World and Town

by Gish Jen

  Hattie laughs. “Wonderful. But this thing with Sarun really is your fault, you’re saying.”

  “It is.” Sophy’s eyes suddenly fill. “I’m no good, Hattie. I’m not even a real older sister. Like when I was talking to my sisters, they sounded so much smarter than me—like they sounded older than me, instead of my being older than them. And look at the mess I made. I should never have been born.”

  “Oh, Sophy.” Hattie pulls into a parking spot and turns her engine off. “You know, part of this may be your fault, but what about Ginny?” She digs some tissues out from the between-seat storage compartment. “Hasn’t Ginny sinned, too? I mean, who set the fire, right?”

  “I set it.” Sophy blows her nose.

  Hattie shuts the compartment lid.

  “I did. I set it,” Sophy says again. “Do you see what I mean? How wack I am? Do you see?”

  “Did Ginny help?”

  “She showed me how to strike a match.”

  “Was she there when you did it?”

  “No.”

  “Did she drive you there?”

  “No.”

  “Sophy.” Hattie speaks slowly, clearly, as if she is talking to Mum. “Did you know what you were doing? Did you know it was wrong?”

  “I thought it was Christ’s plan.”

  “You were like Esther, and Sarun was like Haman.”

  “He was, he was like Haman—like he didn’t like anyone doing things different than him, or following different laws. He couldn’t tolerate difference.”

  He couldn’t tolerate difference.

  “He couldn’t tolerate holiness,” Sophy goes on. “He wanted to kill it because he knew he was doing bad things.”

  “Was it drugs?”

  “Bear stuff. Bear paws and bear—what do you call it—gallbladders. You know, like people use for traditional medicine. I guess the paws are for soup or something. The gang got them from the hunters and brought them up to some guy in Canada—it was all Sarun’s idea. I mean, some of the puak maak knew guys who did it in Cambodia, I guess in Cambodia there were guys who, like, sold stuff to Hong Kong and Korea, places like that. But it was Sarun who realized they could do the same thing here.” Sophy blows her nose again.

  “He was the mastermind.”

  Sophy nods with energy—as if despite herself she’s a little proud of Sarun. “The puak maak liked it because it was a new gig. Like they didn’t have to compete with a zillion other gangs, it was theirs.”

  “Is it illegal?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “So why didn’t you turn him in for that? Why try to get him for plywood the gang didn’t even steal? Or did they.”

  Sophy folds up her tissue so she can wipe her nose on a fresh part. “I don’t think so.”

  “Was it because you’d have to act by yourself on the bear parts? Whereas this way you had company?”

  “I don’t know.” Sophy looks genuinely confused. “I mean, it just didn’t seem like that was what Jesus wanted, I guess. Like Jesus sent me Ginny, and that wasn’t what Ginny wanted, so it didn’t seem like that’s what He wanted. It didn’t seem like the reason we were given what we were given.”

  “I see. But let me ask you—did Ginny make you help her? This is important, Sophy. Did she make you?”

  “No.” Another flash of pride. “I wanted to, I wanted to be like Esther. I knew Jesus would give us victory, I knew that He’d protect us.” Sophy’s face is blank, but her voice is strong. “I knew He’d be with us when we passed through the water and the fire. I knew He’d make sure we wouldn’t get, like, drowned or burned.”

  “Or caught?”

  Sophy slumps. “Anyway, that guy was building on the wrong foundation.”

  “You mean Everett?”

  Sophy nods.

  “ ‘For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ,’ ” quotes Hattie. “Is that it?”

  Sophy unfastens her seat belt.

  “How does it go after that?” Hattie looks up, undoing her belt, too. “ ‘Every man’s work shall be made manifest; for it shall be revealed by fire.’ Something like that. First Corinthians.”

  “You know a lot of scripture.”

  “I can’t always remember what happened yesterday, but I remember my scripture from when I was a girl. Oh, wait, I’m missing part of it. ‘For the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.’ ”

  “I’ll never be as good as you.”

  “Of course you will, if you want to be. But tell me—you’ve heard that verse before?”

  Sophy hesitates but then nods.

  “From Ginny,” guesses Hattie.

