The Supply Depot
Sunday morning, January 6, 1957. Seogwang left the house and set out for the Cheongsan Briquette supply depot, and out front Hansu was already waiting with Hyun-kyung and her younger brother, Young-gi. The moment they saw him, they bowed.
"Director, you're here."
Seogwang took the greeting and turned a bright smile on Young-gi.
"Young-gi. You came too."
"Yes, Director."
His eyes lingered on the boy, and on the prosthetic leg he wore, with a pang of tenderness. His own leg was only a trouble to him. Young-gi had nothing below the right knee. How hard that must be.
"Young-gi, that leg your brother-in-law—no, the one Hansu made you. Is it comfortable?"
"Of course. Have a look."
Young-gi rolled up his trouser leg. The prosthetic Hansu had carved from wood with his own hands was strapped on with tire rubber sliced thin.
"Well made."
"Yes. So I get to do good work with you, Director."
"Ah, as if I do any of it alone. We all do it together."
While the two of them were talking, Dae-ik and Wang-cheol arrived.
"Director, you're out early. And good morning to you, Hyun-kyung."
Wang-cheol offered it with a slick, unhurried grin. Dae-ik traded greetings around the circle, pushed up the cloth guards on his forearms, and spoke.
"On the way up just now with Brother Wang-cheol, we saw the President over at Gyodong Elementary, playing with Yeongsu."
"He didn't catch you?"
"No. We slipped past. He was so wrapped up playing marbles with Yeongsu on one side of the schoolyard, he hadn't a glance to spare."
Everyone laughed at that.
"There's just no stopping the President," Seogwang said. "Looks after his family like nothing else. Won't even take his rest on a holiday—ha ha."
"Anyway, we keep this from him. If he learns what we're up to, he won't let it lie."
"Yes, Director."
Seogwang laid the warning down hard on the five from Cheongsan gathered before the briquette depot in Gyeongun-dong.
What the six of them meant to do, Seogwang among them, was to give Cheongsan briquettes away to the poor of Gyeongun-dong, Insa-dong, and the rest of Bukchon. Once it had been his work alone. Then Hansu happened to catch him at it, and they had decided to bring the others in and carry it on together.
After the Cheongsan briquette works in Yongsan went into operation in 1956, Seogwang had spent his own money carrying coal briquettes to the poor houses around his home. The kindness had begun only once the life he had lived, poor to the point of tearing, turned—once he met Kijo, and his fortune opened with the meeting. Generosity starts, as the old saying has it, when the granary is full. A house in Seoul, a wage of ten thousand hwan a month, and at last there was room in his heart.
Ten thousand hwan was five times the average monthly wage of a working man in Korea. Reckoned by the year it came to a hundred and twenty thousand hwan, a considerable salary, and Kijo had not forgotten the men who had raised Cheongsan beside him. The pay stood level with what went to Lee Man-ik, president of Cheongsan Construction; to Kim Moon-hwan of Cheongsan Briquettes; to Oh Yang-soo of Cheongsan Shipping. The department chiefs at the head office held lesser rank and nothing else. In the treatment they received, they stood with the presidents of the companies.
Seogwang opened the warehouse of the Gyeongun-dong depot with the key he had brought. In the dark inside, the black briquettes caught the morning sun and glinted.
"Well, would you look at that. Handsome devils, our briquettes. Must be the professor's hand on them—sharp as can be, every last one."
Seogwang laid it on thick, and the staff burst out laughing. Without being told, they loaded the briquettes onto the handcart. All of them had joined his purpose and agreed to chip in five hundred hwan apiece from their wages, so that houses with none might have them free. Hyun-kyung and Young-gi, who earned less, had only to give their labor.
They hauled the loaded cart off toward Bukchon, the old northern quarter, and children playing in the alleys sang out as soon as they saw him.
"Hello, Depot Chief!"
"Hello, Chief!"
They called him Depot Chief. There had been a time when the sight of Seogwang limping along was enough to set them jeering "cripple" from a safe distance before they ran. But once he began his briquette rounds, and their parents took to addressing him as Depot Chief with open gratitude, the children had come to respect him too.
"Hey, you little rascals! Play when the weather breaks this afternoon! Fool around in the cold and you'll be starving before you know it!"
He took their greetings with a laugh. The third department chief, and Hyun-kyung with her brother, smiled with quiet pleasure at the back of him as he limped on ahead.
