by Joey Bui
‘You have to let me see it!’ Apostrophe cried, her eyes wide.
Comma fished the note out of the pocket of her brown bà ba pants, the modest shirt-and-pant ensemble of the southern woman, with two cuts up the side of the shirt for easy movement.
‘You carried it with you? Are you mad? It could be cursed!’ Apostrophe’s voice rose even higher. ‘It is a curse.’
‘I couldn’t leave it anywhere, could I, where somebody else could find it,’ Comma said, softly, still afraid someone could hear them. She was glad that she had not told Apostrophe about the chicken feathers and the hair. ‘Besides, there are no such things as curses.’
‘No such thing! No such thing!’
Apostrophe kept exclaiming as they rode to the Cai Lậy floating market. It was a small market, thirty-odd boats per morning—nowhere near as big as the Cái Bè floating market, where hundreds of boats arrived every day, but the Trươngs had regular customers, especially for their water spinach. The catfish didn’t do as well. The Trương boys were digging another pond on the property that very day, in order to breed more fish to sell. On the steep riverbank by their canoe, Apostrophe held the two bikes in place while Comma tied their baskets onto the canoe.
Comma’s fingers were calloused and her arms were taut from working ropes. She had learnt about knots from fishermen at the floating market. In fact, she had learnt from five different fishermen before choosing her favourite, and then taught the skill to her little brothers. Now, she deftly selected a top strand of rope, pushed it gently out of its loop, flipped it out of another loop, and the intricate knot unfurled smoothly between her fingers. She wrapped it around a bucket they kept on the canoe for gutting and cleaning the fish. Once Apostrophe was safely aboard, she pushed the canoe into the water before jumping into it herself.
By the time the canoe made its way down the small stream and approached the thoroughfare of the floating market, Apostrophe had concocted a plan.
‘Uncle Cup’s thirteen-year-old son Table should be able to read your note,’ said Apostrophe.
‘Table, isn’t he—’
‘I know. He can’t really speak, but he’s not dumb. He can read. He’s just…’ Apostrophe arched an eyebrow. ‘Shy.’
‘But you can’t go straight to Uncle Cup’s boat. He would tell everyone,’ said Comma.
‘That’s why I’m going to get Auntie Pillar’s son Leg to pass it on to Table. It’s a bit early in the week, but we can pass by Auntie Pillar’s boat for condiments. There must be something you can tell her that we’ve run out of. Fish sauce? And while you’re making the trade, I’ll give Leg the note and tell him what to do,’ said Apostrophe.
‘But how will we—’
‘Get the note back? Leg will ask his mother if he can help us unload our goods off the boat at the end of the morning—he will give the note back to us then,’ Apostrophe continued.
‘Leg would do it?’
‘He’ll do it,’ Apostrophe smiled, and two dimples emerged in her soft cheeks. ‘And he’ll keep quiet about it too.’
As Comma paddled, Apostrophe smoothed two evenly parted bundles of hair down the front of her chest and began to plait the strands. She liked to arrive at the market with her hair down, to show how smooth and elegant she could keep it, like a Sài Gòn schoolgirl, before doing it up like a Cai Lậy marketwoman. And she knew that people liked to watch as her fingers moved delicately and precisely between the black locks that flashed in the morning sun.
Comma continued working the paddles, glad to have the grip of them in her palms and to feel the thickness of the Mekong water beneath her. As the sun rose, the market people floated into view. Canoe after canoe, laden with piles of vegetables and fruits, and meat and fish freshly killed and gleaming in buckets of ice, drifted in and lined up along the river. The growers stood guarding their goods, each person’s silhouette cut out on the horizon by the nón lá, the conical, palm-leaf Vietnamese hat. Comma and Apostrophe’s hats were fastened to their chins with a pink polka-dotted strip of fabric that Apostrophe had fashioned. The Mekong water was waking up to the call of its people, and soon the burble of neighbourly greetings, bartering, gossip, fights and laughter settled in.
