Kwon Hae-shik went to his door at the sound of an approaching motor. The car was trundling down the cement road, leaving a ghost trail of brown dust in the air behind it. Mud from the fields accumulated over time on the cement, falling from work boots and tractor wheels, though just a few years ago it had been a freshly poured white-gray scar cutting across the valley.
The car was one of those smart types, or so they called them, that people were using in the cities to squeeze in between others in the parking lot—people like his son, and that harlot from Busan he’d taken as a wife. As the vehicle drew closer Hae-shik could make out that it was only his granddaughter inside. She at least had enough of her father’s decency to come out here and visit him once in a while, even if she bore her mother’s looks.
He opened the front screen door, hocked and spat phlegm into the dirt beside the step.
The car turned onto the rain-gutted gravel driveway, rumbling uphill on seldom-exercised shock absorbers. It rolled to a stop next to what was left of the dead oak tree. He’d had the lower branches and the top two thirds of the tree lobbed off six months back, lest it become a hazard, but the rest of the trunk still stood there. He hadn’t brought himself completely remove a giant that had existed here for 150 years.
“Grandpa,” said Si-eun, stepping out of the vehicle. “Nice to see you.”
“And you,” Hae-shik muttered. “Well come on, come on in then.”
Si-eun was long-legged and tall. Ever since she was sixteen she’d stood higher than either Hae-shik or her own father, and was only a hair above her mother, from whom she’d received the long frame. It was hardly natural looking, thought Hae-shik, a girl so tall. He’d be damned if he was going to say she was beautiful, but at least she was decent.
“I don’t have a lot of time today . . .” Si-eun began, but Hae-shik waved her words away. He was used to this little speech.
“It’s all right. I’ve got some things to attend to anyway. Let me just fix you a cup of tea and you can be on your way.” He knew how to play his part as well, though he’d played it so many times it was easy to forget it was a part at all.
“That’d be nice, thanks.” Si-eun offered him her mother’s smile, the one where she seemed happier than she had any clear reason to be, showing off all her teeth. Hae-shik didn’t see anything of himself in that face. His son didn’t plan on having any more children, either, so Si-eun was it: their family’s legacy—Hae-shik’s one hereditary requiem for the future.
He spat again into the dirt beside the step once more, paused, and kicked a layer of dust over the spatter before entering the house. In the evenings he used to spit on the bathroom floor during his shower, where he could wash it away with water; after he’d been married for a year or so his wife had gotten on his case about spitting there and would fly into a rage if she heard him doing it. She was dead a decade now. Cancer, the doctors had said—started in her breasts and spread until one day she’d told him she wanted to come home from the hospital in Daegu and die. He’d been glad to have her home again, even though she was in too much pain to sleep most nights. It felt better that way, more like it should be. Daegu was a cesspool, with foreign language—English, of course—plastered along every street and storefront, as if the Americans were picking up where the Japanese left off seven decades before. What they called globalization on TV was just another big imperial push.
He still didn’t spit in the bathroom.
Si-eun followed him inside and the screen door slammed closed behind her with a rattle.
“How are the apple trees this year?” she asked. When she was little she used to come out to pick apples in the orchard when they were ready. But that was in the summer, and it was only spring now.
“They’re fine,” Hae-shik told her. “Blossoms are out. Place is filled with bees. You wouldn’t like it.”
On top of having a genuine interest in the apple trees, Si-eun hadn’t been afraid of insects as a child. Now she was terrified of them. She said they were dirty, as though the very fabric of nature was inherently impure.
He put the kettle on and took a tin of tea off a shelf above the sink.
Si-eun took a seat on one of the two worn wooden chairs by the table. “So I suppose you’ve heard about the amalgamation,” she said.
“The what?”
“The amalgamation. No big surprise, I guess. It already started for the most part, you know, when they closed down the elementary school.”
“Uh huh, that have anything to do with me?”
Si-eun lowered her eyes, and Hae-shik could tell she was embarrassed—maybe even ashamed—of how stupid he must sound. She might not have had much to say anyway, just trying to fill the air with conversation until the tea was done and she could leave feeling like she’d done her familial duty.
