by Linda Hogan
“What else was there to do?” she said to the girl about the sap. “But it worked.” Still, it was why Grandmother always wore one of her two scarves. It was why her eyes saw only as far back as they would; not far. All this accounted, also, for her grandfather’s—“Uncle,” as he was called by everyone—scars. They were symmetrical, not the result of an accident.
“That’s enough now for a young girl to know,” Auntie said, combing the tangles out of her own long gray hair.
Lin buried her head against her great-aunt’s chest. “Is it human?” Lin asked. “To do that. Is that human?”
“Such a question.” Yet Lin had been born as a different child. They knew that. She saw everything. She learned quickly. She had watching eyes as a baby. If they were still tribal, she would have been set into a special place in the tribe and trained for a future. But perhaps she got this from her father. They thought him a man of compassion and great strength. The aunt remembered him. She had been off selling American beer when she came back to the village and found him standing there like a statue, before he collapsed into a deep sleep. They ran off with him and hid him when the helicopters came to take the bodies, knowing they’d be blamed and killed for the deaths of the Americans. “Yes. I think it is human. There is so much to a human.”
“Does it have to be?”
“I don’t know.” She braided the child’s hair. “But that’s enough for now. There’s only so much a girl can hear.” Just then there was a gunshot in the distance.
Later, when they were down in the reddish sand by the water, she held Lin and said, “I’m sorry.” Crying.
Lin studied her face, to see what she meant. She looked at her fine nose, her cheek that seemed dented, her eyes. Lin said, “I know. You’re sorry about humans.”
Auntie nodded, hiding her face.
The rains began. It was the beginning of the monsoon season. First a light mist, then a rain, then the downpour. Lin had time to think about what was human as the land turned to brown water and the air smelled thick and rich with mud. Clouds gathered darkly in the sky and water covered everything. The roads were filled and people stood with their legs in water as it poured down the hill. One poor man with one leg walked by on crutches. Another tried over and over to catch a fish from a lake now dead, throwing the line in again and again. “Well, at least the rice is happy,” her grandmother said, her grandmother who told Lin a story about the great river and how there were a large number of white animals that had to cross over it and when they reached the other side they had all become black. Lin always thought of the animals crossing the water.
Across an ocean, her father had also changed. No more kites. No more presents. He carried the family’s fading photos in his worn leather wallet and took them out to look at them, fearing the day their images would fade away completely and he would lose everything he had left. Everything he had left. He thought of the irony, the strange double meaning of those words. He could return now if he were able, but it wasn’t a simple matter of human will. That, too, is human.
He remembers the air was quiet. No birds. There was tension unfelt by the food-buyers who had grown attuned to all things left unsaid and would force them to be spoken. He worked in the rice fields. He kept his back to the Others when they passed. After a while he was the only one not questioned by any enemy because he was an ignorant man who neither heard nor spoke nor understood the things happening around him. He wore a band around his head and his blue-black hair was the color of the hair of the others. Only in the way he moved could you tell he was an American; he disguised this by limping as if he’d been wounded. But when they’d gone and the work was done he and Lin sang on the road. They sang a song about the great frogs with golden eyes. She and her father sang and he carried a stick in each hand and beat a rhythm. He lived this life whole and fully, always knowing it could end at any second with a wrong step or movement. She looked up at him when she was too large to be carried on his back. They smiled.
Now, in Ho Chi Minh City, Lin’s husband, Tran, is thin and wears a white shirt. His black hair is neat and combed back. He has a beautiful face, made more narrow by his soft dark eyes. He drives a motorbike. He always seems strong and confident even though he is narrow and slim in the way she is. No one would notice at first that he is missing an ear. Right now his eyes are worried. He has been left before. In so many ways: death and betrayal. He is thinking, What if she doesn’t come back?
“But you have decided,” he says, looking into her face. He knows her. He sees the determination in the way her face is set, the need, the decision, as if it is written in law. And it is. Blood law. Father-and-daughter law. Still, they are both full of unspoken words and fears.
“I will miss you until you come back.” He moves closer to her and runs his hand down her hair, the back of her head and pulls her face against him. He smells like lemon, she thinks. And she always smells of flowers, as if her life in the presence of them has become her flesh. In the green and yellow light of their place, with the one wall that looks lavender because of the evening light, she is sweetness. She is soft and kind. She is sensuous. He presses his body against hers, into hers, then they sleep in the last of daylight, sweating in the heat before the rainy season, not even bothering to close the shutters, almost forgetting the veil of mosquito netting. She reaches for his hand and entwines her thin fingers in his and sleeps. They don’t talk about fixing the rice. Besides, now they have electricity and a rice cooker.
They each have their own fears, lifetimes of them. He’d been forced into the same army that had once attacked her people. She discovered this information at her new job. He never wanted to tell her. He put his narrow hands over his face and cried when she asked him about it. “I was only eleven and hungry by then. When I tried to leave, they shot at me.”
