15
Lying on a Roadside Grave, 1959
Dano was bizarre. He was abnormal sort of a student at a normal school whose major function had been to produce all-around students equipped with the pedagogical capabilities to teach elementary school pupils. He was an odd man out at Andong Normal School. He could neither catch up with both required and elective subjects at school nor could stand the run-of-the-mill classroom activities. He was distracted, absent-minded and obsessed with something else: reading and illusionary thoughts.
Dano knew very well that he was indebted to many others who had molded him up to that time: particularly the boarding and lodging conveniences during his education. He owed the kindnesses and considerations to his homeroom teacher Mr. Tschiang at the senior class of the middle school who had arranged to board Dano and two other students at his father's house during the entrance exam period. He also owed the boarding amenities to his immediate uncle on his mother's side.
Uncle Lee and his wife were financially pinched themselves, but the spouses were generous enough to help Dano out by allowing him to board at their house, such as it was, for nearly a year. Uncle Lee had lived a meager life as a low tax official at Andong County Office, with his residence of two rooms rented from Mr. Kwon, a local rich.
Dano's room, which was attached to the uncle's like conjoined twins, had two first cousin brothers as his room mates. The immediate next-door room had one man and wife and their three daughters as room members. Any member of the adjoining rooms was able to get to the other room through a wall slot by crawling.
Andong-eup, the capital of Andong County at the time, was the greatest place Dano had ever stepped on. There were no bullying pranksters or ijime anymore. Two hundred co-ed peer students of Andong Normal School, of whom there were 50 girl students, were friendly and cooperative. The school had no boarding system, so the students used private boarding houses at a monthly payment, or had to cook on their own at rented rooms.
The husked rice and barley, which Dano had brought from his house for his own cooking, were always in short supply. Dano was always hungry. He more often than not took a few friends of his--The Virtuous Chang and the Prosperous Park, etc-- for ransom to pay his gourmet, the red bean chrysanthemum breads. "Haben Sie Geld?" Dano would ask mischievously of Chang, in clumsy beginner's German, then Chang took Dano by the hand to a roadside shack baking the chrysanthemum breads.
Dano made efforts to bail himself out of financial troubles. He started delivering morning newspapers, but the delivery office chief of a vernacular newspaper showed him the door on the grounds of his tardiness and misdeliveries. Some of his friends went to great lengths to give Dano the job of teaching English, whose suggestion Dano himself snubbed because he was not so versed in the language that he could teach the others.
Dano was well aware that he himself was reputed or rumored to be very good at the language in the town, which was a small one in a strict sense of the word, probably because of Dano's vainglorious and presumptuous habit of grab holding the TIME magazine with him for ever. He loved the magazine, its design, its brilliant headlines and enlightening stories indeed, but his long-lasting accompaniment of the magazine during his high school years was deceptive. Which meant that the grab holding of the prestigious magazine did not guarantee his versatility.
The dandy place, on which the Time magazine did pride itself on its presence, used to be School Book Store. The book store, lined with banks and fashion stores, was located in the central quarter of the riverside town of the Nakdong. The bookshop boasted tens of thousands of glamorous books, the covers of which Dano used to grope with lusty eyes.
He then used to leave the place and head second-hand bookstores, located on the outskirts of the town, where he shuffled through the covers and content pages. The one proprietor of the place, whose plump body wedged itself between disheveled piles of dusty books, was especially curious about and amenable to Dano's frequent visits. He was always willing to lend his books to Dano for an extended period of time at a meager price. He would say to Dano, "Normal is O.K."
Dano had restless nights. Red eyes would throw him curseful blood-shot stares at him, getting him awake startled. He would then sit up absentmindedly for a while or get out of the bedding and pace around, concerned about the wellbeing of his parents.
With no means of electronic communication at the time, Dano, so missing his parents and worried about them, on a certain summer Saturday afternoon, with the last train heading south for Danchon stopped, an intermediary train station for his home, hit the road for home just on foot, for the distance of about 30 kilometers. It was far into the night, almost past midnight, when Dano got to Gowoonsa Temple. It was mildly drizzling. The valley trail, low and shallow, which was past the temple and bending toward Jeomgok, was shrouded with misty fogs.
Graves were lined on both sides of the valley hills from across the trail. It was right time ghosts would come out at their haunts. Dano felt short of breath, with sweats welling down the cheeks, and felt himself restrained by the one. He could not move a step further, so he naturally had to turn around and get to an immediate grave. He then reclined on the grave mound, as if the quiet resting place of a certain silent soul had become a big human pillow of his. He felt so comfortable and so relaxed. "Hello, there!"
Awoken by their son's unexpected small time appearance, Dano's parents couldn't be more astonished. Flabbergasted was the right word for the scene. They got flabbergasted at the shape Dano had been in. Drenched to the skin mixed with sweats, exhausted with hunger and dehydration, their son looked like fainting in any moment. Dano's grandma Mrs, Euiseong Kim hollered and issued orders, and the rest of the family raced. Dano said, "I am fine." He went to the house well, got undressed and cleaned. After a little while he got nourished, too. "How come?" they wanted to know. "I missed home so much!" Dano said, beaming mischievously.
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Bright boys and girls from ten more counties came to the Normal and Tiang Huon was the best and brightest of them all. He was from a northern county of Yeongju. He was tall, shapely and handsome. He was such a handsome kid on the block that the pretty coeds could blush. He was a brilliant student, too, so brilliant a student that he started and finished first of the entire class. Dano, who isolated himself on a bench of the school pond and on the stairs leading to the music room, used to throw an envious glance toward Tiang Huon who, surrounded by his supporters, went by chattering away. On the Fourth of July, 1959 on his second year, Tiang Huon, then the President of the Student Body, came to Dano one day before the occasion, asking him to read the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the United States, for the students. Dano mounted the school pulpit and read the famous address beginning with, "Four score and seven years ago..." That was the first and only occasion that he had talked to the Normal School students in public.
Dano thought to himself that the coed girls in school uniform were handsome, but he was averse to the female human species in general. Afraid of them might have been the right word. Whereas he was somewhat curious about the adult women who had once called on him in another virtual reality called dreamscapes, hankering for the union with him, saying, "Live with me," he in actuality shied away from any contact with the girls whenever he ran into them. There was not a girl who Dano talked to during his school term. The only two extreme prototypes of women, who were the whining and weeping mother type and the hollering and nagging grandmother type, rankled in him. He was virtually ignorant about the human condition that there existed benevolent categories of women in between.
