The Train Robbery
When Ki-jo and Seogwang's jeeps reached Deokjeong Station, the plaza out front was packed solid with vehicles—U.S. military police cars and Korean police cars, filling every space in front of the station.
Ki-jo slowed to take them in, then pulled over a little way off from the station. Seogwang, who had followed behind, climbed out and came over to him.
"I'll go find out what's happened."
"No. Let's see the station master later."
"I was only going to stop by the baggage office. I'll have a look and be right back."
Ki-jo tried to hold him back, but Seogwang was already heading for the baggage office to see his old coworkers.
"Something must have happened at the station."
"It looks that way."
Ki-jo nodded at Sunrye's words. He knew exactly what had happened. He had simply been running himself ragged between Incheon and Busan, and the day's incident had slipped his mind until it was too late. Of all the days to come… Have I been living too hard? He blamed himself for choosing the wrong one.
He was still turning it over when Seogwang came back, his face grave.
"Chairman, something bad has happened…"
"What is it?"
He asked, though he already knew.
"They say an American troop train was robbed."
Sunrye, sitting in the back seat, started at Seogwang's words.
"Will my cousin be all right?"
"The station master should be fine. It doesn't seem to have happened at Deokjeong Station."
"Really?"
Seogwang answered her, anxious as she was for that cousin of hers.
"Ma'am, please don't worry too much. The chairman is right. They say it happened on the road from Uijeongbu to Deokjeong."
Sunrye let out a breath of relief.
"Director Kim, let's each go see our own people first. Better if we come by Deokjeong Station after lunch."
"Yes, sir."
Seogwang went back to his jeep, turned it around, and headed the other way. The village where he had lived lay in the opposite direction from Ki-jo's.
Ki-jo took Sunrye and the children into the village where he had once farmed as a tenant. He nosed the jeep down a grassy track barely wide enough for a single vehicle and stopped in front of the house they used to live in.
In the yard, a young couple sat facing each other, floating rice seed in brine. Getting ready for transplanting, Ki-jo thought. When he stepped out of the car, the man rose and addressed him.
"Where have you come from?"
Strangers arriving by car put the young couple on their guard, and they watched Ki-jo with wary eyes.
"I used to live in this house. I wanted to see the old place, so I came."
"You lived here…?"
The man stared at him in disbelief. A man in a crisp Western suit, arrived in his own car—it was hard to credit that he had ever lived in the shabby thatched house they now called home.
"Would you mind if we looked around for a moment?"
"No, please. As much as you like…"
Sunrye stepped down with Yeong-eun in her arms, and she and Yeong-su offered their greetings; the young couple smiled and returned them. Looking at the pair, who seemed no more than seventeen or eighteen, Ki-jo and Sunrye were carried back to another time. He took her hand, and together they walked slowly through the house where they had first set up their married life.
New owners had brought new household goods, and the traces of the two of them were gone. But the shaded rear of the house, where hands seldom reached, was just as it had been. The smell of damp moss rose to meet her, and a memory Sunrye had forgotten came back.
"Do you remember hiding back here at night to scare me?"
"I remember."
"I wasn't eating well then, so my eyes were bad after dark and I could hardly see what was in front of me. The insects were chirping so loud I never even felt you there."
"That's right. I came right up close, and you just kept calling for me, not knowing a thing."
"When you put your hand on my shoulder, I truly thought I was going to faint dead away."
They laughed together, remembering their days in Deokjeong. Coming out of the narrow backyard with Sunrye, Ki-jo turned to the man.
"The chimney on this house doesn't draw very well, does it?"
"Ah, yes. It leaks a bit of smoke."
"Wait just a moment."
Ki-jo opened the jeep's rear door and took out half a sack of cement, a sack of sand, and a trowel. He poured the cement in one corner of the yard, mixed it with water into mortar, scraped away the dried mud plugging the smoking base of the chimney, and plastered the spot over with cement.
"Dear, see if the stove mouth is cracked anywhere, too."
Ki-jo nodded. He asked the homeowners' leave and stepped into the kitchen, and there it was, just as Sunrye remembered: the cracked mouth of the firebox, untouched. He filled that in with cement as well. When he was finished in the kitchen, he used what cement and sand remained to set a stepping-stone where the yard rose up to the wooden floor.
