by Quan Barry
Three times Lam waves off the crumpled piastres she offers him. Please, she says, her eyes fixed on the ground, as each time he refuses. Finally she tucks the money back up in her conical hat. Grandfather, she says, turning to go. In the next life I will serve you. He places a fist in the scarred-green palm of his other hand and bows deeply. It isn’t until she has fully disappeared around the bend in the road that he stands back up.
Sometimes things blow shut of their own accord. The way a door creaks on its splintery wooden hinges—pain in the very sound of it. How the pain comes fluttering up in the joints, the pain permanent like new teeth. This is a moment of thresholds. The sound of doors swinging wildly somewhere in the wind.
THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE SONG MA HAD LONG SINCE BEEN destroyed, but the little basket boat was still sitting on the near shore, bobbing in the current. There were no oars, just a series of guide ropes one could use to pull the bamboo boat back and forth. This was the last place she’d seen him. More than eight months had passed. Little Mother still remembered the shape of Tu’s neck under his hat as he pulled himself across the water, the birthmark gleaming on the edge of his hairline. They had walked to the river hand in hand through the dusk, the bats just starting to stir. Something buzzed in her ear, but she didn’t swat it, not wanting him to remember her as anything less than stoic, Little Mother eager to demonstrate that she would be all right in his absence. They both knew the time had come for him to disappear, the war changing the land around them. As he slipped across the Song Ma, Tu didn’t look back. The sound of water lapped against the sides of the boat as he melted into the landscape, her heart slipping away from her body.
Little Mother studied the sky. There was an hour left until sundown. The old medicine man had said it would come that night. There was nothing else to do. On the far shore the rope was fastened around an iron hook set deep in a rock. She found the other end where she had left it tied up to the roots of a mangrove tree. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat, the water hot around her ankles as she stepped in. Swiftly she pulled herself across the river, though it was mostly the current that carried her. The water coursed so dull red and matte she couldn’t see anything in it, not even her own reflection.
On the other side of the river she stepped out of the boat and crawled hand over hand up the bank. Just five months ago there had been a cluster of families living on both sides of the Song Ma. The families had made their living fishing and ferrying people and goods across the river. For the past few months the charred remains of their huts dotted the shoreline. Over time the blackened heaps looked less and less like the remains of houses. It was hard to say who’d done it with any certainty. Little Mother took a deep breath and held it as she hurried past without looking. The patriarch had gone running back into one of the burning huts to find his granddaughter, the thatched roof like a woman with her hair on fire. Neither the old man nor the girl were ever seen again. Little Mother half remembered meeting the little girl from time to time, her hair done in two mismatched braids, one longer than the other, a space where her front tooth was missing, the head of the new tooth just starting to show. The grandfather had been a fisherman. He was known far and wide for fishing with a snow-white cormorant, the bird an albino, its eyes a bloody pink. Until the fire, most nights the grandfather and the bird could be seen together floating on a simple raft, the old man’s long gray beard in stark contrast to his bald head. In the weekly market Little Mother had heard that the man and his granddaughter were somewhere still walking the earth. She imagined meeting the two of them, the blue flames of their spirits roaming restlessly through the dark. From the look of things, with the next good rain the last of the wreckage would wash down into the river, everything as if nobody had ever lived there.
A half mile down the road Little Mother came across the carcass of a wild sow. Its teats gleamed like big brown buttons up and down its bloated gut. Most likely the creature had eaten something poisonous. There was no noticeable trauma, though its mouth gaped, its yellowed tusks long as fingers where the gums had receded. Little Mother wondered if she herself looked like that—gums drawn so far back her teeth as if twice as long.
By the trunk of a black palm she stopped to rest. In the distance the Truong Son Mountains were hazy with ash. It happened often enough that she had learned to sleep through it, the nightly rumble of distant planes. Each time it started, the night sky would light up. The next morning ash would shower down, a black confetti floating as far as Qui Nhon on the coast.
