Treasure Hunting - 3
Who could have ever imagined it?
That in South Korea, someone would massacre an entire village's residents just to fast-track a highway opening.
"Aigo, those rotten sons of bitches! How could they do something like that? What in the hell is money worth that they'd kill forty-two people, I'm asking you!"
The sun was growing hotter by the day. Park Dae-hyung, the village chief of Ugok 1-ri, had gone out to the fields before dawn and had only just come back — and the news pouring from the television sent his blood boiling all over again.
Even back when the accident happened, rumors had swirled. All those villagers wiped out on the very same day — people whispered that someone had done it on purpose.
But in the countryside, where hands were always short, no one could afford to dwell on a tragedy from a neighboring village.
It was May. Sleep one night, and by morning the weeds would be up to your ankles. Transplanting rice seedlings in paddies no bigger than your palm, pulling weeds, spraying pesticide — busy didn't even begin to cover it.
And so the Ugok Tunnel disaster was quickly forgotten.
"Hurry up and wash your hands and come help me. People are going to start showing up any minute."
Mrs. Han Su-ja spoke urgently as she sliced cucumbers into fine julienne. A whole cauldron of noodles sat boiled and rinsed in cold water, draining, while she prepared the toppings.
Today she'd invited everyone — Han Mi-ja's family, Grandma Mak-sun, Kim Yunho, and even Chai.
"What are you planning that you need my hands for, too?"
"Just a few pans of jeon to go with the bibim-guksu. My brother-in-law made a hundred million won thanks to our Yunho young man, after all."
"A hundred million? Ah, right — that farm owner did demand a hundred million out of him, didn't he."
The village chief went to the tap, turned on the water, and scrubbed his hands thoroughly.
"You're the one who introduced him to that farm, Chief. How could your eye for people be that bad?"
Under Han Su-ja's scolding, Park Dae-hyung had no excuse to offer. When the son of a former National Assembly member said he was moving to the country to run a farm, he'd believed it outright, no questions asked.
Turned out the old saying was true — the ones already settled in are worse than the newcomers. Ju Mandeok had demanded a hundred million won in "repair costs" for an irrigation system that wasn't even broken, squeezing Bang Jeong-su for every last won.
"I suppose I was a fool. All these years I've lived, and I still couldn't read a man's true face."
Park Dae-hyung shook his head, chiding himself.
"You know, the more I think about it, the more amazing it is. Here I am past seventy, reflecting every day that I've still got lessons left to learn about life — and how does our Yunho young man understand the ways of the world so well? It boggles the mind."
It had been Kim Yunho who quietly came to visit him, gently letting on that Bang Jeong-su was buckling under the pressure of that hundred-million-won demand — and asking him, please, to look into it discreetly, since surely there were others who'd been through something similar.
At the time, Park Dae-hyung had doubted it. Bang Jeong-su failed at everything he touched, so he'd assumed the man had simply caused another accident at the farm.
But still — blood runs thicker, and family comes first. He'd scrambled to track down everyone who'd ever worked at Ju Mandeok's farm, and what he found staggered him. Five people. Five different people had been through the same thing, forced to pay out anywhere from a million won to four million.
The moment I handed Yunho young man their information, he sat right down and wrote the complaint himself and filed it straight with the Pyeongchang Police Station.
Detectives were assigned almost immediately. At the Pyeongcheong station, a team famous for being their very best had opened an investigation.
As it happened, the farm owner Ju Mandeok had been picked up wandering the village in nothing but his underwear, so he was already in custody.
Plenty of people had seen Ju Mandeok sabotage the irrigation system with his own two hands. The police, judging that he might be connected to something even more serious, collected his DNA and ran it through the database.
And what do you know — his DNA turned up around the skeletal remains found in Ugok 5-ri.
So he was the murderer.
Park Dae-hyung wiped his wet hands on a towel and stepped up onto the wooden maru floor.
"So Joo Chang-nam massacred forty-two villagers to win one more term in the Assembly, and then Ju Mandeok killed the one child who survived. What kind of father in this world orders his own twenty-six-year-old son to commit murder?"
"The news is saying Joo Chang-nam probably helped kill the child too — right there in that basement."