“The children are going to school in town now because the village is going to become part of it soon. Next spring, actually.”
Hae-shik paused, a tannin-stained ceramic cup in each hand. “So what’s the issue?” he asked, feigning an air of disinterest.
“It’s not an issue, really, but they’re building an addition to the highway that’s going to come through close to here, so the village is going to expand.”
“Expand? Like they’re going to make it bigger?”
“Yes, it’ll get bigger. And I also heard about some other plans for it.”
The kettle came to a boil and Hae-shik took it off the gas range. He flicked the dial and the blue ring of flame winked out. When he was Si-eun’s age his family hadn’t had a gas stove; it was unnecessary, but it made things faster, just like every other piece of technology. “And what are those plans?” he asked, dropping tea bags into the cups. He poured a quivering stream of water over both.
“It’s kind of exciting, actually,” said Si-eun. “There’ll be a motel, some new restaurants, a police station, and the police station’s going to have a tourist booth.”
“A tourist booth,” Hae-shik sneered. “For who? We don’t have tourists out here. Did you forget where you are?”
“Not me, grandpa, them. This is all from the county seat.”
“Yes, yes, you know what I mean.” He brought Si-eun her steaming tea.
“They’re going to start a trout-catching festival in the river. You know how you like catching trout down there. It’s a good fishing place, right? So they’re going to have this event where people come and catch trout in the fall. It’ll be popular, I think. There’ll be food and games and singing, and they’re going to advertise it a lot. Oh! That’s another thing—they’re going to build a stage near the river, just like over in Yecheon. You know that stage?”
Hae-shik put down his cup suddenly; scalding hot tea sloshed out down the sides and onto the counter top. His hands were big and rough and they trembled nowadays when he didn’t concentrate on them, and often even if he did. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
Si-eun frowned sourly. “Why is that ridiculous?”
“It just is, and if you don’t know that you’re a fool.” His volume was overbearing in the small kitchen. He was used to doing most of his speaking outside, in the fields, the orchard or on the roads.
“I’m sorry, grandpa.” The girl looked at her cup with its drowned tea bag sitting on the bottom. “I’ve made you angry.”
Hae-shik gripped his own cup again and raised it to his lips, fighting the tremble. He blew on it and sipped. The tea was terribly hot, but the inside of his mouth had grown tough over the years.
“You didn’t make me angry, but you should know they’re never going to go through with such a thing. Not out here. Those tourist gimmicks aren’t for us. We don’t need Seoulites—and definitely not foreigners—rolling in here and making demands.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s plenty fair and it’s the way it is.”
Si-eun grew quiet and finished her tea quickly. With the cup emptied she gathered her things and said she really needed to be going, but mom and dad said hi and they’d try to make it out soon but they’d been busy lately and just hadn’t found the time. She and Hae-shik were back to playing their parts, with prepared lines, and Si-eun was making her usual exeunt.
He followed her to the door and stood watching her while she slipped into high-heeled sandals. The damn things, how did she walk in them?
“Thank you for the tea, it was nice to see you,” she said, looking relieved to be on her way out the door. She bowed her head to him from the walkway before she turned to go to the car.
At least she was decent.
The next day, in mid-afternoon, Hae-shik walked into Yong-gi’s Grocery. Park Yong-gi had died years ago, but his wife still ran the place and had never bothered to change the name. Rightfully so, too.
Park Ji-min lay on a mat behind the counter, propped up on an elbow with a pillow under her, watching the dusty old TV above the drink cooler. Hae-shik remembered when Yong-gi had gotten the thing new and set it up. There’d been some excitement about the store that day and they’d watched a baseball game that very night, Hae-shik, Yong-gi himself, and some of the men, drinking beers and makgeolli straight out of the cooler. People had stopped by all through the evening to ask the score and duck out again, though he didn’t think anyone in the village had given two shits about any particular team at the time.
