Beauty Rising

by Mark W. Sasse

  He looked and nodded over to Lola Meyers who stood beside Mrs. Grassely sitting at the piano. The piano started and then Lola began singing the Bee Gees’ How Deep is Your Love – a special request of My Phuong from all her days singing Karaoke. I barely heard any of the song. I could only concentrate on that angelic face in front of me.

  At the end of the song, Reverend Fox opened his Bible and turned to I Corinthians 13 and read the love chapter also specially requested from My Phuong.

  “Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast . . . ”

  I thought for sure everyone would envy me, and I wanted to boast to the world about my bride. She was so patient to tolerate me, and she was ever so kind.

  After the Reverend finished reading the chapter, he asked us to turn and face each other and clasp hands together. We then repeated our vows, one at a time, gazing right into each other’s eyes.

  “Martin, do you have a symbol of your love?”

  “Yes, this ring.”

  Derrick handed me the gold band, and I placed it on her left ring finger.

  “And My Phuong, do you have a symbol of your love?”

  “Yes, this ring.”

  Lola walked over to My Phuong and handed her the ring and then placed it on my left ring finger.

  “This ring is a symbol of eternal love with no ending and no beginning,” Reverend Fox continued.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few people in the congregation turning around and whispering about something. Then Reverend Fox stopped speaking and looked directly past us down the aisle. I turned my head to the left and saw her approaching – my mother. My Phuong dropped my hand which she held and turned around towards her as well. A slight buzz of commotion rippled through the small crowd and all eyes were fixed on my mother. She was dressed in a Sunday outfit and held her pocketbook under her right arm. She walked slowly towards us in a steady pace with her eyes fixed on me.

  “Mom,” I said walking two steps towards her then stopping. “You came. You can sit up here in the front.”

  I motioned my hand towards the front left pew, but she had taken her eyes off of me and stopped about fifteen feet in front of My Phuong. I cringed to think that she was going to make a scene. I heard nothing from the Reverend, who now stood to my back.

  “I will not let you ruin my family,” she said looking straight at My Phuong.

  “Mom, stop this. Now,” I said as my heart filled with despair and anger. I could not believe that this was happening again. I refused to believe that she could ruin the greatest day of my life.

  “Vietnam ruined my family once. I will not allow it to happen again.”

  “Mom!”

  As I yelled out at her, she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a handgun and quickly pointed it. CRACK. The shot reverberated from every direction off the ceiling and walls. People screamed and dove down behind the pews. The bullet hit My Phuong with such force that she went flying backwards and landed against the altar. Her body lay twisted with her arms and legs going in different directions. The sound closed in on me until my mind drowned everything out. My ears felt like a great fullness had entered them. I felt dizzy and lost my balance falling down to one knee. My mother kept holding the gun pointing it towards the front of the church.

  “And you,” she said now aiming at Reverend Fox. “It’s all your doing, too.”

  Her hand shook up and down. The Reverend stood crying, shaking his head back and forth, pleading for mercy.

  Suddenly, my mom dropped the gun to the floor and stood coldly with her arms down at her sides, not moving. One of the church elders who cowered behind a pew just a few feet away from her lunged for the gun and secured it. Two other individuals came and grabbed my mother’s arms and pulled them tightly behind her back holding her captive.

  I looked over at My Phuong. Blood, bright red blood, flowed down the front of her beautiful white ao dai. I rose to my feet and ran to her, picked her up and put her into my arms rocking her, talking to her, crying at her. Reverend Fox came to my side and quickly put his suit jacket on top of My Phuong as if to stop the bleeding. Movement and sound surrounded me, cornering me on all sides, but I could only see and comprehend two things – my lovely My Phuong with a red stained chest, bleeding to death in my arms, and my mom staring at me expressionless from the center aisle.

  I don’t remember what happened in the next few minutes. It wasn’t long though until I saw uniformed policemen and paramedics coming towards me. They took My Phuong out of my arms placing her on a gurney. They worked on her chest and shouted back and forth. They tried to revive her and keep her stable, but she lay lifeless in front of me. I sat against the altar and wept. Reverend Fox wept right beside me with his arm around my neck. There was nothing anybody could do. My Phuong was dead.

  Home

  Nothing heals the wounds from a tragedy such as this. There are no prayers of comfort, no silver linings, no moral lessons to be learned. At night I went to sleep. In the morning I woke up. It was only in these mundane tasks that my life had any meaning. There was nothing more. Nothing at all.

  Reverend Fox took me into his house those first few days after the incident. He didn’t want me to be alone. Every morning I would walk out of the house, and the church building would stab me with reality. I felt sick every hour of every day. Every evening I sat on the picnic table out near the steps to her apartment which was the closest thing to sacred ground my family would ever know. So much pain and promise went up and down that staircase, but it was once again vacant. I wouldn’t go up to the apartment. I didn’t want to see her belongings, and I didn’t want to sit in the shadows of what once were the most magical places in the world for me.