The moon was just on the edge of the horizon as Little Mother rounded the final bend, the sugar apples coming into view in the yard. The one-room she shared with Bà was west of the Song Ma in the southern corner of the province. The first few months of her marriage things had been quiet. Then a small weapons cache was found buried in a field outside Hau Bon. The farmer said he hadn’t worked the field in years, that he left it fallow as a place for the spirits of the rice to live, and that everyone for miles around knew it, but he was carted off to Pleiku anyway. After that, everything changed. Evenings she would see people floating through the hamlet she had never seen before, their accents hard to place. Across the Song Ma a village chief was killed. Someone draped a sign around his neck. PUPPET. Then one by one Tu and the other men of fighting age disappeared, some like Tu joining the Vietcong out in the jungle, others just slipping away. The bombings in the Truong Son Mountains began to physically change their topography, the peaks leveled, helicopters landing at all hours. And now the whole fifty square miles west of the river had been declared a free-fire zone. The Americans ordered everyone out. Tu said the Americans were trying to stamp out the Vietcong by banishing the local people. No people meant no food, no aid. In a free-fire zone the Americans could shoot without asking. Anyone remaining was assumed to be VC. Bà had begged Little Mother to stay, saying they would be all right because they were harmless, two women in the middle of nowhere, and besides, how else would Tu know where to find them when he returned from the jungle? Most of the other villagers had left for Cong Heo, the strategic hamlet in Binh Dinh Province, though Cong Heo had long since fallen into disuse. Little Mother had heard there was a wooden fence with razor wire running along the top, a ring of bamboo stakes all around the compound, the stakes gone soft with rot.
As she entered the yard, she could see the door was open. Inside, a fire was burning in the fire pit, but the room was empty except for their few possessions—some cooking utensils and a pair of rice bowls stacked on a small table, Bà’s hammock strung up under the window. The tin bucket they used to collect water from the creek on the other side of the orchard was missing, a ring left in the dirt where the bucket usually sat. Little Mother picked up her sleeping mat and unrolled it on the floor. Slowly she eased herself down and took off her non la. The money was there, but the flower was gone, its little pink bud like a mouth. She took a deep breath and held the hat up to the fire, searching it with her eyes for the words Tu had paid for, had chosen just for her, and how the artist had painstakingly woven them through the lining. In the long river, fish swim off without a trace. How the local people believed that a girl who wore a conical hat laced with poetry would become milder, more gentle, the girl effectively domesticated. Like a water buffalo when the farmer takes her newborn—how in her mourning for her baby, the water buffalo will do anything the farmer asks.
Little Mother could feel the hole where her heart should be. The poem was gone, the writing rubbed out from sweat and the daily friction of her head. Who tends the paddy / repairs the dike? She considered going back out into the fading light, the mosquitoes beginning to swarm, maybe even going all the way to the river to look for the missing flower she had been entrusted with, but outside the visible world exploded and the first pain hit.
Bà tottered back into the hut carrying the tin bucket. Outside the sound of the burning sky roared overhead. She put the water down next to the fire and stood still for a moment taking in the scene with her remaining senses, her eyes g
ray with twilight. I knew the old man wouldn’t disappoint us, she said. Quickly she hustled back outside to collect more firewood.
Left alone, Little Mother didn’t cry out as her water sluiced down her legs and into the dirt. On all fours she made her way to the door. She wanted to see the mountains one last time. From the doorway they looked like a python after it has eaten a full-size animal. The dream was over, the heat of his hand on her leg. Already the memory of blue flames dancing on the mountainside was fading.
Their last night together she and Tu had sat staring off at the mountains. On the closest slope they could see a handful of blue lights twinkling. She’d sat back and waited. He was always telling her the most beautiful stories, transforming the world before her eyes. Tu cleared his throat. We all carry a light inside us, he said. He told her they were little blue fountains of flame where someone had died and gone unburied, the body’s gases escaping into the air. In the distance she could make out four of them, the fires like indigo stars twinkling on the mountainside. Wandering ghosts, Tu said. Briefly he touched her knee. If you meet one, address it as anh or chi, he said. Brother Ghost. Sister Phantom. She nodded, her young face filled with seriousness.
