“No. Would you force the rats to sing your song rather than theirs? Daughter, is there not something crucial to the song being for and from them that makes the essence of the music vital to what it is?”
“Yes. but …” I trailed off.
“Ask daughter. Only in questions does grace unfold.”
“I thought you could do anything.”
She laughed, not a twitter, but booming as if I’d said something hilarious.
“You don’t understand. Life will unfold as it will. There is nothing I can do to save her. She is dead. Do you remember what brought everything into existence, the infinite universes, substance and objects?”
“The coyote said it was randomness.”
“Randomness rules all spaces! Dear child, not even shepherdesses can see but a short way into the future—and, oh my, only those trends so large that we can’t miss them because they are stable and linear. Determinate futures—we can see to their end—but not many. No. No. No, Dear Child. That is why all things must be accountable, both things sentient and not. Those not, must follow such wisdom as is found among all the players struggling to find place in the tick tock of machines and the movement of agents. Those thus endowed with sentience must choose those paths through which they are led. We guide where we can. Offer advice. This is the grace we bring into the world. We offer wisdom. Nothing more.”
“Then you cannot heal a rat wounded unto death? Can you not heal the sick at all?”
“What the mind can do, we can often do. It is a powerful thing. Limits should not be easily assumed.”
Her love was overpowering. She was smiling at me. Her eyes shone like emeralds in firelight.
“Can I come with you?”
She took my hands and I was surprised to find I had two.
“No. But I have counsel. You may take it if you wish. You would be wise to do so. You will doubt this one day. You will question your memory. You will remember how hollowed out and empty you were and you will imagine this but a product of your shocked and ravished mind. But try not to doubt this one thing. You are filled with grace. A grace that comes of being who you are. Objects and events do not change the wonder and complexity of what you have evolved to be. Remember your friends the rats. You have followed our own desires and work in this lifting. We shepherd you and yours, you have done so to them. Remember the songs you have learned. Shepherdess of Rats.”
She turned as if looking at a clock or something in the distance.
“It is time for me to leave you.”
“Must you go?”
“Yes. Father and I are going dancing. I won’t miss that.”
Then she reached down and took my face into her hands and kissed me on the lips, then on the forehead.
“I love you daughter. And love, my dear, is everything.”
My head was racing in strange circles. I held onto her, breathing in her luscious scent and ambience. I did not want her to go. She stood up and smoothed her dress. The rush of emotion bursting through me like an electric current brought forth a sudden silliness because I did not know what else to say, “Your shoes are beautiful.”
She looked down at them and smiled, “Yes they are.” Then she bent down and whispered in my ear, “They ought to be. I am a shepherdess after all.”
She turned as if to go, but paused, her head tilted as if listening. It was the rats. During all this time they had continued to sing, providing a background to Heavenly Mother’s visit that I had not noticed until this minute. She then gracefully walked among them touching them on the head and stroking their backs as their voices continued to squeak out their strange and fantastical music. Then she raised her head and from her pursed lips issued the most lovely chirping I’d ever heard. She joined the rats, taking her turn in holding the notes, pausing when necessary, adding, amending, joining in their aharmonic chords, it was rapturous. I could swear that in the chorus I could hear the distinct voice of Fatty joining in.
The music ended and the woman turned to me and clapped her hands in delight. “Gilda! Look what you’ve done! You’ve brought a new thing into the universe! You’ve created a new niche! Novelty! Newness! Shepherdess of the Rats, indeed!”
She laughed and ran over to me and kissed me one more time, “Now I really must go. But one thing. I know you think you are tainted. That you are poisoned. I tell you in no uncertain terms, you are not. You are not. You are a creature of love and nothing can touch that. Nothing.”
“But, I’m so broken.”
“Oh, my dear child, can’t you see? We are all broken. It comes with existence.” Then she smiled, “Broken yes, but not unhealed. Believe that.”
I nodded, “I do. I do believe it.”
She turned to go, smiling once more at the rats, and as she did I said, “Mother. Please take me with you.”
She turned to me and smiled, her eyes moist and shining, “Not yet. What would Babs think if you left her behind?”
Babs! I’d not missed a day, or more likely, not missed an hour without thinking about her. How could I have forgotten her in this moment of such significance?
“But perhaps I can leave you with a blessing?”