Dano might have heard the whispers ("There goes English!") traded behind his back and he might have savored every minute of them. And it might have been the self-awareness posing as pride that his shallowness of the linguistic capabilities could be bared in the course of his tutorship when he had declined the job opportunity. And he might have been hiding and running from any chance that his vulnerabilities would be exposed. He might have been the very person of mean-spirited cowardice which caused his vainglorious snobbery.
His extreme escapism from women found expressions in misogynistic interpretations of their considerations toward him. The one otherwise clinical episode of his mistaken notions was that one of his high school landladies had once seduced him into "sleeping beside her", taking advantage of the "god-sent" opportunity that her husband and the rest of her family had been away from her home. "Come over and sleep here. Your room is not aptly heated," she had said, with her voice trembling. Dano had found himself grabbing the doorknob, with cold sweat running down and shaking all over. A lone flashback was that he was not sure whether it had been a reality or a nightmare.
His tardiness of classroom activities and loose financial practices incurred him the disaster that Dano could be suspended from graduation. The last grade at the senior class had been rated "out of consideration", which meant that he had been marked at the dangerous bottom which would make his graduation impossible. However, his homeroom teacher Mr. Nine had pleaded with the Graduation Assessment Board to bestow mercy on him on condition that he would pay the default balance amounting to tens of thousands of won to the school stationery office.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Ghosts Dance on the House Roof
14
Ghosts Dance on the House Roof, 1958
Toung Doung got up early at dawn, swept the earth ground clean leading to the mountain spring which had worked as a source of drinking water for the past eight years. He washed his face and hands and dried them with an old towel. He circled "his good old house" several times, stopped for a while to hug the four wooden pillars. He then turned around, walked to the "good old pear tree" and stroked it a thousandth of times. He then turned around, walked up to the rear of the house and stroked two persimmon trees a lot of times.
He then lifted his eyes to see the two frontal hills where his grandmother was buried and his father was transinterred from Danuishill Hill. Mrs. Euiseong Kim rose and got out of the room to see what was going on. She knew what it was meant by her son's pacings. She coughed dry coughs a few times as if to let him know her presence. "Must've slept well, Mother?" Toung Doung said. She had slept well, of course and inquired after his son's last night's wellbeing. It would be a busy day. It was a moving day after eight more years. They had lived long in this place.
She was happy and sad at the same time over the light load of the removal. The moving work would be carried out not by vehicles of any kind but by the power of human muscles only. But the movable goods were so little and so light that would be done by the manipulative transport. Some money, if any, which might have been made by the sale of some surplus rice, beans and other dry field crops, and the mountain produce such as pine mushrooms and other herbal plants, had been invested in the purchase of a water mill and processing plant and its adjacent lot.
The plant had been introduced, recommended and arranged by Toung Doung's elder brother Toung Jahng to erect and operate for the livelihood of the brother family. Toung Jahng was always resourceful in helping his brother Toung Doung manage his family's livelihood, but he had been feeling a guilty feeling of some sort to his younger brother who had been supporting their old mother, Mrs. Euiseong Kim.
There was a change in the membership structure of the moving troops: The Toung Doung couple bereft of their grandmother and lost a son eternally during the Korean War but got a daughter after the war evacuation who would later become a Buddhist nun.
The moving troops packed light. The belongings were packed in the form of backpacks and some loads would be moved on the women's heads. When they had gotten into the valley hut eight years ago the weather had been cloudy and cold and the mountain roadbed had been tough with piles of snow on the rocks. As they got out of the lonely hut to a greater place, the sky was crystal clear without clouds and the mountain roadbed was tough as always but lined with wild flowers, green trees and tall bushes.
There was an odd company this time, or, a feline company for the road. Cat Nabbi was following the troops for most of the route, but at a certain moment, before anybody of the family knew, she betrayed the trust of the family, straying from the family troops. Sexually very responsive then, she opted to pursue her instinctive impulse by trespassing into a village town which had found itself at the tail end of the valley route.
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A water mill plant had been a novel landscape around Oksan-Jeomgok local district, but it turned out to be an object of interest and a target of anathema as well. The locals who had been plowing up the paddy fields regarded the presence of the water mill as a threat to their paddy farming because they thought the mill would contribute to distorting the water flow and snatching it. It was, of course, very convenient of the locals to be able to mill flour from wheat, separate the husk from rice and barley, at a place not far from their residence at a very low fee. Toung Doung had converted from a tough woodcutter to a kind miller with his clothes covered with white flour.
The shallow and narrow waterway along the paddy fields, spanning several kilometers, ran with greed and disbelief. The farmers had to keep a sharp eye on the flow of the farming water, particularly during the summer season. Whenever their fields were not aptly wet, or when the drought spell was in progress, the watching eyes used to be bloodshot. They usually kept vigils all through the night with shovels, picks and scythes. If and when somebody had been caught cheating on the "rationing of the water supply," the farming tools flew to death. They had to obey the rule required for the time and mode of the rationing.
The local paddy farmers, with whom Toung Doung had been familiar or with whom Toung Doung had had clannish connections, held occasional meetings, which had been termed "Waterway Meetings," to give him a rein on the use of the water. So Toung Doung more often than not had to obtain permission to run the mill one or two days in advance. The operation of the water mill plant was hand-handled. It was so easy how to do it. To keep the water from rolling the wheel of the mill, you had to pull up the square wooden handle that was called the "water gate." But to get the water mill rolling and running, you had to push the slot fit watertight in with the wooden board.
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Festivities had been held at successive intervals at Danuishill in the late 1950s. The clan families at Danuishill, who were Dano's distant uncles and aunts, married their daughters as if they were a burden to be disposed of. Since marital affiliations at this small hamlet had usually been made in the perimeter of 20 or so kilometers at the least and several hundred kilometers at the most, the hosts and guests had been mostly close or distant "relatives" on father's or mother's sides.
So when the would-be bridegroom and his party visited the wedding site, which then had been at the bride's, and when the guests got together, they were busy figuring out the relation knots. Dano was told by his grandmother and father to go see the sights and scenes and learn the customs and manners of the traditional weddings. Danuishill ladies were really pretty, he thought, but that the weddings could have been an anathema to the sister ladies. Dano intuited that they, the uncles and aunts, were making a trade in losses, if the human marriages were justified to be figured out in such calculations.
----------------
The lights, although they were flickering in kerosene lamps in the village houses across the road from the water mill, were growing by the hour. Toung Doung, smeared with the flour, was miffed at Dano's presence who should have been at the wedding of Eunshill, the second daughter of Uncle Tower, who had been so called by the origin of his wife's.
