I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  A helicopter woke him, flying in low from the hills and over the valley and the road, going south. He jumped to his feet, listening. Was that gunfire? Had the war returned? Or echoes of the boar hunt with his uncle? You will not go there again, Father had shouted. He is a crazy man. He tries to steal you away from me. Unheard of. Does he not know common decency? This is the family of your mother, a man who does not know the order of things. A knife to him!

  He stood there a long moment, dazed, and then woke the woman and the boy. Wearily they loaded the cart and rolled it across the fields to the road.

  Heavy military traffic going both ways. Ugly shanties in the fields and along the sides of the road. Clinging yellow dust underfoot and in the cold sunless air. The cart jounced, the boy pushing from behind. Was the wheel tilting again, the wire coming loose? Black ice and grimy snow in the roadside drainage ditches. Pulling on the shaft, the woman recalled the large town they had passed along this road during the flight from their village: homes and sheds and markets. A blight of shanties now across an expanse of cleared scarred mucky earth. The foreigners saved the country but the North destroyed the land. Will we live now our remaining years in a shack made of pieces of metal and wood? Can the spirits be so without mercy?

  The road crossed over a wide culvert and the old man saw four tanks moving quickly between the fields, hatches open and commanders on the machine guns, shields yellow and brown with caked mud, long cannons pointing north, clanking caterpillar tracks kicking up dust. If the soldiers from the North did not burn the village, the big machines of the foreigners certainly crushed it. To rebuild the house and the shed. Where will we find wood in this burned land? How many of the animals survived, surely they took all the animals, those barbarians. And is the old carpenter still alive?

  The road twisted and curved awhile and ended parallel to the railroad tracks that ran north from Seoul. At the crossroads about a mile south of the cart path to their village there had been a town, a train station, and a large marketplace. As they approached the town, the woman saw the marketplace: once big, attractive, lively, now a squalid strip of thrown-together shanties along the side of the road across from the railroad station. The station platform and its protective overhang, gone; now only flat bare earth. Shanties from the edge of the tracks and on into the foothills behind the new one-runway airfield on the other side of the tracks. Across from the airfield the main road branched off at right angles into a road that went past the end of the marketplace into an American division compound. American soldiers lounged near the market stalls talking with Korean girls. Jeeps and trucks rolled in and out of the compound. On the runway a single-engine aircraft buzzed with power, rolled briefly along, and leaped into the dim air.

  The woman stared in astonishment at the marketplace and the airfield and the compound. On the shaft next to her the old man was looking about in disbelief. The air seemed so lifeless, the light melancholy and filled with shadows. He felt in his heart the desperation of the land. The boy, remembering his village before the fire, recalled a tale told him by his grandfather about the illness sent by the spirits to someone who went around gossiping and telling mean tales about others. I said something cruel about fat Choo Kun. The spirits sometimes punish an evil tongue with an evil illness, Grandfather said. It seemed to the boy that everything here had caught that illness. Had the land been so evil as to merit this punishment by the spirits? The land near the village of the old man and the woman had become leprous.

  About a hundred yards beyond the crossroads lay the entrance to another compound: long low buildings and tents and jeeps and trucks, and vehicles with huge red crosses. Seeing the crosses, the woman raised her arms in vertical and horizontal motions. Some distance after the wire fence of the compound they stopped on the side of the road near a cart path.

  The boy came out from behind the cart and stood in front of the old man.

  “This path leads to the village,” said the old man to the boy.

  The boy lowered his eyes.

  “You can stay with us awhile but then you must leave.”

  The boy felt his heart freeze.

  “You are not of our blood and there is no place for you in the village.”

  “After all we have been through,” the woman said.

  The old man wanted to say: Perhaps I will ask the carpenter whether the boy can stay with us. But the thought that the carpenter might agree filled him with bewildering dread. When in his life had he been so fearful of another, especially a boy?

  He picked up the shaft.

  The boy followed behind the cart as it crossed fields and paddies and began a gradual climb to the crest of a low hill. He could not see what lay below the crest but in the distance beyond the crest was the sloping rise of another hill which flattened into a long shoulder before leading down gently to unfarmed wild-grass fields that went on to the wire fence of the American compound where the trucks with the red crosses stood.

  On the crest the old man and the woman brought the cart to a halt and stood gazing down. The boy thought they would continue on in a moment and waited behind the cart but when they had not moved in a while he came forward and glanced at their faces and realized they were looking down the hill and followed their eyes and saw the village.

  It lay at the end of a small round valley beyond rows of terraced paddies. Winter trees and courtyards and sheds and grass-roofed earthen homes. Two girls on a see-saw near a wall: flowing red and blue skirts green and yellow blouses long red-ribboned pigtails. A woman walked along the village path, a bundle on her head. From some of the chimneys rose white smoke.

