They fell asleep. After some time June awoke to a dying fire and climbed out of the pews to feed a small log into the stove. The fire flared quickly with new heat.
“Could I have some water, noo-nah?” Min said to her, peeking up over the pew back, his voice raspy.
She said all right. Outside, the sky was clear but moonless and the stars barely thwarted the darkness. But her eyes quickly adjusted and she made her way to the well. It was by the kitchen, and after she worked the hand pump five or six times the frigid water splashed out of the spout. Beneath there was a wooden ladle in a bucket, and while she filled its large cup she noticed a tiny, weak glow at the far end of the field. It was Min’s kerosene lamp; they had left it by the gate. She went across the field to fetch it and was about to head back to the chapel when the low groan of a door broke the silence. June instinctively crouched down, thrusting the lamp behind her to shield its light.
A dusky figure emerged from the Tanners’ cottage. It was Hector. He must have gone over while she and Min were asleep. Hector turned and held out his hands toward the pitch-black doorway and then it was Sylvie, in her light-hued robe, stepping out gingerly on the stoop. He helped her down, her one leg unsteady, and though it was obviously painful for her she appeared to want to walk by herself, if closely braced by him. But as they made their way across the yard she tucked her face deeply into his neck, not so much with ardor but rather as if she were trying to blind herself, as if she were unwilling to see.
They had not noticed her. June waited until they were long inside Hector’s room before rising. The night air had grown even colder now but June did not feel its sharpness. She stood stiffly before his quarters, staring at the lamplight or stove light knifing out from a vertical gap near the bottom of the door. She had no picture in her mind of what might be going on inside, whether they were speaking or kissing or making love, but that was no matter now. She did not desire to see them or hear them as she had from the other side of the shared wall, for she did not want any image of their animate bodies, or the sounds of even chaste breathing, any signs of life.
June crept into the storeroom and took a can of kerosene. Outside she silently doused the wooden stoop, the walls, splashed the ground in front of his door. She raised high the wick of her lamp, the heightened brightness surging through the clear glass globe to illumine the whole side of the building and the night as though she were still in search of someone, still bearing the light of everlasting devotion. She lifted the lamp and was ready to hurl it against the door when a shadow inside interrupted the slat of light at the bottom. It was a moment’s pause, a mere flicker, and yet it was enough to send a shudder through her bones.
She extinguished the lamp. She picked up the square-bottomed ladle from the ground. It was night again, and she suddenly felt the full chill of being alone. Inside the chapel, Min had pushed open the pews so that he was sitting directly in front of the fire, the door of the stove opened for light; he was looking at the book Sylvie had given her, flipping through the pages. When he realized June had returned he quickly put it down. He said, “You were taking so long.”
“You can have it,” she told him. “I don’t care.”
“I don’t want it,” he replied. “I don’t want anything anymore.”
“I brought you water.”
She gave him the ladle and he drank half of it, saving her the rest. She took a sip and offered it back and he finished what was left. Then, with a surprising indifference, he threw the ladle into the stove. It was not worth ten grains of rice, but like many things in the orphanage it was a shared object and therefore of communal value, and the ease with which he tossed it in startled her. They watched it closely. The ladle was waterlogged and at first it only hissed but soon the twining and edges began to burn, smoke starting to billow from the bamboo cup, gathering beneath the long handle, and then in a whoosh it was aflame, its light hot on their faces. Min got up and left. When he returned he was carrying two of the small footlockers. One was his, the other June’s-he had stolen into the girls’ side. He opened the lid of his locker and began taking out the few items it contained, inspecting them for a moment and then tossing them into the stove. She did not say anything or try to stop him. He started with his box of pencils, and then a deck of Korean playing cards, and then he put in two special pairs of dress socks that he’d received from a church group in America. Next were some letters and greeting cards from the same people. Then he drew out the fine scarf he had made; aside from his everyday clothes, it was the last thing he had. He handed it to June to put in the fire, and after he nodded to say it was all right, she balled it up and dropped it in. It burned not quickly but rather steadily and well, the fire consuming it with its own slow savor.
“You want to try?” he said. “It feels good.”
June opened her footlocker. One by one she began tossing in her possessions, which were nothing at all, letting Min throw in every other, a straw doll she had never played with and old magazines and a yellow summer dress that she had worn only once and knew now she would never wear again. The fire flared with each item and they had to lean back from the blasts of heat. The last thing of June’s was not in her footlocker but on the pew, beside Min, and he picked it up now, the little book. “How about this?”
She regarded it for a long moment. “Okay,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she told him. “Put it in.”
Min leaned in toward the stove, one hand shielding his face. He then flipped it into the seething vault. It lay on the coals, its cover pristine and cool blue. It appeared as though nothing would happen, that it was miraculously immune to their private inferno. And then she knew how wrong she was to give it up. She was wrong to ever let it go. There were things not bound for oblivion. But all at once the book was in flames, blazing as brightly as anything gone in so far, and without hesitation June reached deep into the stove and grabbed at the heart of the fire.
“Noo-nah!” Min gasped, trying to pull her back. “Noo-nah!”
There was pain at first, pain so sharp and great and pure that for a moment June felt that she had become the burning itself, that she was the crucible and not the iron, and as she grasped the book a lightning flashed into every last part of her. She fell back onto the floor, Min immediately snuffing her hand and the book with the blanket. He was frantic because she would not let it go, and when the flames were finally out he was crying at the sight of her hand and arm. The horrid, bubbled skin was like half-molten, bloody wax. But to June it belonged to someone else, for there was no feeling at all, the nerves seared dead up to her elbow. It was the untouched rest of her body that was shuddering, as if buffeted by the wake of all the phantom pain from her hand. Yet her mind was clear.
“Somebody must help us!” Min said, panicking. “I’ll go get Mrs. Tanner!”