Читать книгу My First Hundred Years - Donald R. Fletcher - Страница 11

It was a different world that opened to my early childhood perception and acceptance. Our family was still the firm center. Dad was with us on work days, morning and evening, and for a short while around noon, when he came home for lunch. Leaving the lunch table, he would sit for a few minutes in his large Morris chair and relax, taking off his glasses. But if he dozed and they slipped from his fingers, he would get up with a start and quickly be out the front door and down the path toward the hospital buildings. Mother (she didn’t like “Mama,” “Mommy,” or “Mom”) was in charge of the household, which came to include Kang Si, our cook, and Pak, our “outsideman.” We didn’t have an “ammah” for child care, as some families did. Mother chose to take care of us herself.

I became aware that our house was at one end of a compound, which was the mission’s Taegu Station, built along the crest of a low hill that overlooked the city. Around the compound there was a mud-brick wall topped by clay tiles. If I were helped to the top of the wall, I could look out across a sea of straw-thatched houses built close together, with a few streets along which there were some tile-roofed shops or more affluent homes. That was Taegu in the 1920s—not the modern city of almost three million that it is today.

In my early world there were people, including my family, who were not like most of the rest. We were “foreigners.” The word had no hostile overtone in my child-world. In fact, it had a comfortable feel, because that was our identity—who we were. Around us, other people were Koreans, except for the occasional Japanese official of some sort. When Dad, for a rare outing, took us downtown in the family Ford touring car, children might gather around to gaze at us as a curiosity. That was not pleasant. We found that a solution was to pick out one of them and point and giggle, which tended to disperse the onlookers.

Why didn’t our parents—and most missionary parents at that time—encourage us to mingle and play with the children around us? There were small graves in some mission cemeteries to answer that. This was Korea of some ninety years ago. Not only were the familiar childhood diseases prevalent, but also more ominous ones—dysentery, typhus fever, even leprosy. In his practice, our dad was encountering these every day.

For a halcyon time, while I was small, Taegu Station had quite a few children. The “big kids,” mostly, went off to an English-language boarding school in Pyongyang. But there were enough younger ones, for a time, that their parents put together to employ a teacher for a one-room school. Mrs. Gordon’s School was a mysterious, near-legendary place to me, even in its final year, when Mother felt ready to start Elsie and Archie together there. I have a blurred recollection of being taken to the school for a visit once, near the end of the school day. Here was a new thing: familiar forms and faces sitting in rows—my own siblings among them—all with quiet, serious looks, paying attention while this one adult talked to them and some took turns answering her. How special it would be, I thought, to be part of that.

But that all changed. The Korea mission sometimes moved its personnel, according to its developing program. It happened that a couple of the families with early-school age children were transferred from Taegu. Mrs. Gordon’s School was disbanded.

*****

It was about this time that something memorable happened. Mother, exceptionally, was away in Andong, gone to comfort a new widow who had lost her husband to malaria. Dad encouraged her to go, saying we would be fine for a few days.

It was winter—cold enough, even in southern Korea, that our house had a furnace in the basement for warm-air, radiant heating. From the furnace, a sheet-metal flu pipe passed up through the first-floor and second-floor hallways and into the attic, where it bent and entered a brick chimney.

On this morning we three children were at breakfast with Dad. Still in our pajamas, we had kicked off our slippers under the table, as we liked to do, when suddenly the sewing-woman, who was upstairs, came rushing, almost falling, down the staircase. Her face was full of fear and she could hardly speak. As she frantically waved her hands, Dad went bounding up the stairs. Archie followed, and Elsie dared to go half way up; but I stayed at the bottom.

Archie told us later that when he got to the stair landing and looked up, he saw little tongues of flame licking down around the hall flu pipe, where it passed through its asbestos-insulated opening into the attic. When Dad opened the door, the attic stairway was full of fire.

Immediately, all was commotion. We three ran out into the yard, forgetting our slippers. Looking up, I saw flames shooting out of the attic windows. Fortunately for us, at the mission academy for boys, built on a low hill a quarter-mile away, the students were just gathering. The quick-thinking principal, catching sight of our smoke and flames, called together a group of the oldest boys and sent them over, on the run, to help.

