I Am the Clay Read Online Free Page A

bring the boy. Where will we run?
    The woman came over to him in the course of the day and said, “The boy may live.”
    “Then he can care for himself.”
    Her eyes sparked. “Better to have left him in the ditch.”
    “What are you saying, woman?”
    “Will we heal him only to kill him?”
    “What are you thinking?” He was angry. “Tell me!”
    She said after a long moment, “This is talk about seeds that have not yet sprouted.” And she went away.
    In the late afternoon the wind herded dull-gray clouds over the city and snow began to fall. The woman sat near her small fire cooking their food whilethe two old men and the boy lay in the shack. The boy was still with fever and called out from time to time: names uttered through gasps of breath. The two old men bleated with annoyance at his cries and told the woman to silence him, they could not rest for the noise, and the woman gave them a bowl of rice and they ate greedily and were quiet.
    Many died of the cold that night on the riverbank and in the morning their bodies were set out on the upper level of the mudflats, near the row of houses. The bodies were frozen into grotesque shapes, some melting into the ice so they would have to be hacked out later by those coming to bury them. But the boy, still hot with fever, remained alive.
    Again the old man went out for wood. He slowed his wandering through the snow-clogged streets lest anyone sense how near the river the cache was. He walked through streets crowded with refugees and listened to talk about the war: men, women, children forced by the soldiers from the North to dig their own graves and then shot; towns and villages burned. He fled from the talk and came upon the same dog he had seen the day before but it ran from him. At the broken wall he removed the stones and loaded wood upon the A-frame and replaced the stones, and then he returned to the riverbank with the wood.
    Men and women squatting on the mudflats regarded him with pinched faces. Soon they will begin to follow me. Only in the land of good spirits do such treasures go on forever.
    The woman looked at the wood and said nothing: it was not for her to praise her husband for an ordinarytask. The two old men, seeing the wood from their sleeping bag in the shack, squealed with joy.
    The boy lay still in the pulsing circle of warmth cast by the burning wood and it was now clear to the old man that he would not die.
    The following morning the woman told him that soon there would be no more food.
    He squatted at the river’s edge. A pitiless north wind gusted across the river. In the milk-white sky the yellow disc of the sun. Trucks rolling across the faraway bridge. Distantly the thump and thud of big guns. The Chinese like locusts in the fields. A dull heavy dread seized him. He remembered hunger, once from a time of river flood and again from a time of endless sun: firespears in his belly; locusts in his head; tremors in his arms and legs. Dark-circled vacant eyes and sunken faces and rotting gums. The long dying of his grandmother and uncle and others in the village. All turned into shriveled foul-smelling dolls. Hunger he dreaded more than war, more than death itself. A dark and leprous scourge.
    He returned to the shack and removed the small square of cloth he kept in his coat pocket and spread it on the ground. From their basket of food he took a handful of rice and placed it on the cloth, which he then tied with care and replaced in the pocket. The woman, squatting next to the sleeping boy, watched the old man in silence, no expression on her small wrinkled features. He settled the A-frame on his shoulders and, bent beneath it as if it already carried its anticipated load, he left the shack.
    The snow had hardened to a slippery crust over the frozen mudflats. More refugees had entered the city inthe past two days; both riverbanks were a mass of men and women. No one was fishing the river. He gazed across the river, looking for the tent with the