Uncertain Season in
High Country
by Robert Penn Warren

A Hundred Wild Geese
by Carol Ann Davis

Fires
by John Lee

Consenting to Love: Autobiographical Roots
of O’Connor’s “Good
Country People”
by Mark Bosco S. J.

Fires
    John Lee

Already that winter the war was drawing closer, close enough on some nights to see in a thin blaze over the northern horizon, and we heard that Seoul was about to fall when the pyobom, the leopard, began to appear in the valley. Each morning we woke to find fresh tracks in the fields like little rosettes printed lightly in the snow. Soon no one was going out after dark. All the men were very afraid. One morning they discovered what was left of a bull calf that had been dragged into an unfenced field, and my father went to see it for himself. When he returned he went back to work without saying a word, but later that night I saw him take down the heavy Garand rifle and carefully load it, pushing in the dull brass cartridges one by one.
     We could not afford to lose any more animals. We had had to slaughter most of the livestock earlier that winter when we could no longer buy enough millet to feed them, and now the old plow horse stood alone in the corner of the feeding yard, grazing for hidden foxtails under the snow; a few thin chickens hobbled and blinked in the sunlight. In the evenings my father made a great bonfire out in the fields to chase the predator away. A steady breeze sifted through the valley after sunset, and by dark the flames whipped up against the night sky like a red flag flying in battle; the rising gray smoke made a shifting curtain before the stars. My father did not sleep but remained outside on the courtyard steps, a heavy blanket around his shoulders, smoking and listening to the war dispatches on the old Hermes radio. As I lay in bed I could hear the solemn, toneless announcer’s voice lifting through an unputtied crack in the window, and I could see the faint reflected moonlight shifting in the unsettled glass. I was afraid to sleep, certain that if I did something would happen to my father. A few times during the night I would get up to peer through the window to make sure he was still there, and once or twice I thought I could feel a tremor in the windowpane, though whether it had carried from the distant fighting or was just the wind I did not know.
     The war was going badly and I knew that this was very dangerous for my father. He was a ROKA deserter, and if he were caught by the retreating army he would be arrested and almost certainly shot. He had surprised my mother and me by reappearing at our doorstep one morning dressed in a splendid Western gabardine suit and hat, all black, an intense new leanness in his rough brown face, and for a moment it was as if my father’s spirit had returned in some strange form to announce his own death. But my father was not dead, and the clothes he had were only stolen. Somehow he had slipped away from the front and walked all the way home, 170 kilometers, at enormous risk, and he went back to what he knew, which was farming. He could not go on, my mother told me, after what he had seen at Kunu-ri. His old brashness, his strong feeling for the Republic, was gone. He stood at the doorstep that morning and he touched the withered pumpkin flower vine above the door and wept, and he would not speak of what had happened at the front, then or ever. But he kept the one weapon for the day the army came to take him back, and I was a little startled now to see that he handled it easily and well.

Continued in volume 41, issue 2, spring 2005