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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 77

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Landmine (3)

Im Baechil forced the words out as if wringing them from himself.

"E-Elder Cheom-ji... a-about my father's words, please, just a little..."

"A little what! A little!

Come to think of it, you wretch! You half-baked fool! On the night that typhoon came, you were the first one to go down to Middle Hamlet, weren't you!? To help those base-borns!?"

"S-San's my friend, that's why..."

"Friend!? Where would a fellow like you have a friend, you half-baked stammerer! Hah, too dim even to know you're being used, no different from a court jester!"

The more Yun Cheom-ji spoke, the less he could hold the fire down. If not for this dolt, would Cheol-min, that senseless grandson of his by his daughter, have gone off to gad about in Middle Hamlet?

"My teacher said it again and again! Kim Hong-jip was more the vermin than Ito Hirobumi! More harmful than an outside enemy like Han San is an inside traitor like you! Your mother raised a traitor!"

Im Baechil's breath came fast and ragged.

"M-my mother's got nothing, n-no! It was my father's words too, and yet why, why bring my mother into it!"

"Why! Am I a man forbidden to speak of your mother!? The one who married your mother came from a household of my own bondservants!

From the very start I found no favor in that marriage! Calamity descends not from heaven but is born of woman! Ruin comes not from above but out of a female!"

The sage's dread pronouncement echoed through the hall of Upper Hamlet.

"Was your mother not the daughter of a court entertainer driven out of the palace in the Eulmi year!? How could your father's cutting his thread of life so early have been anything but the will of heaven! Poor as he was, your father was devoured by that mother of yours and her fierce fate, the widowhood-curse hanging over her..."

At that instant, Im Baechil let out a wild cry and lunged at Yun Cheom-ji.

"You insult my mother!"

He thrust out his hands. He seized the collar. Yun Cheom-ji's, and he roared.

"M-my mother!"

His hands, his hands shook and shook. The words, the words wouldn't come out right, his vision was spinning, and not knowing how to swing a fist, he only clutched Yun Cheom-ji's collar and screamed at the top of his lungs right in the old man's face.

"You! You insult my mother!!"

"Th-this fellow's gone mad!"

Yun Cheom-ji roared back. That this half-baked stammerer would seize him by the collar!

"Let go! Let go! Le, what are you all just standing there looking at! Make him let go!"

The once-sacred Upper Hamlet hall was reduced to bedlam in an instant. Someone rushed in and pulled Im Baechil off Yun Cheom-ji.

It was Mr. Baek, the blacksmith. Shoving the pried-loose Im Baechil toward Shin Cheol-min and the others, Mr. Baek waved his hands busily.

"Quick! Quick, all of you go home! Leave this to the adults!"

Yun Cheom-ji ground his teeth, his collar still in disarray.

"Go where! Stop! Grab him! Not me, grab that half-baked fellow!"

"Off home, now! You especially, Baechil!"

"I said go where, let go! Bring a straw mat! Bring a club! Bring it and beat him!

That fellow, that wild-eyed traitor, beat him! Roll him in a straw mat and beat him till the breath leaves his body!"

Yun Cheom-ji screamed at the top of his lungs, his face gone crimson.

The oligarchs of Upper Hamlet, though, only looked at one another and did not move.

'Rather funny, this yangban who's always so prim and proper now thrashing about like a cur with its balls caught in a bear trap.'

'Get mixed up wrong in such lowly business and I'll only dirty my own hands.'

Father Cho, at the head of them, wore a strange smile as he watched Yun Cheom-ji and thought so.

'Baechil's usually such a meek, docile fellow.'

'Then suddenly slaps his own grandson's cheek and carries on, and that mother business, that went a bit too far...'

Mr. Baek the blacksmith at the head of them let out sighs and thought so.

Even so, for the fearless boys to strap on armbands and step in, well, it was their very leader, Shin Cheol-min, who'd just been struck across the face.

Im Baechil knew none of these underlying matters. Nor did he know that his getting safely out of the Upper Hamlet hall that day was a miracle born of several coincidences piling up together.

The truth was, he could take nothing in at all.

After hearing his mother insulted, his head just went round and round, buzzing, buzzing, his hands shook, his heart ached, and he could think of nothing. Only tears kept flowing, but no words, no voice would come out.

With a dazed face, choking and gasping, Im Baechil went home.

He was not alone. Shin Cheol-min and the rest of the Upper Hamlet boys' band walked at his side in silence.

When they reached the house that was full of the smell of medicinal herbs, Shin Cheol-min patted Im Baechil's shoulder. One cheek was still red and swollen, but his voice was clear.

