Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

  We turn. I row and feel the power of my arms as I pull. A small smile is on Yiey’s lips. When I find Rosa’s light, I follow it across the spine of the river and bring our small boat back to shore.

  Pilot yelps with joy and hunger—it’s way past breakfast—to see us come back. On the dock, my body still rocks with the sea, but I look out to where I rowed. “We came back,” I say to Yiey. She is matter-of-fact, busy with her fishing pole, securing the fish. “Now we cook,” she says.

  I look out. All that space out there. Maybe that is mine. Maybe Luke will explore, too, and what holds him will lose some of its power.

  THE SOLDIER NOT HERE

  Yiey has filleted the fish and fries it in a skillet. She says that if you dream a baby, it means a baby will come live with you.

  “The soldier not here,” she says.

  I think of both the little Pol Pot boy with the ax and Luke Sanna at Rye Harbor. I shake my head. “He is not here.” I step away. They are both not here. I close my eyes. I stretch my body across Luke’s in my mind.

  Yiey brings a piece of the fish to my mother, who has dark half circles under her eyes. She’s not sleeping. My mother breaks it into bites and slowly brings each bite to her mouth. My grandmother and I watch the movement of her hand and her mouth.

  My grandmother pulls the red kitchen chair in front of us, sits with one hand on each of our thighs. Strong hand, patting.

  “She is good karma, this one,” my grandmother says.

  I feel the weight of her body press against my knee. “Me?” I say, surprised. “I have good karma?”

  She cocks her head with her lips pressed slightly together.

  “Maybe,” she says. “You help me remember when I was a girl and we catch magic fish.”

  Because of Luke, I think, I could go on the water and bring back a fish.

  I feel the ache of my arms from pulling against the water. My mother eats her fill of the fish, and I think of the doctor calling the baby “big boy.” He’ll probably grow up with a craving for sea bass caught in March from the middle of the river. Where is Luke? What do I do with the stories I told only him?

  YOU SING

  “You need fresh air,” I tell my mother. “You need rosiness in your cheeks.” She is large and glum and exhausted looking and sallow, as well. “Maybe it’s good looking for berries in the woods.” She achieves a half smile.

  Then I tell her, “I missed you all the time. I had this song I sang to you.” I say this without emotion to my mother.

  We are silent. Our hands are busy folding warm clothes from the dryer.

  “You sing,” Yiey says.

  I shrug, sing a few lines.

  Ma sings to me, her long hair flowing.

  I love her more than the dark loves dawn.

  I don’t go on. This is as close as we will come to expressing affection. It would also be true to shout, I’ve always always hated you.

  “Your mother come here to stay because I say. She want to, but she scare. It is bad karma to not take care your kid. No matter how hard your life, you have to take care your kid.”

  Yiey likes the house very hot. I am wearing only a T-shirt and leggings. With my father, we kept the heat so low, we bundled in sweaters, sometimes snow pants. But Yiey said, too cold.

  My grandmother rubs my back. Her fingers are strong.

  “I remember the rabbit,” I say. “From my childhood. I thought my father told the rabbit story, but he said it was you. About looking for the rabbit in the moon. I was happy when I looked for it.”

  My mother shakes her head. “A children’s story. When you were little, I told you, look up there at the moon. See the rabbit? I would roll a ball of sticky rice and pop it in your mouth. You would stare and stare, and chew the rice and look for the rabbit.”

  “It made me happy,” I say again.

  “It a Buddha story,” Yiey says. “One time the Buddha is a rabbit. The rabbit have no food to give the god, so he throw himself on the fire. He give himself. The god thought, this rabbit is loyal. He make the fire grow cold and the rabbit not die, and the god paint his picture on the moon. And now the rabbit on the moon and he is stirring pot, a potion that he drink and he live forever. That a true story.”

  “You mean immortality?” I say.

  “Yeah,” my grandmother says. “The rabbit on the moon is about ancestor and how the Buddha honor them. He make them live forever.”

