She looked searchingly at me for a minute, then turned her attention to sliding one of the pieces of chicken off a bamboo skewer. She ate. I followed her lead, glad to be doing something non-controversial.
“Come on,” I finally urged her. “It’s a little thing. After the Trade Center, it’s the least I can do . . . help out in some way.” I could see that this statement registered with her. She’d been in the City that morning and had seen the boiling wall of gray ash come racing up the streets. Some things you can’t forget, no matter how much you wish you could.
“Look,” she replied in defeat, “you’re going to go. And on some level, I accept it. I know you want to help and that’s okay.” She looked at me earnestly and I was surprised to see that her eyes looked shiny. Sarah reached across the table and touched my hand. Lightly, her fingers slowly resting on the skin where the small white scars showed. “I just don’t want you getting . . . ” she let out a tight jet of air through her lips as she struggled for a word, “sucked in, okay?”
I smiled at her. “Don’t worry about me, doll.” It was my patented Humphrey Bogart imitation. Perhaps I should have worn my trench coat for the full effect. But it’s crumpled at the bottom of my closet—the various buttons keep popping off and I lost one of the epaulets.
Sarah smiled sadly. “I’m serious. You’re a good man, Connor Burke. But remember what Changpa said.” I nodded. Chanpga Rinpoche, the Tibetan holy man who runs the Dharma House, had once described the martial path as a razor’s edge. One slip could result in your destruction. And he wasn’t talking about simple physical danger. Changpa felt that we harnessed force to a good purpose, but that power is seductive. This path required discipline and care and commitment. To slip, he felt, would destroy you spiritually.
“I know, I know,” I nodded. Yamashita has this awareness, too. He scrutinizes his pupils for years, trying to sense the quality of their character. I had thought for a long time that those narrowed eyes only focused on technique; now I understood that he watched for the indications that revealed something of the inner self, like the
hamon
of a sword blade.
“You know,” she chided me, “but you keep finding yourself in these . . . situations. Don’t you?”
“Hey,” I smiled at her reassuringly, “don’t worry about me. I’m all grown up.” Sarah looked at me skeptically. And I couldn’t blame her. I spend large chunks of my day working with wooden swords, practicing an art that was archaic a century ago. And I’ve seen more bloodshed than I care to think about. I tried a different tack.
“You know why they use young guys for soldiers, Sarah?” She shook her head, no. “Mostly because they don’t know any better. They haven’t seen enough of life to be really scared. And they haven’t built much of a life that they can worry about losing.”
“And you?”
“Me? I’ve been scared plenty.” But I waived that away. “The real issue is that I’ve got too much to lose.” I gave her hand a squeeze. “And I know it. So. I’m gonna go to Fort Bragg and review some manuals. Get some exercise with the grunts. Help them fine-tune some technique. Nothing more.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
She looked skeptical for a time, but slowly relaxed. Maybe it was what I had said. Probably it was more the good meal and nice surroundings. Whatever it was, the night began to get better. We smiled more. And after a while, the waitress brought
sake
. The small white ceramic cups were warm with the promise within. We lifted the cups up in a silent toast. I smiled. I don’t know whether I’m a good man, but I am an incurable and persistent romantic.
Even in the mountains of the tropics, it was cool in the mornings. Hatsue could hear the coughing of the villagers as the morning fires in their huts smoldered into life. Chickens cackled and scratched. The light was burning through the night mist and washing the slopes and the small mountain village in a pearl-like haze. She rolled off her camp cot, her clothes damp with humidity. She shivered into a fleece jacket and rubbed her hands through her spiky hair, cut short for her sojourn into the field.
The field. The floor of the hut was packed dirt. You could smell the earth everywhere in these hills. It was damp and rich and aromatic. She lit her small kerosene stove to heat the day’s tea water. Hatsue had set gauze sheeting over the window and doorway to keep the bugs at bay—and to provide some privacy. She peered out through the screening into the village that had been her world for the last ten months, and the cloth created an impressionist image: a blurred universe of moist greens and dark wood tones. Dirt and wood. The screen netting was a filter that softened the reality somewhat—but not enough.
