Silver Stallion by Junghyo Ahn Page A

as heard everything happening in Ollye’s room. Kangho’s mother was especially well informed about some important facts such as how the bengko who was black as a crow strangled Fluffy to death in two breaths or how desperately Mansik’s mother, kicking like a mare, struggled, naked, against the giant soldier mounting her.
    Later when Choe’s wife, on her way back home with the hot pepper powder, came upon the widow from Inner Kumsan on the road to the ferry, she told the wobbling old woman not the account she had heard from her husband, but the more vivid and entertaining version as embellished by the miller’s wife. New imaginary episodes developed bit by bit until they became a part of the narrative. The story passed from the hawk-nosed rice bag weaver to an old farmer from Outer Kumsan who spit a gob of yellow phlegm every ten steps, from a sharecropper who kept raking down his long ashen beard with his gnarled fingers to a chunky middle-aged man with narrow inquisitive eyes, from a young farmer with a torn straw hat sitting on an upturned pail to an emaciated tobacco-smoker, from a gossipy woman to her imaginative nineteen-year-old daughter who was picking mushrooms, from a grinning farmer to a sly charcoal-maker, and from the farmer with six fingers on his left hand to the county sorceress. And when Chandol’s mother went to the ferry and the boatman asked, “You mean you saw all those things?” with great admiration, she was so amused that she did not try too hard to correct his wild misinformation.
    By noon many farmers at other villages in West County had learned of the Chestnut House incident, and almost everybody at Kumsan had heard it at least twice. The same two farmers who had gossiped about Ollye crossing the log bridge, repeated the story when they met again on a dike with several other farmers to have the lunch that their wives had brought out to the field. They relished it anew, from the very beginning to the last word, as enthusiastically as the first time, and nobody minded that some of the details had changed.
    When Yun, a farmer of Castle village, appeared at the ferry to go to Central Market to sell his sesame, Yom the boatman, wiping his perspiring chin with the grimy towel hanging from his neck, asked the innocent farmer, “Have the Castle villagers heard about what happened here last night? I mean, what the bengkos did with the Chestnut House woman.”
    There was an obvious lewd insinuation in the boatman’s squinting glance when he said this, and his tale no longer reflected any sympathy or compassion for the victim of this incident. When the Castle villager went to town and met his friends at the tavern, he claimed confidently that “a woman at Kumsan village actually watched the whole thing through the back window of the room and she saw this black soldier violating the Chestnut House woman, you know, and this woman saw the bengko’s cock, too. She told me that the cock looked like a black rubber stick.”
    In the late afternoon, the stories evolved faster and faster, and some said that Ollye had bitten the black rubber stick off the Negro bengko when she could no longer resist the rapist, and some said that Mansik had been stabbed by a bayonet while trying to rescue his mother from the soldiers, and some said that the bengkos had such huge tools that the Chestnut House woman had bled a whole chamber pot of blood “down there.” The village women washing clothes at the stream giggled and exchanged delicately bawdy anecdotes and some farmers insisted that Mansik’s mother actually enjoyed it a lot, for she had had no man at all for two full years.
    All this went on but nobody came out of the Chestnut House to explain to them what really had happened.

FIVE

    S itting listlessly on the walnut stump by the gate, Mansik looked over at the room where his mother had been lying dumb and motionless all night. Nanhi was asleep beside her