Silver Stallion (4 page)

“Oh, that,” the miller said. Bags of rice and barley had rolled down and burst open on the ground, the grain spilling out all over the place, he explained. Some townspeople had gathered with baskets and sacks to take away the abandoned rice, but did not dare to go near the collapsed walls because Communist soldiers armed with submachine guns were standing guard around the ruin to protect their military provisions.

“The Red soldiers?” she said doubtfully. “But you said they had started to run away to the north early yesterday evening, didn't you?”

“Some of them did, but there are still quite a lot of them left in the town,” the miller said. “I saw a dozen soldiers guarding the storehouse until their trucks come to take away the rice. But the townspeople are waiting, hoping that the People's Army may leave at least some of the spilled rice behind.”

“If the World Army is really arriving in a day or two, the Reds will have to leave tonight,” said Kangho's mother, as if to herself, calculating. “Or tomorrow morning at the latest.”

Realizing what his wife was scheming, the miller warned, “Don't even dream of going to town to get that free rice, woman. The Reds are now as mad as rabid dogs because they are losing the war, and at this very moment, they say, they're killing everybody in sight in many towns, out of sheer anger. If you hang around the storehouse, they might just start shooting and. …”

She had experienced too much poverty in her childhood, surviving on nothing but potatoes and corn for months, to give any heed to his warning. Now the Hans were quite well off, running the only rice mill in West County, and some villagers suspected that the miller had secretly bought rice paddies and vegetable patches here and there, and the Hans were even richer than the Rich House these days, but she would never be rich enough to overlook any morsel she could get for free. At least she had to see the granary with her own eyes.

Without telling her husband, Kangho's mother sneaked out of the mill about an hour later, went over to the widow who lived with her six children next door, and briefly explained about the free rice piling up in the street. The two women headed for the town. They came back so late that although they shouted and screamed for more than half an hour the boatman, sound asleep on the opposite shore, did not hear them. They might have spent the whole night on Cucumber Island if the worried miller, suspecting his wife had gone for the rice after all, had not come to the ferry around eleven o'clock to check with Yom.

Both women, of course, wanted to go back to town for more rice but Kangho's mother had to stay home; the miller beat her with a broken piece of old conveyor belting until she foamed at the mouth for ignoring his warning and swore that he would kill her if she left the mill by so much as one single step. The neighbor woman went back to the ferry at midnight and woke the boatman up to take her across the river again, but Yom refused. A woman without a husband was a half person, and few people respected a widow's wish. The widow had to wait until daybreak.

Chandol's mother found out about this when she went to the ferry very early to take a dozen bamboo baskets she had made to her sister-in-law, who ran a general store at the Central Market, so that she could return home before the day's work began at the rice paddies. She met the widow at the bench before the boatman's cabin and they waited together for a male passenger to arrive. Yom, like any other boatman, never took a woman as the morning's first passenger because it would bring him bad luck; shops, inns, bathhouses, and all other public places never served a woman as their first customer for the same reason. While they waited for the boatman, the widow told her what had happened the previous night, and Chandol's mother hurried back to the village to deliver this good news to some of her friends.

“The widow said rice is abandoned in heaps and piles on the street for anyone to take, but it won't last too long if everybody swarms there,” Chandol's mother said. “Don't you think we should hurry and take our share before it's too late?”

Ollye glanced over at the rice jar buried in a dark corner of the kitchen. The rice remaining in the jar was only one knuckle deep. What would she feed Mansik and her three-year-old daughter Nanhi during the long cold season?

“Mansik,” she called. “You go into the room and tie Nanhi to the door handle. I'll put away the cooked rice so that we can have breakfast when we come back.”

“Come back?” Mansik said.

“We are going to town. Hurry.”

“I guess I'll take my boy along with me, too,” said Chandol's mother.