  I think of Rithy. Now I hold him, too, like my mother and grandmother. I have his story.

  My family rides in the curve of the moon.

  Luke would like this story. Maybe the ghosts would be more content and settle into their old bones and Luke would sleep.

  - - -

  “Mom, I’m hungry,” I say. Relieved to not talk anymore, she waddles to the kitchen. She begins rice in the cooker. Soon the house smells like basmati rice. While it cooks, she brings my grandmother and me bowls of hot tom yum soup with tamarind broth. I sit cross-legged on the couch and slurp it down. Then my mother brings steaming rice with red chilies and spring rolls we dip in green mango sauce; she pours from a pot of jasmine tea. We’re not done.

  She brings us a platter of bananas fried golden in batter.

  We sit back, all of us with our hands on our bellies.

  It feels like the first whole meal I’ve eaten with my mother since I was five. My belly is full.

  “If you see the rabbit in the moon you are blessed,” my mother says. She believes this bodes well for the new one.

  But no sooner have we eaten than her contractions start. “Maybe they won’t do the C-section if he wants to come now,” my mother says through grimaces. Yiey puts on her coat over her sarong, and we pack up to go. Then we ride three abreast in the truck to go to the hospital. The moon comes with us, too.

  I imagine many things in the moon. A bump for a pot, a crack for an ear. The rabbit stirring the potion of immortality.

  LUCKY BOY

  I am holding Heng, “lucky boy.” My father drives back to New Hampshire, both he and his deckhand, who wants to see his kid. My father comes to help us. He lectures my mother, his first wife, like she’s my older sister. “Don’t go back to that guy. He’s poison for you.” He tells her there’s an apartment in Newmarket a buddy of Pete’s is trying to rent. He tells her. She nods, like a teenager, looking at help wanteds on my computer.

  My father takes over the couch by the woodstove. His boat’s in Virginia, but he stays a while and fishes a few days here with Pete.

  Heng and I are surrounded by every plastic infant product sold in America. All the Cambodians in New England have come to see Heng, bringing a plastic bathtub, car seat, baby rocker, baby crawler, high chair, hammer toy, a mobile of tiny giraffes that plays him songs in the crib.

  Heng is too tiny to believe. He does one thing very well. Eat. He loves to eat. Pilot stares in amazement and abject envy. Pilot has to wait for sunrise and sunset to eat. This creature, so little a fisherman would have to toss him back for another season’s growing if he were a fish, eats around the clock.

  My grandmother is soaking spring roll wrappers.

  I put the baby, who finally fell asleep, in one of his plastic bassinettes. I have printed out various forms for my business plan project at school. Now I’m filling out federal permit forms, state forms, all the forms for a CSF.

  My father shakes his head at the forms.

  “By the books,” I tell him. “By every book the government wrote.”

  “If you got the heart for it,” he says.

  My mother signs the forms. I ask her because she is over twenty-one. She does this solemnly.

  “We got dogged,” my father says to my mother, Rosa, and me one day when he comes home from fishing. We are working on forms at the kitchen table. “Net full of them.” He means dogfish.

  He and Pete truck what monkfish they caught down to Gloucester. I know he gutted the monkfish on board. They are the ugliest fi
sh in the world, but the reason he guts them isn’t because no one should have to see how ugly they are. The ugly head and dagger teeth are half the body, but he guts them because the meat is in the tail so the tail is all they bring in.

  Rosa says she and her mom will kitchen test some good dogfish recipes and we could make dogfish a delicacy if we open a CSF in the summer. Sweet New Hampshire dogfish. She’s also imagining small concerts we could do beside our CSF. A girl band would build extreme excitement, she says, and draw people to our market.

  Now Rosa’s in. We don’t know what to call our CSF, so we ask my grandmother, “What should the name be?”

  She does not wonder. She says, “Magic Fish.”

  “We’ll call it Magic Fish CSF, Portsmouth.”