He "wanted to know" why his son had left the place so early in which he should have gotten familiarized with the clan families and gotten himself nutrition in the gala event. The bridegroom was too short and ugly for the lily-white beauty of dear Sister Eunshill. Toung Doung questioned with strong words what the hell the short height and uncomely countenance had to do with the propriety of the bridegroom.
Dano had no answer for that. He was reading the novel titled The Story of Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanjhong. The vernacular daily newspaper Dong Ah Il Bo had been running the serialized Korean version of the ancient Chinese war romance. Dogs were heard barking dimly as if they were in a faraway distance. Tsao Tsao's army troops must have vandalized the town, Dano shuddered.
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There were harassers who kept pestering Dano like dung flies clinging to the back of a cow. They were Oksan Elementary School graduates who went to Jeomgok Middle School, the near myon town. Although they were distanced by Dano who had gotten nearer the middle school, they still were predators who were able to harrass the poor Dano with impunity.
Thing was that a metamorphosis of some sort had taken place from individual harassment, which had been done at the time of the elementary school years, to group harrassment. The bullies used to select one dull underling or two to play the teaser who played havoc in no time on the poor victim. The pranksters watched their puppet get to Dano and kick him from behind, trample him on the feet, or nudge him in the rib from nowhere and laughed out loud or giggled away while the poor Dano was startled, shrieking.
On one early summer's day, Dano decided to put a stop to all those insanities once and for all. It was late afternoon. They were on their way home from school. He distanced himself from the bullies getting ahead of him talking, talking, talking; He figured out the stream bed which had bottomed itself out and on which gravels were all over the place after all the dry spells; He calculated the distance which would be fittest for him to attack.
He then dashed at him and knocked him over; He mounted the fallen bully and punched him on the face hard right and left, left and right. There were the other harassers who had kept troubling Dano, watching the scene. He vanquished the real and imagined harassers for ever, with the beaten boy showing up the next day, led by his father before Dano's father's presence, asking for Dano's punishment for his son's mangled face, and with the end of the meanspirited approach of the pranksters.
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However, another faceless and unseen harasser or harassers kept troubling him, in the depth of nights' slumber. He most of the time awoke, scared, chased and terrified by the unidentified stuff. Two small rooms, about four square meters each in width, and with clayed room floor and wall, which had been annexed to the water mill plant, on Dano brother's later recollections, had been haunted.
On a late autumn night, November someday, 1957, when Dano was on his middle school junior year, his father Toung Doung had been away from home, to Daegu probably for the purchase of sea fish and vegetables to be used for clannish rituals. Dano, chased in his dreams by gangsters or something for the whole night, who, with their guns lifting, at the last moment, were seen to aim at him, awoke startled and screaming. He, at the same moment, heard his mother shriek, crying at the top of her voice, "Cut the water off the gate!"
Dano kicked the room door open and raced up the slope to "the water gate." He lifted it up and let the water fall through the open slot. He then raced down the slope to the mill and tried to get what had happened.
He was in panic; The lights were not very bright because the only kerosene lamp was dangling above the machine. While he was in chaotic confusion, his brother and grandmother raced into the mill. There were yells and shrieks. Boolim Lee was in disastrous shape, got her one arm wrapped in the conveyor belt, and the other arm wrapped in the cogs of the wheel.
The loose garments of her chima and jogori were to blame. She should have worn tighter. She bemoaned. They paced up and around the brutal machine and after trials they managed to drag her out of the wheels and belt after all. The one arm of hers was in mangled state. The blood was oozing out of the also mangled wear.
His grandmother was complaining, whining and blaming herself endlessly and trying something to stop her daughter-in-law's hemorrhage. Dano raced out of the mill. He was still in his bare feet. It was a frosty morning, which he did not care. He raced all the way to Dr. Choi's, two kilometers away, the only one-man clinic in the whole town. He did own "an office" attached to his house, but he had no nurses nor facilities which could be described as hospital or clinic. Awoken by Dano in bare feet, he hastened to the patient's assistance, with his first-aid kit on his age-old bicycle.
Left alone, after the doctor had departed for the site of the disaster in haste, Dano belatedly realized his sore feet. And he felt a little cold. He limped a little and stopped to think to a shudder of his nightmares and his mother's machine mishap. The tragic instant's scream echoed in his ears all the way home from the doctor's. He shuddered to his dismay the potential ubiquity of the evil spirits which had attempted on his mother. Why, he intoned to himself, “did the devils or the demons try to attempt on his mother, while terrifying her poor son? Dano was really scared. He was extremely disturbed bordering on disorientation.
Boolim Lee, who had been given a hemostatic treatment and a first-aid dressing, was transported, on board the only inter-town bus to a surgical hospital at Euiseong, the capital of Euiseong County, called Gongsaeng Hospital. Boolim's wound was severe: deep, wide and gaping. The cog wheels had pierced into her arm flesh, having torn it apart.
"Several muscle lines on the patient's right arm must have been torn off," the doctor, who was to perform the surgery, said, "so much so that the patient, even after the operation, would have some difficulty moving the hand." Dano was once again surprised to find his mother, who had been moved to the convalescent room, did not utter a word of pain, which reminded him, judging from his mother's utter composure, of her cold silence about the sudden death of her third son and Dano' second brother immediately after the war evacuation.
The nick of time helping hands contributed to Boolim's survival: The absence of Dr. Choi's first-aid efforts might have been fatal, and the unavailability of a swift operation by a competent surgeon might have made her limb activities incapacitated. And the good Samaritan acts by the couple of Brother West greatly enhanced a chance for Boolim's restoration of health. Brother West and his wife, Mrs. Mooshill Liu, had kept a modest residence at the capital but the hospitalities they had provided were grand.
Brother West was not an immediate nor a close relative; He was a clan brother, indeed but are a remote brother who was four times removed, which meant that Brother West was on ten-knot relation with Dano. Husband and wife are zero knot; Parents and their offspring are one-knot relation. Brothers and sisters of the same parents are two- knot relation; And uncles and their nephews and nieces are three-knot relation. Although remote, the Wests acted as if they had been close relatives. Brother West, on Dano's terms, was a government official on the middle hierarchical ladder who worked at the county education office.
Hospitality One of the West, after having been informed of Boolim's mishap, was send a telegram to Toung Doung which notified him of her misfortune. Hospitality Two was send his wife Mrs. Mooshill Liu to arrange Boolim's hospitalization procedures with the hospital official in charge. Hospitality Three was that the couple called on the poor patient, comforting her by assuring that she would not have much difficulty using her hands. Hospitality Four was the West couple's delivering nutritional meals for Boolim by themselves.
