Chapters 15. 16:Ghosts Dance on the Roof

15
Grandma's Lamp on the Pine Hill,1956


I could not get what was in my mind across to my family, to my elementary school friends and to whoever I was in contact with. The folks around me could not guess how much I was traumatized by the recent incidents, either. I had blamed myself badly over the parting with the dear cow because of my ignorance and impatience; I had flabbergasted over the sudden disappearance of my brother and my parents' silence pact; I had mulled over the nocturnal wails at Cheongdo Refugee Camp; I had sneezed and frowned on the stench of the dung fields; I had from time to time shaken my body over the gunshot noises and the images of the pitiful falls.

I was a lonely boy in Sun Valley. My grandmother Mrs. Euiseong Kim was busy chiding and scolding her poor daughter-in-law who was also busy whining and weeping. My dad was also busy plowing 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 me, alienating me, playing harsh pranks on me, and cursing me, "Let the tigers eat you up!"

I 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: I was 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 to and a god to pray to. Mounting any hill of the valley, reclining on a hilly grass complete 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 beaming at him, he acquired peace.

No, he was not alone. All nature was his friends. Fresh air tickled his face, ears and all. Winds of all sorts were music; The blue skies were the seas on which the celestial boats were sailing; The creeks were telling him endless tales; The iries at the deep valley below the bottom of the pines were keeping him company.

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 talk 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 me Dano, there were only two categories of women in the world: the victim and the victimizer. My mother Boolim Lee was a victim who had been nagged, reprimanded and scolded, and cursed by my heartless mother-in-law and my 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 and women of understanding about her.

To me Dano, women would hurt me or be harmed by me. There were only women of extremes; There were no women in between. I despised women and was afraid of them at the same time. I did not get near the school girls, either.

To me, a major impediment to my 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 my long-distance commuting, my dad took a standoffish attitude and Mom did the same, too, because my grandma was the only one who could control.

When snow fell heavily, Mrs. Euiseong Kim opted to keep her grandson from attending class. But more often than not me Dano was insistent on going. On one winter day in the year 1952, at my fourth class year at the elementary school, I had had huge snows. I was looking out the classroom window anxiously while snow went on falling.

So when I hit the road back home, I had to trudge through the knee-deep 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 I got to the stream that became a river the kids of the village had already crossed it. I had almost met early death once when I had gotten hit by the running rocks while crossing for myself the rapid stream which had swollen suddenly.

Although pranksters were all around, it did not mean that all the surrounding situation was against me. Mr. Kwon, my 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 me Dano, saying "Tigers will eat you up!"

There was not a tiger, of course, but the curse words gave me a chill in the spine. And there had been a moment fright came on me so much so that I froze when it drizzled on the moonless valley and when I passed the roadside grave shrouded with night fogs. But I could not turn around and run. If I had done it, I knew I would not be able to return home and that actually there was not a home which would welcome me back. So I knew all that I could do was to keep going because my grandma was waiting for her dear grandson on the hilly pass, holding a kerosene lamp.

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I imagine today, and more often than not I dream, Grandma holding a lamp for her late-coming grandson, for minutes and for hours, on the hilly pass, in the still darkness, standing the night chill and the shrill cries of the wild mountain beasts. In the dream my grandma is so tall and aptly old, standing upright, holding the lamp. I wake up startled to find that I am old now and it's time I went to the bathroom.

On my sixth-year class of the elementary school, starting from early fall and ending in early winter, her grandson had to do the extra hours for the middle school examination. I had to cut them off and come home before dark. I could be excused on the grounds of the distant commute. But I didn't. Owing to my obstinacy, Grandma went through the trouble of mounting the steep uphill and I had to take a chance of being consumed by a tiger.



16
Ghosts Dance on the House Roof, 1958

Don 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?" Don said. She 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.

Grandma 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 Don's elder brother Bin to erect and operate for the livelihood of the brother family. Bin was always resourceful in helping his brother Don manage his family's livelihood, but he had been having a guilt feeling of some sort to his younger brother who had been taking care of their old mother, Mrs. Euiseong Kim.

There was a shift in the membership structure of the moving troops: The Don couple bereft of their grandmother and lost a son eternally during the 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 cottage 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 cottage 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 landmark 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 for 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. Don 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 Don had been familiar or with whom Don had had clannish connections, held occasional meetings, which had been termed "Waterway Meetings," to rob him of a rein on the use of the water. So Don 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 town had usually been made in the perimeter of 20 or so kilometers at least and several hundred kilometers at 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 not making ends meet, incurring losses, if the human marriages were justified to be figured out in such calculations.

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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. Don, smeared with the flour, was miffed at Dano's presence that 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.

Don "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. Don questioned with strong words what the hell the short height and uncomely countenance had to do with the propriety of the bridegroom.

Dano was crazy. 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 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 shift 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 the underling harasser 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 Don'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, chased, scared 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 my brother's later recollections, had been haunted.

On a late autumn night, November someday, 1957, when I was on my middle school junior year, my father had been away from home, to Daegu probably for the purchase of sea fish and vegetables to be used for clannish rituals. Me 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 me, awoke startled and screaming. I, at the same moment, heard my mother shriek, crying at the top of her lung, "Cut the water off the gate!"

I kicked the room door open and raced up the slope to "the water gate." I lifted it up and let the water fall through the open slot. I then raced down the slope to the mill and tried to get what had happened.

I was in panic; The lights were not very bright because the only kerosene lamp was dangling above the machine. While I was in chaotic confusion, my brother and grandmother raced into the mill. There were yells and shrieks. Mom 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 disaster was caused by the loose garments of her chima and jogori. 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.

My grandmother was complaining, whining and blaming herself endlessly and trying something to stop her daughter-in-law's hemorrhage. I raced out of the mill. I was still in bare feet. It was a frosty morning, which I did not care. I 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 me 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, I belatedly realized my sore feet. And I felt a little cold. I limped a little and stopped to think to a shudder of last night's nightmares and my mother's accident. The tragic instant's scream gyrated in my ears all the way home from the doctor's. I shuddered to my dismay the potential ubiquity of the evil spirits which had attempted on my mother. Why, I intoned to myself, “did the devils or the demons try to attempt on my mother, while terrifying her poor son? I was really scared. I was extremely disturbed bordering on disorientation.

Boolim, 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." I was once again surprised to find my mother, who had been moved to the convalescent room, did not utter a word of pain, which reminded me, judging from my mother's utter composure, of her cold silence about the sudden death of her third son 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 is a remote brother who was four times removed, which meant that Brother West was on ten-knot relation with me 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 Don 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 me to their home to feed me. I found that there had been two student lodgers 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. I 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.

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Routines were restored. Don 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 Bin 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 Don 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 disaster in proximity to a mere few feet across the room door.

I was all nerves about people and things around me. In one reality where I moved in the sunlight with eyes and ears open, I was conscious of stares all around. In the other reality where night came and I 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. My brother Ilseo confided to me casually one day decades later that he had watched very often at that time human shapes in white garb dance on the house roof of the water mill.