In this exuberant atmosphere, Apostrophe fitted in perfectly. She was lanh, quick-witted and chatty, praise fondly given to southern women who were well liked. Comma’s contrasting reserve would usually raise suspicion, but the people in Cai Lậy had come to understand that she was kind and dutiful, a generous marketwoman and the eldest daughter who had raised most of her younger siblings. Some gossiped that Comma’s introverted manner was a reflection of a dull spirit, from being forced to shoulder responsibilities too quickly. Things would be better when she married, they said. That would cheer her up.
Comma and Apostrophe made their way down the river. They traded water spinach for bittermelon, cured lemon for sugarcane, guava for mangoes, and sold the occasional fat, whiskered catfish. Soon enough they reached Auntie Pillar.
‘Heavens, Auntie Pillar, have your pickled radishes have sold out already?’ Apostrophe exclaimed as Comma manoeuvred their canoe beside Auntie Pillar’s.
‘Everyone knows I make the most flavourful pickled radishes in Cai Lậy. If only you had come earlier, instead of hanging about by that Auntie Rain’s boat. Tell me the truth, Apostrophe, were you buying pickled radishes from her?’
‘Heavens, no! How my mother would beat me if she knew I was bringing anything but the best pickled radishes home. Please tell me you can make something work for me today, Auntie Pillar.’ Apostrophe pouted happily.
‘Good thing I knew you are a sensible young girl—I saved you this jar.’ Auntie Pillar fished a small jar out from under a pile of fresh white radish and handed it to Apostrophe.
‘Three thousand,’ Auntie Pillar said to Comma, who had the three notes ready to pass over. ‘And is business going well, Comma?’
‘As well as we can hope for,’ Comma said politely.
‘We’re not having much luck with the catfish this morning,’ Apostrophe said with a sigh.
‘A lot of competition for catfish lately, isn’t there?’ said Auntie Pillar.
‘We don’t mean to complain,’ said Apostrophe. ‘But all the catfish we don’t sell here has to go to the land market. It’s far away and Comma and I struggle with the heavy load.’
‘You know, I hardly have anything left to sell,’ said Auntie Pillar. ‘I don’t really need Leg to help me bring things home. Maybe I can send him to help you girls? Hey—Leg!’
A twelve-year-old boy bounded across four adjoining boats to reach his mother’s side. He froze when he saw that his mother was talking to Apostrophe, who smiled brilliantly at him.
‘Leg, you’ll be helping these girls bring their catfish to the land market at the end of the morning,’ said Auntie Pillar.
‘Hey, come here, Leg, let me see how tall and strong you’ve grown! Are you are up to the task?’ said Apostrophe. She waved him over and offered him a guava out of the basket at the end of their boat.
‘Say, do you have any fish sauce left, Auntie?’ Comma said quickly.
As Auntie Pillar packaged the fish sauce, scooping it from a bucket into a clear plastic bag, Comma glanced at Apostrophe and Leg. The boy had just slipped the piece of paper into his pocket.
Anxious to please one of the beauties of Cai Lậy, he bounced from boat to boat up the floating market to Uncle Cup’s durian boat, found out that his son Table was home for the day, went back up the riverbank and rode his bike down to the Lê house to find Table, asked Table to read the message out and repeat it three times over so that he could memorise it for Apostrophe.
At the end of the morning, when Comma and Apostrophe pulled up to their part of the riverbank, Leg was waiting. Apostrophe ran up the bank to meet him. She leaned her cheek to his lips to hear the message that he had brought for her from the other end of Cai Lậy. Comma watched on anxiously beside the canoe, her feet still in the water. She saw Apostrophe’
s eyes grow wide.
IF YOU MARRY HIM I WILL KILL YOU.
Comma received three more threats before the wedding. The next one was waiting for her one Sunday morning in the curing shed behind the house. Another of Comma’s chores was to organise the storage of the Trươngs’ jars of lemon, kumquat, salted fish and radishes. In the middle of the dirt floor was a freshly slain chicken, slashed at the throat, a pool of dried blood beneath it. One of its wings was twisted grotesquely where another handwritten note had been clipped.