They also took Dano to their home to feed him. Dano found that there had been two student boarders from Danuishill who went to district high school or something. In fact, The West's house played the role of a stopover place for the clan members who would go up and come down from Seoul or the other major national cities. Dano remembered the amicable ambience by the merry voice of the "six princesses" of the West saying, "Nice coming, Uncle Dano!" The flashback of the later years was that the hospitality role of the house would have been impossible if somebody of the clan had heard some voice in the house raised, if somebody had watched the hostess or the princesses make face, or if some clan visitors had heard the door banged shut behind them.
---------------
Routines were restored. Toung Doung was hard at work again at the grinding mill; Mrs. Euiseong Kim was on her routine tour of her oldest son's about one kilo meter away, talking behind her son Toung Jahng and his wife's back when she returned to the mill, with Boolim at a loss what to do about that. Boolim, after more than a month's hospitalization, managed to manipulate things with her arms but was not able to articulate two fingers of her right hand, which might have been a sheer luck after all the mishap.
What got any member of the Toung Doung family really wounded was invisible. Under the facade of the normalcy, that is, the restoration of routines, trauma was at work on Dano. What really troubled him was the mystery of the spontaneity of his shrieky nightmare with his mother's misfortune in proximity to a mere few feet across the room door.
Dano was all nerves about people and things around him. In one reality where he moved in the sunlight with eyes and ears open, he was cognizant of stares all around. In the other reality where night came and he slept in fits and starts, snipers were lurking in ambushes; and the air was about to be torn to shreds in no time by shrill cries.
Which naturally resulted in Dano's lack of attention and focus at his middle school class rooms. His distractions caused disciplinary activities by the teachers by which he was suspended several times from school. His intuition told him that evil spirits were really hard at work on his mother and him. Dano's brother Illczhin confided to him casually one day decades later that he had seen very often at the time human shapes in white garb dance on the house roof of the water mill.
Ghosts Dance on the House Roof, 1958
Toung Doung got up early at dawn, swept the earth ground clean leading to the mountain spring which had worked as a source of drinking water for the past eight years. He washed his face and hands and dried them with an old towel. He circled "his good old house" several times, stopped for a while to hug the four wooden pillars. He then turned around, walked to the "good old pear tree" and stroked it a thousandth of times. He then turned around, walked up to the rear of the house and stroked two persimmon trees a lot of times.
He then lifted his eyes to see the two frontal hills where his grandmother was buried and his father was transinterred from Danuishill Hill. Mrs. Euiseong Kim rose and got out of the room to see what was going on. She knew what it was meant by her son's pacings. She coughed dry coughs a few times as if to let him know her presence. "Must've slept well, Mother?" Toung Doung said. She had slept well, of course and inquired after his son's last night's wellbeing. It would be a busy day. It was a moving day after eight more years. They had lived long in this place.
She was happy and sad at the same time over the light load of the removal. The moving work would be carried out not by vehicles of any kind but by the power of human muscles only. But the movable goods were so little and so light that would be done by the manipulative transport. Some money, if any, which might have been made by the sale of some surplus rice, beans and other dry field crops, and the mountain produce such as pine mushrooms and other herbal plants, had been invested in the purchase of a water mill and processing plant and its adjacent lot.
The plant had been introduced, recommended and arranged by Toung Doung's elder brother Toung Jahng to erect and operate for the livelihood of the brother family. Toung Jahng was always resourceful in helping his brother Toung Doung manage his family's livelihood, but he had been feeling a guilty feeling of some sort to his younger brother who had been supporting their old mother, Mrs. Euiseong Kim.
There was a change in the membership structure of the moving troops: The Toung Doung couple bereft of their grandmother and lost a son eternally during the Korean War but got a daughter after the war evacuation who would later become a Buddhist nun.
The moving troops packed light. The belongings were packed in the form of backpacks and some loads would be moved on the women's heads. When they had gotten into the valley hut eight years ago the weather had been cloudy and cold and the mountain roadbed had been tough with piles of snow on the rocks. As they got out of the lonely hut to a greater place, the sky was crystal clear without clouds and the mountain roadbed was tough as always but lined with wild flowers, green trees and tall bushes.
There was an odd company this time, or, a feline company for the road. Cat Nabbi was following the troops for most of the route, but at a certain moment, before anybody of the family knew, she betrayed the trust of the family, straying from the family troops. Sexually very responsive then, she opted to pursue her instinctive impulse by trespassing into a village town which had found itself at the tail end of the valley route.
------------------
A water mill plant had been a novel landscape around Oksan-Jeomgok local district, but it turned out to be an object of interest and a target of anathema as well. The locals who had been plowing up the paddy fields regarded the presence of the water mill as a threat to their paddy farming because they thought the mill would contribute to distorting the water flow and snatching it. It was, of course, very convenient of the locals to be able to mill flour from wheat, separate the husk from rice and barley, at a place not far from their residence at a very low fee. Toung Doung had converted from a tough woodcutter to a kind miller with his clothes covered with white flour.
The shallow and narrow waterway along the paddy fields, spanning several kilometers, ran with greed and disbelief. The farmers had to keep a sharp eye on the flow of the farming water, particularly during the summer season. Whenever their fields were not aptly wet, or when the drought spell was in progress, the watching eyes used to be bloodshot. They usually kept vigils all through the night with shovels, picks and scythes. If and when somebody had been caught cheating on the "rationing of the water supply," the farming tools flew to death. They had to obey the rule required for the time and mode of the rationing.
The local paddy farmers, with whom Toung Doung had been familiar or with whom Toung Doung had had clannish connections, held occasional meetings, which had been termed "Waterway Meetings," to give him a rein on the use of the water. So Toung Doung more often than not had to obtain permission to run the mill one or two days in advance. The operation of the water mill plant was hand-handled. It was so easy how to do it. To keep the water from rolling the wheel of the mill, you had to pull up the square wooden handle that was called the "water gate." But to get the water mill rolling and running, you had to push the slot fit watertight in with the wooden board.
-----------------
Festivities had been held at successive intervals at Danuishill in the late 1950s. The clan families at Danuishill, who were Dano's distant uncles and aunts, married their daughters as if they were a burden to be disposed of. Since marital affiliations at this small hamlet had usually been made in the perimeter of 20 or so kilometers at the least and several hundred kilometers at the most, the hosts and guests had been mostly close or distant "relatives" on father's or mother's sides.
So when the would-be bridegroom and his party visited the wedding site, which then had been at the bride's, and when the guests got together, they were busy figuring out the relation knots. Dano was told by his grandmother and father to go see the sights and scenes and learn the customs and manners of the traditional weddings. Danuishill ladies were really pretty, he thought, but that the weddings could have been an anathema to the sister ladies. Dano intuited that they, the uncles and aunts, were making a trade in losses, if the human marriages were justified to be figured out in such calculations.
