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By Root 368 0

although he begged you and your sister to let him go. You can almost hear it now: Please send me to school, brother; please send me to school, sister. He cried up a storm every day, asking you two to send him to school. Even though a few years had passed since the war, it was pitiable—you were unbelievably poor. Sometimes you think of those days as if they were a dream. You survived miraculously after being stabbed in the neck with a bamboo spear, but you were mired in a desperate situation as the eldest son of the extended family, responsible for feeding everyone. That might have been why you wanted to leave this house, because it was so difficult. It was difficult to find food, let alone send your brother to school. When you and your sister didn’t listen to him, Kyun begged your wife.

“Sister-in-law, please send me to school. Please let me go to middle school. I’ll spend my whole life making it up to you.”

Your wife said to you, “Since he wants it so badly, shouldn’t we send him to school somehow?”

“I couldn’t go to school, either! At least he was able to go to elementary school,” you retorted.

You couldn’t go to school because of your father. As a doctor of Chinese medicine, he wouldn’t let you go anywhere there were a lot of people, whether school or anyplace else, after he lost his two older sons to an epidemic. Your father, sitting knee to knee with you, taught you Chinese characters himself.

“Let’s send him to school,” your wife said.

“How?”

“We can sell the garden.”

When your sister heard that, she said, “You’re going to be the ruin of this family!” and she sent your wife to her hometown. Ten days later, drunk, your feet headed toward your in-laws’ at night. You stumbled along the mountain path, and when you got to your in-laws’ cottage, you stopped near the glowing window of the back room, the one closest to the bamboos. You didn’t go there thinking you would bring your wife back. It was the rice wine that had brought you there, the makgoli you had been given after you helped a neighbor plow his fields. Even though you weren’t the one who had sent your wife back to her childhood home, you couldn’t step into your in-laws’ house as if nothing had happened, so you just stood there, leaning against the dirt wall. You could hear your mother-in-law and your wife talking, just as you had in the cotton fields a short time ago. Your mother-in-law raised her voice and said, “Don’t go back to that damn house! Just pack up your things and leave that family.”

Your wife, sniffling, insisted, “Even if I die, I’m going to go back into that house. Why should I leave that house when it’s my house, too?” You stood against the wall until the dawn light rippled into the bamboo forest. You grabbed your wife as she came out to make breakfast. She had cried all night, and her large, dark, guileless eyes were now so swollen they had become slits. You took your wife’s hand and pushed through the bamboo woods, back to your house. When you got past the bamboo forest, you let go of your wife’s hand and walked ahead of her. Dew dropped onto your pants. Your wife, falling back, followed you, breathing hard, saying, “Just go a little slower!”

When you got home, Kyun ran over to your wife, calling, “Sister-in-law!

“Sister-in-law,” he said, “I promise I won’t go to school. So don’t leave like that again!” Kyun’s eyes welled up; he had abandoned his dream. From that point on, Kyun, unable to go to middle school, threw himself into helping your wife and doing housework. When they worked in the hillside fields and Kyun couldn’t see your wife behind the tall millet stalks, he would call out, “Sister-in-law!” When your wife said, “Yes?” Kyun would smile and call out again, “Sister-in-law!” Kyun would call and your wife would answer, and Kyun would call her again and she would answer him again. The two would finish up the work in the hills like that, calling and answering. Kyun was a faithful companion for your wife whenever you wandered from home. When Kyun got stronger, he plowed the fields with the cow in the spring, and harvested rice in