The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [170]
There was no breakfast, and my hands blistered before the sun was fully up. For hours I did nothing but dig open irrigation dams and backfill running canals. Why we drained one field and flooded another, I had no idea, but light dawned hard on the peasants of Chagang Province. They all wore cheap, ill-fitting vinalon clothes, they had nothing but black sandals, and their bodies were rail thin with cracked, dark skin and teeth translucent to their black cores. Every woman with a hint of beauty had been siphoned to the capital. It turned out I showed too little promise as a rice harvester and was instead sent to empty latrine pots, raking the contents in between layers of rice hull. Then I dug ruts through the village that I was told would be of use when the rains came. An old woman, too old to work, watched me dig. She smoked her own kind of cigarette, rolled in corn husks, and told me many stories, but because she lacked teeth, I could not understand them.
In the afternoon, a city woman was struck by a grand snake, long as a man. They gave her wound a poultice. I tried to quiet her screams by stroking her hair, but that snakebite must have done something to her—she started hitting me and pushing me away. The peasants by then had caught the twisting snake, black as the befecaled water that had concealed it. Some wanted to take its gall bladder, others wished to milk its venom for liquor. They appealed to the old woman, who motioned for them to free it. I watched the snake swim away through a paddy field cleared of rice. The shallow water was both dark and flashing with sunset. The snake took its own course, away from all of us, and I had a feeling there was another black snake out across the water, waiting for this broad swimmer to make its way home to her.
It was midnight when I made it home. Though the key turned in the lock, the door wouldn’t open. It was somehow barricaded from within. I pounded on the door. “Mother,” I called. “Father, it’s me, your son. There’s something wrong with the door. You must open it for me.” I pleaded for a while, then put my shoulder to the wood, leaning into it some, but not too hard. Breaking down a door would cause much discussion in the building. Finally, I buttoned my smock and lay down in the hall. I tried to think of the sounds of the crickets and the children running in the dark, but when I closed my eyes I could imagine only cold cement. I thought of the peasants with their ropy bodies and harsh manner of speaking, of how, except for starvation, they didn’t have a care in the world.
In the dark, I heard a sound—bing! It was the red cell phone.
I found the phone, its green light flashing. On the tiny screen was a new picture: a Korean boy and a Korean girl stood half-stunned, half-smiling against a sunny blue sky. They wore black caps with ears that made them look like mice.
Come morning, the door was standing open. Inside, my mother was cooking porridge while my father sat at the table. “Who’s there?” my father asked. “Is someone there?”
I could see that one of the chairs had a shiny spot on its back where the doorknob had rubbed.
“It’s me, Father, your son.”
“Thank goodness you’re back,” my father said. “We were worried about you.”
My mother said nothing.
On the table were the files I’d pulled on my parents. I’d been studying them all week. They looked like they’d been rifled.
“I tried to get in last night but the door was blocked,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Father said. He spoke to the air. “My wife, did you hear anything?”
“No,” she said from the stove. “I heard nothing,