Silver Stallion Page 7

  “So you’ve heard about it, too,” said the miller’s wife.

  “You mean you already know about the incident at the Chestnut House?”

  The two women exchanged various details about the incident, throwing in the phrase “that poor woman” and sighing regularly in their conversation which fed on boundless curiosity and sentimental sympathy in equal proportion. Soon they realized that certain minor details or interpretations differed a little, for the stories had started to change as they traveled from one mouth to another. Kangho’s mother insisted that Chandol’s mother had crossed the stream at a dark spot some distance up from the log bridge, wading in cold water mounting to her waist and pushing through the billowing branches of willows. According to the miller’s wife, Chandol’s mother had soundlessly stolen to the fence behind the Chestnut House, sneaked into the back yard, and saw as well as heard everything happening in Ollye’s room. Kangho’s mother was especially well informed about some important facts such as how the bengko who was black as a crow strangled Fluffy to death in two breaths or how desperately Mansik’s mother, kicking like a mare, struggled, naked, against the giant soldier mounting her.

  Later when Choe’s wife, on her way back home with the hot pepper powder, came upon the widow from Inner Kumsan on the road to the ferry, she told the wobbling old woman not the account she had heard from her husband, but the more vivid and entertaining version as embellished by the miller’s wife. New imaginary episodes developed bit by bit until they became a part of the narrative. The story passed from the hawk-nosed rice bag weaver to an old farmer from Outer Kumsan who spit a gob of yellow phlegm every ten steps, from a sharecropper who kept raking down his long ashen beard with his gnarled fingers to a chunky middle-aged man with narrow inquisitive eyes, from a young farmer with a torn straw hat sitting on an upturned pail to an emaciated tobacco-smoker, from a gossipy woman to her imaginative nineteen-year-old daughter who was picking mushrooms, from a grinning farmer to a sly charcoal-maker, and from the farmer with six fingers on his left hand to the county sorceress. And when Chandol’s mother went to the ferry and the boatman asked, “You mean you saw all those things?” with great admiration, she was so amused that she did not try too hard to correct his wild misinformation.

  By noon many farmers at other villages in West County had learned of the Chestnut House incident, and almost everybody at Kumsan had heard it at least twice. The same two farmers who had gossiped about Ollye crossing the log bridge, repeated the story when they met again on a dike with several other farmers to have the lunch that their wives had brought out to the field. They relished it anew, from the very beginning to the last word, as enthusiastically as the first time, and nobody minded that some of the details had changed.

  When Yun, a farmer of Castle village, appeared at the ferry to go to Central Market to sell his sesame, Yom the boatman, wiping his perspiring chin with the grimy towel hanging from his neck, asked the innocent farmer, “Have the Castle villagers heard about what happened here last night? I mean, what the bengkos did with the Chestnut House woman.”

  There was an obvious lewd insinuation in the boatman’s squinting glance when he said this, and his tale no longer reflected any sympathy or compassion for the victim of this incident. When the Castle villager went to town and met his friends at the tavern, he claimed confidently that “a woman at Kumsan village actually watched the whole thing through the back window of the room and she saw this black soldier violating the Chestnut House woman, you know, and this woman saw the bengko’s cock, too. She told me that the cock looked like a black rubber stick.”

  In the late afternoon, the stories evolved faster and faster, and some said that Ollye had bitten the black rubber stick off the Negro bengko when she could no longer resist the rapist, and some said that Mansik had been stabbed by a bayonet while trying to rescue his mother from the soldiers, and some said that the bengkos had such huge tools that the Chestnut House woman had bled a whole chamber pot of blood “down there.” The village women washing clothes at the stream giggled and exchanged delicately bawdy anecdotes and some farmers insisted that Mansik’s mother actually enjoyed it a lot, for she had had no man at all for two full years.

  All this went on but nobody came out of the Chestnut House to explain to them what really had happened.

