The Surrendered

When he appeared in the central yard the entire orphanage descended on him, Reverend Hong and the kitchen aunties and all forty or so children, even June, who like Hector typically kept her own company, leaning against the corner of the dormitory building, watching all with her sullen glare. But she was right up front now. Hector put Min down gently, the boy’s eyes half open, his mouth slack. His foot was a bright, sopping mass. Hector was shirtless and slick with sweat and smeared blood, one pant leg soaked crimson all the way down to the cuff. Reverend Hong, ever-suffering Hector, made a great pained face of resignation but said nothing. Sterner of expression was the thin, bespectacled American kneeling beside him, square of jaw and formally dressed in a black woolen suit. He was in his mid-forties, the minister from the States they’d been expecting for several days now. The man immediately began working on the boy, carefully removing the bloody bandage of the shirt and the sneaker to reveal that the ax blade had cleaved off his smallest three toes. He picked the little nubs out as if they were stones and gave them to Hong, who gingerly wrapped them in a handkerchief. But Min was awake now, wailing on seeing his own foot and the horror in the onlookers’ eyes.

“Have you got it yet?” Ta

“Here it is,” a woman’s voice answered. “It was in my bag.”

It was Ta

Hong motioned to Hector, for a word. Hong was ten years older than he, in his mid-thirties, but with his slight, short frame he appeared almost adolescent beside Hector’s broad bulk. And yet Hector seemed callow and shrunken before him now, his head dipped down as Hong spoke quietly to him in his fluent, quite formal English. Hong knew Hector had been considering leaving as well, but he reminded him again how much the orphanage needed his labors, asking him to promise to stay on until he returned from his trip to the States.

“Will you do so?”

“I don’t know.”

“No one blames you for this. I am sure the boy will be all right. Reverend Ta

Hector didn’t answer. Hong clapped him on the arm and said he hoped he would do the right thing. Hector didn’t want to lie to him, for the reverend had always treated him with an everyday decency. He’d wait until they were gone and go back to Seoul tomorrow, to one of the rooming houses in Itaewon, where he could blend back in again among his kind, to whom he could do only superficial harm. Meanwhile, Ta

Hector immediately went to his quarters at the far end of the orphanage’s supply building. Soon after he came to the orphanage Hong let him convert part of the storage room for his quarters, framing out a door on the rear, hillside face of the building, but not bothering with a window. Inside it was still and hot, with the only light coming through splits and cracks in the single-sheath panels of the walls. He stripped off his bloodied trousers and found his hands were caked with dirt and blood. Outside he’d rigged a simple gravity shower, a round tin wash-tub that he had affixed to the roof eave and fitted with a short length of pipe and a hose bib. Of course it would be useless in freezing weather, but he had no other private spot to wash himself. He washed only his hands at first, but then decided to clean the rest of himself. The water was tepid but fresh, for he’d filled it that morning, and he let it run freely, not bothering to save it for another day.

As he scrubbed his forearms and chest and legs with the bar of green laundry soap he wondered if Min was crying again in pain in the back of the taxi, or else gone that ill shade of gray. The thought of a small coffin being lowered into a hole at the orphanage graveyard made him shiver. It was a grave that he should have to dig, but he was sure he couldn’t do it; he’d dug scores of graves during the war, and a few afterward, but he couldn’t bear to dig this one. His flanks were smudged with dried blood and he scrubbed them harshly until they were raw, doing the same everywhere else the boy had marked him with blood, now using an old hairbrush (as he had learned to do after a long day of handling bodies after a battle) against his skin until the last of the water ran out. As he reached for the towel he caught a flash of reflected light disappearing around the corner. He thought at first it had been a falling leaf or a bird but there on the ground was his torn, blood-soaked shirt. He peered around the building and saw the children ru

The rest of the afternoon he worked, waiting for Reverend Ta