They rushed in and began to haul out whatever could be saved. Upstairs, they pulled clothes out of closets and dropped them out windows to others below, who carried them to safety. Downstairs there was a piano. It wasn’t ours; our parents were taking care of it while its owners were on furlough. This was one of the old-fashioned “player pianos,” with its mechanism of perforated paper rolls coupled with foot pedals to create a suction that worked the keys. The whole thing was ponderously heavy; but somehow these schoolboys picked it up and carried it outside.

Most of this I had to learn afterward, from the telling and re-telling. To our chagrin, our neighbors’ daughter—one of the “big kids,” who was in her early teens—corralled us, all three, and shut us in one of their bedrooms with the blinds drawn. She was sure that if we watched our home burning we would be emotionally scarred for life. But how frustrating, more for Elsie and Archie than for me, that we couldn’t see the excitement—such a rare happening in our world!

I later learned, from a more adult perspective, more of the details—such as how the city fire company arrived but could do little. The weak water pressure in our compound—built on a hill—left their hoses useless. Nothing could be done to damp its flames, the house blazed like a torch for the whole city to see.

What about Mother, as all of this was happening? There was no telephone line to Andong, no means of emergency communication. The telegraph was all, and it was cumbersome, with text very limited. Besides, Mother was expected home that same day, and she would be unreachable as she traveled by jitney over seventy miles of rutted roads. The winter daylight was already waning when at last the jitney—a Model T Ford chassis fitted with three crowded seats—entered Taegu and Mother began to look for familiar signs.

They came into the wide street that she knew, but as she looked up, she thought, “That’s strange. I don’t remember an abandoned building there.” Above her, on the hill, there were some empty brick walls—no roof, and windows that were just holes through which she could see the evening sky.

Then suddenly it hit her. “That’s no abandoned building. That’s our house!”

The jitney honked its way, agonizingly slow. It seemed to take forever to reach the corner and turn toward the hospital. But there, before she could move to climb out, a figure came running. It was the sewing-woman. She had been waiting and watching, anticipating how Mother might feel.

“Lady, lady,” she called, “the Doctor is safe, and all the children! It’s all right!”

Mother hugged her, which was unusual in Korean custom. Gradually, as Dad came out to meet her and as she at last reached us at the house where our family would provisionally be lodged, she heard the whole story.

We had a new outsideman, who had been instructed how to light the furnace on a cold morning. He would use the small branches of dry pine needles that were effective in getting the molded balls of soft coal to start burning. But this furnace was large, as everything that these foreigners had seemed to be. He would pack in an extra amount of the resinous pine branches.

When he struck his match, the pine ignited with a whoosh. The almost-instant blaze leaped up the chimney. Flames, perhaps igniting some soot on the way, shot up the sheet-metal flu pipe, all the way to where it bent in the attic, with such heat that the pipe gave way. Quickly, stored items caught fire, with a sound that startled the sewing-woman, who then was terrified to see those small flames licking down around the flu pipe.

The Japanese police arrested the hapless outsideman. They needed someone to blame and to arrest and would have clapped him into their feared prison; but Dad argued his case—he was simply trying to do his job very well. Reluctantly, they let him go.

Were we children scarred for life? Not so. But Mother told me later that, at times that winter and the next, when she would lift the lid of the pot-bellied stove in our bedroom, letting a few flickers light the ceiling, I would get tearful and want to hold on to her. That much stayed with me.

*****

In Taegu, after some families with children were moved and Mrs. Gordon’s school could no longer be maintained, Mother turned to an educational resource used by US expatriated families across the world—the excellent Calvert School in Baltimore, Maryland. We three became familiar with its label on printed materials and complete supplies, down to pencils and erasers. Mother kept Elsie and Archie in one grade and started me in the next. I would listen in, avidly, on their lessons.

We were assigned to teachers in the far-off Calvert School. Some of our completed tests and important papers were sent there; but boat mail was slow—no trans-Pacific airmail yet—so such contact was tenuous. Mother was our resource for learning, bolstered by the superb Calvert School materials, including fine reproductions of classic art and architecture.

There were fewer children, now, in Taegu Station. Two or three older ones, like our neighbors’ daughter, Harriet, were away at boarding school in Pyongyang or in college back in the US. Our age group numbered four—we three Fletchers and Huldah Blair. Huldah had two older sisters; but the age gap was wide. She was now the only Blair child living at home.

