Goodbye, 1954
On December 23, as the year drew toward its close, Kijo brought his family to Eundae-ri. Some three hundred villagers came all the way out to the edge of the village to welcome them, and the warmth of that greeting stung Kijo and Sunrye at the nose.
"The place felt empty with you gone, Chief. Now that you've come, the village seems full again."
Old Man Gusuk, the eldest soul in Eundae-ri, said it with Kijo's hand clasped tight in his own.
"Have you been well, Elder?"
Kijo returned the greeting, folding the old man's thin hand in both of his. Sunrye, caught in a press of village women, had her hands full returning their hellos. Most of all she and Yun Mal-ja, with whom she had always been easy and unguarded, threw their arms around each other and wept.
"I ought to have come more often. I'm sorry, Malja."
"You moved away to Seoul. How could you come often...?"
Their son Yeongsu was glad to the bone to see his old friends. The children of Eundae-ri hung back at first, made shy by the clothes he wore, but the old affection soon found them and they tumbled in together as before. Juseok, who reigned as captain among the children, tucked Yeongsu under his arm and made much of him, and Yeongsu shared out the malt candy he had brought and told them stories of Seoul.
When the gladness of meeting had been passed around, Kijo followed Jang Seokgu, who was serving as village chief of Eundae-ri, up to the rice mill. Kijo had built it for them ahead of the autumn harvest. The moment they stepped into the building—two stories high beneath a roof of corrugated iron—the smell of rice husks rolled over them.
"Thanks to you, Chief, we milled the rice and sold it for a better price."
"The machinery didn't break down on you halfway?"
"Not a bit, Chief. We could have milled every grain of rice in Yeoncheon and the mill wouldn't have faltered. Folks from Paju and Pocheon, right next door, even came to the Eundae-ri mill to have theirs done."
"You must have taken in a tidy sum in milling fees."
"Every last coin went into the village common fund."
In the 1950s a rice mill was a fat trade. Right through the 1980s, country people counted three households the rich of any village: the mill, the brewery, and the orchard. Kijo meant to make all three the chief enterprises of his plan to turn Eundae-ri into a prosperous place.
"Is the brewery coming along?"
"Sure is, Chief. Old Gusuk and Manpal have taken it in hand. They've started brewing cheongju from the rice—a clear rice wine."
"Hm. Rice wine is well enough, but the government may yet ban brewing with rice. Try making spirits from other grains, too."
"Yes, Chief."
"And the pear saplings—did you get them?"
"Bought a heap, with the money from the rice."
"Good. Pears won't be an easy crop. I've asked the agricultural technology institute for an extension agent, so run the orchard as he tells you."
"Understood, Chief."
Once the village had the knack of raising pears, Kijo meant to have them grow and sell bottle pears as well, the byeongbae that were a specialty of Yeoncheon. A bottle pear was a fruit liqueur of a particular kind: the fruit was grown to ripeness inside a round glass bottle, and after the harvest the bottle was filled with soju and sold just so.
"After Lunar New Year, come up to Seoul. I want to use the village common fund to buy some land outside the Four Great Gates, and south of the Han."
"If we buy land, who's going to look after it?"
"We lease it out. The tenants pay rent."
"Then hadn't we better buy over toward Yeoncheon-myeon? Easier to manage, seems to me."
"It has to be land near Seoul. No exceptions. Set the tone so the people will trust me and follow."
Kijo meant to buy up the country around Seoul with Eundae-ri's common fund. Step outside the Four Great Gates and the capital was farmland from end to end; the ground south of the Han, in Gangnam, was not even reckoned a place where people lived. Buy that land and let it lie, and it would make a fortune.
"Understood, Chief. I'll bring them around."
It sat a little wrong with Seokgu, passing over land close to hand to buy what lay far off, but his faith in Kijo ran deep.
"I'm counting on you, Chief Jang. The day will come when every one of them thanks you."
"If it works out, how's that my doing? It'll all be thanks to you, Chief. Say the word and we'd believe you even if you told us you'd brewed soybean cakes out of red beans. You tell them you said so, and they'll all agree. Haha."
"I'd be glad of it. Haha."
