Beasts of a Little Land(15)

It didn’t matter that the major didn’t understand Korean. He took his foot off and kicked Stoney’s head hard—there was a loud cracking sound like a watermelon bursting. The officers then let go of their grasp, but Stoney was long past the point of struggling and lay limply in place.

Without waiting any longer, Hayashi grabbed Luna by her arm and dragged her to the floor. She screamed, kicking him away, and he hit her so hard across her head that her long hair flew out of its braid, covering her face. After he punched her several more times she stopped resisting and lay still and silent beneath him. Jade shut her eyes but she couldn’t stop herself from hearing his mechanical grunts.

When it was over, Hayashi pulled up his pants as if nothing had happened and walked away, followed by his men. Silver threw herself down next to Luna’s discarded figure, and some girls rushed to get rags to bind Stoney’s head together. The sound of their crying faded in and out of Jade’s ears. She realized she’d been carrying the basket of watermelon all along, which she set down carefully—although no one would eat it, no one would eat anything for a while. It didn’t seem possible they could ever go back to playing games and reading poetry in that courtyard. The edges of her vision seemed to come unstitched, and her weak knees finally gave out. Jade passed out unnoticed by anyone, a pool of black-red blood drenching the ground beneath her hand.





3


Something to Remember When You’re Down

1918

AFTER THAT NIGHT, JADE HAD TO KEEP HER LEFT HAND BOUND IN LINEN for close to a month. When the dressing was removed, nothing was different in her except a long, dark-red line on her left palm that eventually faded to white. But Luna was changed. She could no longer torment anyone, and inspired no fear, only pity. She didn’t come out of her room for any reason. Silver herself carried in trays piled with Luna’s favorite dishes or fresh melons, and brought them back out a few hours later, mostly untouched. Jade lurked outside the chamber and offered to watch over Luna, but Silver refused all help and continued her vigil alone.

During this time, everyone said Luna would be fine and that Stoney would die. Luna was young, and though she was injured, it wouldn’t kill her. But Stoney’s head had split, and he’d gone into a stupor. The old herbalist said he probably wouldn’t wake up again at his age, and that if he by chance regained consciousness, he would be an even more useless creature, unable to walk or even relieve himself without help. At that, Silver tossed a coin at the herbalist and told him to never set foot in her house again. She took to caring for Stoney herself, changing his clothes and bathing him with towels. Then one day when Silver went to see him, he was awake, waiting for her. Within a week he could sit up, and then the following week he stood up and went to the outhouse by himself, though later they found him immobile on the ground, halfway to his room. The women carried him back, and he lay still for days.

The story of what happened had gotten around town, and some people said that it was a shame Stoney failed to protect his young mistress, that between the two of them it would be better losing a deaf servant than a young beauty just beginning to bloom. But Stoney, not being able to hear these opinions, eventually recovered most of his strength.

LYING IN HER BED for such a long time, Luna drifted in and out of sleep until she stopped distinguishing between her thoughts and her dreams. She remembered a story her mother used to tell her: a long time ago, there lived in the mountains a bear and a tiger. Both wanted to become human, so they prayed to the heavens and were told that they would transform if they stayed in a cave for one hundred days, eating only a bundle of wormwood and twenty cloves of garlic. The tiger eventually gave up and ran out of the cave—becoming so near to humans in intelligence and emotion, though still a beast in form. The bear persevered alone and turned into a beautiful woman on the hundred and first day. But the bear-woman wanted, most of all, to have a child. So she prayed again, and this time the son of heaven himself came down and lay with her. The child that the bear-woman bore became the first king of Korea.

As long as she could remember, Luna had heard dozens of stories like these about women who desperately longed for children. Such tales never told of women who didn’t want to become mothers, although there were plenty of these among courtesans, servants, unmarried girls, widows, and matrons who already had too many mouths to feed. These women also had to pray and eat bitter herbs to get their wish.

A while back, a fourteen-year-old girl who did their washing had become pregnant and begged Silver for help. She didn’t have any money to go to an herbalist, and at any rate she couldn’t be caught buying something that would ruin her chances of marriage forever. Courtesans, of course, had the “medicine” in stock at all times. Luna had watched carefully as the maid prepared the bitter-smelling brew. Thick curls of cloudy steam overflowed from the bowl that the girl gulped down—almost greedily, Luna had thought at the time. This was what she now had to re-create.

Once she made up her mind, she rose from her bed quietly so as to not wake Silver. Her legs were weak and spindly under her weight, but she made it to the kitchen somehow. The herbs were still tucked in a bronze pot in the corner. Luna boiled water in a clay pot and let the herbs simmer until the liquid turned dark brown and thick. It tasted like woodsy bile.

Luna lay back down in her cot and waited for the medicine to take hold. She had only missed one period, but she could already feel something sharp and pointy in her womb that was never there before. That this seed was like an evil nail didn’t surprise her in the least; it was to be expected from a man like Hayashi. The air was beginning to feel unbearably hot. And instead of flushing the nail out, the medicine seemed to make it grow larger, tearing her from the inside. Her mother was awake now, holding her hand and taking her temperature. She wanted to feel the blood rush out between her legs, but the nail was stuck inside her. If she could have spoken out loud, she would have asked someone to please scratch it out of her body, but she couldn’t utter a word, as if caught in a bad dream.