Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [49]
The young woman kept sobbing loudly, and your future mother-in-law slapped her on the back. “Stop, stop crying …”
Your bride didn’t stop, and your future mother-in-law burst into tears, too.
If by pure coincidence you hadn’t seen the two women crying in each other’s arms in the cotton field, you might have left home before October. When you thought of that young woman, however, embroidering on the porch of the cottage, calling out “Mom!” at the cotton field, when you thought she might be dragged away by a soldier into the mountains, never to be seen again, you couldn’t pick up your feet to go away.
When you came back to the empty house after your wife went missing, you slept for three days. You couldn’t fall asleep at Hyong-chol’s; at night you lay there with your eyes closed. Your hearing grew so sensitive that your eyes would fly open if someone came out of the room across the way to go to the bathroom. At each mealtime, you sat at the table for the others’ sake, even though you weren’t hungry, but in your empty house you didn’t eat anything and slept like the dead.
· · ·
You thought you didn’t love your wife very much, because you married her after seeing her only once, but every time you left home and some time passed, she reappeared in your thoughts. Your wife’s hands could nurture any life. Your family didn’t have much luck with animals. Before your wife became a member of the family, any dog you got would die before giving you a litter. It would eat rat poison and fall into the toilet. Once, without anyone’s realizing that the dog had crawled into the floor heater, a fire was kindled in the furnace, and not until you smelled the stench did you lift open the lid and pull out the dead dog. Your sister said that your family should not have a dog, but your wife brought home a newborn pup from the neighbors, one of her hands covering its eyes. Your wife believed that dogs, being smart, would return to their mothers if their eyes were not covered when they were taken away. Your wife fed that puppy under the porch, and it grew and had five or six litters. Sometimes there were as many as eighteen squirming puppies under the porch. In the spring, your wife coaxed the chicken to sit on eggs and managed to raise thirty or forty chicks without killing them, except a few that were snatched by a kite. When your wife sprinkled seeds in the vegetable garden, green leaves shot up in a riot, more quickly than she could pluck the tender shoots to eat. She planted and harvested potatoes then carrots then sweet potatoes. When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall. Anything she touched grew in profusion. Your wife didn’t have time to take the sweat-soaked towel off her head. As soon as weeds poked up from the fields, your wife’s hands pulled them out, and she chopped the food waste from the table into small pieces and poured them into the puppies’ bowls. She caught frogs and boiled them and mashed them to feed the chickens, and collected chicken waste and buried it in the vegetable garden, over and over again. Everything your wife touched became fertile and bloomed, grew and bore fruit. Her talent was such that even your sister, who endlessly found fault with your wife, would call her and ask her for help sowing the fields and planting pepper seedlings.
On the third night after you return home, you wake up in the middle of the night and lie still, staring at