Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  I felt pulled to want to let him hurry up and die just because I didn’t like to see so much sadness. But I knew it wasn’t sensible to say, “Well, if things are this bad, better to be dead.” I also noticed that when things looked bad, I felt like they would only get worse, which was not always the case. Chan seemed better that day. In the night he had even sat up without my help. I wondered if with all the crying he was working his way toward a fighting stance. He even drank the dreaded apple-celery juice without complaint and ate a whole bowl of yellow split pea soup before they left.

  It’s not over yet, I told myself.

  I stretched back in the one chair we had. The smooth cool slats of wood connected by rope made a swinging bridge suspending my legs and back and bottom just right. With my feet resting on the railing of cut saplings that kept us from tumbling over the edge of the porch and down to the valley below, I thought about how comfortable I was. I had noticed the day before, in the midst of running for something from the bedroom, that I never sat down. This was the third time in as many weeks that I’d sat in that chair and rested.

  * * *

  A few days later I sat cross-legged on the dark boards by the kitchen fire, Chan in my lap, his slender limbs tense with upset, his small fists clenched as he cried. It had been days since I’d had a break from taking care of him, and I was tired. I wondered where processing all that misery would take him. He expended so much energy raging that I never thought of him as frail, no matter how thin he got. When his sobs slowed enough to tell me his fears, I listened as if our lives depended on it.

  “I’m just afraid when you go away from me you’ll get sick and go in the hospital and never come back,” he finally confessed.

  “Honey, nothing could keep me away from you. Nothing. Not a hundred strong men, not tigers, not guns. I would always fight my way back to you, no matter how sick I was. And besides, I know how to stay well. I’ve learned from you how to fight,” I reassured him, relieved to finally know what fear was driving this latest upset so I could try to fix it.

  Another time he complained he was sick of being ordered around, that there was someone in his heart yelling at him, but he was doing the very best he could. He said he was tired of Cody and Tahn trying to annoy him when he never did anything to bother them. When he was crying hard about this with Cody nearby, Cody said, “Well, you try to bother me.” And then the rapid-fire dialogue that begins so many sibling discussions.

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “When?”

  “Like when you said, I got to eat corn and you didn’t.”

  “Well, I wasn’t trying to bother you.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “Well, you should’ve told me.”

  “Okay. I will next time.”

  And they quieted down again, satisfied.

  That afternoon, when I was walking my bike up the steepest part of the road where it turns back toward our hut and the water jars finally come into view between the yellow hill and the blue sky, Chan spoke to me from the plastic seat on the rear rack: “I hated it when we were in Seattle and you and Daddy were cranky and I would go by myself and sit in a corner and cry by the heater.”

  I listened, amazed that he remembered and disgorged these heartbreaking memories. I kept telling myself, He’s processing his way to health, he’s getting rid of what doesn’t serve him, but these tidbits that bubbled up all day long astonished and pained me.

  “I hate being here. I hate being like this. I’m so miserable. I just want to have fun. I just want to be happy. I just want to walk.”

  All his complaining made me constantly second-guess my decisions. Maybe we’re in the wrong place. Maybe he belongs in a city where he can go to malls and museums and movies. Maybe he should be by the river with his friends. Maybe here is nice for me and Dtaw but boring for a sick six-year-old. Maybe he belongs in a hospital where he could just have plenty of morphine and Cartoon Network and entertaining people dropping by and then he could just be quiet and comfortable and die that way. Not be miserable like he is here on a windy mountain. These thoughts cycled in and out of my consciousness.

  Then when I had some time to myself, I was looking at pictures from the previous month, pictures of him with his brothers and the neighbors who came up to visit, pressed in close around him; of him at Cody’s soccer game sitting in Tong’s lap in a crowd of cheering families; in Cam and Tong’s front yard watching the chickens in their endless fidgeting and pecking; sitting with Tong’s sister’s family palms out and open to the village fire. I realized that he belonged here. He hated hospitals. He shut down in them. They would have given him so much morphine he’d be dead by now, quiet and not miserable and not in pain, but dead.

