Mr. Kim offered us cigarettes. I refused, as did Ernie. Kim wrinkled his eyes shut as he lit up, and with the free side of his mouth he started to talk.
“They were three happy GIs, always talk too much and play around, and they made Miss Won laugh. I told her not to go out with GI. I told her many times, but you know young girl. They no listen nobody.”
“Had she been out with GIs before?”
“Never. He first one. Maybe I should’ve fired her.” He blew a smoke ring toward the wall-papered ceiling. “If I told her I fire her, then maybe she don’t go out with GI. She was a good girl. Send all her money home to her family.”
“What was her job here?”
“Help with receipts, clean up shop, wrap orders for GIs who want to mail things back Stateside. Not much. Everything I can do myself, but shop must have flower if shop want to bring in bees.”
During the Korean War, the country was completely flattened. In the twenty years since, the economy had improved, but not much. Attractive young women are an expendable commodity. Their main job is to work in factories or shops and save money for a dowry so they can get married. A woman doesn’t have any real status until she’s old and has a slew of grandchildren running around.
“How often did she go out with Pok-no?”
“Only once.”
“Once?”
“Yes. He was here from Okinawa for only a few days, but every day he come here and talk to Miss Won and after second day I let him take her to lunch. On third day he took her to dinner, but she come back after eat to work night shift.”
“What time did she get off?”
Kim’s eyes widened. “She don’t get off. After work she sleep here. Someone must protect shop from slicky boys. Me, I go home.”
“But you said she only went with Pok-no once.”
“I wasn’t counting lunch or dinner. I give her one day vacation each month. She was like little girl, very excited each time her day off come. She always go to country to visit her parents or to visit her sister at temple. She’s a …” He snapped his fingers. “How you say? Suknyo?”
He said the word in Korean, but I didn’t know it either. We looked it up in his Korean-English dictionary.
“Nun,” I said.
It wasn’t vocabulary that was often used in Songtan-up.
Ernie quit fiddling with the brassware, grabbed a folding chair, straddled it, and leaned forward at Mr. Kim.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “On their one date this Miss Won takes some Marine from Okinawa with her to her family in the countryside or to visit her sister who is a nun and then she comes back here the next day alone and that night kills herself?”
“Yes.” Mr. Kim nodded somberly. “She worked all day and that night. After I left, she locked up the shop and went out.”
“And the next morning the police found her body on the railroad tracks.” Ernie leaned back on his chair.
Kim nodded and smoke drifted out of his nostrils toward the soot-stained paper above.
Before we left, I jotted down an address, and Ernie bought one of the brass fists. Kim wrapped it up awkwardly with the paper wadded too tightly around the hard, pugnacious digit.
The jeep purred along the ribbon of asphalt that wound through the acres of wavering green rice paddies. Straw-hatted farmers, their pant legs rolled up past their knees, bobbed through rows of sprouting shoots. Long-billed white cranes lifted gently from the muck and mire and flapped serenely into an endless blue sky.
“Don’t they have any bars out here?” Ernie asked.
“Not for GIs,” I said. “Besides, you’re driving.”
“I won’t be for long if I don’t get a cool one.”
After we slowed to read the signs at a crossroads, I motioned for him to turn right, and three kilometers later the village of Chunhua loomed ahead of us. The cluster of straw-thatched huts sat on a rocky promontory like a crown of thorns amidst the spreading wet fields.
Ernie jammed the jeep into low as we chugged up the one dirt road that led into the village. Pantless toddlers and flapping-winged chickens scurried out of our way. We stopped in the center of the cluster of huts and stepped out of the jeep. Old men in hemp cloth tunics and women cowled in white linen stared at us curiously.
As I turned my back on the dying roar of the engine, I felt for a moment as if we’d stepped back in time. Bright eyes peered at us from within mud brick walls. Then I spotted a rusty Coca-Cola sign and I snapped out of it. I flashed my badge to the proprietor of the open-stalled store and told him who I was looking for, and he yelled at a boy who went scurrying off toward the fields. While we waited by the jeep, a crowd of children too young for school surrounded us, and Ernie horsed around with them and broke apart his last few sticks of gum trying to make sure that no one was left out.
A thick-legged man trudged up the hill, his dark face hidden between his straw cap and his broad shoulders. He approached and spoke to me in Korean.
“I am Won Man-yuk. Hei-suk’s father.”
He nodded but kept his grip on the short scythe in his right hand and made no motion for us to move toward his home or out of the sun. If he could be direct, so could I. I spoke Korean.
“We are here to find out why your daughter killed herself.”
“The lawyer said he took care of all that.”
“He is taking half of what you receive for his troubles, is he not?”
“We are farmers. If it wasn’t for him, we’d get nothing.”
“Maybe your daughter killed herself for some other reason. Not because of the American.”
“She was a happy girl. She would never have killed herself if she hadn’t been involved with foreigners. It was our mistake for letting her work in the city. But we have other children. Other mouths to feed.”
“Did she ever bring the American here?”
“She didn’t ask.”
“Would you have allowed it if she had?”
“No.”
“She had only known the American for a few days. During that time you never saw her-or saw him. You have no way of knowing why she killed herself.”
“It had to be that. There could be no other reason.”
“The claim is for a lot of money. Would you move away from Chunhua?”
“No. I would buy more land.”
“Does your oldest daughter also send you money?”
His face hardened. “Don’t speak of my oldest daughter. She wastes her life as a hermit on White Cloud Mountain, tending to some old temple that no one ever visits.”
His knuckles bulged around the hilt of the scythe. I took a half step backward. Ernie moved around the jeep, but I waved him off.
“We believe that Hei-suk spent her last day with your oldest daughter.”
“Then she wasted her last day of life. Better if I’d kept them both in the fields.”
His dark face turned up at me, and in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his black eyes burned like fire in a pit. The cracked flesh of the cheeks quavered and for a moment I thought it would break, but then his face set itself back into stone, like the granite outcroppings that form the foundations of the ancient village of Chunhua.
I didn’t know what else to ask him, and I wondered why we had even bothered to come. A claim like this was a family’s only chance to pull themselves out of poverty, and they’d try to get it no matter what the facts of the case. Still, I had a job to do.
As gently as I could, I nodded and thanked him. We climbed into the jeep and rode away, the crowd of children running after us and the sturdy old farmer standing like a rock amidst the swirling dust.
The steep cobbled lanes of the village of Ok-dong had been carefully washed and festooned with bright blossoms and hanging paper lanterns in anticipation of the coming Festival of the Spring Flower. The aroma of boiling beef and onions wafted out of open-fronted noodle shops. Freshly scrubbed, lacquered wooden table of soju houses that serve rice wine beckoned with their smiling, silk-bedecked hostesses and the warbling sounds of female crooners crackling out of small wooden speakers.