would speak when telling a secret. She took in a deep puff on her copper pipe and let the smoke seep slowly out of her lips. “How strange.”
I squirmed. Was it that obvious to her that I was a girl dressed in men’s clothing? Women had yin energy, and men had yang.
I cleared my throat, and in a deep voice, I said, “I have come here to ask about Madam Byeol. I would like to know more about her.”
“Mmm. She is a stubborn, angry ghost. She has much han accumulated here on this earth…” Her eyes skimmed over to the man kneeling behind me. “Before she died, we all knew her to be the most beautiful woman in our region. But her beauty was her curse.”
“Why?” I asked.
“An unsightly servant might become the wife of a lowborn man, but a beautiful servant will become a concubine, later discarded when she grows old. That is what happened to Byeol when she encountered a passing traveler; he was staying at our inn for three lunar months.”
“Why so long if he was only passing by?”
“She bragged that he was a secret royal investigator, come to survey this province.”
Around three decades ago, how old would Councillor Ch’oi have been? I assumed somewhere in his thirties, surely. Young enough to have received such a royal appointment.
“Byeol was impregnated by the man,” the shaman continued in her scratchy, whispery voice, “and when the child was born, she named him Ji-Won. Not the ‘ji’ that means wisdom, but the character that stands for ugliness. So that was the meaning of his name. Ugly Origin. A not-so-very-subtle name, but then, everyone knew of her disgrace. She was dismissed from her employment and became the village whore.” The shaman again looked at the man behind me, who was picking his ears. “Used and rejected, used and rejected by all the men here.”
I shifted away from the old man. He must have been involved in Byeol’s accumulated resentment. Returning my attention to the shaman, I asked, “And no one knows who the father of the bastard is?”
The shaman shook her head.
“And what happened to Ji-Won?”
“When he turned thirteen, perhaps thinking his future too bleak, or perhaps merely despising him, she strangled him and then dumped him into the well.”
The shaman took another puff from her pipe, and as the smoke unfurled from her lips, she shook her head, looking deeply puzzled. “I saw her that day, perhaps moments after she had returned from the well. She was standing under a tree, smiling and laughing, telling me that she was waiting for her son. Then at night, there she was, hanging by the neck from a rope. The townspeople buried her, and for many years after that, I have held a ritual there to comfort her spirit.”
“And her son’s corpse?” I asked.
The shaman shook her head. “A street urchin witnessed his death, from the strangling to the dumping of his corpse. She was too afraid to tell anyone until the next day. But when we went to the well, we couldn’t find Ji-Won’s corpse. Never did. We only discovered Byeol’s corpse, and no one wanted to bury her at first, knowing she had murdered her own son. But we did in the end.”
“Show me to the grave,” I said, my voice low. I did not know where else to begin searching for the truth.
Both the shaman and man, perhaps curious to know the reason behind my insistence, rose to their feet and led me out of the hut. We traveled along the base of the mountain, and as we ventured through a thicket of trees, I noticed three trunks, each of which had white charm paper tied around them. They were meant to contain evil spirits from wandering into the village. I was led past these trees and into an eerily quiet open field sprinkled with snow.
“This is the place.” The shaman gestured with her hand, and the raglike robe she wore over her dress billowed behind her, appearing as though a ghost was hanging on to her. “Her grave.”
A lump protruded from the ground, no higher than my knees; a burial mound where the casket would be buried below. I didn’t know what I’d meant to find by visiting Madam Byeol’s grave, but then I noticed something strange. Madam Byeol had been buried seventeen years ago, so the burial mound ought to have been covered in snowy grass and weeds. Instead, the mound looked freshly disturbed, the grassy soil overturned.