The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  It was a bewildering thought. I stared at the ground. It was unimaginable how anything could be in my control. It would be so much easier if I could simply pick up a gun, fall into rank, and fight the enemy.

  “I think we all have the duty to fight for our independence,” I insisted.

  “Oh, my dear son, he who seeds the wind reaps the storm.” She sighed again. “I am afraid the time for you to fight will come. When it does, you can contribute more to the fight if you’re educated.” Mother wiggled to sit up straight, then clapped her hands. “First, you still need to pass your exam so we can drink this champagne.”

  “We have to hide this! The legionnaires might want it if they come back.”

  “Don’t worry, I doubt the French will patrol our domain again any time soon. Besides, we’re going to bury this bottle.”

  “We can just hide it somewhere. I have a few secret places.”

  Mother chuckled. “The champagne will taste better after aging awhile under ground.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The French keep wines in underground chambers to keep them cool and at a constant temperature so they age properly. I read it in a book.” She winked at me. “You know I have a whole library of books that you haven’t read.”

  “Yes, Mother. But if you bury it, the water may seep in through the top.”

  “We’ll seal the top with wax and bury it upside down.”

  “You won’t tell my brothers, right?”

  “Of course not. This is just between us. It’s a reward for your efforts.”

  Mother brought out a lamp and a lump of wax. We sealed the bottle. She levered herself slowly from the bench and led me to her prized guava tree. We dug a hole and buried the bottle wrapped in cloth. She picked out a large flat black stone from the edge of the koi pond and had me put it over the spot as a marker.

  THE day Mother went into labor it rained heavily. An unseasonable storm came from nowhere. Dawn cast little light on steely clouds that quickly burst into torrential rain. Midmorning, Mother told the maid that it was time. Aunt Thuan, Aunt Lang, and Aunt Thao descended on our house like a gaggle of geese, asking questions and shouting directions at the servants. Mother said the baby was coming earlier than the doctor had predicted, but she wasn’t worried, as this was her fourth child. Aunt Thuan put her hand on Mother’s forehead. Aunt Lang placed her hands on Mother’s belly to feel the contraction. The women knew what needed to be done and quickly mobilized the staff to prepare for the delivery.

  “Have you sent for my doctor?” Mother gasped.

  “The roads are blocked. There’s been heavy fighting for the last three days outside the district. No one can get through the French line,” said Aunt Thuan.

  Aunt Thao agreed. “It’s a long way. The roads might be washed out.”

  “Try! I want my doctor,” Mother insisted. He was the family physician who had delivered all the children on the estate.

  Aunt Thao said, “I’ll have Noui go with our contact in the Resistance. He will have to go around the blockade.”

  “Let’s send him by horseback,” Aunt Thuan said. “In the meantime, we’ll fetch Midwife Nga from the village.”

  A sense of expectancy loomed over the household. With the storm gathering strength outside, there was little work to be done. The men stoked the kitchen fire to boil a cauldron of water, and then sat around mending tools and milling rice flour. The women brought out fresh linens, ground medicinal herbs, put fresh fruits on the ancestral altar, and lit the prayer incense for a safe delivery. The Aunties took turns sitting with Mother.

  It was a Sunday, so there was no school. I studied in the living room, but couldn’t concentrate with Mother’s muffled groans coming through the wall. Outside, the afternoon had gone dim. The downpour was so thick I couldn’t see across the courtyard. Thunder rumbled across the underbelly of the sky. The water was ankle-deep and rising. I grabbed an umbrella and waded across the courtyard to the Ancestral Temple. I lit three incense sticks and prayed to Grandfather’s spirit.

  A runner arrived with a message that Noui had not found a way across the French line, though his connection expected to get him into the district town during the night. It was bad news, and the Aunties were very worried. Late in the afternoon, a young woman carrying a basket arrived. She took off her hat and shed her rain-cloak of palm leaves. She was in her early twenties, very young for a midwife.

  She bowed to the Aunties and Mother, and said, “Mrs. Nga went to help with the Resistance’s hospital. I’m Trang, her apprentice.”