"Devils, the both of them. There's no other word for it."
Han Su-ja said to set a few jeon pancakes aside from the pile.
Kim Yunho was heading out to Ugok 5-ri today with liquor, meat, and jeon as offerings, she'd heard.
"Well then, I'd better put my heart into every single one of these, hadn't I?"
Park Dae-hyung moved to the spot Han Su-ja had already laid out with newspaper and began frying with practiced ease. The flour batter — studded with julienned zucchini, onion, potato, and perilla leaves — was thinned with plenty of water so the jeon would spread out delicate and thin.
That was the trick. Only then did the oil soak in properly, giving the jeon that chewy, nutty richness.
Sizzle!
The sweetness of zucchini and onion, the earthy nuttiness of potato, the bright fragrance of perilla all mingled together, and his mouth watered on its own.
Meanwhile, Han Su-ja finished the toppings and picked up her phone.
"Where are you? The noodles are going to go soggy at this rate."
"We're at your front gate right now."
She spoke into the phone, but Han Mi-ja's voice carried clearly from the gate itself.
"Wow, something smells delicious!"
Bang Seong-eun came scampering across the yard, and behind her walked Han Mi-ja, carefully guiding Grandma Mak-sun along. And bringing up the rear came Bang Jeong-su, chatting away warmly with his son Bang Seong-hyun as the two of them strolled in together.
"So, brother-in-law. You've decided to work with our Yunho young man, then?"
"Yes, that's the plan."
"Good thinking. He's a sight younger than you, but he's a man with a lot to teach. Even at my age, I'm still learning things from him."
"Yes, sir."
Bang Jeong-su felt he owed Kim Yunho a debt for this — no, truthfully, his gratitude went back further than that.
If he'd kept living in that food-stall container, he'd be penniless still. He'd have had to kick up a share of his earnings to the construction company, pay rent on the container besides. And even when he managed to scrape together a little money, moving on to the next site meant slipping cash into the foreman's pocket.
The real problem was that the next site would be no different. He'd never escape that position.
It was the offer to care for Grandma Mak-sun that had brought him to Ugok 1-ri. Two million won a month in caregiver wages plus a million-won allowance — and simply walking the grandmother to the local clinic to fill her prescription earned him a hundred-thousand-won special bonus.
Christmas, year's end, New Year's, every holiday, even the children's birthdays — there was always something extra.
A man to be grateful to.
Kim Yunho put thought and care into them. He had to repay that — no, repay it and more. If you were a person at all, you had to know gratitude. Live that way, he believed, and his children would grow up straight and true.
The sound of a car came from up the village road.
"Well, well — there's the man of the hour now."
Park Dae-hyung flipped a jeon high into the air and caught it neatly in the pan.
"Uncle!"
Bang Seong-eun, who'd been peeling boiled eggs for the noodle toppings, shoved her feet into her shoes and ran out to greet Kim Yunho.
"Uncle? How on earth did Yunho young man become our Seong-eun's uncle?"
Bang Seong-hyun answered his question.
"He bought Seong-eun clothes a while back, apparently. That day the neighbor from the house above said, 'So Seong-jinwoo gets to be her oppa, and I'm just an ahjussi?'"
"Haha! So that's why she decided to call him uncle instead!"
"Yes, sir."
"Now hold on, let me work out the family tree. Between Yunho young man and me, I mean."
Han Su-ja chimed in as she piled the bibim-guksu into a large naengmyeon bowl.
"What's there to work out? We're all just family."
"Correct answer! Very well said!"
Grandma Mak-sun fished a fifty-thousand-won note from her blouse and slipped it right into Han Su-ja's apron pocket.
Han Su-ja gaped at her.
"Goodness, why are you giving me money? Is money growing on trees?"
"Yep, it sure is."
Grandma Mak-sun beamed and went on.
"They say if you don't spend it, they give you even more. So I've got to spend at least two hundred thousand a day, no matter what."
Kim Yunho had started giving her fifty thousand a day in pocket money — with strict instructions not to go fleecing the other elders of their loose change over go-stop at the community hall.
