The Surrendered

When night fell, candlelight briefly illuminated the front window of the cottage. Hector was sitting out front of the supply room, leaning back against the support post on a cut-down stool, drinking steadily from a bottle of warm whiskey. Reverend Ta

Hector went on to a rooming house where the proprietress knew to have two women from the adjoining brothel sent to his room. It was how he preferred it, never hiring just one if he could afford two, a satisfaction and habit that had grown out of those first ministrations with his older sister’s girlfriends, though on this night it was a craving not so much libidinous as a want of continuous labors, an intense need for usage on his body. But when they stripped for him he could see they were girls, and young ones-hardly sixteen, if that-and rather than send them back down to someone else, he just had them lie with him in the bed. It was four a.m. and they were tired, too. He had not been so valiant in the past but his heart was sodden with the unhappy sights of the day, and though he had no desire to go home to the States he realized he ought to leave Korea soon. It was true he had little sentiment left for his ex-comrades-he could bait any poor bastard like the sergeant into a harsh and probably undeserved realm of pain-but seeing for three long years these destitute people and their children serve as handmaidens in their own wrecked house had finally begun to vanquish him. It had not seemed a problem at first, for it was nothing compared to what he had witnessed in the war, but he sensed that he was being replaced, cell by cell, with bits of stone. Even in regard to Min his guilt was as much conception as feeling. And he still wanted that feeling, at least for the natives. In the morning the girls stood above him in their too-colorful dresses and the older one politely asked him if he would pay them extra for staying the night, which he did, knowing that they would otherwise get docked of their pay, or even beaten.

When Hector got back to the orphanage in mid-morning, Reverend Ta

When they were done, Ta

“It happened soon after Mrs. Ta

As he spoke, Hector caught his wife’s eye a few times but she looked away whenever he did, her gaze returning straight to her husband as if to a beacon shining out from a dark shoreline. Ta

For the first week, Hector steered clear of the new reverend and his wife; he worked on the immediate grounds in the early mornings and during congregations and meals, saving any fieldwork for when they might be about. He couldn’t help but pause, as everyone did, whenever he caught a glimpse of Sylvie Ta