Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

Like a waterfall, the great wave crashed on deck. Boards splintered. The front window in the pilothouse blew out. Duc slammed into the wheel, pulled the rope tighter that lashed him to it. Their one compass and all their maps were washed out to sea. The door to the hold caved in. Water cascaded down the stairs. Phuong grabbed the sack, the last thing she’d removed from her floating house, the one that clattered when she walked, and cradled it in her arms. The engineer slogged his way to the opening, taking his family up above. He yelled they would drown down there, but no one could hear him. People sat dazed in the cold. The other families followed the engineer up into the outer dark, the children in their parents’ arms. Qui started to move, but Arun reached out and shook his smiling head. The doctor also sat back down. Later when they left the hold, everyone who had gone up on deck was gone.

Then Arun was holding a piece of wood. He was hammering at a spot in the wall. After a while he managed to make a small hole. No light came pouring in. He crawled on his belly to another spot and made another. He made four in all, each high up in a corner. When they were riding a crest, a man would stand at each hole furiously scooping out water with a pot or bucket. When they were coming down, he would flip whatever he was holding in his hands, using the bottom of it as a shield and with all his might try to keep the water out.

There was nothing left to throw up. They felt themselves being lifted. Huyen threw more dirt over the bloody spot growing between her granddaughter’s legs. Somehow they all knew if they could just make it to the other side of the wave. The blood so thick it gleamed black. It wasn’t like anything Huyen had ever seen. Qui whimpered. Rabbit latched on to her body looking for the peace of the world. Huyen assumed it had been flushed out in the first blood, but now it was just coming. She could tell by the way Qui lay panting. Riding the wave all the way to the top, Rabbit sucking on her chest. Then the deep root snapped. A body lay floating in a river. A family was swept overboard out into the open sea. A door blew shut behind them. Huyen peered in the dirt. Something stirring like the silky threads that cling to a yolk, the thing the size of her ear finger, all of it there in miniature. Their ears began to ring. They felt themselves lifting off the floor as the momentum shifted. In the dark, hair floating like a star around each and every head. A tiny golden fish glittered in the blood. Huyen scooped it up in a bowl and swept it into the fire.

The fundamental difference between lights is forgiveness. Among the Christians forgiveness is everything. Ask for it as you lay dying on the jungle floor, the bloody work of your hands lying all around you, and the Christian god will grant it. In the Eastern cosmology the Lady will come to you and bathe your wounds and listen to your suffering, but She will absolve you of nothing. Absolution comes in the next life if you live within the path .

QUI SKIMMED THE FAT OFF THE BOILING WATER. MOST OF THE foodstuffs had been ruined. They had enough gas left for three days, maybe enough oil for one. Nobody wanted to say it, but with the other families gone their chances of surviving had increased somewhat. What little rice there was would go further. With less weight the boat rode higher in the water. From the pilothouse Duc and Hai had nothing left to steer by but the sun and the stars. Hai said they could do it, but Duc knew a few cloudy nights and they could get turned around, plus after the storm they couldn’t be sure of where they were. The doctor’s wife said she hoped the good lord had taken the missing families all together. Rabbit was thankful they were far enough away she couldn’t hear them. She didn’t want to know if the children had gone first, the parents left searching their empty arms, or if it had been the other way around, the children standing all alone on deck looking up into a wall of water.

The engineer had brought a small wire cage on board with him. In it was a rooster and a hen. On deck there had been a heated argument between Hai and the doctor as to whether or not they should cook the birds now or wait and see if they got an egg. Then Arun had explained that they could use the fat to make oil. Mixed with gasoline it might buy them a day or two. With that, Hai swung the chicken in the air by its neck. The way he swung it, he just missed hitting the doctor. He didn’t apologize. He just swung it a few more times before handing it to Qui and storming back to the pilothouse.

Son and Rabbit weren’t allowed up on the roof anymore. The structure was too shaky. Inside Hai swept the glass up and threw it overboard. More and more the doctor let his daughter sit with Rabbit and Son in the front of the boat, Minh’s foot baking in its black boot. Everyone slowed down as they ate less. The children tried to stay out of the way. From time to time they pretended they were the captains of the ship. They would send Minh on make-believe errands, telling her to go wash the deck. She would hobble away, eager to please. Below deck the sound of her walking like someone knocking erratically on a door.

Once when they sent her to mend a net, Rabbit said to Son do you think your uncles could kill somebody? In the silvery room inside her head she could still hear the voice in the pilothouse — the voice all breathy and scared, the air hissing out like a hole in a tire. You mean in a war, Son asked. Okay, she said. Yes, said Son. They sat for a while thinking about it. Rabbit could feel the skin of her shoulders starting to burn. The freckles on her face were growing darker in the strong light. You know our fathers killed people in Cambodia, said Son. An didn’t, said Rabbit. Of course he did, said Son. She looked down at her arms. My father did too kill people, Son repeated. Rabbit considered her burning skin. The tingling felt strangely good.

Rabbit considered telling Son the story, but she didn’t know what exactly she had seen. Her family had all been asleep one night as they lay on the leaky floor of their floating house in Ba Nuoc, Huyen softly snoring on her mat, the moon growing fuller in the window. Tu had only been back a few days. Qui? His voice sounded childish as he whispered. Then Qui rolled over and lifted her head. Rabbit could hear her father exhale. Most nights he tossed and turned, eyes glassy, his words few. Tu began to tell Qui about a place called the Parrot’s Beak. How the Vietnamese, with all their years of fighting western forces, had easily crushed the tactically inept Pol Pot, defeating his nineteen divisions in just days before settling in Phnom Penh for the occupation. That’s where I met An, he said. The government had let the southern prisoners out of the reeducation camps, telling them they could earn their freedom by fighting the Cambodians. One day after the battle of the Parrot’s Beak, An was sitting up against a tree with his eyes closed, said Tu. There was blood and dirt on his face. I thought he was dead. Then he opened his eyes. The left one blue like a flower. I did what he’d asked me to do a long time ago on the night Rabbit was born when a kindly soldier drove me to the banks of the Song Ma. I remembered him.

Tu talked for hours. He told Qui how he and An had stayed together digging graves. Even during the American war he had never seen so many bodies, the flies thick as thunderheads. He said often the only way you could tell the Vietnamese dead from the Cambodian dead was by their weapons. Most of the Cambodians were armed with just axes or hoes.

Not everyone was dead, Tu said. The man in charge of our unit pointed to a ridge and told us what to do. I don’t know why he picked us. He should have picked some of the teenagers, the ones drunk every night who would cut off fingers from corpses the way they’d heard the Americans used to. We were each given a pistol, said Tu. An didn’t know how to load his. The man pointed to where a ring of them were sitting on the hillside. Said take the ones who have hoes. Tu laughed at the memory. You could say they came prepared, he said.