Please Look After Mom (17 page)

“Do you want to be dragged off by the mountain people?”

Your bride was silent for a moment, then crumpled in the cotton field, her legs stretched out, and burst into tears. At that moment, she wasn’t the well-groomed, demure woman who had been embroidering on the porch of the cottage. She wept so achingly that you wanted to cry, too, just from watching her. That was when your future mother-in-law waded out of the cotton fields and went to the young woman.

“Look, you’re feeling this way because you’re still young. I would have kept you by me a few more years if it wasn’t for the war. But what can we do when the world is so frightening? It’s not a bad thing to get married. It’s something you can’t avoid. You were born deep in the mountains. I wasn’t able to send you to school, so if you don’t get married what can you do? When I matched your horoscope with the groom’s, it said
that you two will be very lucky. You won’t lose a single child, and you will have many children, and they will grow up and succeed. What else could you want? Since you came into this world as a human, you have to live happily with your mate. You have to have your babies and breastfeed them and raise them. Stop crying, stop crying. I’ll make you special blankets with willowed cotton.”

The young woman kept sobbing loudly, and your future mother-in-law slapped her on the back. “Stop, stop crying …”

Your bride didn’t stop, and your future mother-in-law burst into tears, too.

   If by pure coincidence you hadn’t seen the two women crying in each other’s arms in the cotton field, you might have left home before October. When you thought of that young woman, however, embroidering on the porch of the cottage, calling out “Mom!” at the cotton field, when you thought she might be dragged away by a soldier into the mountains, never to be seen again, you couldn’t pick up your feet to go away.

When you came back to the empty house after your wife went missing, you slept for three days. You couldn’t fall asleep at Hyong-chol’s; at night you lay there with your eyes closed. Your hearing grew so sensitive that your eyes would fly open if someone came out of the room across the way to go to the bathroom. At each mealtime, you sat at the table for the others’ sake, even though you weren’t hungry, but in your empty house you didn’t eat anything and slept like the dead.

·   ·   ·

You thought you didn’t love your wife very much, because you married her after seeing her only once, but every time you left home and some time passed, she reappeared in your thoughts. Your wife’s hands could nurture any life. Your family didn’t have much luck with animals. Before your wife became a member of the family, any dog you got would die before giving you a litter. It would eat rat poison and fall into the toilet. Once, without anyone’s realizing that the dog had crawled into the floor heater, a fire was kindled in the furnace, and not until you smelled the stench did you lift open the lid and pull out the dead dog. Your sister said that your family should not have a dog, but your wife brought home a newborn pup from the neighbors, one of her hands covering its eyes. Your wife believed that dogs, being smart, would return to their mothers if their eyes were not covered when they were taken away. Your wife fed that puppy under the porch, and it grew and had five or six litters. Sometimes there were as many as eighteen squirming puppies under the porch. In the spring, your wife coaxed the chicken to sit on eggs and managed to raise thirty or forty chicks without killing them, except a few that were snatched by a kite. When your wife sprinkled seeds in the vegetable garden, green leaves shot up in a riot, more quickly than she could pluck the tender shoots to eat. She planted and harvested potatoes then carrots then sweet potatoes. When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall. Anything she touched grew in profusion. Your wife didn’t have time to take the sweat-soaked towel off her head. As soon as weeds poked up from the fields, your wife’s hands pulled them out, and she chopped the food waste from the table into
small pieces and poured them into the puppies’ bowls. She caught frogs and boiled them and mashed them to feed the chickens, and collected chicken waste and buried it in the vegetable garden, over and over again. Everything your wife touched became fertile and bloomed, grew and bore fruit. Her talent was such that even your sister, who endlessly found fault with your wife, would call her and ask her for help sowing the fields and planting pepper seedlings.

On the third night after you return home, you wake up in the middle of the night and lie still, staring at the ceiling. What is that? You’re staring at a box with a yin-yang symbol, perched on top of the wardrobe, and quickly get up. Memories of your wife waking one day in the early dawn, stirring, and calling you, flood in. You didn’t answer, even though you were awake, because you couldn’t be bothered.

“You must be sleeping.” Your wife heaved a deep sigh. “Please don’t live longer than me.”

You remained quiet.

“I have your shroud all prepared. It’s in that yin-yang box on top of the wardrobe. Mine is in there, too. If I go first, don’t panic, take that down first. I splurged a little. I got them in the best hemp. They said they planted the hemp themselves and wove the fabric out of it. You will be amazed when you see it—it’s beautiful,” your wife murmured as if she were casting a spell, even though she didn’t know if you were listening.

“When Tamyang Aunt passed away a while ago, her husband was bathed in tears. He said that before Tamyang Aunt died she made him promise he wouldn’t get an expensive
shroud for her. She told him that she had ironed her wedding hanbok and asked him to put that on her when he sent her off to the next world. She said she was sorry that she was going first, without even seeing their daughter get married, and that he shouldn’t spend money on her. Tamyang Uncle was leaning on me when he told me that, and he cried so much that my clothes got completely wet. He said that all he did was to make her work hard. That it was wrong of her to die, now that they were a bit more comfortable, and that she’d made him promise he wouldn’t buy her a nice outfit even at her death. I don’t want to do that. I want to go wearing nice clothes. Do you want to see them?”