The Japanese were nature lovers. But their nature was carefully managed: pruned and manicured and manipulated for esthetic effect. Hatsue’s childhood had been a world of razor-neat gardens, postage stamp-sized plots tended with ferocious zeal. Bonsai trees twisted and bent to human intentions. But here, nature was a wild thing, unpredictable and overpowering. Like the smell of earth, it seeped everywhere, a riot of growth and decay.
She sat at the rickety table she used for a field desk. She stared at her hands. They were small and she worked hard to keep them clean, but the line of dirt under her nails was always there. It wasn’t that she did not struggle against it; it was simply that the mountain jungle was too strong.
She felt warmth in her eyes and made a grimace of disgust.
Idiot
, she thought.
Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself again
. She busied herself making her breakfast, the small, sure movements a reassertion of some sort of control.
It will be so good to be back
in Boston
. Hatsue moved some notebooks aside and opened her calendar journal. She carefully inked another day off.
Two more
months. You’ve done it this long; you can hold out ’til then
.
When she had won the research grant to come to Mindanao to complete her doctoral research in anthropology, she had been excited. Her professors smiled quietly and congratulated her, but they looked at each other with strange, private expressions— something in their eyes that had made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t until she had actually entered the field that she realized what they were thinking.
Fieldwork was the last hurdle for an aspiring anthropologist. The academic discipline prided itself on a tradition of sending its young researchers to experience firsthand the peoples and tribes they studied. Hatsue, the product of a tightly controlled and cosmopolitan upbringing in Japan, had been caught up by the romance of studying exotic cultures. There was something so uncontrolled and free about it. She had plunged into graduate studies at Harvard with a determination to excel. She read unceasingly. Debated obscure theory with her equally engaged classmates. Researched and wrote endless papers. It was a world of books and ideas, supercharged intellects and fragile egos. Graduate study had sharpened her mind and her pen. It had made her an able debater. But, despite all her enthusiasm, it hadn’t prepared her for the immersion into a world of primitive hill farmers, of complex personalities and emotions. Sickness. The unceasing sweat of the mountain farmer. The dirt.
Fieldwork was the last cruel trick her professors had played on her.
But she was from a proud family. She had been groomed for success; first at the best preparatory schools Japan had to offer, then at Harvard. She would not destroy her career because of emotion. She would not let her family down. She would persevere.
You occasionally heard stories of graduate students who washed out in the field. Their trips were cut short and they came back, strangely quiet about what had happened “out there.” They lingered at school for a course or two, but if you looked hard at them you could see the essence of an academic career evaporating. Eventually, they simply disappeared as well.
Hatsue knew this would not be her fate. She opened the waterproof locker and looked at the notes she had taken, careful records of observations and conversations, hastily set down at the time, then more neatly organized and analyzed later. Pages of ink—you used pens here because the humidity made the graphite of pencils smudge and fade. She fanned through page after page of data. It was a frequent ritual, a reminder of progress and purpose. And as the notebooks filled and were carefully placed in the locker along with small packets of desiccant, they, too, told her that soon she would be gone from this place.
She set herself to her breakfast and another day.
Villagers were stirring. Someone was hawking up phlegm in the next hut. Children were calling like small birds. An old woman was scolding someone in the rapid syllables of the language of the Higuanon tribe. The thud of a metal blade sinking into a piece of wood set a rhythm to the morning as fuel was chopped to feed the fires.
Morning with the Higuanon, a Philippine hill tribe
, she thought, creating a mental caption for the sights and sounds around her. She wondered how the process of writing up her notes would leach the immediacy of experience from her description. The smell of morning fires, the cool air of the hills on your skin as you set out with the women to the small clearings known as
kaingin
. It was here that the Higuanon hacked out a spot on the hillside to grow their crops: corn, dry rice, water grass, sayote, and white beans.
