I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  “There is no stink in this valley,” the woman said after a while.

  “It is to keep warm,” he replied sullenly.

  “How many more bottles did you steal from them?”

  “Hold your tongue, woman. We are returning home, where women know when and how to speak.”

  She turned away from him.

  The boy sat in silence, staring into the fire. He felt the old man’s eyes scrape his face and kept his eyes on the flames. I am nothing to him. He speaks to the woman as if I am not here. Father never spoke that way to Mother. Not when I was near. Look at him, he is going to become drunk again and the woman will not be able to wake him, and she and I will once more have to share his turn at the fire.

  The woman sat thinking: The war has changed him, he was never this way before, a little rice wine in the town with his cronies but never night after night like the carpenter. How his eyes shine in the firelight. What does he see? The village? The ox? What memories? Foolish old man, if the war does not kill him, the drinking will, and his eyes will soon see the color of cold wormy earth.

  The old man sipped again from the bowl and felt the hot liquid inside him and wondered why he was still so cold. He shivered and saw clearly the glide and swoop of the hawk and the brief struggle of the pheasant. A cry of triumph burst from his uncle’s lips and echoed through the valley. Do you hear that echo, asked his uncle. Do you hear it? From his mouth vapor plumes rose into the brittle November day. I have given this valley a special name. Echoland I call it. All the sounds of this valley run together into one great echo, a song that is sung by all the spirits of this valley. Only a hunter hears it. The spirits of this valley are happy when they see a hunter who loves the animals he hunts. A truly great hunter is grateful to the birds and animals he kills, he takes their spirits into himself. See all the things you can learn from me if only your father will let you.

  He remained squatting by the fire drinking and after a long while he thought: I see the boy’s eyes, he is clever and crafty, I have seen how crafty he is. It might be useful to have him in our home but not for too long, because he will begin to think that one day he will take my place, take my land and my inheritance and replace my name with his and perhaps not bring offerings to my spirit, because he is not of my blood, and make of me a shadow, a melting snowfall, a fading echo.

  He fell into a drunken sleep by the fire and the woman and the boy carried him into the shanty and covered him with the quilts. The boy saw the shame and resignation on her face and looked away. After a while she lay down silently beside the old man.

  The air was very cold but still. Squatting inside his quilt by the fire, the boy was thinking of the girl with the woolen gloves. If I find her will she and her mother come with me to my village? He could not remember the paths he had traveled across the hills and paddies to the main road and he wondered how he would find the village. The woman will help, yes. He pulled the quilt tighter about himself, suddenly frightened. Vague echoing sounds rose from the darkness. Hungry dogs? The furry spirits of the cave in this valley where he and the old man and woman had lived?

  He sat watching the fire and from time to time tossed fresh brush onto the flames.

  Crossing the valley the next morning, the woman looked for the cave but there were so many caves she could not be certain which one it was. The boy, pushing the cart from behind, squinted in the sunlight and thought he recognized the screen of brushwood they had placed in front of the cave opening: it lay covered in snow and ice with thin black fingers of brambles protruding from it. Walking beside the woman and breathing with difficulty as he pulled the cart, the old man had no interest in the cave: his head ached, his tongue felt gritty and swollen, there was a taste of cold metal in his mouth. He heard the boy calling from behind the cart: Could they stop and see the cave?

  The old man said morosely, “I do not want to stop.”

  But the woman said, “Can it hurt us to see the cave?”

  “Woman, I do not want to see the cave. Why should we stop for the cave?” Anger and warning filled his voice.

  Still the woman persisted. “A visit to the spirits of the cave. An offering of thanks.”

  The old man thought: See how he delays us. He thinks the longer he is with us the safer he will be. A clever boy.

  Without waiting for his response, the woman began to pull the cart to the edge of the path. The old man, raging within himself, felt it unseemly to resist her in front of the boy. They turned off the path and went on some yards over rocky terrain. A newly risen wind blew against the towering walls of the valley. They left the cart near the brushwood screen and approached the cave.

  The woman stepped inside. Cold earth-smelling dimness and the silence of a tomb. This was almost our grave. She murmured softly to the spirits of the cave. Standing beside her, the boy saw in memory the pond and the fish and the three dogs and the old man dying on the cart.

  The old man stood shivering in the entrance to the cave and would not enter. This was a place of weakness and shame for him: he had almost died here. He turned to go back to the cart and saw two boys, dirty-faced urchins, lifting out of the cart a rolled-up strip of canvas and a quilt.

  He shouted.

  Startled, the one carrying the quilt dropped it. They ran off with the piece of canvas.

  The old man stood trembling, his shout echoing through the cave, the tiny furry creatures fully roused and flying about in a cluttering frenzy.

  “Woman!” he called.

  The woman and the boy followed him back to the cart and they left the valley and that night slept inside a grove of shell-torn trees. Near evening the next day they set up the shanty on a mudflat at the edge of the sea.

  A shivering wind blew in across the water. The light was slowly fading from the clear sky. Earlier that day a Korean officer riding past on a jeep had tossed the woman a packet of rice. Now the old man saw her cooking a soup. The boy stood near the fire, feeding wood to the flames.