  “She said Everett was meddling with God and should know better!” Sophy says. “Like he should know that verse ‘Forbear thee from meddling with God’ something something—”

  “ ‘Forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that He destroy thee not.’ ”

  Sophy plays with her toggle. “I just wish someone would destroy me,” she says, in a small voice. “I do. I wish someone would put me in jail.”

  “What about a foster home again? Or a girls’ group home? I don’t think they’re going to put you in jail, Sophy.”

  Sophy presses her tissue to her eyes. “I made a bad choice,” she cries. “I made a bad choice.” Her earrings swing.

  Hattie puts a hand on her hoodied back; Sophy’s whole body is shaking.

  “I should have listened to you. Why didn’t I listen to you? I loved Annie so much!”

  “Annie loved you, too,” says Hattie. “And still does, you know.”

  But Sophy does not hear her. “I am ashamed to have been born,” she sobs. “I am. There’s no reason for me to live. I’m sorry I was ever born.”

  “Don’t say that,” says Hattie, but there’s no stopping Sophy. She cries even as the clouds start to part and thin and lift; she cries even as visiting hours end and Hattie starts up the car. There is nothing to do but fill up the gas tank and head home.

  • • •

  Hattie might as well have told the walking group that Town Hall had fallen down. People seem to have turned into salt or stone or bronze—so resembling a life-size sculpture of themselves that Hattie can picture a little plaque next to them, with a title: THE NEWS.

  “These are serious charges,” says Greta.

  “Thank goodness Ginny is out of town,” says Candy. “Thank goodness the Lord spared her this.”

  “I think I’m going to have a brownie with ice cream,” says Grace.

  “Grace!” says Beth. “You are not!”

  “With hot fudge sauce,” continues Grace. “And whipped cream and nuts. Anyone who wants a bite is welcome to it.”

  Flora brings them five spoons; and within minutes only the cherry sits unclaimed, its fluorescent red bleeding into a last bit of whipped cream. They order a second sundae.

  “Is everything all right?” asks Flora.

  Yes, they say, but when her back is turned, they go back to morosely sharing their dessert. The table wobbles; no one fixes it. Neither does anyone comment on the new bear-shaped honey dispensers that now grace every table. This is just so disturbing, says Greta instead. If it’s even true, says Candy. Beth’s gut says Ginny’s innocent.

  “A flip-flopper,” she says, her voice too loud. “The girl’s a flip-flopper.”

  Greta objects. How can they call Sophy a flip-flopper when they never even asked her themselves about Sarun’s gang?

  “It was Ginny who said they were the plywood thieves. Sophy never said that,” she reminds everyone.

  Beth sets her elbows on the table just the same. “Before it was plywood; now it’s bear parts,” she says. “Before she hanged her brother; now she’s hanging Ginny. That is just a fact.”

  Hattie looks at her. On the one hand, you couldn’t say Carter broke Beth’s heart. On the other, how hard it must be that, even with things so rocky wi
th Jill, Carter never seems to have given Beth a thought. Nothing’s harder than nothing, Uncle Jeremy used to say, back when Hattie was awaiting word about her family in China. Now Beth’s not only cutting her hair short-short, but growing more no-nonsense, too—not to say less inclined, it does seem, to indulge pretty young girls in whom people take an interest.

  “If Sophy were trying to hang Ginny,” says Greta, “why would she insist that she herself was guilty?”

  “Because Ginny didn’t do anything and she knows it,” says Beth.

  “Beth,” says Hattie, gently. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Reaching for the great gavel of logic. And of course, catching someone in a contradiction would have stopped everything at the lab. Here, though, it stops nothing.

  “If even Sophy thinks she’s guilty, why shouldn’t we turn her in?” asks Candy.

  “Because she’s Cambodian?” says Beth. “Because she’s an immigrant?”

  “She’s fifteen,” says Greta.

  “Her brain’s not fully developed,” says Hattie. “Her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex isn’t in.”

  “Does that mean she didn’t know what she was doing?” asks Beth.

  “Consequences,” says Candy. “It’s really important that kids get taught consequences.”

  “Tell me you honestly think she had no idea what she was doing,” says Beth.

