She Weeps Each Time You're Born (6 page)

Huyen had first noticed a change days earlier as they packed up their belongings beside Lak Lake. Qui had been sitting under a palm tree plaiting her endless hair into two thick braids, the baby nested in her lap. In the distance a trio of elephants trundled across the shallows, their handlers nowhere to be seen. A canoe floated by carrying some of the local M'Nong people, the boat weighted down with housewares and livestock. It was then as Bà bustled around the yard loading the two-wheeled cart that Huyen noticed how the left side of her face appeared as if melting, the skin going slack. It's just age, Huyen thought, and put it from her mind.

In their two rooms by the shores of Lak Lake she and Bà had
argued about what to do if the central highlands fell. Would it be safer to be part of the fleeing millions pushing south all the way to Saigon on Highway 1, or should they stay clear of the masses and use forgotten trails like this? Bà had said it ran all the way from Cambodia to the coast in one form or another. From her girlhood she remembered new recruits arriving at the rubber plantation near Kontum, the people trudging in from a week's march on the trail, their faces haggard. How the overseer would immediately hand them each a tin bucket and send them out.

In the end Huyen decided they would go as far as they could on small trails following the Serepok east until it hit the Song Cai. From the highlands it was seventy-five miles to the coast. Nights they would sleep in what remained of the brush. In the coastal city of Nha Trang they would join the masses on Highway 1 and push south. Secretly Huyen feared the highway. She had seen mass exoduses before. The lawlessness, the air like tinder. The population realigning itself because somewhere far away somebody had drawn a line on a map, the population fleeing because everyone else was fleeing.

Huyen surveyed the trail ahead of them, the terrain jungly and overgrown. From the looks of it the journey would only get tougher. If you put in the work to sharpen steel, eventually it will turn into needles, she growled, but the adage didn't lift her spirits. Silently they trudged forward, the only sound the cart's wheels rutting the earth as Qui pulled it along.

Their fourth day on the trail was hot, but they were used to it. The elephant grass scratched their necks. Small brown burrs stuck in their hair, the sound of the Serepok always in the distance. The full face of the lidless sun shadowed them on their way. Each day their skin grew darker, except for Qui, who stayed
the same ghostly hue as she pulled the cart along using a wooden bar built for an animal. The baby sat in the cart along with Huyen and some bamboo mats, a few utensils including a rusty cleaver which they used on chicken they were able to catch on the outskirts of abandoned villages. On the second night of their journey, outside the hamlet of Son Trinh, Bà had brandished the cleaver when they heard something rustling in the elephant grass. Who goes there, Bà whispered, but nothing appeared. As a precaution she had taken to sleeping with the cleaver under her head. Already if she lay down without it she couldn't sleep.

Mornings she blamed her dreams on it. Ever since her eyes had soured, her dreams had dissolved into fuzzy splotches of color. But since sleeping with the cleaver under her head, Ba's dreams had taken on a new brilliance, images clear as day. An orange spider the size of a crab lurking in the trees. A white horse grazing under a colony of bats. The French Foreign Legion officer coming toward her with his cold gray eyes, the tip of his burning cigarette that already smelled of scorched skin. Each night, dreams like a river of memories bearing her away in the current.

It was almost noon. Tomorrow they would reach the coast. Qui stopped for a moment and wiped her forehead. She could feel the ends of her braids tickling the backs of her calves. Her breasts hurt. The baby was taking less and less, but her body was producing more and more. Evenings the milk ran silver in the light of the fire as it leaked from her nipples. Along with her ghostly white skin it was her one miracle. Her chest burned day and night. Mornings the ground was damp where she'd slept.

Already the baby was no longer a baby. She was four in the ancient system of reckoning, the months counted in which the unborn are forming in the dark caves of their mothers. Traditionally it was said babies arrived fully one year old with their
little old-man faces wrinkled and red, their old souls hardening in new vessels.

