Treasure Hunt — 4
"Come up here and eat while it's hot."
When Mrs. Han Su-ja urged me on with a smile, I stepped up onto the wooden veranda in quick strides. The tangy-sweet smell of the bibim-guksu sauce pooled in my mouth, filling it with saliva, and the toasty aroma of freshly fried pancakes sent my stomach into open rebellion. This was the kind of moment where the elders' words—there isn't much, so eat plenty—really hit home.
Come to think of it, the only things they actually paid for were probably the noodles, the flour, and the oil.
Mrs. Han Su-ja began tossing the noodles, and the garnishes she'd set aside to crown them were cucumber, lettuce, and boiled eggs. The vegetables came straight from the kitchen garden, the eggs from the hens that roamed free around the yard.
"Chai, help me set the table."
"Chai likes buchimgae. It's delicious."
While Chai and I laid out the table, Han Mi-ja fetched a cloth and wiped it down until it gleamed. Bang Seonghyun and Bang Seongeun set down chopsticks, then fetched the water pitcher and cups, and with that everyone took their seats.
"All right—bibim noodles and pancakes, coming through!"
The table filled with plates of vivid red noodles and buchimgae, each fresh off the griddle and cut into four quarters. Mrs. Han Su-ja, having brought out the young summer radish water kimchi, the little dishes of soy sauce, and even a jug of makgeolli, was the last to sit down.
"It's nothing fancy, so eat up, everyone. Especially you, Yoonho—young man, you have to finish two bowls. My brother-in-law has been through so much heartache, and you've helped him, and even asked him to come work alongside you. I'm so grateful I could cry."
Mrs. Han Su-ja wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Have a cup of makgeolli. Don't think of this as the village chief or an elder pouring you a drink—think of it as a toast to someone I'm truly thankful for."
The village chief lifted the makgeolli jug and tilted it toward me, and I received it with both hands. In the meantime, Han Mi-ja filled her husband Bang Jeongsu's cup. Bang Jeongsu filled Chai's; Han Mi-ja topped up Grandma Mak-sun's with water. Bang Seonghyun and Bang Seongeun filled each other's cups in turn.
"Now then, let's all take a nice refreshing sip and get into these noodles. To everyone's health!"
The whole table chorused along with the chief's brief toast.
"Thank you for the meal!"
"Yoonho, thank you again."
"Of course."
Ah, this is so good.
She must have tossed the chewy, perfectly boiled noodles with a drizzle of sesame oil to keep them from clumping together. The tangy-sweet sauce practically radiated the hard-earned know-how of Mrs. Han Su-ja's hands—not cloyingly sweet, yet not too sharp either. When I slurped the noodles down, the first taste was spicy and tangy, and the finish came back sweet.
It's because she uses gochujang she fermented herself.
Store-bought gochujang leans heavy on sugar. But the paste Mrs. Han Su-ja made herself drew its sweetness purely from barley malt and glutinous rice, so it clung sweetly to the very tip of the tongue. The garnishes on top were the kind of flavor you couldn't buy at any other time of year, either.
Right now is when cucumbers taste better than they will the rest of the year.
Midsummer cucumbers grow fat with seeds and bitter, but at this season they were sweeter than fruit. The lettuce and perilla leaves were tender, and even the onions—small enough to be pickled as jangajji—snapped crisp between the teeth. This was the one stretch of the year when garden vegetables were at their absolute peak. A happy groan escaped me of its own accord.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a flavor like this even at the food hall of an Apgujeong department store.
These vegetables had been picked from a plastic greenhouse garden less than a hundred meters away—the very essence of freshness, really. Until I moved to the countryside, I'd never known vegetables could taste like this. I couldn't have imagined a zucchini fritter outshining meat.
"Ah, that hit the spot. Ma'am, that was honestly incredible."
"What do you mean, one bowl? Have another. Hurry up!"
"No, really. I'm stuffed."
I clutched my belly and burst out laughing. "You must have packed the noodles down into my bowl, because no matter how much I ate, it never seemed to go down."
"I did pack it in. With love."
"Oh, come off it!"
The village chief shot her a sidelong glare. Apparently, he considered Mrs. Han Su-ja's affection his exclusive property.
"Hahaha. I'd rather not become your rival, sir."
"As if you could rival me? Our Yoonho here is this handsome, after all."
"That's true," Bang Seongeun said, nodding earnestly—and the chief looked visibly wounded.