  “You’re the herbalist’s youngest daughter,” Aunt Thuan noted with raised eyebrows. “I didn’t know you started training with the midwife.”

  “I’ve been her assistant for five months, but I have never delivered a baby on my own.”

  The older women glanced at each other. It was bad fortune and dangerous to have such an inexperienced midwife. Perhaps the doctor from the district would arrive in time.

  “Isn’t there anyone who could help you?” Aunt Thao asked.

  The girl shook her head, looking at the floor. “There are no healers or midwives left in the village. My father went with Midwife Nga to tend wounded Resistance fighters.”

  Mother’s face was flushed and wet with perspiration. “Sister Trang, listen to me,” she moaned. “You will have to deliver this baby. It’s coming!”

  The women closed around Mother and chased all the men and children away from the house.

  IT was dark when Kim, the cook’s daughter, fetched me from the Ancestral Temple where I was hiding from the awful sounds of birthing. She said I had a new baby sister. I splashed across the calf-deep water in the courtyard. In her room, Mother was propped up with cushions. Beads of sweat ran down her flushed face.

  “Mother, are you in pain?” I sat on the divan next to her and held her hand.

  She smiled wanly, too exhausted to talk. She squeezed my hand. Her fingers were soft.

  “It’s a girl, Mother, so her name is Huong, just like you decided.”

  Mother seemed to want to say something, but her eyes closed to sleep. Aunt Thao whispered that Mother needed her rest. Trang frowned as she tended Mother. That was when I noticed there was a lot of blood everywhere. They were wiping it up, but it kept coming. In the light of the oil lamp, it looked dark like pitch on the straw mat; on the white rags, it was red. They called for more hot water and fresh linens. Trang gave Mother an herbal concoction, and the Aunties were panicking. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. The wind howled around the eaves, struggling to get inside. Within the flickers of the oil flames, fate shifted. Mother closed her eyes as if to rest, but her spirit sped away, slipping over our world, gone from me.

  The women wailed. The storm did not relent, the sky pouring through the night.

  THE day burned white, the sky as clear as blue glass. The ground steamed. A reddish film of dried mud left by the receding floodwater coated the grass and bushes. Along the creek, brown water filled the breached dikes. Roads disintegrated into miles of slop and puddles. The gravediggers had waited three days for the water to ebb before breaking ground on her resting plot.

  As her firstborn, I led the funeral procession out of the Ancestral Gate. It was difficult walking backward in the mud. I kept slipping and falling, holding up the whole column of marchers, monks, relatives, friends, and servants. My white mourner’s robe was completely brown. I struggled to perform the funeral rites—the same one Tan had done for his father. I walked backward in front of the casket bearers. I stopped, knelt, pressed my forehead into the mud, and cried: Please, don’t leave us, Mother. We are lost without you. Please, stay and watch over us. We love you. We need you. Please, don’t leave us, Mother.

  When the coffin reached me, I rose, took ten steps back, knelt down, and repeated the pleas.

  Towed by their nannies, Hung and Hong wailed. Cousin Tan was walking next to his stepmother, head down, sobbing into his chest. He was closer to my mother than to his stepmothers, Aunt Thu
an and Aunt Lang. The rest of the household followed behind as we went out of the estate. Villagers lined the road to pay their respects. The peasants adored her—the soft-spoken outsider from another province.

  I lost my sandals and cap. I was covered in slime, mud in my mouth and the hot smell of earth in my nostrils. A heavy sun. The villagers, my childhood friends, my relatives, the monks, the servants, the heady incense, the mourning chants, the cymbals and tolling bells. Nothing could fill the hollowness within me.

  We came to a crossroad. To the left was the dirt path to our Ancestral Cemetery in the village—a modest park enclosed by a low brick wall, with a few trees and stone benches where Uncle Thuan rested with his forefathers. Places for Father and Mother had already been chosen long ago.