I nodded, unable to speak. She came over and stood behind me and laid her warm soft hands on my head as my father had when he had blessed me as a child. Then she pronounced a blessing. The words she said are gone or maybe my mind never articulated them, as if she spoke in a language that only my heart could understand. But the power, the wonder, and the magic of that moment will ever be with me. I am weeping now just remembering the joy and feelings that poured from her mouth. I remember that snatches of my life appeared. Random events moving backwards in time—I was a young woman playing in a tournament; I was helping my mother saddle a horse; I was a child holding my father’s hand as we walked through a hardware store. Until at last I was nursing, suckling at my mother’s breast. Warm milk poured into my rooting mouth. No, it was not coming from my mother’s breast, it was coming from the shepherdess’s hands, pouring into me, through my head and down my throat like a spirit-filled colostrum abundant with body heat and healing powers. The taste! The joy of it was as if a thousand spring days of sunshine and green sunny mornings were condensing into a thousand summer nights, with stars bright and clear shining through every blackness life offered, scattering shadows rooted deep within the hidden crevasses of my soul, chasing them away like tumbleweeds in an April storm or like ghosts on an October wind sailing off to distances from which they could never return. I saw autumn leaves gracing aspens, dancing and playing in the wind with the sun low and billowy clouds like ships sailing across a deep blue heaven, and too, I felt the glow of a winter moon cold on virgin snow alive with a sparkling dance. It was the milk of passing days. Of laughter. It was singing carols with frosty breath in the dancing lights of a window framed in blinking colored lights, a tree adorned with popcorn and silver in tribute to the child king. I saw me as a toddler capturing bees in a jar and bringing them to my mother laughing and holding me tight as we pressed our ears to the lid as the bees hummed their summer work. It was my old Labrador retriever curled by a fire. My grandmother rocking softly, the soft click of needles knitting. I cried and cried, but no tears of sorrow. The milk was healing me. Bringing me the life that mother’s milk always brought. I was being brought back to life with every swallow. I felt light infusing every cell until I knew they would burst into a thousand new universes. I could bear such joy no more. I turned around and we wrapped our arms around each other and she held me tight and sung a lullaby stroking my hair. I cannot describe it. It was existence itself. When it was over I was shaking. Sobbing for joy. I was changed. Forever.
We both trembled and cried together until finally she pushed me gently away. Then with her thumbs wiped the tears from my eyes, she pulled me close for one more quick hug, then turned and stepped away.
Back into the sky she ascended. As she did however I saw she was joined by others, until there was a small group of people swirling
around her as she and they ascended together—each as magnificent as she.
As soon as she disappeared, the crash and commotion of the camp returned. I sat there numb, and strangely, all I could think of, and all that seemed important, was what she said about being broken. And being healed.
Footsteps approached and the door opened. The rats did not hesitate this time and scattered, leaving the few dead who had been killed in the previous visit lying strewn on the wooden floor.
In walked the camp director, some of his men and the Russian visitors. They found me sitting on the floor, Lumpkin’s blood covering my chest, and the bodies of dead rats lying here and there. They were shocked silent for a moment and then one of the Russians said to the camp director, “Please clean her and this room up.” It was translated and the director gave a reluctant bow and ordered something to one of his men.
Then one of the Soviet officers, a Podpolkovnk Vatutin, the same whose niece had played badminton, squatted down in front of me, speaking as if to a child, “Miss Trillim we have made arrangements for your release. Tomorrow we will return to Hanoi and you will fly with us to Moscow. There you will be turned over to the American Embassy. Do you understand?”
I nodded. I asked if the rats could come. He said he was afraid they must stay. I nodded and the men left. A few minutes later the old woman who collected our bowls came in. She led me to a nearby small river that I did not even know was there. She took off my bloodied clothes. And gave me a bar of lye and lard soap and motioned me into the calm still waters. The bank was sandy and shallow and I had to wade about ten feet to get enough depth to submerge myself. The water was magical and cleansing. I scrubbed away years of neglect. I washed my sheared crop of hair with the harsh soap, and scrubbed every part of my body twice, three times, and finally a fourth time. I did not care that we were not alone and there were other women nearby washing clothes. My body seemed hollow. I was reluctant to scrub Lumpkin’s blood from my chest and breasts, but at last I did. Weeping. The old woman did not seem to be in a hurry and I stayed in the water until the skin of my fingers was wrinkly and swollen. Finally I walked back up the sandy bank and she handed me a paper-thin towel. With it I dried myself as thoroughly as I could. She then handed me not the shabby dirty clothes of a prisoner, but the black shirt and wool pants of the Vietcong soldiers, including a black and white checkered scarf. She gave me a conical straw hat and looked me over approvingly.
As we came into the compound, the other prisoners were returning and upon seeing me dressed in the uniform of the enemy they said nothing, except for the Dutch women who shouted vehemently at me, “Whore!” Their faces however were of such disgust and anguish that their judgment still haunts me.
I was led back to my new room. The murdered rats were gone. The carnage cleaned up. The old woman entered and showed me some propaganda pamphlets written in English that had been laid on my bed. As she turned to go, I wrapped my arms around the old woman and kissed her on the cheek. She seemed surprised and smiled awkwardly, bowed and left.
That night the rats sang for me for the last time. It seemed stilted and forced, as if we both knew this was goodbye, and we wanted to make this last time meaningful and significant, but were trying too hard to make it so, and in the effort recognized things were as they were. I sat on the floor and listened. When it was over, I held a few of my favorites and let them scamper over me, licking me, and squeaking what I took to be their goodbyes. At dawn, I heard the diesel engines starting and intuited that I was leaving. I looked at my friends and started to cry.
“Remember me. OK? Remember Fatty Lumpkin and her grace. Keep singing. Please keep singing.”
Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps and the rats bolted for their exits. One-eye turned just as he departed through a crack in the wall and looked at me and squeaked and was gone.
