She Weeps Each Time You're Born (3 page)

As she entered the yard, she could see the door was open. Inside, a fire was burning in the fire pit, but the room was empty except for their few possessions—some cooking utensils and a pair of rice bowls stacked on a small table, Bà's hammock strung up under the window. The tin bucket they used to collect water from the creek on the other side of the orchard was missing, a ring left in the dirt where the bucket usually sat. Little Mother picked up her sleeping mat and unrolled it on the floor. Slowly she eased herself down and took off her
non la
. The money was there, but the flower was gone, its little pink bud like a mouth. She took a deep breath and held the hat up to the fire, searching it with her eyes for the words Tu had paid for, had chosen just for her, and how the artist had painstakingly woven them through the lining.
In the long river, fish swim off without a trace
. How the local people believed that a girl who wore a conical hat laced with poetry would become milder, more gentle, the girl effectively domesticated. Like a water buffalo when the farmer takes her newborn—how in her mourning for her baby, the water buffalo will do anything the farmer asks.

Little Mother could feel the hole where her heart should be. The poem was gone, the writing rubbed out from sweat and the daily friction of her head.
Who tends the paddy / repairs the dike?
She considered going back out into the fading light, the mosquitoes beginning to swarm, maybe even going all the way to the
river to look for the missing flower she had been entrusted with, but outside the visible world exploded and the first pain hit.

Bà tottered back into the hut carrying the tin bucket. Outside the sound of the burning sky roared overhead. She put the water down next to the fire and stood still for a moment taking in the scene with her remaining senses, her eyes gray with twilight. I knew the old man wouldn't disappoint us, she said. Quickly she hustled back outside to collect more firewood.

Left alone, Little Mother didn't cry out as her water sluiced down her legs and into the dirt. On all fours she made her way to the door. She wanted to see the mountains one last time. From the doorway they looked like a python after it has eaten a full-size animal. The dream was over, the heat of his hand on her leg. Already the memory of blue flames dancing on the mountainside was fading.

Their last night together she and Tu had sat staring off at the mountains. On the closest slope they could see a handful of blue lights twinkling. She'd sat back and waited. He was always telling her the most beautiful stories, transforming the world before her eyes. Tu cleared his throat. We all carry a light inside us, he said. He told her they were little blue fountains of flame where someone had died and gone unburied, the body's gases escaping into the air. In the distance she could make out four of them, the fires like indigo stars twinkling on the mountainside. Wandering ghosts, Tu said. Briefly he touched her knee. If you meet one, address it as
anh
or
chi
, he said. Brother Ghost. Sister Phantom. She nodded, her young face filled with seriousness.

Little Mother closed her eyes. Pain radiated through her body. She could still see the bright red birthmark on the edge of Tu's hairline, the mark shaped like a diamond. At times it seemed to change with his feelings, the color deepening as an emotion
took hold of him. She would never see him again in this world. She crawled back to the fire and collapsed.

When she opened her eyes again, it was night, the air sulfurous and filled with thunder and lightning. Each time one hit, brightness like hell itself. She could feel the earth tremble, the one-room hut quivering as bits of dried thatch rained down from the roof, the splintery wooden boards rattling like teeth. On her mat in front of the fire pit she imagined what kind of world the planes came from, a land of fire and iron, liquid light, pain and the quiet that comes after. She tried to remember even the smallest scrap of her favorite dream, the heat of his hand on her leg, but all she could recollect was a cacophony of doors swinging wildly in a thrashing wind, the sound of their hinges like broken jaws. It was the only dream she ever had anymore.

There was a piece of rope and a knife and an old gunnysack laid out on the floor. Bà had the fire going strong, her eyes red in the light. The old woman lay smoking her pipe in her hammock by the window. The pipe was carved from an animal's thigh bone, the bowl itself the head of a dragon. Each time Bà inhaled, the creature's eyes burned as if alive. Little Mother knew that when the time came to act, Bà would fly into motion. They never talked about it, how Bà's eyes had soured in the last year, everything gone but light itself, though it didn't seem to slow her down any. The old woman was as she had always been. Up each morning before the sun's first rays, then doing the things that needed doing.

