A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Read A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Online
Authors: Robert Olen Butler
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories
Butler, Robert Olen
Perseus Books Group (2012)
Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.
A GOOD SCENT
FROM A
STRANGE MOUNTAIN
Also by Robert Olen Butler
Fiction
The Alleys of Eden
Sun Dogs
Countrymen of Bones
On Distant Ground
Wabash
The Deuce
They Whisper
Tabloid Dreams
The Deep Green Sea
Mr. Spaceman
Fair Warning
Had a Good Time
Severance
Nonfiction
From Where You Dream
A GOOD
SCENT
FROM A
STRANGE
MOUNTAIN
STORIES BY
ROBERT
OLEN
BUTLER
GROVE PRESS
New York
Copyright
© 1992,
2001 by Robert Olen Butler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
First published in
1992
by
Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York
This Grove Press edition includes two stories—"Salem” and “Missing"—not included in the original collection.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butler, Robert Olen.
A good scent from a strange mountain : stories / by Robert Olen Butler.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 9780802193896
1. Vietnamese Americans—Fiction. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Fiction. 3. Louisiana—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552. U8278 G66 2001
813’.54—dc21
00-066310
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
07 08 09 10 11 12 13 12 11 10 9 8
FOR JOHN WOOD
The stories in this book have appeared in the following places: “Open Arms,”
The Missouri Review;
“Mr. Green,”
The Hudson Review;
“The Trip Back,”
The Southern Review,
reprinted in the 1991 edition of
The Best American Short Stories;
“Fairy Tale,”
The Virginia Quarterly Review;
“Crickets,” syndicated by P.E.N. and broadcast on National Public Radio’s “NPR Playhouse” “Letters from My Father,”
Cimarron Review;
“Love,”
Writer’s Forum;
“Mid-Autumn,”
Hawaii Review;
“In the Clearing,”
Icarus;
“A Ghost Story,”
Colorado Review;
“Snow,”
The New Orleans Review;
“Relic,”
The Gettysburg Review,
reprinted in
New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best 1991
; “Preparation,”
The Sewanee Review;
“A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,”
New England Review,
reprinted in the 1992 edition of
The Best American Short Stories
and in
New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best 1992
; “Salem,”
Mississippi Review,
reprinted in the 1996 edition of
The Best American Short Stories;
“Missing,”
Gentleman’s Quarterly.
CONTENTS
A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN
A GOOD SCENT
FROM A
STRANGE MOUNTAIN
OPEN ARMS
I have no hatred in me. I’m almost certain of that. I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn’t matter. In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this, and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I’ve been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.
There are others I could hate. But I feel sorry for my enemies and the enemies of my country. I live on South Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana, and since I speak perfect English, I am influential with the others who live here, the West bank Vietnamese. We are all of us from South Vietnam. If you go across the bridge and into New Orleans and you take the interstate north and then turn on a highway named after a chef, you will come to the place called Versailles. There you will find the Vietnamese who are originally from the North. They are Catholics in Versailles. I am a Buddhist. But what I know now about things, I learned from a communist one dark evening in the province of Phu’ó’c Tuy in the Republic of South Vietnam.
I was working as an interpreter for the Australians in their base camp near Núi Ð
t. The Australians were different from the Americans when they made a camp. The Americans cleared the land, cut it and plowed it and leveled it and strung their barbed wire and put up their tin hootches. The Australians put up tents. They lived under canvas with wooden floors and they didn’t cut down the trees. They raised their tents under the trees and you could hear the birds above you when you woke in the morning, and I could think of home that way. My village was far away, up-country, near Pleiku, but my wife was still my wife at that time. I could lie in a tent under the trees and think of her and that would last until I was in the mess hall and I was faced with eggs and curried sausages and beans for breakfast.
The Australians made a good camp, but I could not understand their food, especially at the start of the day. The morning I met Ð
ng V
n Th
p, I first saw him across the mess hall staring at a tray full of this food. He had the commanding officer at one elbow and the executive officer at his other, so I knew he was important, and I looked at Thp closely. His skin was dark, basic peasant blood like me, and he wore a sport shirt of green and blue plaid. He could be anybody on a motor scooter in Saigon or hustling for xích-l
fares in V
ng Tàu. But I knew there was something special about him right away.