I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  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.

  “And the grave?” asked the boy.

  “The proper location for the grave is on the shoulder of the hill near the village.”

  “That is a good place,” said the boy.

  “But the cold has frozen the ground and our shovels cannot dig out the earth.”

  The boy felt a deep and terrible shuddering.

  Inside the eyes of the old man were shadowy images of frozen bodies and fire and rising black smoke. Let the boy use his power for this.

  Next morning the boy walked hurriedly to the battalion and spoke with the cook. In the early afternoon the teenage boy appeared at the door to the Jamesway where the boy sat polishing boots.

  “You bring out the shine in those boots all right. The cook said you wanted to see me. What’s it about?”

  The boy told him about the grave and the frozen earth.

  The teenage boy grinned and said, “You came to the right guy, but first you got to do something for me, you got to promise me something.”

  Shortly before the boy returned to the village a man appeared at the house and left a pickax with the old man. It was theirs to keep, he said.

  In the early morning the old man and the boy climbed to the shoulder of the hill. Taking turns with the pickax and the shovel and the leather gloves, they began to dig the grave. Grinding hacking labor with the pickax and shovel through nearly eighteen inches of frozen earth until they reached f
ree soil, still compact enough to need the pickax but without the wrenching force.

  That afternoon the burial procession of the woman left the village and proceeded slowly along the path to the shoulder of the hill. The boy was among those who carried the coffin to the grave. Village women wailed. The boy watched shivering as men heaped earth onto the coffin and the grave filled. A cruel and evil wind blew across the hill and the blue sky seemed as frozen as the ground. From where he stood he was able to see the battalion and the long low building with the white cross and the Jamesway of the chaplain. He looked away and saw the old man holding open over the grave a small box and he heard the old man call out the woman’s name and he saw, he was certain he saw, a gray shadow leap from the grave into the box. The old man closed the box and they all filed back down the hill. The old man carried the box into the house and placed it near the box containing the spirit of his father and covered it with a white cloth and sat down before it, silent, his eyes closed.

  The following morning the boy prepared food for the old man and himself and offered it to the spirit of the woman by leaving it for some moments before the box. They ate the food and the boy cleaned the bowls and afterward climbed the hill and stood before the new grave. A low mound of earth. He tried to imagine the woman’s face in the earth and saw instead the face of his mother. “Amuni,” he murmured. Earth in her eyes and mouth and the village burning.

  The new officer, the chaplain, was enraged: he had waked to discover his tape recorder gone. The boy could understand a little of what he overheard the officer telling the other officers. The tape recorder a farewell gift from his woman friend. Find the crooks who did this. From now on sleep with a bayonet under his pillow. The man’s anger frightened the boy. Never do this again, never. Very dangerous now.

  That night the boy cooked supper for the old man and himself and again offered it to the spirit of the woman. In the morning he climbed the hill to the grave. “Amuni,” he murmured, addressing the woman, and realized it was also to his own mother he was now speaking. And he heard himself then say, “Grandfather, Father,” for he saw them all here now in the grave of the woman.

  This he did every day for the next week.

  One day the old man saw him put on the wide hat of mourning and climb to the grave and return and leave the hat behind when he went off to the foreigners. The old man would not wear the hat of mourning: one did not wear it for one’s wife, because a wife can be replaced but a father and mother are forever lost. Yet the old man felt keenly the loss of the woman, because suddenly there was no one to cook for him or wash or mend his clothes, and if it were not for the boy cooking what would he do; and he was also haunted by clear memories of the woman, and her voice was in his ears, and he could see her face when she was young and not yet ugly; and why had he not married again when it had become clear she could not bear children; had there been something in his feelings toward her deeper than the mere convenience of marriage? Now the spirit of the woman seemed to be everywhere around him, even when he went to the town with the carpenter to forget his sorrow, and one morning, as he watched the boy climb the hill to the grave wearing the hat of mourning, he felt deep within himself a slow and tortuous turning and then an opening of doors to deeper and deeper recesses inside himself, caves leading to caves, and his heart raced and he wondered if this was what was meant by the word love, which he had heard spoken from time to time, this baffling sensation of trembling warmth and closeness he now felt for this boy, and of course he said nothing of it to the boy and not a word even to the carpenter.

  Weeks went by and every day the boy climbed to the shoulder of the hill in his hat of mourning and stood before the grave of the woman and his grandfather and mother and father. Sometimes he sang the song the woman had taught him, Have thine own way Lord have thine own way, and made over the grave the vertical and horizontal motions. Always he spoke to the spirits of the woman and his grandfather and parents, telling them of his work for the foreigners and his life with the old man and once even asking aloud if this was where he would spend all the rest of his years, was there nothing else he could do. If there is something else I can do, show it to me. Sometimes he woke during the night trembling with dreams and lay in the darkness and felt washing down from the hill the comforting spirits of the grave.

