Grandma Mak-sun's Land – 3
Kim Yong-gu lifted his eyes toward the ceiling.
'Hrk!'
A thick, heavy blade wielded by a madman hung directly over the crown of his head, swaying precariously as if it would drop at any moment.
His son Kim Sang-gyun, it seemed, could see none of it.
"How long am I supposed to wait?"
At the sight of Kim Yunho resting his chin on his hand with a bored expression, Yong-gu's heart plummeted.
'If I get on that man's bad side, the sword up there will come down.'
And then he would die. Horribly, agonizingly.
"I... I didn't know where to start talking."
That's right. I have to survive!
So what if he did a little time in prison?
Even rolling in a dung heap, this life was still the best of all—so people said.
'If that's the case, I absolutely cannot cross Kim Yunho.'
The reason he'd cheated countless people yet never once seen the inside of a cell was his sharp instincts and good gut feeling. One look was all it took for him to size a man up—someone soft enough to exploit, someone to avoid at all costs, someone with nothing worth fleecing, and so on.
But Kim Yunho was impossible to read.
It was as if an invisible curtain blocked every scrap of information about him.
'The only thing I know for certain is that he's sparing me right now.'
The pain and terror of the past few days had been just a taste. If that man ever decided to truly torment someone, Yong-gu would be a dead man walking. He had power to spare.
"I never actually decided to steal the gold rings. I just... saw them, and my hand moved on its own."
And with that, Kim Yong-gu began pouring out every crime he'd ever committed.
'Unbelievable.'
According to Kim Yong-gu, stealing the rings hadn't been his own will at all. His hand had simply moved by itself—that was the excuse he droned on and on with.
'So this is why they say you should never expect a wicked person to regret or reflect on what they've done.'
Still, his confession would be useful for the investigation, so I pressed the record button on my phone and spoke up.
"So in other words, Kim Yong-gu-ssi's feet wandered from village to village, and whenever you spotted gold, your hands moved on their own and you stole it. Is that about right?"
"Yes, exactly that."
Apparently, once he'd melted the stolen rings down into a golden calf, he'd been euphoric. That was when he'd decided he wanted a golden key too, and a golden toad to go with it. He laid out, in a matter-of-fact tone, exactly how he had degenerated into a petty thief preying on rural villages.
"I was planning to stop around the time the former village chief started noticing me. Nobody was hiding gold in their closets anymore, you see."
Once he came under the old chief's suspicion, he admitted, he had committed the hit-and-run. He'd only meant to scare her a little with a threat, but Grandma Hwang Sun-ja had fallen the wrong way, and her injuries had turned out far worse than intended—he said it as if that excused everything.
Kim Yong-gu, who had blamed everyone and everything for all his crimes, then blurted out something truly absurd.
"And the field where I bought the xi-rae greens in Ugok 1-ri cheap—that wasn't a scheme I orchestrated. I figured you might suspect me of that too."
"Then who did scheme it?"
"Why, that family's son, obviously."
The full picture Kim Yong-gu laid out went like this.
When his biological father died, Kim Chang-su had wanted to sell the land, but the gift tax galled him too much to stomach. To dodge it, he'd formally renounced his inheritance and transferred the land into Grandma Mak-sun's name instead.
'Then he went around looking for someone to buy the land at a pittance—and that someone turned out to be Kim Yong-gu.'
Chang-su had colluded with Yong-gu to fabricate a fake promissory note making it look as though Grandma Mak-sun owed money. He deposited funds into her bank account, then withdrew and spent every last won himself.
Grandma Mak-sun, knowing none of this, of course defaulted on the "interest" payments, and Kim Yong-gu seized on that as pretext to place a lien on the land being held as collateral and have it auctioned off. It was a flawless-looking scheme—except for one fatal mistake.
Upon checking, the amount Kim Yong-gu had deposited into Grandma Mak-sun's account amounted to only ninety percent of the land's value. The remaining ten percent he'd stalled on with every excuse under the sun, day after day, until he simply never paid it at all.
'Of course a con artist was never going to hand over the final payment in full.'
And so the land had passed into Kim Yong-gu's hands. Then, out of nowhere, Kim Chang-su—who had kept his mouth shut all this time—suddenly sent a certified letter.
"He's claiming the entire transaction is void, using the ten percent he never paid as his pretext."
"Kim Chang-su-ssi does need money urgently, after all."
After all, he was now in a position where he owed three hundred million won to me, as Grandma Mak-sun's designated representative.
"What? That's his own problem! And now he wants to cry about what's legal and what's not? All I did was pay ten percent less than agreed!"