"Hyung."

That was the first day fifteen-year-old Shin Cheol-min called twenty-year-old Im Baechil hyung.

Im Baechil's shoulders shrank tight.

"Ch-Cheol-min. Sorry, I, to your grandfather..."

"It's fine."

A slap makes a man shut his mouth, but it can also make him open his eyes.

Shin Cheol-min's lips twitched as though he meant to say something more, then he simply left one more "It's fine" and went. Im Baechil watched his back a while, then went inside and wept.

"Mother! I, I made a mess of things..."

And Baechil's mother.

The widow who had raised her son alone to the age of twenty, who had claimed with full pride one of the three seats among Sebeom Valley's three wicked ladies, the daughter of the last medicine woman of the land of Joseon, she coaxed and soothed her weeping son until she at last learned what had happened.

"Mm!"

Baechil's mother rose from her seat.

She began to pack.

"We're going, son."

"Wh-where to, Mother...?"

"It'll be hard to keep living here."

Her voice was cheerful as ever.

She had lived her whole life in Upper Hamlet.

In the Eulmi year, carried on her mother's back after she came out of the palace, she'd entered this mountain hollow, so it had been about thirty-eight years. All that while, she'd watched clearly how her mother lived.

Her mother, a medicine woman, had held unrivaled healing skill in this hollow. When people fell ill, they came bearing this and that and asked her to set the needles, asked her to prepare medicine.

And once they were fully healed, they turned their backs and called her a lowly wench.

Not that everyone was like that. There were kind people. In Upper Hamlet too. Perhaps because it was a place like Upper Hamlet, there were more such people.

But scars settle deeper than medicine.

Ah, it wasn't that there was no medicine that worked well. A man. Big-framed, quiet, with no cruel corner to him, and this was the important part, a very handsome man, one in Upper Hamlet.

But over and over, always, scars settle deeper than medicine.

Watching all of it with her hands clasped behind her back, the medicine woman's daughter, now thirty-eight, knew all too well what this village could do to someone who'd fallen out of favor.

She had to get away. As soon as possible.

Helping his mother pack the moving bundles, Im Baechil hung his head.

"I-I'm sorry. It's because I, because I made a mess..."

Baechil's mother smiled softly.

"You're right! Thanks to my son I'm off to move house at this age."

Im Baechil lifted his head with an expression like the sky was falling. Seeing that face, Baechil's mother, hands still clasped behind her back, burst out laughing.

"It's a joke, a joke. My son."

She got up and came over, and drew the legacy her son had inherited, that handsome man's, this son who stood a head taller, to her chest and patted it.

"You did well."

"...What?"

"Grabbing the collar of the man who insulted your mother. I said you did well."

Im Baechil's eyes went wide.

Baechil's mother stroked her son's back a couple more times, then stepped away and clasped her hands behind her. She smiled brightly, the way she had at eighteen.

"Dependable!"

"...Mother."

Baechil's mother smiled once more, stroked her son's back a couple more times, then stepped away and began to pack again. Gathering up the needle case and wrapping the medicine-boiling pot in cotton cloth, she said in that soft voice of hers,

"And let me say this in advance, this move isn't because of you, son."

"M-Mother... you, you don't have to comfort me for no reason..."

"It's not comfort, it's the truth."

Baechil's mother lifted her head a touch and glanced sidelong past the wooden-lattice window, out at Upper Hamlet.

"I'd been thinking it for a while. That I had to leave this place."

But back then her mother was still living, and back then she'd gone and met that man, and back then her son was still young, and repeating those "but back then"s over and over, the baby girl who'd once been swaddled in cloth had somehow become this middle-aged woman.

Still, life had been pleasant enough, all things considered.

"Especially lately."

Baechil's mother looked back at her son. As always, a lively smile hung in her eyes.

"A way to live more comfortably and more happily happened to come to me, too."

Im Baechil blinked. A way to live more comfortably and happily?

What sort of way that was, Im Baechil found out thirty minutes later.

At the Han household, Baechil's mother sat down with Im Baechil and made a deep bow to Ham Ssang-sim.

"Sister Ssang-sim. Let the two of us, my son and me, live here as boarders a while. Kitchen work, laundry work, whatever you set us to, we'll do it all."

"Aigo! What talk is that. Get up, get up! Bow, my foot! As for boarding, let's talk it over when our San gets back! The house matters these days, San decides all of them..."

And so when Han San came home from his work that day, he learned of all of this.