  “She thought she was doing the will of God,” says Hattie. “She thought the whole thing was God’s plan. She even thought the bombing of the World Trade Center was His plan—making people so nervous, they would believe anything, she said.”

  How sorry she is that she told the group anything! Why did she tell them? What was she thinking?

  Now Candy at least hesitates. “The will of God.” She rucks up her mouth.

  “She thought she was doing the will of God but said later it was a bad choice,” says Hattie.

  “So she knew she had a choice.” Beth gestures with a french fry.

  “Later. She knew later,” says Hattie. “I don’t know how she could have thought she had a choice if it was the will of God. And I don’t know that she wasn’t manipulated into believing that to begin with.”

  “Of course, she was manipulated,” says Greta.

  “And of course she would be vulnerable to that,” puts in Grace. “Think of her background.”

  “Because she’s Cambodian!” says Beth again. “Because she’s an immigrant!”

  Candy makes up her mind. “If you want to know what’s wrong with this country, I can tell you,” she says—her left cortex resolving things willy-nilly, Hattie knows. Producing “coherence” at any cost. It’s anything but rational. And yet, Candy’s conviction is palpable: Her small eyes blaze; she looks about to burst out of herself. “What’s happened to us that we are so afraid to say what’s right and what’s wrong?” she demands. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened,” says Grace.

  But Candy is on a tear. “This is what’s the matter with us,” she says. “This is why other people hate us.”

  “Why, because we think?” says Greta. “Why, because we are honest about the complexities of things?”

  “Are you trying to say the terrorists are right?” says Grace.

  “She’s saying,” says Beth, “that she can see their point of view.”

  And Candy agrees. “I can. I can see their point of view. We have gone wrong!” Her thin voice hammers.

  Silence.

  “Maybe it’s you who have gone wrong,” says Hattie, finally.

  Flora slips them the check.

  Everett: What Went Wrong, Now

  In an ideal world, this shack would be out on the ice instead of in the air—a fishing shanty instead of a tree house. In an ideal world, he’d be pulling up the smelt instead of hanging out with the birds, wishing the wind would not howl so loud. Wishing he’d put in a stovepipe that vented right no matter which way the wind was blowing instead of only some ways. And maybe wishing some other things while he was at it, what the heck. And that that Cambodian kid’d get out of the hospital all right. That’d be one. That Ginny’d turn back into the girl he married. That’d be another. What the heck. ’Cause used to be, she was this sweet gal. Used to be, she was a gal no one would ever imagine getting mixed up with the Cambodian girl the way she did. Pursuing her. And causing his trouble, too, he’s going to guess. The fire, everything, somehow. Causing it.

  Causing it somehow.

  What went wrong, now. He’s talking about what went wrong. How a sweet gal got to be so angry the way she did.

  What went wrong.

  When she was born again, Ginny used to draw these pictures showing her life before and after. Two little circles, she’d draw, with a throne in the middle of each one. The before circle’d be her life, with an E in the throne, standing for herself. For her ego, she’d say—the part of her that was self-centered. The part that was all about me. Christ would be there in the circle, too, but He’d be kind of floating around along with other things she was doing. Cooking, working, driving the kids to baseball. They’d all be these dots floating all over. Until she took Jesus Christ for her Lord and asked Him to rule her life, she’d say. And then there’d be the after circle, see, with Christ on the throne. Her ego’d be off to the side, and everything she did would be arranged in a circle, like they were minute dots on a clock. Organized, so you could draw a line from them to Christ in the middle. And that’d be her new life, now. Organized.

  That was the story she told.

  But the way he saw it, her before life wasn’t any near so disorganized as that. Or maybe it was sometimes. But other times it was organized around the farm. The farm was on the throne. And whether or not his life used to be disorganized, it’s organized, too, now, see. Around telling why.

  What happened. What went wrong. Why. It’s on his throne, now, right smack in the middle of the picture. ’Course, there’s folks would say that ain’t grand enough for a throne. Folks who’d say that ain’t like the Lord. Just like there’s folks who only want to go forward. They don’t ever want to go back. Look back. Understanding—they don’t care about understanding.

