“They are grateful for your generosity,” said Manee, translating for her.
The ceremony had ended. The head monk had promised the villagers that the mem-farang would come for the ceremony, and she had. Marley stood next to the bodhi tree. She continued to run her fingers over the belt on the wedding dress fixed to the tree, spun with gold sequins, the silk dyed aqua and copper. All eyes were on her. The village women behind the food table stopped serving to watch. The villagers who carried the plates to the monks stopped to watch. Even the monks looked up from their plates.
One of the women gave a plate of food to Colonel Pratt, and another woman handed Calvino a plate piled with rice, chicken, fish and green beans. Marley waved away the plate offered to her. She had no appetite. The villager looked disappointed. She listened to the music, staying close to the bodhi tree and watching the monks.
Manee finished eating and found herself talking to a middle-aged Thai couple. The woman cried, and the man put his arm around her for comfort. They had lost a daughter, and her wedding dress hung from the tree. After the monks finished eating, Marley approached the senior monk to request that he send nine monks to her house down the road. No further directions were necessary; they knew where the mem-farang’s house was.
“Ten minutes,” the senior monk said, removing his glasses and cleaning the lens on the sleeve of his robe. “I will come myself.”
Marley walked back to her car with the others following. There wasn’t much to say. They sat quietly, lost in thought, as she drove the short distance to her house.
Manee broke the silence.
“A fifteen-year-old girl died in a motorcycle accident. Her father is a government official. He had no money to pay for the food and the monks and the wedding dress. He said Khun Marley paid for everything. I saw him with his wife in the front row. They looked happy that their daughter was now married in heaven to a famous Thai singer.”
“Her ashes were inside the sand chedi,” said Marley, using the rearview mirror to look at Manee.
A new, deeper silence fell over those in the car. A rainbow had arced from the colored stones strung like rows of Christmas tree lights around the sand chedi. What had muted Colonel Pratt and Manee wasn’t the rainbow but the mystery of how this foreigner had gone to the trouble and expense of the ceremony. The way she’d touched the wedding dresses and talked to the monks, and the way the villagers had accepted her without knowing her or why she had arranged the ceremony. Calvino wondered how Marley, a mathematician, could believe what the villagers believed. She was a foreigner, and foreigners could only play the game of pretending to believe. Foreigners were among the last to understand the local faith, let alone share in it. Calvino tried to understand Marley’s connection to the ceremony. If it wasn’t merit she was after, that left the acquisition of inside information, data of the kind that would not be found on the Internet. Calvino wondered what bits of hidden information the locals possessed that they’d shared with her.
Marley, the brilliant and rich mathematician who lived in a mansion by the sea, down an isolated road not far from an ancient bodhi tree, had surprised him before. When he’d watched her caressing the tiny dress among the others, all intended for the marriage of the dead girls to the dead singer, he saw the pearl of a tear roll down her cheek. He remembered the first time they’d passed the shrine dedicated to the memory of unmarried women who’d died young. Once she’d driven past it, she’d sped up as if in a hurry to put the tree behind her.
FIFTY-TWO
YOSHI NAGATA EMERGED from the mansion and walked to the main gate. Marley waited until he’d opened it, and then her car slipped inside as quietly as an iguana under cover of night. Calvino glanced back at the familiar figure. His image of Nagata had up to then been of the ascetic dressed in white yoga clothes. “That looks like Professor Nagata,” he said, not quite believing his eyes. The yoga mystic wore gumboots, jeans and a long-sleeved workingman’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His faded blue collar was damp around his neck. He flicked away a fly with the back of his hand.
Marley powered down her window.
“No problem getting the gas at the marina?” she asked.
Nagata shook his head as two stray soi dogs stuck their noses through the open gate.
“None. I filled up the tanks, paid cash. We won’t run out of fuel.”
Marley smiled.
“Professor Nagata arrived last night to make preparations for the journey,” she said.
Nagata saw a look of disbelief on Calvino’s face.
“My father taught me how to sail in English Bay when I was six years old,” he said.
“You bought the provisions?” she asked.
“Everything is ready. When do you want to go out?” he asked.
She had asked him to take charge of organizing the memorial service.
“As soon as the monks arrive,” she said.
Manee looked through the back window.
“They are here.”
The color of saffron filled the space between the bars in the gate. Nine monks stood outside, waiting to be summoned in. The morning had started at a bodhi tree. They’d performed a ceremony to celebrate the marriage of a dead unmarried Thai girl with a dead singer. The sea memorial ceremony, their second act, allowing a blessing of the spirit of an unmarried Burmese girl who’d died with child.
Colonel Pratt climbed out of the back of the car, walked to the gate and invited the monks inside. He watched the nine monks silently file into the compound. A couple of feet away his wife stood, head slightly bowed, her tapered fingers forming a perfect wai as they continued around the back of the mansion. After they had passed, Calvino saw husband and wife exchange a look. He tried to understand what it meant—understanding, peace, love, respect, whatever name it had, the effect communicated the strength of their connection, illuminated a spiritual space they shared.