When he had first pulled her from the body bag buried in the ground, Tu had held her up in the light of the full rabbit moon. Love, he whispered.
Ai
. The air glittered with soot. He held her high above his head, letting the silver light bathe every inch of her. The goddess be praised, said Bà, bowing her head and clapping her hands in prayer. Huyen and Qui stood silent. Ash drifted through the sky, sparkling as if sprinkled with mica, then going leaden as it hit the earth.

When Tu brought the baby down out of the moonlight, she was completely clean. No blood or waxy yellow slick coated her skin, everything just soft and shining, her small cap of black hair fragrant as honey.

That night standing by the grave Huyen had spit a long dark stream in the dirt. Love, she growled. She reached over and took the baby from Tu, then handed it roughly to Qui. You name your child Love and the gods will be jealous, she said. The way she looked at him, the heavy furrows gathering between her eyes. As if to say, don't you know anything?

Tu didn't argue. His true love lay cold and dead in a makeshift wooden box at his dirty feet, her head resting in the bowl of her hat. A piece of ash blew into his ear. Frantically he tipped his head. As he pawed at his ear, he didn't see the ring of white words beaming up into the night, the poem he had paid for long ago in its entirety.
In the long river, fish swim off without a trace / Fated in love, we can wait a thousand years / Who tends the paddy, repairs its dike / Whoever has true love shall meet / But when?

Tu looked to his mother, her gray eyes shining. She had a way of knowing things she shouldn't know. Already the baby was cooing in Qui's arms. A piece of ash landed on the baby's forehead. Bà nodded. It was settled. No one would ever call the child Love.

Qui swooped down and picked up the pale blue rice bowl half buried in the dirt and turned back to the hut. The baby suckled on her nipple. The young girl's face went rapt, the feeling as if a ray of light were being drawn out of her body. For the moment the memory of the thing her grandmother had done to her was forgotten.

Huyen watched her granddaughter walk back into the hut. Already the girl was cutting a path through the world like a mother bear, already her appearance less deranged. Huyen grunted, satisfied. She was the oldest among them, older even than Bà by some years. It was right for the others to defer to her. It was how she negotiated the world, how she'd lasted. If you showed any attachment to things, you risked the gods' wrath. It was best to act as if the objects closest to you were of no consequence. Indifference kept the pain from shattering you when ordinarily you should have shattered.

And so the night of the child's arrival passed like a dream. Inside the dismantled hut, the fire burned down in the fire pit. In the distance no blue flames danced on the broken mountain. In less than a week Tu was gone, back to his days in the jungle passing messages and parts of heavy artillery along the network.

Even during the few days he was with them, watching Qui handle the baby out of the corner of his eye, they had begun calling her Rabbit, naming her for the full moon that had licked her clean. The rabbit with its innocence, its youthfulness, its long bright ears that hear everything in the realms of both the living and the dead. Rabbit because the world is full of rabbits. Rabbit because by sheer force of numbers, the rabbit walks among us unnoticed but pandemic.

And even now on the trail east to the highway that will take them south, the baby sits in the lap of the old honey seller, the woman like a second grandmother to her. On Rabbit's face is a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks as
if someone has dusted her with flecks of cinnamon. From time to time across the highlands she will rub her ears as if trying to clear them of something. She can hear the old honey seller's heart beating, the sound filling her small head though no one else hears it, not even the heart itself.

By mid-afternoon they reached the Song Cai. It wasn't as glorious as the Serepok, but it would take them to where they were going. They could feel the earth beginning to descend. Three times Qui took the cleaver to the brush before giving up. They were less than thirty miles from the coast. The forests this side of the mountains hadn't been sprayed with defoliant, but the landscape was rapidly changing, the greenness giving way to aridness. When the wind was right, you could smell the salt. Sometimes Qui thought she could hear the sound of voices carrying on the wind—the sound high and raw like lamentation.