  I couldn’t stay focused on anything. I sat, and I walked. I drove around town and did everything in my power to ignore the lawyers who tried to contact me. I wanted nothing to do with them or anyone else. Reverend Fox became my only conduit to the outside world. He made all the necessary arrangements concerning My Phuong’s death. When he asked me what my wishes were, I told him that I wished this whole thing didn’t happen, and I asked the typical questions about God’s presence that the victims of tragedies so often voice.

  On the third day of life without My Phuong, I sat at the familiar picnic table and Reverend Fox came up unnoticed from behind me. He placed My Phuong’s urn right in front of me without saying a word. My eyes fixated on it, but there were no tears left within me. I stared at it feeling nothing but emptiness.

  “Martin,” Reverend Fox jolted my consciousness. “Martin. What are you going to do?”

  I sat, unresponsive having no idea of what to say. He sat down across from me.

  “I can’t tell you what to do, Martin. But in your own time and in your own way, you need to bring closure to this part of your life. You can stay here as long as you like.” He stopped and looked at me while I kept my eyes on the urn. “If you want to have some sort of memorial service . . .”

  “No,” I said abruptly. I didn’t want to look into my neighbors’ eyes and fake a smile of appreciation for them coming to pay their respects. I didn’t want to hear Reverend Fox’s words ring hollow. If my dad were here, he would know how to use some vulgar phrase to sum up my feelings really well. I needed something profane, not some memorial service.

  “Okay, Martin. Just so you know. You can stay as long as you like. My home is your home.”

  The Reverend stood up and walked silently back to his house.

  Home. That last word reverberated inside me, and it wasn’t long until it finally hit me hard and clear. The obvious had been staring me in the face for days now, but I was too caught up in my emotions to see it. I knew now more than ever what I had to do, and there was no time to waste.

  I got into my car and drove over to Home Avenue and parked in front of my house. Urn in hand, I went in the front door, through the living room, and into the kitchen. I pulled a large red-lid Rubbermaid container fro
m the cabinet and placed it on the table. I opened My Phuong’s urn and very carefully poured the ashes into the container spilling nothing in the process. Then I grabbed a Ziploc from the bottom drawer and ran upstairs to my bedroom. In my closet, under my hanging clothes and on the bottom shelf sat dad’s urn. I pulled it out and sat on the floor, opened the Ziploc wide and balancing it delicately on the floor, I poured out the remaining ashes of dad which hadn’t fit the first time around. I zipped it up, ran downstairs and placed the bag on top of My Phuong’s ashes already in the container. Then I closed the lid and sealed it all with blue duct tape.

  I made two phone calls. The first was to the stockroom to tell them that I quit. The second was to the travel agent to book my flight. I then grabbed Mom’s debit card from her purse in the desk, drove down to the bank and withdrew the maximum amount allowed, which was a considerable sum. Within three days, I was packed and ready to go.

  On Sunday morning, the eighth day after the incident, I arrived at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City – the former capital of South Vietnam. It had been nearly forty-four years since another Kinney had been in this location. It was still very early in the morning. I went promptly to the taxi counter and hired a car to take me to Tay Nguyen – Dak Lak Province – Ban Me Thuot town. I threw my backpack into the trunk and put my shoulder bag containing the Rubbermaid container on the seat next to me behind the driver. We drove for hours and hours through the countryside. Peasants and water buffaloes dotted the landscape readying the fields for another planting. We travelled up the coast past Nha Trang until we finally turned west up into the highlands.

  “How far are we from Ban Me Thuot?” I eventually asked the taxi driver who hadn’t spoken a word to me since the airport.

  “About seventy kilometers.”

  “These house on stilts, are these a different ethnic group?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who lives here? Vietnamese?”

  The driver still didn’t understand me.

  “Kinh?” I pointed out to the fields with rice paddies and with long houses on stilts towered out of the trees perched on the rolling hills in the background. I had learned the word kinh from My Phuong. It meant the ethnic Vietnamese – the majority of people in Vietnam.

  “No, no, not kinh. These are the Mnong.”

  “The Mnong?”

  “Yes.”

  I still wasn’t sure, so I pulled a receipt out of my wallet and scribbled M-N-O-N-G on it and showed it to him.

  “Yes, Mnong.”

  “Can you pull over? I want to see some of them.”

  “No, no. Buon Me Thuot one hour. We stop there.”

  “No, I want to stop here.”

  “No, nothing here.”

  “Stop the car.”

  “Nothing here.”

  “Pull over here,” I said forcefully.

  Finally, the driver said a few words under his breathe and pulled off to the side. I really missed Tan. Between two rice paddies was a small elevated dirt road which wound out of sight through the woods on the hill. Several houses on stilts were visible on the right.

  “Drive down there.”

  “No, my car can’t go down there.”

  “Go!”

  He complained some more under his breathe, and we went bumping up and down, in and out of the potholes.

