Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  It was warm inside the trailer at night and only slightly chilly in the mornings, when we would wake to find the covers kicked off or stolen. Dimly, through the haze of half sleep, I could hear my father that morning filling the dogs'food bowls—the opening and closing of the cupboard door, the crinkling of the dog-food bag. He set the bowls on the counter. He opened the built-in refrigerator that faced the sink. Then came the sound of eggshells cracking, two over each bowl of dog food. Raw eggs helped keep the dogs' coats shiny and healthy. For a moment our father paused, his gaze on us stirring in our sheets. As he did many mornings, he reached down and rearranged the sheets to cover our bare chests. He placed my brother’s arm back in the bunk beside his body.

  Then he exited the trailer and set the dogs’ bowls down on the hard dirt outside, and the dogs came to him, butts and tails wagging, snouts nuzzling against his hands and legs.

  Our mother took us into town to do laundry and shop for groceries that afternoon. Our father stayed home to string wire around the chicken coop and make a pen so the chickens would not wander. The dogs lay panting in the shade under the twisted oak trees while our father squatted by the coop and planned his pen, and when he got up the dogs stood, too. They sniffed the ground, shoved their noses around under the fallen leaves.

  Our father went up the hill to the storage shed to get some wire. Suddenly he heard a loud squawking and the sound of wings beating and scuffling in the dirt. He ran down the hill in time to see Kee attacking one of the chickens. He shouted and swung his arms at the pup, who cowered backward with his tail low and let go of the chicken. Our father stepped closer to inspect the damage. Lucky lay listing to one side in the strewn leaves, making strangled clucking noises and flicking her feathers. Our father did not see any blood yet, so he leaned closer and placed his hand under the chicken’s soft belly feathers and gently he lifted her. The hen’s stomach lay beneath her in the leaves with an egg not completely laid. The egg was broken, its yolk like a filmy yellow eye within the stomach. Our father realized Kee must’ve been trying to reach the egg.

  Of course. Kee would’ve never deliberately injured the chicken.

  Our father said out loud, “Well, I’m sorry, Lucky.” He decided he would have to finish it for her. He pressed down on her back with one hand and twisted with the other.

  As he was carrying Lucky down the hill to bury her, he spotted Kee hiding under the trailer. The poor pup was already punishing himself. That dogs were capable of shame seemed evidence to our father of an awareness not typically expected of dogs—an awareness of responsibility, or the ability to discern (and thus not act on, if the dog were well trained enough) an impulse. “A test of love and duty” was the lesson he would draw for us out of what had happened that day. And he did not mean love in the mushy sense we wanted to give it, of course; he meant love only as a condition irrevocably tied to how one did or did not act dutifully in a given circumstance. When he told us, he told us carefully, even clinically, what had happened to Lucky. “Love,” he said scornfully (when we speculated that Kee had felt bad because “he loved Lucky and knew we did, too”), “bah. Don’t let it trick you.”

  “Not so lucky!” laughed our mother to our brother in the background as they unpacked groceries in the trailer’s tiny kitchen space—for she was callous about chickens, understood the butchering of them to be purely practical.

  “The egg wasn’t ready to be taken yet,” explained our father. He gently told us about the logistics of chickens’ stomachs.

  “Why did Kee do it?” I asked.

  “Because he likes the eggs I’ve been feeding him and he wanted more,” said our father. “He wanted more but it was too soon.”

  His head hunched, Kee was looking at us through the trailer screen door.

  “But he’s a smart dog,” said our father, “to have figured out where the eggs come from.”

  CHICKENS

  The relatives were waking. Hus Madsen could hear them moving around inside the van and the storage shed where they had slept in their sleeping bags. Hus took his cigarettes and headed down the hill to smoke and admire the view. The mid-August sun was rising over the mountains and the silver line of the American River wound soundlessly through the bottom of the Coloma Valley, wheat-yellow this time of year, and pocked with faraway houses and squares of plowed land and the cloudlike green puffs of live-oak treetops and the darker, bramblier heads of the black and blue oaks. Hus walked down the steep driveway, kicking up fresh red dirt with his boots, and stepped onto the concrete foundation he’d had poured the previous week. He stood there and looked out over the Coloma Valley with his arms folded across his chest.

  Down there was where gold had first been discovered in California, in 1848, by some other unsuspecting new landowner.

  One can only hope, Hus liked to joke.

  Behind him, from the top of the driveway, he heard the dogs’ collars jingling and their paws scraping excitedly on the ground as the trailer door banged open against the sharp morning air. He began to hear the voices of the relatives. They had arrived just two days ago to visit the Madsens’ new land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and it was only the second time Hus had met them in the five years he and Tran had been married and living in Sacramento. The relatives spoke in slow, broken English, or rapidly and loudly in their native tongue, which he didn’t understand a word of. Hus had insisted, when he married Tran, that they speak only English in their home. He believed it was more important for the children to speak the language of the country they were growing up in than for them to cling to a culture they had left. It was what he had done himself upon coming to America, twenty-eight long years ago, and if they were to succeed in this society, fluent, natural-sounding English was what they would have to learn as well. As far as he could tell, Tran agreed.

