The Healer's War (34 page)

No wonder. I turned back to her with more sympathy, which I had no idea how to express. I murmured, "Sin loi, Dinh Thi Hue."

Ahn was defensive on my behalf, however, and hobbled over to Hue's bedside and regaled the girl for several minutes, nodding at me, slapping the thigh above his stump with a gesture that said it was now sound as a dollar owing to my expert intervention, and clearly told her I was a GI of a different kind than she had known before. I hoped he wasn't telling her I was the only one of my kind.

She let out a long sigh and lay back against the pillow, her face sweaty and her hair still matted with mud and blood. Her face seemed familiar to me, but I thought that was because she reminded me of one of the patients. She had a banty toughness about her that reminded me of Cammy Dover, a four-foot-eleven biker I'd met at a folk club in Denver.

Ahn picked up her hand and la daied me over to her, and put our hands together. She didn't look into my eyes but inclined her head a bare half inch and muttered something in English.

"She say, 'Thank you, Mao,' for helping her when big snake have her. She say thank you to Ahn also, because Ahn hite big snake, make him let her go. She say Ahn and Mao numbah one team and she love us too much."

I laughed and patted his shoulder. "I say Ahn numbah one bullshitter and full of wishful thinking, but thanks for trying."

"Com bic? What means 'wishful thinking'?" he asked.

But about then Hoa came to the door and gestured urgently to Ahn to la dai. He turned away from the peace conference and hobbled toward the door, negotiating the ditch with more agility than I would have thought possible. I wished we'd been able to save his crutch during the crash.

The little girl appeared in the doorway again and this time la daied me.

Truong frowned at her, but the child didn't notice.

Dinh Thi Hue watched all of this through slitted eyes, as if taking notes.

"It's been great having such a warm friendly chat with you," I said,

"but I gotta go now. Kids. You know how it is. Probably want me to car-pool them to the Little Ixague game or take them to the Dairy Queen."

She blinked, mildly puzzled. Her aura looked a little less muddied now.

I thought I would be able to tell from it if she was losing blood. It would be dimmer surely. The way she felt about Americans, I didn't want to invade her privacy to check under the Army blanket someone had laid across her. Truong bent over her, murmuring something.

The rain started again, a thin gray drizzle. It made a pewter backdrop for the wet brilliance of the jungle.

As soon as I was outside, Hoa took off at a run, leaving me standing beside Ahn.

In a few minutes, Hoa returned, her pace slow and solemn this time, her arms cradling something that turned out to be a puppy.

"This Hoe's friend, very fierce tete guard dog, Bao Phu," Ahn told me.

"Protecting Hoa, Bao Phu is hurt. Hoa want Mao to make better."

Wow. Snake charming, faith healing, and veterinary medicine all in one day. Ought to look great on my r'esumd.

he funeral procession for the old woman was a slow, thin line Tof people bareheaded and barefoot, people in conical hats and B. F. Goodrich sandals, people in what seemed like patched Sunday best, trudging, sometimes slipping, up the muddy incline, carrying smoking incense that refused to stay lit and stubs of guttering candle protected by open palms or a leaf shield. Children blew noisemakers and pounded on things-a shell casing, the basin I'd used to clean Ahn's wound. The noise, I've learned since, was meant to frighten away demons. I got the feeling from the auras of those around me that having a funeral so late in the day was irregular-that there might be more demons out than usual.

Hue limped, with Truong anxiously offering support and mostly being spurned. Both women wore white with bits of gilt paper and red cloth attached to their hair and clothing. Hue, who should have been in bed after her miscarriage, walked with the help of two friends. She walked hunched over and I guessed that was because the snake must have broken some of her ribs. Ahn and I joined the procession, and he leaned on the old man, Huang, for support and knocked another stick against his makeshift crutch to make noise. I caught up with them and it was all I could do to keep pace with an old man and a crippled boy. I was that exhausted, and the path was very slippery.

Ahn looked up at me with the lugubrious expression of an amatellr undertaker doing his best to look depressed about an improvement in business. He wasn't pleased about the old woman's death, I knew, but with the practicality of the poor and dependent, he knew she was dead and he was alive. The cause of her death was also a chance for him to fit in, get himself adopted and become one of the villagers. He didn't want to dissociate himself from me, exactly. My world had been his home for some time. Together we had done something that earned him a place in this world. But although he was a child, he could not afford to be an innocent. He was hedging his bets for his own survival. His faith in my omnipotence was not what it once had been. Which was in line with my assessment of the situation. I patted his shoulder and trudged beside him.

I didn't understand many things about that funeral, but the need for the incense was obvious, and not just for symbolic or religious reasons. The body already stank-the crushing from the snake would have ruptured the organs and hastened the decomposition. It was carried on a board and draped with a red cloth, jungle flowers scattered on top of it.