  “Not good for the car,” he said and continued to complain the whole way. I ignored him and just watched two small boys who sat on top of a grey buffalo in the rice field. They waved furiously at me, and I waved back.

  We finally pulled up around a cluster of five or six houses. Several people were standing around and several more came down the steps of the houses to look at the tall, fat, red-headed American step out of the taxi. I smiled at the people and nodded my head. They chattered fiercely and stared at me. I looked around and noticed that one of the houses had a cross hanging over the windows.

  “Hello. Does anyone speak English?”

  Several little boys walked up to me and mimicked “hello, hello” but seemed to know no other words. I turned to the driver who was standing beside the car smoking.

  “Can you ask them in Vietnamese if anyone speaks English?”

  “Co ai noi Tieng Anh o day khong?”

  A couple of men chatted in the background and yelled into one of the houses. A moment later, a young man, perhaps in his late twenties and wearing glasses, came down the house steps, exchanged words with the old men and then approached me.

  “Hello. I speak English. Can I help you?”

  “Yes. Is this a Christian village?”

  “Yes, it is. We have small church over the hill there.”

  “I’m looking for the church of a man who was arrested by the police about four years ago.”

  “Pardon?” the young man asked for clarification.

  “Let me write it for you.”

  I handed him a slip of paper that read ‘Mnong pastor – four years ago – arrested by police – do you know him?’ He looked at it at length and then went over to two elderly men and translated what was written on the paper to them. The elderly men were very animated and kept pointing over the hill.

  “Yes. We know. His name is Nong Klung. His church is only five kilometers from here. I can take you there.”

  “His church? He has a church?”

  “Yes, today Wednesday. He at home for sure. I take you there.”

  “No, sorry. That is the wrong person.”

  I thought for a moment I might have gotten lucky when he said they knew him, but when I heard he was alive, I knew it was a mistake.

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “Well, do you know if Nong Klung had any children?”

  The young man turned back to the elderly men and chatted for a minute.

  “He has two sons and one daughter.”

  It was a good try I thought to myself.

  “But his daughter disappeared about four years ago. Nobody knows where she is.”

  My heart pounded. Could it really be true? I had to find out for sure.

  “Take me to him.”

  “Okay, but we can’t go by taxi. We go back way on foot.”

  “Okay.”

  I went back to the taxi and took out my large backpack and my one shoulder bag. I decided to jump in feet first with no turning back because I had nothing to lose. I told the driver he could leave, and I started walking with the young man into the forest. A trail of children clipped my heels at every turn. One of them caught up with me and handed me a bunch of bananas. Others would try to sneak up from behind and rub the hair on my arms. They were the cutest little kids, and I didn’t care what they did to me. I even found myself smiling at them from time to time.

  We walked on a small trail through the lush vegetation. After about thirty minutes of heart-pounding walking, we climbed a steep, muddy embankment and stopped at a clearing overlooking the valley. I huffed and puffed insufferably, bent over with my hands on my knees trying to catch my breathe.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “My name is Long.”

  “How did you learn English?”

  “My father work very hard so I can go to better school near Ban Me Thuot. I get to study English there, plus I take more English classes at night.”

  “How much farther to the church?”

  “It’s just down there. In bottom of valley.”

  “Do you know the pastor?”

  “Sure, I know Pastor Nong.”

  “What about his family? Did you know his daughter?”

  “No, he’s only been here a short time. I met his sons but never his daughter.”

  I still couldn’t believe what I sincerely hoped in my heart.

  We continued the trek down the slippery slope and after another forty minutes came to a cluster of houses with a rather large church standing in the center. This can’t be it, I said to myself. My Phuong’s father didn�
�t pastor in a church building.

  Several people came and greeted us as we entered the village. Long talked with them and then led me over to the church building. We walked up the four wooden steps and entered a long structure which had wooden walls, open windows, and bamboo floors in which you could look right through the cracks and see the ground below it. I wondered if I would soon be looking up at them since the thin strips of bamboo seemed to give way so much, but they continued to hold me as we walked to the front.

  A short older gentleman with a round face, bald head and a kind smile approached us. Long exchanged greetings with him and he came over to me and held out both hands to shake.

  “Wel-come,” he greeted in broken English.

  “Hello.”

  Student Long explained a few more things about me and then they whisked me to the back of the church where they rolled out a mat and invited me to sit. Before I knew it, a tea cup filled with piping hot strong green tea was in my hand.

  “This is Pastor Nong.”

  “My name is Martin.”

  We both nodded our heads and smiled.

  “Can you ask him if he knows a girl named My Phuong?”

  As he translated, I pulled out a photograph of her and held it up to him. He immediately took it out of my hands, and his countenance changed as tears of joy started streaming down his face. He exchanged some words with Long then Long confirmed it all.

  “That is his daughter. Where is she? How do you know her?”

  My poor My Phuong. I felt sick for her. I had found my way back to her home – the one she never knew she had. I sat across from her father, tears streaming down my face, and glanced deeply into my soul to see if I had the strength to tell him the truth.