The word that the miller's wife and her widowed neighbor had brought rice from the granary got around among the Kumsan villagers. By the time Ollye, Chandol's mother and the two boys went to the ferry, a small throng of villagers was waiting for the boat to come back from the island. The crowd increased as time passed and the boatman had to skip his breakfast because of the women constantly howling at him to hurry. More than twenty Kumsan women had brought rice home from town before breakfast, and by this time the news had reached Hyonam and Castle, too. The boatman was furious because nobody listened to him when he shouted that it was dangerous for them to rush into the boat all at the same time, that the boat would capsize and sink if anybody else came aboard, that he had to stop to take a breath for five minutes, just five minutes.

Except for some young boys, however, very few male villagers joined this column of human ants making trips to the granary. Men were hesitant to go to town for two reasons. First, the farmers feared that they might encounter the Communist soldiers, who, it was rumored, recruited every man in sight under sixty to join the People's Army to fight against the pursuing World Army. The Communists executed anyone resisting the conscription order on the spot. The other reason they were reluctant to go was that a proud man would not do certain things, such as begging or stealing, even if he starved to death. They knew the rice was abandoned on the street, but they did not want anybody to see them taking Communist rice. They stayed home and pretended that they did not notice their wives going to town.

Women did not care about pride or dignity, because only men were supposed to possess these qualities. Women could not afford to starve to death on account of anything as absurd as honor.

When Ollye, Chandol's mother and the two boys reached Chunchon Railroad Station, the townspeople were swarming around the National Grange storehouse like bees collecting around peeled persimmons spread on a mattress to dry. More than half the rice was already gone. Mansik glanced at the column of people streaming back and forth along the road. Most of them were heading back to the town. The whole column looked like one big golden centipede moving away from the granary, only moving legs visible under the straw sacks, hemp bags or large vessels being carried on heads or backs. Some families were loading sacks on the small carts they had brought, and some women, for whom a rice sack was too heavy, charged into the turbulent granary with kitchen knives in their hands, stabbed open the bulging stomach of a straw sack, and let the white rice pour out of the opening into their baskets or bags. Inside the granary it was as noisy as a night pond alive with mating frogs in summer. Young and old women scooped and stuffed the rice into their pails and buckets, bamboo and wicker baskets, their legs sunk in grain up to their shins.

“What are you waiting for? Fill your bag quickly!” shouted Chandol's mother, looking back at the two boys, who stood in a daze amidst the pandemonium. With her open palm she began to scrape the rice into the bag she was holding.

“This is really something,” said Chandol, scooping up the rice with his gourd dipper. “Look at these people. Just like maggots thriving in a rotting corpse.”

Mansik knelt down on the grains, that slipped under him like sand, clamped the opening of his bag between his teeth and pulled in the rice with both hands.

“Seems they're taking everything in sight,” said Mansik, tilting his head to point at a thin woman in her fifties, who had just hurried out of the stationmaster's office, hugging a tall grandfather clock in her arms. The townsfolk were looting not only the granary but the neighboring railroad station building as well. Chandol saw two middle-aged women dragging a plank desk out of a station warehouse, followed by an old man carrying a sawdust stove on his shoulders. The boys even spotted a young woman stealing cabbages from a patch behind the granary.

“The whole town is crazy,” Chandol whispered to Mansik, knotting the top of his bag. “I heard some women over there a minute ago say the Reds left a lot of confiscated goods behind. At the buildings they've abandoned there are more valuable things than a lousy sack of rice. And then the women left …”

All of a sudden, everybody started to run away, the women clustering on top of the rice pile sliding down backwards in panic, the whole mountain of grain crumbling with them like a sand castle washed away by a big breaking wave. The women fled desperately, screaming, some of them abandoning their bags or baskets. Mansik and Chandol and their mothers, puzzled, stood there, not knowing why everybody else was running away so frantically. Then somebody shouted “Air raid!” and they finally understood. Although the two boys and their mothers had not noticed it, the townspeople had experienced enough bombing to instantly recognize, even amid all the other noise, the faint purr of the bombers coming over the mountains. “Air raid!” women shouted, fleeing breathlessly. Some tripped and tumbled down, their baskets bouncing and rolling and spinning on the sidewalk, and a little lost child wept by a telegraph pole, her nose bleeding. Hemp bags and wooden receptacles were abandoned on the street, spilt grain lay on the pavement like the bleached remains of cow dung. A woman, carrying her baby on her back, threw herself into a roadside turnip patch, several women blindly ran into the open field, and several others rushed back into the granary to hide behind the rubble of the demolished wall. The old man threw the heavy sawdust stove away and ran for his life.