Fortunately, the pallbearers walked very slowly and were as sure-footed as mountain goats. There had apparently been no time to build a coffin.

Everyone made lots of noise chanting and weeping, but since I was brought up to think that funerals were hushed affairs where it was almost bad taste for the bereaved to weep in public, I kept still.

Mostly I attended out of curiosity, and, of course, to pay my respects to the family. My own family believed that even if you didn't know or hated the deceased, if you knew someone in the family you turned up at the funeral to show your concern for them. But it was awkward. I not only didn't know the deceased, I didn't know the family, really. And I didn't know anything about Vietnamese funeral rites except that they had them rather often.

This was apparent from the number of stone-covered graves on the breast of the hill. There were probably a hundred times as many graves-just the newer ones-as there were villagers. Many bore small shrines of red-painted wood, rain-sodden paper, and framed photographs, or other objects. We wound our way through them to what seemed to be the old lady's ancestral burial plot where the fresh hole, already filling with water, waited to receive her. The pallbearers were excruciatingly gentle as they lowered her, but the body still splashed a little when it hit, and the red cloth began darkening where the edges sucked in the water.

The people with incense wove tendrils of smoke in graceful arcs around the body and laid things beside it: a rice bowl and chopsticks, a cracked cooking pot, and a book with a French title. Old men in black pajama bottoms, dirty white tops, and coolie hats chanted prayers.

Children in shorts and shirts, some of the younger ones wearing shirts with no pants, kept beating on their pans and artillery shells, crying and wailing ceremoniously, and looking up at their elders to make sure they were performing their roles properly. Their auras were bright as tropical birds against the gray sky, the silver rain, and the collectively dull aura of the adults. Huang lit a stick of incense and after what sounded like a sentence or two would circle the incense over the body. A young pregnant woman tossed flowers, one at a time, on the cloth-covered corpse.

At the proper time, when the old lady had apparently been given the respect due her by her own rites, Hue came forth carrying a small bundle, the remains of her baby, wrapped in a scrap of silk. Her friends helped her kneel. Her breath came in quick gasps. Her face was ravaged with pain and anger, and wet with sweat, rain, and tears as she leaned far into the grave and laid the bundled infant beside its grandmother. Hue's friends helped her to her feet again.

I waited for the people to start shoveling the dirt back into the grave, but after what seemed a time of communal prayer, Huang, Truong, and a couple of the others I recognized from the snake killing started talking among themselves, then broke off and looked expectantly at me. Ahn said something to them that sounded questioning, received a short answer, and turned back to me. "Mamasan, people want to know: what Americans do when bury dead?"

I was so tired I felt momentarily annoyed by the question. What did they think we did?Obviously, we dug a hole and buried people, or cremated them, same-same Vietnamese. But Truong, Huang, Hoa, and the rest of the village obviously wanted an answer, so I said, "Well, it depends on your religion, or the uh-loved one's-religion, but generally we say prayers, bring flowers, and sing a hymn."

Ahn relayed this information. They held another discussion, then Huang said something to Ahn that sounded like an order.

"Papasan say, you sing for Ba Dinh," Ahn told me.

I started to protest but caught papasan's eye. He nodded once sharply, his aura rigidly contained in a red-violet binding of pride, the pride of face. He and the others were trying to do me an honor by including me in the service. If I declined, he would lose face. The only problem was, I never learned hymns. They were usually pitched too high for me.

I stared into the grave. The barest glimmer of aqua leaked around the saturated scarlet cloth, and from the baby's a tinge of blue. I remembered reading on the back of an album cover once that in New Orleans, the slaves used to have parades and parties for the dead because they believed that it was a sad thing to be born into the world, a happy one to escape it. That was why "When the Saints Go Marching In"

didn't sound like a funeral song. I sang the chorus and the only verse I could remember as well as I could by myself, resisting the urge to ask everyone to sing along. I doubted Ba Dinh had been a saint, but her next life, next world, whatever, could hardly be any tougher than the one she'd just left. And the snake had probably spared the baby a sad life as an unwanted Amerasian child of rape.

I sneezed twice during the song, but other people sneezed and coughed and blew their noses too. Hoa threw a last garland of jungle flowers on the grave and we all half walked, half slid down the muddy path, away from the all too populated cemetery, back down to the funeral feast.

I was given a pair of freshly carved bamboo chopsticks and a white bowl that must have been somebody's treasure. Everyone else ate out of earthenware rice bowls. The dinner was buffet style. We filed up to the cookpot, and the attendant on duty-everyone took turns-filled our bowls with snake stew and stirred while the rest of us huddled in doorways, under the nearest trees, and talked. Or rather, they talked.

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.