The Blairs’ house was the last one at the other end of the compound from ours. As we four found ourselves left to our own resources outside of home-school time, Elsie, Archie, and I became familiar with the trek along the clay road, the whole length of the compound ridge, to play with Huldah. Mother kept our school work to week-day mornings; but sometimes, when we turned up at Blairs’ in the afternoon, we might be told that Huldah, who was also in Calvert School, wouldn’t be out for an hour or two that day because she was behind in her lessons.

Let me add here an interesting aside. Huldah was just a couple of months older than Archie. Both were born at home in Taegu in the mid-summer heat of 1917. One morning, Mother, her own pregnancy far advanced, had gone to help with Susie Blair’s new baby when, on the way home, she felt the first signs that Archie was on the way. So those two—indeed, we four—grew up together and went off to college. Archie studied medicine, enlisted in the US Army, and was in Germany with the Medical Corp during the occupation after World War II; while Huldah, now an RN, served in a mission hospital in Costa Rica.

Their contact during and after college had been only casual. But now a warm correspondence developed, and soon they realized—by mail—that they were in love. That led to a long and happy marriage; a medical missionary career in India, during which five sons were born; and a serene retirement in Southern California.

As children in Taegu, we four played games, inventing new ones as we could. The side yard of our house was gravel, just a thin layer over rock. It was on the sunny side of the building, and Mother was determined to grow some flowers. The outsideman went to work with a pick, chipping at the sedimentary rock a short while each day, until there was a rectangular basin deep enough to hold the soil for a small flower plot.

Then we took over. In the basement we found half of a packing case for an upright piano. The size was just right, to cover that flower-bed excavation. We also found some rice straw to make it more comfortable inside. One could wriggle through an opening we left at one end, and a few—if not all four—of us could squeeze inside our shadowy “barrow.” It was a special place. A point of protocol established that anyone, on entering, must be chewing one of the faintly sweetish stalks of the rice straw.

In those brief childhood years, I had no awareness of choices our parents were making. On the table there was always hot food for dinner. I didn’t think about where it came from. I did know that Pak, the outsideman, had a bicycle on which he would bring back purchases from the market, such as a pair of chickens tied together at the legs and slung over the handlebars.

The trouble, it seemed, was that those chickens had spent their short lives scratching and foraging for food, which meant that they were lean and tough. Dad, the former farm boy, found an answer. He directed the construction of a lath-and-wire-netting pen in our backyard, complete with an enclosed hen house with a roost and nests. We would have occasional fresh eggs, plus a well-fed chicken for the table.

The experiment succeeded so well that, in time, there were broods of fluffy chicks—all quite fascinating for us children. But then the trouble began. There was commotion in the hen house at night—loud squawking—and in the morning some baby chicks were gone. Arming himself with sticks of firewood, Dad positioned himself at an upstairs window, from which he could let fly at any marauding animal.

That helped for a while. Then, one night, the squawking was unusually loud and frantic. Dad hurled his stock of firewood, aiming as close to the chicken pen as he dared, and eventually there was silence; but in the morning his favorite brooding hen was bloody all around her head, and only two of her chicks were left. The afternoon before, while we were playing in the backyard, we thought we glimpsed a slim, brown shadow that disappeared behind the wood pile.

Dad brought a trap from the hospital. It had an end compartment, where he could shut in a live chicken. Then there was a larger compartment with a treadle and a trap door. When an animal entered there and stepped on the treadle, the door would drop shut behind it.

Dad set the trap inside the chicken pen, and it worked! In the morning there was a very frightened chicken in the end compartment and, shut in next to it, a small, snarling, unbelievably ferocious animal—a weasel. We tried to feed the weasel bits of raw meat through the wire of its cage, but it ignored the food, its ferocity intact. After only two days, the wild creature died.

I haven’t mentioned Tootsie, our small dog. She was of an uncertain ancestry, white, with some brown markings, cute and lively, with a suggestion of Pekingese. Dad had spoken for her from a friend and colleague in another mission station, where the family dog had produced a litter. The doctor friend came to us by train. It was winter, and he brought the pup in his overcoat pocket, keeping her quiet by letting her suck on his fingers. We named her Tootsie, from a popular song of the 1920s, and she became our constant companion.