“Any bug killer left?” he asked Ji-min, staring at the empty space on the shelf where she usually kept cans of the stuff.
“Sold out,” Ji-min said from her mat.
“Damn it, woman. It’s spring, it’s spring.”
“That’s why I’m sold out.”
Hae-shik shot her a look of disgust. She was used to it from him, and he from her, but there was no animosity in it. She’d moved out to the village after marrying Yong-gi, going on forty years ago now. Yong-gi had owned the vegetable fields just across the road from the store, all the way down to the river, but Ji-min had never stepped foot in one as far as Hae-shik knew, content to fritter away her days in the store. Now the fields had been leased out to the Jeon family and she lived off the savings her husband had left her, plus whatever profit she turned with the grocery—and considering that it was the only grocery in the village, she was well enough to do. They’d had one son, same as Hae-shik, and also like Hae-shik’s, that son moved away long ago.
He looked at the shelf where the spray was supposed to be, pretending to consider whether there was something else he might want to pick up while he was there.
“You hear about this trout festival they want to have?” he asked Ji-min.
“What was that?”
“It’s ridiculous, the whole idea,” Hae-shik went on, ignoring her. “People wanting to come in here and build a motel and a police station and all that.” He snorted. “A joke.”
“Oh, there’s been plenty of talk about that.”
“What do you mean plenty of talk about that? I haven’t heard any talk about it.”
“Obviously you did,” said Ji-min wryly.
“Not from anybody from around here I didn’t.”
Ji-min pushed herself up to sitting. “They had a man out here just the other day doing something or other. Walking around. Look, he put up those little orange flags down by the river.”
“What?” Hae-shik sauntered over to the window. “Where?” His eyes weren’t so good at distances and he’d left his glasses at home.
Ji-min sighed and swung her legs onto the floor, slipping her feet into a pair of beaten-up shoes. She hobbled over to the window with him.
“What don’t you see? You can see the river, can’t you? Well you ever see orange flags there before?”
Now Hae-shik did see them. They were just simple markers—lengths of flagging tape tied onto stakes, wriggling in the breeze. There were five or six of them he could see sticking out of the long grasses on the bank of the river.
“Now just what the hell is that all about?”
“Measurement or something? How would I know? They came out here and did a quick job of it, that’s all I can tell you.” She returned to the platform behind the counter where she’d been laying and sat down on the edge. She groaned, settling back on her wide, fleshy rear.
Hae-shik remained at the window, staring across Yong-gi’s old fields. Ji-min studied him. “You don’t look so good,” she said.
“I’m seventy six years old, of course I don’t look good.”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean your face. Looks like you bit into something rotten.”
“Humph! Park Ji-min, you’d swear you saw turds in a fresh salad if someone gave you the time to look hard enough.”
She snickered at that, but Hae-shik only grimaced and went out the door. He spat in the dirt and set off for his home across the river.
On Saturday morning he shaved for the first time in days, using the electric razor he kept stashed in a box beneath the bathroom sink. He’d given up the straight razor years ago when the shakes had gotten to be too much. His wife would have made him stop sooner, if she’d been around, and as it was he’d been stubborn enough to keep using it until one day he’d sliced deep into his chin. Too deep. He had enough sense to know it could’ve been one of those big veins in his throat.
He ate a hurried breakfast and got into his rattling Daewoo pickup, a truck he’d had for 15 years. It’d given him some problems in that time but still held up. The cab used to be white, but now the places where the paint still clung to the metal had been stained different shades of yellow, like the teeth of a heavy smoker. The rest was rust, and the bed and undercarriage were caked with a dozen seasons of mud.
He drove down the lane, comforted by the familiar bumps and jiggles, and onto the cement road. He crossed the bridge and turned onto the cracked pavement that would carry him past the boarded-up school and its weed-strewn yard with the derelict slide, the post office, Yong-gi’s Grocery, a few houses with their copper roofs tarnished green, and the Do family farm.
