He was long past being repulsed by such things. After the trouble with Zelenko in his regular platoon, he was assigned to a Graves Registration Unit. Hector ended up serving in it for the largest part of his active duty; like many of the Graves Units it was a colored one, and as such the assignment itself was meant to be an equal part of his sentence, apart from the work of having to handle bodies in every state of mutilation and decay. It was unsettling at the beginning for him to work side by side with the black GIs, for he’d never known or even been in close proximity to any blacks except when he was in Albany once with his parents and they got momentarily lost at night in the streets of Sheridan Hollow, finally venturing into a church to get directions out. The Negro soldiers were estimable and relaxed among themselves, and though he kept his distance as he did with everyone else, none of them had a need to call him out or taunt him for his movie-idol looks. They avoided trouble because there were other troubles to be had equal to or worse than the misery of body handling, like unloading munitions, or fighting on the line. Better to do the ghoul’s work of cleanup and retrieval, which was dangerous enough with the booby traps and land mines.
But it was like anything else, for as disgusting as the tasks were, one grew accustomed to the abominable sights and smells and processes of the necessary operations: the way you’d have to tug just enough on a corpse’s arms, say, if the rest of him was stuck in the dirt and a bit too ripened, so as not to pull them off completely; or how you’d pour hot water from a kettle and chip away carefully with a bayonet to release a poor bastard who was frozen facedown in snow and ice, the flesh falling off sometimes like shredded meat, and other times remaining absolutely preserved and perfect if he’d been there only a night or two. Or in the first days of the spring thaw how they’d find a mess of bodies in a ditch and could tell only from the uniforms if they were enemies or friendlies, and if friendlies maybe only from the hair whether they were white or black, because all of them had turned the color and sheen of licorice by then, the skin finely lacquered by the elements. Every man is a black man in the end, was the joke among them, which made for a bitter laugh and a moment’s introspection before they’d continue traversing the slushy snowpack of the hillsides in search of newly exposed bodies. That is, when the front line had moved far enough forward; but even then there was the threat of sniper fire or an opportunistic mortar round, Davison and Jeffords getting it that way one day in early April, a single round landing on the exposed slope of the next hill and leaving a scatter of red on white. The Chinese mortar position was instantly wiped out of existence by both rear and forward artillery batteries, and then Hector and his partner and a pair of medics didn’t wait for the regular grunts to go up but hiked up to help them, though it quickly became apparent when they reached the spot that it was retrieval duty for them now, Hector immediately heading back down and then up again with body bags, their uniforms and boots getting more bloodied than usual from handling the freshly dead.
Hector could never quite inoculate himself against the sight of blood, and he readily volunteered to do the very worst tasks, gaining the respect and appreciation of the other men, though it was secretly to avoid that certain hue, that crimson brightness. They called him the Prim Reaper, though chummily, judging him to be a little crazy as he knelt over some headless, legless, armless torso, probing with chopsticks or needle-nosed pliers or with his fingers to see if the dog tags had somehow descended into the flesh. They couldn’t know that he’d rather deal with the horror of a rotting body visibly shifting and radiating a sickening warmth from its hold of maggots than with that clean red proxy of life. It was that blush still in the skin, in the eyes, that residual vitality of someone just dead or killed, that always shook him to his bones. Life was too fearsome. At least the long dead were dead, if fouled and base, their forms a mere figuration of the inevitable, just flesh collapsing, denaturing into nothing but unsung mud and dirt. It was mud and dirt he was lifting, bagging, collecting with his bare hands, and he could simply wash it off afterward, though having to clean carefully under his fingernails, scour them with a tuft of steel wool dipped in kerosene to rid the most resistant notes.
He unconsciously brought his fingers to his nose now, as was his habit ever since those days, and while they stunk for sure he couldn’t make out any of that unsavory, fecund redolence. And yet, something else had been revived. Was it the smell of smoke, of ash? He had long thought that was finally dissipated, gone for good, but then he was someone who was too often mistaken.
FIVE
Yongin, South Korea , 1953
HECTOR BEGAN WORKING at the orphanage soon after the armistice, in June. He had been given his separation from the army for “a pattern of discreditable conduct” that included charges of chronic fighting, trading in contraband, and assaulting an officer. The fighting he was certainly guilty of, but the other charges were debatable, the black-market dealing a case of his being an unwitting courier for a friend, and then the one of striking an officer outside a bar in Itaewon completely bogus; there was a wild scrum of drunken servicemen and Hector pushed a lieutenant who was kicking an already passed-out grunt and the officer tripped back over someone else, his face clanging against the rim of an empty fuel drum. The officer was badly gashed and nearly lost his ear, and it was only due to the resolve of his idealistic army lawyer that Hector received a bad-conduct discharge and not six months in the brig.
Hector decided to look up a Korean preacher he knew, a Reverend Hong, who eventually arranged his papers so that he could stay on in the country. Hong ran an orphanage an hour’s drive south of Seoul and had once offered Hector a job there as a general handyman. They’d met, by chance, when Hector had defended him, coming upon the reverend being mugged in an alleyway of Seoul. Some street kids had beaten him with their fists and bamboo sticks, one of them trying to strip him of his briefcase, his billfold, even his shoes. Hector had to punch the biggest kid when he waved a knife before they would all scatter. After the reverend gathered and composed himself he asked if Hector wanted a job, which Hector immediately declined. But after the discharge Hector remembered the orphanage’s name, New Hope. He hitched a ride part of the way but walked the last half with just a satchel of his things and the clothes on his back and, of course, a starving girl named June marking him in the near distance like a dusty little moon. They had arrived at the orphanage like this, in tandem but separate, and soon enough both found a place there. They would have likely remained in their respective orbits and never drawn closer to each other had an American couple not arrived in late summer, a reverend and his wife.
When the Tanners first arrived, Hector was out gathering firewood with a crew of boys. He liked working at the orphanage, being in the clean, sweet air of the valley and fixing and making things with his hands. The grounds of the orphanage were set on a low and wide plateau amid steeper, higher hills and mountains that ranged across much of the country. The land was a lesson in hills, one right after the next. The orphanage itself comprised two old, long dormitory buildings (a former stable, a granary), a cottage, and a new building that had been built by an army unit that held a kitchen and classrooms that doubled as mess halls. The structures, laid out in an L, bounded a dirt field where the children played soccer and other games. Reverend Hong played with them all the time, but Hector knew only American football and always declined. In truth, he tried not to spend much time with the orphanage children, even though he enjoyed their company; he admired these children especially but he was wary of getting to know any one of them too well, to get close to them, to be relied upon as a friend. By definition they were hard-luck cases (and often worse) and in the time that he was in Korea he had witnessed enough acute examples of wartime suffering and misery on the roadside and in the villages and in the red-lanterned parlors that he couldn’t help but see cast over them an altogether different shadow, with the conflict being over: for who could bear the idea of any misfortune befalling them now?