Seogwang—Kijo's closest man, and the one whose tie to him went back the furthest—was a warm presence among them, an older brother whichever way you turned. Outsiders, the suppliers who delivered brick to Cheongsan, took Ma-ryang, Kijo's brother-in-law, for the second man in the company. Those who worked on the inside saw it differently. Ma-ryang was the sort to honor Kijo as elder brother and obey without a question. Seogwang was the man who could say to Kijo what needed saying.
And so the staff sometimes leaned on him. When there was something they longed to tell Kijo but could not bring themselves to raise, they brought it to Seogwang instead, and he would walk up to Kijo as if it were nothing and say it outright. Kijo, for his part, nearly always listened when the words were Seogwang's, and the trust the Cheongsan people placed in Kim Seogwang ran deep. Not that it saved him when he and Ma-ryang locked horns face to face. Seogwang always lost.
He stopped and spoke to the staff.
"This house only needs thirty."
At his word they each took up two briquettes and followed him in. While he went inside and talked with the owner, they stacked the briquettes off to one side.
"Chief, thank you for bringing briquettes every time, like this."
The elderly couple bent into a full, right-angled bow, grateful to the bone.
"Good grief. Am I supposed to haul these to your door myself every single time? How many times have I said it—come by the depot, write my name down, and just take them."
"It isn't the first time we've bought on credit, or the second. A person ought to know some shame..."
"Why? The folks at the depot giving you looks?"
"No. It isn't that. We just don't know when we could ever pay for them..."
"Maddening, truly. All for a scrap of pride, the whole house shivering the night through in a room cold as an icebox? Keep that up and you'll sicken every last one of them."
"We're sorry, Chief."
"Ah, enough. Next week I'm going over the depot books. If I don't find your name in there, I won't be bringing another lump."
It was a threat that wasn't quite a threat, and the couple who had taken the free briquettes could not straighten their backs until he was gone.
The next house was much the same. Seogwang did nothing but scold.
"Honestly! How many times—pay me when the money comes! And when you're earning plenty someday, don't you go buying some other company's briquettes. Cheongsan, and Cheongsan only!"
Watching him, the staff worked hard. The more briquettes they gave away, the more strength filled their bodies. Their breath came out white, but they were not cold, and even when soot smudged their foreheads as they wiped the sweat away, there was nothing in it but pleasure. Hansu, easy with Hyun-kyung now, sneaked a sooty finger across her white cheek. When the two of them spilled over in giggles, the others kindly pretended not to see.
One turn around the neighborhood, and the briquettes on the cart were gone. When it came time to go back to the depot for more, Seogwang said they should steer clear of Gyodong Elementary, where Kijo was playing with Yeongsu, and take another alley.
"Huh?"
The six of them had swung wide and were just coming out of a narrow lane when they met Kijo face to face. The man who had been shooting marbles with his son in the schoolyard had moved the game. Now he was out in the alley, whipping a top along for the boy.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
The staff, caught in the middle of a good deed they had meant to keep secret, looked utterly at a loss.
"It's... well. President."
Seogwang, eldest among them, stepped forward and explained how things stood. At that Kijo broke into a wide smile.
"Then I'll put in five hundred hwan myself. Let's do it together."
Now that he knew, the staff had a feeling it would not end at five hundred hwan. For all they knew he would sow free briquettes across the whole of Jongno. Kind as the man was, he was a man who ran a business, and a man in business had to earn—you could not leave him doing nothing but giving the money away. The broadcasting station had already been in the red for half a year, and with two rivals sprung up against the Miwon trade, the takings were nothing like the early days.
"Shall I call my brother-in-law as well? If the good deed is only ours, he'll feel left out..."
Seogwang waved the notion off.
"Don't call Manager Jang, President."
"Why not? He'd gladly put in five hundred hwan. Call it his morning exercise. Better if we work together, and when we're done we can wash up and eat lunch."
"The truth is..."
Seogwang told him what had happened on Saturday.
He and Ma-ryang and Hansu had finished the morning shift and ridden out together on bicycles, meaning to see how Miwon was selling. They passed through Gyonam-dong, Hyeonjeo-dong, and Muak-dong, crossed over into Hongje-dong, and there in the street found three men picking a quarrel with one of the Miwon Ladies.
The Miwon Ladies wore beige work clothes marked with the red Miwon emblem, easy to pick out even from far off. The men were employees of Cheil Jedang. The company had launched Mipung and opened a full-blown sales war with Cheongsan's seasoning. In the fifties a fight over customers observed no scruple and no limit. Cheil Jedang had judged that the heart of Cheongsan's sales force was the Miwon Ladies, and had tried hard to lure them away, meaning to bring the seasoning network down from the ground up. But the women would not betray Kijo, the man who had been first to hold out a hand to the widows of the war. So the tactic changed. Harass the Miwon Ladies, and squeeze the network until it shrank.