At the village boundary sat the jangseung, facing the main road that would take Hae-shik to the highway. The finish had worn off them long ago and the wood was grey and badly weathered. Only spots of paint remained on their faces: a bit of red inside the mouths, some black on the pupils. They had once been special, back when people cared.
Jangseung were the village guardians and always had been, since back in the days of the three kingdoms, Hae-shik’s father had told him, and even before. They were limbless idols, totems carved from tree trunks or large sawed-off branches, with long, leering faces contorted in mad laughter or steely glares. They frightened malevolent spirits away from the village: demons that brought pestilence and blight, stillbirths and insanity; demons that bore drought, flood and death; those forces moving through the wilds that sought to invade and corrupt the communities of Man.
Hae-shik drove past the jangseung with a scowl. He barely needed to look at them to know what state they were in. The truck clunked on its axels as he bounced onto the main road, cutting across the center line and speeding off toward the highway ten minutes on. The faster he got this over with the better—he had plenty of work to do in the back field before dinnertime.
He became immersed in ingoing Andong traffic less than twenty minutes later, and was soon crawling into the heart of the city, hammering on his horn at the jackasses cutting in front of him or the school kids meandering across the streets, lost in conversation and the screens of their phones so much as to be oblivious to the fact they walking in front of speeding metal boxes. By the time he reached the public offices he was feeling harried and wanting nothing so much as to get back to open roads.
It was dark inside the building, but he could see a few yellow lights glowing over the counter at the back of the lobby. The doors were closed.
Of course they are, Hae-shik told himself as he approached them, squinting through his smudged spectacles at the hours of operation pasted on the inside of the glass. It was Saturday.
Cupping his hands over his eyes, he peered into the lobby. A woman was seated behind the counter at the back. She glanced up in his direction and turned her head down just as quickly. Hae-shik knocked on the glass with his gnarled, blocky knuckles. The woman looked up again, studied him, and rose as though noticing for the first time that someone was there. She came out from behind the counter and across the darkened floor of the lobby.
“Yes?” she asked from behind the door.
“I’d like to discuss something,” Hae-shik rasped in his most congenial voice. His words seemed to splatter on the glass and die.
“We’re closed today,” the woman said, muffled and faraway sounding. “You’ll have to come back on Monday.”
“This’ll just take a minute,” said Hae-shik, louder. “And no, I’m not coming back on Monday. You’re here now, so you can open the door and talk to me now.”
The woman frowned and unlocked the door. She was young, no more than thirty, but at the very least older than Si-eun. Her features were plain and pale.
“And you can take that look off your face, too,” Hae-shik said, shouldering his way in.
The woman didn’t reply, but strode to the counter, asking him to follow. She went back around and stood in front of her chair.
“How can I help you?” she asked politely. Her body language betrayed her distaste at being interrupted, but it was hardly of Hae-shik’s concern.
“I live in Hancheongsan. I’m here to ask about the developments you have planned there.”
The woman blinked at him. “I’m sorry, Hancheo . . . what was it?”
“Hancheongsan,” Hae-shik repeated, annoyed. He waggled his fingers at the computer monitor. “Look it up on your thing there.”
The woman’s cheeks flushed pink and her lips tightened into a white line. She asked him to wait, tapping away on the keyboard. “Okay,” she said after a few moments. “And what is your issue?”
“The so-called developments you have planned for the village,” Hae-shik said. “Some sort of trout fishing festival, a motel, a police station—as if we need police out there! Haven’t seen a crime there my whole life and now you’re saying we need a police station?”
“Sir, this isn’t at all my department. I have no connection to any of that whatsoever.”
“Well then who the hell does?” Hae-shik roared. “I came here to get some answers. Are you going to do your damned job or not?”
The young woman was keeping a steady face, but a muscle in her cheek was twitching. Her eyes roved around, as though searching for a coworker who might miraculously be waiting nearby to relieve her, then she fixed her gaze squarely on Hae-shik. “As I said before,” she said slowly, “you need to come back on Monday. This is Saturday. The person you’re looking for isn’t here.”
