Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

Son had been with Rabbit and Huyen when they’d first found the nest hidden in the mangrove roots by the water’s edge. Huyen had taught them to never take more than they needed, otherwise the birds would move and never come back. Over the next three years they had returned again and again to the same nest, never taking more than one egg with each visit. It was a time-consuming process. Huyen showed them how to keep the eggs warm until they hatched, then how to feed the hatchlings tiny shrimp and bits of fish. The few times Son had gone hunting for a nest with his uncles with the intention of raising a pair of birds to sell, they had picked eggs that never became anything. By the time they realized it, they couldn’t even eat them, the shells starting to grow soft. With Huyen and Rabbit it was different. Every egg they took became a bird.

Ordinarily it could take as long as six months to train a young adult, but Huyen could do it in less than three. The locals joked she was part cormorant, her betel-stained teeth the same fleshy color as her tongue. Son knew it had something to do with the silvery room inside Rabbit’s head, the place where she went to listen. He imagined a cavern blasted somewhere deep inside her skull, a jagged room made of silvery rocks like the caves down by Cuu Long Bay where people hid things from one another, a place where Rabbit could hear things no one else could hear. That was the only way he could explain it. All she had to do was speak a thing and the bird would do it, Rabbit and the bird as if talking to each other. Dive. Open your mouth. Give it here. Be quiet. Sometimes Son did exactly the opposite of what she said just to make sure she didn’t have any power over him, but even then he wondered.

Rabbit extended her arm. Son put the second bird, still in training, on her wrist. At two feet tall it towered over her head. We don’t need the cage tonight, she said, brushing her cheeks in its ragged feathers. A few months back she had argued with Huyen. It’s what people expect, Huyen had said. You can’t always be there, the old woman added. A customer had come back and said his bird had flown away. After the man was gone, Huyen took the cleaver off its peg and opened one of the cages with a new bird in it. Rabbit climbed over the railing into the sampan. She put her fingers in her ears as Huyen slammed the cleaver down on the bird’s wing, clipping its best feathers. Huyen breathed heavily as she worked her way through, her teeth the same color as markings on the bird’s head and beak.

Unlike other fishing birds, the cormorant couldn’t swallow underwater. It had to surface with its catch. Most fishermen fitted small bands made of cane around the bird’s throat, the poorer fishermen simply tying a piece of string just below the gullet. When the bird resurfaced, the fisherman would pull the string tight, keeping the bird from swallowing. Time and again Huyen would tell customers the string wasn’t necessary. If you respect the bird, she would say, it will respect you. Hers were the best fishers on the river.

Son stood upright paddling in the back of the sampan, Binh preening on his shoulder. The stars were out and the air was muggy. The last time he had gone out alone with Rabbit, Phuong had carried on when the two of them got back even though one of the fish they caught was the length of his arm. Rabbit was lucky that way. Qui couldn’t talk. The front of her shirt was always wet, her pale face with the large eyes so filled with beauty his uncles never talked about her, as if the mere mention of her radiance were a kind of sacrilege. On the other hand Phuong was always yelling. Ever since his father had disappeared in one of the reeducation camps, Phuong was beside herself over the littlest things, wailing that if anything ever happened to him, who would take care of her? He was nine years old. There were other boys younger than him who went out fishing by themselves, their fathers dead or off clearing land in the new economic zones. Phuong didn’t care. Even when her own brothers told her to let him be, she would acquiesce during the day, letting him go with them to the black market in Cantho to sell any extra rice. When he came back home, it was a different story. Nights on the leaking floor she slept with her arms around him.

Rabbit didn’t even turn to face him. The Dragon’s Head, she said. Son kept paddling east toward the stars in the Winnowing Basket. We need the money, Rabbit said. Please. A bat swooped by his ear almost knocking him off-balance. He tried to remember the last time he’d heard her say please, but nothing came to mind. She was a seven-year-old girl who spoke like an old man, addressing everyone with the pronouns meant for inferiors, her freckles cowing adults into silence. Once, unthinkingly, Rabbit had called Huyen em , and Huyen had slapped her. Son’s older sister, Sang, liked to say that Rabbit was a tiger girl and that one day her tiger blood would get him killed.

Son sighed and swung the sampan toward the stars of the Black Tortoise. He thought of the things Huyen had told them about the river. The Mekong was a series of rivers that originated in the icy mountains of Tibet and reached the South China Sea through a network of tributaries south of Saigon. It branched and forked and twisted for almost three thousand miles, the dark brown surface deceptively calm. Anywhere two or more branches met there was a dangerous current as the two rivers became one. At its widest, the Mekong stretched more than seven miles from shore to shore.

The Mekong is our mother, Huyen had said. She gives us fish and birds and a place to live. The old woman put her hand in the river and scooped up a handful. She will kill you without shedding a tear, Huyen added. In her palm the water gleamed an impenetrable brown, silt-rich. Sometimes when he wanted to hide, all Son had to do was jump in and hold his breath.

He was steering toward a spot where three fingers met a tributary called the Sap River, the waters originating from Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap. By sampan it was almost an hour. He tried not to think of the way his mother would lock her arms around him when he got home. A bird that could fish the Dragon’s Head was worth double, though if you fell out of the boat, it wouldn’t matter to you how much the bird was worth.

Son had only been there once with his uncles in a boat with a small engine. They’d gone to look for river otters. The animal’s bladder could be sold for three months’ wages in the fields, the glistening sack smoked and pulverized for Chinese medicine. Otters were drawn to the Dragon’s Head because of the types of fish the fast water attracted. Son had talked his uncles into bringing Rabbit along. She’ll be able to hear them, he said. She’s small. She knows where things like to hide. At the time his uncle Duc had intended to say no, but something about the little girl with the cluster of freckles and the boy’s haircut standing there looking him right in the face as if she were his elder gave him pause. The next thing he knew she was in the front of the boat.

In their first ten minutes at the Dragon’s Head, Rabbit had pointed to some dead saplings snagged in a mass of weeds. Duc managed to scoop the creature up in a net. The thing was obviously a baby, its coloring still tawny but glistening in the light. Then Hai, Son’s youngest uncle, brained it, holding it by the hind legs as he smashed it twice on the side of the boat. When he was done, Son could see what looked like chunks of pink sponge coming out of its ears. Within seconds the flies began to clot. Rabbit rode the rest of the way in silence. Something about the impassive look on her face, as if she were seeing all the way to the ends of the earth. Though they wouldn’t admit it, none of the grown men could bring themselves to disturb her. They came home with just the one lying like a tattered sock in their net.