Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

“A thousand and fifty years ago?” Siri laughed again, and all the Hmong laughed with him. They were a good audience. “It’s true I am beginning to show my age, but a thousand and fifty years? Don’t be cruel to an old man.”

Nabai spoke. “This isn’t the body you used then. You couldn’t fight off half a Vietnamese with the body you have now.”

“ That’s very kind of you .” That was another Hmong expression. It was obviously a very simple language if he could pick it up just by being around these people. “But if I’ve changed bodies, how do you know it’s me?”

The captain finally lost interest in this fiasco and went off to eat with the guards.

“A body is easy to shed,” Tshaj explained, “but the eyes will always be there. You can’t replace the river-frog emeralds. Zai, the rainbow spirit, turned two river frogs into emeralds to thank the first shaman for giving him more colors. They’re passed from body to body.”

So it was his eyes. It all came down to the fact that he had green eyes. Through the course of the discussion and the meal that followed, he wasn’t able to convince them he wasn’t a one-thousand-year-old shaman, not even by showing them his motorcycle license. Even when they’d persuaded him to stay the night with them, and the captain and the driver had gone back and left him in the charge of the permanent village guards, he still wasn’t comfortable. He felt embarrassed to be receiving food and lodging on the strength of his similarity to Yeh Ming. But he was having a good time.

The business he’d come to resolve had been shuffled to the side somehow. But he thought that as a respected imposter, he’d eventually get more answers than the captain. He was sitting at the edge of the village under a rustic pavilion with the senior men. They were into the second bottle of the most delicious fruit-flavored rice whisky he’d ever tasted.

“I want to tell you all why I’m here,” he said.

Tshaj interrupted him. “We know why you’re here.”

“You do? Why, then?”

“You’re here for the dying soldiers.”

“That’s true. Can you tell me what killed them?”

“Yes.”

Sweet Auntie Suab arrived at the crucial moment. She was a maker and distributor of amulets and she carried a large collection to the table.

Tshaj was annoyed. “Suab, this is a men’s meeting.”

“I’m so sorry, brother. But this can’t wait until morning.” She dumped the assortment of pendulums and amulets and religious and sacrilegious artifacts on the table in front of Siri and stood back. Siri laughed.

“Oh, God. Don’t tell me I have to wear all these.” The others laughed too.

Suab shook her head. “No, Yeh Ming, only one. I blessed one of them with your spell.”

“Which one?”

“You’ll know.”

“How?”

“It’ll come to you.”

Siri raised his eyebrows and looked down at the thirty-something medallions in front of him. He’d pick the wrong one and perhaps they’d take him more seriously as a coroner. The odds were in his favor. He knew it would dispel the magic of the evening, but perhaps that was a good thing.

He reached across the table for the largest amulet. It was an ugly, dust-covered lump. He felt sure if Suab had blessed an amulet for him, she would have doused it, or anointed it, or at the very least dusted it off. This was easy.

But as he reached across, the ever-dangly button on his shirt cuff became anchored on something. He lifted his arm to find he’d hooked a small black prism on a leather thong. The amulet was so old that any characters or images that had once been etched on it were now rubbed away.

“Yes.” Auntie Suab said with a sigh. “Yes.”

“No, wait. That wasn’t fair. Best out of three?” But it was over.

Suab gathered up the failed medallions and, with a satisfied smile, walked off to leave the men and the blessed amulet to their business.

“That was weird,” Siri conceded.

“Aren’t you going to put it on?” one of the men asked.

“Certainly not. I’m not about to start believing all this nonsense.”

“Then you won’t be pleased to hear how the soldiers died,” said Tshaj.

“Don’t tell me it was voodoo.” He disguised his unease with another giggle, but noticed how Lao Jong and a man so dark Siri could barely see him exchanged a guilty look. Because it was one of his duties as head of the village, Tshaj assumed the role of story-teller. The others refilled the glasses and leaned back in their seats.

“The soldiers came half a year ago. They said they were coming to help us. They said they needed to clear forest land so we’d have somewhere to plant crops to replace our opium.

“We’ve always grown opium. We don’t do much with itourselves. Use it as medicine sometimes, eat it when there’s no food. But it was our only cash crop for a long time. It was good enough for the French. They bought every kilo we could produce. And the Americans refined it in Vientiane and sold it to their own troops in Saigon.

“But the good People’s Democratic Republic decided it was a terrible thing. They said we have to substitute something else for it. Something healthful. If you ask me, I’d say they just wanted to keep our income down, so there’s no chance of our funding an uprising.

“We’ve been watching the soldiers clear the forests, and we’ve been waiting and waiting to see what substitute crops they were going to plant for us. Hectares and hectares they’ve cleared.”

Siri nodded. “I thought as much. Do you know where they’re selling the timber?”

“Oh, yes,” the dark man said. “It goes through Vietnam and gets shipped off to the enemies of the Chinese, to Formosa.”

“Really? I wonder just how much of those profits is being shared with the government.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us,” Tshaj said. “If the army gets the profit, or the government gets the profit, it’s all the same to us out here. We don’t get anything.”

Lao Jong spoke up from the far end of the long table the Americans had left as their only memento. “The animals are fleeing from the saws, so we have to go further to hunt. Some of our young men are away for weeks at a time, looking for game. The water in our stream is polluted by the silt that’s running down from the hills. But these are just physical problems.”

“Yes, they’re only physical problems,” Tshaj continued. “We’ve suffered many physical ills over the years and survived. That’s not what frightens us here. It wasn’t physical things that killed your soldiers. As you know well, Yeh Ming, powerful spirits abide in the jungle. [Siri rolled his eyes.] Most are kind, helpful spirits, but there are many malevolent lost souls out there. They leave the bodies of the troubled dead and reside in the trees with the nymphs and the ghosts.”

“A bit like sub-letting, you mean?”

Tshaj ignored the smiling doctor. “When we cut down a tree for our huts, or to make space to plant crops, we ask for permission from the tree spirits. We make offerings, sacrifices sometimes, as our own shaman sees fit. Usually, the spirits will move on without blaming us. After all, we have to live together, share what resources we have. That’s the way it has always been.

“Some of the trees in these parts are as old as the land itself. The spirits have become powerful here. When the soldiers came, they didn’t ask permission. They didn’t show any respect. They didn’t sacrifice a buffalo or consult a shaman. They just started cutting. And they cut and cut and hauled the timber away in trucks. They cut hundreds, thousands of trees.

“Can you imagine? Even the most benevolent spirits have become evil. They all seek revenge.”