In the next valley they found a stand of trees tucked back in a shady ravine and Hector was glad that he’d brought along an ax. He set the boys to gathering kindling while he worked on a dead tree. Its thick trunk had been cleaved by lightning. He chopped at it steadily but the ax head was dulled and whenever he struck a dense spot or knot it jumped back at him violently. The tree still had most of its limbs and as he got closer to felling it he kept ordering the boys to move back, which they did, but soon enough they had gathered around him again and were begging for a try. He let some of the older boys take a few swings each and then he took up the ax again and worked steadily, gradually losing himself in the exertion, in the rhythm, the muted chuck s of the blows, and by the time he was near done he was sweating like a draft horse, his hands raw and abraded but alive. Finally he dropped the ax and pushed; the tree groaned once and then cracked and fell in a sudden threshing of dry leaves and dust. The boys cheered him and themselves, clambering upon it as if they’d brought down big game, raising their arms in triumph, with even Hector chiming in.
No one noticed that Min had picked up the ax and was swinging at a root; Min gave it a couple of good hits, but on the third try he slipped and lost his balance and missed and the blade came down on his foot. He screamed as if he were dying. Hector was immediately on him, his own heart bolting, but he couldn’t get Min to move: the heavy blade had gone straight through his foot and was stuck in the wide root below. Hector took the boy’s face in his hands and told him he would count to three but immediately pinched the boy’s ear as hard as he could while pulling out the ax head. Min cried out once more and fainted. The worn canvas sneaker welled instantly with blood. Hector took off his T-shirt but was afraid of removing the sneaker and so bound it all up as tightly as he could. He put Min on his back and ran, trying not to jostle the boy too much, ordering all the boys to sprint ahead and alert Reverend Hong to what had happened. But they had marched a half hour here and he knew he would have hills to cross on the return. Soon Min was awake again and moaning and crying softly, and to his own surprise Hector began singing the chorus of a song that his mother often sang to try to put him to sleep, an Irish famine-era ballad called “The Fields of Athenry”:
Low lie the fields of Athenry,
Where once we watched the small free birds fly.
Our love was on the wing.
We had dreams and songs to sing.
It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry.
He got Min to hum along and for a while it was as though they were a young father and son on a Sunday hike as they ascended the hillside, making music together in a sentimental key. But it was warm, and with Hector sweating and shirtless the boy began to lose his grip; twice he nearly fell off and Hector had to slow down. Soon he was crying and the sopped bandage was dripping blood again and after a while the boy’s frame went limp around him and Hector realized he was drifting in and out. He was losing too much blood. Hector laid him down and tried to rebind the bandage, but when he loosened it the blood only seeped out faster, so he tied it up as tightly as Min could bear.
“Ah, ah!” he moaned sharply, the pain sapping him. He began to cry weakly again. “It hurts, Hector. It hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” Hector replied, breathless, “I know.”
But Hector didn’t know. It was amazing, but through all the battles and firefights and skirmishes, he’d never been seriously injured: he’d been knifed and shot, even hit by shrapnel, but they were always superficial strikes, glancing off him as if he were shielded by the harder steel of some mysterious fortune, the only drafts of his blood drawn by the nurses for the blood and plasma reserves, or else coming from his bloodied noses after the tussles outside bars and whorehouses. Then his wounds always healed with miraculous swiftness, as if his corporal self existed apart from everything else in a bounding, lapsing time. And in the same way that he could not feel true drunkenness he felt no true pain, either, just the cold report of impact, his nerves disconnected from the necessary region of his mind, if never quite his heart. Looking at Min, he felt a dense, sharp lump knocking in his chest; he knew if he didn’t get him to a hospital soon the boy might die. So he lifted him over his shoulder and set his head low and started to run, run as fast as he could bearing fifty pounds of child, trying not to remember how he’d futilely done the same for a soldier with his foot blown off by an errant friendly shell, applying a tourniquet and ferrying him back to the HQ only for the medic to declare him dead after discovering a perfect half-dollar-sized hole in the back of his head.
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?” Tanner called sharply up into the air. “We need it now!”
“Here it is,” a woman’s voice answered. “It was in my bag.”
It was Tanner’s wife. She appeared above the gathered mass and passed him a first-aid kit over the children crowded about him. In the strong sun her wheat-colored hair and pale skin shone almost too fiercely for Hector’s eyes, her face obscured by the brightness. Tanner opened the kit and from a smaller metal case lined with slotted rubber he removed a syrette of morphine and without warning stuck the boy behind the knee, leaving it in for less than a full second; the boy’s size apparently made the anesthesia dangerous. Min gasped but then went slack in his limbs, his fists slowly opening. Meanwhile Tanner was completely focused on the task, sweating heavily in his tie and suit jacket but not bothering to remove them while he re-dressed the foot. His hands were unhesitating and this seemed to calm the boy and everyone else. While Tanner attended to Min, Reverend Hong directed the taxi driver who had just brought the Tanners to retrieve his own bags from his cottage and load them into the car. The Tanners had come to take over for Reverend Hong, who was tasked by the church offices in Seoul to go to America to begin making contacts for future adoptions of the children.
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.