The Iron Sickle

by Martin Limon

  The side of my face still hurt. I touched it gently. Bruised. I probably looked like hell. My headache had been alleviated somewhat by the Tylenol Captain Prevault had given me last night, but it was throbbing again and I didn’t have the heart to wake her just for that. She snored softly.

  “Where the hell are we going to find chow out here?” Ernie asked.

  The village was composed of rickety wooden buildings lining either side of the main road. There were a few signs painted on rotted wood but they said things like GRAIN WAREHOUSE or PAK’S FARM EQUIPMENT. Finally, at the single intersection in town, I spotted the flag of the Republic of Korea hanging from a metal pole on a cement-block building. The local KNP headquarters. We cruised past slowly. No one looked out. Apparently, they were still asleep. A few yards down the road, I spotted three kimchi cabs parked in front of a sign that said Unchon Siktang. The Driver’s Eatery.

  “Pull the jeep around the corner,” I said. “We’ll eat here.”

  Ernie found a place to park the jeep out of sight of the KNP office and padlocked the steering wheel to the chain welded to the metal floor. I woke Captain Prevault, and she looked around groggily.

  “Chow time,” I said.

  She rubbed her eyes and climbed out of the backseat. As we walked toward the eatery, she did her best to wipe the sleep from her eyes and straighten her hair. Once she had it properly arranged, she pulled her field cap down low.

  “Do you think they’ll know I’m a woman?” she asked.

  “I think they’ll figure it out,” I told her. Even though she was shapeless in her fatigues and combat boots, Ernie and I still towered over her.

  The glass in the sliding door was smeared with steam, and when I slid it open and ducked through, the clatter of metal bowls, wooden chopsticks, and porcelain cups stopped abruptly. All eyes turned toward me. I was used to this, and I was not going to let it stop me. The aroma of onions and garlic and hot peppers bubbling in a huge vat alongside chunks of beef made my mouth water. Unfortunately, all of the small tables were taken, but I stood my ground. A woman who I figured to be either the proprietress or a waitress glanced at me and then looked away, as if I represented a problem she hoped would go away on its own. Ernie and then Captain Prevault bumped in behind me.

  “No place to sit?” Captain Prevault asked.

  “Not yet,” I replied.

  Ernie scanned the room. There were fewer than a dozen customers there, most of them workmen wearing jackets, at least three of them the drivers of the cabs parked outside. Ernie spotted a table that was round and big enough for the three of us. Only one man sat there. Ernie took a couple of steps forward and motioned to him. The man was studiously ignoring us, his nose buried in his soup. Ernie slipped through the crowd and wrapped his knuckles loudly on the round table. The man looked up from his soup, startled.

  Ernie pointed outside. “You drive kimchi cab?” The man stared at him with blank surprise so Ernie mimicked both hands turning a steering wheel. “You drive?” he asked. “Outside?”

  The man shook his head negatively and turned back to his soup. Another man rose from a smaller table near the wall and stepped up to Ernie, smiling and motioning toward one of the cabs outside and nodding and pointing at his own nose.

  “You?” Ernie said. “You’re the driver?”

  The man nodded, smiling broadly, sensing a cash-paying fare. Ernie patted him on the back and put his arm halfway around the man’s shoulders and then motioned to me and Captain Prevault. “Come on over here,” he said. “This is the ajjoshi who drives the cab.” We walked over, not sure what Ernie was up to. When we approached, Ernie swiveled away from the smiling driver and grabbed the mostly empty bowl and cup and spoon and chopsticks that had sat on his small table and lifted them over to the larger round table. Ernie motioned for me and Captain Prevault to sit at the small table he had just cleared. We did. Then Ernie motioned to the driver and together they sat down at the larger round table, joining the morose man who glared at their intrusion.

