a winged creature. She saw it as she worked in the fields: a vast ugly furry creature, wings slowly rising and falling. Father to the creatures in the cave? No, those were good spirits. Good spirits of the earth and sky, good spirits of the valleys and hills and caves, end the war and bring the rains. Standing in the paddy, she paused in her work and made the vertical and horizontal motions of the cross. Have thine own way Lord have thine own way. Mother taught me.

  Later she squatted by the stream over the laundry, her arms in the cool shallow water, and thought of the boy. At that very moment the boy was listening to the Korean soldier talking to him in the kitchen about another boy, who had worked cleaning the little houses of the officers and had not been to the compound for many days and seemed to have vanished. Did the boy want to take his place, the job was for more money than he was getting in the kitchen.

  The boy looked questioningly at the cook.

  “Stealing one of my best boys,” the cook said to the soldier.

  “What do you say?” the soldier asked the boy.

  “Take it,” the cook said.

  The boy hesitated.

  “Better than peeling potatoes and washing dishes and floors,” said the cook. “You come in and visit, I give you something.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Then it’s done,” said the soldier.

  “You should go to school,” the cook said to the boy.

  “Don’t give him fancy ideas,” said the soldier.

  “You’re a smart kid. You should go to school and learn something. You want to spend the rest of your life here?”

  “When you come in tomorrow, I’ll show you what to do,” said the soldier. “You got to pay me again for this new job, but don’t worry, I’ll take it out of your wages.”

  “Don’t forget to visit,” said the cook. “But meantime you’re still working for me, finish those vegetables.”

  That evening the boy told the old man and the woman about his new job. The old man asked immediately, “The meat, what about the meat?” and the boy told the old man what the cook had
said and the old man drew in on his pipe and gave the boy a nod of satisfaction. The woman said to herself: He is a boy doing the work of women. Let the war end so new work will begin. Let the rain come. Let there be an end to the shadow over the sun.

  Later the old man went with the carpenter to the nearby town and the woman cleaned the bowls and lay down in her little side room to sleep. It was dark outside and cool and the boy stood in the courtyard breathing the pungent smells of the paddies and listening to the sounds of the village—night air in the trees, quiet voices from nearby homes, soft giggly laughter of girls—and the darkness seemed to him suddenly immense and vibrant with movement. The dead were scratching against the thin curtain that separated them from the living. He heard his mother calling to him and quickly reached out an arm—upon emptiness. Was that Father? Foolish boy, why are you living with farmers? And Grandfather’s whispered response: Foolish? Where else is he to live? Look at him. What separates him from the orphans roaming the fields and streets? The confused mind of an old woman, the hungry belly of an old man, and an occasional piece of meat. A fragile bamboo reed upon which to hang one’s life. They stood around him talking softly: Grandfather, Mother, Father. He reached out a hand to his grandfather and touched something and saw dimly by the light of stars the side of the cart. All the weeks with the cart then rushed back to him; this cart, this dumb assemblage of wood used by Grandfather and Mother and Father to help keep me and the old man and woman alive through sea-shore and cave and mountain and plain. Do Grandfather and Mother and Father hold such power even though they have no graves I can honor? Perhaps make a grave for them somewhere. Honor them all together. How?

  A rush of wind in the tree startled him. He stood for some moments longer listening to the night and then returned to the house. He was asleep when the old man stumbled into the room and struggled out of his clothes and lay back on his pad and began immediately to snore.

  The snoring woke the boy. Unable to sleep, he rose and took his pad and quilt and went out into the courtyard. He put the pad and quilt on the cart and slept there and woke chilled by the early-morning air. For a moment he was in the shanty on the plain and the flames had died in the firepit and the girl stood silhouetted against the snowy light motioning to him soundlessly to help her carry away her dead father. He lay shivering in the chill darkness and after a while climbed down from the cart and went back into the house.

  The boy worked in the little canvas houses—Jamesways, he learned they were called—of the officers, making the beds, sweeping the plywood floors, wiping down the plastic windows, filling the five-gallon water cans, keeping the fire alive in the potbellied oil stoves; he did those chores day after day in the four small dim Jamesways assigned to him by the Korean soldier; and the old man and the woman harvested the rice crop in the burning heat and spread out the plants beneath the sun for drying.

  As the rice lay drying the rains came and the old man and the woman worked to save the harvest. But much of it rotted in the torrents that poured from the sky and down the mountain slopes and through the gullies. The river rose and the stream behind the village flooded and the earth in the valley and foothills began to move and paths along which men had once safely walked with brushwood on their A-frames were now deadly with mines that had shifted with the sliding mud. The boy saw ambulances bring two old men to the battalion with their legs gone, and one of the girls from the village he remembered swinging up and down in a nearby courtyard higher and higher and giggling went off to play with friends of her chronological age on a hillside and stepped on what looked like a rock and vanished in a dull thumping noise and a rain of dust and pebbles and a spray of red mist. The rain tore away part of the grass roof of the old man’s house and the carpenter and the old man labored to rebuild it, and the day they worked on the roof the boy went over to the officers’ dining room to speak with the cook and the cook smiled and nodded and gave him another gift. The teenage boy was there and said idly, “How does the captain like his new phonograph?” and the boy said, “He plays it all the time,” and the teenage boy said matter-of-factly, “Where does he keep it?” and the boy told him.

