A Million Shades of Gray (6 page)

“But …” If Ama didn't know, then there was nobody left to ask. “What do you mean? Do you mean … you don't know?” Y'Tin waited for more, but Ama had stopped to think. He liked to think so much that he'd taught himself how to read just so he could learn new ideas. Y'Tin waited a moment for his father to speak again. When Ama didn't speak, Y'Tin asked, “What about Ami? What about H'Juaih and Jujubee?”

“Your mother must leave, and even if she does not, I have to. It's our only chance.”

“But she'll need you to protect her.”

“With a crossbow?”

“But, Ama, the Americans said they would help us. Shepard promised. It must be that they don't know what's going on.” Y'Tin paused, then said excitedly, “We need to get a message to them.” His father sometimes spoke of the Americans coming back, but he hadn't spoken of it lately.

“Y'Tin, they said they would help us two years ago. And what have they done? The Americans aren't coming back, and I say that with certainty.”

Y'Tin stared into his father's eyes. His gaze was steely. Y'Tin looked away first. Now he knew for sure: The Americans weren't coming back. “When will you leave, Ama?”

“We're having a meeting about it tomorrow.”

“Can I come?”

“Of course.”

“I'm not going back to school anymore.”

“Your mother doesn't expect you to. I just spoke with her. Now go on to your elephant.”

Y'Tin turned to leave, but his father put his hand on Y'Tin's shoulder again. “I would die for your mother. But the reality is that dying would not help her.”

“You can kill a man with a crossbow.”

“Killing one man means nothing when there are a hundred men. Now go on.” His eyes softened and he tousled Y'Tin's hair. Then he strode toward the longhouse.

Y'Tin paused at the gate and gazed at the village. It seemed so utterly peaceful. Y'Thon Nie, who was in his older sister's class, was clucking to his family's chickens. The sun was setting on the west side of the fence. Tomas's mother was tending her special eggplants in their garden. Nobody knew how her eggplants grew so delicious. She wouldn't tell anyone her secret. Y'Tin had no secrets at all, but his mother had many. For instance, she wouldn't tell anyone if she'd loved anyone before she married Ama. And she wouldn't tell anyone how she cooked her special buffalo stew.

Anyway, Y'Tin could still smell elephant meat. That seemed like a bad omen. As he crossed through the fields, he saw Lady grow fidgety as she spotted him. She walked toward him but stopped, exactly at the point where she would have had to stop had she been chained. He hoped she didn't try to cross the field. His parents would scold him for not chaining her … or maybe they wouldn't. They had more important things to worry about now.

On the way to the elephant pen Y'Tin again had the sensation that someone was watching him. He looked around and saw nothing. Then he looked anxiously at the jungle. The sensation was so strong that he paused. Still nothing. He continued to the pen. He snapped off a piece of bamboo for Lady, but she wasn't interested. With her amazing sense of smell, she probably knew the Nies were eating elephant meat.

He lay on his back as the first
mtu
appeared in the sky, sparkling shyly. The war was coming just like the
mtu
came, barely sparkling at first and then glowing stronger and stronger. And then as darkness came, all you could see were the
mtu
. He listened to the leaves in the jungle rustling with the wind. He loved the sound suddenly. He loved the wind on his face. He loved lying on the ground quietly. Tomas, Y'Siu, and Y'Tin liked to lie on the ground near the elephants because it felt risky but also comforting. The elephants could step on them—but they wouldn't. That was elephants for you.

The next morning Y'Tin awoke to the rising sun, and his first thought was that he hadn't done his homework again and, as a matter of fact, couldn't quite remember what his homework was.
Then he remembered that he didn't have to go to school today and might never have to go to school again. And all of a sudden, he actually
wanted
to go to school. School had been predictable, but now he
wanted
a predictable life.

“Did you hear the gunfire last night?” Tomas asked. Tomas spent about half his nights sleeping near the elephants and the other half in his longhouse with his family. Y'Siu approached and sat down without even a greeting. That was his way.

Y'Tin shook his head. Y'Tin hadn't heard anything. The first time he had heard gunfire in the distance, he was surprised how harmless it sounded.

“My father says there's a meeting of the whole village today,” Tomas said.