“What have we here?” said a commander who was his cousin. And so they only cut off his ear and the blood ran. He got off lucky, he told her. He lived. His ear at times still aches. He used to cover it with longer hair. When they had gone through her village they’d taken the young men and boys away. The women had hidden in the trees and down in the water, breathing through reeds. He never said where the young men and boys were taken. He tells her he doesn’t know. Maybe they were killed. Others joined willingly, but war wasn’t part of his hopes for the future. He’d had other dreams, of being a doctor, a professor, dreams he could tell no one after the revolution because he came from the other class. He’d even been to school in France at one time.
And Lin, she was used to escaping, hiding, running, he knew. Both of them knew in their skin the loud explosions, the bright lights in the sky at night, the smell of cordite that stayed on clothing. Red narrow lights and smoke falling, crossing earth, the sounds at first like ghosts calling down the sky.
But love is not held back by the lines and bounds and fires of war and they found love for one another. He knows that love has always been her constant search. It is part of Lin’s cell structure. It is why she wants to find her father.
“It’s so far away. You are very brave,” he says, holding her in his sweating arms. He knows her story in the way lovers talk. “You always were.”
Even so, she keeps a light burning all night. There are nightmares. He sleeps with his narrow arm across his eyes.
So, the plan is made. Lin will fly to San Francisco. She already speaks English and several other languages. She calls it the gift she inherited from her mother. She has the gift of flowers but she is also a translator and studies the archives of the lost. She remembers the joy she felt, finding the children of the mother who was taken from beneath a tree near where she once lived. She could sit for long hours at a clean wood table, looking at papers, orderly files, talking with people who haven’t known order, who haven’t slept, who have miraculously, as she knows, survived. It is comforting there for a girl who loves organization and cleanliness. The room itself is straight lines, neat and clean, papers filed away. But she also has compassion. It
has always been her nature. She expends energy finding documents, as if each one is personal to her, a search of her own, sometimes working late hours. When the occupation and then the Party came, papers were gone through, torn, used against people. Some files were scattered and missing, some wet and difficult to read. Words have great power and she knows it and now she looks for words to put together. Sometimes she sits beside a person or family who has lost everything, where she can see the speakers and the emotions on the faces of those who understand nothing being said and have no choice but to trust her. She softens the direct questions. She looks at them openly. They might not know it to look at the gentle, steady young woman, but she has seen what they have seen, the wounds, parts of bodies, fires, the lost families and villages and crying children everywhere. She was one of them. She wonders what her father thinks of her.
Thomas remembers how on the day she was born he was sent outside the blue wooden door to wait. It was a door he and her mother had found and carried from a bomb site and added to their makeshift place. He used wood and leather for hinges, replacing them often. He thinks of her mother. He’d first seen Ma wearing the pants and tunic traditional to the women in Vietnam, silk, not work clothes. Later, Ma was so gentle with him, giving him water and rice when he could not stand up. And then she was having their child on a mat, on the brushed floor of earth. His child. He sat on the ground outside and it began to rain. He thought about, of all things, love. There were those who would have killed him, but now he forgets them and thinks of love. Out there, Ruth came to his mind like someone gone, a ghost he’d once held, and later, when he opened his arms, she had disappeared. He lived in another world then. He loved her still, but he was no longer an American. The village was his place and he was happy there.
At first he hadn’t thought to ask why there were no young men. He didn’t think they were dead or soldiers in another war than his. Even after the Americans left, the war was not over. He’d heard about the many who came to power. Whenever some of them passed by he was hidden, or, if seen, the questioners were told he didn’t hear or speak. He looked like the village people. He worked with them, with the women in the rice fields, or at the river. When the enemy came by they thought he was a dullard, a stupid man, and even those who liked to hurt the vulnerable left him alone because he was a strong worker and they needed him. Otherwise he would have been teased to death, not by words. But they needed rice in the city. They needed workers.
He could still see Ma carrying the baskets of rice to them, walking up the white path, moss growing across it now because it had not been used for some time. Even the followers of Ho were hungry.
And then, the baby cried.
Lin looks like her father, yet she has her mother’s gentleness and narrow shape. She was a reed as she grew. She was a willow. She was a deer. Nature is her place, though she now lives in the city with traffic, motorbikes, phones, noise constant, in a city once called “The Pearl.” Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City. Yet there are still the country vendors, old-fashioned, hitting their sticks together, calling out their wares. There are street foods, and buyers.
From the plane, her seat at the window, she looks down at the world below, Vietnam, then the many green islands with the light blue water of coral reefs. Lin opens the map of the continents and looks again. Inside her mind is a boat, overloaded, sinking in the ocean, and people trying to swim, one young man being taken up, wet, skinny, by someone from a ship. She doesn’t think of what happens with the others. The stewardess now brings her a soda and saves her from her memories.
Just as her father would have done, she studies the map of the continents, always having to check and recheck the flight path, the world as it should be. She looks down at everything as if the world could vanish, and then it does. There is only cloud.
