My First Hundred Years. Donald R. Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ there and stepped on the treadle, the door would drop shut behind it.

      Dad set the trap inside the chicken pen, and it worked! In the morning there was a very frightened chicken in the end compartment and, shut in next to it, a small, snarling, unbelievably ferocious animal—a weasel. We tried to feed the weasel bits of raw meat through the wire of its cage, but it ignored the food, its ferocity intact. After only two days, the wild creature died.

      I haven’t mentioned Tootsie, our small dog. She was of an uncertain ancestry, white, with some brown markings, cute and lively, with a suggestion of Pekingese. Dad had spoken for her from a friend and colleague in another mission station, where the family dog had produced a litter. The doctor friend came to us by train. It was winter, and he brought the pup in his overcoat pocket, keeping her quiet by letting her suck on his fingers. We named her Tootsie, from a popular song of the 1920s, and she became our constant companion.

      About the weasel, though, she was sensibly wary. She barked at it in its cage, ruffling her neck fur and showing her teeth, but not coming very close. After the weasel died, and Dad found a taxidermist downtown, who stuffed it in a life-like pose, mounting it on a wooden stand, just a sniff of it would send Tootie (we usually dropped the “s”) into a paroxysm of scrambling and barking. After some months, moths got into the weasel’s fur, where it was put away while we were gone for the summer. It had to be disposed of; but we kept the end of its tail, and for a long time after—when we children were older, and Tootie, too—producing that tip of tail and giving her a sniff would set her to racing wildly around, as if the snarling creature were right there again.

      *****

      In Taegu there were other experiences—trivial childhood happenings—but such as left impressions on memory that are still there, after some ninety years. In two of these, it was an unexpected act of kindness that made the impression.

      Archie and I were getting interested in kite flying, which at the time constituted almost a major sport in our region of Korea. Of a long spring or summer evening, if there was a stiff breeze, we could perhaps perch on the top of our back wall and see the kite masters in an open street below. There might be two of them, standing thirty or forty feet apart, each surrounded by his group of cheering onlookers. All would have their eyes fixed on a patch of sky where two square kites were battling, climbing and diving, or moving laterally, as their expert handlers worked the thin kite strings. Those strings hung, in an inverted arc, from the reels of the handlers, up and away through the evening air, to their tiny, darting squares fifty or eighty yards away.

      The last five yards or so of each string had been dipped in glue and then passed through powdered glass. If the glass-treated string could be made to cross the taut string of the other kite, then given a sawing motion, it might cut that other string and send the opponent’s kite floating helplessly away.

      Archie and I watched such contests with fascination. Once or twice we were able to recover from one of the trees on our compound a hapless kite that had been cut away. But the memory I want to share was of nothing that grand. It was early in our kiting experience. I had made a very small kite, following the very maneuverable Korean design, and Archie had built a similar, but larger one. It was a bright, breezy Saturday morning when we boldly took our kites outside the compound wall, near its far end, to a place where the land fell away in a wide, grassy slope. There were already other boys there with their kites—not foreigners like us, of course.

      My small kite would only spin erratically in the breeze. Archie took off running with his, and I was left with this useless thing on the end of the strong thread I was using as a kite string. Then one of the boys, about my age, came up to me. Smiling, he took from a pocket in his short, Korean cloth-jacket some scraps of paper and, in a heavier, folded piece, a lump of rice-flour paste. He put together a paper tail and pasted it to the bottom corner of my kite. Smiling again, he had me try it, and the little kite took to the air, holding quite steady for its small size. I thanked him, with the phrases of Korean that I knew, little thinking that more than ninety years later, as I write, his warm, shy smile and his finger rubbing the flour paste—the spontaneous kindness of his gesture—would still be with me.

      Another memory that my brain still holds brings in our dad. The scene is the lower corner of our yard—again, a late spring evening. The family Model T Ford is there, with the engine hood lifted off. There is some problem, and Dad is conferring with a couple of men about it. In the era of this memory, trained auto mechanics were not available as yet in Korea—just those who had been learning by experience. Dad was a person of caution and persistence, and in this case, it showed in a very long discussion.

      Archie and I had been standing by. Whether he understood anything of the conversation, I don’t know. I did not; but as long as he stayed, I would stay, too. What persists in my memory, after Archie had found some place to sit, is that Dad went around behind the car and brought an empty gasoline can—one of the five-gallon cans that were the only way, then, of transporting the fuel. He placed the can kindly for me to sit on it.

      I was used to following Archie’s lead, and to his getting attention in any sort of manly, adult-type matters; so, Dad’s thoughtfulness toward me made an impression, deep enough for that memory to live on. Archie, as I’ve mentioned before, was only a year and five months older than I, but much of the time I was definitely the “kid brother.” He was more outgoing, more sociable, and he proved to be much more athletic. It was exactly right that he should be named A.G. Junior, and that, as I said above, he should follow Dad into medicine and a career as a missionary doctor.

      Many years later, I am remembering a photo of him and Dad. Both are wearing appropriate academic regalia. As a Canadian and still a British subject, Dad had qualified to be inducted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Now he was a US citizen, and he and Archie, in the same ceremony, were both being named Fellows of the American College of Surgeons.

      Growing up, I was more domestic than Archie. I enjoyed being where Mother was—listening intently when she read, although infrequently, from one of the American poets, perhaps Whittier or Longfellow. I remember that once I suggested to her that Archie and I were like the Biblical twins Esau and Jacob—Esau the hunter and outdoorsman, Jacob a man of the tents. Mother didn’t like the comparison and immediately discounted it. Probably she was thinking of the conflict between the brothers, after Jacob tricked their aged father into bestowing on him the paternal blessing of the firstborn. I gathered very clearly that there should be no more talk about Esau and Jacob.

      In effect, I always felt close to Archie, respecting his strong points. We roomed together through boarding school, and also at Princeton, when I joined him there. I made an unsuccessful effort at soccer as a freshman, but Archie was on the varsity team and before he finished was named All-Eastern halfback.

      I gladly remember one of the last times we had together, just the two of us. He was a first-year medical student at Columbia in New York City. He invited me for a weekend visit, squeezing a cot into his tiny dormitory room. I enjoyed sharing, at night, his view of lights festooning the George Washington Bridge. And I recall, some five years later, when Martha and I were newlyweds, how he visited us and laid on our dining room table the returned ring of his first engagement, which had been broken off.

      *****

      For many of us there come moments of a personal epiphany—whether in childhood or later in life—when our spirit spreads its wings, testing the air. I carry from my childhood, even now, a clear impression of such an experience.

      Members of Taegu Station used to gather on Sunday afternoons for an English-language service. Most of its members were involved elsewhere on Sunday morning, and perhaps evening as well, in services in Korean. The afternoon gathering was an opportunity for sharing and mutual uplift in the language and traditions that were our own. I was still very young, not mindful of much СКАЧАТЬ