About the weasel, though, she was sensibly wary. She barked at it in its cage, ruffling her neck fur and showing her teeth, but not coming very close. After the weasel died, and Dad found a taxidermist downtown, who stuffed it in a life-like pose, mounting it on a wooden stand, just a sniff of it would send Tootie (we usually dropped the “s”) into a paroxysm of scrambling and barking. After some months, moths got into the weasel’s fur, where it was put away while we were gone for the summer. It had to be disposed of; but we kept the end of its tail, and for a long time after—when we children were older, and Tootie, too—producing that tip of tail and giving her a sniff would set her to racing wildly around, as if the snarling creature were right there again.

*****

In Taegu there were other experiences—trivial childhood happenings—but such as left impressions on memory that are still there, after some ninety years. In two of these, it was an unexpected act of kindness that made the impression.

Archie and I were getting interested in kite flying, which at the time constituted almost a major sport in our region of Korea. Of a long spring or summer evening, if there was a stiff breeze, we could perhaps perch on the top of our back wall and see the kite masters in an open street below. There might be two of them, standing thirty or forty feet apart, each surrounded by his group of cheering onlookers. All would have their eyes fixed on a patch of sky where two square kites were battling, climbing and diving, or moving laterally, as their expert handlers worked the thin kite strings. Those strings hung, in an inverted arc, from the reels of the handlers, up and away through the evening air, to their tiny, darting squares fifty or eighty yards away.

The last five yards or so of each string had been dipped in glue and then passed through powdered glass. If the glass-treated string could be made to cross the taut string of the other kite, then given a sawing motion, it might cut that other string and send the opponent’s kite floating helplessly away.

Archie and I watched such contests with fascination. Once or twice we were able to recover from one of the trees on our compound a hapless kite that had been cut away. But the memory I want to share was of nothing that grand. It was early in our kiting experience. I had made a very small kite, following the very maneuverable Korean design, and Archie had built a similar, but larger one. It was a bright, breezy Saturday morning when we boldly took our kites outside the compound wall, near its far end, to a place where the land fell away in a wide, grassy slope. There were already other boys there with their kites—not foreigners like us, of course.

My small kite would only spin erratically in the breeze. Archie took off running with his, and I was left with this useless thing on the end of the strong thread I was using as a kite string. Then one of the boys, about my age, came up to me. Smiling, he took from a pocket in his short, Korean cloth-jacket some scraps of paper and, in a heavier, folded piece, a lump of rice-flour paste. He put together a paper tail and pasted it to the bottom corner of my kite. Smiling again, he had me try it, and the little kite took to the air, holding quite steady for its small size. I thanked him, with the phrases of Korean that I knew, little thinking that more than ninety years later, as I write, his warm, shy smile and his finger rubbing the flour paste—the spontaneous kindness of his gesture—would still be with me.

Another memory that my brain still holds brings in our dad. The scene is the lower corner of our yard—again, a late spring evening. The family Model T Ford is there, with the engine hood lifted off. There is some problem, and Dad is conferring with a couple of men about it. In the era of this memory, trained auto mechanics were not available as yet in Korea—just those who had been learning by experience. Dad was a person of caution and persistence, and in this case, it showed in a very long discussion.

Archie and I had been standing by. Whether he understood anything of the conversation, I don’t know. I did not; but as long as he stayed, I would stay, too. What persists in my memory, after Archie had found some place to sit, is that Dad went around behind the car and brought an empty gasoline can—one of the five-gallon cans that were the only way, then, of transporting the fuel. He placed the can kindly for me to sit on it.

I was used to following Archie’s lead, and to his getting attention in any sort of manly, adult-type matters; so, Dad’s thoughtfulness toward me made an impression, deep enough for that memory to live on. Archie, as I’ve mentioned before, was only a year and five months older than I, but much of the time I was definitely the “kid brother.” He was more outgoing, more sociable, and he proved to be much more athletic. It was exactly right that he should be named A.G. Junior, and that, as I said above, he should follow Dad into medicine and a career as a missionary doctor.

Many years later, I am remembering a photo of him and Dad. Both are wearing appropriate academic regalia. As a Canadian and still a British subject, Dad had qualified to be inducted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Now he was a US citizen, and he and Archie, in the same ceremony, were both being named Fellows of the American College of Surgeons.