"See here, Seongeun, so you don't need me anymore, is that it? Since your dad's going to drive you to school now, you won't even spare me a kind word. That's how it is, huh?"
"Ack! You caught me."
"Aigoo, this is why you shouldn't be too good to other people's children."
"Hehe, that's not it at all! I was just teasing."
Bang Seongeun suddenly sprang to her feet and bowed to the chief at a perfect ninety degrees. "Thank you for driving me to school all this time. I honestly wasn't going to do something this cheesy... Hehet!"
Then she raised her hands above her head and framed a heart.
"Aw, that's adorable. Seongeun, you are too cute."
At Chai's declaration, everyone nodded in agreement and the table dissolved into laughter.
"Well, it looks like everyone's finished—shall we clear the table?"
"I'll do it."
The moment I stood to fetch the tray, Bang Jeongsu quickly caught my arm and sat me back down.
"Please, stay seated. I'll handle it with my wife."
"Yes, please let us do at least this much. We've been nothing but a burden to you—my sister and brother-in-law, and you, Yoonho-ssi."
Han Mi-ja said she'd feel easier in her mind if she could do something, anything, so I smiled and gave in.
"All right, I'll leave it to you then."
"Thank you. Seongeun, Seonghyun—you two get the coffee going."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Bang Seonghyun and Bang Seongeun set about making pour-over coffee with the beans I'd roasted myself. Despite having learned it from me, both of them moved with surprising confidence, and before long a mellow coffee fragrance drifted through the room.
This right here is what happiness is.
My belly was full, the makgeolli had put me in a pleasant mood, and starting next week I'd be heading off to Hwacheon in search of gold.
I wonder if there'll be a golden chalice. A golden Buddha statue seems likely enough.
Chai stepped out the front gate to escort Grandma Mak-sun back to the village hall, and watching him go, the chief asked, "If Chai's the work crew leader, does that mean Seonghyun's father works under him? He's an assistant laborer, is that it?"
"No, he's a crew leader too."
"How can you have the same rank?"
"I'm a crew leader as well, actually."
At that, the chief rolled his eyes as if he'd never heard such nonsense. But I went on, explaining that rank didn't much matter to us.
"None of the three of us has ever grown soybeans before, so we decided to forgo the pecking order entirely and put our heads together as equals."
Everything I knew came from farming school. Chai was confident with watermelons and tomatoes, but soybeans would be a first for him too. As for Bang Jeongsu, he'd only ever picked tomatoes and packed European greens for shipment. When the chief heard all this, he pressed a hand to his forehead.
"Looks like I'll have to be checking in on you folks regularly."
"Yes—and you're saying you're going to plant all these soybeans and make paste out of them?"
Having wiped down the table once everyone had eaten their fill, Mrs. Han Su-ja came over and sat down across from me.
"That's right. If you share your recipe with me, ma'am, I'll pay you royalties."
"So what you're saying is, if I hand over my secrets, you'll pay me money. I can't do that sort of thing. Not me."
Mrs. Han Su-ja's face went abruptly hard. She'd sworn up and down that she'd help with anything I did, so I couldn't fathom why she'd changed her tune all of a sudden. I'd been so relaxed that it startled me clean out of my ease.
"You... you'd rather not pass on the secret? That's not what you were saying until last month."
"I did say that. Said I'd teach you everything. But..."
Mrs. Han Su-ja looked in turn at Han Mi-ja and Bang Jeongsu washing dishes at the tap, then at Bang Seonghyun and Bang Seongeun chattering over their coffee brewing at the kitchen doorway, and said:
"I couldn't take money for it if I was dead and buried. I'm not a woman without a conscience."
"N-no, ma'am, this is business. And if you were receiving royalties, money would come in every month—you could be generous with allowances for your niece and grandkids."
Even my persuasion couldn't budge her. "It would be different if you built a doenjang factory and hired me to come work there for wages, mind you. But I won't be eating off money for free just for telling someone how to make soybean paste."
The chief chimed in with his full agreement. "She's right about that. The one who taught our Women's Association president how to make doenjang was her own mother. So if she sold it, she'd be selling her dead mother's words for money—that's what you're saying, isn't it?"
Well, if that was how both of them felt, there was nothing to be done about it. I'd simply pay her a generous monthly wage when the time came for her to help me brew the paste.
"Then you'd be all right helping me once the soybean harvest is in and we start setting the meju blocks? I'll pay you a monthly salary."