Little Mother closed her eyes. Pain radiated through her body. She could still see the bright red birthmark on the edge of Tu’s hairline, the mark shaped like a diamond. At times it seemed to change with his feelings, the color deepening as an emotion took hold of him. She would never see him again in this world. She crawled back to the fire and collapsed.
When she opened her eyes again, it was night, the air sulfurous and filled with thunder and lightning. Each time one hit, brightness like hell itself. She could feel the earth tremble, the one-room hut quivering as bits of dried thatch rained down from the roof, the splintery wooden boards rattling like teeth. On her mat in front of the fire pit she imagined what kind of world the planes came from, a land of fire and iron, liquid light, pain and the quiet that comes after. She tried to remember even the smallest scrap of her favorite dream, the heat of his hand on her leg, but all she could recollect was a cacophony of doors swinging wildly in a thrashing wind, the sound of their hinges like broken jaws. It was the only dream she ever had anymore.
There was a piece of rope and a knife and an old gunnysack laid out on the floor. Bà had the fire going strong, her eyes red in the light. The old woman lay smoking her pipe in her hammock by the window. The pipe was carved from an animal’s thigh bone, the bowl itself the head of a dragon. Each time Bà inhaled, the creature’s eyes burned as if alive. Little Mother knew that when the time came to act, Bà would fly into motion. They never talked about it, how Bà’s eyes had soured in the last year, everything gone but light itself, though it didn’t seem to slow her down any. The old woman was as she had always been. Up each morning before the sun’s first rays, then doing the things that needed doing.
Bà tapped her ashes into a tin can. He will come, she said. The old woman had a way of knowing things she shouldn’t know. Something hit the earth. A jar of nuoc mam fell off a shelf, the glass cracking on impact. It was the closest one they had ever felt, the thing as close as a mile away. The smell of fish drifted through the room. Even now he is on his way, said Bà, smoke shirring around her head.
Two rats came out of the darkness and stopped at the spot where the nuoc mam had fallen. Little Mother turned her head and watched them scratch at the dirt. Then another one hit, the power of a thousand tons lifting her body clean off the floor. One of the rats paused and looked at her. There was no fear in its eyes. Little Mother wondered if she were already among the dead. Finally the animal turned and along with the other scurried out of her line of sight.
In many ways the pain was just like the mosquito sickness, a burning all throughout her body. She would wake for a few minutes, a few brief images limned with each explosion—Bà stoking the flames, Bà fanning Little Mother with her straw hat, the night as if immolating itself, outside the sugar apples bursting on the bough—and then she would fall back into darkness. She could feel a door creaking open in her body. The circular bruises on her skin throbbed as if gasping for air.
A few hours past midnight they ran out of wood. There were hardly any rice husks left to burn. We need to save what we have, Bà told her. And so they sat in the dark, her body’s doors opening at a glacial pace, like something fermenting. Outside the world going up in flame.
Toward morning Bà awoke when something landed on her face. The dawn was silent, no animal noises stirring in the growing light. The old woman was sitting in the doorway, her pipe cold in her hand. She could feel the first rays of the morning sun just coming over the mountain and struggling to break through the smoky haze.
Bà touched her cheek where the thing had landed soft as a moth. Another landed on her neck. It was coming down. She could hear it hitting the earth, each one alighting faint as paper. One landed in the middle of her forehead. She wiped it off and smelled her fingers. It was ash. The little round scar on her chest next to her heart began to grow hot. Little Mother, she said.
Later the sound of an engine coming through the orchard. Bà turns her head toward the noise. For the first time she is conscious of the gray lace glazing her eyes. She wipes her face with the backs of her hands. There is so much to do.