For the past few years they had been working their way down the coast. Shortly after Rabbit's birth, the Americans began withdrawing from the country. Even with the Americans leaving, the war dragged on, the rice harvests left rotting in the paddies or never planted in the first place. In Cong Heo the people ate rats and frogs, whatever the countryside had to offer. When the rats and frogs ran out, Bà with her turbid eyes led the four of them down to Lak Lake in the central highlands, the highlands once the stronghold of the ethnic tribes who had sided with the Americans. They lived beside the lake for two years while the Americans slowly exited. Now that the tribes had been abandoned, everyone was left to fight for themselves, the mountains steeped in blood. It was all a mystery no one could explain. Why a foreign power would come all this way and then just disappear.

Overhead the scavengers were circling on the currents. Despite her cloudy eyes, Bà could feel the vultures' cold gaze.
The birds were in their season. For them it was a time of plenty. All outcomes were possible. How many hours had Bà spent trying to calculate what might happen? Tu's years working the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a foot soldier for the VC should be enough. Theirs was a family of heroes—Bà with a burn between her breasts where the Frenchman had stubbed out his cigarette. But she couldn't be sure their years of service would save them in the eyes of the new government. There was talk of an impending bloodbath. Some said if your family hadn't left for the north during the Great Partitioning of '54, you were an enemy of the people. Bà didn't know what to believe. Only one thing was certain. A great unknown was bearing down on them. Overhead the scavengers circling like a storm.

T
HERE WAS AN HOUR'S WORTH OF DAYLIGHT LEFT. THE EMPTY
sky was washed of color. The scavengers had landed somewhere long ago to clean some poor creature of its flesh. Finally it was time. There was no moon, the sky overcast. Huyen took out an old flashlight. She hit it a few times before the weak light winked on. In the darkness Bà took charge despite her crookedness, her unblinking scar guiding her through the shadows. With her one good hand she took out their mats and the iron kettle with the remaining rice in it. They had just enough left for two more days. They had cooked the rest of it the day before, figuring it would keep until the end. They were all too tired to look for stray brush to build a fire. They lay down right in the middle of the trail. Qui took Rabbit up in her arms and sat down on a mat, opened her shirt. Bà handed her a rice bowl. It was the bowl from the grave of Little Mother, the bowl light blue and chipped along the edge. Sometimes when Rabbit held it, she would move her lips and prattle on as if talking to someone.

Qui jostled Rabbit on her thigh, but the child kept squirming. She forced Rabbit's mouth onto her breast, but the child turned her head away. Qui sighed. She put Rabbit down on the mat and rubbed her hands together until they were warm. Then she leaned forward and began massaging one of her breasts with her bare hands, moving from the base of the breast all the way to the tip. After a while she began to squeeze the area around the nipple with her thumb and index finger. At first the milk came hissing out. After a few more squeezes it shot out in a thin stream, dribbling uselessly into the dirt. When she finished, she switched breasts, milking the other one until it was bearable. Slowly the last light drained from the sky.

As Qui emptied herself, Rabbit lay on her back on the bamboo mat, her legs and arms rigid. She had a way of crying without moving, only her tiny chest expanding as she gulped the air, refilling her lungs, then the silent scream that turned her face
red. Even after Qui finished, Rabbit kept crying as she furiously rubbed her ears.

Bà and Huyen ate their rice cold, Bà's mouth awkwardly hitching up and down like a puppet with a broken string, one side of her face frozen. When Qui was done, Bà came forward with the mosquito net and laid it over the girl and the fussing toddler, the two of them as if trapped. Once long ago on the rubber plantation, Bà had seen a Frenchwoman get married, the young woman the niece of the
propriétaire
. The way the woman floated from the front door of the villa to the shiny black limousine, her veil trailing on the ground, her whole being as if swaddled in netting.

They lay in the darkness, Bà on a mat by the cart wondering where her pipe was, if her dead hand had dropped it somewhere in the brush. She could feel the cold metal of the cleaver tucked safely under her head. In the early part of the night, she dreamed of a wedding party walking through a minefield. The bride was the first to step on one. The noise of the explosion sent a cloud of white doves rocketing up out of the dead trees. The guests froze in place except for the flower girl, who continued to swing her tin bucket as she skipped along through the elephant grass. The child dipping her fingers in the milky white sap, then flicking the droplets into the air.