Land, Capital, and Labor (2)
By the late autumn of 1953, Ki-jo's wasteland had been brought under the plow without a hitch. It was a feat wrought by nothing but human hands—no machines, and not even the strength of a single ox. The villagers could now tenant more land than before, and the rent was so light that they worked as if they were tilling fields of their own.
Of the three elements of wealth, land and labor were ready. The last piece of the puzzle, capital, still stood empty. Even farming demanded a minimum of money. There had to be coin enough for seed, and living expenses enough to last a year, before anyone could sow and hold out until the autumn harvest. But Ki-jo had no such capital, and neither did the tenant farmers who had gathered in Eundae-ri. Bank loans, or aid from an agricultural cooperative, were things no one in that time could even dream of.
So Ki-jo set about the third task: finding capital. He called the tenants into the yard of his house and laid the matter before them.
"We're people who farm, but first we have to earn money. Only then can we hold out until next autumn."
"Earn it how?"
Old Man Gusuk, the eldest soul in the village, asked for all of them.
Ki-jo gave the answer he had prepared.
"Yeoncheon County is to be set as a garrison zone, with the Hantan River as its line."
"What's a garrison zone?"
Samjin's father asked—a man rich in sons, with six boys and not a daughter among them.
"It means the soldiers stationed in Yeoncheon won't be allowed to leave the area. Even if they get a weekend pass, they can't cross the Hantan River bridge and go south."
"And how does that put money in our pockets?"
It was the question Ki-jo had been waiting for.
"We go into trade. With the soldiers—and with the families who come to visit them."
"Trade?"
"Yes. I have a little land in front of Jeongok Station and Yeoncheon Station. Put up an inn and an eatery there, and the business will come."
"An inn and an eatery?"
The people murmured over the proposal. A few were startled to learn that Ki-jo owned land beyond Eundae-ri—something even Soonrye had not known.
"It won't cost much. We'll strip materials from the abandoned houses lying all over Yeoncheon and raise buildings in front of the stations. They don't have to be fine houses. People only need a place to lay their bodies down."
"And the eatery?"
"We add a single bowl of soup to the rice we already eat. Whatever we cook and sell will be better than army food."
Army rations in the 1950s were hardly fit for a human being. Meat was something a soldier never so much as glimpsed, and the portions were small besides. Young men in uniform lived in a constant hunger. Food cooked outside the barracks was bound to outcompete military chow.
"Then what if we made gukbap and sold that? My parents sold rice-and-broth at the market. I still remember how it's done."
Yun Mal-ja said it. She was on easy terms with Soonrye.
"Gukbap needs meat. Where are we supposed to get meat?"
Another woman asked her.
Lee Ki-jo called up the research he had carried all the way through 2019.
"Do you know what kind of land Eundae-ri is?"
"Our farmland, isn't it?"
Someone answered.
"This was a royal hunting ground in the Joseon era. There's plenty of wild game. Pheasant, roe deer, wild boar—catch it and sell it."
"Game animals stink. You can't make gukbap out of them."
Shim Hansu said it. He knew hunting better than most.
"We have the Hantan River, don't we? Catch freshwater fish and boil a spicy stew. Gather river snails and simmer them in soybean-paste soup. So long as the taste comes out clean and refreshing, that'll do."
Ki-jo had offered an alternative, and Jo Man-pal, a man of prodigious appetite, shoved his way into the talk.
"Let's just grab whatever dogs are wandering past and boil up some bosintang to sell. Ownerless dogs are everywhere these days. Catch a male and a female, let them breed, and once the pups are grown you smear them with soybean paste and you're done. Hahaha."
Ideas spilled out from every side.
"There's one more way to make money. Is there anyone in the village who can dress stone?"
"Uncle Seokmun's good at that sort of thing!"
Singled out, Seokmun flushed at the praise for his clever hands. Ki-jo stole a glance at them. Thick, even at a look—the hands of a man who could work.
"Good. Let's make millstones and sell them."
"Millstones?"
Most of the village was taken aback.
"Yes. Long ago a great volcano in Gangwon Province erupted, and the lava flowed across what is now Yeoncheon County. That's why there's so much basalt here. Carve it into millstones, haul them to Seoul, and sell them. There'll be money in it."
In his eleventh life, working from research he had done on the internet, Ki-jo had gone to Yeoncheon and walked the ground himself. Strangely enough, the walls of the county's old houses resembled the stone walls of Jeju Island. Yeoncheon had as much basalt as Jeju.
"How do we move millstones that heavy?"
"Ah, what's there to worry about? The men each shoulder one, ride the train, and go up to Seoul."
