Nobody seemed to notice the rain soaking our clothing and running in rivulets off our faces to join the mud that caked sandals and bare feet.
The fire looked more eerie than cheery and I kept thinking of the witches in Macbeth. The sky grew black very quickly, and the fire and an occasional oil lamp or candle were the only illumination in the village.
I choked down the snake stew. Protein wasn't to be scorned, no matter what it was, and cooked snake was better than raw rat. Besides, it was only fair that we ate the snake. It would have eaten us. Ahn scarfed down bowl after bowl. Finally there was plenty of something hot besides rice to fill our bellies with after all these days.
The heat of the food made my nose and eyes run and every once in a while I had to wipe them on my remaining sleeve. I was shivering then and sneezing as often as Ahn.
To the east, what looked like sheet lightning lit the sky, bright yellow for a few seconds, then died. Other light, streaks of it this time, followed.,Slapping feet retreated from the funeral gathering, toward the jungle. Everyone's aura darkened with apprehension. The rolling thunder of mortars crumped, almost gently, in the distance. The sound gave me an odd sense of security. Then, almost as muted, the
'ba-dada-da-da-da-da,' wait a beat, 'ba da dada da' of automatic weapon fire repeated many times, solo and en ensemble.
Most of the villagers looked quite calm, very much as we did back at the 83rd, as though we were watching a fireworks display. But the sludge of fear oozed out around their individual auras until it lay like smog enveloping all of us. I found myself growing more afraid. Here were no bunkers, just a few flimsy houses, nowhere to go for decent cover.
Suppose my countrymen didn't come through on a search-anddestroy mission but simply opened fire? Suppose the village was suddenly declared a free-fire zone? Suppose some pilot decided to empty his old spare bombs on us on his way back to base? And they didn't even know I was there, I whined to myself, it wasn't fair. They might ill me, and I was American.
Old Huang was carving on a stick, with the children around him. Truong and Hue weren't in sight. I thought maybe I should go see Hue; maybe if I paid my respects, told her I was sorry about her mother, we might be a little friendlier. Her hostility perplexed me. I hadn't done anything to her- just because her rapists had been American men didn't give her reason to hate an American woman.
Hue knelt amid a cloud of incense in front of a small shrine with photos of different people, a few flowers, what looked like a military decoration, a bit of embroidery, and a little piece of wood carved in the shape of an elephant.
I stood quietly in the doorway and waited for her to finish her devotions. The pictures were of men, two of them, and, recently added, one of her mother. A little covered bowl like a sugar bowl was there too. With the incense rose a gray-umber shade of mourning, and like the scent it filled the little hut, scumming the cooking pots, tainting the rice, staining the bedding and the mats.
The longer Hue knelt, the more the mourning color, and the smoke, rose, filled the room, and crept through the corners and cracks of the house to dissolve in the rain.
Her own aura, the bright colors, grew slowly stronger, clearer, until at last she rose. I was going to announce myself in a soft voice, but instead I sneezed.
Hue started and whirled around. A spasm of guilt passed through me for interrupting her, but her mouth twitched very slightly, more acceptance than annoyance. She was still dressed in her funeral clothing, white pajamas, with streaks of mud at the knees where she had fallen on the way up the hill. Her black hair was combed and shining now, the blood, mud, and sweat washed away by the rain.
I made the little hand-steepling bow. Looking troubled, she returned it, nodding over her own hands.
'I-I just came to see how your leg was.' I nodded toward the damaged thigh. Her aura was still less strong there, with flecks of black reappearing. Tissue damage, I thought. The venom was gone, but its toxins would have caused some tissue necrosis, a source of infection, possibly gangrene.
She looked down at her leg, her eyes clouding with confusion. Her aura clouded and swirled again, fogging over with shock. Well, who wouldn't be in shock? She'd almost been killed, sustained a terrible injury, and lost her mother and her baby all in the same day.
I nodded toward her shrine and said as gently as I could, 'Sin loi,' and she steepled her hands and bowed her head again. I wasn'tn sure the
'I'm sorry' I knew was the proper one to use, but she seemed to accept it in the spirit offered.
The light of the oil lamp glinted off her dark eyes.
I wanted to do something, to say something, that would let her know that I understood at least partially, that I sympathized. I dug into my pockets and found the crumpled package containing the last three peanut M&M's. It seemed as silly as the time I'd put my costume jewelry earrings in the collection plate at church because in a movie I'd seen a deposed duchess give the church her diamond ones since God had kept her husband alive. But I couldn't think of any other way to tell her.
'In my country, when someone dies, people bring food to the family.
Please accept this candy as a symbol of my respect for your mother and for your grief,' I said formally.
She looked down at the crumpled package and I expected her to open her hand and let it fall.
Instead, she slit the package as delicately as if it were an elaborately wrapped gift, extracted the three M&M's, an orange, a green, and a yellow, and set them in a triangle on her mother's shrine.
Then she dipped her head over her hands again and turned away from me, confusion whirling around her in a Joseph's coat of clashing emotions. I had to leave it at that, having done the best I could to make friends.
Outside, the wind had risen, carrying with it the acrid scent of smoke, drifting on the ozone freshness of the storm, overpowering the heavy blossom-from-decay fragrance of the jungle, the faint stench of the sewage trenches, and the mingling of incense and snake stew. It was hard to tell now what was war and what was storm. The rumbling and the flashing in the eastern sky could have been either. Rain splatted across the thatches on roofs, dinged on tiles, plopped into mud, and rattled the leaves, creating an ungodly din. The tops of the trees bobbed from side to side, bowing like an obsequious butler in some old movie. The palm-type trees bent easily, giving under the storm until they arched to the ground. The little ditches outside the houses were rapidly becoming substantial moats. Earthenware jars and plastic jerricans were set out to catch rain. People scuttled about like land crabs, spring-green anticipation mingling with the fear I'd seen earlier.
At home during such a storm the dogs would be barking, the cows stupidly heading for trees under which to get struck by lightning, and the cats curled up watching the windows, congratulating themselves on having the sense not to be outdoors. I wondered suddenly where the animals were here. With the notable exception of the snake and Hoe's puppy, I hadn't seen any animals, not so much as a chicken, much less a water buffalo.
Where could they all be? I was never a genius in 4-H, but I knew enough about farming to know that not everything went to market all at once.
My GI patients told me that sometimes, to add to a body count or avoid shooting people, they shot animals, but that was mostly when they were on search-and- destroy-type operations. This village did not look as if it had been searched or destroyed. There were no burned marks on the earth, though I supposed the fast-growing greenery would have covered them up fairly quickly; it seemed that if the ammals had been destroyed long enough ago for traces of other damage to be erased, the villagers would have managed to replace at least a few of the beasts.
My feet, legs, and hips ached from slogging around in the mud.
Everything else was stiffening up too. Snake wrestling used muscles that I had somehow missed noticing in anatomy class.
I popped a couple of Midols without water, since I had no idea what was safe water and what wasn't, and didn't feel like going through the charades it would take to ask anybody, and lay back on the mat.
Sometime in the middle of the night a rocket whistled overhead and woke me. Ahn was not on the next mat, and our hostess, Truong, was missing too. White, orange, and red flashes popped up before my eyes as I glanced toward the door. The war was getting closer. Well, if it was going to kill me, I preferred that it land on top of me. I was too worn out to be curious about the whereabouts of anybody else. I rolled over on my stomach and pillowed my head on my arms, my eyes in the crook of my elbow so the lights wouldn't wake me, and slept again.
woke up when they laid a bleeding man next to me. He miscreamed when they dropped him, and that's actually what woke me. I rolled over, looked at him, and looked