As you know, Trillim was indeed taken to Hanoi and flown to Moscow. There, after the American counter intelligence officers at the Moscow embassy had extracted everything she could remember about the camp, her fellow prisoners, the trip from the camp, and the Soviet relationship to the Hanoi government, she was flown to Washington where she was met by her family and friends.
I will leave it here. Much has been written about her stay in Vietnam. But I think Gilda’s recently discovered final account that I just reported will suffice better than anything I could add.
Vignette 13: Meditations at Apua Point, Big Island Hawaii. Circa 1972
This represents a well-known fragment from Gilda’s Journal. It is one of my favorite pieces in all of the Archive. Anything I could add would be superfluous and take away from the depth of this work. I therefore provide it without commentary.
No one will find me here. To the southeast hangs the friendly gibbous orb I’ve known all my life occasioning a path of serene white moonlight reflecting across the top of the ocean, fulgent in the breakers. To the north a sulfurous fog steaming off of Kilauea obscures the low stars. They say in a few weeks the lava might reach here and cover this spot. I hope not. Perhaps the ghosts of the ancient Hawaiians will hold it at bay. This is a sacred spot I am told. I gently breathe in good sea air. I am sitting on a spit of land jutting out from an unpretentious lagoon that makes this place susceptible for basking in nature’s sorceries. I am alone. Inhaling the moist oceanic ether drives away the fear, or some of it anyway.
I look back over to my bivouac and see the reflection of my fire against the black lava rock wall that guards my camp. What was that rectangular ruin of piled stones once constructed to be? A temple? A home? A hut for a fisherman who whiled away his time mending net and line to catch his family’s dinner? I want to think temple. This seems the kind of place I would raise one had I the inclination to give into certain temptations. I just cooked a pan of Japanese noodles and opihi that I picked from the wave-caressed rocks this afternoon.
A kind old Filipino man who ran the little mom and pop store in the town of Volcano introduced this delicious shellfish to me. When he saw I had a transradial prosthesis, he asked if I had been in Nam. I answered yes, managing to lie while telling the truth since I was implying that’s where I lost my hand. He told me his son had died there. His eyes watered and we were soon talking, I told him I had been a POW for two years. I don’t tell anyone that, but it all spilled out of me like a confession. Soon we were both in tears telling each other stories that burst from us like some sort of emotional flatulence. Ironic given the purpose of the trip was to leave that event behind.
He then told me about Apua Point, the loneliest spot on the island—a six-mile backpack from the most southern point of the Chain of Craters Road. He told me about the opihi, something he would normally never tell a tourist. He also warned me about the rats that would try to steal my food. He didn’t know that the promised presence of rats would guarantee my visit to the spot. Isolation and rats. What could be better?
The taste of opihi may have been worth spilling the beans about how I spent the last few years. Wow. A delicacy worthy of royalty. A gastropod that clings to the rocks like a barnacle, they are found throughout the islands. I climbed out on the rocks to gather them, watching the untamed waves beating the island back into the sea with such violence it left me holding my breath. With each smash of the waves against the rocky shore, I felt a surge of wrath from the ocean both frightening and exhilarating. One slip and I would be feeding the crabs and fish below.
You have to sneak up on these little hors d’oeuvres. Like the clams beguiled by the walrus and the carpenter in Alice in Wonderland. If you make your intentions known you lose them. You have to climb among them without touching them, then squatting down, work swiftly, by sliding a knife between their shell and the rock, all before the next murderous wave strikes. You can pry them off of the hardened lava with a flick of your wrist, but if they catch what you are about, they clamp down on the basalt and you’ve missed your chance. I don’t even think you could chisel them off the rock face.
Shaped like a conical rice
paddy hat, they are open on one side and therein lies their precious meat, a gelatinous mass that I scooped into the Chinese rice noodles boiling in my tin mess pan. When the shahe fen was cooked, I was delighted to find that the fleshy mass had shaped itself into a little rubber miniature of a snail-like creature complete with a slug-like nose, upraised neck, and little antennae. And the taste? Indescribable. It tasted like all that I fancy in seafood, fashioned and condensed into a single untamed flavor.
My first night I placed the remains of my dinner on a flat rock and waited hoping to lure in some rats. They never showed. I sat near the pebble-sand shore and watched the waves and composed a poem. This one:
The Moon
The woman on the newly hardened rocks
of ancient lineage—was seeing the stars for
the first time in ages. The moon—old friend,
distant comrade—grinned at the cooled lava
as the sea ebbed and rolled at the pahoho’s
black and jagged edge, old friends reuniting.
She stood singleton, alone, a stranger amid the
supposed rats and mongooses that wound their way
among the succulent xerophytes along the shore
(the clever beasts survive by snatching whatever the tides
toss out in its heaving or whatever they can
take from trekkers to this lonely spot,
though none came to her).
She was wild and unafraid of what ghosts
might abound. And of which she’d been warned.
She too, like the kindred moon
and the natal rock, was brewed from the violence
of an exploding sun. She felt the kinship of
an essential and elemental reunion—reunited sisters.
She reminisced. She and the waves and the rock and the
moon told their singular tales and even as poorly
as they understood each other, some implied
Gilda Trillim Page 16