Bà tapped her ashes into a tin can. He will come, she said. The old woman had a way of knowing things she shouldn't know. Something hit the earth. A jar of
nuoc mam
fell off a shelf, the glass cracking on impact. It was the closest one they had ever felt, the thing as close as a mile away. The smell of fish drifted through the room. Even now he is on his way, said Bà, smoke shirring around her head.

Two rats came out of the darkness and stopped at the spot where the
nuoc mam
had fallen. Little Mother turned her head and watched them scratch at the dirt. Then another one hit, the power of a thousand tons lifting her body clean off the floor. One of the rats paused and looked at her. There was no fear in its eyes. Little Mother wondered if she were already among the dead. Finally the animal turned and along with the other scurried out of her line of sight.

In many ways the pain was just like the mosquito sickness, a burning all throughout her body. She would wake for a few minutes, a few brief images limned with each explosion—Bà stoking the flames, Bà fanning Little Mother with her straw hat, the night as if immolating itself, outside the sugar apples bursting on the bough—and then she would fall back into darkness. She could feel a door creaking open in her body. The circular bruises on her skin throbbed as if gasping for air.

A few hours past midnight they ran out of wood. There were hardly any rice husks left to burn. We need to save what we have, Bà told her. And so they sat in the dark, her body's doors opening at a glacial pace, like something fermenting. Outside the world going up in flame.

Toward morning Bà awoke when something landed on her face. The dawn was silent, no animal noises stirring in the growing light. The old woman was sitting in the doorway, her pipe cold in her hand. She could feel the first rays of the morning sun just coming over the mountain and struggling to break through the smoky haze.

Bà touched her cheek where the thing had landed soft as a moth. Another landed on her neck. It was coming down. She could hear it hitting the earth, each one alighting faint as paper. One landed in the middle of her forehead. She wiped it off and
smelled her fingers. It was ash. The little round scar on her chest next to her heart began to grow hot. Little Mother, she said.

Later the sound of an engine coming through the orchard. Bà turns her head toward the noise. For the first time she is conscious of the gray lace glazing her eyes. She wipes her face with the backs of her hands. There is so much to do.

They were walking through the orchard. Judging from his smell, the first boy who arrived wasn't an American, his body as if wrapped in rotten leaves. Bà took another deep breath in through her nose. He wasn't Vietnamese either, not a northerner or a southerner, not even one of the ethnics from the mountains. She heard him call to the others, words like the barking of dogs. How many she didn't know, hundreds of thousands or just a handful, and all of them coming to where the first soldier had called them. Bà could hear the fatigue in their voices, the swinging of their heavy guns against their gaunt bodies. The sun trickled in from the east through the dark man-made clouds.

The first one was talking, saying words she knew were directed at her. Bà pointed into the hut. She could feel the soldier peering into the darkness, following the line of her finger. We must, she said. There's still time. Was he understanding? The scrim burned heavy on her eyes. She made motions with her hands as if breaking open a piece of fruit.

More words were said, then the boy was leading her through the orchard, away from the one-room shelter her son had built. In the crisp morning air she could smell the burnt fruit littering the ground. She remembered the day some months before when her neighbors had been relocated by the Americans, the sound of her childhood friend Hong Hanh's high-pitched keening as the soldiers carried her small body across the road to the waiting helicopter, loose grit whipping through the air, the
whole hut shuddering as if it would simply lift off the earth, Hong Hanh's screams cutting in and out in the wash of the great blades. Mong Yen was a small hamlet of fewer than ten wooden huts. The Americans had cleared the area in under half an hour. Bà and Little Mother lived on the edge of Mong Yen. The day the Americans swept the hamlet, Bà and Little Mother had been curled up like sea horses in the small space Tu had hollowed under the floor during his last and final visit. The creatures of the earth crawling all over them as if they themselves were earth.