  The woman began to weep soundlessly and turned toward the hill, murmuring words of gratitude to the ancestors of the village. The old man felt the rising of the hairs on the back of his neck and the heavy beating of his heart as he stood staring at the columns of climbing white smoke. A confusion of feelings: soaring joy at the saving of the village; astonishment that they had survived; dread at the might of the boy. No doubt now. This is a boy with the same magic as the ginseng root. To have him in our home. Power.

  They brought the cart down the slope and across the paddies and entered the village. The girls came down off the swing and hailed the old man and the woman and stared curiously at the boy. Men and women appeared in doorways and spoke quietly, glancing toward the hill.

  The shed stood intact and the old man went inside but all that was left of the ox was an envelope of leathery skin and some bones crumbling into the earthen floor. A horrid stench filled the air and he backed quickly out. Take care of it tomorrow.

  In the deep pit behind the shed the large clay vase of kimchi lay buried and untouched. But rats had nibbled away much of the rice in the two bags stored in the small shed attached to the animal shed. And nothing remained of the dried fish.

  Murmuring her thanks to the spirits of her ancestors, the woman entered the house. Tiny creatures skittered across the floor, leaving behind zigzagging hairline trails in the thick dust. The main room was cold and had about it the dank smell of the cave. Men and women began appearing in the doorway and speaking softly with the old man and the woman. Where? How long? Most of them farmers. Glances of wonder at the boy. Girls poked their heads in and looked at the boy and giggled.

  Though it was only early afternoon the boy was suddenly very tired.

  A man stood in the doorway, bantam and brown-skinned, deeply furrowed skeletal features, dark glittery narrow eyes, thick-fingered callused hands. He was bareheaded and wore a dark jacket and baggy white trousers and rubber shoes. His hair was white and a wispy white beard lay across his lips and chin. He looked very old and he gazed intently at the boy, and the old man went over to him and they stepped outside, speaking quietly.

  The boy stood watching the woman clean the house. She brushed vermin from the walls and removed the straw mats and inspected the sliding screens and swept the floor. She told the boy where the wood was kept and he went through the kitchen and carried wood inside and pu
t it into the stove. She lit the fire. The hot smoke, moving through the flues beneath the floor to the chimney on the other side of the house, began to warm the air.

  The boy sat down cross-legged on the bare floor and leaned his head against the wall. Fire and ashes, my house. Tired. Am I sick again?

  He fell asleep sitting on the floor and dreamed the house was on fire.

  Someone prodded his shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked into the face of the old man.

  The floor was baking hot. He rose dazedly to his feet.

  “I will return to my village,” he heard himself say.

  “The carpenter is a wise man,” the old man said. “He has been to many towns and has seen the cities and mountains of the North. He says it is a cruelty to send you away and you may remain as long as you wish.”

  “With respect, I will return tomorrow.”

  “You should remain until you get back your strength,” said the woman.

  “Remain as long as you wish,” said the old man again.

  Strange old man. Suddenly he wants me to stay. Why?

  “The carpenter says you can work for the foreigners.”

  “With respect, I will remain until my strength returns and then I will go to my village.”

  “As you wish. In the meantime, if you should want to work for the foreigners, the carpenter will tell you what to do.”

  “I do not want to work for the foreigners.”

  “We must eat,” the old man said. “Many in the village now work for the foreigners. It is not dishonorable.”

  “My mother was a servant in the house of the provincial governor,” said the woman proudly.

  “I want to go home.”

  “If your village is burned and all your people are dead, you have no home,” said the old man. “Your home will be a house for children without parents or fields and roads and streets.”

  And the woman asked, “Did we save you for that?”

  “I’m very tired,” the boy said. He wanted to sit down on the floor and lean his head against the wall and go to sleep. Why couldn’t I find the girl? She would have gone with me to the village.

  The floor was hot. He felt the rising heat brushing his face and eyes. The woman went out to bring the floor mats inside. They had left the cart in the courtyard, near the tree. The man took from it the box with the spirit of his father and placed it tenderly against a wall of the main room. Through the doorway the boy saw the woman shaking out the quilts and running her hands over the corners and edges, searching for lice. She spread two pads on the floor and covered them with quilts. A third pad and a quilt and the gloves she took into the adjacent small room.

  The man squatted on the floor, sucking on his pipe.

  “I will bathe you,” the woman said to the boy, “and then you will sleep.”

  “I am able to bathe myself.”

  “Of course you are. But now you are too tired.”

  “I am not a child.”

  “I don’t know what you were before,” the woman said, “but no one will ever say of you now that you are a child.”

  She drew water from the well and heated it in pots on the stove and the boy sat cross-legged and naked in a tub on the hot floor of the main room and she bathed his face and neck and arms, carefully avoiding the sores on his lips, and then began to wash his back and chest.