  She had dropped the shaft and stepped into the middle of the road in front of the approaching jeep. The old man and the boy shouted at her at the same time and the jeep skidded to a halt, the driver cursing, and the woman had pleaded for food and the officer had tossed her the rice. Stubborn crazy old woman. This will end when we return to the village. Such madness will cause her death one day and who will cook and mend and wash and help with the fields?

  The old man moved across the mudflats to the edge of the sea. He stood on a curious swerve of shore, its shape the palm of a pleading hand, thin curled fingers protruding into the waves. Long crestless swells rolled in across the fingers. On occasion a wave rose languidly and crested and crashed against the shore, where it hissed and foamed before sliding back into the water.

  As he stood watching in the last of the light a surging wave disgorged a school of tiny silvery fish.

  He stared in astonishment: six fish flopping about and writhing on the ground at his feet. Glancing quickly around, he saw he was alone.

  He waited until the fish were still and then scooped them up and quickly chewed and swallowed two and brought the remaining four to the woman, who took them from him without a word and dropped them into the steaming soup.

  Before he fell asleep the old man whispered fearfully to the spirits of the sea: What are you saying to me with this gift of the fish? Is it about the boy?

  The woman, lying beside him, did not hear his words. She murmured her thanks to the spirits that had sent the officer to her. Remembering the driver’s anger, she said silently into the darkness: Could I let the boy go without food? A mother does not let her child go hungry.

  Outside the shanty the boy sat huddled in a quilt, guarding the fire and the cart.

  The next day they entered the city on the edge of the sea. A dusty brown cloud lay over the broken houses and streets, and soldiers patrolled amid the ruins. Men and women stood around burning oil-drum fires or squatted near shanties, and children played in the debris. The boy, staring with hor
ror at the destroyed city, remembered his village. He had given up searching for the girl; he would return to the village without her. The woman kept murmuring to herself as they passed through the city and the old man smelled the acrid stench of burning that clung to the gutted buildings and remembered the stink on the plain and wished he had not finished off the last of the bottles the night before. Our village will smell like this.

  They passed the barbed-wire fence of the airfield and the old man could not remember where he had been gathering brushwood when the guards had fired at him. Searching for the woman and the boy, the dread of having lost them, his memory of that now angering him. Let him return to his own people; let him take his cleverness back to his own village.

  The advance of the Chinese and the soldiers of the North had been halted near this airfield and the dead had littered the road. Pieces of shattered military vehicles still lay scattered on the sides of the road and in the fields.

  Before twilight they arrived at the riverbank in Seoul.

  Quickly they set up their shanty and the old man went off to gather firewood. The woman laid out the pads and the quilts and the boy dug a firepit. Both banks of the river were crowded with shanties. A cold wind blew across the mudflats but its ferocity was gone. Ice floes clotted the surface of the river: scraggy leprous water creatures that frightened the woman. I will offer them the little rice we have left. May they not waken until we are far from here.

  The old man had taken the A-frame and gone up the sloping mudflats and between two of the houses that faced the river. He saw the streets were bare of ice and now the houses had people living in them. There were people in the streets and some regarded him with suspicion: a withered old man with a wispy graying beard roaming about with an A-frame on his back.

  At the courtyard with the broken stone wall where the pile of wood had once been concealed, he stopped cautiously and stood looking up and down the narrow street. The wind that blew now between the houses made only the palest of sounds. There the little dog had entered the street; there it had stopped to eat the grains of rice; there from behind the stone wall he had thrown the first stone at it. How he hungered for meat. It was a ceaseless gnawing in his belly and his bones. Hunting with his uncle, he had eaten meat day after day. The best of foods, Uncle exulted. Do not roast it too long. For your strength and manhood, for that thing between your legs. Makes it big and hard. Meat.

  He stood waiting near the broken wall. The street remained empty. Were there people now in the houses? He stepped through the break in the stone wall and entered the courtyard.

  The pile of stones was still there. He stared at it, dazed. Clearing away some of the stones, he saw the wood.

  He felt himself begin to tremble. The wood, the dog, the fish, the second dog, the second fish, again the wood. Is this the magic of the boy?

  He set the A-frame on the ground, loaded it quickly, covered the wood with rocks, hoisted the A-frame onto his back, and stepped out of the courtyard into the street. This empty street. Inhabited by ghosts kindred to the boy? His father and mother? His grandfather?

  He felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck as he hurried down the street toward the river.

  The boy helped him make the fire.

  The woman heated the leftovers of the rice soup and fish they had eaten the night before and offered it to the spirits of the river.

  They sat near the fire.

  The woman pointed to the river. “There I carried you on the ice.”

  “I barely remember,” the boy murmured.

  “The doctor said he had no medicine to waste on you, you were already dead.”

  “I died and returned from the dead?”

  The old man put down his bowl and shivered.

  “Death had its hands on you,” the woman said.

  “I remember little from the time I was on the road running until the time I woke and saw you.”

  “You were more with the spirits than you were with us,” the woman said.

  The old man felt terror.

  “Finish your food,” the woman said. “Soon we will be in our village.”