  We waited and within a couple of minutes the rotund middle-aged woman who I believed to be the proprietress approached us, a worried look on her face. When I greeted her in Korean and asked her what they served, she visibly relaxed. In fact she was so relieved we wouldn’t have to wrestle with sign language that she started speaking faster than I could follow. I asked her to slow down and she did. It turned out they had komtang, sliced beef in noodle broth, and since you could usually rely on that to be edible wherever you went I ordered a bowl for myself, as did Ernie and Captain Prevault. Ernie also ordered a chilled bottle of Sunny-tan orange drink. Captain Prevault and I stuck to barley tea.

  The morose man got up and left, so we all slid over to the larger table. This time the driver grabbed the bowl and chopsticks the man had left behind and shoved them out of the way. Now we were comfortable and the driver beamed with joy at having stumbled into such august company. Captain Prevault nodded at him and smiled occasionally, adding to his glee.

  “Yoja i-eyo?” he asked me. Is she a woman?

  Koreans are more frank than Americans about matters of sex.

  “Yes,” I told him. “A woman soldier.”

  “She’s not very pretty,” he told me.

  I translated none of this until Captain Prevault, still smiling, asked me what he said.

  “He said this is the first time he’s ever seen a female American soldier.”

  She smiled back at him and nodded.

  The steaming metal bowls of komtang arrived along with an array of small dishes: rice, cabbage kimchi, and muu-maleingi, dried turnip slices. We wolfed down the soup and the rice and the cabbage kimchi, but when Ernie tried one of the slices of dried turnip he spit it out on the table.

  “What the hell is this?”

  I told him.

  “Who would want to dry a turnip?” he asked. “Isn’t it tasteless enough to begin with?”

  Captain Prevault tried the muu-maleingi, chewed thoroughly and said, “Not bad.”

  Ernie frowned.

  When we were done, I paid the proprietress and we left. The driver followed us outside. He scurried in front of us, reached his cab, and popped open the back door, waving with his hand for Captain Prevault to enter first.

  Ernie waved his open palm at the driver.

  “No need there, papa-san. I drivey jeep. You arra? Jeep.”

  When we breezed past the driver, his face soured. Placing his hands on his hips he walked after us a few paces. When we turned the corner, he was right behind us. Ernie leaned into the open door of the jeep and popped open the padlock. As we started to climb in, the driver screamed at Ernie.

  “Okay, okay,” Ernie said, continuing to wave his open palm in the irate man’s face. “So you lost your seat at the chop house. Tough shit. Life’s a bitch.”

  Ernie offered the man a stick of ginseng gum. When he refused to accept it, Ernie groaned and pulled out a thousand-won note, two bucks. This the driver accepted. He bowed and smiled. As we drove away, the man stared after us, hands on his hips.

  The Simkok-sa Buddhist Monastery sat on a craggy granite cliff surrounded by rolling grey clouds. The roads were treacherous, slippery with mud, and Captain Prevault and I held on for dear life during the entire ride. Ernie, however, seemed to be having a wonderful time, zooming around curbs, downshifting up inclines, slamming on brakes, steering into skids, acting as if the entire rock-hewn road had been especially designed for his driving pleasure. When we finally pulled into the gravel clearing in front of the main gate of the temple, Ernie turned off the engine and Captain Prevault and I climbed out to pay homage, at last, to solid ground.

  Together, we walked to the edge of the cliff. Somber mist billowed gently between the distant peaks of the Taebaek Range.

  Captain Prevault inhaled deeply. “It’s beautiful up here,” she said. “And the air is so clear.”

  Most of these monasteries had been here for centuries. Some of them predated the Chosun Dynasty, their found
ing stretching back to an ancient time when Buddhism had been ascendant in the politics and cultural life of Korea, before the first king of the Chosun Dynasty established Confucianism as the official state religion. The strict precepts of Confucius had long ago taken control of Korean social structure, and although they were still revered by the people, Buddhist monks were definitely not the dominant power anymore.

  “Why are we starting here?” Captain Prevault asked me.

  “My experience has been that these monasteries are the repositories of local knowledge and local history.”