  They had both agreed the past would be something best gotten over without much grief, or elaboration to one another or the children.

  Of the three children, only the youngest was Hus’s by blood. The other two had come with their mother from Vietnam, just four months before Hus had met them. They had escaped on one of the last vessels out of Saigon (and there had been all kinds: famed helicopters, DC-3s, DC-10s, whole squadrons of fighter planes, naval, marine and army air carriers, little rat-trap fishing boats, overloaded rowboats), before the capital fell to the Communist forces. Tran and her two children had been moving between refugee camps, from Guam to San Diego to Sacramento, and while in the last camp, called Hope Village, Tran had written an article about her and her children’s experiences that was published in The Sacramento Bee. Hus had just relocated from San Francisco to Sacramento through a transfer of air bases (he was now in the civil sector, putting his architectural degree to work) when he read Tran’s story. He had heard many of these stories lately, and his sympathies were with the Vietnamese people, the dislocated; he believed these people could prosper if only given the right chance and circumstances. And then it had occurred to him. He had no one else. He was forty-four years old, still living with only a cat. He was not an unattractive man. Women had often said things to him, and men in bars even, long ago, when he’d been first feeling his way around the States. They had told him he might try Los Angeles, that he looked like he should be on TV. The few involvements he’d had with women, however, had been messy and disruptive, or just plainly confounding to him. He had given up. Those women, he thought, were not serious about anything and were too demanding of men; they did not know how to respect—or let alone—the deeper, more important facts about a person. They had refused even to try to understand the hardships he’d been through, or the distance he’d had to put between himself and his former life and home. They listened with consternation when he spoke about his childhood during World War II, and their questions, when they asked them, seemed always unimaginative (“Do you miss your mother? Was she a good cook? Was she pretty?”) and designed to elicit only light-hearted answers. As he read Tran’s story in the paper, though, something stirr
ed in him, a sense of recognition that was more than personal, that was strangely nostalgic already; he thought, now here is a woman who has done some necessary fighting of her own. Here is a woman for whom life has not been easy, yet she has endured, she possesses character. Sitting up late that August night in 1975 in his small two-room apartment, Hus found himself writing a letter to send to her via the newspaper, typing as if another’s hands were guiding his own hands over the keys. He wanted to do something for this woman who was a fighter. What could he do, he asked in his letter. His intentions at this stage were purely pragmatic, he’d thought. But when they met his heart went out to her and to himself also.

  They were married two weeks later.

  They drove in a rented car out to Virginia City, Nevada, and after the brief proceedings made their way into a shop called the Silver Time Saloon, where they tried on authentic pioneer costumes from the 1800s and had their picture taken. The photo was tinted to appear old, as if they had already shared history together—and a prototypical American one, at that. They spent their honeymoon in a hotel in Virginia City. Then they drove their rented car back to Sacramento the following day. Hus brought back gifts for the children, who’d been staying with some volunteers from Hope Village. Now the new family moved into Hus’s apartment near downtown Sacramento. And when U.S. citizenship was officially granted to them all three years later, he encouraged the children to come up with American versions—or at least American spellings—of their former names. The little girl agreed to April, the month of her birth (she was too young to choose for herself and didn’t fully understand anyway); the boy, however, was less agreeable and insisted on remaining Thien—although Tim was a close and nice enough alternative, Hus had tried explaining—but the boy could not be persuaded.

  The girls were coming down the hill, holding hands with Huong, the girl cousin, who was maybe seventeen. He couldn’t remember all of the seven cousins’ names, and couldn’t pronounce them all, either. Hus knew Huong because he thought her the most pleasant and considerate. When they ate dinner, the boys left their plates on the table, and Huong did all the cleaning. As she came down the hill now with his daughters, he called out, “Well, good morning! Come and look at the view. I’ll bet you’ve never seen a view like this before.” Views like this were, in large part, what he’d been after in moving the family up into the hills, away from the congested, suburban way of life in Sacramento. He held his cigarette away from his lips and made a sweeping gesture at the landscape beyond, as if it were his own painting he was showing.

  His daughters, he noticed, were dressed in the flimsy, strapless dresses the relatives had brought as gifts. The girls had been wearing these foolish outfits ever since the relatives had arrived two days before. Even on women with full figures, the dresses would’ve looked nothing more than cheap, Hus thought. April, the seven-year-old, wore a glittery purple dress, and Beth, four, was in a satiny blue one. Neither had anything up top to hold up the dresses, and the fabric bagged out over their torsos, often slipping to expose a babyish nub of nipple. Tugging at the dresses, they came tottering toward him down the steep drive in high-heeled shoes that were far too big as well. Hus hadn’t known what to say about these gifts without seeming rude, so he had decided, from the beginning, not even to acknowledge the dresses.

  “Hi, Daddy, hi, Daddy.”

  “Aunt Mary and I made the girls look very pretty,” said Huong, smiling brightly. She was wearing a tiger-striped bathing suit and a floppy straw hat.

  “Why don’t you show your cousins how to take a bath?” Hus said to the girls.

  “We’ll show you the way we take a bath in the country!”

  “Good idea,” said Hus.

