around the dinner table. In the center of the table was a bowl of fish curry. On another plate was a roasted chicken. Then there was a green tomato salad. The family knelt around the table on blue velvet cushions, and there was a blue cloth spread under the plates. The father stretched his hands out to each side, and her mother and Sunny took hands with each other and with him and he said a blessing over the food. An electric fan in the window sprayed puffs of air and the scent of palms back and forth through the room, ruffling a few loose strands of Emma’s hair.
There was a knock on the door. She saw soldiers on the doorstep. Emma picked up her child and held her aside, out of the way. Nu came and took her then, sheltered her. The father was flustered and pink. Boots came in on the floor. Flies were on the curry. The fan went back and forth. Sunny was afraid. Her mother was still chewing a bite of dinner, swallowing, trying to get it down.
The father had been exposed as a Christian missionary and was immediately taken captive by the military junta. He understood them perfectly when they explained themselves. General Ne Win himself had approved his execution, the soldiers told him. General Ne Win just wanted to do things right. He did not deny that Bob Butcher was a fine scientist. Any who knew him might have volunteered to say that he exhibited nothing but the most excruciating charisma and honor. He never offered any woman his left hand, or touched any man on the top of the head. But the general had to, as he put it, crush all who sought to weaken the union.
But how did it happen these men in gray from over the mountain came again to their door, and penetrated the laboratory, and opened the secret cabinet full of Bibles and hymnals? Who told the tale that led the flat-faced soldiers to take Bob Butcher down to the post office, along with a dusty box of smuggled whiskey which he had attempted to use as a bribe? No one wanted money in Burma. You could bathe yourself in emeralds that you dug from your backyard, but you couldn’t eat them, smoke them, or use them to kill your neighbors. Look at the stupas, covered in gold. But no one can get a bus across town. So who cares about the clinking offering of one sweating missionary?
AFTER HER HUSBAND WAS taken away and the door had been slammed in their faces, Emma Butcher’s heart raced in her body. She went into their bedroom with her small daughter, holding her by the hand. She took a golden nat, an image of one of the ancient Burmese gods, out of her dresser from underneath her nightgowns. While her daughter watched, she put this nat, The Young Lord of the Swing, into the living room of Sunny’s dollhouse in the corner. From a pocket of her robe came a stick of incense, which she lit, hand shaking, and placed in front of the little house. Sunny came to kneel beside her, with Nu. Nu was stern and smiling; she sang a song. They watched the godlet sitting on the little rag mat before his bamboo chairs and table. Sunny ran to the kitchen and came back with a grape. This animism the women of the house had hid from Bob Butcher the way he had hid the Bibles from the Communists. Over her dozen years of service, Nu had taught it to Emma, and Sunny had learned it from the both of them. Everyone sneaking around having their religious ceremonies. Baptism and fruit sacrifice. Communion and incense. Smells and bells.
Emma prayed for blessings and protection. Life went on without her husband. A letter came to them after a week. Bob Butcher was imprisoned in Rangoon and his execution was set to happen in four days. She called Sunny in out of the tea garden and began to pack up the house. She gave Sunny a small linen bag and told her to choose whatever treasures she could fit inside, not too heavy to carry herself. Sunny chose the golden nat and some of her braided hats. A flowering branch from one of the garden trees. The family teapot. Emma packed a few of their clothes and then meticulously gathered all the notes from her husband’s research. She filed them all into a leather case with a collection of bottles and vials, and everything that was left she gave to Nu along with a packet of money. Sunny cried when she left her nurse, saying “Nu-nu” over and over. Emma cried, too, and said, “Nu, as soon as I can, I will send for you. Don’t worry. We will see each other again.” They left the cottage at the bottom of the mountain forever.