It was still too early for her family to be up, so Comma left the ghastly display in the curing shed and dashed outside to count the chickens. Her heart raced. One was missing. She ran back into the shed and stared at the dead chicken. She picked it up, swept her sandals several times over the dirt floor to smooth it down, and took the dead bird to the outdoor kitchen. She was certain that her enemy would not have said the prayer, Nam mô A Di Đà Phật, to the chicken before cutting its throat. Comma had taught her brothers and sisters to say the prayer before killing any of the family chickens, to acknowledge that a life was being sacrificed for the family’s nourishment. It vexed her that this one had died for nothing but revenge.
In the kitchen, Comma plucked out the chicken’s feathers, cleaned it and began cooking. She started a broth with the bones and cooked the meat for the family lunch: green papaya salad with shredded chicken.
On Monday morning, once again, word was sent along the river through Apostrophe, Leg and Table, and came back down to Comma.
DON’T YOU BELIEVE I WILL KILL YOU, YOU WHORE?
At night, before she fell asleep, Comma was haunted by the scraping of the chicken running in the yard. Someone had come right onto their property, so close to the sleeping family, and taken something that wasn’t theirs.
The third threat came the morning after the wedding date was set. While Comma and Apostrophe were riding their bikes to the floating market, Comma reached into the pocket of her bà ba. She screamed as she felt needles stabbing her hand. Startled, Apostrophe lost balance and her bike come crashing down, the basket of market goods on top of it. After helping Apostrophe to pull the bike upright again, Comma turned out her pocket.
Along with her handkerchief, a cloth voodoo doll tumbled out. Comma picked it up gingerly. A grotesque face had been painted, smudged, on the doll and three needles were stuck on it, in…
‘In the vagina,’ Apostrophe gasped. There was no note this time.
The sisters stopped their trip in order to burn the voodoo doll. Apostrophe cried as the little cloth doll smouldered.
‘There has to be an end to this,’ Apostrophe sobbed. ‘How many more of these do you think she has out there?’
Comma could not really imagine the stranger who sent her these messages as a real person, a real woman who lived somewhere amongst them in Cai Lậy.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ said Comma.
‘How can you be so calm!’ Apostrophe’s sobs increased. ‘Wake up, Comma! This woman is a real danger. She’s crazy. She wants to kill you.’
‘I don’t think she really would,’ murmured Comma.
‘What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you ever feel anything?!’ Apostrophe cried.
Comma waited a moment before coming over to hug her sister. She had been asking herself the same question. She had now formally met and exchanged greetings with Slip at the engagement ceremony when she knelt before their parents—and felt nothing. And all she felt now was anxiety that her mother and Apostrophe would not be able to manage the Trương house on their own, and vague concern about how many women had told her she should be excited to marry the most handsome young man in Cai Lậy. It was early days, she told herself. In the meantime, her worry for her family weighed more heavily in her heart than the mysterious woman sending her threats.
When the sisters finally arrived at the market—late for the first time in years—onlookers were surprised by the sight of Apostrophe paddling the canoe, while Comma nursed her right hand.
The fourth threat arrived the day before the wedding. In the middle of the night, someone had poured a shocking amount of blood—it must have been almost a bucketful—all over the pale stone entrance to the Trương house. A chicken’s head, only the head, lay in the blood, a note in its beak.
The stench of the blood woke Comma’s father from his sleep. Searching the house for the source of the smell, he soon found it at his door.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ he thundered, waking all nine members of the family.
Tearfully, Comma and Apostrophe told their parents about the previous threats. Apostrophe was still upset by their monstrousness, while Comma was filled with the shame of having kept secrets from her parents.
The four of them were sitting in the formal living room by the family altar. Two of the boys had been sent to clean the blood from their door and the rest of the children were in the girls’ bedroom. Their mother had started crying from the moment she heard her husband’s raised voice and was now sitting with Apostrophe, clinging to her as they both sobbed.
Comma’s father looked at her carefully.
‘What do you want to do about this?’ he asked.
Comma was startled. Though he often relied on her to take care of things around the house, she assumed that it would be his decision on how to handle the threats. She had not expected him to consult her. His expression was weary. She realised that he had no idea what to do.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
They had already ruled out sending for Table or anyone else to read the note. They could not risk the community finding out about the threat. It did not really matter what the note said anyway. The message was clear.
‘Do you want to go ahead with the wedding?’ Comma’s father asked.