  He watched as the girls hobbled over to the wooden rack holding gallon jugs of water and showed their cousin how to feel for the warmest. The rack had black sandpaper nailed to it to absorb the sun’s heat. They each picked up a gallon jug and started back up the hill. It was good, he thought, to see his four-year-old lugging the heavy gallon of water as well as her older sister and cousin did. He heard April explaining, “See, the sun heats up the water.”

  He called after them, “Make sure you lather first!”

  He spotted his wife coming out of the trailer. Tran was wearing cut-off jeans with cowboy boots. She was laughing and speaking Vietnamese with her sister, the one they called Aunt Mary. Often Hus could not tell, with this language, whether the speakers were angry or happy. The tones of it were so garrulous and aggressive and shrill. Aunt Mary’s husband, whom they all referred to as Uncle John, was smoking a cigarette outside the trailer, his shirt unbuttoned to well below his chest. His eyes were narrow, his brown skin mottled, and he had a straight, black moustache. He wore a gold necklace and was a skinny man, at least a head shorter than Hus. Hus had never understood men who wore necklaces. He believed men who adorned themselves to be vain, in an untrustworthy way. Uncle John saw Hus and waved his hand. “Come, eat!” the man said in his thick accent. He nodded his chin and again waved his cigarette in the air.

  Hus put a hand on his stomach and shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said loudly. “I have to go check on the pups.” He pointed to the doghouse on the hill. Then he stepped off the foundation and dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

  Since the doghouse sat on a slope, at night the puppies sometimes rolled down the hill in their sleep and fell into the deep trench that had been dug for the septic system. Hus counted the puppies in and around the doghouse, then walked along the edge of the trench, searching. Usually he would get Thien out of bed in the mornings to do this. That morning, two puppies whined and clawed at the fresh dirt at the bottom of the trench. Hus felt some irritation that the boy had not been out here first thing to help the puppies. But Thien was a teenager, fourteen now, and what more could one expect, these days especially? Hus hopped down into the trench and picked each puppy up by the scruff of its neck. They kicked their legs and yelped. They were so young that they had not yet opened their eyes. As he held them up and looked into their soft faces, he realized how, in or out of the trench, the world was still dark for them. Hus wondered, could they sense him helping them even when they couldn’t see him? And later, when their eyes opened and they could see, would they recognize him as the man who had helped them?

  Hus carried the two puppies back up to the doghouse where the mother dog was nursing, and carefully set them down.

  Heading back up the hill, he heard voices and splashing. At the side of the trailer around the stump the girls usually stood on when Tran bathed them, the cousins were loosely gathered, bathing, each with a gallon of water, and the girls were instructing them, teetering on their high heels and still tugging at those dresses. The cousins wore their bathing suits, the boys small and scrawny in their swim trunks. They giggled and stomped and shook themselves as they poured water over their heads. They looked a little like chickens. Hus was struck by the realization that these people were his relations.

  He walked toward them, lighting another cigarette, and he called out to them that it worked best if they poured the water slowly. “Just enough to get you wet first,” he said. “Then put the gallon down, and lather up and shampoo. Then, rinse. Out here in the country, we have to conserve water.” As they paused to look at him, he made lathering motions around his body to illustrate what he meant. They smiled and laughed. They put down their jugs while they rubbed shampoo in their hair. Then, one of the boys picked up a jug and splashed water at his brothers. They began to shriek and laugh and chase each other around. Hus waved his arms. “Hey, hey,” he called, “we have to conserve water here. No horsing around now.”

  This was Hus’s design for their sewage system: a large septic tank buried deep in the ground and twenty feet of pipe running the length of the trench across the hillside, attached at one end to the porthole of the septic tank and the other—when it was ready—to the sewage pipes beneath the house. In the meantime, however, Hus planned to le
ave one end of the pipe loose, so it could be dragged up the hill and attached to the waste tank underneath the trailer at least once every week. Thien, wearing thick rubber gloves, would be in charge of this chore. Hus had already shown him the lever that opened the trailer’s sewer tank valve, how it released the smaller tank’s contents into the long pipe, through the trench, and into the larger septic tank.

  Thien had stared glumly, silently, at the coils of pipe as Hus explained all this to him. Hus had tried to make a joke of it, nudging the boy’s shoulder and commenting, “Hey, you may hate it now but one day you’ll realize, this might well be one of the most interesting experiences of your life! How many kids get a chance to man a septic tank every week, anyhow?”

  Of Tran’s two children before Hus, only Thien had been old enough to be aware of the changes they had gone through in coming from Vietnam and his mother’s remarriage. While Tran’s daughter had accepted Hus easily enough, Thien was gloomy and reticent. Hus worried that the boy might be unresilient, one of those simply fated not to adapt well to changed environments. Hus had tried to teach him about fishing, cars, model airplanes —things Hus thought should have interested a boy. But Thien always seemed to listen rather unenthusiastically, though in private, Hus soon discovered, Thien worked intently on the model airplanes Hus brought him, or pored over the photos of cars in books and drew countless pictures of them. Hus took it personally, this stubborn, reclusive enjoyment of his gifts. It startled Hus, how effective an insult from a child could be.