They were a small people, much like the Japanese, light-footed on the narrow mountain trails. But, despite all her preparatory studies, she had not really been prepared for the plunge into their world. They were a people who had fled to the mountains generations ago to carve a primitive living out of the hillsides, steep and covered with vegetation that sprang from the rich dark soil of old volcanoes. On an island of increasingly militant Muslims and evangelizing Christians, they held to the old beliefs of animism. To the Higuanon, the world was alive with spirits, powers for good or evil. The inexplicable, even the inevitable arrival of sickness and death, were the work of unseen forces.
Hatsue had talked of these things with the villagers, curious and yet skeptical. She wasn’t supposed to judge these people, but she couldn’t hide her disbelief. They, in turn, had laughed at her. She came from the world of cars and radios and other wonders. How could she be so ignorant of the basic things in life? The world was filled with spirits. Of this there was no doubt. When she had looked at them in disbelief as they told her tales in the night, the patient
datu
, the headman of the village, had gently taken her by the hand and led her out of the hut into the absolute darkness of a mountain night.
The villagers rarely left their huts after nightfall. It was pitch dark, and her eyes were still dazzled by the firelight in the hut. Hatsue could feel the hard, dry skin of the old man’s hand as he led her into the village center. The
datu
grasped her by her shoulders and turned her to face off across the valley. In the distance, cherry red embers glowed on a remote elevation. It was Mount Kamatayan, the center of the Higuanon universe. There, the old man explained in the bubbly language of his tribe, the dead traveled to be judged at the end of their lives. By night, their campfires were visible. Even during the day, the smoke of their fires vented from the mountainside.
The mountain was called Balatukan on her official maps. She knew that the fires and smoke were from the venting of volcanic action. But here, in the close darkness, with the jungle breathing on her, the surety of science and cartography seemed distant and unpersuasive. The world was alive, the old one told her.
Hatsue nodded. Later, she noted the conversation in her journal. But she did not write a word about the feeling of unease the conversation had created. In the darkness, the jungle pressed in on her, speaking in the visceral language of the hills.
After breakfast, she joined the women and children as they wound their way along the grassy trail that led to the fields.
Tiger
grass
, she noted almost automatically, vaguely pleased at her growing knowledge. That morning the villagers were gay as birds, the turbaned women balancing rattan baskets on their heads, the children darting along the trail, alive to the slightest diversion. On their flanks, off among the trees, there were benevolent shadows. The
alimaong
, the tribal guards, were with them.
The Higuanon held to the high ground in the hopes of peace. It was in many ways a tranquil life; one measured by the pace of dry seasons and wet ones, of the growth cycle of crops. But the jungle slopes were not always quiet. More than just spirits haunted the deep woods. The Muslim tribes, the old Moros, still struggled for independence. The central government fought back. Truces were made and then broken. There were times when the faint ripping of automatic weapon fire could be heard, even on the high slopes of the Higuanon farms. Hatsue had shrugged off the danger: there were very few places left in the world to study tribal peoples. Most of them were curious blends of shamans and Kalashnikovs, of Stone Age farming and geopolitical struggle. It came with the territory. Literally.
That day passed like most others. Hatsue had long ago paced off the dimensions of the hill fields and inventoried the crops grown. She had reduced what she could of Higuanon life to facts and numbers, but that effort was soon completed and paled in comparison with the challenge of really understanding these people. She watched the daily pace of their lives and hoped for insight through the experience of the mundane.
Hatsue resigned herself to another sleepy day on the mountain slopes, to the buzz of insects and the distant calls of birds, and the desultory conversations with the women. Only the children offered some relief. They hovered around her, fascinated by the spectacle of a grown person who, even now, knew so little about their world. They offered to take her into the forest to show her a troop of monkeys or a tree as old as the world. They brought her curious insects, cupping them in the cage of their small hands and smiling at her feigned surprise. The sun made the fields steam with heat and they moved into the shade of the trees for relief. The weeding done, the adults, Hatsue included, culled the fields for the evening’s meal and collected wood for the fires. She straightened up for what seemed like the millionth time and rubbed the small of her back. An old woman saw her and grinned. The old one’s face was creased and leathery, her few teeth discolored from chewing betel nut. Her ageless brown eyes glittered with silent understanding: she too rubbed her back. Then bent again to pick up another piece of firewood.