“Yes, I've heard. Are you scared?” Y'Tin asked.

“No … yes. Yes, I am. What about you?”

“Yes. I just want the war to be over. Then we can go back to our regular lives.” Yet even as Y'Tin spoke, he knew he was wrong. They would never go back to their regular lives.

Y'Siu climbed to the top of Y'Tin's hutch and slid across Dok's back. Then the three of them took the elephants down the wide path to the river. At
the river the elephants drank and drank the way they did every morning. Elephants could drink two hundred liters a day. That took a while.

“I'm not leaving without the elephants,” Y'Siu announced.

No one replied. Of course Y'Tin wouldn't leave without the elephants either. But where would they go? After drinking their fill, the elephants wandered over to a bamboo grove, where Lady picked young shoots and then pushed them around on the ground for a few minutes before eating them. Usually, Y'Tin was the last to leave the river, but this time the others lingered as well. Y'Siu lay atop Dok. Suddenly, tears were falling down his face. Though Y'Siu was fifteen, Y'Tin always thought of him as the youngest. His voice hadn't changed yet, and you always had to be careful what you said to him because you might hurt his feelings.

Y'Tin and Tomas glanced at each other, then Y'Tin said, “It's okay, Y'Siu.”

“I'm scared.” He was sobbing now.

“We're all scared,” Tomas said. “Everyone is scared. Our fathers are scared. Our grandfathers are scared. The chief is scared.”

“Y'Siu, we'll live in the jungle. We know how to
hunt. We'll be safe,” Y'Tin said, trying to comfort Y'Siu. Anyway, it was possible that they would be safe.

“I don't want to live in the jungle. I want to stay here with Dok.”

The elephants finished eating before Y'Siu finished crying.

Back at the pen Tomas said, “Don't chain your elephants. If the enemy comes, the elephants may need to flee into the jungle.”

“Go ahead and wander, Lady,” said Y'Tin. He patted her pregnant belly. “I'll be right back.” But he knew she wouldn't wander. She would walk only as far as her chain would have let her. She was so domesticated, he worried that she might not be able to survive in the jungle if something happened to him. For the first time in his life, he regretted that Lady had ever been captured.

Y'Tin, Tomas, and Y'Siu walked across the empty fields. Y'Tin had never seen the fields like that in the morning. Everybody always started working before Y'Tin headed for school. The Rhade prided themselves on how hard they worked. Their whole lives revolved around working. But that didn't matter now.

Y'Tin had expected to find all the villagers talking animatedly about the big meeting. Instead, an eerie silence had fallen like ashes from the sky. The yellow, grass roofs of the houses shivered in the wind. The private gardens and rice paddies were unattended, and nobody seemed to have remembered to let their chickens out. Usually at this time of morning, chickens were clucking everywhere.

At his own house Y'Tin found everyone gathered on the floor of the large room at the entrance. All his relatives had closed their eyes and were holding hands. He had never seen this before, so he did not think it was a ritual. It was
more like they could not stand to face the world at this moment.

He sat down. Jujubee immediately came over and leaned against him. Apparently, she'd gotten a nosebleed, for a small piece of cloth was sticking out of her right nostril. She was usually full of energy, but when she got nosebleeds, she suddenly grew docile and wanted to lie on Y'Tin. Ami kept a supply of small pieces of cloth handy for when Jujubee got one of her frequent nosebleeds.

“Is it a bad one?” Y'Tin asked Jujubee.

“Yes, we've had to change the cloth four times.”

He put his arms around her and pulled her in close.

A gong sounded, but at first nobody moved. It was as if no gong had rung at all. His mother did not even open her eyes. Then Y'Tin's father stood up, and everyone except his mother followed. As the others headed down the ladder, Y'Tin stood uncertainly. “Ami?” he said. “We're going.”

Finally, she opened her eyes. She pushed herself up slowly, as if she were an old woman. Y'Tin waited until Jujubee and Ami had climbed down the ladder. He gazed around the room.
He needed to soak in the moment, to remember his house. Then he headed to the meeting by himself.

Y'Tin watched the men pour out of the bachelor longhouse. Some of them were old, in their late thirties. He wondered whether it might be better in times of war to have no family to worry about. But he couldn't imagine having no family.

