It was in November of the previous year that Suni had left for Sŏjetkol to become the concubine of a former low-level official named Pak. And it was then that Sŏgi had taken to gazing from the paddy dike out to where the dusty road disappeared around a nearby hill. Suni had left in a sedan chair and someday, Sŏgi told himself, she would return in one.
But the new year arrived and January passed without Suni returning to pay respects to her family. Suni’s case was unusual: her role as a concubine was to care for a sick old man. Sŏgi guessed old Pak had taken a turn for the worse because of the cold weather, and this would have prevented Suni from returning.
Nor did Suni appear in early May for the Tano Festival. As in the old days, the villagers staged a wrestling competition and tied a triple-ply rope swing to the old weeping willow at the entrance to the village. But Suni, who should have been among the village maidens as they washed their hair with sweet flag and combed it, the scent of ch’ŏn’gungi all about them, was not to be seen. And so Sŏgi shut himself up at home.
The rope swing was taken down and several days passed. Sŏgi went out again to the dike. But on this particular day he wasn’t expecting Suni. Given her absence from the Tano Festival, he held no hope of her returning before the Yudu Festival in mid-June. All the same, Sŏgi gazed toward the nearby hill. His face was noticeably drawn.
For some time Sŏgi had been plagued by a disturbing dream: Suni had returned in a sedan chair. But unlike the chair that had taken her to Pak’s house, this one was white. This could only mean that old Pak had passed away. But Suni’s sedan chair stopped only a moment at her house, then returned to Sŏjetkol. She had to prepare for the traditional three-year mourning period, Sŏgi assumed. Or perhaps she had returned there to live out the rest of her days as a widow. Sŏgi found the latter thought intolerable, so off he went to Sŏjetkol, where he climbed the lofty wall of Pak’s house on a rope made of cotton cloth and stole away with Suni on his back. Sometimes the dream would continue with Suni obediently following Sŏgi. Other times Suni resisted, rolling on the floor, kicking and screaming. Usually he awakened at the point of jumping from Pak’s wall with Suni on his back.
Deep down inside, Sŏgi wished old Pak really were dead, and this realization brought with it a sense of shame. Why couldn’t he have contrived to prevent Suni from leaving in the first place? It disgusted Sŏgi to see himself in this light.
Suddenly a chilly breeze came up, raising dust devils on the dike. Dark rain clouds swept in over the ridge behind the village, and in no time everything was in shadow.
Sŏgi started down the dike, taking one last look toward the hill as he did so. There, what was that? Coming into sight was a sedan chair—there was no mistaking it. Even from this distance he could see it was the regular variety and not a white one.
A few heavy drops plopped on the ground and then rain was spattering all about. The sedan chair’s dark outline blended into the haze of the downpour. Sŏgi remained where he was, peering toward it.
Precisely three years earlier Sŏgi had been caught in a similar cloudburst on his way to the brook for a bath. He took shelter in the lookout shed in the melon patch worked by Suni’s family. There minding the shed was Suni. Upon Sŏgi’s arrival she stood and looked away. Sŏgi noticed the roundish profile of her chin and the flush beneath her ear. The oily stains near the breast ties of her thin summer jacket loomed prominent. She’s not a little girl anymore. Already for a year or two Suni had been avoiding his gaze if they happened to meet outside her house or at the village well. But not until the encounter in the shed did it occur to him with visceral certainty that she was no longer a girl. Adjusting her pigtail ribbon, she climbed down from the shed, shoved some ch’amoe melons and a sickle inside so he could eat, and set off toward the village—just like that. Sŏgi watched as she picked a large pumpkin leaf from the path and covered her head with it. But her clothes were sopping wet and they clung to her body, clearly revealing the undulations of her ample figure. Once again his own body reminded him of what he had just realized about Suni.
The mist of the downpour alternately veiled and revealed the sedan chair in its gradual advance. The vehicle passed the old weeping willow, then disappeared among the dwellings in the village.
Sŏgi had stood motionless the whole time, oblivious to the rainwater streaming down his spine and chest.
Old Pak’s family and Sŏgi’s family had long been on friendly terms. It so happened that the Pak family’s fields were located in the village where Sŏgi’s family lived. And during the harvest, or at any other time when the Paks found it necessary to come to the village, they always lodged with Sŏgi’s family. But Sŏgi himself had had no direct ties with Pak until he began to study under the old man.
Sŏgi’s paternal grandfather, Squire Hong, after some untoward incident in the capital, had exiled himself here to Umulkol in the Hadong countryside, to live out the rest of his days in utter seclusion from the outside world. He would take Sŏgi along when he went out to oversee the work in the fields, but otherwise he never ventured forth from his seat in the master’s room. Nor was he the sort of man to dwell on such matters as his son’s conduct and progress in the world. He seemed to want to make a farmer out of him.
