She Weeps Each Time You're Born (2 page)

W
HEN LITTLE MOTHER TOOK OFF HER
NON LA
UNDER THE
jackfruit tree, Lam knew what he had to do, and he knew what he wasn't capable of doing. All his long life he'd been the hand that shields the candle guttering in the storm. And now this young woman was standing in his yard underneath the jackfruit tree, the cuffs of her loose black pants dirty from paddy water. It was obviously the mosquito sickness, the kind that can eat twenty pounds off a grown man in under a week. Yes, it was definitely the mosquito sickness, but there was something else. He tried not to stare. Her pregnant stomach was stretched tight, her cheeks sunken, gums receding as if she had already died and nobody told her.

He was just coming back from gathering the wild peony root. With his cane, the errand took twice as long. The flower grew in a small grove along the road to the mountain. He had heard that on the other side of the mountain the landscape was bombed flat, empty C-rations and discarded magazines and clothes and everything the Americans no longer wanted strewn in the places where the butterfly bush used to flower.

He lifted his cane and motioned for her to follow him inside. A jackfruit fell from the tree and broke open, the smell instantly on the wind. Little Mother nodded and put her hat back on. Something shimmered at her feet. Lam blinked and rubbed his
eyes. When he looked again, it was gone. He was an old man, older than Uncle Ho would have been were the old patriot still alive. He was old enough to remember the famines brought on by the Japanese army and their insatiable hunger for rice. Still, he knew what he'd seen shimmering at her feet—a ring of words shining in a perfect circle on the ground around her. Sông dài cá lội biệt tăm.
In the long river, fish swim off without a trace
. The sunlight streaming through the reeds in her hat.

Then Lam heard the sound of a door banging shut in the wind. His nearest neighbor was more than a mile away. This is what happens when you live in two worlds at once, he thought, but all he said to her was come.

His two rooms were just off the road along a bend in the Song Ma, the river an impenetrable red. No one was allowed on the other side of the Song Ma, the area declared a free-fire zone where anyone remaining could be shot without question. In the last year he had taken down the paper lanterns that hung from the branches of the jackfruit tree. Without the lanterns it was still obvious somebody lived there. Even on the eastern side of the river, it was best to be cautious, not attract attention. Sometimes when a convoy of trucks would rumble past, his house would shake, the planked boards rattling, the palm leaves thatching his roof rustling as if a strong wind were blowing.

Inside he offered Little Mother his only stool, turning it so the few stray pieces of reed sticking out of the warp were to the back. She bowed before taking his hand and easing herself onto it. He smiled at her humility. They say the Emperor has a throne of solid gold in his summer palace, he said. Can you imagine such a thing? She didn't answer. During the last war he had treated a Vietminh soldier with a blood infection who claimed his mother had worked as a cook at the palace. The soldier had
said as a child he and his cousins would sometimes play in the many splendid rooms, the Emperor away for most of the year. The soldier didn't move when Lam stuck a needle in the top of his head, all of the soldier's joints swollen from the infection, his knuckles big as grapes. Once I sat on it when no one was looking, the soldier whispered. Sat on what, said Lam. The throne. The needle wouldn't stay in. A drop of blood appeared, beading on the scalp. What was it like, Lam said. The soldier gazed into the fire, the flames raging in his eyes. Finally the needle took, the metal ringing at an imperceptible frequency, vibrating like the wings of a housefly. The soldier didn't flinch as he answered Lam's question. Like sitting on a mountain of corpses.

Little Mother placed a hand on her swollen belly. In the firelight, shadows ravaged her face. In places her scalp was visible, her hair patchy as if moth-eaten. Child, Lam said. The word hung in the air. The time is late. The medicine will do for you what it can. He could hear the sound of flies buzzing among the overturned crates heaped with clutter in the other room where herbs and flowers hung from hooks. Rows of glass bottles lined dusty shelves. In each one floated insects, tiny birds, embryonic reptiles.

With his finger he began to draw a figure in the dirt. He made a star at the top of the head, a large X at the base of the spine. Then it was time, the flames the right shade of gold. Are you ready, he whispered. He could feel his heart ticking in his chest. Gently Little Mother reached out and took his hands, drawing them to her face. He uncurled his fingers to let her have a closer look.