  I knew his crying and misery were just good processing and the right thing for him to do. I knew he’d rather be in the bosom of his family, noisy and raucous and crabby as it was, than lying lonely and lost in a hospital bed. This had to be the right place.

  * * *

  The next morning, I woke up to cold wind and wet wood on the porch. I woke long before it was time to get up as we always went to bed when darkness made it too hard to see snakes or scorpions or stinging bugs where we stepped. I lay on the thin mattress, eager to get a fire blazing, but Chan had me pinned in his usual leg-and-arm-wrapped-across-my-body grip.

  Tahn woke up full of play as usual. “Mama!” he called to me across his daddy’s chest, rising and falling gently in sleep. “Shhh . . .” I smiled back at him. “Don’t wake Chan!” He crawled over Dtaw to where I lay, and we cuddled and joked, me shushing him every minute. Finally he started to complain of a tummy ache, which turned into, “I have to poop.” I quickly disengaged from Chan’s embrace and scurried to find sweaters and hats before braving the cold drizzle.

  On the way from outhouse to kitchen, I balanced Tahn’s warm body against my hip and leaned over the wood piled against the outside kitchen wall, searching for a dry piece for the breakfast fire. Inside Tahn watched from where he sat next to me, small fingers fluttering against my knee as I lifted the machete from its corner behind the bucket stove and chopped splinters of wood. Chan called out from the bedroom, “Mama! I’m awake!”

  “Okay, honey. I’ll be there in a little bit. Let me get the fire started.”

  But he kept calling for me until his calls turned to crying. I kept thinking, Why doesn’t he call for Daddy? He’s right there next to him. I continued to pull last night’s dishes from the mouse-proof glass cabinet, set the tray for our breakfast, refusing to respond to Chan’s lament.

  “Nobody is taking care of me,” he cried, until he became so angry he maneuvered himself, crawling on hands and knees, down the three steps from the bedroom to the smaller room beside it. “You’d better hurry up!” he threatened, by now furious. “I’m about to go out the door with no hat or coat!” The love of my life was still sleeping comfortably through all of this, but I was mostly used to that by then. Well, not really. When I finally went to Chan and finished dressing him and asked Dtaw if he was planning to join the morning preparations for school, it took some effort not to kick my husband in the ribs.

  I carried Chan through the narrow doorway, the two steps across the porch and down the stairs, around the corner of the hut, and into the side room that was our kitchen. I settled him on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. He watched, quieted by being together.

  Once the wood caught, the coals glowed pink at their edges and finally gray enough that I could put the pan over them to warm up last night’s stew for breakfast. I laid the dishes and sticky rice basket on the big enamel tray between shooing Tahn out of the kitchen, listening to Chan whine, and rushing Cody along, criticizing his outerwear selection and then later defending him from Dtaw’s criticism of the same.

  When Dtaw walked stiff and sleepy down the stairs to start the day, I slipped away without a word to check on the horses. Dew on broken grass wetting my toes, I let gravity pull me gently down the hill to their w
arm forms moving on the land. Their coats were soaked with mist, but Dap was the only one shivering. With a length of stout tree branch on the ground nearby, I knocked the wooden stake from side to side, loosening it from the ground where it held his tether in place. Dap turned from me and immediately began walking purposefully up the hill toward the taller grass. I leaned my back against air, pulling on the lead line that trailed out behind him and calling, “Yu! Yu!” (Stay! Stay!) as he dragged me, skidding like a water-skier in slippery flip-flops through the mud, rice stalks, and manure piles. Finally he slowed down at the tall grass.

  I pounded the anger of my bruised ego into the ground with the stake and went down the hill to bring Tolay up too. He had pulled his stake from the ground in the night and gone below to the banana trees to strip the huge leaves from their stems. His line was wrapped up in the mess of vegetation, so I set to work untangling it and led him up to Dap. Tolay was much better behaved. He always let me believe I was leading him rather than the other way around. After unwinding the other three horses’ ropes from the stump they were tied to, I trudged back through the wind and rain to untangle whatever mess was brewing in the kitchen.