The villagers talked and laughed among themselves. Watching them, Ki-jo smiled.
Before the deep of winter came, an inn and an eatery had risen in front of Yeoncheon Station and Jeongok Station. The great iron cauldrons for boiling soup were carried over just as they stood in the village, and the households that gave them up cooked their rice and soup together at a neighbor's fire. Those who hunted well, those who fished well, those with a feel for stone, those with a hand for food, and those who had nothing to offer but strength spread out across field, mountain, and river. From the old to the children, not a soul sat idle. Everyone bent to the work of earning.
The children even brought in sparrows to roast and sell at the eatery. All of them had come through the war, and the will to survive ran hard in them. To eat and to live, there was nothing they would not do.
The trade itself began in earnest with the winter. The inn was a shabby thing, yet on weekends a premium clung to every room, and when no room remained the villagers lent out their own houses. It was Airbnb in everything but the name. Beside the inn, the eatery selling spicy fish stew and soybean-paste soup with river snails did so well that the ingredients ran out early, and they were reduced to serving guests nothing but rice and kimchi.
The Yeoncheon where Ki-jo had settled held a Paleolithic site famous the world over. That a communal dwelling of Paleolithic people still remained there meant the country round about was naturally fitted to the bare needs of survival. Ancient men and women had used that land to live. Ki-jo had merely developed it along capitalist lines.
Cash began to gather. Every week Ki-jo laid the earnings open before the villagers and divided them fairly. If the money were heaped in one place and a thief happened to take it, there would be no farming the following year. And people, by their nature, worked harder when something came back into their own hands. With the shares they received from Ki-jo, they sought out seed for themselves and bought the tools they needed.
Ki-jo skimmed a portion of the takings into a common village development fund and kept it under his own hand. That money had to go somewhere else, somewhere that mattered. He told neither the villagers nor Yang Soonrye where it went, for it was coin meant for lobbying the government offices and the army stationed in Yeoncheon County. Not one person in the village asked him how the common fund was spent.
Now and then Ki-jo forgot his own standing, but he was, beyond any argument, both landlord and village head of Eundae-ri. He was not old, yet everyone there granted him his wide learning and his force of will. Even Mr. Kim, the Deokjeong Station porter who had come with him from Yangju, had grown uneasy in his presence. Once Ki-jo had honored him as an older brother, and Mr. Kim had taken Ki-jo as a younger one. Little by little, he could no longer move at ease around him.
"Hyung, please speak freely with me."
"Ah... that's a little hard."
"Why, hyung? Treat me the way you did when we worked at Deokjeong Station."
"You're the village head, and the landlord..."
"What village head? I was never even elected. And it stings if you think of me as a landlord instead of a younger brother. Hyung."
"No. If I, a tenant, treat the landlord without reserve in front of the other tenants, I'm the only one who'll catch the blame. When people are watching, I'll just bend at the waist and greet you. Take it easy, little brother."
"Really, hyung. Why would you bow to me..."
However Ki-jo tried to keep things easy between them, Mr. Kim would not allow it. It hurt, but there was nothing to be done. And it was not only Mr. Kim. Everyone in the village held Ki-jo in a wary respect, and little by little he grew used to it.
That respect reached past Ki-jo to Soonrye, and to their son, Yeong-su. The more it did, the more Ki-jo felt he had to watch his conduct and his words. At the table he was forever telling the boy the same thing.
"You must never be a burden on the neighbors, and you must never look down on the children of the village."
"Yes, Father."
Ki-jo knew Yeong-su was gentle and good-hearted, but that was the Yeong-su of his lives through the eleventh. Change the life, he thought, and the boy might change with it.
"And you—let the neighborhood women's talk go in one ear and out the other. Don't go where people tear one another down..."
"I know, dear. Even without that, the women have been so stiff around me lately that it's hard on me too. I go to the washing place and they yield me the best spot, and the men bow their heads and greet me whenever they pass."
"That much is all right. I'll be careful too, dear."
Even as they aired their discomfort, Ki-jo and Soonrye felt as if they had become yangban, the old landed gentry. Great as the change in their lives had been, Yeong-su seemed to go on living exactly as before. Ki-jo was proud of him for it, and yet he worried that even in this twelfth life the boy might live too small a life.
If only he'd carry a bigger dream, something with a man's ambition in it...
After breakfast Ki-jo took down the suit hanging on the wall and put it on. It was a secondhand suit he had bought in Seoul. In Yeoncheon County, almost no one had occasion to wear Western clothes.
"I'm going to stop by the county office."
He said it to Soonrye, slipped on the secondhand shoes he had bought with the suit, and rose from the wooden floor.