In the center of each of his palms was a spot like a moldy thumbprint, the skin pitted with a deep green scar the size of a coin. When he was younger, he would sometimes chase small children playfully through the market, holding his open hands up in front of his face, the green scars like unblinking eyes. It's
who I am, he said. She let go of his hands. The clock in his chest was pounding. We have to get the blood moving, he said. Let the light in. Little Mother nodded. I am an old man, he added. Please. Quietly she took off her shirt. The skin over her belly was stretched tight like an animal hide dried in the sun. He couldn't help but wince.

Even Lam is surprised by the steadiness of his hands, though there has always been a gentle knowingness in his touch. He lights a scrap of paper on fire and drops it inside a small bamboo jar, then places the mouth of the jar on Little Mother's bare shoulder. The jar tightens, the lip adhering to her skin as the fire burns up the air inside, creating a vacuum, the body's internal pathways invigorated as the darkness within is drawn out of the blood. After a while he lets go and the jar stays fixed where it is. Then he lights other slips of papers, drops them in other jars, attaching each one to a different spot on her body. The smell of burnt paper fills the room.

When he's done, he stands back. She looks arboreal, arms outstretched, her body wreathed with burls. Something in the way she holds her arms in the air reminds him of a tree. He imagines sitting under her boughs and opening his eyes as if for the first time on earth, her limbs bursting with white fist-sized flowers. Lam gasps, the memory of a long-ago afternoon suddenly flooding his heart. Life is a wheel. That love should summon him again through the curtain of all these years. There are times when one must prune the tree that bears the fruit. The new life has to come that day, that very night. He must do all he can. There is nothing and everything to lose. He lights one last strip of paper and drops it in ajar. Quickly he attaches this to the root chakra, the volatile door on the lower back.

The drawing of toxins to the surface of the skin. Like drawing light out of the darkness. Little Mother's body covered with mouths, each one breathing clean and fresh. Her eyes heavy-lidded,
both open and closed. The seeing into a thousand rooms at once. An orchestra of doors and hinges, worlds opening, jawbones rattling in the wind. The body wheeling through room after room. Sometimes in the quest for health, one must purposely inflict damage. The tree pruned back so that the fruit will flower.

Will it come tonight, she whispers. Yes, he says, patting her shoulder, but he says it mostly to reassure himself.

Gradually the jars loosen and drop off one by one, and where each has been, a dark circle remains. Technically they are bruises, like kisses that bring the blood up to the surface of the skin, the blight patterning her body. The fire burning in the corner of the room begins to die out.

After her skin has cooled, he helps her to dress. For a moment he thinks he sees the skin of her belly trembling, but it is probably just a trick of the late-afternoon light. Together they walk outside to the jackfruit tree. He has done all he can. He of all people should know that when the heart breaks, there is no salve. Around them the air hangs fetid with the wet heat that follows the southwest monsoon. On the ground the ants are already dismantling the ruined fruit.

Wait, Lam says. He hobbles back inside. He returns with a peony, its pink bud furled tight as a fist. Tell your mother-in-law Thuan I am her servant always, he says, pressing the flower into Little Mother's hand. He thinks of Thuan and her old-woman eyes as though rinsed with milk. If he were a younger man, he would run a needle through fire and take Thuan's face in his moldy old hands, carefully lifting the cloud from each of her eyes. He imagines that when he finished, Thuan would rise from the stool and behold him as he used to be, both their bodies once again young and flawless.

Little Mother nods and tucks the flower in the weft of her hat. She has never heard anyone call her mother-in-law by her given name. She knows Bà will be happy to get the peony, her milky eyes shining. For a second time Little Mother pats the flower with her fingertips, securing it in place. Everywhere the small bruises jewel her skin, each one the diameter of a child's wrist.

Three times Lam waves off the crumpled piastres she offers him. Please, she says, her eyes fixed on the ground, as each time he refuses. Finally she tucks the money back up in her conical hat. Grandfather, she says, turning to go. In the next life I will serve you. He places a fist in the scarred-green palm of his other hand and bows deeply. It isn't until she has fully disappeared around the bend in the road that he stands back up.

T
HE BRIDGE ACROSS THE SONG MA HAD LONG SINCE BEEN
destroyed, but the little basket boat was still sitting on the near shore, bobbing in the current. There were no oars, just a series of guide ropes one could use to pull the bamboo boat back and forth. This was the last place she'd seen him. More than eight months had passed. Little Mother still remembered the shape of Tu's neck under his hat as he pulled himself across the water, the birthmark gleaming on the edge of his hairline. They had walked to the river hand in hand through the dusk, the bats just starting to stir. Something buzzed in her ear, but she didn't swat it, not wanting him to remember her as anything less than stoic, Little Mother eager to demonstrate that she would be all right in his absence. They both knew the time had come for him to disappear, the war changing the land around them. As he slipped across the Song Ma, Tu didn't look back. The sound of water lapped against the sides of the boat as he melted into the landscape, her heart slipping away from her body.