The meeting was being held outside because the entire village of five hundred would not fit into the meeting hall. Y'Tin sat in the front because he wanted to see the proceedings up close. The shaman sat near him with his stick. It looked just like a plain stick such as you might find lying on the ground in the jungle. But that was only a disguise. The shaman used this amazing stick to communicate with the spirits. No doubt it would be the stick that would tell them what kind of sacrifices they would need to make today.

The shaman was tall for a Rhade. He was almost as tall as the Americans had been. He was lean except for his stomach, which formed a small mound, like when Y'Tin's mother was first pregnant with Jujubee. But his face was what Y'Tin studied now. One eye was bigger than the other,
and his mouth curled up more on one side than the other. The result was otherworldly.

Some of the men somberly smoked pipes. Y'Tin overheard two old women talking of making a sacrifice to Yang Lie, the great evil spirit. Once, last year, Yang Lie had chased Y'Tin down—Y'Tin had sprained an ankle tripping over a rock one week, and the next week he'd sprained a wrist tripping over another rock. His parents had sacrificed a couple of chickens to Yang Lie, and then Y'Tin didn't get hurt again. So he knew that Yang Lie was susceptible to sacrifices.

The Rhade spent much of their time thinking about the spirits. Every living and nonliving thing was inhabited by at least one spirit, so you had to watch your step all the time. Sometimes his mother worried so much about the spirits that she couldn't sleep at night. Every so often Y'Tin liked to boil an egg and give it as a private sacrifice for his family. So far it seemed to be working, since his family had been prospering for several years. His family was very lucky indeed.

The village chief, dressed head to toe in khaki army clothes, arrived and scowled at the crowd. Everyone fell silent. The chief was very dramatic,
and his face was rarely at rest. He gestured a lot when he talked. It was just his way. He could be talking about, say, whether to eat eggplant or corn at dinner, and he would gesture dramatically and talk very loudly. In fact, his nickname among the boys was Monsieur Loud. Now he cleared his throat and shouted out, “Many of us have been talking informally about what our next move should be. According to our own spies, the North Vietnamese are nearing our village. Every day they are in violation of the Paris Peace Accords, and yet the Americans still don't come to offer us aid.” He leaned forward and paused dramatically. Y'Tin found himself leaning forward too. “We will now ask the shaman for advice about where to go, how much to take, and when to go.”

Y'Tin waited for the shaman to ask the stick. “Asking the stick” meant that the shaman would ask his stick for advice. It was a special stick, and the spirits would speak to him through its movement. He would hold out the stick in front of him, and he would concentrate as the stick shook. Once, one of the Americans drank a lot of rice wine and tried to explain why asking the stick didn't make sense. But it made perfect sense to Y'Tin. How was
it different from what the Americans said about electricity? The power in electricity went through a wire. In the same way, the power of the spirits went through the stick. Simple.

And the village boasted one of the most talented shamans around. Sometimes visitors from other villages made the long trek here to ask the shaman for advice. Y'Tin was pretty proud to live in the same village with such a talented shaman. Now the shaman raised his stick as if his arms were magically floating up, and for all Y'Tin knew, they really
were
magically floating up. The dark part of his eyes disappeared, leaving only white balls for eyes. Y'Tin sat very still, staring at those eyeballs. The chief asked loudly, “What should we sacrifice to appease the spirits?”

The shaman's tongue stretched out of his mouth and wriggled. Once, the shaman's tongue had grown so long, it reached the ground. Y'Tin had not seen it, but he knew several people who had. The shaman brought in his tongue, and his eyes normalized. His hands, which held the stick, began to shake. This went on for quite a while. And then it went on for quite a while longer. Y'Tin had never seen it go on so long. Finally, the stick
stopped shaking. Y'Tin could not hear a single noise from any of the five hundred people present.

“You should leave the village within two days,” the shaman finally said. “Women, children, and the elderly should leave as well. That is the message of Ai Die, great spirit of the sky, most powerful of the spirits, ruler of our world. Each family should sacrifice a buffalo if they have one, a pig if they don't have a buffalo, and a chicken if they don't have a pig.” Then it was as if the shaman turned back into a normal man again.