I Am the Clay Read Free

The fields and paddies came to an end. Houses now along both sides of the road. The road littered with downed power lines and the scattered debris of broken walls.
    The woman had never been to Seoul and she looked around with astonishment at the wide paved streets and the tall stone buildings. The old man had been there once before, when he had inherited the parcels of land upon the death of his father and for some reason the local town administrator sent him to Seoul and he took his papers to the office of a sneering official in a black Western suit, slicked-down hair, and pointed black shoes, who kept him waiting outside his office door for days until he realized that more money than usual would need to be exchanged for the favor of his attention. Arrogant, scornful man. Leech.
    He noticed there were fewer foot soldiers and vehicles now on the main road. Damp with sweat beneath his wadded blue coat. Hands and shoulders and back trembling and aching with fatigue. Blood beating in his neck and head.
    Some of the refugees were moving off the main road, vanishing into the side streets.
    He heard the voice of his wife and turned to her and saw she was talking to a young woman who stood in the open doorway of a house with shattered windows and broken walls. The young woman was pointing up the road. She asked where they were from and the old woman said a village above Dongduchon. The young woman said her parents, two uncles, and grandmother lived in Dongduchon, were the Chinese anywhere near there, and the old woman said one of the sons of their village carpenter had seen Chinese soldiers in the hills just north of the village. The young woman put her hands to her mouth and hurried into the house.
    The old woman turned to her husband. “We will go to the river.”
    “What is on the river?”
    “Perhaps a doctor for the boy.”
    The old man looked at the boy. He lay very still beneath the quilts she had heaped on him. Cold snow, warm quilts. Where had she learned such things? Stubborn, crazy old woman. Even in old age she surprised him.
    He took up the shafts of the cart and walked, following a line of refugees through the rubble of the main road. A grimy-faced little girl squatted alone on a pile of rubble, crying. He turned to his wife, warning her with a fierce look to leave the girl alone. Here and there bodies lay along the sides of the road. Dark and fetid odors in the air: torn earth, wrecked houses, broken sewage lines, rotting flesh. Starved dogs roamed about and he thought he might catch one but he had little strength for a chase after this day of pulling the cart.
    Some time later he saw through the winter twilight the dull sheen of the frozen river.

    The riverbank, its mudflat skin frozen to tundra ice, slanted down in a wide brownish scraggly slope from the shell-pocked stone houses along its upper edge. A silent horde squatted upon its surface inside thrown-together shanties and near discarded oil drums in which burned scavenged wood. The flames fed upon the air through holes poked into the drums and roaredupward into the darkness, casting lurid reddish dancing patterns upon the frozen surface of the river.
    Beyond the opposite bank of the river was an airfield. Huge aircraft rose and landed, wing flaps extended and wheels down, like giant herons, flying directly over the old man and his wife and the boy. Earth and air trembled at the roar of their engines. Spears of light on their wings pierced the darkness.
    Squatting near a blazing oil drum while the woman cooked their rice, the old man gazed at the aircraft and the burning oil drums along both riverbanks and the play of light and shadow on the river, and a memory of childhood returned to him: living men suspended head-down from chains over open firepits. A nightmare from the time when the Japanese governed the land and stories were told of their cruelties to those who resisted their rule. The flaming wood crackled, showering forth a spray of sparks. He felt on