Again, Comma was startled. It would be scandalous to call off the wedding. Their relationship with the Nguyễns would not survive it, and they would be the source of gossip and derision for years to come: the family who arrogantly, rudely, left the most eligible bachelor of Cai Lậy at the altar. Yet she could tell by her father’s manner, by his vulnerability—which unsettled her more than she was prepared for—that he really would call off the wedding if she wanted to. She glanced at her mother and at Apostrophe, who were staring at her, their eyes shining. And then she felt it—the spark of courage, of passion, that had ignited in her on the night of the first threat.
‘Yes,’ said Comma. ‘Real gold has no fear of fire.’
The night before the wedding, the young woman was back among the grass blades at the back of the Nguyễn property. Was it a coincidence that Slip had chosen this night, of all nights, to come out to this field and cut the grass again? She could not help feeling that he knew she was out there for him. How could he not? She lay down again beside his footprints in the dirt. She picked up some of the dirt from the imprint of his feet and pressed it to her cheek, imagining she could feel the warmth of his skin.
How could he not know, she asked the cicadas and the half moon. She did not believe it was possible to have this much love for someone, and for him not to feel it. Her love must reach him somehow, somewhere in his aura, or in his dreams, giving him the invisible reassurance that he was safe in the world because he was loved. She wondered, agonised, if he knew where this love was coming from…But how could he know when she could not reveal herself to him?
‘It’s me, Slip, it’s me, it’s me, it’s all mine,’ she whispered into the dirt.
Comma and Slip’s wedding proceeded smoothly. Slip’s popularity and the good reputation of their two families brought what seemed like the entire population of Cai Lậy out onto the main road by the River Ba Rại in the morning. During the first ceremony, the groom and his family came to the bride’s house with gifts, to ask the elders of her family for her hand. Led by his father, Slip and his seven groomsmen, each in the deep blue-and-gold men’s traditional dress, walked in formal procession to the Trương house, bearing tray after tray of food covered in
bright-red cloth.
Next, the groom’s procession came back down the same path to the Nguyễn household, this time with Comma, who was swathed in the dazzling lucky red of the bride’s áo dài dress. The golden khăn đóng headpiece held her hair off her face and brought out the startling dark brown of her eyes.
As the wedding party approached the entrance of the Nguyễn house, firecrackers exploded, filling the air with festive smoke. Inside, Comma knelt before the elders of her new family. She was poised and graceful. She lifted the ceremonial china cup on its saucer above her head; there was not the slightest rattle. Slip’s mother fastened gold earrings to Comma’s earlobes and each set of parents presented a bar of gold to the couple.
The reception was held in the yard by the main Nguyễn house. There were almost three hundred guests; it was one of the larger weddings in Cai Lậy. All the women in the extended Nguyễn family—some of whom had travelled from neighbouring provinces—had been busy for days with food preparations, mostly fish—fish hotpot and fish summer rolls. The translucent rice paper held a riot of colour: beds of white rice noodles, glistening pink fish flesh, the yellow and orange of diced pineapple and mango, and the different shades of green in the herbs and leaves. There was also the dark, sticky peanut dipping sauce. For dessert, hundreds of bowls were filled with a mixture of red bean, green bean, tapioca and grass jelly, swimming in coconut milk and topped with shaved ice. By sunset, the men were happily drunk, the women chatting in cozy circles, and the children were left free to roam.
At the end of the night, a raucous group of groomsmen and bridesmaids accompanied Comma and Slip to their new home, a small one-room house on the Nguyễn property built for the new couple by Slip, his brothers and his uncles. As their brothers and sisters left, the happy conversation and giggling fading away, Comma and Slip were alone for the first time. They stared around them at their new home.
Comma’s brothers had brought over bags of her things, and lined them up neatly in the corner of the house. Not looking at Slip, she knelt down by the bags and busied herself with her toiletries. With her back to Slip, she began to undo the red áo dài, unhooking the row of buttons that ran from her neck, down her shoulders to her armpit. She put on silk pants and tied up the strings of her new yếm, a silk halter-neck and backless top worn as undergarment. Comma wasn’t sure if she should only wear the yếm by itself, then decided to put on a jacket as well. She turned and saw that Slip had already changed. She wandered if he had seen her naked back.