  If I walked straight ahead, I would come to the interprovincial road that led back to Mother’s ancestral home. Her family had a splendid cemetery there, much nicer than my father’s family’s. It was a beautiful flower garden with statues, gravel footpaths, trees, and a fishpond, all enclosed by a high wall and tended year-round by a caretaker. Former senators and mandarins and village chiefs of her line had been laid to rest there. She would have been among family.

  To the right, in the middle of a rice field, lay the plot Aunt Thuan had picked out for Mother. During Mother’s wake, the Aunties had a monk augur the family’s fortunes. In the tea leaves and chicken bones, he predicted dangers ahead, so the Aunties summoned a feng shui master who said that the estate was exposed to ill elements from the north, and that if they buried Mother in the northern field, the estate would be protected from evil. I protested, but they would not hear of it. Auntie Thuan said Mother’s spirit had the duty of safe-keeping the household. As head of the clan, she had the right to decide my mother’s resting place.

  My knees buckled. I couldn’t make the turn. I couldn’t lead them to that grave, the lone mound of red earth in a blue paddy-sea of sky. Crumpling in the mud, I was useless. I opened my mouth, but no words came. Dry sobs seized my throat. The bearers stopped, the shadow of her casket falling on me. Guards Canh and Khi pulled me to my feet and walked me backward down the path the Aunties had chosen.

  The monks chanted and the bearers lowered her into the ground. Aunties burned paper chariots, fake money, and gold foil to send Mother’s spirit to heaven in comfort. I wondered if water would get into her casket. I could not stop shaking.

  I STUDIED as I had never done before. I bent my entire being into the text, poring over the equations and chapters as if Mother were in her garden, waiting for me to pass the exam. Within the pages, I could pretend that nothing had changed, that Father was safe in Hanoi, and that things would return to normal soon. My escape portal was through literature, history, and mathematics. The tighter my focus, the easier the texts became. In grief, I discovered my mental stride. Learning was transformed into an act of pleasure. It was Mother’s last gift, her wish for me to love the quest for knowledge.

  Week after week, I stayed in our house, ate meals the cook set out for my brothers and me, and avoided the Aunties. Boyhood games lost their hold on me. I stopped going into the village. My friend Hoi came and urged me to join the Resistance and avenge my mother. He did not know that I blamed the war for everything and that I loathed both the Resistance and the French. I told him that I had promised my mother I would finish school.

  I TOOK the exam. When the results came back, I had the highest score in the district. I told no one and brought my grade card to Mother’s garden. Her rosebush had grown wild with blooms. The birds were absent. Mother would have been thirty-two the next month, this poor woman who had shed more tears than laughter in the brief time I had known her. I sat beneath the guava tree and thought of Mother and her smiling eyes. The stone marker was still there, beneath it our secret promise as fresh as the day we had committed it to the earth.

  THE NORTH

  1948–1949

  27. THE SLAVE

  It happened at the apex of his life; he was thirty-one, in his prime, a country nobleman at large in the city with the riches of generations at his disposal. It happened on a journey home to see his pregnant wife. He had stopped midway to spend the night at the estate of his cousin-in-law. The next morning, a French patrol passed through the village, looking for guerrillas. Warned by scouts, most of the village men, regardless of political affiliation, had fled with their sisters and daughters. French forces were known to plunder and rape villages suspected of harboring rebels.

  They herded a handful of elders, cripples, drunkards, and one oversleeper into the courtyard of the community temple. Three captives were shot on suspicion of being Viet Minh sympathizers. When they put a gun to the man in the silk pajamas, he protested in fluent French, claiming to be the brother of the late magistrate of the Pham Domain in Tong Xuyen, candidate apparent to that seat and sworn enemy of the Viet Minh.

  It amused the soldiers. For the colonialists, native nobility was merely a convenience. The French commander was delighted. He had lost his interpreter to a sniper’s bullet and was in dire need of a replacement. Dismissing the man’s identifications and promise of a cash reward, the commander shackled him in his silk pajamas to the line of coolies.

  Within months, his wife would die and take with her the secret burial site of the vast ancestral fortune.