"Oh, I'd welcome that a hundred times over. That's exactly what I want—to earn my money fair and square."
"Then that's what I'll remember, ma'am."
Just then the chief looked at me and asked, "But to boil all those soybeans, set the meju, and make doenjang out of it, don't you need a facility? You can't do all that from your house as it is—am I wrong?"
"Which is why I think I need to buy more land."
Everything around my house at the upper end of the village was state-owned land. I already had a permit to use it and paid the annual usage fee, but rather than putting up a smart warehouse for fermenting meju or a doenjang factory there, it made more sense to plant deodeok and wild mountain ginseng.
And I'd rather not spoil the scenery, anyway.
Just below my house lay the old Hosik Grandpa place—his house and his land—with Grandma Mak-sun's house and land directly across from it. That was where the soybeans were currently being grown. So here was the decision I'd come to.
"I think I need to buy land in the middle of the village. Grandpa Sang-jong said he'd sell to me, but Grandma Jeomsun won't so much as let the conversation start, so I've put it on hold for now."
Grandma Jeomsun had no wish to sell her land.
Even though her son, who lives over in Ugok 3-ri, keeps telling me he'll sell it to me right away.
For the moment I'd left it be—no sense in mother and son falling out over a land sale for nothing.
The chief seemed eager to put his head together with me on the matter. "Did you hear the news? The whole of Ugok 5-ri is going up for auction."
Ugok 5-ri—the village that had lain hidden behind a barrier for thirty years, its very existence concealed from the world. The man who had once bought up that entire village was Jeong Hyeontaek, the largest shareholder of Mirae Civil Engineering and Hanju Construction. The very man who had swindled people out of hundreds of billions of won on the promise of building the Yeongcheon Theme Park—after making sure the villagers of Ugok 5-ri died for it.
Jeong Hyeontaek must have believed he'd live forever, which was no doubt why he'd done what he did—and absurdly, he'd dropped dead of cardiac arrest. The reason no one had ever gotten to the bottom of whether the Yeongcheon Theme Park was a fraud in the first place was precisely because of his sudden death.
Could that really have been a coincidence?
I'd been suspecting all along that it was the work of the shaman Cho Eunsun—the woman Abe had torn apart with his own hands. Cho Eunsun's divine power was strong enough to drive the spirit of an onmyoji like Abe to the very edge of annihilation. If she had a working brain at all, what would she have thought, watching Joo Changnam and Jeong Hyeontaek recruit each other in a plot to murder Abe—Abe, whom they'd squeezed dry for years? Wouldn't she have sensed that one day her own fate was to crawl into the same cauldron?
So suppose she had killed Jeong Hyeontaek with a heart attack, then designated one of his sons as heir and installed him as a puppet...
By now, Cho Eunsun would be sitting on mountains of wealth and power, doing far worse things.
Then, when the mass deaths of the Ugok 5-ri villagers had come back into the public eye this time around, someone had put the entire village up for auction. I'd already heard the news on my trip to the county office.
"I heard it when I went to the county office to set up the coffee workshop."
For the coffee workshop, I just had to pick one of the vacant houses and apply to change its use. I'd also have to file for a food-manufacturing license, but that was comparatively easy. The same went for a doenjang factory—if the soybeans were processed domestically, even farmland could be approved for it.
Building a doenjang factory on farmland using Chinese soybeans would be illegal, of course.
But I'd be making my paste from beans I grew myself, so there was nothing to worry about.
"A coffee workshop and a doenjang factory too—that's a lot of hands you'll need. You sure about that?"
"Jobs bring people into the village, don't they? In a few months, all twelve of the vacant houses will be fully renovated."
"Fair enough."
The chief nodded along, then looked at me with a question. "If all of Ugok 5-ri goes up for auction, I wonder if anyone would actually buy it. Rumors are already flying that the place is haunted... You're not interested, are you?"
He seemed genuinely curious what I was thinking.
"Haha. Would you believe me if I said I'd buy it on the spot if it were haunted?"
"No, I'm asking because I know you're not scared of that sort of thing. Look—there's a cave over there in Ugok 5-ri. Didn't you say you were going to age your doenjang in an earth cellar?"
Thump!
I had had no idea whatsoever that there was a cave in Ugok 5-ri, and my eyes went wide.
"There's a cave there?"
"Of course. It's not famous or anything, but everyone around here knows about it."