They traveled to Mandalay on one seat of a terrible bus, Sunny on her mother’s lap, holding her nose and sometimes crying. Emma sat erect, her face without tears. She kept her eyes forward and her mouth quiet, even her tongue. She used a little money to buy them some sour food that they did not like, that Sunny would not eat. She wished she could nurse her daughter again, but Sunny had weaned. It would make her feel better.
They came to Mandalay this way. From the dusty place they stood, on the shore of the Irrawaddy River, it was not beautiful. Kipling notwithstanding, they could see neither the Moulmein Pagoda nor the dawn coming up like thunder. They could hear wind in the palm trees, though, carrying dust along with it, a dry wind that made them thirsty and twirled Emma’s hair and the ends of Sunny’s head wrap. In the end, they found a way to get down the river, in a ferry piloted by a fat man who traded their journey for Emma’s personal Bible. It took ten hours to get to Rangoon.
The triangle sails of the round-bottomed fishing boats made sharp peaks against the horizon. The pointed horns of water buffalo marked where the animals were dragging plows along or wading in the shallow water. Nothing else rose up. Small farming villages hugged the shores of the warm flat river and long teak canoes slipped along, driven by poles or paddles. Emma clutched Sunny to her chest and gripped their bags between her feet. Nearby, an old person sitting in a large basket was lamenting being born a woman. A young monk crouched on his heels under the railing. His head and even his eyebrows had been shaved in an initiation ritual. Emma shuddered. No one could sleep on a boat like this, even on the Irrawaddy River. You couldn’t tell a regular monk from a government spy wrapped in an orange blanket.
ANOTHER MEMORY. THEY STOOD, linen bag and leather case in hand, in the square before the elaborate Sula Pagoda in Rangoon. Sunny could remember the shape of her mother’s face, it was so serene. The gold point of the shining pagoda rose up in the center of the building, layer on layer of gold getting smaller up to the very top. Around the central peak was a golden fence and there behind that fence, some people were congregating. The day was hot and Sunny was not well rested. She hung on her mother’s hand. She let her head fall back against the top of her shoulders, her neck going slack. At the very peak of the pagoda’s spire, there was an extra little hat shape and a beautiful star.
Her mother shifted her weight but did not lean on the white wall behind them. She stood straight. In the square, Sunny saw a woman with gold rings around her neck. The rings were stretching the neck to double its natural length, and on top of this great neck the woman’s head was wrinkled and flat. She saw the great white chinthes, sacred lion statues, with enormous teeth and their beards green. She saw brown babies carried on their mothers’ backs. She saw a man with one arm and half a leg where his whole leg should be. He was sitting on the ground. She saw hungry children gathered around a bag of trash outside a restaurant. Sunny was only three years old. Her mother had to help her remember, later, what things she saw, and what she knew. Some people were in rags, and some were draped in orange robes. Her mother held her hand. Then some people dressed in brown were hurled off the roof of the golden pagoda, over the golden fence. They dangled under the edge of the roof and swung back and forth, like they were dancing.
Sunny’s mother pulled her away and they began to walk toward the harbor. She asked her mother if they would see her father soon. Her mother said that they would never see her father again. Years later, in front of the Sula Pagoda, there would be a violent antigovernment uprising. Thousands of protesters would be silenced by bayonets in the face. When they had been killed, they would lie down in the street with broken skulls. The protest continued for months, until people began to wonder whether Burma had ever been a beautiful place. Pain was all around. In Burma, things never seemed to get any better. For Sunny and her mother, it was over. They were done with Burma and the Irrawaddy River. They were done with Buddhism and nats and monsoons. They boarded a boat with some other people going to America. They left the entire country of Burma behind.
In the end, the fate of Bob Butcher is murky. But his wife, at last, returned to America, where Sunny began her life as an American child.
12
In her mind, Sunny did not really accept that her father was dead. She did not learn that lesson of the dangling bodies. She believed in her heart that he had survived, and lived. Maybe he had never been put up there, swinging high from the pagoda. After all, no one had seen his face. Maybe he had stayed in the prison, escaping
