Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

From the sampan Huyen spit in the river. Qui nodded to Rabbit. Even Rabbit knew they didn’t have time for this. She sighed and hopped out of the boat.

Two days earlier in the floating market Huyen had traded Binh for the red ao dai . The silk was threadbare in places, the dress obviously used. And now Sang stood on the porch in the red ao dai waiting to be carried downriver. This morning she had put it on as soon as she woke up, even though they wouldn’t be pushing off for hours. The night before she had laid it out at the foot of her mat. In the morning when she slipped it on, it smelled musty, as if it had been stored in a rice shed. You smell funny, Son had said at breakfast, waving his hand in front of his face. You don’t know anything, Sang said. She went back to humming to herself.

The day the dress appeared Rabbit had watched Huyen load Binh in the sampan one last time. She knew Huyen wouldn’t be bringing the bird back from the market. Please, Rabbit said. I can take care of her — she’ll feed herself. Hush, said Huyen. It won’t be happy where we’re going. The old woman tucked some fresh betel leaves in her cheek. Only a fool puts his heart in things.

On the front porch Phuong handed Rabbit the sack her daughter wouldn’t carry. It was heavier than it looked. Rabbit hoisted it up onto her shoulder. Her head filled with voices, some of them so old they seemed to speak another dialect. Rabbit closed her eyes and rubbed her ear with her free hand. There were so many she couldn’t pick out just one, the voices unintelligible as static. She turned to climb back over the railing and down into the boat, but Sang held her back. Me first, the older girl said before climbing down.

Phuong had told all their neighbors about Sang’s marriage. It’s sudden, conceded Phuong, but she’s ready. It explained the comings and goings of the past several days, the strange men peering out of the windows. The other families in Ba Nuoc nodded and offered their tempered congratulations. We wish you one hundred years of happiness, they droned. Mostly they were grateful for the show. When the authorities asked, they wouldn’t have to act incredulous. As if they hadn’t noticed their neighbors packing up all their worldly possessions right underneath their noses. They could tell the government officials we saw her standing right there on the front porch in a red ao dai with a full face of makeup. They could say yes, there were strange men coming and going at all hours of the day. We thought they were the groom’s family.

Sang stepped down into the boat. Rabbit watched as the older girl tried to catch a glimpse of herself on the surface, but the river was turbid with silt. Then they were floating away. Qui stood in the back with the bamboo oar in her hands. Her curtain of black hair was loose and almost skimmed the water. From time to time the second boat would bump them in the back, making their possessions rattle. Sang was trailing her fingers in the water. After sunset it was a dangerous thing to do. Rabbit kept her eyes on the horizon. Downriver the heron began flapping its wings, beginning its long ascent into the air.

The man with one sleeve tapped Son on the head and pointed across the water. They had been waiting in the marsh grass twenty feet from shore for what felt like an eternity. Things had begun to fall into place when their group had left the swelling crowds at the festival. They had walked two hours east, the paths empty as the countryside celebrated in Cantho. As they waited in the marsh grass, the tide was out, but the water was beginning to rise. By the shore it was still too low for a sizable boat to clear. So far upriver the tide was just a matter of inches. There was a line of ants running up one of the tall blades of grass. Son wondered how the ants got there, how they moved over the water from stalk to stalk. Then he looked down and saw a string of ants striding on the surface, a black line snaking all the way from shore. He wondered if the moon was so bright the ants thought it was day.

The man with one sleeve tapped him again. Son looked to where he was pointing. At first he couldn’t see anything, but then he saw it — in the distance the tip of someone’s cigarette drifting past. Son woke his father up. They had been squatting along with the other men in the tall grasses on the edge of the Turtle Marsh for the last hour. It was well past midnight, the moon in the third quadrant. Son noticed the back of the doctor’s shirt was damp with sweat, though Son himself was getting cold.

The Cambodians began whispering among themselves. The man with one sleeve cupped his hands around his mouth. He let out a series of short squawks, each one like the noise the white-eared night heron makes when disturbed. When he finished, they waited. From across the marsh a sequence of squawks echoed in the night. The doctor closed his eyes. Son could see his lips moving. With his hand, Dr. Kao touched his forehead, then several places on his chest.

They watched the drifting boat come to a stop only a hundred feet from shore. In the moonlight Son could see two sampans coming their way. The boat itself didn’t seem large enough to take them all. It was a fisherman’s boat built for a crew of five, ten at the most. He knew at best the motor would be a relic from before the war. There were no new engines to buy. He wondered where his uncles had found the boat, if they had actually paid money for it. If it was stolen, he wondered if that would affect their chances, the boat’s karma tainted, all of them doomed before they’d even set out.

After the sampans reached them, Son and his father and the man with one sleeve were the only ones left waiting in the reeds. There wasn’t enough room for everyone. Someone whispered that a sampan would be back shortly. Son could feel himself shivering, the snake’s pulpy heart somewhere deep inside him. The moon lay on the water like a hole filled with fire. The man with one sleeve was playing a game with his fingers. Even as the others loaded up the sampans and moved across the water, the man kept pressing his fingertips together in different patterns — thumb to the ear finger, the first to the ring. Son knew the man could do it all night long, could do it all the way across the sea or in the overcrowded cells his father had described where men had to take turns lying down because there was so little room.

His father had fallen asleep again. An’s fatigue seemed endless. From across the water in the moonlight Son imagined An might look like something in the heron family, his delicate silhouette as if branched, bones hollow. He held a hand up in front of his father’s mouth and waited until he could feel the breath on his palm before lowering it.

Son heard them before he saw them. They were rounding the headlands when they came into view. A string of shadows moved along the path like figures cut from black paper, their voices traveling over the water. A few of them carried torches, the light dancing like little souls. They were still a half mile away, but it didn’t matter who they were. If they were a patrol, then they would all be arrested, the ragged men put back in cells where the whole cell had to defecate in a plastic bucket with a hairline crack running the length of it. If they were peasants, they might ask for money in exchange for their silence. Son shook his father. Ba, he said. The man with one sleeve was already wading out into the river. They couldn’t wait for the sampan to come ferry them across the water. Son grabbed his father’s hand and followed.

Ordinarily the swim wouldn’t have been difficult, but the boat was anchored in deep water. The deeper the water, the more unpredictable the current. Son was holding his father’s hand when the drop came and the current took them. He felt his father jerked downriver, their hands ripped apart. He could feel the soft earth disappear beneath his feet as the water picked him up. He knew he couldn’t cry for help or all would be lost. The trick was to swim upriver. If he swam for the boat itself, the current would bring him up short. The man with one sleeve seemed to know this. Son could see him swimming for a spot thirty feet upriver of the boat. He began to head for the same spot, but he could hear the sounds of someone fighting for breath. Already ten feet away his father was floundering, his body spinning wildly in the water. There was so much light on the surface of the river, he looked as if he were being spirited away by moonlight.