Silver Stallion by Junghyo Ahn

gate.
    Ollye did not answer. The door of her room remained closed firmly.
    Sokku called out again, “Mansik. Come on out here if you’re home. I want to talk to you or your mother.”
    There was still no answer. Young Hwang waited. While he was trying to decide whether he should go on calling to them until one of them came out of the closed room or just go away and leave them alone, Young Hwang heard someone inside, moving slowly. The door opened and Mansik, listless and pale, stepped into the yard. Avoiding Sokku’s eyes, the boy plodded out to the gate. He stopped and gazed over Sokku’s shoulder at the rice paddies around the mill.
    â€œDid something happen at your home last night, Mansik?” Young Hwang asked.
    The boy did not answer.
    â€œWhat happened?”
    The boy did not answer.
    â€œIs your mother all right?”
    The boy still did not answer.
    Sokku realized that he would not be able to find out anything from this boy. After a pause, he said, “Go tell your mother to come here. I want to talk to her.”
    Mansik plodded back to the room, opened the door, thrust his head inside and murmured something. Mansik remained motionless, leaning forward, waiting for his mother’s response, and then returned to Young Hwang at the gate.
    â€œI told Mother to come out but she wouldn’t say anything.”
    Silence followed.
    â€œI see,” Young Hwang said with a sigh. “You may go back to your room.”
    Mansik slowly trudged back, entered the room and quietly closed the door. A heavy silence hanging over the Chestnut House was broken only by the soft gnawing sound of the rabbits in their cage in the yard.
    Chandol’s father, scrubbing the mud off his black rubber shoes at the dew-wet roadside grass, called to Choe, a farmer who was coming down the rice paddy dike with a shovel and a pickaxe slung over his shoulder on his way home for breakfast. He told him what had happened last night, his voice filled with shock and pity. “Oh, I really can’t believe it,” he said. “Such a terrible thing happened to Mansik’s mother …”
    He went on to relate what his wife, hiding in the brush by the stream, had witnessed, and what he had heard from Kijun’s uncle. When Choe went home, he told this amazing news to his wife over the breakfast rice, his voice hushed lest his children in the other room should overhear the scandalous story. “Chandol’s mother actually saw it all happening,” he said emphatically. “Although she was too scared to cross the stream, she could watch everything the bengkos did to Mansik’s mother.”
    Choe’s wife could not keep this stunning account to herself. As soon as she had finished washing the breakfast dishes she hurried to the rice mill to have her red peppers ground.
    â€œI just can’t believe it,” Choe’s wife told Kangho’s mother dramatically. “How on earth could such a horrible thing take place in our own village?”
    â€œSo you’ve heard about it, too,” said the miller’s wife.
    â€œYou mean you already know about the incident at the Chestnut House?”
    The two women exchanged various details about the incident, throwing in the phrase “that poor woman” and sighing regularly in their conversation which fed on boundless curiosity and sentimental sympathy in equal proportion. Soon they realized that certain minor details or interpretations differed a little, for the stories had started to change as they traveled from one mouth to another. Kangho’s mother insisted that Chandol’s mother had crossed the stream at a dark spot some distance up from the log bridge, wading in cold water mounting to her waist and pushing through the billowing branches of willows. According to the miller’s wife, Chandol’s mother had soundlessly stolen to the fence behind the Chestnut House, sneaked into the back yard, and saw as well