  The teenage boy kept showing up at odd times. He seemed to know all the boys who worked in the battalion and many of the American sergeants. Once the boy saw him in a soccer game played in clouds of dust on the battalion compound during the first warm week of spring. Later the teenage boy came over to him, grinning and smelling of sweat.

  “You be a help to me, I be a help to you,” he said. “You got your ox and your pickax, you want something else big, you help me, I help you. You don’t help me, I get another boy, boys like you everywhere, under every stone, think about it.”

  He went off and returned later that day. “Where does your officer keep the camera he just bought? I split with you half half, more than before.”

  The boy shook his head and remained silent and the teenager walked away.

  Some days later a strange stirring was felt in the compound, and excitement played through the air. The boy sensed its presence and went to the cook.

  “Ah, the battalion is moving to a new place,” said the cook.

  The boy was frightened. “Why does it move?”

  “Too much dust from the road all the time, gets into the hospital, bad for the sick people.”

  “Will I lose my job?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Does it move far away?”

  “No, no, it moves only to there,” said the cook and pointed through the wide window of the dining room to the hill behind the village.

  The boy felt the lurching of the ground beneath him.

  That evening he hurried back to the village and found they all knew: the carpenter had been informed by one of his acquaintances in the local administrator’s office. The foreigners would soon be moving to the shoulder of the hill. Yes, the carpenter said somberly, the location of the old woman’s grave would have to be changed.

  “Where?” asked the boy.

  “To the other side of the hill,” said the carpenter.

  “That will bring bad fortune,” said the boy, trembling.

  “Use your power to stop them,” said the old man loudly.

  The boy stared at him.

  “You will know how to stop them,” said the old man. “You saved the village, you brought us food, you found money for the ox.” There was a tone of desperation in his voice. “Your strong spirits will protect the grave.”

  Even the carpenter looked with hope at the boy. And the boy stared back at them in astonishment and suddenly understood the reason the old man had let him remain with them in the village; and at that precise moment the old man, gazing at the boy’s fearful and fragile face, his astonished eyes and trembling chin, realized he truly and deeply loved him. But he did not know what to say or do, and so he said and did nothing.

  In his broken and halting English the boy spoke to the chaplain the next morning. “Battalion move to hill, sah?”

  The chaplain looked surprised. He had been in the battalion some months and had never heard the boy say anything: he always came and went silently, making himself small. “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “I listen American soldiers, sah. Soldiers say to move grave, sah. Not good place. Bad for amuni. Very bad for village.”

  “Calm down. Take it easy. What are you talking about?”

  “Amuni grave on hill.”

  “What?”

  “Amuni, sah. Mama-san. Amuni do for us good things. Amuni have nice place for grave and see all to the south. Now bad people come to village, sah. Bad men, bad women.”

  “What village?”

  “Village near hill where I live. Bad people come make money from Americans.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, there isn’t anything I can do. How old are you?
”

  “I thirteen almost fourteen, sah.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “No money, sah. No school. Grandfather great scholar and poet, but war come and village burned and everyone dead and I live with farmer in this village.”

  He saw the chaplain’s face grow sad and dark, as though disturbed by a long-forgotten memory.

  “I can’t help you about the grave,” the chaplain said and turned away.

  The boy spoke to another of the officers, a doctor, who listened and asked, “Why are you so worried about the grave if she’s not your real mother?”

  “Spirit of my mother in grave too, sah. And spirit of my father. And spirit of my grandfather. All in same grave. Have no other grave.”

  “I don’t understand. It’s a good move to that hill. Get rid of this stinking dust.”

  Two days before the spring plowing the old man and the boy and the carpenter brought the cart to the shoulder of the hill, the old man and the carpenter on the shafts and the boy pushing from behind. They opened the grave. The old man would not let the boy look into the grave as he and the carpenter removed the coffin and loaded it on the cart and covered it with canvas. They brought the cart to the slope on the other side of the hill and with the boy looking away buried the old woman again in the new grave they had earlier dug. Then they returned to the village and that night after supper the old man went to the town with the carpenter and the boy slept in the courtyard on the cart and did not waken when the old man returned.

  One of the boys about his age who worked for the officers vanished. They had become friends and he asked around for him but no one seemed to know anything.

  A second boy returned after a week away, his face purple with bruises, but he would not respond to questions about his absence.