Drifting House by Krys Lee Read Free Book Online

gleamed with their blades rising from a large vase, like flowers. There were plates of sliced pork, Asian pears, rice cakes, uncooked grain, a pig’s head on a platter, its eyes slit as if about to open. The pig looked alive. It scared Mark, and he wanted to touch it. In the middle of all this, there was his father, on his knees like a child being punished, and the shaman spitting chants onto his back. Mark touched his father’s thigh; he was pushed away. The shaman turned her ear up as if she were listening to the heavens.
    “I’m here, little brother,” she said in a young boy’s voice. “Don’t worry about me, I’m all right.” She slapped a folding fan against her palm.
    Mark slid to the floor. He said, “What are you doing to my
appa
?”
    She spun around his father, shaking her fan to the hourglass drum that a man sitting on the floor beat, left side then right, with a rod. A woman in a white
hanbok
clanged at a handheld gong. His father leaned forward as the shaman uttered scraps of ­old-fashioned words between a song and an incantation. “None of it was your fault,” she said, striking her father’s back with a fan. Mark felt seasick and afraid as she leaped across the room, and voice after voice seemed to enter his father and send him capsizing to the floor.
    It was getting dark. His father cried as he talked to his deadolder brother, holding on to a branch with leaves in his hand and shaking it into a bowl of uncooked rice grains. There was more chanting as Mark sat at the door hugging his knees, worried that his mother would come back early from English class and never forgive his father, and they would not be a family anymore.
    When the shaman tried to take the ­branch—some kind of spirit ­wand—from his father, he wouldn’t let go. Instead he said,
“Sarang haeyo,”
his lips making a confession of love toward the ceiling. He was remote and lonely, again the ­late-night stranger in the kitchen. His father curled up on the floor, his knees to his chest, clutching at the wand with both hands. Mark wondered and feared at the world that filled his father with such trembling.
    “Sarang haeyo,”
his father said again to an invisible person. I love you.
    His father had once untied Mark from a telephone pole on his way home and didn’t press him when Mark said, “You must
never
talk about today,” but the next time he got off the school bus, a Korean granny neighbor of theirs was waiting to escort him home. When he begged, his father had sponsored two sheep for him in Morocco and told his mother he had purchased one, and sometimes Mark woke up and saw his father watching over him, his hand feathering through his hair. Still, not once had his father ever said those words to him.
    Mark’s father could never keep a secret from his mother. The ninth commandment said, Thou shalt not lie. The Arabic saying was that lying and stealing are ­next-door neighbors to each other. Mark also favored honesty, but within reason. When his fatherdecided to confess just where he had been that Monday afternoon when he should have been at work, the results were predictably disastrous. His mother withdrew his father’s rice bowl before he had begun eating breakfast. She cleared his utensils and pushed the dishes of pickled vegetables and mountain roots away from his side of the table.
    “You’ve chewed away a small fortune on a superstition. I know how much a
kut
costs!”
    His father’s chin dropped down to his neck. “My brother was ­there—”
    “I work and clean and cook so you can give away money to talk to the dead. Your brother’s not ­here—he’s dead! He’s no­­where!”
    Mark was shocked; he had assumed these were chores that she had enjoyed. His father put his head down on the table; in the August heat, his mother shivered.
    “This is our country now.” She jabbed at the tiled floor below her. “But it isn’t enough for you to live in the shadows. You have to bring my Myeongseok there