----------------
The lights, although they were flickering in kerosene lamps in the village houses across the road from the water mill, were growing by the hour. Toung Doung, smeared with the flour, was miffed at Dano's presence who should have been at the wedding of Eunshill, the second daughter of Uncle Tower, who had been so called by the origin of his wife's.
He "wanted to know" why his son had left the place so early in which he should have gotten familiarized with the clan families and gotten himself nutrition in the gala event. The bridegroom was too short and ugly for the lily-white beauty of dear Sister Eunshill. Toung Doung questioned with strong words what the hell the short height and uncomely countenance had to do with the propriety of the bridegroom.
Dano had no answer for that. He was reading the novel titled The Story of Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanjhong. The vernacular daily newspaper Dong Ah Il Bo had been running the serialized Korean version of the ancient Chinese war romance. Dogs were heard barking dimly as if they were in a faraway distance. Tsao Tsao's army troops must have vandalized the town, Dano shuddered.
-------------
There were harassers who kept pestering Dano like dung flies clinging to the back of a cow. They were Oksan Elementary School graduates who went to Jeomgok Middle School, the near myon town. Although they were distanced by Dano who had gotten nearer the middle school, they still were predators who were able to harrass the poor Dano with impunity.
Thing was that a metamorphosis of some sort had taken place from individual harassment, which had been done at the time of the elementary school years, to group harrassment. The bullies used to select one dull underling or two to play the teaser who played havoc in no time on the poor victim. The pranksters watched their puppet get to Dano and kick him from behind, trample him on the feet, or nudge him in the rib from nowhere and laughed out loud or giggled away while the poor Dano was startled, shrieking.
On one early summer's day, Dano decided to put a stop to all those insanities once and for all. It was late afternoon. They were on their way home from school. He distanced himself from the bullies getting ahead of him talking, talking, talking; He figured out the stream bed which had bottomed itself out and on which gravels were all over the place after all the dry spells; He calculated the distance which would be fittest for him to attack.
He then dashed at him and knocked him over; He mounted the fallen bully and punched him on the face hard right and left, left and right. There were the other harassers who had kept troubling Dano, watching the scene. He vanquished the real and imagined harassers for ever, with the beaten boy showing up the next day, led by his father before Dano's father's presence, asking for Dano's punishment for his son's mangled face, and with the end of the meanspirited approach of the pranksters.
------------------
However, another faceless and unseen harasser or harassers kept troubling him, in the depth of nights' slumber. He most of the time awoke, scared, chased and terrified by the unidentified stuff. Two small rooms, about four square meters each in width, and with clayed room floor and wall, which had been annexed to the water mill plant, on Dano brother's later recollections, had been haunted.
On a late autumn night, November someday, 1957, when Dano was on his middle school junior year, his father Toung Doung had been away from home, to Daegu probably for the purchase of sea fish and vegetables to be used for clannish rituals. Dano, chased in his dreams by gangsters or something for the whole night, who, with their guns lifting, at the last moment, were seen to aim at him, awoke startled and screaming. He, at the same moment, heard his mother shriek, crying at the top of her voice, "Cut the water off the gate!"
Dano kicked the room door open and raced up the slope to "the water gate." He lifted it up and let the water fall through the open slot. He then raced down the slope to the mill and tried to get what had happened.
He was in panic; The lights were not very bright because the only kerosene lamp was dangling above the machine. While he was in chaotic confusion, his brother and grandmother raced into the mill. There were yells and shrieks. Boolim Lee was in disastrous shape, got her one arm wrapped in the conveyor belt, and the other arm wrapped in the cogs of the wheel.
The loose garments of her chima and jogori were to blame. She should have worn tighter. She bemoaned. They paced up and around the brutal machine and after trials they managed to drag her out of the wheels and belt after all. The one arm of hers was in mangled state. The blood was oozing out of the also mangled wear.
His grandmother was complaining, whining and blaming herself endlessly and trying something to stop her daughter-in-law's hemorrhage. Dano raced out of the mill. He was still in his bare feet. It was a frosty morning, which he did not care. He raced all the way to Dr. Choi's, two kilometers away, the only one-man clinic in the whole town. He did own "an office" attached to his house, but he had no nurses nor facilities which could be described as hospital or clinic. Awoken by Dano in bare feet, he hastened to the patient's assistance, with his first-aid kit on his age-old bicycle.
Left alone, after the doctor had departed for the site of the disaster in haste, Dano belatedly realized his sore feet. And he felt a little cold. He limped a little and stopped to think to a shudder of his nightmares and his mother's machine mishap. The tragic instant's scream echoed in his ears all the way home from the doctor's. He shuddered to his dismay the potential ubiquity of the evil spirits which had attempted on his mother. Why, he intoned to himself, “did the devils or the demons try to attempt on his mother, while terrifying her poor son? Dano was really scared. He was extremely disturbed bordering on disorientation.
Boolim Lee, who had been given a hemostatic treatment and a first-aid dressing, was transported, on board the only inter-town bus to a surgical hospital at Euiseong, the capital of Euiseong County, called Gongsaeng Hospital. Boolim's wound was severe: deep, wide and gaping. The cog wheels had pierced into her arm flesh, having torn it apart.
"Several muscle lines on the patient's right arm must have been torn off," the doctor, who was to perform the surgery, said, "so much so that the patient, even after the operation, would have some difficulty moving the hand." Dano was once again surprised to find his mother, who had been moved to the convalescent room, did not utter a word of pain, which reminded him, judging from his mother's utter composure, of her cold silence about the sudden death of her third son and Dano' second brother immediately after the war evacuation.
The nick of time helping hands contributed to Boolim's survival: The absence of Dr. Choi's first-aid efforts might have been fatal, and the unavailability of a swift operation by a competent surgeon might have made her limb activities incapacitated. And the good Samaritan acts by the couple of Brother West greatly enhanced a chance for Boolim's restoration of health. Brother West and his wife, Mrs. Mooshill Liu, had kept a modest residence at the capital but the hospitalities they had provided were grand.
Brother West was not an immediate nor a close relative; He was a clan brother, indeed but are a remote brother who was four times removed, which meant that Brother West was on ten-knot relation with Dano. Husband and wife are zero knot; Parents and their offspring are one-knot relation. Brothers and sisters of the same parents are two- knot relation; And uncles and their nephews and nieces are three-knot relation. Although remote, the Wests acted as if they had been close relatives. Brother West, on Dano's terms, was a government official on the middle hierarchical ladder who worked at the county education office.
