Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  After the meal, the children worked on their assigned tasks in the silence of midday. Some practiced their penmanship while others read to themselves.

  “Do you have a lesson for the children?” Great-Aunt asked Maia.

  “A lesson?”

  “Neither the kitchen help nor the children’s teacher came today. Something must have kept them. Did you notice anything unusual in town on your way here?”

  “No.”

  “They’re volunteers from public security, coming and going on a regular basis, keeping watch over this orphanage.”

  Great-Aunt was sitting beside the child without arms, helping her with the spacing between the characters. With the pencil wedged between her warped toes, the child continued to inscribe over a single space, character upon character.

  As Maia watched her overlay one character on top of another, she recalled the dwarf’s inscription. She wanted to ask whether it was Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, Cyrillic, or a combination of all those scripts, and what it meant.

  “Well?” Great-Aunt peered at her.

  “I don’t have a lesson.”

  “Everyone has a lesson. The children can’t travel. Whenever a traveler passes through, we ask for a lesson. They might be bound to their small lot, but they’re a part of a larger world. Learning from travelers will help them become aware of others and understand that an individual’s action affects the whole. What knowledge have you carried from afar?”

  Seeing the children losing themselves in the tasks at hand, Maia hesitated. Their concentration enveloped the moment in serenity. She held back the message from overseas. She would speak with Great-Aunt when they were alone.

  “I have stories and songs for the children.”

  “Then you can tell a story and teach them a song.”

  The children gathered around Maia, and Kabāb was placed again in her arms. Rocking the bundle to and fro, she told stories she had accumulated—stories from her father, stories she read in school, stories of rocks. Talking animals made the children happy, so she told an animal fantasy and taught them a bit of song.

  That night Maia slept in the hammock with Kabāb on her chest. Resting a light hand on the newborn, she felt its irregular strained breathing. When the last lantern was snuffed out and the house was silent, she became aware of the sounds outside her window: the wind rustling through the bamboo, water flowing over stones, crickets chirping, and an occasional owl hooting.

  Her mission was ending. The next day, when she was alone with Great-Aunt, she would relay the message to instigate insurgency from overseas. Once delivered, her assignment would be complete.

  A quiet call came from outside. Was it a child or an animal? A response came back, just as quiet. The whispers rose to a crescendo, a sudden burst of animal-like sounds, followed by a play of back-and-forth from different directions.

  She then heard a fragment of a song she had taught the children earlier and knew they were outside. The interplay between a tune she had learned growing up in America and the children’s night calls warmed her. She tightened her embrace around Kabāb, whose breathing had become effortless, like a leaf cradled in the evening breeze before falling on the stillness of the earth.

  When Maia woke the next morning, Kabāb was sound asleep. Great-Aunt and the children had gone off to the field. With Kabāb tied on her back, she followed the footpath through the bamboo where the children had emerged the day before. Beyond the thicket was expansive rolling red dirt, barren of all trees but overgrown with weeds.

  Great-Aunt was assigning each child a strip of field along the hill’s contours. Besides the children, several townspeople came to help.

  “If the land were flat,” a young man from town explained, “we could bulldoze the light brush and grasses. But it’s uneven. We weed by hand.” Thin and pale, he was a few years older than Maia. His accent told her that he was from a northern city.

  Maia was given a strip between the man and Binh, who gladly reclaimed Kabāb.

  “After the land is cleared and the soil tilled,” the man told the children, “we’ll sow the seeds two-by-two meters apart.”

  “We’re planting a forest,” Binh whispered, humming a lullaby to Kabāb.

  The man dug at a spot near Maia. His voice lowered. “That’s what this country needs—a new beginning. We can’t wait for the old guards to die out. War poisoned their blood, and they’re killing the country and people. We need to slash and burn to rid the poison. We can’t do it alone. We need outside help.”

  The ground heated up and cracked under the sun. Great-Aunt, carrying a pouch of acacia seeds, moved easily among the children and townspeople. She stopped between Maia and the man. “I see you’ve met the children’s teacher,” she said, resting her gaze on Maia. “An intelligent man from public security. You must consider what he says.”

  The man locked eyes with Great-Aunt before setting off to help a child weed.

  “You didn’t imagine that you’d be doing this kind of fieldwork, did you?” Great-Aunt gave Maia eight glossy brown seeds and then got on her haunches and began pulling up the weeds around her. “Unlike Teacher, you look like you’ve done physical labor. It hardens the body and clears the mind.”

  Great-Aunt was right. Maia had spent many summers picking fruits and berries on New Jersey farms. This was her first time planting trees. Clearing and preparing the earth to sow the seeds, she felt at home among the children. She was reminded of her childhood working in the fields in America for her keep. She thought of her mother working the land while imprisoned.

  She felt happy in sadness, connected in aloneness.

  In the stillness of noon, hands and knees in the dirt, she decided not to pass on the message from overseas.

  She slept that night with Kabāb on her chest. She dreamed of the children chanting and dancing in circles: arms raised, faces uplifted to the sky. Rain came. The acacia seeds sprouted, and the seedlings grew into trees. A forest was reborn.