Growing up, I was more domestic than Archie. I enjoyed being where Mother was—listening intently when she read, although infrequently, from one of the American poets, perhaps Whittier or Longfellow. I remember that once I suggested to her that Archie and I were like the Biblical twins Esau and Jacob—Esau the hunter and outdoorsman, Jacob a man of the tents. Mother didn’t like the comparison and immediately discounted it. Probably she was thinking of the conflict between the brothers, after Jacob tricked their aged father into bestowing on him the paternal blessing of the firstborn. I gathered very clearly that there should be no more talk about Esau and Jacob.

In effect, I always felt close to Archie, respecting his strong points. We roomed together through boarding school, and also at Princeton, when I joined him there. I made an unsuccessful effort at soccer as a freshman, but Archie was on the varsity team and before he finished was named All-Eastern halfback.

I gladly remember one of the last times we had together, just the two of us. He was a first-year medical student at Columbia in New York City. He invited me for a weekend visit, squeezing a cot into his tiny dormitory room. I enjoyed sharing, at night, his view of lights festooning the George Washington Bridge. And I recall, some five years later, when Martha and I were newlyweds, how he visited us and laid on our dining room table the returned ring of his first engagement, which had been broken off.

*****

For many of us there come moments of a personal epiphany—whether in childhood or later in life—when our spirit spreads its wings, testing the air. I carry from my childhood, even now, a clear impression of such an experience.

Members of Taegu Station used to gather on Sunday afternoons for an English-language service. Most of its members were involved elsewhere on Sunday morning, and perhaps evening as well, in services in Korean. The afternoon gathering was an opportunity for sharing and mutual uplift in the language and traditions that were our own. I was still very young, not mindful of much of this; but one Sunday Mother sang a solo, choosing a hymn of very personal faith and devotion. She was not a trained singer but had a pleasant voice and was just taking her turn.

A day or two later I was playing alone in our front yard near sunset. We had a Weeping Willow tree there, and the low, golden sunlight came slanting through its trailing branches, which were just beginning to sprout their tender leaves. I stood still, with the melody of that hymn and my mother’s voice filling my head. Even to a child, the situation, the sound, the whole late-sunlit scene were powerfully, transcendently poignant. There was an awareness of Spirit, of Reality quite beyond; but for that moment, intersecting my simple, day-to-day reality.

I was perhaps six or seven at the time. I had no language to express such an epiphany. I still don’t, really, but am profoundly grateful for that unspoken Word that let me spread my spirit’s childhood wings. That was God, touching me.

Of other childhood epiphanies, I am remembering just two. For one of them I was probably a bit younger, because there were more children on the compound, including a couple of “big kids.” They had organized a game, maybe some sort of war game. There was a patch of tall grass, and I was told that I was to lie there. I must remain very still—just lie there until someone came for me. Perhaps I was supposed to be one of the wounded; I don’t know.

The voices moved away, and everything grew still. Where I lay, I could look up, between some stems of tall grass, into the sky—a deep, tranquil sky of mid-afternoon. There was a small, white cloud moving slowly across it, and then another. I had never before felt how deep the sky is. I was lifted out of myself, out of my world, received and absorbed into that serene vastness.

How did the experience end? Did someone finally come for me? Apparently, the bigger kids had forgotten this wounded casualty. As I remember, I at last got up and went looking for them.

The other childhood epiphany I am calling up takes me to a different venue—Sorai Beach, a missionary resort on the northwestern coast of Korea, where our family had a summer cottage. The cottage stood on a bluff, with a zigzag path that made a steep descent to rocks and a bit of stony beach below. We mostly went to the community beach, a beautiful stretch of sand at a ten-minute walk; but this day Archie, Elsie, and I had taken the steep path down to explore the rocks. I was probably seven or eight.

We found a place where the tide had left a small pool in a deep cleft of rock. That pool was a microcosm of the sea world, with green moss on the rock, a few strands of seaweed—even a couple of sand crabs scuttling nearby—while the warm sun lit up its clean water. I was fascinated by this miniature seascape. Then I happened to look up. My gaze took in the zigzag path up the bluff. At the top was a shape, one corner of our cottage roof thrusting out and beyond it, the crystalline space of sky. For that moment, it wasn’t sky. It was Beyond—Spirit—what is ineffable. I had—and have—no words for it. My spirit felt, for that brief, timeless moment, its reality.