She spoke as though talking to a four year old; Hae-shik stared at her for an instant in disbelief. “Useless,” he murmured, and turned to go.
The woman said no more until he was halfway to the door. “I can give you a card with our number on it,” she called after him. Her tone dripped with condescension—nothing but condescension. They wouldn’t believe it back in the village, what he’d had to put up with here.
“Keep your shitty card.”
He pushed at the door, to no avail, before he remembered that it only swung inward. And what a surprise—PULL was written in English right there beside the handle. It was an invasion was what it was. Andong had already been taken.
He got back into his truck, breathing hard. The woman came to the door and locked it again without looking out at him. She wore a hurt expression, but Hae-shik had a hard time believing that’s what it was. He keyed the ignition and pulled out of the lot, turning onto the highway for home.
Sunday came and went. He didn’t intend to return to Andong and subject himself to blank stares and sneering public servants tucked behind their counters, but he did have to head down the road on Monday morning to fill up on gas. As he reached the bridge he saw a long white van parked on the riverside path, taking up its entire width and then some. Two men, one in a pair of jeans and a traffic vest with reflective strips on the back, the other in a one-piece navy blue uniform with a tool belt slung around the waist, had strung a line of string down the row of orange flagging tape markers and gone on to cordon off a square of field adjacent to it.
Hae-shik went across the bridge and pulled onto the shoulder, putting the truck in park and lowering himself out of it slowly. His bones felt more brittle every passing week, like they were turning to seashells. He’d taken the family to visit a beach up in Gangwon-do back when his son was still just a boy, and for some reason he’d never forgotten just how easily, and even satisfyingly, the shells crunched on the rocks beneath only the pressure of his foot. That’s how he felt these days, like the weight of his body might just shatter the bones in his legs if he came down on them too fast.
He came around the side of the truck and descended the well-trodden footpath to the river bank. The men paid him no heed as he made his way over to them, but at last, when he was almost upon them and could be ignored no longer, the one in blue looked up and said hello. By this time Hae-shik was standing practically next to him and peering at the instrument in his hands. It was some electronic gizmo or other and there were numbers on its little display. “Hi,” he said with a nod. “What’s that you’ve got there now?”
The man shrugged and looked to his companion, who was trudging back to their van and not paying any attention. He looked to be in his early forties, maybe late thirties, and now he offered Hae-shik a small sardonic smile: You wouldn’t understand if I told you, old man.
“I was asking you what you were doing,” Hae-shik said.
“Um, we’re taking some measurements of the field.”
“I see, I see.” Hae-shik patted his pants pockets, found the shape he was looking for there. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, empty save for two. “Smoke?”
“Uh . . .” The man glanced toward the van. His partner had the back open and was busy rooting around inside. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
Hae-shik slipped one out and gave it to him. He took the other for himself and stuck the empty box back into his pocket, producing a lighter at the same time.
“Let me,” the man said, and Hae-shik handed him the lighter. The man lit Hae-shik’s cigarette and then his own. They each took a drag, letting the acrid smoke out into the fragrant spring air, ripe with the scent of greenery and newness.
“Now then, what are these measurements all about?” Hae-shik asked, keeping his voice as curious and innocent as he could muster without gagging on it.
“Mm,” the man murmured, lungs full, his eyes grown momentarily distant. He exhaled through his nose. “They’re going to be building a stage here. Summer concerts and all that, I guess. We’re just laying out the best spot for it. We think this looks pretty good.” He stamped the earth with his boot. “Level ground and all. Needs to be level, easier that way for the—”
“Who’s building the stage?” Hae-shik interrupted. “Who is ‘they’?”
The man eyed him and took a quick puff. The end of his cigarette grew bright, like the flash of a hazard light. “Construction folk.”
Hae-shik fixed him with a hard, beady stare. “What construction folk? You construction folk?”
“No, not us. We’re just subcontracted for the measurements, you see.”
“Sure, sure,” Hae-shik said, but his voice had grown cold. “So you’re subcontracted. And who is it that’s hiring you?”