  The old man sat on the floor, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and watching the woman bathe the boy. How thin he is, the bones sticking out from his chest and ribs. The penis and genitals look to be fine though the hair has not yet appeared. The years before the body changed: he remembered them dimly as if through a screen of dark smoke; the times of hunting with his uncle were clear. How gently she washes him. Nearly a grown boy and she bathes him as if he is a child. The child if he had lived would be a comfort now in our old age; grandchildren running about. The spirits decreed no. Angry spirits, we give them offerings all the time, with few results. Stop, wrong thoughts, bring on their anger, stop thinking this. Maybe they gave us this boy in exchange, very strong power in him. See how tenderly she bathes him, his thighs and back and genitals. He lets her, he looks so tired. Singing. What is she singing? Arirang, Arirang, O Arirang, The pass of Arirang is long and arduous. In the front of the house the young scholar is late at his books, In the rear of the house his neglected bride is weeping. Old woman’s voice. A good woman. But stubborn. The spirits were cruel to take away the child. See how she dries him now and puts on him an old shirt of mine and old trousers and rubber shoes and they laugh at the size. Do they play with us, the spirits? Are we their amusement? There is magic in this boy but he also brings with him too much remembering.

  The boy slept on a clean pad in the same room with the old man, and the woman slept in the side room. In the early morning, when the old man and the woman woke, the boy was still asleep. They moved about quietly so as not to wake him. When the old man returned to the house at noon after a walk through his fields and rice paddies, the boy was still asleep. He stood a long moment beside the woman, gazing down at the boy, and then went outside to bring more wood for the stove.

  The boy slept a great deal in the weeks that followed but woke at odd hours during the night and lay listening to the dry noisy breathing of the old man and the silence of the village. No sound drifted here from the main road; the village lay in a shell of stillness surrounded by its low hills. Once he woke in the cave with furry winged creatures on his face; another time in the shanty on the plain, the air filled with the choking black cloud and the girl in the doorway like a beckoning ghost. He woke bathed in sweat and trembling, his heart beating ominously and the wound in his chest flaming with pain.

  He rose late one morning and helped the woman bring wood into the kitchen and then walked about the village. Babies in the courtyards, girls on their swings, men repairing the paths and sluices in the fields and paddies, women cooking and washing. The village was smaller than his own: about a dozen homes, a single path, sheds, courtyards, trees. There were no boys his age: did they all work for the foreigners? And no animals. No cows, oxen, dogs. No chickens.

  In the evenings, when people sometimes gathered in the house of the old man and the women, the boy listened to the talk. It was the talk of farmers. Weather. Plowing. No seed for planting. A lost harvest. Famine. Perhaps food from the government or the foreigners.

  When they talked of the war, which was still raging far to the north, they lowered their voices and spoke in tones of fear. Villages all around them had been burned to the ground. Two of the farmers had lost their wives to hunger and sickness in refugee camps. One old man had been killed by an American bomb.

  No one understood why their village had been spared. The boy noticed that whenever they talked of it some would glance at the hill beyond the village and murmur quietly words he could not hear.

  He climbed the hill one afternoon in early spring and found burial mounds scattered about on the small flat areas of its tranquil slope; the broad shoulder was bare of graves and thick with winter weeds. He walked among the mounds awhile and then to the edge of the shoulder. Some distance below lay the American compound with its tents and long low houses and red crosses. Fine yellow dust floated across the compound from the traffic on the main road. As he watched, a small single-engine aircraft raced along the runway of the airfield and lifted itself into the air.

  That night, as they sat on the matted floor after having just finished eating, the boy announced to the old man and the woman that he wished to return to his village.

  The woman blinked and looked down.

  “Perhaps wait a little longer,” said the old man after a moment. There had been a promise of seed from the local government and he wanted the magic of the boy for the time of planting.

  “With respect, tomorrow or the next day.”

  The old man went out to talk to the carpenter.

  “So soon?” murmured the woman. “Are you strong enough?”

  “The snows are gone, the weather
is warm.”

  “I thought you would remain longer.”

  “If there is no one alive may I come back?”

  She nodded gravely. “And if there is someone alive you will not come back.”

  “I will come back to visit.”

  “How I hoped you would remain a while longer,” she said.

  The old man returned with the carpenter. They sat down on the floor at the low table. A few grains of rice clung precariously to the carpenter’s beard.

  The old man spoke to the boy. “The carpenter has something to say to you.”

  “What I wish to say is this,” the carpenter said in a strange whispery voice that seemed to be only air moving between his dry wrinkled lips. The grains of rice trembled on the wisps of his beard. “I wish to say that you should not leave the village now. In your leaving now I see much unhappiness.”

  The old man said, “The carpenter has been to many places and seen many things. He has been to the Shuotsu valley and the Tumen River in the North and to the great thousand-year-old temple of Buddha near Myokosan. He has climbed the sacred mountain to the Lake of Heaven and descended to the cave at the very center of the earth.”

  But the boy had not heard of any of those places and sensed an emptiness in the voice of the old man. Is he repeating words that are without meaning to him?

  The woman said, “It is wise to listen to the words of the carpenter.”

  “Stay until after the planting of the fields,” said the old man.

  “I have seen in dreams the spirits of my father and mother,” the boy said simply.

  They regarded him with startled eyes.

  “Twice I have seen them.”