Hospitality One of the West, after having been informed of Boolim's mishap, was send a telegram to Toung Doung which notified him of her misfortune. Hospitality Two was send his wife Mrs. Mooshill Liu to arrange Boolim's hospitalization procedures with the hospital official in charge. Hospitality Three was that the couple called on the poor patient, comforting her by assuring that she would not have much difficulty using her hands. Hospitality Four was the West couple's delivering nutritional meals for Boolim by themselves.
They also took Dano to their home to feed him. Dano found that there had been two student boarders from Danuishill who went to district high school or something. In fact, The West's house played the role of a stopover place for the clan members who would go up and come down from Seoul or the other major national cities. Dano remembered the amicable ambience by the merry voice of the "six princesses" of the West saying, "Nice coming, Uncle Dano!" The flashback of the later years was that the hospitality role of the house would have been impossible if somebody of the clan had heard some voice in the house raised, if somebody had watched the hostess or the princesses make face, or if some clan visitors had heard the door banged shut behind them.
---------------
Routines were restored. Toung Doung was hard at work again at the grinding mill; Mrs. Euiseong Kim was on her routine tour of her oldest son's about one kilo meter away, talking behind her son Toung Jahng and his wife's back when she returned to the mill, with Boolim at a loss what to do about that. Boolim, after more than a month's hospitalization, managed to manipulate things with her arms but was not able to articulate two fingers of her right hand, which might have been a sheer luck after all the mishap.
What got any member of the Toung Doung family really wounded was invisible. Under the facade of the normalcy, that is, the restoration of routines, trauma was at work on Dano. What really troubled him was the mystery of the spontaneity of his shrieky nightmare with his mother's misfortune in proximity to a mere few feet across the room door.
Dano was all nerves about people and things around him. In one reality where he moved in the sunlight with eyes and ears open, he was cognizant of stares all around. In the other reality where night came and he slept in fits and starts, snipers were lurking in ambushes; and the air was about to be torn to shreds in no time by shrill cries.
Which naturally resulted in Dano's lack of attention and focus at his middle school class rooms. His distractions caused disciplinary activities by the teachers by which he was suspended several times from school. His intuition told him that evil spirits were really hard at work on his mother and him. Dano's brother Illczhin confided to him casually one day decades later that he had seen very often at the time human shapes in white garb dance on the house roof of the water mill.
Grandma's Lamp
13
Grandma's Lamp on the Pine Hill,1956
Dano could not get what was in his mind across to his family, to his elementary school friends and to whoever he was in contact with. The folks around him could not guess how much he was traumatized by the recent incidents, either. He had sobbed unawares over the parting with the dear cow because of his ignorance and betrayal; He had flabbergasted over the sudden disappearance of his brother and his parents' silence pact; He had mulled over the nocturnal wails at Cheongdo Refugee Camp; He had sneezed and frowned on the stench of the dung fields; He had from time to time shaken his body over the gunshot noises and the images of the pitiful falls.
Dano was a lonely boy in Sun Valley. He was all alone; had no one to talk to; had no friends to talk with. His grandmother Mrs. Euiseong Kim was busy nagging her poor daughter-in-law who was also busy whining and weeping. His father Toung Doung was also busy tilling in the fields or cutting the woods.
There was no peer pressure but peer torture. The bullies at the school village and nearby villages had a good time taunting him, alienating him, playing harsh pranks on him, and cursing him, "Let the tigers eat you up!"
He had developed no skills to respond to that bullying. The boys of the peer age had to become buddies, but they always turned out to be bullies: They were predators prowling the hills for the poor prey. There were no interactions: Dano plummeted into the bottom of a great reservoir onto which all the garbages had been thrown away, sunk, and deposited.
Dano sought solace in nature. Nature was all that he had depended on: She was a true friend to converse with, a mentor to consult, a mother to whisper to, a judge to appeal and a god to pray to. Mounting any hill of the valley, reclining on a hilly grass surrounded with tall bushes, looking up to the clear autumnal sky, savoring the aromatic air coming up from valley creeks, pines, wild flowers, and low hill reeds, seeing iris beam at him, he acquired peace.
Warm sun rays, which were shining celebration and consecration on him, soothed him to doze off, finally to slumber. Even in those catnaps, fairies used to take a visit to him, seducing him, whispering to his inattentive ears, "Live with me, honey!" Still, it's a mystery how the fairies had come to materialize in a eight-year-old boy's dream as mature women, not juvenile girls.
Boy Dano had had no girls in the neighborhood to speak to, much less to play with. There had been no girls about him at Sun valley. At the faraway school, there were girls, of course, but he was shy, so shy that he did not get near them nor looked at them. It's another mystery what it had meant by the pretty women's seduction remarks, "Live with me, honey!"
To Dano, there were only two categories of women in the world: the victim and the victimizer. His mother Boolim Lee was a victim who had been nagged, reprimanded and scolded, and cursed by her heartless mother-in-law and his grandmother Mrs. Euiseong Kim was the victimizer who had been destroying every minute of her daughter-in-law.
Boolim had a tough time weeping and whining. There were no men of understanding, symbiosis and harmony. So to Dano, women of the world, and girls of the world, too, would hurt him or be harmed by him. There were only women of extremes; There were no women in between. He despised women and was afraid of them at the same time. He did not get near the school girls, either.
To Dano, a major impediment to his long-distance walking commute to and from school was the weather factor. The hot and cold temperatures were an obstacle, of course, but they were a minor one. The rain and snow precipitation was a major obstacle for pedestrian commute. Regarding Dano's long-distance commuting, Dano's Father Toung Doung took a standoffish attitude and his mother did the same, too, because Dano' grandma was the only one who could control, that is, who could decide to run the gauntlet.
When snow fell heavily, Mrs. Euiseong Kim opted to keep her grandson from attending class. But more often than not Dano was insistent on going. On one winter day in the year 1952, at his fourth class year at the elementary school, he had had huge snows. He was looking out the classroom window anxiously while snow went on falling.
So when he hit the road back home, he had to trudge through the white pile which had turned disastrous during the five-lesson period. And when it rained it almost always poured, and the problem was that when he got to the stream that became a river the kids of the village had already crossed it. He had almost met early death once when he had gotten hit by the running rocks while crossing for himself the rapid stream which had swollen suddenly.
Although pranksters were all around, it did not mean that all the surrounding situation was against him. Mr. Kwon, Dano's fifth- and sixth-year classroom teacher, was a very sympathetic and compassionate gentleman, and his wife was also very nice. When blizzards struck and when rainstorms darkened the sky, the kind-hearted couple invited Student Dano to stay at their home.