She'd saved it up without spending a won, tucking each day's fifty thousand under her floor mat — and then he'd started giving her a hundred thousand. She saved that too. And then the floor mat began to buckle under the weight.
She'd even considered moving it all into the closet to hide it.
But the last time she'd gone to Seoul for a health checkup, the doctor had said he'd prescribe something to slow her dementia.
And what did that mean? It meant the medicine would slow it, but never stop it.
It means I don't have much time left.
What was the use of hoarding money she'd die without spending, hiding it away in a closet?
Since she'd started taking the hospital's medicine, her mind had grown wonderfully clear. Memories that had sunk beneath sleep began surfacing, sharp and vivid.
The son who'd appeared only after her husband died, hauling her off to Seoul and dumping her in a one-room apartment. The time she'd wandered lost after going out to buy food, and her son had abandoned her at a police station in Gyeongju. The desperate phone call to the village chief, the narrow trip back home, the abandoned house she'd lived in afterward — and the fire that had nearly killed her.
She'd thought: if life was going to be that wretched, better to simply die.
But then — the day a total stranger named Kim Yunho had carried her, drunk at the village festival, all the way home — she'd dozed off for a moment and had a dream.
In the dream, my husband said he badly needed to relieve himself, and asked me to bring him his chamber pot.
And when she'd brought it, her husband — bedridden with illness for years — had suddenly risen to his feet and walked out into the yard.
She'd snapped her eyes open and rushed out to the yard, and there stood Kim Yunho.
So that's why I gave him my husband's old chamber pot.
From that day on, Grandma Mak-sun's life had begun to turn around. A caregiver appeared, her house was repaired, and pocket money came every single day.
She wore the fine clothes Kim Yunho bought her from the department store, good shoes on her feet, and fell asleep under a duvet as soft as a cloud.
Was Kim Yunho the son my husband bore in a past life? Or... the child I bore in the life before that?
Whichever it was, Kim Yunho was no longer a stranger. Which meant that when Kim Yunho said to spend two hundred thousand a day, spend it she would.
Grandma Mak-sun smiled brightly and tucked a fifty-thousand-won note into Bang Seong-hyun's pocket.
"Go buy yourself something tasty."
"G-Grandma, I already get an allowance."
"Buy something tasty with the money your mom gives you too. Chop! Chop! You can't do taekwondo right unless you eat lots of good food, can you?"
Han Mi-ja's eyes reddened with gratitude as she spoke to her son.
"That's right — train hard and win a medal for your grandma. Your competition is next month, isn't it?"
"Yes, ma'am! Yes! Grandma, I'll train hard and bring home a medal, I promise!"
"Good, good!"
Grandma Mak-sun pulled out another fifty-thousand-won note and handed it to Han Mi-ja.
"This one's for Seong-eun. And the last one is..."
With the final fifty-thousand-won bill remaining in her hand, Grandma Mak-sun tucked it right behind Park Dae-hyung's ear.
"Here. Take it."
Park Dae-hyung, mid-flip with a jeon, blinked in surprise — then burst out laughing.
"Well, I'll be. Seventy-three years old and collecting pocket money. Thank you kindly, Grandmother. I'll spend it well."
"There's my boy!"
At Grandma Mak-sun's antics, everyone broke into hearty laughter.
"Oh — am I the last one here?"
Led in by Bang Seong-eun, Kim Yunho stepped into the yard, tilting his head at the eyes fixed on him.
"Why is everyone staring? Is there something on my face?"
"There sure is! Handsomeness — it's all over your face!"
Grandma Mak-sun thrust her thumb in the air, and Park Dae-hyung declared his fervent agreement.
"Well, our Yunho young man is a fine-looking fellow, no argument there."
"True words. In all of Pyeongcheong County, there's not a soul who could beat Yunho young man on looks alone."
With even Han Mi-ja chiming in so enthusiastically, Kim Yunho flushed and ran a hand down his face, embarrassed.
"If you all keep praising me like this, I'll start feeling a little too—"
"A little too what?"
"Good, that's what."
When Kim Yunho winked playfully, the whole yard dissolved into laughter.
The May sunshine was glorious beyond compare, and the breeze carried the rich fragrance of lilacs on the air.