The men snatched the bag from the woman's shoulder, flung it down, dumped the Miwon into the street, and ground it under their heels.
"War widow, and look at you, traipsing around selling nothing but Miwon. You want to eat? Then get out there and sell something decent!"
Bag gone and Miwon lost, the woman sank to the ground and gathered up what she could. The men watching cackled. One of them said to her,
"Nice life, isn't it, you husbandless bitch—out selling Miwon, catching a breeze? While you're at it you're angling after other fellows' men, aren't you? A bit of fun and a bit of money. Must be sweet for you."
In the fifties a woman who had lost her husband was slighted as a matter of course, but these men were going too far. The instant Ma-ryang saw it, his bicycle shot forward like a loosed arrow.
"Hey! Ma-ryang!"
"Manager Jang!"
Seogwang and Hansu tried to stop him. It was no use. He had already driven the bicycle straight into the man who was taunting her.
"Agh!"
The man the bicycle struck went flying. Ma-ryang sprang clear, seized the next one by the hair, and hurled him bodily into the telephone pole at the roadside. A crack like a watermelon splitting, and the man who had met the pole with his head went down.
The one left standing looked from the colleague sprawled in the road to the colleague slumped unconscious against the pole. It had happened so fast he half believed lightning had struck them. Then he started at the giant who was suddenly before him.
"Hhk—!"
One look at Ma-ryang's face and he went white.
"What'd you say to that lady?"
Ma-ryang pushed his face in close, and the man shook like a child who had seen a ghost.
"I—I'm sorry..."
"Sorry to who?"
The man dropped to his knees before the Miwon Lady and begged for all he was worth.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. I was wrong. Please forgive what I said."
She nodded at him as he rubbed both hands together like a fly. Ma-ryang, watching from behind, drove a kick into the side of his head. The man toppled sideways where he stood.
"Forgiveness is one thing. You still pay what you owe."
By the time Seogwang and Hansu arrived, it was already over. Hansu set the Miwon Lady on her feet and scooped the spilled seasoning back into the bag. Seogwang looked over the three men lying in the road. No one, fortunately, was dead.
"Ma-ryang... this far?"
But Ma-ryang, eyes blazing, seemed not to hear a word of it. He shoved Seogwang aside, caught the fallen man by the collar, and hauled him up.
"P-please. Spare me just this once..."
Both feet dangled in the air.
"Show me the office where you work."
Seogwang and the Miwon Lady said to leave it there. It did no good.
Kijo had listened that far.
"So what came of it?"
"Ma-ryang walked into the Mipung depot in Seodaemun and put down twenty able-bodied men before you could blink..."
Only then did the bandage wound thick around Seogwang's right arm catch Kijo's eye. He looked to Hansu as well. Hansu was untouched. Seogwang had the strength, but he was no fighter, and he had been hurt; Hansu, quick in the body and good in a brawl, seemed not to have taken a single blow.
"And my brother-in-law? He's all right?"
"Yes. Ma-ryang caught a few from a club, but since when does a flyswatter leave a mark on an elephant?"
Kijo nodded.
"The police turned up afterward, and even they were dumbfounded. Tell them Ma-ryang laid the whole lot out by himself, and they wouldn't believe it. Anyway, we got hauled to the station and let go with a scolding."
In the fifties, a fight that landed you at the police station involved nothing like a charge of mutual assault. An officer heard both sides, pronounced who had been in the wrong and who had deserved the beating, told them to be careful from then on, and that was the end of it.
"Manager Jang was something yesterday," Hansu put in.
"After he'd smashed the Seodaemun Mipung depot to pieces, this is what he said."
"What did he say?"
"Lay a hand on the Miwon Ladies again, and I'll slit your boss Lee Byung-chull's throat."
Kijo stared, brought up short, at Hansu doing Ma-ryang. The words were unlikely to reach President Lee Byung-chull's ears, but they were dangerous words all the same. He reckoned Ma-ryang must have worn himself out the day before, thrashing the men from Cheil Jedang. He remembered how tired the man had looked after beating a crew of gamblers—met at the cattle market—for two solid hours on Mount Bulgok in Yangju.
"Let's not call my brother-in-law. We'll do the work among ourselves, and not a word of it to Manager Jang."
"Yes, President!"
Kijo went to the briquette depot and loaded the handcart alongside the staff.
All that day Yeongsu followed his father about and watched him work up a sweat with his aunt and his uncles. In the boy's eyes, the grown-ups looked happier than anyone in the world.