  After breakfast, Dtaw, Cody, and Tahn set off through the mud to walk Cody to school. Chan settled into his usual narration of woes as I cut the vegetables for his juice. He renewed his most recent claim that he would no longer eat unless it was tuna fish sandwiches purchased and consumed at one of the two acceptable restaurants located in or near the resort town, an hour drive down off the mountain and toward civilization. I listened, begging him to change his mind and eat good food, with the aim of eliciting more anger and indignation, which seemed to do him good. He refused and fought and screamed and cried until I had finished preparing and boiling the fresh greens Tong had gathered for him from her garden the day before. He ate half the plate without complaint before gagging so that I let him stop.

  * * *

  The next morning, I watched with quiet wonder again as the world turned toward the east. The returning sun crested blue-black mountains, green leaves turned gold, birds sang from every side, wood bores buzzed, and clothes drying on the line fluttered softly. Behind me, the fire I’d made when the sun was only a promise had burned down to embers.

  Earlier I had awakened to find the hard dirt bathed in blue-white light from the full moon. In bright moonlight—no need for a flashlight—I gathered wood and splintered kindling and lit the breakfast fire.

  Then cutting the apple and celery for Chan’s juice, fighting with Tahn for turns with the knife, then fresh rice to the pot, then embers settled, just right to cook without burning. The sky lightened to soft purples with smoky black clouds wandering over the mountain, the fog on the valley floor thinning almost visibly as the sun advanced. Chan called to me, “Buwat kee!” (I have to poop). I carried him outside and to the steep slope below the hut. There I crouched with Chan over the new hole Dtaw had dug in the black soil. Chan, naked from the waist down, sat suspended between my legs so he could be comfortable while he pooped, my hands wrapping nearly all the way around his bird-leg thighs. More bird songs filled the air and the spreading light became harder on the eyes but warmer on the skin, almost undoing the cool of the breeze. The full moon paled into the brisk morning blue, comforting as a covenant that the world would again turn to quiet night after another hard day.

  So often when I felt overwhelmed with living with the fear of grief from Chan’s probably imminent death, I looked around. And being there with the trees and mountains and sky and sun, I was assured that everything would be okay. Whatever happened to Chan, the trees would keep blossoming, the birds nesting, the moon shining. Somehow I felt certain that life would continue and be okay. I wondered if living elsewhere I could be thus calmed. Green humps, a line of hills far below, floated like islands in a cloud. The shadows of the trees that grew from them cut long straight lines slanting toward me through the sunlit mist.

  And then blue, blue, blue. Everything blueing up. Bright between the leaves, the sun burnished the wide blades of grass and the soft coats of the gentle horses standing in the field.

  Laundry, stuffy bedding, breakfast waited. This morning I would not rush. The sun does not rush. The birds and horses do not. I will sit here with the living creatures a bit longer, I thought, no movement to the next task yet.

  The day before I’d taken the boys down to the village to watch television at Tong’s house. We were busy with juice and baths and shampoo and medicines and taking walks. Dtaw spent the day at home raking up dead grass, hoeing steps into the dirt, tidying up the land. When we returned, the bed was still unmade.

  * * *

  At nine o’clock the next morning, the sun shone too bright in my eyes for me to see the computer’s screen, but I liked that. I could just sit and soak in the morning UV rays and let my fingers fly. That morning while I swept the dust from the kitchen floor and then sprinkled the water from washing the vegetables over the floorboards before rubbing the tattered old rag of a wool sweater over them, I asked myself why, knowing that the computer is waiting on the porch and the children are down the mountain, why did I feel compelled to keep a journal? Why did I want to record the little meaningless details of our life here?