  Before daybreak, a slow sputter woke Maia. As soon as she became aware of the lightness on her chest, she knew Kabāb was not with her. She sprung from the hammock. Shadows flitted across the window. She dashed outside and saw the children trotting after the wooden boat pulled by the motorcycle-cartman. Binh ran haltingly with Kabāb bundled in his arms.

  She trailed them on the footpath through the bamboo. They cut across the rolling fields they had cleared the day before. They entered a pine forest that grew along the mountainside. As they climbed, the sputter became faint, then fainter, then silent.

  They reached the lake atop the mountain.

  The cartman had unhitched the boat from his motorcycle, and the motley travelers were pushing the boat into the water.

  The children rushed to the shore. Binh held the bundle out to Old Seeker.

  Maia followed. “What are you doing?”

  “Sixth Kabāb will go with them.”

  “Why?”

  “To see the world!”

  “What about home, father and mother?”

  “No one will miss a piece of meat.”

  The children nodded.

  Dawn came as gently as a cat’s paw, nudging a sleeper awake.

  “Everywhere is home,” a child recited softly.

  The children responded in unison, “Everyone is family.”19

  Binh continued to cradle the empty space in his arms after Old Seeker took Kabāb. “Don’t make it cry,” the boy said, and the child cried, as they had never heard it cry. Tears dropped into the lake. The children watched as the boat set off across the water that reflected a waning moon above and an orange sunrise in the horizon.

  The Sea Lake

  MORNING LIGHT PASSED through pine trees and refracted in still water. Maia and the children remained at the shore long after the boat was a speck on the horizon.

  “Where do you think they’re sailing to?” Maia asked the children.

  “To the sea.”

  “The sea?”

  “The lake has no
bottom, linking it to the sea.”

  “It’s our longing for the sea.”

  “It’s salty, full of tears of the living for the dead.”

  Maia absorbed the children’s stories. Retold from old tales or newly made-up, each tried to illuminate what is. She glimpsed their connectedness: what was visible on the children, she carried a sliver of within. She noticed the deformities less and less and recognized the children by their words and actions. Though distinct, they moved interdependently as if they were a part of a single mammoth being. She wondered whether they could continue in this human-created hell—living in isolation on the ranch, operating with the disfigurement handed to them.

  Or could they find a way to transcend the illusory world of borders?

  It was a Sunday, so the children had to fend for themselves. They swam and bathed in the lake and then scrubbed their scanty clothes on the flat boulders. They caught fish with bamboo poles and trawled for shrimps and crabs with wicker nets. They dug sweet cassavas from the ground and picked wild red berries off vines. They gathered dried leaves and twigs to start a fire. By midday, they had a feast that for a time filled the emptiness Kabab’s departure had left.

  When evening came and a bright moon appeared, it was time for the children to return to the communal home. Maia stayed behind. The children headed off in a single file along the lake toward the pine forest. They moved with a lighthearted romping, as if dancing, singing the song they had just learned. The children disappeared into the forest, but she could still hear their voices. Alone by the lake, she joined in the dance.

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  Come out tonight, come out tonight,

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  And dance by the light of the moon?20

  Night Calls

  A COLD MIST came with nightfall and veiled the waning gibbous moon. Shadows flitted among the silent pines. When the air was still, Maia smelled a heavy odor of blood and decay. Two figures approached from afar. They stopped, leaning into one another, as if conversing. They parted, one retreating through the forest, the other coming toward her, empty-handed but carrying the nauseating smell of the midnight shuttle.

  “The children told me you might be here,” JP said, enfolding her into his arms.

  “Uh, you need a bath.”

  “Aren’t you curious where I’ve been?” He took off his bloodstained L’amant T-shirt and khaki pants.

  “You should wash your clothes, too.”

  He was now naked. “Is this the lake of your father’s letter?” He stepped into the dark glassy water and submerged himself. He vanished and then surfaced, floating easily on his back.

  “It’s warm and salty and buoyant,” he said, “like the sea.”

  Water undulated, ripples spreading across stillness.

  “Come, Maia!”

  And she did.

  They swam in the lake, cold air above and warm water below. The buoyancy lifted them, and they let go to the embrace. Two bodies moved as one. The mist swirled like a dance of white cloth above. The water cupped them below. When their skin cooled, though inside remained hot, they left the lake and lay on a flat boulder.

  “Do you remember the soldier we picked up on the shuttle?” JP asked.

  “I can’t forget his smell.”

  “He’s coming back in the morning to take me across the border to where the locals have sighted a group of men. One of them could be my brother.”

  “Can you trust him?”

  “It’s my only lead.”

  “I’m not coming to translate for you if that’s why you’re here.”

  “I’m not looking for a translator.”

  Night calls burst from silence, startling JP, and he reached for her hand.

  “It’s the children,” she said.

  Lying side by side, they listened to the back-and-forth calls that encircled them in a rawness of flowing emotions. She could identify many of the voices as belonging to the children, but two did not: clear resounding voices she could not pin down but had heard from the previous nights. She was reminded of the odd duet on Waiting Mountain when their animal-like calls transformed the bare peak into a lush forest. An inexplicable lightness filled her. The mist thinned and unveiled the moon above and its reflection below in the pearl-shaped lake. Turning to JP in the silvery light, she whispered yes to the question he had not asked. Yes.