But the son, Sŏgi’s father, had different ideas. While he respected his parents’ wishes and went quietly to seed here in the countryside, he wanted his own son to turn out more respectably. And so as soon as Squire Hong passed on, Sŏgi’s father saw to it that Sŏgi applied himself to studying. Always awaiting Sŏgi in the master’s room, where he studied, was a bundle of ash switches.
The year he turned fifteen, Sŏgi left home at his father’s bidding to study reading and writing under Pak. He shared a room with Pak’s son, his elder by a year, taking his meals and studying with him. Because of all the Chinese medicine the elder Pak had taken in his earlier years on account of his frail health, his hair had turned white even while his cheeks retained a rosy glow. Somehow Sŏgi found these features more intimidating than his father’s rebukes or the ash switches.
The incident at the lookout shed had occurred after Sŏgi returned home from his three years of study under old Pak. During that period Suni had become a young woman inside and out.
Sŏgi recalled the times his father had caught him playing with Suni as a youngster, occasions that might result in a whipping. To fuel the boy’s enthusiasm for learning, his father liked to offer Sŏgi various goodies after he had finished his studies for the day. Sŏgi had taken the chestnuts, the Chinese dates, the persimmons, and other edibles to share with Suni, and had been discovered by his father. This encounter with the offspring of such a lowly family had earned Sŏgi a lashing across the calves. But now, this was merely an insubstantial memory from his childhood.
After the encounter at the lookout shed Sŏgi had begun to regard Suni with new interest. During the Tano Festival it was Suni more than the other girls who seemed to produce the fragrant scent of sweet flag and ch’ŏn’gungi. The night of the Harvest Moon Festival she looked ever so comely, wheeling about under the moonlight in the circle dance. It was inevitable: Sŏgi waited for Suni and took her by the wrist as she was walking home. Her hand trembled ever so faintly. Sŏgi felt the warmth of her blood. He began to lead her away. For a moment she seemed poised to resist, but then she followed without a word. They arrived, breathless, at the oak grove on the ridge behind the village. The brilliant moonlight was no longer welcome. They searched for a place that was shadier still.
The previous spring, old Pak’s son had visited. While he and Sŏgi were out for a stroll among the dry fields, they saw Suni approaching, a round wicker lunch basket balanced on her head. She made way for them by stepping down into a furrow. Pak’s son wondered which family she came from. She wasn’t strikingly beautiful, he remarked, but he liked her lovely eyes and the clean profile of her ears. She seemed to have eyes for Sŏgi—was it true? Sŏgi had better be careful: her fleshy lower lip suggested that once she had begun to think about someone she wouldn’t give up easily.
Sŏgi smiled. “Since when have you been a face reader?”
Pak’s son took a quick glance at him. “Well now—you’re just as interested in her, aren’t you?” he said with a laugh.
“Don’t be silly,” Sŏgi had responded. But his face had flushed and he had quickly turned away.
Around the time when the ears of barley were ripening to a golden yellow, news arrived that the elder Pak had taken ill. Sŏgi’s father paid a visit and returned to report that the old man’s chronic backache, dating from a bout of palsy in his youth, had flared up. Day and night the family were taking turns massaging his back.
A few days later Sŏgi was asked by his father to look in on the sick man. It would have been unthinkable to refuse. Confucian precepts required a person to treat king, master, and father as one, and Sŏgi was as indebted to old Pak for his favor as he was to his own father. So he went. He discovered that Pak’s face was pale, lacking its attractive flush.
That fall, around the time the Chinese parasol tree outside Sŏgi’s father’s room shed its leaves, there was a further report on Pak’s condition. The old man’s back was no longer a problem; instead he had lost all movement from the waist down. Sŏgi called again and found that there was a complication: Pak had trouble keeping warm from the waist down. The old man’s complexion had turned sallow; his white hair, once so shiny, was a dull ashen color; blotches had appeared around his hollow eyes.
A well-known doctor offered a remedy: the patient had to be warmed from the waist down, and this was best done with the body heat of a young woman. Pak’s family decided to try this approach, and the woman they chose was Suni.
Suni’s family had always sharecropped Pak’s land, and so in return for their daughter’s service they received an acre of paddy. And it was decided that when Pak died, Suni would be given land of her own so that she could live out the remainder of her life in dignity.