  “What about the Korean National Police? Like that KNP station we passed in Im-dang?”

  I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her about the feuding I suspected between the KNPs and the ROK Army. Instead I just said, “The Korean National Police in some areas of the country are seen not as law enforcement but rather as arms of the occupying government.”

  “I thought Pak Chung-hee was popular.”

  “He is, in Seoul. Out here, not so much.”

  Ernie was checking the oil in the jeep. I suspected if we waited long enough a delegation would emerge from the Simkok-sa Monastery, and I was not disappointed. The big wooden doors beneath the crimson arch creaked like bones and then popped open. Two men walked out, both bald, both wearing saffron robes.

  Captain Prevault and I stepped forward and bowed to the men. They bowed in return. The level of education in Buddhist monasteries is very high and more often than not when I’d encountered monks here in Korea they could always produce at least one of their number who could speak English.

  “Good morning,” one of the monks said. “Welcome to Simkok Temple.”

  He was a youngish man, thin but strong, maybe in his late thirties. The monk next to him was considerably older, with blue pouches beneath sad eyes.

  “Thank you,” I said. I pulled out my identification and handed it to him. He glanced at it and handed it back. “I am Agent Sueño from Eighth Army headquarters in Seoul.” I introduced Captain Prevault as a military psychiatrist and Ernie as my assistant. He wouldn’t have liked that but he was out of earshot, still fussing with the jeep, content to let me handle the boring parts of our job.

  I told the men about the young woman we called Miss Sim, how she’d been abducted from the home for the criminally insane and how we were anxious to find her. We also told them about the man and the woman who had abducted her.

  “Why would Americans be interested?” he asked. “The crime, as I understand it, involves three Korean citizens.”

  I agreed. Then I went on to explain about the man with the iron sickle, the Americans who had been murdered and why I believed the man had been systematically leading us to this area of the Taebaek Mountains.

  “The Lost Echo,” the monk repeated. “Very poetic.”

  “Yes. Have you heard of it?”

  “I haven’t.” He turned to the older man and they conversed for a while until the younger man said, “Excuse us,” and the two of them walked away. Captain Prevault and I waited, out of earshot.

  “Do you think they’ll help?” she asked.

  “We’ll find out.”

  The two returned and the younger man spoke. “Our master remembers the farm couple who was murdered by a young woman with a hoe.” The monk shook his head. “Tragic. And he also remembers the hardships of the war, the winter when the Chinese invaded, the Americans suffering and dying along with Koreans. He remembers it all.”

  “Does he remember the Lost Echo?”

  “He remembers something like it. On that mountain.” The monk turned and pointed. “On that ledge on the southern slope.”

  “I see it.”

  “That’s Mount Daeam. The Americans set up their signal equipment there. Later, when the Chinese came, they took the equipment down and hid.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly.”

  “Were they ever seen again?”

  “Never. Only rumors.”

  “What sort of rumors?”

  “Superstitions, really. Some of the farm people hereabouts claim that on certain nights, when there is a full moon, they can hear the strange foreign sounds of the Americans, like a whispered conversation, floating on the wind.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  The monk shrugged. “All things come within the purview of the Lord Gautama Buddha.”

  “Where is this farm you were talking about, the one where the two elderly people were murdered by the young girl?”

  The monk asked for some paper and pencil and offered to draw me a map. Instead, I pulled out my tactical map and spread it out on the hood of the jeep. Only dim sunlight filtered through the heavy overcast, so I aimed my penlight at the map while the monk studied the multicolored contour lines. He was a bright man. It took him only seconds to say, “Here, this is our position.” He pointed to the military symbol for a Buddhist temple, a red inverted swastika. “The farmhouse is at this end of the valley, in the foothills between us and Mount Daeam.”

  “Not too far from where Echo Company had set up their equipment.”

  “As the crow flies, yes,” he said, surprising me once again with his mastery of English colloquialisms, “but very far indeed if you had to make the climb.”

