She feeds the boy, bathes him, guards him from danger, even chews the stitches out of his wound with her teeth. The woman sees the rescue of the wounded boy as an act of redemption, an opportunity to regain the infant that she lost in childbirth so many years before. And she insists on making a food offering at every meal, even if it consists only of melted snow, a few grains of rice and a morsel or two of dog meat. To him, the boy is merely “a stealer of food and loyalty,” and he resents the way that the boy’s very presence rakes up the banked fires of his own youth: “Memory,” the old man carps, “is a grave best left undisturbed.” The old woman, by contrast, is kindly and caring, a pious soul who is intimately attuned to the spirits whose “sighs and flutters” she detects in the caves and mountains where they seek refuge. The old man is fearful, embittered, bewildered by the chaos around him. By the end of the tale, we realize that it is the boy who will save them. The old man is impatient and indifferent, but the old woman-childless and still yearning for a child of her own-insists on trying to save the boy’s life. An old farmer and his wife, driven from their mountain village by the armies of the north, come across a dying child. “I Am the Clay” presents itself with the simple lines, the squashed logic and both the horror and the delight of a fairy tale.
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