And so it was that on a frosty morning in November, Suni climbed into the sedan chair and left for Sŏjetkol. Two nights previous, Sŏgi had instructed her younger brother Kwidong to have her meet him in the oak grove up on the ridge. When she arrived, all she did was weep. What was to be done? Sŏgi wondered. He couldn’t very well interfere if Suni was being asked to tend to a sick man.
But as the days passed, Sŏgi began to suffer. Never before had he felt compelled to see Suni’s face every day, and now that they were apart he yearned for her. He could have gone to Sŏjetkol, some four miles away; he could have gone two or three times a day. But he never did, not once. For there he would encounter the forbidding gaze of Pak’s son, even if he pretended to be visiting the sick father. More intimidating still was the prospect of the awkward behavior he would most certainly display in Suni’s presence. In this troubled state Sŏgi awaited the day when Suni would return.
His father urged him to take the state civil-service examination in two or three years’ time. Sŏgi stayed up late, his books in front of him, but all his eyes did was search for some distant place. And when he went to bed the dizzying dream would return. Sŏgi realized for the first time that he would never again encounter a woman as precious to him as Suni.
This was Sŏgi’s state of mind when he witnessed Suni’s return.
Suni spent the night with her family, and the next day, shortly before lunchtime, she visited Sŏgi’s family.
“Well, look who’s here? I heard you were back, and I thought of visiting you myself. Please, make yourself at home.”
Sŏgi, studying in the master’s room, detected the note of delight in his mother’s voice. He had reckoned that Suni would come calling that day. But it wouldn’t be seemly to leave his room just then for the person he so longed to see.
Again he heard his mother’s voice: “How is the old gentleman these days?”
“About the same,” came Suni’s soft voice.
“I guess it’s not an overnight kind of malady, is it? I don’t envy you. Your face shows the strain.”
Suni remained silent.
“When must you go back?”
“Tomorrow. If I’m away even a day. . . .”
“Of course. It’s not like other maladies.”
Sŏgi heard a rustling from the other room; it sounded as if Suni was getting up.
“I’ll say good-bye now in case I don’t see you tomorrow.”
His mother urged her to stay for lunch, but Suni felt obligated to return home.
That evening Sŏgi cautiously sought out his mother in her room.
“Mother, could you give me some money?”
The abrupt request puzzled her.
“I’d like to take a trip—could you spare some money?”
“Where to?”
“I thought I’d stop by Grandpa and Grandma’s. . . .”
Sŏgi was referring to his mother’s parents, who lived in the city of Chinju.
“What do you need money for, then?”
“I thought I’d head for Seoul afterward. I need a change.”
Sŏgi’s mother took a closer look at her son. His oval-shaped face had always been attractive, but now his cheeks were hollow, making his eyes seem larger.
“You haven’t said anything, but I’ve been wondering if something’s wrong with you.”
He was fine, Sŏgi replied.
The boy’s studies must be wearing him down. Perhaps this would be a good time to let him go off on his own for a change. But the decision was not hers alone to make.
“Have you talked with your father?”
“I just told him I’d be visiting Grandpa and Grandma.”
If her husband had given Sŏgi permission to visit his grandparents, then there shouldn’t be a problem sending him off to Seoul on his own afterward.
“When were you planning to leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“And when will you return?”
“First I’ll go and see what it’s like, and then maybe I’ll stay for a while.”
His mother fished out the money bag she kept hidden deep in the wardrobe and gave him fifty silver pieces and fifteen brass coins to live on. And so he wouldn’t have to hoard this money, she made him take some of her wedding jewelry as well.
* * *
That night Sŏgi arranged through Kwidong for Suni to meet him at the oak grove. He had been absorbed in thought the entire day. He was prepared, if Suni did not appear, to hide the next day where the road to Sŏjetkol left the village, and take things into his own hands.
The night was far along when Suni finally arrived. Her only thought was to see Sŏgi and cry her heart out.
The outstretched hand that took her wrist was strong and reassuring. Before she could burst into tears, he led her off through the oak grove. They came out where a road crested on a height of land. What Suni saw now in the light of the moon frightened her: Sŏgi was dressed for a long journey.
From the pass they could go in one of two directions: northeast past Sŏjetkol to Samch’ŏnp’o, more than twenty miles away, or southwest seven or eight miles to Hadong. The road was a rugged backcountry track that was some distance from the main summit of the Chiri Mountain massif.
Sŏgi chose the road to Hadong. The moon had a bluish tinge. Almost full, it inched its way toward the horizon. Suni was all giddy with anxiety. Now she would have to follow Sŏgi wherever; now they would be pursued.