She had investigated as much as possible before she left. She found the map of America, his reservation, the nearest towns, where he was born. She looks at it now, as if she can see him, a tiny figure on the paper. He was born at home, like Lin, if she could call her only place home. When she had visited it once, after working near the region, nothing was there except rice fields, remnants, trash and a faded blue door lying on the wet road near a collapsed tunnel entrance. She didn’t know she was born behind that door.
It was easy to find information about her father’s location, since she works with the papers that help connect people to whoever and whatever they had lost, or to families in America or France. Sometimes it is as if she is restringing beads of a broken necklace, not the necklace of war, of skulls, but one of beauty, pearls, and as she does, she hears Song’s voice saying, “Okay,” that part always in English. Then he would say, as if it meant nothing, “The government has changed again.” She continues stringing the necklace until it is complete, the clasp in place. It is made of pearls with a dragon claw to hold it. She closes it so it will not come undone.
After the plane lands she is sent through customs, thinking, My father came to this very place. He walked here.
She walks through the long building, following the others. They take away her fruit. Purpose for visit: Personal. Then she picks up her bag and, looking around, finds the place to rent a car, feeling good to be able to do all this.
Driving, she sees that America is strange, the places all the same bright stores. Then she turns off and she drives into the mist curling about the hills, sometimes seeing the ocean, its waves and swells, the odor of the water not like the water at home, a different air. Not swampy so much as fishy. At home, water is the color of tea, yellow, almost brown. Here it is deep blue, green and gray. The waves remind her of life and history, enormous and without end. She stops the car and watches one wave come in after the other.
When she reaches the last coastal town, she turns into a shop in the last mall before the reservation and purchases a red goldfish in a plastic bag and a glass bowl. It is an offering to her father, to show him how much she remembers.
“You want food?” asks the woman with frizzy red hair who sells her the fish.
Lin looks at her, thinking she means to feed her. She had no idea they fed customers in America. She looks at her in amazement. How kind.
“You know. For the fish.” The woman’s voice is louder now, as if Lin is deaf or does not understand English, because it seems clear from her calm face, the way she moves, that Lin is not American. “Fish food.” The woman’s skin is thin and white. She wears a ruffled collar. She points at the container that holds the dried contents.
“Oh,” Lin puts the fish down. “Yes. Thank you.”
Lin purchases the food. Back at her car, she places the fish and bowl on the floor of the passenger side, but before she drives away she sings to it. She sits in the busy parking lot, cars moving behind her, and she remembers the old song. But it is more than just a song. It praises the golden scales and the red flowing tail, its beauty. “Oh, you swam the river of perfume, the river of my mother world in the current. You could hold still and not be swept away. That is why, for a while, you were strong and free.” The song praises the world it came from, the egg it once was with only an eye and a heart visible in it, the direction of water it followed. Then she feels sorry for it, wondering if it is lonely.
When she arrives in her father’s world she sees the striking beauty of green land. Not as green as home, but green. And black rocks. Dark mountains in the distance, mist around them. She looks at the map and drives all the way past the reservation, past the old houses on the hill, looking at the pier and marina. Mobile homes sit down on the lower road with cars parked beside them, a fence made of buoys and other plastic parts, a canoe planted with flowers. Some of the trailers and houses have flowers planted around them. She doesn’t recognize whalebones. Most of the places are dark and worn. Some trailers have bleached plywood nailed along the bottoms to keep the heat in. At the waterfront is a gray warehouse. There is the long skeleton of a pier, just the pilings exposed, this one unused, left over from some past, but not far from i
t is a dock, a marina, although only a few boats are in good condition. She stops at a pull-off. She watches the horizon, her eyes moving from one side to the other. A mist is over the bay, a cloud. A blue fishing boat moves across water, leaving a path behind it. Then the water closes, as if nothing had passed. On one side of the land a forest is cleared. Elsewhere, it is moist and rich. There is a river in the distance. The green banks of the river flow into the sea. She likes the water running seaward and the sounds of the seabirds. Behind her, to the east, is a forest of great trees, a ray of late afternoon sun.
Lin realizes she is nervous. She turns left, driving along the damp road close to the ocean. She stops at a large square building. Inside, it looks like a hardware store, but disorderly. In a case are knives, ammunition, but also wood carvings of faces, painted masks, some with hair. The man who stands before her in overalls smells like fish. He sees her looking at a mask. “That one’s whalebone. It’s very old. You don’t see them much down here, at least not these days,” he tells her, as if she is a potential buyer.
She looks up and smiles and asks where Thomas lives. She realizes when she looks down at the address that his last name is worn away by humidity and her own hands. She gives the number and the street by memory. She remembers it by heart. “Thomas Just,” she says. She doesn’t know the name was given by an Indian agent who signed the people up for registration on the rolls. Some were given the name “Only,” some named “Little.” She doesn’t know it was to demean the people, the namers of the Indians. She thinks “Just” means he is the balance of a scale of what is right, that America was built on fairness and justice. She doesn’t know it shares the same history as hers. The people in this place were once massacred, infants bayoneted on these beaches and mounds. The land is full of the blood of their ancestors. She has read of this country, America, but she has read another history.