Ham Ssang-sim heaved sigh after sigh.

"Ugh, what to do. To grab that son-of-a-bitch Yun Cheom-ji by the collar. Like Baechil's mother says, who knows when a bolt from the blue might drop on them if they stay there. That place is a bit, well, just when it seems to have passed over without incident, one day it suddenly dredges up things long gone.

So for now, that thing, I told them they could stay a while in the newly built room, the one that's just finished..."

Han San waved a hand.

"Come now, why speak as if you're making excuses. We've got a housemaid at home, hired hands. A little matter like this, Mother, you can decide on your own now."

"You brat! As if that works. If you earn all the money and I go about taking all the credit, no matter how hard the menfolk of such a household strain, it won't do."

"Well, that's true enough too."

Han San laughed. Then he stretched himself out long.

"Anyhow, then I'll see to it. Simple matters, is all. As it happens, we were just in need of new staff at Han's Myriad Commerce."

Han San met with Im Baechil first.

Given that a mess of his own making had driven his mother to volunteer herself as a housemaid at a friend's home, and with that particular temperament of his, Im Baechil's mental state was already a drill boring clean through the mantle.

'Mental, mantle...'

A bit of humor that might soothe Im Baechil's heart flitted through his head, but before Han San could even put it into words, Im Baechil covered his face first.

"San... I-I'm sorry..."

"Mm."

Han San went straight into the matter at hand. He judged that giving Baechil a 'role' quickly would comfort him more than a joke.

"Hyung, for now you're in charge of odd jobs at our company.

Basically, you stay at the house and handle all the labor that takes muscle. Now and then, when our hired hands need a hand, I'll send you along, so lend your strength there too."

He'd finished sizing up the Chuk Brothers' temperaments, and the business was more or less on track.

Once trading resumed, he meant to leave one or two behind at the house or put the rest of the Chuk Brothers on other work, rather than move all of them at once. Having handy Baechil on hand at those times would raise the scheduling flexibility dramatically.

"Yearly wages, of course I'll pay them, though let's see about the amount. I'll never leave you feeling shortchanged, so don't worry."

Im Baechil jerked his head up.

"N-no! Yearly wages, when I'm being such a burden, money, what would I..."

"No. Take it."

Han San trusted Im Baechil's character, but he also knew a relationship with no money changing hands stagnates and rots. What can be reduced to numbers should be reduced to numbers, so there's less friction.

Having thus hired Im Baechil as a Han's Myriad Commerce intern, Han San went to meet Baechil's mother.

'Now this one's a bit of a high-grade talent.'

The returned old man knew well the standing a doctor would come to hold in the future.

To be precise, Baechil's mother was closer to a pharmacist, and at that not one who'd gone through a formal medical course but a self-taught, back-alley sort raised through household instruction. But to an old man who'd returned before ever seeing the separation of prescribing and dispensing, that difference was slight.

Han San grinned and said to Baechil's mother,

"I'll put up a house quick in the inner yard, so stay on there. Ordinarily you can just do the same as you've been doing, seeing to the village's patients and such."

Surely a man ought to have at least one medical practitioner in his own domain to command as he pleased.

"Then, when your hands are free, the medicinal herbs I've dug up, my mother and father are just now knocking the dirt off and drying them, you see? Lend a hand with that together with them. In any case you're the more of an expert there."

Baechil's mother smiled. Brightly.

"Thank you, my benefactor, sir."

"Come now. That's not it."

The medicine woman's daughter smiled a shade more brightly, then corrected herself.

"I'll work hard, Sajang-nim."

That would do.

A landmine is a landmine because the one who steps on it does so without knowing.

That day, Yun Cheom-ji stepped on a great many landmines. He scarcely even knew he'd stepped on them.

Just one thing, though.

Every time a landmine went off, one person got flung out of Upper Hamlet, and the flung-out person tumbled down below.

Just below Upper Hamlet, in Middle Hamlet, there lived a hunter who'd pick up and put to use whatever had a use to it, be it a mushroom or a snake.

And so September came.

[1] Kim Hong-jip (1842–1896) was a late Joseon reformist prime minister assassinated by a mob after his cabinet's pro-Japanese reforms, and was long vilified in nationalist memory as a collaborator.

[2] Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909) was Japan's first prime minister and the first Resident-General of Korea, assassinated by independence activist An Jung-geun in 1909.

[3] The Eulmi year (1895) marks the sexagenary cycle year of the Eulmi Incident, in which Japanese agents assassinated Empress Myeongseong — a common era-marker in colonial-period speech.

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