Startled birds took wing from the woods beside the road. Almost without realizing it, Suni wasn’t holding Sŏgi’s hand anymore. The flapping wings of the birds and the bluish tinge to the moon no longer frightened her.
Before sunrise they were within sight of Hadong, and there they set about changing their appearance. Sŏgi loosened the pigtail that marked him as an unmarried man and made it into a topknot, then donned the traditional man’s overcoat he had been carrying. Suni combed and redid her hair and tidied her clothing.
They lodged for several days at a peddlers’ inn, and with the help of the proprietor were able to find a place of their own to live.
For work they decided to try fishmongering. Inexperienced as they were, they were constantly cheated, but miraculously they found at the end of each month that their losses were minimal. This was almost more than they could have hoped for.
Winter passed and the ground began to thaw. One day Sŏgi returned home to find Suni’s face filled with anxiety. After a moment’s hesitation she sat down beside him and said she had noticed a young man staring at her as she was doing laundry at the village well. Certain she had seen the man before, she grew apprehensive and rushed to finish the laundry before returning home. She sensed the man had followed her.
Around sunset four days later they had a visitor. Suni opened the door a crack and started. It was the same man.
Sŏgi went outside. He recognized the young man as a distant cousin of Pak’s.
The young man asked Sŏgi to follow him and Sŏgi felt compelled to do so. He had secretly dreaded this day, which he had known was inevitable.
After walking some distance they arrived at a path running through a paddy. Awaiting him there were several young men from Pak’s extended family, among them his son.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” said Pak’s son. He was dressed in mourning. “And then a few days ago my cousin had some business here and he discovered you. Once I knew where you were, I had to do something.”
His tone was polite, but without the feeling of intimacy that had characterized their conversations when they were friends.
“You knew my father didn’t take that woman as an ordinary concubine. He didn’t use her for his pleasure; he needed her because he was sick. What you did was no different from stealing a sick man’s medication.”
Sŏgi’s gaze was drawn once again to the son’s mourning outfit. Pak must have passed away. This bothered Sŏgi, but he realized he couldn’t undo what he had done.
The other young men began to clamor for revenge:
“Rip his head off!”
“Break the bastard’s legs!”
“I understand how you must have felt. But for human beings there is such a thing as duty. That woman came to our house as my father’s concubine, and no matter what anyone says, she was his woman. And doesn’t that make her my stepmother? What you did was wrong. You disgraced your teacher’s wife and your friend’s mother—that’s what it amounts to.”
The young men showered Sŏgi with more curses.
Pak’s son continued:
“I wanted to put the whole affair behind me and never see you again. That way I could prevent rumors from spreading and avoid soiling our families’ reputations. But when I found you were here, my duty as a son forced me to act. I think you can understand.”
The young men swarmed closer and heaped more abuse on Sŏgi.
“Off with his topknot!”
“Cut off his nose!”
Sŏgi tried to brace himself for what would happen next. Following Pak’s cousin to the paddy, Sŏgi had resigned himself to the prospect of physical attack. But he had never anticipated the horror of having his nose cut off. He had to get away. But the next moment he realized it would be useless. These vengeful young men would spare no effort to track him down, and when they found him, Suni would suffer as well.
Before Sŏgi could think of an alternative, Pak’s son spoke again:
“Cutting off your topknot accomplishes nothing—it would only grow back. And a man has only one nose, so that won’t do either. Instead I’m going to cut off one of your ears. From the time you were a boy, my father tried to drive home to you the Confucian moral precepts, but apparently they didn’t sink in. Since your ears seem to serve no useful purpose, I’ll take one of them off.”
So saying, Pak’s son produced a knife from his waistband.
Sŏgi recoiled, but the young men closed in and held him fast. Resistance would just make things worse. Better to let them have their satisfaction. He closed his eyes.
Off came Sŏgi’s right ear. Pak’s son tossed it into the paddy.
“This is the end. There’s no reason for you to see me, and I’m of no mind to see you ever again. One last thing: you’re a burden to me, staying in this area. I want you out of here. Go someplace where I don’t have to hear about you anymore.”
Sŏgi had already decided he could stay no longer in Hadong.
Sŏgi spent a sleepless night. Quite apart from the burning pain where his ear had been, the question of where he and Suni would go next kept him awake. Around daybreak he finally dropped off to sleep, but he was soon awakened by the sound of a door opening and shutting. Suni, who should have been beside him, was gone. But it was too early for her to have been preparing breakfast.
Sŏgi opened the small door that led down to the kitchen. Suni’s white form drifted into view in a dark corner.
Sŏgi hurried down in time to see a porcelain bowl fall from Suni’s hand. He heard it shatter.