  Well, he’s past caring now. He is. Everyone’s got to pick what sits on his throne, and he’s picked the truth. How it started with the farm, and with Ginny’s pa. Rex the Farmer King, they called him. And he’s going to tell it now, the whole darned thing. How Ginny got to be what she was. What happened. It ain’t all straightforward, but what the heck. He’s going to tell it anyway. He is.

  Let’s just say it’s his idea of heaven.

  It is.

  In an ideal world, Ginny’s pa’s barn would be full of hay and that’d be a lot of hay, now. Rex once figured his barn could hold fifteen thousand bales. Think on it. Fifteen thousand bales. That did seem a big number even before he, Everett, ever came to help load an entire barn himself. And since he’s had that honor, well, it’s just gotten bigger. Heavier. Even for a big guy like him, it was a job. See, you’re tired already from all the cutting and the tedding. The raking. The baling. You’re tired. Then it’s load, load, load. Theirs was the old-fashioned bale you get with an old-fashioned baler. The kind of baler that rams the hay into bricks, and then ties ’em up with twine. The kind where you can still see the hay. Lot of farmers did go with the new balers some time back—thought they were quicker. More modern. Nowadays you see those round plastic bales all over. But come to find out lately, critters get in there and putrefy. How do you like that. Seeing as they’re all sealed up with no air, they putrefy. And from that you get disease. Botulism. They say you can’t give that hay to horses. Horses’re too sensitive. But the fact is, it’ll kill a cow, too. It will. So folks are backing off those new balers. Coming back to the old-fashioned bales, where if a critter gets in, it’ll mummify. Where it’ll dry up and get crunchy, maybe, but that’s all. It’ll mummify.

  Folks are coming back.

  Old Rex’d have had a good laugh over that one. />
  ’Course, old style or new, loading was work. But at the end you’d look up and see all that hay. And that was something, all right. Stacks and stacks, it’d be, stacks and stacks. Stepped up, so’s you could climb on up to the top if you were inclined and have a look right out one of those little high windows, assuming it wasn’t too cobwebbed. And you would have yourself quite a view, now. Quite a view. But Everett’s always thought, even better’s looking down. ’Cause it’s a vast amount of hay, see. A vast amount. And ain’t that the difference between people and cows, that people’d see winter coming and load up, where’s all cows know is the hay’s here or it ain’t, it’s fermented or it ain’t. That’s the older ones who’d know that. The older ones who get the sweet-smelling fermented on account of it’s easier on their systems. The young’uns, now, they’d know something different. There’s grain, too, or there ain’t. That’d be what they know. Something different. ’Cause that’s what they’d get, some grain with their hay on account of they were growing. Probably the cows know there’s timothy in the hay or there ain’t, now, too. Clover. A little mummy. They know. But people are the thinkers that would ever get the notion of building this vast thing to store hay in, see. The cows’d never have any such idea. They would not.

  They’re escape artists, though, those cows. You wouldn’t think so to look at them. ’Cause they’re big. Big as cows, Rex used to say. But big as they are, they can get through the fence in a wink. Big as they are, they know every hole in the fence, those cows. They know every hole that ain’t even a hole but a hole coming up eventually. Potential. They understand potential. Smart as they are, though, a man like Rex was smarter. Rex could tell you where they escaped to, see. ’Cause they did not escape to the same place every time, now. Nope. That would make things too easy, if they escaped to the same place every time. Nope, some liked certain places and some liked others, and some liked certain places depending on something, and other places depending on something else. Say it just cleared. They might like a certain corner then, but if there was a bunch of them and not just one, they might like another corner. Or if it was cloudy. Cows don’t like to go from light to dark, see. So they might avoid a certain dell on a sunny day, but head straight on over there if it was cloudy. Those cows could send you tramping around until you were plain worn out, they could. They could send you to the nuthouse. But Rex, now, Rex never would have to tramp around. ’Cause Rex could think like a cow, see. He could. He could think like a cow. Even after he got sick, he’d just sort of wake up sometimes and say, What about by the ditch? Or else, Them puddles. They’re not going to like them puddles. One time he asked if Everett was wearing a yellow raincoat. Told him to leave it home. And Everett did, see. Didn’t ask why, he just did it. ’Cause he knew Rex.