  I did it because I wanted to hold on to that time, that time before Chan died, or the time he was getting well, the time we were just living day to day with one clear purpose: to care for Chan, to help his body heal or ready him for death, I didn’t know which one.

  Our lives seemed very beautiful then. There was the beauty of the physical world around us, but it was more than that. Everything was stripped bare. All that we cared about was being with our children, working hard toward wellness and some sort of understanding. Every day I marveled at Tahn’s stout tan body, his cherry-red lips and white teeth, and at Cody’s growing muscular, agile frame. Because I was holding a small, crying skeleton of a boy all day, the healthy, happy boys were a double delight to me, if not to Chan, who cried when he watched little Tahn run joyfully as fast as his thick legs could carry him. And in some terrible way, they offered me a kind of assurance. Well, if Chan dies, I will be left with these very healthy boys. I hated it when I had thoughts like that. I could not imagine the horrible hole that would be left in all our lives if Chan died. But things did seem to be headed in that direction­—the swollen joints, the pain, the discomfort, the way food didn’t taste good, lips pale again only two weeks after his last transfusion, and that was when we transfused when his hematocrit was above twenty, just as a cushion. But I told myself not to get sunk into that fear, to instead keep fighting for him every day, every step.

  His crying was getting predictable. He was so miserable, I was so mean, he felt so bad, he would say, and the tears would flow. But I told myself crying was the right thing for him. Two days before he’d screamed at me and even Dtaw. He looked into my eyes while he was screaming and asked furiously, “How would YOU like to be ME?”

  But after a nap, he was much more content. And the day after that, he really seemed to enjoy himself. When several young children were playing in Tong’s kitchen and I placed him down in the doorway while I finished putting away the dishes, he even sat and didn’t ask to be taken out of sight of their staring. He told me later that he felt better in the mountains than he did in Bangkok because he worried less.

  Every morning we went down before breakfast to say hello to the horses. They were so placid. It soothed us. And there was the excitement of the relationship between the three adult males. When they squared off and rippled their muscles and nipped and gathered together and parted, it was impossible to look away. I wanted to figure out how they could roam free not tethered to their stakes.

  Grateful for the sight of distant peaks, sometimes hidden in a haze, sometimes dark silhouettes against the blue, edges cut clean by the rising sun, I could see three ranges in three directions: east, south, and west. To the north, our cabin sat beside a path winding up into the darkness of the jungle.

 
But the mountains and valley and sky might always be like this. My family would not. My family ran and tumbled and tangled and cried and changed by the millisecond.

  The day before, in search of good cell phone reception, I’d found a secluded hilltop in the middle of acres of dry fields, miles from the village. I had just crouched down on the earth to confide my miseries into the ear of my friend at the other end of the call, when Cody and his gang emerged over the crest of the hill like a band of ragged elves, cheeks cracked and tan, eyes shy and bright at seeing me. Who could be sad after that? Cody was roaming free, getting tall and strong and slightly arrogant. His sweetness was covered a little by the boyish roughness, but it was still there. I found it one day when I was typing at Tong’s house and he came in for his afternoon bath. He hadn’t expected to see me and came over and rested his head on my knee to watch me work, trying to pick out English words that he knew on the screen.

  Dtaw remained steadfast and hardworking. He continued to hold out endless hope for Chan’s recovery when mine was gone. He was never dramatic or loud. I cried about Chan’s dying and he only looked at me each time and said, “He will get well.”

  I cried about not knowing if we were in the right place for Chan. When I worried about this aloud with Dtaw, he would look at me and say, “We are here for only one purpose: to get Chan well.”

  Dtaw worked hard on the cabin and the earth around it, raking and cutting and planting and building. He took the boys on horseback rides. He talked about what we would plant in the spring. He held his back and groaned. He fell on the ground whenever he sneezed, as if dodging a grenade, to decrease the pressure the sneeze put on his ruptured disc. But he kept going every day. He never complained. He listened to Chan rant and sob. He held firm when Chan begged to be taken out or not drink his juice or not eat his brown rice.