  - - -

  “Do you like fish?” Rosa says, trying out a marketing plan. “Buy it Fresh from the Boat. Support Seacoast Fishermen. Today’s recipe: Sweet Dogfish Marsala.

  “We’ll get a map of the Gulf of Maine to show where Johnny goes, and we’ll also have never-ending recipes for cooking the tail of a monkfish. Tastes like lobster!”

  My father watches Heng in my mother’s arms. My father is thin as a tree and bronzed. That’s what Chincoteague did to him. Heng is jowly. He wears incredibly tiny Mickey Mouse sneakers from Auntie Rosa. I lean over to the baby and wipe his fat lips that pooch out sideways while he sleeps.

  He wakes, and my father holds him for a while, but when Heng’s lips start to crinkle and before he can let out a cry, my father hands the baby to my mother. Pilot stands by whoever holds him, and when he sleeps, Pilot lies beneath his baby crib, her head on her paw, waiting.

  LOVE SONG

  I stand alone by the window in Mr. Murray’s room and watch the tug that has been guiding that same tanker up the river all semester.

  At seven thirty Mr. Murray walks in. He wears a white scarf around his neck, the same white as his beard, which I think he has trimmed. He looks at me and nods his head, like he assumed, of course, Sofie Grear could be here.

  “I just want to know,” I say. “Have you read Maggie Cassidy?”

  “Beautiful story,” he says, taking off his scarf. “A love song to Lowell. A love song to Jack Kerouac’s people. Have you read it?”

  “My friend Luke and I read it. And we read it to each other, different scenes.”

  I don’t say how sometimes we read it stretched across his bed, and sometimes we put it down to kiss.

  “Thank you, Mr. Murray.”

  “Any time, Ms. Grear.”

  I go to my locker.

  Good. That felt good. Just to touch Luke in that tiny way feels so good.

  PEIRCE ISLAND

  Pilot and I drive to the spit of land where she loves to race the birds, out beyond the Fisherman’s Co-op. She races. I walk the length of the small island and stand at a semicircle of rocks overlooking the dogleg of the river. A breeze lifts from the river. Looking west, I see the Memorial Bridge, the Sarah Long Bridge, and in the distance my bridge, the arch rising over I-95.

  Across the river, cranes at the Navy Yard lift at an angle to the sky. If I stayed till sunset I’d hear the bugle call. Not Taps. But in my mind I can hear Luke whistling it for my grandmother, and I can imagine the notes coming across the river from the shipyard sound system. The memory of the sound fills me, and I see Luke at the window, whistling the notes to the words I always add.

  Day is done,

  Gone the sun,

  From the hills, from the lakes, from the skies.

  All is well,

  Safely rest,

  God is nigh.

  The notes press on my heart.

  “He will chase the ghost,” Yiey had said. “He help Srey Pov. He need time to take care himself.”

  I look out over the rocks. Sometimes I see seals even in winter. They could be rocks until I see their eyes staring back. Souls of the drowned. Luke had hope in the seals and their mysteries, imagining how a living creature can transform and endure.

  I call Pilot. She is busy, her licorice tail pointing, her right paw lifted, as she finds me a bird. I call again. She releases. We race with the wind round the curve of the land.

  Rosa catches up with us, and we walk in the pebbles down on the beach before I go in to work. It’s mid March, and already the air’s different. It doesn’t cut into my skin.

  “I missed your opening at the Press Room,” I say.

  “I was breathtaking,” Rosa says. “I’m officially a country western star. I wore boots with five-inch heels.”

  Rosa has small Mickey Mouses painted on her fingernails over coral-pink polish. Her hair is down today and curled around her face.

  “I did come to your birthday,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “How is seventeen?”

  I will remember seventeen as the year that I found it easy to slide into Maggie Cassidy and grasp a gun in my hand. And fire it into the Atlantic Ocean. And I loved a soldier.

  “Seventeen,” I say. “I was a Spanish dancer.”

  STICKY RICE

  It’s another work day. Soon I’ll I step into Dunkin’ Donuts, Keeps You Running.