The day after her neighbors had been forcibly removed, Bà felt her way through the sugar-apple orchard to Hong Hanh's two rooms. The ancestors' bowls were still there on the shelf in the corner. A sheet of muslin lay in a heap in the dirt. Flies crawled over the hardened rice, a few of them drowned in the small dish filled with fish sauce.

For the first few days Bà picked her way through the orchard each afternoon while Little Mother was off working in the fields. Each day she would change the rice, recover the bowls with the muslin. Some days she would light a joss stick and clap her hands together as she bowed her head before fishing the dead flies out of the
nuoc mam
. By the end of the week none of her prayers had come true, but that wasn't the reason why she stopped taking care of the family altar of her childhood friend. All her life Bà's prayers had never come true. She didn't know anyone whose prayers did.

The final time Bà went next door she stood in front of the altar, the smell of sandalwood spicing the air. A breeze began to blow through the room, though outside the palm trees stood stone still. Then she saw it—a vision of her daughter-in-law lying in the dirt, the girl's stomach swollen and distended, her face as if dead. All week Bà had prayed for just the opposite. Not now. Please. Not in this world. The last time Tu had been with
them, the sound of the couple's long nights of love filling the air which in a culture of one-room households it was taboo for anyone to acknowledge. For as many nights as it lasted Bà lay in her corner pretending not to hear the rhythmic noises and small groans coming from their mat but remembering her own nights of pleasure long ago in a world at war, hoping they were being careful but knowing that they weren't.

Later that day after Little Mother came home from the fields, Bà could feel her prayers had not been answered. The girl didn't even know. She was stirring the rice in a pot over the fire, the aura of the new life filling the room. There would no longer be enough rice to fill the bowl on the altar next door. Little Mother, said Bà for the first time. The scar just above her left breast throbbed. Now you must call me Bà.

And so it had come to pass. Little Mother lying in the dirt in the darkness of their one room, her stomach swollen and distended, her face all but dark. Outside Bà floating through the orchard on the arm of a foreigner.

Finally they arrived at a jeep. Among the soldiers there was more talk like the grunting of animals, the soldiers deferring to the boy who had led her there, the boy their leader. Already he was walking away. It had been years since Bà had ridden in a jeep, not since Terres Noires and the trees that cried white tears. For a moment she felt like a child again, she and her mother with their buckets full of sap.

She could hear the driver drumming on the steering wheel with his fingers. He had yet to start the car. Ash was still wafting through the air. From the backseat, she held her hand out and caught a black flake on the tip of her finger. She was glad to be with these foreigners. It was her own people who would've
ruined everything. Most times the South Vietnamese soldiers would leave a body where they'd found it, not even caring enough to close the eyes.

Within minutes another soldier climbed in the front seat and slammed the door. The jeep fired up, and she was moving, the ash hitting her in the face. The soldiers were taking her to Cong Heo, the old strategic hamlet built by the Americans. The Americans didn't even know what Cong Heo meant. She had a way of knowing things she shouldn't know. The scar on her chest burned like a third eye. She hadn't crossed the river in years. She knew she wouldn't cross it now.

Wait. Bà held up her hand. The jeep came to a stop. Carefully she pointed at the house, gesturing that there was something she needed. The driver and the other soldier considered it, grunting among themselves. They were tired and didn't care, their resignation evident to Bà even as they spoke in their own tongue.
Oui
, she said, in the only other language she knew. She heard the car door swing open. The other soldier helped her out.

And if the glaze had momentarily lifted from her eyes, she would have seen two soldiers digging by the sugar-apple tree, a body bag lying on the ground, the body already in it. She would have seen another soldier hammering together a makeshift box made of splintery wooden boards from her own house. If Bà's eyes had been clean, she would have seen the boy-leader approach the long black bag, unzipping it partway, the boy reaching into the void and placing a single bright circle in the corpse's mouth as someone had done for his own mother years before on the island of Gye-do in the Korean Strait when she died giving birth to him, then sealing the bag up again.