But the peers were deadly against him. When dusk fell after six class lessons, the peer boys and girls hurried home where the whiffs of smoke were coming out of the house chimneys, which hinted that supper was being cooked somewhere in there. The boys jeered as they raced into their village homes, throwing curses on Dano, saying "Tigers will eat you up!"
There was not a tiger, of course, but the curse words gave him a chill in the back. And there had been a moment fright came on him so much so that he froze when it drizzled on the moonless valley and when he passed the roadside grave shrouded with night mists. But he could not turn around and run. If he had done it, he knew he would not be able to return home and that actually there was not a home which would welcome him back. So he knew among all things that he had to keep going because his grandma was waiting for her dear grandson on the hilly pass, holding a kerosene lamp.
Grandma's Lamp on the Pine Hill,1956
Dano could not get what was in his mind across to his family, to his elementary school friends and to whoever he was in contact with. The folks around him could not guess how much he was traumatized by the recent incidents, either. He had sobbed unawares over the parting with the dear cow because of his ignorance and betrayal; He had flabbergasted over the sudden disappearance of his brother and his parents' silence pact; He had mulled over the nocturnal wails at Cheongdo Refugee Camp; He had sneezed and frowned on the stench of the dung fields; He had from time to time shaken his body over the gunshot noises and the images of the pitiful falls.
Dano was a lonely boy in Sun Valley. He was all alone; had no one to talk to; had no friends to talk with. His grandmother Mrs. Euiseong Kim was busy nagging her poor daughter-in-law who was also busy whining and weeping. His father Toung Doung was also busy tilling in the fields or cutting the woods.
There was no peer pressure but peer torture. The bullies at the school village and nearby villages had a good time taunting him, alienating him, playing harsh pranks on him, and cursing him, "Let the tigers eat you up!"
He had developed no skills to respond to that bullying. The boys of the peer age had to become buddies, but they always turned out to be bullies: They were predators prowling the hills for the poor prey. There were no interactions: Dano plummeted into the bottom of a great reservoir onto which all the garbages had been thrown away, sunk, and deposited.
Dano sought solace in nature. Nature was all that he had depended on: She was a true friend to converse with, a mentor to consult, a mother to whisper to, a judge to appeal and a god to pray to. Mounting any hill of the valley, reclining on a hilly grass surrounded with tall bushes, looking up to the clear autumnal sky, savoring the aromatic air coming up from valley creeks, pines, wild flowers, and low hill reeds, seeing iris beam at him, he acquired peace.
Warm sun rays, which were shining celebration and consecration on him, soothed him to doze off, finally to slumber. Even in those catnaps, fairies used to take a visit to him, seducing him, whispering to his inattentive ears, "Live with me, honey!" Still, it's a mystery how the fairies had come to materialize in a eight-year-old boy's dream as mature women, not juvenile girls.
Boy Dano had had no girls in the neighborhood to speak to, much less to play with. There had been no girls about him at Sun valley. At the faraway school, there were girls, of course, but he was shy, so shy that he did not get near them nor looked at them. It's another mystery what it had meant by the pretty women's seduction remarks, "Live with me, honey!"
To Dano, there were only two categories of women in the world: the victim and the victimizer. His mother Boolim Lee was a victim who had been nagged, reprimanded and scolded, and cursed by her heartless mother-in-law and his grandmother Mrs. Euiseong Kim was the victimizer who had been destroying every minute of her daughter-in-law.
Boolim had a tough time weeping and whining. There were no men of understanding, symbiosis and harmony. So to Dano, women of the world, and girls of the world, too, would hurt him or be harmed by him. There were only women of extremes; There were no women in between. He despised women and was afraid of them at the same time. He did not get near the school girls, either.
To Dano, a major impediment to his long-distance walking commute to and from school was the weather factor. The hot and cold temperatures were an obstacle, of course, but they were a minor one. The rain and snow precipitation was a major obstacle for pedestrian commute. Regarding Dano's long-distance commuting, Dano's Father Toung Doung took a standoffish attitude and his mother did the same, too, because Dano' grandma was the only one who could control, that is, who could decide to run the gauntlet.
When snow fell heavily, Mrs. Euiseong Kim opted to keep her grandson from attending class. But more often than not Dano was insistent on going. On one winter day in the year 1952, at his fourth class year at the elementary school, he had had huge snows. He was looking out the classroom window anxiously while snow went on falling.
So when he hit the road back home, he had to trudge through the white pile which had turned disastrous during the five-lesson period. And when it rained it almost always poured, and the problem was that when he got to the stream that became a river the kids of the village had already crossed it. He had almost met early death once when he had gotten hit by the running rocks while crossing for himself the rapid stream which had swollen suddenly.
Although pranksters were all around, it did not mean that all the surrounding situation was against him. Mr. Kwon, Dano's fifth- and sixth-year classroom teacher, was a very sympathetic and compassionate gentleman, and his wife was also very nice. When blizzards struck and when rainstorms darkened the sky, the kind-hearted couple invited Student Dano to stay at their home.
But the peers were deadly against him. When dusk fell after six class lessons, the peer boys and girls hurried home where the whiffs of smoke were coming out of the house chimneys, which hinted that supper was being cooked somewhere in there. The boys jeered as they raced into their village homes, throwing curses on Dano, saying "Tigers will eat you up!"
There was not a tiger, of course, but the curse words gave him a chill in the back. And there had been a moment fright came on him so much so that he froze when it drizzled on the moonless valley and when he passed the roadside grave shrouded with night mists. But he could not turn around and run. If he had done it, he knew he would not be able to return home and that actually there was not a home which would welcome him back. So he knew among all things that he had to keep going because his grandma was waiting for her dear grandson on the hilly pass, holding a kerosene lamp.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Summary Execution on the Stream River Bed
12
Summary Execution, 1950
A misfortune after another occurred. Hardly had the Toung Doung family returned from the refugee evacuation when his grand mother was bedridden until she died one month later. Dano's second brother below him, who had been very active and playful, went away after his great grand mother one month or so later. The poor brother disappeared suddenly overnight. That was so dreadful. Dano surmised his parents' sad conspiracies, in which they had, in the small hours of the night, moved and buried the sudden dead body of their son somewhere in the nearby hill hurriedly.
Astonishing thing was that his death was not pronounced before the family, that nobody including his parents questioned his sudden disappearance, and that the rest of the family did not and could not ask about his whereabouts. The unfortunate parents, Toung Doung and Boolim, did not mention their dear son's sudden death even once thereafter and did not cry even once, either. Which was really dreadful.
A third misfortune, that is, a severe infraction, was inflicted on the cow which had accompanied the evacuation route and which had taken all the trouble of carrying the heavy load. By none other than Dano himself.