  The nobleman’s new life began as a colonial slave. His lineage, wealth, education—even his family’s long-standing obedience to France—didn’t save him the indignity of being led from village to village on a chain. He was fed when he worked, whipped when he refused. No more than a useful piece of equipment or a whore, he was handed from one commander to the next, pressed into one tour after another in an endless series of raids and battles staged across the expanse of the Red River Delta. They gave him no respite and paid him no wages. On the march, he was a pack animal for the regiment’s supplies. In the villages, he was an interpreter of French demands and threats. He translated the interrogator’s questions and penned homesick letters for illiterate legionnaires.

  The scorching sky turned rainy, then wintry; the campaign dragged across a full year. Once the old colonial masters had retrenched themselves, the coolies, the cooks, the errand boys, and the strange interpreter—the learned barbarian well-versed in Voltaire—were unshackled and released back to the land. Freedom was their compensation.

  My father returned to us, a barefoot beggar with neither a bedroll on his back nor a single piaster in his pocket. As raw-boned and light-shadowed as the famine victims that once roamed the land, he staggered through the Ancestral Gate, sunburned and covered in bleeding scabs. No one dared touch him. Lice lined the collar of his shirt and nested in the stitching of his pants.

  Few men had fallen a greater distance.

  The house guards bowed, eyes lowered, reluctant to look upon his debasement. He seized his youngest son in a crushing embrace and wept. The boy could not recognize his father and wailed in terror on the steps of the family temple. Servants gathered round and bowed. The head of the clan had returned from the dead.

  That evening, I walked him to Mother’s grave. We kneeled down in the bed of gardenias and lit incense. We brought Mother her guavas and green mangoes from the garden she loved so much. Father was bent over, his newly shaven head in his hands. He was talking to her, face as wet as rain, hands shaking as I had never seen them shake before.

  I left him by her graveside, for the first and last time.

  The sunset sky had turned upside down in the autumn paddies, and he was afloat on her island of flowers, engulfed by the burning eaves of heaven.

  THE SOUTH

  1971–1973

  28. A LULL OF SILENCE

  It was the summer of 1971. It seemed unreal to me that Tan and I had not seen each other for ten years. We ran into each other at the fountain square on Duy Tan Street, just a few months before the Americans started pulling out from Vietnam. Anh and I were on our way to the park at the center of Saigon for ice cream. The children were at home with
their nanny. Tan had just gotten out from his classes at the law school across the street. He was dressed smartly in a civilian suit, already looking the part of a worldly lawyer. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, he had developed into a modern image of his father. Since his decommission, Tan worked for an American company maintaining U.S. fighter planes and was attending evening classes for his law degree.

  “Are you all right, Thong?” Tan asked, squeezing my shoulder. “You look very thin and tired.”

  “Really? I’m in the best shape of my life. I was very lucky with my second tour. It was only a year and a half. They stationed me here in Saigon to train the City Civil Defense Force. If they sent me to the front again, I doubt I’d still be alive. I just got released last year.”

  “Me too.”

  At last, South Vietnam appeared to be secure. The failed 1968 Tet Offensive had been a major setback for North Vietnam. The NLF suffered heavy casualties because they were used as the main force to attack the cities. Their underground was also exposed and decimated. In the following year, the U.S. took the offensive, hoping to force Hanoi to the negotiation table. By 1969, the impact of the Tet campaign, which had come close to toppling the government of the South, was largely forgotten. Confident that peace was forthcoming, the U.S. cut aid to South Vietnam. With the apparent stability and a shortfall in the budget, the government reduced its armed forces. Old army reservists like myself were decommissioned once more, and senior regulars like Tan were retired.

  It didn’t seem unreasonable for us to expect a peaceful future. Tan no longer worried about being sent to some remote airfield where shelling occurred nightly. I no longer dreaded the prospect of being assigned to a combat unit. Tan was planning a career in law. I had a tenured teaching position and owned a house.

  “It’s really good to see you,” he said.

  I smiled. “Very good to see you too.”