  Vincent will say, “Good of you.”

  The orders will start coming through my earpiece. Vincent’s tattooed fingers will dance on the register.

  From the couch I see the mailman come up the walk. He’s got a package way too big to put in the slot. At the door he hands it to me—an oversized mailer, bumpy and as long as Yiey’s bass.

  It’s addressed to me.

  I look at it a long time, still standing at the door. The baby is asleep. My mother is wearing a blue sarong and is preparing sticky rice. She has put the steam pot on to boil. When it boils, I know she’ll drain the sticky rice in the bamboo steam basket, then rest the basket over the boiling water in the pot.

  I put on my plaid jacket over my sweatshirt, the one that I always wear now with my Mason Oil cap. Luke would tease me and say I look like I work in a gas station.

  I take the envelope outside. The small skiff is on its side by the chimney. I right it so its flat bottom is in the snow, which is down to only a foot or so. I step inside the skiff and sit. Lift the hood of the sweatshirt over my cap. I turn the package all around. It has no return address.

  I peel the tape and rip the perforated seal. What’s inside is wrapped in a layer of heavy brown paper. And under that, a layer of sheer paper, like tracing paper. When I get to the sheer paper, my hands start to shake. I can see.

  I let the brown paper fall, then lift the picture, painted on cardboard, from its thin sleeve.

  Luke has sent his painting of the medic with his fingers on the pulse of the child. There’s the jagged splotches of polish on the child’s nails. He has added something. I still can’t see their faces, only the downward turn of the medic’s head, the black and white American flag. But now, in the little girl’s fist is a lollipop, pale cream with swirls of pink and turquoise, a little bit chewed on already. She’s holding it firmly, upright.

  He said, We never know what happens, we move on. But with the swirling lollipop he added, the story seems to shift. Maybe the child has a chance for healing. Maybe now the picture has hope.

  - - -

  My mother is still cooking. She is barefoot. I see her small steps as she moves from the stove to the sink. It’s a tiny kitchen, and she moves back and forth. It becomes like a dance, step toe, step back, step toe, pause, or lift on her toes as she needs to reach something.

  I unlace my boots and take off my socks and step onto the kitchen linoleum beside her.

  She puts her finger to her lips. I nod.

  She shakes the rice to loosen it in the bamboo basket. I take the basket and flip the rice to steam on the other side. Yiey taught me. She slices a mango, which she’ll serve on the sweet rice. We open the lids of the individual serving baskets. Six baskets in a row on the counter. I imagine how Luke would paint them, the baskets in the morning light, the bright orange of the m
ango.

  As we work, my bare feet move across the floor like my mother’s.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many memoirs contributed to my understanding of growing up during the time of the Khmer Rouge. I’m indebted in particular to authors Loung Ung, Chanrithy Him, and Seng Ty. Thank you to colleagues at the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I once taught English, and whose work supports the lives of Cambodian Americans.

  Michael Pawluk, New Hampshire fisherman and friend, answered my questions with patience for years as he worked with changing regulations. Thanks to Mike and Captain Steve Lee, who invited me aboard the Kirsten Lee. Veterans at the Manchester Community College Vet Center told me of their experiences in war, of coming home, and of their respect for medics who supported their units. Thanks especially to Brian Taylor.

  Thank you to Melanie Kroupa, my first reader, for her profound instincts on how to create story. Thanks also to Tracey Adams, Andrew Karre, John Mort, Jeannine Atkins, Cynthia Lord, Toni Buzzio, Megan Frazer Blakemore, Mimi White, Elizabeth Farish, Debra Lastoff, Raymond Kong, and especially my editor at Carolrhoda Lab, Anna Cavallo.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Terry Farish is the author of the award-winning verse novel The Good Braider, selected as a YALSA and School Library Journal Best Book for Young Adults and an American Library Association Outstanding Book for the College Bound and Lifelong Learner. She leads literacy programs for immigrants and refugees from around the world with the New Hampshire Humanities Council. She lives in Kittery, Maine.