"Be that as it may, it was an illegal transaction, so I doubt it would enjoy any legal protection."
He had, after all, drafted the promissory note with the intent of acquiring the land through an unlawful scheme from the very beginning.
Which meant that I could now reclaim Grandma Mak-sun's land without paying a single won for it.
If Kim Yong-gu wanted back the money he'd deposited into her account, all he had to do was demand it from Kim Chang-su. There was a method for that, too—he could march right into the principal's office and raise holy hell. Maybe then Chang-su would cough up the money he'd swallowed. Whether he managed it or not, though, was no longer any concern of mine.
Toward the end of Kim Yong-gu's long, long confession, the Internal Affairs detectives came storming in with a squad of officers.
"Cuff both of them and take them away!"
The detective who introduced himself as Team Leader Woo Jong-gil did not treat Kim Sang-gyun as a fellow officer for even a second.
"Because of a bastard like you, the entire Korean police force gets dragged through the mud! Get him out of here!"
At Woo Jong-gil's order, the officers cuffed Kim Yong-gu and Kim Sang-gyun and hauled them off.
"Sir, you've done a tremendous thing today."
Woo Jong-gil bowed his head toward me.
"We were moving swiftly and discreetly under the chief's orders, and I can't thank you enough for the enormous help you've given us."
"It's me who should be thanking you for rushing out here so quickly. Hauling those two to the station myself would have been no small chore."
Not that I couldn't have done it. It just would have been a nuisance.
Woo Jong-gil promised he would see to it that Kim Sang-gyun paid the full price for his crimes, once everything he'd done came to light. They would investigate Kim Yong-gu's confession as well, and I might be called in as a reference witness.
"Of course. As long as it helps the investigation, I'll make time whenever you need."
"I heard through the county governor himself—you're Pyeongcheong County's very first PR Ambassador. I look forward to working with you, sir."
Working with me on what, exactly?
Don't tell me he expected me to drape a Pyeongcheong County police sash over my shoulder and promote how safe our village was?
The next day, I made my way to the family burial ground where Grandma Hwang Sun-ja's remains lay. The autumn leaves that had set the whole mountain ablaze now drifted down as scattered, rustling foliage.
'I think it's somewhere around here.'
They said Grandma Hwang Sun-ja had been cremated and given a tree burial, without a burial mound. The spot the village head had pointed out while explaining it should be right about... here.
'Oh!'
Near the great old tree, I could sense traces of the guardian snake's passage. This place, where the guardian serpent came so often—the tree here had to be the site of Madam Hwang Sun-ja's tree burial.
I poured out the soju I'd brought in my bag and spoke from the heart.
'Grandmother, the wicked have been made to answer for what they did, so please rest easy now. I left the gold rings with the Women's Association President to give to your daughter, Madam Park Jeong-ja.'
From what I'd heard, after her mother passed, Park Jeong-ja had lived alone for a time before taking Buddhist vows. She was now devoting herself to practice at a temple near Gyeryongsan, where nuns resided.
Life must have been so unbearable that she'd sought refuge in the Buddha. Was she at peace now, at last?
'Grandmother, I fixed up your old house. I'm the owner now, so I'll live there well. Thank you.'
The moment I finished my vow—that I would repair what had become an abandoned ruin and live there joyfully—a butterfly with violet wings began circling around me.
'I've never seen a butterfly like that before.'
I stood there staring at it for a long while, its purple wings so strange and beautiful—
Ssssssss.
Mixed in with the sound of the wind came the soft whisper of the great snake's movement. On the overgrown trail carpeted with bone-dry leaves, the snake had raised its head and was looking straight at me.
'What's this? It doesn't seem to be here to complain about anything today.'
Ssssssss.
The snake flicked its tongue and tilted its head.
"You want me to follow you?"
Nod.
The snake bobbed its head in a deep, unmistakable dip.
Ssssssss.
I followed the snake deeper into the forest.
'I didn't come this way even when I went picking pine mushrooms last time, did I?'
The mountain path was rough, and there were sheer drops—they'd warned me that one misstep could mean a serious fall. But the snake seemed to know the way intimately, parting the underbrush and pressing ahead with practiced ease.
The snake, which had been moving well ahead of me, paused briefly, then slid aside to clear the way. It felt like a signal that something was there, so I went to look—and found a cluster of familiar leaves.
'Wild ginseng?'
Unlike the colony I'd stumbled upon before, this was a cluster of just three roots growing together. The snake watched me discover the wild ginseng for a long moment, then turned and vanished into the underbrush.
