User:Luciano/Source/After That

After That

by Parménides Guie

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

The new house was probably haunted from the start. From the day it was built, on the edge of the forest, there was a moodiness that would settle upon anyone who spent more than a few minutes near the modest, blue-tile-roofed farmhouse that squatted at the edge of the forest.

Perhaps it could be blamed on the man who built it. Señor Chue was a taciturn man. He would sit on the stoop in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and scratching himself. People said one could overhear him talking, frequently. But he lived alone.

He'd inherited the land from his parents, who had died in a bus accident on the new highway, ten years ago. He'd come back from the city, bitter and scandalously divorced at forty. The storekeeper said that Chue thought that if he built a new house, he could attract a second wife.

Sturdily constructed, it was unxpectedly made to look traditional, as if in the old country. Señor Chue was the type of man one would normally expect to go for a fancy, modern-style house: a flat roof, concrete walls, topiary bushes in a row in front and a Finira in the driveway. Perhaps it was an homage to his deceased father, who'd been a skilled craftsman and builder. The house had a curving roof with rough-hewn eaves of raw wood, and sliding doors, almost like a temple building, but simpler.

Some people said the man had chosen the spot for his house badly. There were some graves, in among the trees on the hillside. There are graves everywhere, in the Ardisphere. Ancestors are thick on the ground.

Some of these graves were Señor Chue's ancestors - including his parents and back several generations, since they'd settled the area just before the Civil War. Perhaps he'd forgotten about his grandmother. She had been a terrible, frightening woman. Rumor said that during the repressions, decades ago, she'd collaborated with the Guardia, and had been responsible for the deaths of several dozen villagers. Because of her, no one completely trusted the Chue family, even now. The Chues didn't go to church or temple, either. They really weren't good, modern Ardispherians.

It was the temple deacon's wife, Señora Sung, who swore that the new house was haunted. She would point out that the Chue family had been shamans, generations ago, in the old country, and that Señor Chue probably still practiced secret, pagan rituals. He had placed some wooden jang-seung - the traditional, carved, protective totem poles - at the turning to the driveway to the house. Probably, his father had made them. "Superstitious," the woman spat, as she gossiped at the store.

All anyone saw him doing, though, was working his fields. And talking to himself, sometimes. He made a peculiar farmer - some noted that he was supposedly well-educated, with a university degree. Supposedly, he had led a student strike, back in the time when that Nihonish woman, Shinoda, had become president.

But people dismissed the gossip, for the most part. They just left Señor Chue alone.

Then, one spring evening, several of the older women were walking along the road by the house. The sun was already behind the hills, making the sky orange and pink. The air was full of smoke from burning the stubble, after cutting the spring barley. The earth was muddy and red-black, dotted with flecks of gold.

The women had paused their conversation. Suddenly they heard shouting, very clearly. The women turned and stared at the house, across a field of freshly planted hot peppers.

Señor Chue came running out of his handsome house, his longish, dishevelled hair flying. He ran off among the trees, waving an axe. The women saw him strike at one of the burial mounds repeatly with the axe, weeping.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

- Translated from Gohangukian to Ingerish by Melissa So from the original story, "그다음에," published in 1954, and printed in the Arksbury International University Press collection Literature of the Gohanian Diaspora, Part II, 20th Century, 1985. Released by author and translator to the public domain.