“What are you doing?”
Suni heaved a great shudder, unable to answer.
Sŏgi stooped and located a piece of the bowl. It was coated with a sleek liquid, which he rubbed between thumb and fingertips—lye.
“You little fool!” He angrily shoved Suni away from the shattered bowl. “What the hell are you doing?”
Suni collapsed in a heap. Her shuddering seemed to concentrate in her back, which began to heave rhythmically as she broke into tears.
“It’s all because of me,” she sobbed. “Why don’t you go back home today?”
“Don’t be silly! If you don’t like this life we’re living, then you should go someplace where you’ll be comfortable.”
All Suni could do was cry.
“What are you crying for? Don’t you like that idea? If we sell everything we have we could raise fifty nyang—that’s enough for you to go and live wherever you want.”
Suni quickly crawled to Sŏgi and embraced his legs. “No, I’m not going anywhere.” She rubbed her tear-streaked face against his knees.
From Hadong Sŏgi and Suni moved to Yangjitkol, a cozy little village a few miles southwest of the town of Sach’ŏn. There they bought an acre of paddy and an ox.
Nearby lived a poor farmer whom everyone called Went-and-Did-It-Again for his numerous offspring. Sŏgi allowed him to use the ox for his own paddy in return for plowing theirs and doing manual labor for them.
Naturally Went-and-Did-It-Again was surprised to see that Sŏgi was missing an ear. But then he noticed Sŏgi’s hands.
“Will you look at those nice white hands—I’ll bet they’ve never done a day of farmer’s work!” he said, his mouth dropping open in amazement to reveal a set of longish teeth.
Automatically Sŏgi stuck his hands inside his waistband.
When it came to putting in a day’s work, Suni held her own. And she was always welcome when the neighboring farmers needed temporary help. But Sŏgi stayed at home, concentrating on their own paddy. An able-bodied boy could have outworked him. At weeding time Sŏgi could initially do half a row to everyone else’s full row, but later in the day he could barely finish that half row while others did three or four rows. The work was too taxing, and Sŏgi began to moan in his sleep.
Suni couldn’t bear to see him like this.
“Why don’t you stay home and look after the ox or something?”
Sŏgi would hear nothing of it.
“What! Do you think I’m a boy? That’s a job for children and old men.”
Next it was heat prostration, which kept Sŏgi in bed several days with the flu. Afterward Sŏgi noticed his sunburned skin flaking off.
“Goodness,” he said as he worked at the skin peeling from his shoulders, “I’m like a little boy. Well, a crab has to molt in order to grow. Maybe it’s the same with me.”
Suni didn’t have the heart to laugh at this jest.
By the time they finished threshing the grain from the autumn harvest, Sŏgi’s pale forehead had taken on a coppery hue and his soft palms had callused.
Sŏgi and Went-and-Did-It-Again loaded the ox with grain and set out for the market in Sach’ŏn.
The other man noticed Sŏgi’s roughened hands. “They aren’t nice and soft anymore. Too bad. They were so white, just like powder.”
But Sŏgi felt thankful that he didn’t have to hide them anymore.
Went-and-Did-It-Again produced a short pipe from the back of his waistband, filled it with leaf tobacco, and lit up.
“A farmer’s hands are like the hooves on that old ox. When we get real busy, the nails wear down and don’t have time to grow. I think we ought to have some kind of covering for our hands, like the shoes on that old fellow.”
Sŏgi produced his own pipe. He had started smoking not long before. But he still handled the pipe clumsily, the strong leaf tobacco made him cough, and he couldn’t inhale the way other men did.
“You know, I just can’t figure you as a farmer. Whatever made you want to do it?” Went-and-Did-It-Again had long been wondering about this.
“Can you really draw a line between people who are cut out to farm and people who aren’t?”
“Sure, why not? Seems to me some folks are born to be farmers.” Went-and-Did-It-Again inhaled deeply on his pipe.
“Well, we’ve been farmers since my grandfather’s day,” Sŏgi said as he watched the smoke exhaled by the other man.
In a certain sense Sŏgi believed this. He remembered his grandfather acting just like a real farmer as he went about supervising the farm work with Sŏgi in tow.
And after three years of farming, Sŏgi looked and acted like a farmer.
It was winter—a time of respite from the busy farm work. One evening after dinner had been cleared, Sŏgi said to Suni, “Look at my fingernails. When I see them growing like this, it gives me the itch to work.”