  FIVE

  Sitting listlessly on the walnut stump by the gate, Mansik looked over at the room where his mother had been lying dumb and motionless all night. Nanhi was asleep beside her mother on the littered floor. Mansik had come out of the house at sunrise and did not want to return. The morning fog was thick; it would be very hot this afternoon. The sun loomed whitish yellow like a disc floating in the milky density. On General’s Hill, golden and red tints of autumn leaves and violet splotches of wild camomile had already encroached upon a large part of the dark green ridges.

  Mansik got up to go down to the stream to wash his face. He stopped by the chestnut tree. He dared not venture out to the footpath. He felt the world beyond had been suddenly forbidden him by some unknown force and he was confined to his house by invisible walls. He was afraid to be outside, to meet anybody.

  The morning dragged on and on, interminably. The fog was gone now and white cotton patches of cloud sailed across the blue sky. The acacias by the stream and the tall ginkgo tree at the entrance of Hyonam village were a dazzling yellow. The rice plants in the paddies basked in the sunshine. Dragonflies flitted around the brilliantly colored cosmos blossoms and sparrows swarmed over the field.

  Mansik paced on and on around his yard. He fed the rabbits with clover. He glanced at the small mound of dirt by the chimney where he had buried Fluffy. He did not want to go out and meet someone who might ask him embarrassing questions about last night, as Young Hwang had done.

  Nanhi whimpered. She was hungry; it was long past breakfast time. Mansik quickly hid himself behind the twig fence when he spotted three women coming down the road from Castle village. The three women, hastening to the ferry carrying reed baskets on their heads, cast curious glances at the Chestnut House. They looked away promptly when they found Mansik peeking out through the twigs in the fence.

  Nanhi whimpered again. The boy wondered for a moment if he should cook some rice for his little sister and mother. But he did not want to cook. He did not want to do anything. He did not want to exist.

  He went over to the chestnut tree and lay down on the straw mattress spread in its shade. He looked up at the distant top branches of the tree. A hot breeze gently stirred the leaves. Even the leaves seemed to have changed overnight. The boy felt the world was missing something very important to him. Everything was different now. So different. In a single moment his world had been lost.

  There was only silence and emptiness around him. And in his heart.

  Listening to the monotonous clang—clang—of a sledge hammer beating an anvil at the distant Hyonam smithy, Old Hwang had been sitting for over an hour on the plank bench under the paulownia tree, thinking. He could not make any decision because his thoughts kept repeating themselves, circling in the same rut. He shook his head to clear it.

  The old man gazed at the four village boys hunting grasshoppers on the rice paddy dike across the stream, their heads and shoulders floating on the golden sea of ripening crops. Five Kumsan boys used to go around together all the time. There were only four of them today. The old man looked over his shoulder at the Chestnut House. Mansik was still there, squatting on the straw mattress under the chestnut tree, watching the four boys on their grasshopper hunt. Old Hwang sighed.

  The old man was not sure what he was supposed to do now. This was a situation that his community had never faced before. He did not know what was proper. If somebody had died or fallen sick, the villagers in this community, who had lived for generations like one single huge family, would have rushed to the house of grief to offer solace and consolation. But they were totally at a loss as to what they should do about the woman of the Chestnut House.

  N
o woman had ever been raped in this county. If Ollye had committed adultery like the flirtatious daughter of Widow Yu and the trinket packman who had been caught naked by two young male villagers one night on the sandy shore of Cucumber Island in the year of the national liberation, Old Hwang and the villagers would have had definite ideas as to what punishment she should be given. Strictly speaking, however, Ollye had done nothing wrong, did not deserve any kind of punishment. She was a victim. Besides, they were in no position to bring justice to the bengkos who had intruded on the village to commit the sinful crime. They did not even know from which country the rapists had come, and Old Hwang doubted very much that their decision to punish the soldiers would be respected by the World Army if they somehow caught the perpetrators.

  Nor could the old man visit Ollye and offer her words of consolation. He could not free himself from the thought that, victim or not, she was a dirty woman. Loss of feminine virtue, under any circumstance, was the most profound shame for a woman—so profound a shame, in fact, that in the old days, a disgraced woman did not hesitate to drink a bowl of lye to terminate her life. The act of taking her own life symbolically restored the chastity of the denied woman.