  “Do you want me to remain here?”

  “You will come with us.”

  The old man scowled. “Woman.”

  But she ignored him and spoke directly to the boy. “We will decide later what to do with you.”

  The old man made a low growling sound.

  “One does not abandon an animal one loves, let alone a child,” she said.

  Early the next morning they left the riverbank and came out onto the wide main road leading from the city and walked with many others going north. Scarred stone buildings lined the sides of the city road: walls pocked by shrapnel; moldy canvas and splintered wood planks for windows and doors. Temporary power poles and restrung overhead lines. An occasional civilian bus lumbering along in the heavy flow of military traffic. Snow on some trees and black ice and snow on the road and gray gaseous dust rising from the street into the still cold air.

  On a street where most of the buildings had remained intact they passed a two-story gray stone building with a flight of wide steps leading up to a portico. Over twin wooden doors hung a sign in Korean which said the building was an orphanage run by an American church organization. To the left of the building stood a tall wire fence topped with four strands of barbed wire. Children milled about in the yard behind the fence. Some girls were playing the rope-skipping game. Boys leaned against the wire fence, staring out at the street. How did I not see that when we came past here before, this is where we should have left the boy; is this where he wishes to leave the boy, in a place like this? One boy about ten or eleven stood with his fingers clutching the wire and watched the boy go by with the old man and the woman. Walking behind the cart, the boy had the sudden odd sensation that he was standing behind the fence looking out at the boy beyond the fence going past with the old man and the woman. An icy leaden grayness invaded his chest, a trembling dread, a sense of the cold earth of a grave. Do they live always behind the fence? What do they eat? Does anyone visit them? How much of their lives will they spend in that empty world? He tore his eyes away from the fence and the boy and concentrated them upon the cart. Small cart, old wood, splintered, scarred. Quilts, sleeping pads, pots and pans, pieces of metal, the box containing the spirit of the old man’s father. He walked behind the cart, pushing it along the crowded road.

  The city fell away. Fields and paddies on both sides of the road and looming snow-covered hills. Everywhere shanty villages had sprung up; people dwelling in the rubble of their past lives. The war had burned up the countryside; no town or village stood. Shacks and shanties and huddling people, and wood burning in oil drums, and children running about in packs, and here and there a starved dog and an ox. The old man and the woman and the boy moved slowly because of the traffic. There was snow on both sides of the road and snow on the fields and paddies and a thin haze of yellow-gray dust floated high over the road and dulled the early-afternoon sun.

  They stopped to rest awhile. The old man and the woman fell asleep sitting against the cart and the boy gently woke them. Shortly before sunset they came to the place in the road where they had found the boy.

  Along both sides of the road the fields were gouged with deep craters partially filled with pools of half-frozen black water. Scorch marks on the nearby hills: wide swaths of charred earth the snows had somehow been unable to conceal. The old man thought he could still smell the burning.

  “There,” the woman said, pointing to the drainage ditch where they had stumbled upon the boy.

  “I can’t remember,” the boy said, feeling ashamed.

  “It is better that you can’t remember.”

  Looking down into the drainage ditch, the old man thought: The ox is gone. Nothing of it remains. See how they took even its bones. Just like our own ox. Nothing. If not for this boy I could have taken a piece of that ox and not have become sick later. He has been a burden and the woman has behaved li
ke a stubborn animal and this will end when we return to the village. The spirits of our ancestors protected us from harm. But there remained annoyingly the thought that perhaps he and the woman had been saved by the spirits guarding the boy. How could he know which was true?

  The woman said, “Here I carried you from the ditch and there, down the road, near the turn, I stopped the car with the red cross and the driver gave me foreign medicine for your wound. You remember nothing?”

  The boy shook his head with shame and embarrassment.

  “How hurt you were.”

  The old man was impatient. “Woman, the sun will soon set.”

  “We should stay here tonight.”

  He glared at her, raging. “Why stay here? We are not far.”

  “Can we enter the village at night? Who knows what waits for us?”

  Delay and delay. One after another. She plays the same game of wait and postponement. They think it will help the boy.

  He followed behind the cart as the old woman and the boy pulled it off the road and along an embankment over the drainage ditch and brought it to a flat area away from the craters. Others were setting up shanties in nearby fields. Shivering, the boy saw the sun slowly dropping behind the hills. With the shadows came a bitter cold.

  The old man went off toward the foothills for wood, and the woman and the boy searched with their fingers in the icy mud of the drainage ditch and found roots and crayfish and last-season rice seedlings for the woman to make into a soup.

  A light snow fell during the hours the boy sat guarding the fire and the cart and he felt the flakes on his face and tongue. Badooki would bark at snow and snap at flakes as if they were flies. Fat Choo Kun said snow was the spirits shaking out their quilts. He would run around in the snow scratching himself. Fat dumb Choo Kun. The night was dark, the noise of the traffic loud, did it never end, the traffic of the foreigners, day and night, did they never run out of cars, what were the roads like in their land, always noise? In time he woke the woman and she in turn woke the old man, who fell into a deep sleep near the fire and saw himself and his uncle hunting wild boar in the mountains of the North.