By now, Suni could smile at the sight of Sŏgi’s toughened hands. And sometimes he unwittingly brought her to laughter. It had all started one day when Suni happened to watch him handling his pipe. Producing the pipe from the back of his waistband, filling it with leaf tobacco, lighting it with the flint—in each of these actions he was the very image of Went-and-Did-It-Again. Sensing the reason for her laughter, Sŏgi had turned to Suni and showed off by puffing away more deeply. Such was the life they had settled into as the years slipped past.
In their fourth spring of farming, a baby boy was born to them.
That autumn, as in previous years, Sŏgi loaded the ox with grain and set out for the Sach’ŏn market with Went-and-Did-It-Again.
Sŏgi had negotiated a price for his grain and was about to leave when a man approached him and bowed deeply. Sŏgi recognized the man as an elderly servant of his parents.
“Young master. . . . Goodness, what’s happened to you?”
The man tearfully related to Sŏgi that he had come looking for him at Sach’ŏn the previous market day, five days earlier, after learning that a man resembling Sŏgi had been seen there. He then confessed he hadn’t recognized him at first—the young master had changed so much! Finally he explained the purpose of his visit: Madam was critically ill; they should leave for home at once.
Sŏgi entrusted Went-and-Did-It-Again with the ox and set out immediately with the servant.
Along the way Sŏgi asked when his mother had fallen ill. It was not so long ago, he was told, but for two or three years prior to that she hadn’t been eating properly. It occurred to Sŏgi that he might have been the cause of her illness. But what could he have done differently?
They made the trip quickly, arriving just before dusk at the hill in front of the village.
Here the servant asked Sŏgi to wait, saying he would return shortly. With no further explanation he disappeared down the hill.
Sŏgi began to understand. It probably wasn’t his father but his mother who had sent for him. And now the servant would be telling Sŏgi’s mother that her son had arrived, and would await further instructions.
Sŏgi noticed that his family’s chimney was the only one producing smoke; the other families must have finished supper. Even from that distance he could see figures moving between the women’s quarters and the master’s quarters. It appeared that his mother’s illness was indeed critical.
In the evening shadows Sŏgi could see ripe red persimmons among the bare branches of the Chinese parasol in front of the gate to the master’s quarters. He recalled from his youth the familiar sound of his grandfather coughing as he tapped the ashes from the bowl of his long pipe—and the voice of his mother calling him too softly for others to hear.
There had been an evening—was it spring? autumn? He remembered only that the mornings and evenings had been chilly then. Once again he had been whipped by his father for playing with Suni. He went behind the chimney in back of the house to cry. He had no idea how long he remained huddled there. He felt as if he were melting in the heat from the chimney and began to nod off. Then he felt his nose tingle in the chill air and woke to realize that the fire had been lit for supper. He rose and discovered something flickering in front of him. A tiny spider was descending on the thread of a web it was weaving. And he heard his mother call him softly from the front yard. Sŏgi gazed at the flickering spider web, not answering. It felt good just to stand there listening to his mother’s voice.
All he could think of now was that his mother was calling him from her sickbed. He shouldn’t be waiting here. He kept rising only to squat down again, paralyzed by anxiety.
The servant returned, his face streaked with tears.
“We’re too late. Madam has . . .”
“Has what?”
“Madam passed on early this afternoon.”
It had all happened so quickly. Sŏgi was too stunned to cry.
The servant for his part began weeping again.
“I asked the master if you could—”
“I know, I know!”
Sŏgi realized his father was loath to allow the sinful son to see his departed mother. It was just as well, he thought. After all, he hadn’t returned to see her while she was alive.
“Since you’ve come all this way, shouldn’t you get a good night’s sleep here?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Sŏgi turned and set off. The servant followed. “You can go back now,” said Sŏgi. And then something occurred to him. “How is Suni’s family?”
“They’re all right. They returned the land they received from the senior Pak, and now that Kwidong can do a man’s work he’s taking care of the farming.”
The servant continued to follow.
Sŏgi stopped. “You’re holding me up—I want you to go back.”
The man reluctantly stopped. “It’s not easy for me to say this,” he said hesitantly, “but the master asked me to tell you—he doesn’t want you in the Sach’ŏn area any longer.”
“I understand,” said Sŏgi, his voice trembling.
“I just don’t know what to think about all of this.”
“Don’t worry. Now off with you.”
Finally Sŏgi was alone on the darkening mountain road. His legs were unsteady and he plopped down, feeling as if the grief he had suppressed was about to explode. But the tears never came.
Sŏgi and Suni decided to move to the foothills of Chiri Mountain. They loaded their ox with seed, staples, and farm tools and departed.
Went-and-Did-It-Again was at a loss. Four years earlier this fellow had drifted in, the most unlikely looking farmer you could imagine, and now he was disappearing elsewhere just as winter was approaching and, what was more, leaving him all his paddy land. How to explain it?