  On the other hand, Old Hwang could not help pitying Ollye. The old man knew none of the neighbors went to the Chestnut House to express his or her compassion and sympathy for Ollye’s predicament because Old Hwang himself had stayed away from her. Nobody wanted to be known as the first person to contact the unclean woman against Rich Hwang’s will. The old man knew all this, and he also knew it was too late now for him to visit Ollye with some neighbors for a belated display of sympathy.

  The old man gazed at the four boys hopping along the dike in the peaceful brilliance of sunshine pouring over the golden field.

  With nightfall came anxiety that gradually turned to fear, and then to terror. In late afternoon the sky became overcast with dark, heavy clouds and it began to drizzle after supper. Kijun’s father, worried, returned home early from the field. They had been safe last night because the bengkos had not noticed his house, but he did not believe they would be as lucky tonight if the soldiers came to the village again. Kijun’s mother was even more worried, and she had good reason. “If they rape anybody in the family,” she said, “I am the one they’d be after. Not you. I heard Mansik’s mother enjoyed it with the bengkos so much that she yowled like a crazy bitch, but I am different. I don’t want to be raped.” This woman, whose eyes bulged forward like a goldfish’s as far as her nose, shook her head emphatically. “If that ever happens to me, I’ll bite my tongue off and drop dead right there even before they put their dirty thing in me.” Seized by fear, Kijun’s parents did not go to bed until late, restlessly peeking out at the dark ominous road from Castle village again and again. Kijun was finally sent as a lookout to the foot of the hillock. The boy concealed himself behind an oak and watched for bengko intruders.

  Although it was drizzling, Kijun was rather proud to be the lookout. He was not a bit afraid. What had happened in the village since the strange accident at Mansik’s house made him more and more excited. Lookout duty was far more interesting to him than the stupid, exhausting expeditions to General’s Hill, the bombing of the town, or even the adventure in the reeds of Cucumber Island watching the arrival of the liberators. Only a few days ago Mansik and Chandol had bragged about their adventure at the town granary, but Kijun realized that afternoon when they were out in the field on a grasshopper hunt that no other boy knew what had happened in their own village as well as he did. Even Chandol, the captain, was so anxious to hear more stories from him that he tried very hard not to call him “Toad". And tomorrow Kijun would impress them again by telling them proudly that he had been on lookout all alone, all night.

  He shivered, his drenched clothes sticking to his skin, but he did not mind the chill. He brushed back his wet hair with a wet hand and stared into the dismal darkness.

  It was late, around nine o’clock, when bengko soldiers appeared at last on the northern road, the beam of a flashlight swishing this way and that in the drizzle. Though they were four or five hundred yards away, Kijun could see by the flashing light that there were two of them. The boy thought that, maybe, they always traveled by two when they came to rape at night. As soon as he recognized them by their rifles, helmets and height, the boy dashed out of the oak grove and, stooping low, hastened back home along the drainage ditch beside an eggplant patch. “They’re coming, Mom,” he breathlessly reported to his parents, “the bengkos are coming, Pop.”

  With a muffled scream, Mother urged her husband to lead her to safety, quickly, and putting a straw mattress over her head for a shield against the rain, she scuttled off to the pine grove behind the house. Father hurried out after her, telling Kijun to go to Uncle and warn him that the bengkos were coming.

  “Oh, oh, they’re coming again,” Aunt blubbered when Kijun told her. “They’re going to hurt me. I know they’ll hurt me this time.”

  “They will come after you if you keep making so much noise,” Uncle hissed at her and ordered her to go hide in the bomb shelter behind the barn.

  Click Beetle showed no fear when the boy told him about the bengkos, because he had no reason to worry. “They won’t do anything to an old man like me, but run to the Hwangs and be sure to warn them,” the old man said, and closed the door to his room to go back to sleep.

