Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Minh left the double to his fate and took the path along the old canal. Ahead of him an old man jerked a water buffalo along by its nose ring, and Minh followed, the animal lurching in a jungle rhythm, full of fellow suffering. The same thick smoke from the trash piles, the same thatched houses, and then his uncle’s home with its orange clay shingles tarnished with mildew, the low gate left open, the meter of cinderblock topped by green ironwork, pointed fleurs-de-lis topping the rusty bars — rustier now—the waist-high chain-link dividing this household from the neighbors’ on either side, the front garden with its small wooden shrine and a dozen or so ornamental Bong Mai trees, said to bring good luck, but they hadn’t, and the same pillared front porch of shiny tile a shade of gray-violet he still found very soothing.

As he came through the gate three children ran from him as if he had a gun. He slipped his feet from his shoes and removed his socks and placed them by the entrance before walking through the house.

Two girls, cousins he didn’t recognize, worked at washing clothes in a cauldron over a fire out back. Aunt Giang was cooking in the kitchen shed. The children’s yelling brought her to see, and she came across the yard wiping her hands on her shift and took his wrists in a strong grip.

“I told you I’d come.”

“No, you didn’t tell me!”

“I wrote you a letter.”

“That was a long time ago! I believe you now.”

“I kept my promise.”

“I’ll wake your uncle.”

His aunt led him into the parlor and left him. The same shrine in its sky-blue box atop the same black lacquerware chiffonier, taller than he by a couple of feet. Mirrors painted with geometric designs spangled the shrine’s inner surfaces. Beside it the same huge candelabra, bowls of fruit, long sticks of incense in a brass burner shaped like a lion, an array of small votive candles, and a small Bong Mai tree growing in a vase, perhaps the same Bong Mai from his childhood, he couldn’t be sure.

His uncle came from the good bedroom, the one inside the house itself, looking sleepy and harmless, skinny and brown, hardly changed at all, buckling the belt of his long pants and buttoning his dress shirt and saying nothing. Aunt Giang followed, patting her husband nervously on the head. A small head, a round face, his features rushing toward its middle. As ever, he maintained a blank expression.

They all three sat on the tiled floor barefoot, drinking tea and eating candy from a big golden plastic bowl modeled after a king’s fairy-tale crown. Aunt Giang asked him about his love life and his prospects for marriage, about the air force, about the great General Phan, and never about her brother Hao. Uncle Huy hardly spoke. Minh saw no need to mention the house, the unpaid rental. After so many years away, he could only be back because Hao had dispatched him here on business.

After half an hour Uncle Huy said, “What about the food?”

“I’m going,” his wife said, and they all three got up from the floor.

Uncle took him around by the paths and introduced his nephew proudly to people Minh had known since childhood. Everyone asked why he wasn’t in uniform today, the anniversary of his aunt’s birth. At the home of Huy’s youngest brother the women left them alone while several male relations gathered to greet the returning pilot. This brother, Tuan, though called Minh’s uncle, was not Minh’s blood. Tuan seemed to have changed. Nothing about him was right. Maybe he’d suffered a stroke. On his right side he looked melted—eyelid, shoulder, his right leg seemed to cave at the knee. His left eye seemed propped wide open. Maybe he’d been wounded. The VC, according to the Americans, operated all over the Mekong ever since the Tet push, though Minh wasn’t so sure. Perhaps his Uncle Tuan was VC. Minh didn’t mention his disability. No one did. The men smoked cigarettes and drank tea from demitasse cups. When one of the men asked Minh about his aunt and uncle in Saigon, Uncle Huy interrupted Minh’s polite description of their happiness: “He rents me a house without land. I have to rent land from old Sang. Sang gets forty percent of my crop. And Hao thinks he suffers.”

They went back to the house, and Minh lay down for a nap in the bed of his childhood.

He woke up confused. Somewhere a descendant of the roosters of his childhood yodeled like a strangled infant, and for a second he thought it was dawn. The voices of children laughed and called. The family had arrived—it must be late afternoon. The room, tin-roofed, of rough boards, was more window than wall, and he swept the bed net aside and sat up to see, meters away, the monuments covering two of his great-uncles. In this bed he’d slept with his little brother. The sheets smelled new and clean but they covered the same bedding and its musty tang of old perspiration and feathers, and overhead was the same baking galvanize under which he and Thu had come to live when their mother had died, in the family that wasn’t their family. To be outsiders had made them close as only children are close, without any sense that time could shake them loose from one another.

At 5:00 p.m. Minh’s Uncle Huy called the family together in the front room.

They waited while he lit candles at the shrine out front of the house, moving among his avocados and kumquats, past the neighbors’ pants and blouses and T-shirts drying on colorful plastic coat hangers on the chain-link fence. He offered his obeisance, came into the front room greeting no one, and went through the house to stand out back before the grave monuments, and afterward came back in and placed two pillows on the floor at the head of the parlor. He crossed his legs and lowered himself to sit straight-backed before them all. The others, the children, the aunts, the cousins, the family of which he was the head, sat against the walls, the littlest ones just beyond the bounds of the room, circling the two porch pillars with their backs against them, like prisoners tied to trees. The family listened without a word. It was Minh whom he addressed. “My sister and my sister’s husband have always been unfair to this family,” he said. “You, also, are unfair to this family. Your father went to high school while I plowed and harvested. When he died they called it a sickness that he got from visiting the mountains, but I believe it was a direct blow from the spirit of our father, who died of his labors rather than give up the rice paddies where his son, my brother, your father, should have worked instead of going to high school. My sister married your Uncle Hao, a businessman, in order to give her sons a life in the city and an education in the schools and make them ready to prosper. Her husband, Hao, had no use for this house. His father left it to him. My sister’s husband, Hao, never lived here. He visited as a child, and then he stopped coming when his grandparents died. Then this house was empty. Then Hao’s father died. My sister’s husband, Hao, is the last of that family. He had no sons to prosper after him. He has no family anymore. He calls us family, but treats us like horses and buffalo. The people you see here in this room looked after this house for my sister’s husband, Hao. This house would have crumbled and washed away in the monsoons, the vines would have broken the walls, nothing would be standing now if not for our labors every day. Do you see the pads on my hands? Do you see my wife’s crooked back? Did you see my wife brushing the dust from the walls this morning after she walked to the paddies and back? Did you see her cooking you a wonderful meal to share with all of us? Do you see the table laid out? Can you smell the delicious soup? Look at the chicken, the dog, the fruit, and smell the steam from the rice—do you see the sweat on her face from the steam? Everyone you see in this room works every day like that so the rest of you can live in the city. We do not pay rent. That is our arrangement with my sister’s husband, Hao. My sister’s husband told us our care for the house paid the rent. We’ve all worked more than we should have. Instead of working like horses and buffalo we should have paid rent and let the building fall to pieces around us. I am planning to set fire to this building. I will burn this building down. This man Hao sends you to tell me I have to buy my own house, and you come without any honor or love for your family to give me his message. This is a time of wars. We have nothing to count on but our family. You are a person without love, without honor, the son of a thief who robbed me of my chance at education and the lackey of a thief who robs this family of our home. Everyone here will die when I burn this building that is not a home because he steals it. Your aunt made you a wonderful meal. Eat a meal under this roof and then go back to the city and tell the man my sister married that he has no family except his wife because this building is ashes, and every one of us is dead.”