Sŏgi would tell no one where they were going, not even this man to whom he had drawn close over the past four years.
The day Sŏgi and Suni arrived at Chiri Mountain they began felling trees, and eventually they were able to build a hut. Nearby they found a rocky slope, an area suitable for fire-field farming, and burned it. After clearing the stumps and rocks, they planted barley. In all of this they put to use their four years of farming experience.
Night and day they saw the ridges of Chiri Mountain, heard the mountain freshets, the wind, and the calls of bird and beast. And sometimes when they least expected it they would hear the patter of centipedes as long as your hand is wide, crawling along the walls of their hut.
They picked mushrooms and gathered acorns. There was the occasional visitor foraging for medicinal herbs, and they were all too happy to put aside their work and keep company with this person for the rest of the day.
Winter arrived and the herb pickers stopped coming. During the long, long nights the wind and the cries of the animals sounded all the more fierce.
The following spring, when the nights were still frosty, they sowed the unplanted areas of the rocky slope with cold-resistant crops such as potatoes, corn, and millet.
The supplies they had brought with them and the acorns gathered the previous fall sustained them until they harvested the barley, which they had husbanded with care. To supplement these foods there were pine trees whose edible inner bark they could peel, and an abundant supply of mountain greens such as bracken fern, bellflower root, aralia shoots, tŏdŏk, and aster shoots.
They managed to obtain fabric for clothing and condiments for their food. Before the arrival of the herb pickers early in the spring they picked their own herbs, then bartered them for such commodities as salt and cotton cloth.
The first ripe ears of barley were small, but when they clipped them and rubbed away the husks, they saw that the kernels had filled out nicely.
They sat down to their first meal of cooked barley. Before they ate, Sŏgi offered a spoonful to their little one, who was old enough now to be reaching for food.
“We’ll have to plant a lot more barley this fall.”
“Where will we ever find the time and the energy?”
“If we put our minds to it, why not? That little fellow comes first. We’ll just have to work more land.”
Sŏgi looked down at the baby trying to mash the barley in its mouth. A smile lingered on his face for the first time in a long while.
“I suppose you’re right,” said Suni. With a beaming smile, she pretended to give their son a playful pinch on the cheek.
The potatoes, corn, and millet were small as well, but they were plentiful enough.
And now it was Suni saying, “Next year we’ll have to plant more corn and potatoes.”
One day Sŏgi went far up one of the valleys and returned with his narrow-mouthed basket full of wild grapes.
“Look at the little bugger’s eyes—just like these grapes,” Sŏgi said as the three of them ate. He held one of the grapes next to the baby’s eye for comparison. “What do you think?”
“His eyes look like those grapes? Darling, really! It’s the grapes that resemble his eyes.”
They both laughed.
And so the little one came to be called Grape Eyes.
The sound of the wind and the animals’ cries no longer bothered them. Nor did the long centipedes seem as frightening.
That fall they burned a different patch on which to grow more barley. And the following spring they planted even more potatoes, corn, and millet.
Summer arrived and floss appeared on the ears of corn. One day around sunset Sŏgi was resting in the hut while Suni gathered water at the spring below. Suddenly, a scream from Suni rent the air. Sŏgi ran outside barefoot. Suni was beside the spring, clutching silently at the air in the direction of a large wolf as it disappeared into a thicket some distance away. In its mouth was the baby. With a sickening feeling, Sŏgi grabbed an ax and set off after the animal.
Sŏgi could see the wolf loping away in the distance, but he couldn’t gain on it. He shouted and shouted, his cries bringing echoes from all over the mountain. The wolf’s only reaction was to look back; it gave no indication of releasing its prey.
Time ceased to exist for Sŏgi. It was dark before he knew it, and he lost sight of the wolf. As he thrashed through the woods, his fiery gaze met the gleaming eyes of animals. Sŏgi charged at those eyes, flailed at them with his ax. But instead of the wolf his ax found a tree trunk or glanced off a rock with a shower of sparks.
And then there there were no more gleaming eyes to be seen. The short summer night had given way to dawn.
Face, arms, shins, the soles of his feet—Sŏgi was everywhere sweaty and bloody. He returned to find Suni in a state of shock, still huddled beside the spring.
Suni never returned to that spring. The sound of the wind, which had become a regular presence in their lives, now threw her into a fright. When the wolves howled she blocked her ears—she said it was their baby crying—and quivered like the leaves of an aspen. Sŏgi would take the ax and run off into the woods like a man distracted.