  Old Hwang, a big man indeed, did not seem to be shaken by the boy’s report. He calmly instructed his son Sokku to take the Toktuwon Woman and the child to the safely concealed shelter. “But, Father, the bomb shelter must be all puddles by now,” the son said. “We have a big empty jar for soy sauce in the back yard. Maybe she can hide in it with the child.” The old man shook his head at his son’s suggestion. “No. You have to take them to the bomb shelter,” he said. “It’s much more dangerous to stay near the house. The bengkos will go away soon, and you can certainly stand the wet for an hour.” As Young Hwang was taking his wife and child to the bomb shelter on the hillock behind the house, Kijun dashed out and went on to the Chestnut House.

  Kijun faltered at the entrance to the footpath to Mansik’s house. He was not sure if it was all right for him to talk to Mansik or his mother. He knew that somehow the Chestnut House had been completely cut off from the village. He felt Mansik had turned into someone more remote than the Castle village gang with whom the Kumsan boys had had so many stone fights. The other boys in the village apparently felt the same way. This morning they had been so curious as to how Mansik was doing that they had gone to take a look at him from a distance, pretending they were hunting grasshoppers. But nobody wanted to go over and talk to him. When he saw Mansik, squatting miserably under the chestnut tree, enviously watching the four boys playing in the sun, Kijun had been secretly glad. Unlike Kangho, who never talked much, Mansik tried to act like the vice-captain of the band, and Kijun hated him for that. Yet, he felt a little—just a tiny little bit—sorry to lose a friend so suddenly and completely.

  Kijun wondered what Mansik was doing now. Maybe he was peeking out at him through a chink in the door. It was time for everybody to be in bed, but Kijun doubted anybody in Kumsan village was peacefully asleep tonight. He had to tell Mansik and his mother that the bengkos were coming, for they might be returning to the Chestnut House. But Kijun felt awkward calling on Mansik at this hour after he had pretended all day long that the Chestnut House did not exist.

  Kijun stole to the twig gate on tiptoe and hollered suddenly at the top of his voice, “Bengkos are coming! Bengkos are coming!”

  There was no response from the Chestnut House, not a sound. Jun was sure that Mansik and his mother were awake. They probably kept silent because they were too abashed to reply or look out the door. Or perhaps … they might have mistakenly thought that Kijun was mocking them. Sneaking up to their gate in the middle of the night and shouting like this about the bengkos! Kijun wanted to convince them that this was no joke.

  “Bengkos are coming! Bengkos a
re coming!” the boy shouted again and scurried down the footpath.

  He stopped by the log bridge and looked back, but he still could not see any movement at Mansik’s house. He waited for a while trying to figure out what he should do next. He glanced over at the northern road to see how near the bengkos had come. The yellow gleam of the flashlight, bobbing like a glowworm in the misty drizzle, climbed down to the rice paddies from the road near Click Beetle’s hut and headed for Inner Kumsan. The soldiers had decided to try a different place tonight. Kijun realized that he had to tell Kangho and Chandol and Bong that the bengkos were going toward their houses. He started to run to the rice mill, thinking everybody would call him a hero before this night was over.

  By the time Kijun pounded on the plank door of the mill with his wet fists, Kangho’s family was already bustling in a flurry, for they had been alerted by the boy’s shout at the Chestnut House.

  “What should I do? What should I do if the bengkos come here?” Kangho’s grandmother whined, fretfully entering the room, stumbling out to the mill, and then rushing into the room again.

  “You don’t have to worry, Mother. They won’t bother old women,” Father said impatiently.

  “Who says those savages care anything about age? I have to run and hide somewhere, too. How can they tell a woman’s age in the dark, anyway?”

  “Do you know where I left my skirt?” Mother said, tearfully.

  “Didn’t I tell you many times to keep all your clothes on?”

  “Mother, do you happen to know where I left my skirt? Oh, never mind. I found it.”

  “Hurry. Get out of the mill quickly.”

  “I have to take an umbrella with me.”

  “Why do you need an umbrella when you’re going to hide in the barn?”

  “I don’t think the barn is a safe place to hide. I’ll find shelter somewhere out in the open field.”