I Am the Clay Read Free Page B

again in my arms. Now the old one will be angry. How he wishes him gone! Memories of the little one dead. Like this one: light and limp and burning. Breath gone? Ear to mouth. Not yet. Be careful—slippery. The shack, where? Ah. He waits on the edge, his belly empty. Angry, yes. Hold him, cover his face. This is not the jacket of a boy who works with a plow. Silk. Special buttons. Amber? Needlewoman. A mother? A grandmother? A yang-ban child? Demon dragon, away! Seek someone else on this frozen riverbank. One is enough. The old one wants his food. What to feed the boy? A soup of rice and the savor of a fishtail.
Arirang, Arirang, O Arirang, The pass is narrow.
…
    The old man watched as she placed the boy on the pads and quilts and gently covered him.
    He asked, “What did they say?”
    “The army doctor would not see him.”
    “So,” he said after a moment. “Why were you so long, woman?”
    “When he said it, I removed the bandage from the boy and with my fingers pulled the splinter from his chest.”
    The old man stared at her.
    “I did not know the boy had so much blood left in him.”
    He shuddered with fear and anger. The demons of madness have claimed her. The boy is a curse.
    “They took him inside and I waited until they brought him out.”
    “Who brought him out?”
    “A doctor.”
    “The doctor who would not tend to him?”
    “He was angry.”
    The old man was silent a moment. “Will the boy live?”
    “The doctor said he will die. But there was another there who said if he does not die it will be because of the white powder the ambulance driver gave me.”
    Then she had set about making their food.
    Now she was feeding the boy soup made of melted snow and cooked rice and bits of fish. He was barely conscious and would not eat, but she crooned to him a song from her childhood and he ate and vomited and she cleaned him and fed him again and covered him and took up her own food and squatted by the fire, eating.
    Somewhere in the fire-tinted darkness of the riverbank two men raised their voices in anger. A woman screamed. Food stolen? A fight for space?
    Their supply of wood was gone. The man edged closer to the fire. He felt the warmth and emptied his mind of all thought of the woman and the boy.
    The sky was black and icy with a wash of brilliant stars. Here and there along the riverbank the oil-drum fires began to die. The woman went into the shack and lay down in her clothes beside the boy beneath the quilts and the old man entered a moment later, bending down and sliding between the quilts. The boy lay between him and the woman.
    The old man thought: The demons of the night will soon be walking on this riverbank. One will take the boy.
    The boy lay shivering with fever. The woman sang to him softly:
    Arirang, Arirang, O Arirang,
The times in which we live are most trying,
To this thousand miles of river and mountains
May peace and prosperity come.
    The old man fell asleep.
    Once in the night he dreamed the woman had given the boy her breast to suckle. He woke with the quilts over his head. The woman and the boy lay silent. The air beneath the quilts was warm with the heat of the boy’s fever. The old man went back to sleep.
    In the morning he woke and came out of the shack and saw that some on the riverbank had frozen to death during the night. But the boy was still alive.

    The woman remained with the boy while the old man went foraging for wood. The streets near the river seemed to have been picked clean and the old man wandered deep into the city. Dark-garbed scavenging shapes flitted through the rubble. Men and women wandering about dazed. Narrow side streets thick with refugees. Main roads noisy with military traffic. Was that the thunder of big guns? So close to the city? Only scraps and branches gathered so far and loaded upon the A-frame on his back. Not yet enough for a day and night of fire. If one could burn mud and stone. Perhaps break into a house? Police everywhere. Merciless.