The two of them seemed suddenly to have aged. The wrinkles in their faces deepened; flecks of white appeared in their hair.
They could no longer bear to stay in the hills, so they left for the coast.
Along the way, at Tansŏnggol, they sold the ox.
“Beast looks ready for the glue factory,” said the broker. He opened the animal’s mouth. “Only eight years old, and it’s a bag of bones!”
In truth, the animal, like its master, was suddenly old and bony.
They agreed to the broker’s price and continued on to Samch’ŏnp’o. There they boarded a ferry for T’ongyŏng.
They had no special reason for choosing T’ongyŏng—except that Sŏgi recalled how much Suni liked the taste of abalone, scabbard fish, and such when they had lived in Hadong. So why not give coastal life another try? For a seaside town Samch’ŏnp’o would have sufficed, but they wanted to go farther so as to avoid, as much as possible, attracting the attention of anyone they might know.
The ferry to T’ongyŏng was a sailing vessel of modest size. There were only half a dozen other passengers.
The ferry put out to sea and the boatman, after trimming the sail, began striking up conversations with the passengers.
“Where you from, uncle?” he asked Sŏgi in an amiable tone.
The “uncle” took Sŏgi by surprise. The boatman seemed no more than thirty, and therefore close to Sŏgi in age.
“Up in the hills,” he answered reluctantly.
“And you’re on the move, eh? You must have had a rough go of it there,” the boatman said, inspecting Sŏgi, who was all too conscious of his missing ear and his generally wretched appearance. “You have some connection in T’ongyŏng?”
Sŏgi stared at the water ahead, his silence telling the boatman that there was no one there to welcome him and Suni.
“No matter what they say, for a farmer, farming is the thing. From the time I was a boy my father used to tell me, ‘Son, pine-eating caterpillars don’t eat oak leaves, and sea gulls can’t live on the mainland.’ And that’s why he told me not to worry as long as I took good care of this here boat and made a living from it.”
The ferry arrived, and Sŏgi and Suni found lodging near the dock in a locality called Haep’yŏng.
Sŏgi brought home the seafoods that Suni enjoyed so much, but mostly the two of them kept to themselves.
When they had exhausted most of their money, Sŏgi took to the shore and helped with hauling in the communal fishing nets. In return he received a share of the catch.
Eventually most of their jewelry was sold. Finally Sŏgi was at his wits’ end and decided to ship out on a fishing boat.
The day before he left, Suni sold the sole remaining item of jewelry Sŏgi’s mother had given him—a silver ring. With the proceeds she bought Sŏgi a pipe and tobacco. For lack of tobacco, Sŏgi had given up smoking during their time in the hills.
The day that the boat was scheduled to return came and went. Two more days passed and still the boat did not appear. This was very strange, for there had been no sign of rough seas.
The families of the fishermen kept a daily vigil at the dock, but Suni remained long after the others had left, watching Mirŭk Island, across from the dock. Its outline seemed to grow ever more somber.
On the third day after the boat’s scheduled return one of the crewmen appeared. The boat had run into thick fog and broken up on a reef, the young man reported. By a stroke of luck he had grabbed one of the timbers and a passing boat had rescued him.
The wails of family members enveloped the dock. But no tears flowed from Suni’s eyes.
The following day the family members went out to sea with the young fisherman. They had given up on finding survivors but held out hopes of retrieving the bodies. Suni joined the others. In the course of those several days her hair had turned noticeably grayer.
They located the reef but found no trace of the boat, nor the bodies.
There was nothing to do but return. But as the boat turned back toward land there was a splash. Suni had jumped overboard. Her body was never recovered.
Something occurred to the young fisherman: “I couldn’t figure out what made her husband tick, either. He kept saying his tobacco tasted different than it did on shore—asked how long it took for tobacco to taste the way it ought to when you shipped out. And he kept saying he wanted a couple of live cod to take home.”
To the left of the path that ascends Mirŭk Island, across from Haep’yŏng Dock in T’ongyŏng, there sits a small, round, moss-covered gravestone that reads, IN MEMORY OF THE VIRTUOUS WIFE OF HAEP’YONG. The simple story of that woman and her husband can be heard even today from the people of T’ongyŏng: many years ago, a man and a woman drifted into town and settled near Haep’yong Dock. They kept to themselves, and no one seemed to know their family names or their ages. They had an unusually harmonious relationship. And then one day the husband, to provide for them, went out to sea on a fishing boat and the vessel broke up. Learning of this, the wife located the place where her husband had been lost and threw herself into the water. The following day a passing boat discovered two bodies floating on the surface. The corpse of the wife was embracing that of the husband.
November 1955