  Two mornings later the captain woke and saw the cut in the canvas wall of the Jamesway made silently during the night right up against the dresser on which the phonograph had sat. The boy, when he heard of it, felt his heart surge with fear.

  The next day the teenage boy tried to give him money and he refused to accept it.

  The teenager said, “Listen, don’t be a jerk. You think it bothers these rich foreigners? They have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Take the money. You do me more favors like that, you can save it all up and one day buy your old people an ox, I know what they are and where you live, don’t play bigshot with me, you know what we do to fancy bigshot people here.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving the money in the hands of the boy.

  That night the boy waited until the old man went out to the town with the carpenter and the woman was asleep. He dug a hole in the earth of the shed where the old man’s ox had starved to death and put the money in a clay jug and buried the jug and covered it.

  From time to time in the weeks that followed he would take out the jug and put more money into it and replace it, and sometimes he thought: Are the spirits watching me and what are they thinking, but it is for the old ones, how they work in the fields and the woman with the harness around her shoulders, it is unbearable to see her pulling the plow like an ox, and do the foreigners really care, they are so rich and fat. But spirits haunted him, he sensed them everywhere, and during the heat and dust of the late summer he woke often in the night and listened to their whisperings and sometimes he took his pad outside and slept in the courtyard and once even on the cart.

  One night the woman woke and saw him by moonlight emerging from the shed and thought she was inside a dream until he stumbled and fell noisily and she called out to him and he said he couldn’t sleep for the heat and the flies and had taken a walk by the stream.

  Later he lay in the darkness listening to the old man snoring and thought of the officer who had arrived at the battalion that day, pale skin and red hair, they came and went and new ones took their places and they brought with them things, so many things, and they purchased new things, so many new things, doctors most of them, and a man who tended to their spirits, a man called chaplain who worked in the long white-painted building with the white cross on its tower.

  The woman seemed interested in the chaplain. “Does he sing?” she wanted to know.

  The boy said, “I have not heard him sing.”

  “Tell me if he ever sings this song,” she said and sang for him in her quavering voice Have thine own way Lord have thine own way thou art the potter I am the clay.

  The boy asked her what the words meant.

  “Once I knew,” she said, embarrassed. “But I have forgotten. It is the language of the foreigners.”

  The old man, who was sitting nearby smoking his pipe, said they were giving him a headache with all the talking and singing, he was going to the town with the carpenter, and he got to his feet and went out.

  “He drinks as if there is still the black smoke,” the woman said.

  “The foreigners drink a lot,” said the boy. “The cook says they drink to forget they are far from their homes.”

  “This man also has a lot to forget. He said to me you bring him memories.” She was silent a moment and then she said, “I think he has begun to care for you. He hides it from you but he said to me two three days ago if you were our son he would make the hat ceremony in a few years and we would begin to look for a wife for you.”

  The boy felt his face burning.

  “You are growing into a man but you are not our son and there is nothing we can do,” the woman said and got to her feet to go into the kitchen. “You will tell me if you hear the foreigner singing those words. Perhaps he will explain to you what they mean.”

  But the boy never heard the
chaplain sing that song. When the fall and winter came the war was still being fought in the north somewhere and there was famine in the village. Some of the old people died and the mournful cry “Aigo, aigo” was heard. The carpenter made their coffins and climbed about on the hills near the village measuring distances with his special instruments to determine the proper sites for their graves.

  There were many blizzards and fresh snow fell upon old snow and crippled the roads and made it difficult to climb the hills for brushwood. The wind blew without end from the north, freezing the snow to ice, and the ice turned black and lay thick on the fields and paddies and hung like glittering dark knives from the roofs.

  In the battalion the small dingily lit Jamesways on occasion reminded the boy of the cave in the valley. Sometimes alone in a Jamesway polishing an officer’s boots he would fall into a reverie and see his grandfather and mother and father and once he saw Badooki and so clearly heard his barking he called out to him to be still he would disturb the doctor sleeping in the nearby Jamesway who had been up through the night in the hospital. On occasion the teenage boy would appear and they would talk briefly, and the gifts of food the cook gave him kept the old man and the woman alive that winter: and I am very frightened, what if I am caught; and the power of the boy is very strong, see what he brings us from the foreigners; and the man treats him like a servant, but I see the man’s face I see his eyes I know that old man, he feels something for the boy.