When you didn’t move, your wife sighed deeply again.

“You should go before me. I think that’s for the best. They say that although there’s an order to when people come into this world, there isn’t one when you leave, but we should go in the order we came.
Since you’re three years older than me, you should leave three years earlier. If you don’t like that, you can go three days earlier. I can just live here, and if I really can’t live by myself, I can go to Hyong-chol’s and be useful—peel garlic and clean—but what would you do? You don’t know how to do anything. Someone has waited on you all your life. I can just see it. Nobody likes a smelly, silent old man taking up space. We are now burdens to the children, who have no use for us. People say you can tell from the outside a house that has an old person living in it. They say it smells. A woman can somehow take care of herself and live, but a man becomes pathetic if he lives alone. Even if you want to live longer, at least don’t live longer than me. I’ll give you a good burial and follow you there—I can do that.”

You climb on a chair to take down the box from the top of
the wardrobe. Actually, there are two boxes. From its size, it looks like the box in front is yours and the one behind is your wife’s. They are much larger than they looked when you were lying down. She said that she hadn’t seen such beautiful fabric in her life, that she’d gone far to get it. You open the box, and there are hemp cloths, mourning clothes, wrapped in blindingly white cotton. You undo each knot. The hemp to cover the mattress, hemp to cover the blanket, hemp to wrap the feet, hemp to wrap the hands, all inside, in order.
You said you’d bury me first and then go.…
You blink and gaze at the pouches that would wrap around your and your wife’s fingers and toes after your deaths.

Two girls run in through the side gate toward you, calling you, “Grandpa!” Tae-sop’s children, who live near the creek. They soon wander away from you, looking around the house. They must be looking for your wife. Tae-sop, who is running a Chinese restaurant in Taejon, left his two children with his elderly mother, who was so old she could barely take care of herself, and never showed his face. Perhaps he isn’t doing too well. Your wife always clucked her tongue when she saw the children, saying, “Even if Tae-sop is like that, what kind of person is Tae-sop’s wife to do this?” Neighbors whispered that Tae-sop’s wife and the restaurant’s cook had run away together. Your wife was the person who made sure the children ate, not their own grandmother. Once, your wife saw that they hadn’t eaten and brought them home to feed them breakfast; the next morning, the girls came over, sleep still in their eyes. Your wife placed two more spoons on the table and seated the girls;
after that, they came by at each mealtime. Sometimes they would arrive before the food was ready and go lie on their stomachs and play, and when the table was set they would run over and sit down. They stuffed their mouths as if they would never see food again. You were flabbergasted, but your wife took their side, as if they were her secret granddaughters: “They must be so hungry to do that. It’s not like before, when things were difficult for us.… It’s nice to have them around, it’s not as lonely.”

After the girls started to come for meals, your wife would, even in the morning, cook an eggplant dish and steam mackerel. When your children visited from Seoul with fruit or cake, she saved the treats until the girls poked their heads through the gate, around four in the afternoon. Soon enough, the girls started expecting snacks on top of three meals, and your wife also started to assume that she would feed them. You don’t know how she managed to feed the children when Pyong-sik, the owner of the store in town, had to bring her home because he found her sitting at the bus stop, not knowing which bus to take home. Or when she left to go to the garden to pick some adlay but was found sitting in the fields beyond the railroad by Ok-chol. What did the children eat during your absence? You didn’t think of the girls while you were in Seoul.

“Where’s Grandma, Grandpa?” the elder child asks you, figuring out that your wife isn’t here only after she has looked by the well and in the shed and the back yard and even opened the doors to the bedrooms. It’s the elder who asks the question, but the younger girl comes right up next to you, waiting for your answer. You want to ask the same thing. Really, where is she? Is she even in this world? You tell the children to
wait, and you scoop some rice from the rice jar and wash it and put it in the electric rice-cooker. The girls run around, opening every bedroom door. As if your wife might walk out of one of the rooms. You pause, not knowing how much water to pour in, because you’ve never done this before; then you add about half a cup more and press the switch down.

That day, in the subway car leaving Seoul Station, how many minutes did it take you to grasp that your wife wasn’t there, in the moving subway car? You assumed that she had gotten on behind you. As the car stopped at Namyong Station and left it, you felt a sudden terror. Before you could examine the source of that feeling, something, despair that you had committed a grievous mistake that you couldn’t go back on, punched your soul. Your heart was beating so loudly that you could hear it. You were afraid to look behind you. The moment when you had to confirm that you’d left your wife in Seoul Station, that you’d boarded the train and traveled one stop away, the moment that you turned around, accidentally hitting the shoulder of the person next to you, you realized that your life had been irreparably damaged. It didn’t take even a minute to realize that your life had veered off track because of your speedy gait, because of your habit of always walking in front of your wife during all those years of marriage, first when you were young, then old, for fifty years. If you had turned around to check whether she was there right as you got on the car, would things have turned out this way? For years your wife used to make comments—your wife, who always lagged behind when you went somewhere together, would follow you with sweat beaded on her forehead, grumbling from behind—“I wish you’d go a little slower, I wish you’d go
at my pace. What’s the rush?” If you finally stopped to wait for her, she would smile in embarrassment and say, “I walk too slowly, right?”