Boy Dano was feeding the cow which was not on a leash. The cow was let go of his rein, keeping himself free so that she could be feeding by herself because fresh grass was afield. The sky was clear without clouds and a warm sun ray was shining on Dano's back who was sitting on the nondurong, a shallow farm road bank attached to a rice field.
The prankster in the cow might have moved. The cow, spotting Dano dozing off sitting on the road, dashed to him and headed him, letting him fall on the grassy clearing below the elevated road. Dano was astonished and angry and he was not so mature enough as to take the cow's sudden attack as a demonstration of a friendly joke. He snitched to his father on the cow's infliction. Toung Doung's temper boiled over, whipped the cow with curses and sold her at a local cattle market.
On the surface, the kids of Oksan Elementary School were joyous again, cheerfully running and merrily talking. But the general atmosphere of the school was subdued. The classroom windows on the main part of the school building were smashed. The classroom desks and chairs were vandalized; The floors were brutally violated. And, most of classmates were, like Dano, victimized or traumatized.
They did neither know, however, the extent of their wounds, nor have the capability to get them known and treated. The teaching staff, originally consisting of 12 male and four female teachers, were in short supply. So the students of the class, who had been incapacitated, were merged into another class with a teacher.
Many mockup classrooms were prepared on the playground with straw mats on which to sit, with no roofs, of course. Teachers of each classroom said that South Korea was repelling the Reds of North Korea who were retreating. The nation would be reunified sooner or later by the strategic wisdom of the Great General Douglas MacArthur and by the global military troops of the United Nations. The people had to help the government with vigilant alerts. They were supposed to inform the police of the "suspicious strangers."
Bad whispers circulated in the town. The rumors had hopped from village to village that the summary execution of partisans was imminent. The gist of the rumors was that "the mountain people" had been nabbed and taken to the local police section and they would be killed that day. The weather was clear and warm that day but the air was heavy with somber murmurs. Kids sneezed like dogs. The time bell indicated that the three classes were just finished and another morning class was soon to be done. But boy after boy tiptoed to the school fence around which Thuja orientalis trees had grown tall and tight. Boys, who Dano was one of, and some daring girls were peeping through the trees.
It was being done on the dry stream bed before the school. You walked out of the school gate and stepped onto the road which had been used both by pedestrians and vehicles. And there was a stream, not so wide nor shallow, down below the road. Now, six or seven or some more men were lined up in a column. All of them were handcuffed and tied to the waist in a row but were not shackled.
It seemed they were blindfolded. The partisans who had been alleged to do sedition activities were made to face the firing squad who were lined in the clearing below the stream bank. It was a rapid snap procedure. There was no reading of guilty verdict; There was no protest, nor chanting of slogans, nor spitting of curses. There were gunshots which tore the air and there were falls. Some had one shot fired to the fall; The others two or more to it.
Summary Execution, 1950
A misfortune after another occurred. Hardly had the Toung Doung family returned from the refugee evacuation when his grand mother was bedridden until she died one month later. Dano's second brother below him, who had been very active and playful, went away after his great grand mother one month or so later. The poor brother disappeared suddenly overnight. That was so dreadful. Dano surmised his parents' sad conspiracies, in which they had, in the small hours of the night, moved and buried the sudden dead body of their son somewhere in the nearby hill hurriedly.
Astonishing thing was that his death was not pronounced before the family, that nobody including his parents questioned his sudden disappearance, and that the rest of the family did not and could not ask about his whereabouts. The unfortunate parents, Toung Doung and Boolim, did not mention their dear son's sudden death even once thereafter and did not cry even once, either. Which was really dreadful.
A third misfortune, that is, a severe infraction, was inflicted on the cow which had accompanied the evacuation route and which had taken all the trouble of carrying the heavy load. By none other than Dano himself.
Boy Dano was feeding the cow which was not on a leash. The cow was let go of his rein, keeping himself free so that she could be feeding by herself because fresh grass was afield. The sky was clear without clouds and a warm sun ray was shining on Dano's back who was sitting on the nondurong, a shallow farm road bank attached to a rice field.
The prankster in the cow might have moved. The cow, spotting Dano dozing off sitting on the road, dashed to him and headed him, letting him fall on the grassy clearing below the elevated road. Dano was astonished and angry and he was not so mature enough as to take the cow's sudden attack as a demonstration of a friendly joke. He snitched to his father on the cow's infliction. Toung Doung's temper boiled over, whipped the cow with curses and sold her at a local cattle market.
On the surface, the kids of Oksan Elementary School were joyous again, cheerfully running and merrily talking. But the general atmosphere of the school was subdued. The classroom windows on the main part of the school building were smashed. The classroom desks and chairs were vandalized; The floors were brutally violated. And, most of classmates were, like Dano, victimized or traumatized.
They did neither know, however, the extent of their wounds, nor have the capability to get them known and treated. The teaching staff, originally consisting of 12 male and four female teachers, were in short supply. So the students of the class, who had been incapacitated, were merged into another class with a teacher.
Many mockup classrooms were prepared on the playground with straw mats on which to sit, with no roofs, of course. Teachers of each classroom said that South Korea was repelling the Reds of North Korea who were retreating. The nation would be reunified sooner or later by the strategic wisdom of the Great General Douglas MacArthur and by the global military troops of the United Nations. The people had to help the government with vigilant alerts. They were supposed to inform the police of the "suspicious strangers."
Bad whispers circulated in the town. The rumors had hopped from village to village that the summary execution of partisans was imminent. The gist of the rumors was that "the mountain people" had been nabbed and taken to the local police section and they would be killed that day. The weather was clear and warm that day but the air was heavy with somber murmurs. Kids sneezed like dogs. The time bell indicated that the three classes were just finished and another morning class was soon to be done. But boy after boy tiptoed to the school fence around which Thuja orientalis trees had grown tall and tight. Boys, who Dano was one of, and some daring girls were peeping through the trees.
It was being done on the dry stream bed before the school. You walked out of the school gate and stepped onto the road which had been used both by pedestrians and vehicles. And there was a stream, not so wide nor shallow, down below the road. Now, six or seven or some more men were lined up in a column. All of them were handcuffed and tied to the waist in a row but were not shackled.
It seemed they were blindfolded. The partisans who had been alleged to do sedition activities were made to face the firing squad who were lined in the clearing below the stream bank. It was a rapid snap procedure. There was no reading of guilty verdict; There was no protest, nor chanting of slogans, nor spitting of curses. There were gunshots which tore the air and there were falls. Some had one shot fired to the fall; The others two or more to it.
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