Kijo trusted Jang Seokgu. He had set the man in the chief's seat because he had taken the measure of a loyalty Seokgu kept hidden, and of the bullheaded drive underneath. There was an authoritarian streak in him, but he was exactly the man to hold Eundae-ri in a firm grip. If Seokgu did a proper job as his proxy, through the years when Kijo himself had no time to look after the village, the future of its people could be made secure.
Should someone oppose him anyway and leave Eundae-ri, there would be nothing for it. Even the governorship of Pyongyang—the fattest post in the old kingdom—is nothing to a man who does not want it. But unless a man were a fool, Kijo did not think anyone would. Look a dozen miles in any direction, and there was nowhere better to live than Eundae-ri.
Coming out of the mill, Kijo took Sunrye and Yeongsu to the house where they had once lived. Jeon Il-su's family was in it now—Il-su, elder brother to Jeon Hyeon-su. Eager to show how well he had kept the place, he led them first to the cowshed, swept clean.
"Chief, the cow's with calf, so I built her a shed of her own."
Kijo looked with quiet pleasure at the three head of cattle he and Ma-ryang had bought in Yangju. The calf that had been nothing but bones, motherless and starved of milk, had grown into a fine, sturdy beast. When Yeongsu held out his hand to the yearling, the young cow licked his palm just as it had in its calf days.
"Oh my. The calf remembers Yeongsu."
Tears welled in Sunrye's eyes as she looked at the animal that had shot up so tall; she had always been quick to weep. She had raised those cattle with painstaking devotion, and she was bound to them. Kijo lifted Yeongsu and brought him close enough to stroke the young cow's head, and the animal raised its head into the boy's hand.
When the family came out of the shed, Il-su spoke.
"Once the oxen we bought with the draft-cattle fund come in, we mean to put up a big barn outside the village and raise them all together."
"Good. That'll be better for the cattle, too."
Kijo went in to pay his respects to Il-su's grandmother as well. Country life, and the company of the neighboring elders, seemed to have done her health a world of good.
"Grandmother doesn't cry out at night anymore. This place must feel enough like the home she remembers that it sets her mind at ease," Il-su said.
Kijo was glad the family had come to live in the old house. Leave a house empty and it fails in no time. A house, too, needs the warmth of people in it if it is to last.
Il-su thanked him once more.
"Chief, I truly don't know how to thank you. That my family can live this easy is all your doing. I don't know how I'll ever repay a kindness like that."
"Kindness? If there was a debt, it's as good as paid. Your brother has done great work for me."
Since his return from Japan, Jeon Hyeon-su had been staying in Busan, sunk entirely in the building of the MSG plant. Even after he reached Korea he had sent his brother nothing but letters, never once coming to see the family, too deep in the work.
"By next summer or so, the plant ought to have found its feet. Your brother should be able to come to Eundae-ri then."
"I don't mind not seeing his face. Just hearing he's doing his part and making a life of it is enough to make me proud."
At Il-su's words, Kijo broke into a bright smile.
"Hyeon-su will come to you before long, bringing good news."
There was a great deal he might have told the man about Hyeon-su's return from Japan, but he left it there and turned toward the village hall.
In front of the hall, Kijo's family waited with the people of Eundae-ri for the Americans to arrive. At last a line of U.S. Army trucks rolled in, and the villagers sent up a cheer. The trucks were packed with relief goods sent from the United States.
Early in 1954, American newspapers had carried the story of a country village in Korea that had been branded a nest of Reds, then taken under the protection of the U.S. Army and restored, safely, to ordinary life. Christian women's societies, charities, and associations of Korean War veterans, reading that news, had forwarded donations to the 7th Infantry Division. Major General Martin had gathered the goods and sent them on to Eundae-ri on December 23, the day before Christmas Eve.
Villagers and soldiers of the 7th Division posed together before the mountain of goods heaped in front of the hall. A reporter from Stars and Stripes, come along with the troops, caught the Americans and the Koreans in his camera.
After the commemorative photographs, Kijo and Division Commander Martin went into the hall to talk.
"Eundae-ri looks to have come on even further. I saw a new building out there. The rice mill? The village has pulled itself together."
"It's what we managed because the 7th Division kept us safe."
"Haha. Come on, friend. That's your doing. What did we ever do?"
Talking on, Major General Martin came around to his own posting.