I had a feeling it would never appear before me again. It had come to say its final goodbye.
'But... am I really allowed to eat wild ginseng twice?'
A few days later, on the morning of the first frost, the Korean-US Joint Remains Excavation team concluded its work.
What they had recovered was a total of fourteen sets of remains, along with rusted, faded buttons from American military uniforms. Dog tags engraved with their owners' names. Shell casings that bore silent witness to a ferocious battle. And alongside buttons from Korean army uniforms, a student ID wrapped in plastic—believed to have belonged to a student soldier.
The ID photo, showing that youthful face so vividly, even made the news, and it seized the nation's attention. With the political world simultaneously raising its voice about strengthening the Korean-US alliance, National Assembly members turned out in force. Not just society-desk reporters but political reporters came swarming as well.
"Hey! Move that car! There's a whole open lot in front of the community hall—why on earth are you dragging your car all the way up here?"
As the village head blew his whistle and waved the car to turn around, the window slid down and a man with glasses poked his head out.
"I'm a reporter! I'm here to cover the story!"
"Practically everyone who came today is a reporter or a National Assembly member. And besides, do you think parking spaces just fall from the sky? Everything past this point is private property, and there's no parking up here!"
Watching the village head repeat himself over and over, I finally stepped in.
"Just block the road with your tiller."
"Aigoo, Yunho, my boy. Aren't you the man of the hour today, the service award winner? What will people think, hearing you tell me to block the village road?"
"I'm not interested in looking good to people who won't follow basic order."
The harvest was finished, open space lay everywhere, and there was the wide riverbank lot beside the stream. Parking there would have solved everything. Instead, they'd tried to drive right up to the entrance of the event grounds, and now the village road was jam-packed—turned into one giant parking lot.
'And the place these people are trying to park is my own front yard!'
While laying the drainage in the yard, I'd carefully seeded it with grass and sown flower seeds on top. The mere thought of their tires churning my painstakingly tended yard into mud had my blood boiling.
"Aigoo, Yunho, my boy. I'll handle this myself."
The village head waved his hands frantically, insisting that the man of the hour, the face of the whole village, shouldn't be catching flak over something like this.
"You hurry on to the event grounds. Absolutely, positively! These cars will never park in your yard—not while I'm standing here. Now get moving! Move that car!"
Feeweeet!
The village head blew his whistle again and signaled the car to turn around.
[Want me to flatten every one of those tires?]
No. 1 slithered past, rubbing against my leg, flicking its red tongue.
Having regained its old strength after tormenting Kim Yong-gu, No. 1 was itching to hassle somebody else too.
'Stop thinking only about tormenting people, you evil spirit, and try doing something useful instead. Catch rats. Eat pest insects. Something like that.'
[Ugh! Tastes awful.]
In the beginning, it had attacked the insects and birds its previous hosts used to eat, but its original nature was growing stronger by the day. It craved cake-sweet things, gut-burning liquor, chewy jerky, and would bound up the mountain to go swooping and flitting between the trees.
'Should I call it befitting behavior for an evil spirit sealed in the beloved blade of Yeon Chumo, the Malgal general?'
It kept nagging me—surely there was someone else around worth tormenting?
'Well, there has to be a villain for that, doesn't there?'
Every elder in our village was a good soul. Should I send it off on a long-distance expedition to go torment some evildoers and come back? That might actually stop it from pestering me.
But not today. With the county governor and all sorts of distinguished guests arriving, I was going to be extremely busy.
'Go play with the neighborhood cats. Hurry!'
[Can I bring them home?]
'Bring them to which house? My house?'
[Obviously the newly renovated one.]
I'd only just finished installing the reinforced flooring, and we were still in the middle of the fresh paint job... Did it really think that was going to fly?
My plan was to keep No. 1 as an outdoor yard cat. I had no desire to invite an evil spirit into my home to live with me, nor to deal with cat hair floating everywhere. My house was going to be clean, fragrant, and comfortable.
'I'll set you up a cushioned blanket in a cooler box. You live in the yard.'
[Boss, isn't that a bit harsh?]
'You survived the Manchurian plains. Stop whining.'
I shook off No. 1 and headed for the event grounds—completely unaware of how No. 1 was glaring daggers at my back.
[You know what? Maybe I'll have a litter of about twelve kittens and have them all freeload off that cat house.]
No. 1 imagined its boss clutching his head in anguish and nearly burst with delight.
'Heheh! Now that's a brilliant idea.'
And with a light, trotting step, No. 1 padded off in search of a female cat.