has to be taken to an emergency room immediately, if not sooner.
“When nobody acts, she does. Jill grabs the father and holds him, screaming and pointing to the ambulance. The father won’t hear of it. Why, no one knows.”
I did. Or at least I thought I did. I explained it to Sergeant Bernewright. And to Ernie. In Korean tradition, it is believed that if someone dies away from home their spirit, when it rises and leaves the body, will become disoriented. It will become lost and then, being away from home, away from the shrine set up by its family, the spirit will become a wandering ghost. Without the proper ceremonies, without offerings of incense and food, without the prayers of the people who loved the spirit in life, it will never be able to make the transition from wandering ghost to revered ancestor. So Chon Un-suk’s father’s reaction was rational from his point of view. He didn’t want his daughter to be hauled away by strangers to die alone in some emergency room. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to make sure she died at home, not on the street where she’d be lost and would wander alone for eternity-with no one to burn incense at her shrine, no one to pray at her gravesite, and no one to make offerings of food and drink to ease her sojourn through the underworld.
A hungry ghost, the Koreans call such a creature. A spirit whom no one remembers. A spirit who can’t find its way home.
Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee. “When did this shit start?” he asked.
“What?” I asked. “Wandering ghosts?”
“Yeah.”
“In ancient times.”
“How come I never heard of it?”
“How many Koreans have you been around that died away from home?”
He thought about this. I knew the answer. None.
“Besides,” I said, “ensuring that a loved one dies at home is not a modern custom. Most Koreans trust Western medicine nowadays and most of them die in hospitals. Alone.”
“Progress,” Bernewright said.
“When Jill couldn’t stop the father,” I asked, “what did she do?”
“She wrestled with the old man,” Bernewright told us. “He wrestled back. And then a horrible thing happened. Chon Un-suk fell to the ground. ‘With a big thud,’ Jill told me. Everyone was shocked and for a moment- Jill said it seemed like hours-there was a deathly silence. Then, like one person, the Korean crowd inhaled and when they exhaled it was in a solid rush and they fell upon Jill like a pack of demons.”
“So the father took Chon Un-suk home?” Ernie asked.
“Yes. The best we can tell, she was dead before she arrived.”
“So maybe her ghost is still wandering.”
“Maybe,” Bernewright said. “Luckily, three MP jeeps arrived about the same time Jill went down. They waded into the crowd, busting heads, and pulled her to safety. She kept screaming for them to leave her alone, and one buck sergeant told me that she cracked him a good one in the chops.”
“Bold,” Ernie said.
“Yeah,” Bernewright agreed. “But he was just trying to help. When Jill pushed through the crowd searching for Chon Un-suk, the Korean mob attacked her again. The MPs pulled her out once more and this time they handcuffed her, threw her in the back seat of a jeep, and drove her to the dispensary on Camp Casey.”
“She was hurt badly?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But she was hysterical, she wanted to go back, save the girl. One of the medics told me they had to strap her down on the gurney and shoot her up with a sedative. Even then, it took ten minutes to calm her down.”
Ernie’s eyes were glassy by this time; he’d stopped stirring his coffee. The faraway look in his eye told me that, for once, Ernie Bascom had found a woman he could respect.
Later, at the Indianhead Snack Bar, I placed a call to Seoul. Sergeant Riley, the CID Detachment Admin NCO, was anxious to talk to me.
“What kind of hell are you two raising up there?” he asked. “The Division honchos have been messaging Eighth Army asking us to recall you because you’re looking into all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the disappearance of Jill Matthewson.”
“What things?”
“They didn’t specify. But they also said you’ve been running the ville, drinking all your travel pay, and punching out MPs.”
“He was tailing us,” I told Riley.
“Who?”
“An off-duty MP.”
“What did you expect? You’re in Division.”
I was getting tired of people telling me that, as if I hadn’t figured it out for myself.
“Are we withdrawn?” I asked.
“Not yet. But the Eighth Army provost marshal is taking it under advisement.”
I asked Riley to use his influence at the 8th Army Data Processing Center and pull a few ration control records for me. I heard paper rustling and ballpoint pen being popped.
“Shoot,” Riley said.
I gave him three names.
“You must be kidding,” Riley said.
“No kidding involved,” I replied. “Get me the information, Riley. I need it.”
Before he could protest further, I hung up.
The Chon family home sat on a hill gazing down on the western edge of Tonguduchon. Brick and cement apartment buildings, none over three stories tall, were interspersed between ancient-looking wooden huts that must’ve once been part of a traditional farming village. At the edge of the line of homes, fallow rice paddies stretched toward a two-lane highway that ran west from Camp Casey. About twenty miles farther on, across a range of hills, the road reached the city of Munsan in the Western Corridor.
Flagstone steps led up to the Chon residence. As I gazed at the cool, mist-shrouded morning, it was easy to see that this homestead, with its commanding view of the valley, had once been the ancestral home of the local yangban family, the educated Confucian elite who had ruled Korea during the Yi Dynasty.
How long had the Yi Dynasty lasted? From the fourteenth century right up to modern times, when the Japanese Imperial Army annexed Korea as a colony in 1910.
Carved wooden poles on either side of the pathway represented Chonha Daejangkun, the General of the Upper World, and Jiha Yojangkun, the Goddess of the Underworld. The walls of the Chon compound were made of lumber slats faded to a deep amber. The buildings behind were topped with tile roofs upturned at the edges. Clay beasts perched along the ridges, protecting the family from evil spirits.
Ancient shamanistic traditions still exist in Korea. Everywhere.
The big wooden entrance gate stood wide open. From within floated the muffled snicker of girlish laughter. Ernie and I stepped through the gate. The courtyard was well kept. Gravel raked, naked rose bushes knotted with strips of white cloth, tiny cement pagodas flanking blue ponds shimmering with golden koi.
An open area in the center of the courtyard held a shrine: A stone foundation with wooden stanchions supporting a tile roof that was a replica of the tile roof that covered the entire home. Bolted into the stanchions was a framed photograph, bordered with black silk, of a young Korean girl. Her face was unsmiling. She stared straight ahead, almost as if she were cross-eyed, trying to focus. Her jet black hair was pulled back and braided into two plaits and she wore the immaculately pressed white blouse of a middle-school student. Directly in front of the photograph was another stone stand, this one holding an ornate bronze urn. From the urn, three sticks of incense smoldered. Pungent puffs of smoke rose past the photograph, wafting their way to the gray-skied heavens above.
Two teenage girls, wearing the white blouses and long black skirts of middle-school students, knelt in front of the shrine. Nervously, they kept trying to light additional sticks of incense but as one of the girls fumbled with the match, the other berated her for her clumsiness. They both worked hard at stifling their giggles.
Ernie and I stopped and stared at the photograph for a moment. Quietly. Waiting for the two girls to finish their homage. They did. They stood and bowed. When they saw us, their eyes widened in surprise. Both smooth