  “You couldn’t go straight up from the valley to that cliff, could you?”

  “No. There is a narrow path that winds far into the mountains and then a less traveled path that leads back to the cliff.”

  “You’ve hiked those areas?” I asked.

  “Often.”

  “Have you ever heard the whisperings of the Lost Echo?”

  “When I meditate,” he said, “I hear only the whisperings of eternity.”

  It was almost midday when we reached the valley that stretched between the monastery and Mount Daeam. Already we were hungry again, and I realized that in our haste to get out of Yongsan Compound we hadn’t planned this trip very well.

  “We should’ve brought a case of Cs,” Ernie said. He was referring to canned C-rations.

  “Too late now.”

  “Maybe we should stop at one of these farm houses,” Captain Prevault said. “See if they’ll fix us some lunch. We could pay them.” She was hungry too.

  “Not a bad idea,” I said. “Up there,” I told Ernie pointing forward. “Pull into that area in front of the pig hut. Don’t get too close to the main house, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to scare them. This is a military vehicle after all.”

  Ernie did as I asked. I told them to wait, and I walked toward the straw-thatched farmhouse. Smoke trickled from a sheet-metal pipe. Eventually an old woman tottered out, wearing a long woolen skirt and a short traditional silk blouse with a blue ribbon. She stared at me, her wrinkled face scrunched against the pale rays of the afternoon sun.

  “Anyonghaseiyo,” I said, taking a step forward.

  She nodded back noncommittally.

  I told her we were hungry, and we were looking for some place to eat. She told me there was no place around here. When I pressed her she told me about the Driver’s Eatery back in Im-dang. We didn’t want to go there. I offered her money if she’d fix lunch for the three of us. She brightened at that.

  “It will only be soybean soup and kimchi,” she told me. “And my rice is brown.”

  I told her that would be fine. She was a trusting woman, and we didn’t set a price. Twenty minutes later she carried a low wooden table out of her kitchen and set it on the long wooden porch that ran the length of the farmhouse. We sat cross-legged on the porch and ate, lifting the bowls to our mouths and shoveling in the unhusked grain. The soybean soup had no meat in it and that was okay, but the cabbage kimchi was sour, as if it had fermented so long it was turning to vinegar. Still, we ate our fill. When we were done I asked her where the byonso was and while Captain Prevault used it and then Ernie, I spoke to the woman in private. I described the farmhouse in the foothills at the end of the valley that we
were looking for. She knew all about it. It had been abandoned for years and was probably overrun now by field mice.

  “Can you give me directions?” I asked and I started to pull out my field map, but she stared at in horror. I realized the interminable squiggles meant nothing to her, so instead I encouraged her to describe the route in her own way.

  “Follow the road about two li until you reach the creek that flows south past the stand of elms. On the far side of the trees will be a wooden footbridge. Be careful crossing it because it hasn’t been repaired in years, and last year a boy fell in the creek while he was fishing. Follow that pathway up into the hills, and you will find the farmhouse where the old people used to live.”

  “How far into the hills?” I asked.

  “Until the land becomes too steep to farm.”

  She seemed nervous with my questions. In fact she seemed nervous about the whole business of the abandoned farm. I asked her if she’d ever been there.

  “Not since the war,” she replied.

  “Why not?”

  She studied me as if I were an idiot. “They come out at night.”

  “Who comes out at night?”

  “Them. The two old people. Many have seen them at night, crying and complaining and wailing.” Then she hugged herself, shivering even though the wind hadn’t picked up. “Demanding justice.”

  I pointed over my shoulder to Daeam Mountain, toward the cliff where the monks believed Echo Company had once set up its signal equipment. “How about that cliff up there?” I asked. “During the war, Americans were there. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I knew. They were famous.”

  “Famous, why?”

  “Because they were the only people with food and medicine and heating fuel.”

  “Did you ever talk to them?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  This seemed to make her angry so I didn’t press it. “Do you know how I can get up there?”