"Looks like I'll be leaving Korea before long."
"Where will you go?"
"They're calling me in to the Pentagon. I expect I'll be working out why the French failed in Indochina."
Kijo was sorry to hear that Will Martin would leave, but he knew the man had stepped onto the road of promotion, and he offered his congratulations. That was how their system worked: earn your marks on a battlefield like Korea, rotate back to Japan or the United States and away from the line, and rise to lieutenant general.
"Congratulations, General."
"Congratulations for what? I'm not sure the work even suits me. Still, what I learned in Korea ought to help in picking apart that failure in Indochina."
Martin went quiet a moment, as if the return to America had stirred a whole tangle of feeling.
"Even after I'm back in the States, if you ever run into trouble, you get in touch. Go through Frank."
"I will, General."
They shook hands. That Major General Martin was leaving Korea left one side of Kijo's heart empty. Hanging his own picture beside the general's great portrait in a portrait shop had been the first step of the bond between them. The connection had been contrived at the start, but afterward it had gone on of itself, and a deep trust had grown up out of it. The tie he had forged with Major General Martin was one of the most important things that had happened in 1954.
"I'll tell the new division commander about you and your village. Your connection with the 7th won't end."
"Thank you."
"I'd like to show you America. If I send a transport, will you come?"
"I'm not even with the military anymore. I'll buy my own ticket and come."
"There you go. Offer you something and you won't take it. That's the trouble with you."
"A Christmas present, I'll accept with pleasure."
"That's more like it. A Christmas present is the one thing a man is not allowed to refuse."
Martin let out a great rolling laugh. Just then his aide stepped into the hall to report that the second round of photographs was ready: they were to open the wrapped goods and take pictures of them being put directly into the villagers' hands.
Major General Martin went out with Kijo, handed the donations to the villagers, and was photographed shaking their hands. Powdered milk, underwear, socks, children's clothes, winter clothing, shoes, pencils, notebooks, soap, detergent, aspirin—all of it went out among the people. Nearly everything, the clothes included, had already been used by Americans, but the people of Eundae-ri were wild with delight. A good few of the socks had holes in them, and that was no trouble at all. Darn them, and they were fit to wear.
The children cheered even the pencil stubs American children had worn down. They stroked the pages of notebooks made from paper so fine it was hard to come by in Korea, and their eyes went wide.
"Father, if I wrote in this, I don't think the paper would tear even if I erased it a hundred times."
"Hey—there's squiggly writing in this notebook!"
They were secondhand notebooks, already used by children in America, but the boys clutched the pencil stubs and the old books and jumped up and down. The mothers caught hold of them and bent to the work of finding shoes that fit.
The villagers had no notion of how to use the detergent, and Kijo had to show them.
"Put just a little of this powder in a basin, dissolve it, soak the wash, and rub it by hand. The stains will come right out."
"So this is that soap powder for doing the laundry?"
The women were full of hope for a washing powder they had never once laid eyes on. With the gifts from America on the day before Christmas Eve, Eundae-ri had already slipped into a Christmas mood.
After Major General Martin and the soldiers had gone, and the villagers had gathered up the donations and turned home, Kijo took his wife and Yeongsu on a circuit of the village. They walked with Yeongsu's hands in theirs, one on either side, and thought back on life in Eundae-ri, which only a year before had seemed a dead end.
"Dear, they want us to stay the night. Where are we going to sleep?"
"I hear they've cleaned out Brother Seogwang's empty house."
"Oh, good. We can sleep there."
As they made their round, the smell of feast food began to lift from one house and another. The villagers were cooking in their own kitchens, meaning to spread a feast in front of the hall.
"I remember the village feast when the cattle came in."
"That was when Mr. Mulbak tried to match Hee-ja up with my brother-in-law."
"Oh, you're right. If that had gone through, what a disaster it would have been. Soon-young nearly lost the man she was going to marry."
Kijo and Sunrye laughed together.
"Your sister and Ma-ryang ought to be along by now, and Mr. Hansu with them," Kijo said, glancing at his wristwatch.
Even as he spoke, figures showed at the darkening edge of the village, waving and calling out to them.
Soon-young, Ma-ryang, and Hansu.
Yeongsu saw them, and he was the first to break into a run to meet the three.