The man screwed up his face, looked at his cigarette, evidently decided it had burnt low enough and pitched it to the soil at his side. “Can I ask what this is all about?”
His partner was on his way over to them with an armload of long, thin yellow poles, like metal bamboo reeds.
“Yeah, you can ask me what it’s all about. You’re coming here to my village, and staking out the area for your employer to come in a build some big hideous stage on—that’s what this is all about. And what do you think that stage is for?”
The worker in the traffic vest had stopped nearby and was waiting, with a bored look, for his partner’s attention. When he didn’t get it, he dropped the poles in the grass and shuffled over to them, attracted by Hae-shik’s rising voice.
“That stage is going up for some damn trout festival or another harebrained fucking thing, and there’s going to be people from all over the place flooding in here to muddy the river up and rip every fish out of the water, and they’re going to be blasting music from that stage so that no one can sleep, and there’ll be idiots walking through the fields and trampling the vegetables. They’ll be up in my orchard wanting to have picnics and take fruit off my trees, and walking around over my wife’s grave in the glade.”
The two men were standing directly in front of him, each nearly a head taller than Hae-shik, looking down at this shrunken beast in their midst. They were trying not to show how much they wanted him to shut up and move on—it was written all over their faces. Both were young enough to be his son.
“They’ll start making demands as soon as they step foot in the village,” he continued. “All the foods they want, all the drinks, all the everything. City people and foreigners. ‘Oh, it’s dirty out here, oh, it’s smelly out here.’ Nothing’s good enough for them and we’ll have to hear about it, goddammit, not you. And then the village gets bigger. Is it your company that’s planning to work on that as well? Huh? Police station, motel and all that. Sure, they’ll stick up some apartment buildings too, and people will come out here because they think they want to live in the country, except they don’t. They don’t know how. They’re addicted to their crap food, and their rows of stores and all that plastic shit. It’s all they want. And they’ll get it—someone’ll pay to have the old copper-roof homes over there bulldozed down and they’ll stick in some cosmetic stores and a coffee shop, that’s what they’ll do.”
“We have to finish our work, sir,” said the man in the traffic vest. “Sorry to inconvenience you. Have a good day.” He met eyes with his partner and cocked his head in a let’s go manner. They each turned away without a word and walked to the heap of poles waiting in the long grass. They picked up an armful each and went with them to the nearest corner of the square they’d cordoned off with the string. Hae-shik didn’t watch anymore. He marched back to the embankment, as well as he could march, furious, and climbed back up to his truck, pushing on his knees to make his legs carry him to the top.
He drove out of the village, and by the time he returned with a full tank of gas in his truck the anger still hadn’t subsided.
He wouldn’t be using that gas today, he decided. Instead of driving any more he returned to his house and parked. He went into his shed, heavy with cobwebs, the eves infested by squirrels and a nest of swallow chicks somewhere that called out for food in barely audible squeaks. When he emerged from the musty interior he carried an axe, a heavy chisel and a wooden mallet. He lay them in the dirt of the yard and went around to the back of the house. There he took the steel extension ladder off the hooks where it was suspended against the wall and carried it under his arm to the front.
The ladder was heavier than he remembered. He felt how soft and deflated the muscles of his arms and chest had become. They’d once been like thick, taught bands, and Si-eun, after whom his granddaughter had been named, had stroked them at night when they went to bed and asked him to put them around her. That was when they’d both been young and fresh. They had stars in their eyes, older villagers had joked—but those people were all gone now, and it was only when Hae-shik reached their age that he realized their jokes had been made in longing and remembrance.
Those times were clouded over in his memory, and most days searching for them was like standing in a thick fog, waiting for something to come forth, but already you couldn’t recall why you were there.
He brought the ladder to what was left of the old oak tree, looking for a patch of flat ground for the legs. It would be easier that way. When he’d located a good spot he went back and got the tools.