A novice would have asked the senior monk why the rich mem-farang had paid so much money to honor a dead Burmese. The Thais had little love for the Burmese, and it would not be in their memory for a Thai to have done this. Why would she do something so strange? Even the senior monk would have no idea how to explain such behavior except that foreigners think in a different way. There had been sightings of Rohingya in her compound. People gossiped. The monks listened to what people said. They also believed what the government told them—the authorities were doing everything they could to help the Rohingya. Villagers and monks alike believed what they were told to believe. That story excluded the part about the Rohingya boat people who’d died off the shores of Thailand or those who’d been forced into slavery. They knew almost nothing of the Rohingya escaping a pogrom in Burma. The authorities told them the Rohingya were faking, lying Muslims who could cause problem in Thailand.
With the monks inside her compound, Marley wanted to tell them the true story. But this wasn’t the right day, or the right time, after a rain, a rainbow over a sand chedi and a full belly while sitting in the shade of the bodhi tree. Normal monks lived a simple existence. They didn’t know of matters in the outside world. It wasn’t important for them to know, perhaps. What mattered wasn’t their knowledge of how those they blessed came to die. What they brought were their chanting and presence at sea, as they believed that the lost ones at sea would hear their names called in those chants and rise to the heavens. Psychoanalysis, thought Calvino, was for the living and not the dead.
Lost at sea was a type of missing person case that he’d never had walk into his office. Finding people who’d gone missing on land was difficult enough.
Nagata approached Marley, greeting her with a smile. She stood beside the car, instructing two servants to take the monks to the boat.
“The marriage tree ceremony ran longer than expected,” she told him.
“We were halfway from the marina in Jomtien when the squall rolled in,” Nagata said.
Marley stood beside Calvino, who had gone around to her side of the car. She introdu
ced Colonel Pratt’s wife. Manee hadn’t taken her eyes off the mansion, with its Doric columns, circular driveway and manicured hedges and gardens off to the side.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“The rain was beautiful,” said Nagata.
He spoke with the awe of a child. His tone touched Colonel Pratt.
“Rain and mercy are companions,” said Colonel Pratt, guiding Manee along a footpath around the side of the mansion.
Marley turned around.
“I like that,” she said.
“So did Shakespeare: ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,’” said the Colonel, quoting The Merchant of Venice.
“To be once blessed is more than enough,” said Yoshi Nagata.
“Later, when we return from the boat, we’ll have tea in the house,” said Marley. “I’ll take you to your the rooms.”
Manee pondered what marvels awaited inside the house.
“I’d like that very much,” she said.
Calvino sought to come to terms with the idea of Yoshi Nagata as a sailor. Nagata easily bounced from one identity to another—mathematics professor to yoga teacher to mystic to doorman to sailor—like a sure-footed child landing each foot dead center on a flagstone path.
The grounds of the mansion facing the sea had walls on both sides sloping down to the beach about fifty meters away. A private pier had squid boats lined along one side of it. On the opposite side of the pier, the nine monks sat at the bow of a fifty-seven-foot yacht. As they approached the boat, Calvino saw several familiar faces standing at the stern. He saw Judy from the Mae Hong Son refugee camp. And there was Sarah from Wisconsin. And there, between them, dressed in white slacks, a hat and sunglasses, was his secretary.
Ratana removed her sunglasses and waved as she caught sight of Calvino. She looked happy to see him, breaking away from her companions to greet him in person.
“Khun Vinny, you are finally here,” she said.
He shot her a crooked smile.
“Working overtime, are we?”
“Working all the time,” she said, slipping alongside him as he walked to where the others waited.
Marley had kept the women’s appearance a surprise, thought Calvino. Ratana disappeared below deck. By the time Calvino had settled onto the boat, she had reappeared in a traditional Thai raw silk dress. Flowers were pinned in her hair. She exchanged wais with Colonel Pratt and Manee, who had gone to the salon.
“I arrived last night with Ajarn Yoshi,” Ratana said. “There was so much to do. The boat, the monks, the ceremony... Too much for one person.”
“You volunteered?” said Calvino.
“We all volunteered,” she said, glancing over at Judy and Sarah.
Calvino saw how Marley organized everything—by the numbers. Marley took his hand in her own and gave it a squeeze.
“I wanted the people who touched Ploy’s life to come today,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right otherwise.”
Calvino followed Marley to the bridge and she sat in the captain’s chair.
“You’ve been in that chair before. Did your father teach you how to sail?” asked Calvino, as she checked the gauges and flipped the controls for the twin engines.
“I am Norwegian and a Canadian west-coaster. The sea and boats are in our blood. It’s like teaching a bird to fly.”
“I grew up in New York right next to the sea, but I never learned to sail. I navigated the streets and that’s in my blood. The only birds I remember were pigeons shitting on drunks sleeping on doorsteps.”