The work done, the young couple thanked him warmly. Having nothing else to offer, they brought him a bowl of cold water. Ki-jo drank it down with pleasure and laughed.
"Ha—the water tastes just the same. You drew it from the spring on the back hill, didn't you?"
"Yes, that's right."
The man was sure of it now. This stranger really had lived here. The last of his suspicion melted away.
Sunrye brought rice cakes from the car. They had been meant for her cousin, but she took out half and pressed them on the young couple.
"We're the ones who ought to be offering you something, and here you are giving us rice cakes…"
"Don't think of it. Let's share them."
Ki-jo and Sunrye sat on the wooden porch and divided the cakes with the young couple. Yeong-su had no memory of the place, but he had been told it was where his mother and father had lived when he was born, and he wandered the yard with a face full of curiosity, peering at everything.
"How long have you been in Deokjeong-ri?"
"We came in '55."
"The landlord's name is Ha, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"And how does the rent run?"
What the man told him left Ki-jo heavy-hearted. The terms were worse than they had been when he himself farmed this land—barely enough for the two of them to keep themselves fed.
"No children yet, I take it?"
"No."
"Have you ever thought of moving?"
"People like us… we're in no shape to go anywhere else and even keep food in our mouths…"
Ki-jo spoke to the dispirited man.
"If you go to Eundae-ri in Yeoncheon County, you'll find a village with a rice mill. The village chief there is a man named Jang Seokgu. Go and look him up."
"Mr. Jang Seokgu…"
"Yes. Tell him Lee Ki-jo sent you, and he'll set aside some land for you."
"Give us land?"
"Yes. There's a fair amount of land the village farms in common. They put what it yields toward a village fund, but if you say I sent you, he'll share that land with you."
"All right. We'll go and see him…"
The young couple could not quite take it in. Who in the world parcelled out land to people as penniless as they were? And yet, judging by the generosity Ki-jo and Sunrye had already shown them, and by the way they carried themselves, it did not have the feel of a lie.
They helped the couple pick the empty grains floating in the brine—the same couple who had let them look through the house—and then they took their leave. With Yeong-su and Yeong-eun in their arms, the two of them climbed the hill that looked out over the tracks. It was the place where, in their Deokjeong-ri days, they had wrapped the infant Yeong-su in a quilt and come out to watch the trains go by, talking of a bright future.
Sunrye watched a train pass with him, then asked:
"Are you still dreaming of sending Yeong-su only as far as middle school, and making a township clerk out of him?"
"No."
Ki-jo smiled and shook his head.
"Will you send our Yeong-su to Harvard, too?"
"If Yeong-su wants it, and if he has it in him, then of course we should."
Sunrye looked straight at him and smiled.
"Why are you looking at me like that…?"
"Just because I love you. It feels like only yesterday that you suddenly said, in '53, that we ought to go to Yeoncheon. Living like this now seems like a dream."
"It seems like a dream to me, too."
It did. A daughter who had never existed was born to him now. He could see Yeong-su all the way through university. Sunrye no longer had to wear herself out at the American base and on the market floor. Ki-jo sat in the grass and let the happiness of it hold him—Sunrye with her head resting on his shoulder, Yeong-su pressed close against his side.
When the hour he had promised Seogwang drew near, he rose and took his family on to Deokjeong Station. By the time they arrived, the cars that had choked the plaza were gone. Seogwang's family was waiting, and they all went into the station building together. At the wicket the station master, counting tickets, looked up at the two families in astonishment.
"Well, if it isn't Kim Seogwang…"
He had seen Kim Seogwang first. Delighted, he seized his hand and shook it.
"Have you been well, Station Master?"
"Of course. Well enough. And you, Seogwang—have you been well?"
He traded news with Seogwang, then turned to Ki-jo and Sunrye. The smile that had come at the sight of Ki-jo grew briefly complicated when his eyes reached her.
"Brother, it's me. Sunrye."
She made herself known first, and the tension went out of the station master's face.
"Ah. I heard. They say you've been in touch with Auntie…"
"Yes, Brother. Why didn't you let on, back when I lived here? If you'd told me then, it would have been so much better…"
"I was shortsighted, Sunrye. I didn't think it through."