  Uprising

  THEY WOKE TO an uprising.

  The morning sky was black with smoke. Red flames rose from the direction of town. Without a word, Maia dashed from the lakeside to the pines. JP followed.

  Several treetops caught fire from flying embers. Maia and JP cut through the forest, crossing the open field of planted acacia seeds and entering the bamboo thicket. Through the screen of bamboo, they saw the longhouse engulfed in flame. All around, tussocks blazed like bonfires. Spreading quickly, the fire consumed the young bamboo grove.

  They hid behind the stone well. Shielded from the intense heat, they watched for movement and listened for voices inside Great-Aunt’s home. Except for thatch crackling and a sweet putrid odor of burning flesh, there was nothing more.

  In the distance, they heard screams from all directions.

  After the longhouse was in smoldering ruins, uniformed men from public security arrived. They covered their noses with white handkerchiefs and rambled about. They kicked at what seemed like a charred tree trunk amidst the rubble. When there was no movement, the men left.

  “Who are they looking for?” JP whispered.

  She slouched against the well, squeezing into a tight ball to still herself.

  The wind picked up the remains of the home. Ashes swirled in the sky.

  Maia and JP did not notice the soldier from the shuttle until he stood beside them. The smoke masked his stench. He told them three major towns on the Central Highlands had held peaceful demonstrations. The events had turned violent when public security rounded up the leaders and dispersed the protesters. The government had declared a freeze on all movement on the highlands. No entering or exiting.

  The fog came at dusk. Whispers seeped out from the darkness. People were on the move again.

  A call. A response. Singing.

  Children sang in harmony, echoing a duet’s lead.

  The soldier tracked the night calls. “That’s the way,” he finally said and beckoned.

  JP shadowed him into the fog.

  Maia rose in the mist that was a dance of obscurity and revelation. The fire burned, but the warmth she felt was from knowing the children were making their way westward. She turned east and followed the pass from the mountain to the sea.

  Epilogue

  CURTAINS LIKE WHITE cumulus clouds billowed through windows. Laughter mingled with the wind rustling through the holes in thatched walls. PHOENIX SALON, a faded sign hung on the door. The beauty shop on the outskirts of the highlands appeared dilapidated, but Maia wanted to wash the burnt odor from her hair. When she lifted the wooden latch, the door swung open and she felt a cold breeze. The curtains flapped and the roof fluttered as if they wanted to fly. A sweet scent of ripe guava filled the airy salon. She smelled something else. Only here it was not subdued but pulsating, sucking her in.

  “Close the door,” a voice called. “You’re from across the bridge?”

  “She’s not from across the bridge,” a second voice said. “Can’t you tell? She’s from down south.”

  “My family moved to Saigon during the summer of red fire.”

  “The girl now lives in America,” a third voice said.

  “Come, over here!”

  All the chairs were taken, except one.

  “Be careful,” the woman with a stylish bob warned. “Go around.” She pointed to the mossy craters in the floor, brimming with water.

  Maia stepped around the basins toward the empty seat where a woman was sweeping with a straw broom. The woman did not look up but continued to make scratching sounds on th
e ground. Her long side-swept bangs hid part of her face.

  “No. No. Not there.” The woman with the bob stood up and motioned Maia into the now vacant seat. “I’m the hairstylist.” She pointed to the sweeper and whispered, “Don’t be afraid. That’s the salon owner. And the ponytail over there is the beautician. She can pluck your eyebrows, give you a facial, and make you honeysome.”

  “You should only be afraid of ma sống,” someone said.

  There were fewer customers than she had thought. The voices and laughter seemed fainter now, as if coming from outside, in the walls, or beneath the ground.

  “I just want a shampoo.”

  The hairstylist slipped off Maia’s sandals and placed her feet into a bowl of cool soothing water. Bony fingers massaged her soles in slow circular motions.

  As she eased into the chair, a sigh released from somewhere pent-up. She tilted her head into a basin and gazed at the afternoon sky through a large hole in the ceiling. What could have fallen through the roof, breaking up the earth—a hand grenade, a rock from a meteor storm falling like fire, a ball thrown from the past in an arc to a future catcher? The hole might have been smaller, but the monsoons had enlarged the sphere, morphing its roundness into an amorphous, gaping sky.

  Water sluiced over her head, and fingers kneaded her scalp, lathering up suds that smelled sweet and tart. Closing her eyes, she saw light twirling. The sky pulsated to a slow beat of a tune at the edge of memory, like a ballad she had heard ferrying across a river in late afternoon.

  “Is the girl here?” A briny smell of the sea drifted into the salon.

  The scraping of the broom on the floor stopped.

  “Come in. Close the door.”

  “Oh, heaven-earth. The girl’s so dark. Just like when she was born. Dark like a child of a black GI.”

  When you were born, your skin was so dark and hair so frizzy your aunt complained to the hospital about a mix-up. Back then the Americans were still here.

  “Not a bit of your father.” A perceptible sigh enveloped the room.