They were walking through the orchard. Judging from his smell, the first boy who arrived wasn’t an American, his body as if wrapped in rotten leaves. Bà took another deep breath in through her nose. He wasn’t Vietnamese either, not a northerner or a southerner, not even one of the ethnics from the mountains. She heard him call to the others, words like the barking of dogs. How many she didn’t know, hundreds of thousands or just a handful, and all of them coming to where the first soldier had called them. Bà could hear the fatigue in their voices, the swinging of their heavy guns against their gaunt bodies. The sun trickled in from the east through the dark man-made clouds.
The first one was talking, saying words she knew were directed at her. Bà pointed into the hut. She could feel the soldier peering into the darkness, following the line of her finger. We must, she said. There’s still time. Was he understanding? The scrim burned heavy on her eyes. She made motions with her hands as if breaking open a piece of fruit.
More words were said, then the boy was leading her through the orchard, away from the one-room shelter her son had built. In the crisp morning air she could smell the burnt fruit littering the ground. She remembered the day some months before when her neighbors had been relocated by the Americans, the sound of her childhood friend Hong Hanh’s high-pitched keening as the soldiers carried her small body across the road to the waiting helicopter, loose grit whipping through the air, the whole hut shuddering as if it would simply lift off the earth, Hong Hanh’s screams cutting in and out in the wash of the great blades. Mong Yen was a small hamlet of fewer than ten wooden huts. The Americans had cleared the area in under half an hour. Bà and Little Mother lived on the edge of Mong Yen. The day the Americans swept the hamlet, Bà and Little Mother had been curled up like sea horses in the small space Tu had hollowed under the floor during his last and final visit. The creatures of the earth crawling all over them as if they themselves were earth.
The day after her neighbors had been forcibly removed, Bà felt her way through the sugar-apple orchard to Hong Hanh’s two rooms. The ancestors’ bowls were still there on the shelf in the corner. A sheet of muslin lay in a heap in the dirt. Flies crawled over the hardened rice, a few of them drowned in the small dish filled with fish sauce.
For the first few days Bà picked her way through the orchard each afternoon while Little Mother was off working in the fields. Each day she would change the rice, recover the bowls with the muslin. Some days she would light a joss stick and clap her hands together as she bowed her head before fishing the dead flies out of the nuoc mam. By the end of the week none of her prayers had come true, but that wasn’t the reason why she stopped taking care of the family altar of her childhood friend. All her
life Bà’s prayers had never come true. She didn’t know anyone whose prayers did.
The final time Bà went next door she stood in front of the altar, the smell of sandalwood spicing the air. A breeze began to blow through the room, though outside the palm trees stood stone still. Then she saw it—a vision of her daughter-in-law lying in the dirt, the girl’s stomach swollen and distended, her face as if dead. All week Bà had prayed for just the opposite. Not now. Please. Not in this world. The last time Tu had been with them, the sound of the couple’s long nights of love filling the air which in a culture of one-room households it was taboo for anyone to acknowledge. For as many nights as it lasted Bà lay in her corner pretending not to hear the rhythmic noises and small groans coming from their mat but remembering her own nights of pleasure long ago in a world at war, hoping they were being careful but knowing that they weren’t.
Later that day after Little Mother came home from the fields, Bà could feel her prayers had not been answered. The girl didn’t even know. She was stirring the rice in a pot over the fire, the aura of the new life filling the room. There would no longer be enough rice to fill the bowl on the altar next door. Little Mother, said Bà for the first time. The scar just above her left breast throbbed. Now you must call me Bà.
And so it had come to pass. Little Mother lying in the dirt in the darkness of their one room, her stomach swollen and distended, her face all but dark. Outside Bà floating through the orchard on the arm of a foreigner.
Finally they arrived at a jeep. Among the soldiers there was more talk like the grunting of animals, the soldiers deferring to the boy who had led her there, the boy their leader. Already he was walking away. It had been years since Bà had ridden in a jeep, not since Terres Noires and the trees that cried white tears. For a moment she felt like a child again, she and her mother with their buckets full of sap.