Shared blood drew them together almost at once. They went into the station office and talked at a happy volume, and the station master, who had looked worn thin, came slowly back to life.
"Faces this welcome put the strength back in a man. I heard you built a briquette plant near Yongsan Station, Ki-jo—and opened a coal mine out in Dogye, too."
True to a railroad man, the master of Deokjeong Station had taken Ki-jo's measure from the doings along the line.
"Brother, my husband is going to make train wheels, too."
Sunrye praised the husband who was already being praised. That was her particular joy. The station master answered her.
"Ah! Those domestic wheels—that was you? The Minister of Transportation himself asked us to take good care of the cars running on Korean-made wheels."
"I didn't make them. It was a project the Minister pushed forward. I only helped at the side."
When Ki-jo demurred, the station master only brightened, glad to have been right all along that the man would go far. While they talked, Ki-jo saw how much the station master's hair had grayed. The big American base at Dongducheon had swollen the freight, he thought, and as the military freight grew, so had the thieves who stripped the trains.
"By the way, Station Master—I heard the goats died yesterday?"
Seogwang asked, and the station master let out a long sigh.
"Yes. There was a bad accident yesterday."
The goats Seogwang spoke of were slang of the fifties. The word had begun as Gyeongsang dialect for an ordinary goat, and then it had come to mean the men who deliberately drove a goat onto a U.S. Army base and walked in after it, claiming they were looking for the animal, so they could steal. In time it was used for anyone who made a living off American goods.
"I heard from the freight hands that two of them died."
"The train guards shot them. Nine of them, I was told. Two killed by gunfire, and one badly wounded."
"They'll have to catch the rest of those bastards, too. I mean, if you're going to rob something, rob something else. A U.S. Army freight train? Those boys have some nerve, I'll give them that. The Americans are up there with guns, guarding the train. What is this, a Western?"
Listening to the two of them, Ki-jo tasted something bitter. It would come to light later, but the Yangju Train Robbery had in fact been a job cooked up between Koreans and American soldiers. The plan was to halt the train for a short while on the pass between Uijeongbu and Deokjeong, so the Koreans could strip American cigarettes off the military cars. Sergeant Wilson of the U.S. Army was to take half the money from selling them. Then the thing went sideways.
The Koreans had agreed to pick the locks on the freight cars and clear them out without leaving a trace. Instead the gang had gone so far as to bring an oxyacetylene torch and burn the doors open with flame. Wilson saw it and panicked, and he opened fire on his own partners. Thieves who had hauled a welding torch aboard—and the man charged with escorting the train claiming he never noticed? It would never have held up. Fear of what the military police would drag out of him later was what made Wilson do it.
In the end the dogged investigation of the American MPs and the Korean police caught Sergeant Wilson. But the Korean police could not so much as indict him, and Wilson went home to America. Ki-jo, who could see all of it coming with perfect clarity, kept his words to himself and said nothing.
"The Americans have decided to string a double line of barbed wire along the tracks."
The station master said it plainly. Through the fifties, wire had already stood along the railroad. Part of the aim was to stop people crossing the tracks where they pleased, but the real purpose was to keep thieves off the freight. It did little to stop the thieves. Only the people who lived alongside the line suffered for it. Rather than walk the long way around to a crossing, they tried to cut straight across, caught themselves on the barbed wire, and accidents followed often enough to be no surprise at all.
Ki-jo's family and Seogwang's unburdened themselves with the station master, and then they started home. On the way back, Ki-jo looked at the wire running along the tracks—wire that had not been there before the war—and his heart sat wrong in him.
In 1957, many children died along the railroad and around the U.S. Army oil pipeline. Students had only to pass near the tracks for the Americans, their nerves drawn tight, to order them to halt; and when the children, startled by soldiers shouting with guns in their hands, broke into a run, the Americans fired. A fifteen-year-old middle-school boy died that way under American guns, and so did a girl cutting grass beside the tracks. A three-year-old who had climbed onto the pipeline to play at riding a horse was shot and killed, and boys swimming in a reservoir near the line were shot and killed as well. In 1957, more than in any other year, Korean boys and girls died from American bullets.
Driving, Ki-jo spoke to his son.
"Yeong-su. You must never play near the tracks."
"Yes, Father."
Ki-jo stared into the darkness ahead of the jeep and nodded, and said nothing more.