I Am the Clay (26 page)

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.

The winter went on into spring and the ice took a long time to thaw. And when finally it was the time for plowing the boy went to the shed and removed the jug and in the presence of the woman gave the money to the old man and said it was for an ox, and after a brief moment of open-mouthed astonishment and a long knowing silence the old man nodded and took the money and together with the carpenter went to the nearby town. Several hours later they returned with an ox.

The village gathered around the ox: young and strong and sleek and tawny. Proudly the old man led it by its nose ring to the shed. The next morning he attached the ox to the plow and, speaking to it, took hold of the shaft. He guided it through the flooded paddy and felt upon his back the envious glances of the others in the fields.

All that spring the old man used the ox. When he
did not need it for himself he rented it to others and with the money bought seed and food. Often the woman, while cooking in the kitchen or doing the laundry by the stream, would ask herself: Where does our good fortune come from? The boy is with us now a year and a half, does it come from him? Can that be the reason the man wants him to stay?

A new officer arrived in the late fall and the teenage boy appeared one day and asked the boy where the officer kept the new shortwave radio he had recently purchased in the post exchange and the boy refused to tell him. The teenage boy scowled but said nothing and went away.

A few days later, the radio disappeared. The boy was frightened he would be blamed but the officer bought another and locked it in his footlocker whenever he left the Jamesway.

Late one afternoon the boy went in to see the cook and the cook said there was too much stealing going on in the battalion, didn’t the boy see the guards were now patrolling the fence with dogs and from today on everyone leaving the compound would be searched at the guardpost and at night there would be oil drums lighting the perimeter, he couldn’t give him any more gifts of food. But the old man seemed not to notice the boy was no longer bringing food; the woman was able to buy dried fish and potatoes and some meat from the marketplace with the money earned by the ox.

In the spring they plowed and planted and one day in the summer they heard the war had ended but nothing in their lives changed, and one night in the fall, as the old man sat in the town drinking with the carpenter,
he wondered silently if the border between the two lands might one day soon be opened so that he could go hunting in the North one last time before he died; but he did not think so. He asked the carpenter if he thought the boy would ever go hunting in the North and the carpenter, who knew of the old man’s memories, said all things were possible for the spirits, and the old man bought the carpenter another drink of rice wine.

One winter afternoon the woman was washing clothes in the stream, bent forward over the cold water, and noticed her face in the dappled lights and shadows on the water surface. Old and ugly.
Have thine own way Lord
. It occurred to her that the stream probably emptied into the river and the river ran down the valley and through the big city and emptied into the sea and the sea returned to land somewhere as a river and the river became many streams that emptied into a river that flowed into a sea. And if my spirit enters the stream it will live on and on in the rush and drift and currents of its water. I will be the water and the riverbank and the cave and the mound on the plain. As she looked into the stream she saw the spirits of the water dark and coiling, and to her surprise they reached up and gently drew her to them, and she slid face forward into the stream and was pulled out by the women near her and carried to the house.

When the boy returned that evening he saw the old man and the carpenter in the house and the old woman beneath her quilts barely breathing, her face the color of parched earth, one eye open and the other closed. He sat on the floor near the woman and waited, making himself small, very small.

She died during the night.

In the early morning, when they were certain she was dead, the carpenter left to build the coffin and the old man took the woman’s blouse and skirt and went outside and threw them onto the grass roof and called out her name. He then threw rice onto the roof and returned to the house.

The boy saw him sit down next to the woman and heard him begin to wail, “Aigo, aigo.” He sat listening to the wailing of the old man, his heart frozen.

Soon two women entered the room and sent out the old man and the boy and began to ready the woman for burial.

The boy wondered if he should prepare food but he was very tired and not hungry and the old man seemed shriveled with grief. And so they sat in silence in the main room until the carpenter appeared with a compass and certain other instruments and talked awhile quietly with the old man as the boy wandered about the courtyard and from time to time came over to the cart and stared at it and touched it, the wood bitter cold in the suddenly icy winter air.

The carpenter came out of the house: a small white-bearded old man wearing a white coat and wadded white pants and a white cylindrical hat. The boy watched him go off in the direction of the hill behind the village.

Some minutes later the two women emerged from the house and went past the boy without a word. When the boy returned to the house he saw the old
man staring in bewilderment at the lined leather gloves the two women had found in the chest where the woman had stored her few belongings. He handed the gloves to the boy.

“Go to your work,” he said. “There is nothing for you to do here.”

The boy had thought the gloves were lost; he could not remember when he had last seen them. There came abruptly to his memory the girl with the gray woolen gloves and carrying the body of her father and the vast pile of grotesque dead. Why had the old woman kept them? Holding them to herself. The boy’s brown musty fur-lined leather gloves.

As he left the house he saw the distant figure of the carpenter scrambling about on the hill, pausing, gazing up at the ice-blue sky, measuring distances with an instrument, moving in straight lines and circles along the shoulder of the hill.

A new officer arrived that day, a troubled dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, to take the place of the previous one they called chaplain. The boy watched him unpack and carefully arrange his books in an old wooden fruit crate set on its end and now used as shelves in the Jamesway. Three orderly rows of books. Grandfather’s books stacked book upon book on shelves in his little house off the courtyard. Odd how this chaplain did not have a cross on his collar but a kind of arching double tablet. Will he know
Have thine own way Lord?

When the boy returned to the village in the evening
the old man told him the carpenter had completed the coffin.