The two boys and their mothers dug into the rice piles because they did not know what else to do. Now Mansik heard the airplanes at last. Snoring slowly and monotonously, a formation of twelve breezed in over Saddle Mountain from the direction of Hongchon. These planes were very big and each had four propellers. A dozen women lying exposed on the road, too frightened to run any more, wept and shrieked louder and louder as the planes came nearer and nearer. Her mother finally found the little lost girl with the nosebleed and both of them, hand in hand, jumped into the cabbage patch to seek shelter. Everybody hiding or fleeing or screaming in the fields or on the road or behind the collapsed granary wall waited for the bombing to begin.

The airplanes reached the sky over the town but did not drop any bombs; they kept on flying and slowly vanished over the northern mountains in the direction of Hwachon.

Mansik craned his neck out of the rice to peek around like a cautious turtle. He was breathing heavily, bathed in sweat. The women who had been hiding behind the demolished wall looked at one another and asked in surprise and disbelief:

“Why didn't they bomb us?”

“What's happening now?”

“They passed the town, I guess, because they know the People's Army is no longer around.”

“That must be the reason.”

The townsfolk who had scattered quickly gathered again at the granary and continued to fill their bags and sacks much faster than before. The old man returned to claim his sawdust stove.

“These planes looked very strange,” Mansik said to Chandol. “They are different from those we saw the other day.”

“Haven't you seen those planes before?” asked a town boy who had just started to fill his pail beside them.

“No. I've never seen such big planes before,” said Mansik.

“They are called B-29s,” the town boy stated, importantly. “A B-29 has four propellers. The plane with one propeller is called Mustang. And you've seen the strafers that have something like sweet potatoes attached to their wing tips, haven't you? Those are Spanglers.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Ollye, who asked Mansik to lift her hemp bag and place it on top of her head. “Let's go home before other planes show up, Mansik. I want to get out of this place as quickly as possible,” Ollye insisted. “Whether they bomb us or not, I just hate that piercing sound. You'd better hurry too, Chandol's mother.”

The four of them waddled out of the granary, carrying their rice, and hurried along the alley which was littered with debris, burnt shreds of clothes and broken cement slabs from previous bombings. Then they skidded down the steep path to the Soyang River. Ollye kept urging them to hurry, hurry.

When, breathlessly, they crossed the shingle and reached the ferry, three Hyonam women were loading their rice and barley onto the boat. The wall-eyed boatman watched them offhandedly, standing aside and puffing at his long bamboo pipe. When all seven were aboard with their booty the old man pushed off with a long pole. They heard two or three automatic weapons burp intermittently in the direction of Kongji Creek.

“What is that? What is that?” Chandol's mother gasped in a frightened voice. “What was that noise?”

“The main force of the People's Army in Chunchon and on Phoenix Hill has fled to Hwachon, but another unit is retreating from Wonju. Maybe some of them are fighting over there,” the boatman explained calmly.

The passengers in the boat kept silent. The boat was loaded so heavily that the water almost reached the place where Mansik was sitting. The seat of his pants was getting wet. When Mansik tried to move forward to the bow, Chandol grabbed him by the elbow and signaled with his eyes for Mansik to come closer so that he could tell him something privately. Mansik leaned toward him.

“When we get back home,” Chandol whispered so that their mothers would not hear him, “you go and tell the boys to come to the sand under the bridge right after lunch hour.”