His hands were shaking worse than usual. His fingers seemed to want to dance along the axe handle rather than grip it. Maybe it was the anger, or maybe it was their time to go on him soon. “Give it a rest,” he mumbled, concentrating on them harder, steadying them by sheer force of will. “We’ll just get a start today, then take a break. Don’t you give up on me. Don’t you dare.”
He swung the axe at the trunk, aiming downward at a sharp angle. On his second strike he buried the blade next to the first gouge; on the third he was able to pry a chunk loose. His heart leapt and pounded erratically, stumbling to catch up with his exertion. He hacked steadily at the wood, down to the layers that had been there since he was a young man, when everything good was in its place and he felt strong enough to keep it that way.
The sun was a red orb in the western sky as Si-eun turned the car into Hancheongsan. It was Sunday evening, a sleepy time for the villagers, and the road was deserted; the whole place seemed closed up against the oncoming night.
She was on her way back to Daegu from Seoul, where she’d spent the weekend with friends, and had decided to pay a short visit to her grandfather unexpected. He was a miserable man, but also lonely, she knew, and misery and loneliness fed off each other. The car trundled over the bridge and she drove down the dirty concrete strip, past the fields, to the driveway leading up to the house.
The jangseung was the first thing she saw as she rounded the soft bend in the hill. What had once been the trunk of a dead oak, twice the width of her body, had been transformed into a massive totem pole, orange and defiant in the light of the fading sun. It was unpainted, but the expression on its elongated face was clear: laughter, mad and fearless, two lines of teeth bared with the hint of a tongue lolling inside the mouth. It was at least four meters tall, a monstrous creation.
She eased on the brakes, coming to a stop in the middle of the driveway. As she exited the car and approached the towering sculpture, her eye caught on Chinese characters, chiseled lengthwise down its base. She drew closer, walking over a bed of fresh shavings, and ran her fingers over the familiar hanja, the lines so crude they looked as if they’d been formed by a child learning to write.
The names Kwon Hae-shik and Kwon Eun-ha ran side by side.
She went to the house, and opened the door—never locked—when her grandfather didn’t answer her knocking. He wasn’t inside, though his old pickup was in the yard.
She went back out to the jangseung and scanned what she could see of the valley and road, in case he might be trundling along on foot somewhere. Though she didn’t see him, her gaze alighted again on the names engraved in the wood.
She circled around the back of the house, and took the foot-worn path up to the orchard. The apple blossoms were luscious; creamy white with soft tints of pink, they glowed with the all-encompassing orange hue of the failing light. The bees, save for a scattering of holdouts humming drowsily amidst the branches, had retired for the evening.
Beyond the trees a trail wound up the hill through deepening shadows to the glade. She made her way up it and soon came to the grassy and well-tended mound in the earth that marked her grandmother’s resting place. Hae-shik sat there, head down, as if engaged in silent conversation.
“Grandpa?”
He looked up with a start, and upon seeing her forced a wane smile, but it faded immediately and he lowered his head again. He was not entirely still, Si-eun saw, for his hands jittered badly, seeming almost to dance in his lap.
“The shaking’s been worse and worse,” he said, voice weaker than she was used to hearing, its gruffness smoothed by notes of exhaustion, even frailty. “Thought I felt something in my chest, when I was just about finished making the damn thing. Pain down my arm. Not normal. Might’ve been my heart.”
“Are you okay?” cried Si-eun, rushing to him. “Grandpa, was it really a heart attack?”
“Don’t know,” he replied, still seated, gazing at the mound. “Kept going. Kept the shaking under control for a while. Could you read the names?”
“Yes. Yes, I could read them. You carved them well.”
Hae-shik grunted. “My bones’ll be down there someday,” he said after a pause, nodding vaguely to the right of the mound. He winced, one of his gnarled old hands, so solid with remembered power, floating to his withered left breast. “I’m no guardian. None of us are. We just create them. That’s all we can do before we go.”
“Oh, grandpa . . .” said Si-eun, and she shook her head for his fervent heart, perhaps the last like it in this old valley, beyond whose borders those corrupting spirits of the new and unknown would forever haunt the wilds.
She took out her phone to dial an ambulance.