Nagata untied the bowline from the cleats, and then the aft and forward spring lines, before hopping over the hull as Marley powered up the engines. He jumped on the stern and they were under way. Below deck Ratana and Manee admired the wreaths laid out on a table. Sarah and Judy huddled in the salon, their voices lowered to a whisper. Colonel Pratt left the women in the salon, continued to the galley and checked out the three cabins and two bathrooms. He estimated a couple of dozen people could squeeze into the quarters. All this space for six people, he thought. In most of Asia six people would have fit into one of the cabins.
As Colonel Pratt returned to the salon, Nagata wielded a calligraphy pen, writing names on pieces of rice paper that the women then attached to the wreaths. Nagata finished with a calligraphic flourish to write Ploy’s name. A second wreath next to Ploy’s had a name that the Colonel didn’t recognize. It wasn’t a Thai name, or at least one he’d ever come across. It didn’t look Burmese or Muslim. The name was Skuld. Yoshi placed the banner with “Skuld” on a wreath of red roses, carnations and chrysanthemums. It was otherwise stripped of any identity and that made it stand out against’ Ploy’s wreath which had her photograph and two other photos—of her mother, father and brother—had been pinned.
Nagata saw Calvino staring at Skuld’s wreath, made with orange gerberas and white chrysanthemums.
“That one’s for Ploy’s unborn,” he said.
“The unborn child had a name?” asked Calvino.
“‘Skuld’ comes from a Norse legend. It means destiny or the future.”
“The name came from Marley?”
Nagata returned a smile, tilting his head as he attended to finishing his work on the wreaths.
“It’s a beautiful name, don’t you think?”
Calvino was going to ask about the doll’s dress on the bodhi tree when Colonel Pratt asked Nagata about the third wreath, which featured white orchids.
Nagata was happy to explain: “The wreath is for the Burmese who were killed at the Mae Hong Son refugee camp.”
More than thirty refugees had died in the fire. The wreath might be the only commemoration for their loss of life, thought Colonel Pratt. It had been left to foreigners to make the arrangements. The Colonel felt sad, even depressed, touching the flowers. More disturbing was that he knew no one back home who had any sympathy for the Rohingya—a dark-skinned people with cruel mouths and large black eyes. Being at sea with monks and foreigners honoring the death of illegal migrants was the Colonel’s introduction to civilian life. He allowed himself thoughts he’d screened out as a man in uniform. Only now he couldn’t stop such thoughts from flooding his mind.
Why had people like him shoved dark-skinned men adrift at sea with no motor, no water or rice? Put them in cages and sold them like livestock? But if your house is broken into and overrun by strangers from another land demanding food and shelter, what do you do? He went back and forth on the problem, unable to find a satisfactory answer. At that moment he didn’t think of Shakespeare. He thought about his father.
What Colonel Pratt’s father had taught him wasn’t about boats; it was about fate. His father had said that fate neither loves nor hates. Instead, like the monsoon floods, a person’s fate or the fate of a group depends on karma. Fate washes over all lives. Some will inevitably drown; others will survive. Why one lives and another dies is something only Buddha knows. Letting go of attachments is the first lesson toward finding the strength to swim against the riptide that is life.
People had always been like that, Colonel Pratt thought, never questioning or seeing that what they thought or believed was wrong, or that it could be based on fear or ignorance. The Colonel had no doubt that he would have to answer for his role either in this life or the next. He felt good to be clear of the department, the petty politics, the jealous rivalries, the need to look away so often that his neck shot with pain. But no physical pain ever matched the suffering of the human heart.
Colonel Pratt touched one of the orchids on the third wreath, the one for the dead in the refugee camp bombing.
“Beautiful orchids,” said Manee, touching the top of his hand.
“We’ll grow orchids at the new house,” he said.
“Yes, we will,” she said, squeezing his hand, telling him in her way that she’d forgiven him.
Ratana gla
nced sideways at Nagata, who smiled radiantly as she admired his finely crafted calligraphy on the three wreaths. They’d gone nearly a kilometer from the shore when Marley cut the engines and the propellers stopped. Nagata lowered the anchor. The swell of the sea softly swayed the boat.
Calvino stuck his head into the salon, saying, “Marley says the monks are ready.”
The sound of their chanting filtered from the top deck throughout the boat. Calvino returned to the main deck where Marley, barefoot and chin lowered, now sat in the lotus position on the bow. The nine monks sat in front of her. Nagata, Ratana and Manee each brought up a wreath. Judy and Sarah crept forward and sat alongside Marley. Both women hugged her. Soon Marley rose to her feet and walked erect with her shoulders back. Towering above Ratana, who knelt on the deck, Marley leaned down to accept the wreath Ratana held out. It was for Ploy. Marley turned and held it out before the monks before moving silently to the railing and dropping it over the side.
Ratana bowed her head and waied the monks.
Nagata handed her the wreath for the unborn child, Skuld. Marley stared at the wreath, a shudder emanating from her lungs and emerging as a short, sharp cry. Finally she swung around with the wreath, facing the monks. She stood as if she were made of stone. The chanting continued. With tears streaming down her face, she then went to the railing and gently released the wreath as if it were a bird she was setting free.
She was spent and collapsed beside the railing. Calvino went to her side.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Give me a minute,” she said.
The Marriage Tree Page 34