Little Mother studied the sky. There was an hour left until sundown. The old medicine man had said it would come that night. There was nothing else to do. On the far shore the rope was fastened around an iron hook set deep in a rock. She found the other end where she had left it tied up to the roots of a mangrove tree. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat, the water hot around her ankles as she stepped in. Swiftly she pulled herself across the river, though it was mostly the current that carried her. The water coursed so dull red and matte she couldn't see anything in it, not even her own reflection.

On the other side of the river she stepped out of the boat and crawled hand over hand up the bank. Just five months ago there had been a cluster of families living on both sides of the Song Ma. The families had made their living fishing and ferrying people and goods across the river. For the past few months the charred
remains of their huts dotted the shoreline. Over time the blackened heaps looked less and less like the remains of houses. It was hard to say who'd done it with any certainty. Little Mother took a deep breath and held it as she hurried past without looking. The patriarch had gone running back into one of the burning huts to find his granddaughter, the thatched roof like a woman with her hair on fire. Neither the old man nor the girl were ever seen again. Little Mother half remembered meeting the little girl from time to time, her hair done in two mismatched braids, one longer than the other, a space where her front tooth was missing, the head of the new tooth just starting to show. The grandfather had been a fisherman. He was known far and wide for fishing with a snow-white cormorant, the bird an albino, its eyes a bloody pink. Until the fire, most nights the grandfather and the bird could be seen together floating on a simple raft, the old man's long gray beard in stark contrast to his bald head. In the weekly market Little Mother had heard that the man and his granddaughter were somewhere still walking the earth. She imagined meeting the two of them, the blue flames of their spirits roaming restlessly through the dark. From the look of things, with the next good rain the last of the wreckage would wash down into the river, everything as if nobody had ever lived there.

A half mile down the road Little Mother came across the carcass of a wild sow. Its teats gleamed like big brown buttons up and down its bloated gut. Most likely the creature had eaten something poisonous. There was no noticeable trauma, though its mouth gaped, its yellowed tusks long as fingers where the gums had receded. Little Mother wondered if she herself looked like that—gums drawn so far back her teeth as if twice as long.

By the trunk of a black palm she stopped to rest. In the distance
the Truong Son Mountains were hazy with ash. It happened often enough that she had learned to sleep through it, the nightly rumble of distant planes. Each time it started, the night sky would light up. The next morning ash would shower down, a black confetti floating as far as Qui Nhon on the coast.

The moon was just on the edge of the horizon as Little Mother rounded the final bend, the sugar apples coming into view in the yard. The one-room she shared with Bà was west of the Song Ma in the southern corner of the province. The first few months of her marriage things had been quiet. Then a small weapons cache was found buried in a field outside Hau Bon. The farmer said he hadn't worked the field in years, that he left it fallow as a place for the spirits of the rice to live, and that everyone for miles around knew it, but he was carted off to Pleiku anyway. After that, everything changed. Evenings she would see people floating through the hamlet she had never seen before, their accents hard to place. Across the Song Ma a village chief was killed. Someone draped a sign around his neck.
PUPPET
. Then one by one Tu and the other men of fighting age disappeared, some like Tu joining the Vietcong out in the jungle, others just slipping away. The bombings in the Truong Son Mountains began to physically change their topography, the peaks leveled, helicopters landing at all hours. And now the whole fifty square miles west of the river had been declared a free-fire zone. The Americans ordered everyone out. Tu said the Americans were trying to stamp out the Vietcong by banishing the local people. No people meant no food, no aid. In a free-fire zone the Americans could shoot without asking. Anyone remaining was assumed to be VC. Bà had begged Little Mother to stay, saying they would be all right because they were harmless, two women
in the middle of nowhere, and besides, how else would Tu know where to find them when he returned from the jungle? Most of the other villagers had left for Cong Heo, the strategic hamlet in Binh Dinh Province, though Cong Heo had long since fallen into disuse. Little Mother had heard there was a wooden fence with razor wire running along the top, a ring of bamboo stakes all around the compound, the stakes gone soft with rot.