Table of Contents
___________________
PART 1
River
New Home
Commute
Meeting
Badminton
Falling
Land
Consent
Motherhood
Mei Ya
A Place on the Mountain
One World
Blessing
Labor
Keeping
Busy
Seattle
Home
PART 2
Learning
PART 3
Treatment
Trade
Conditioning
Wishes
News
PART 4
Back to Bangkok
Leaving Bangkok
Gathered
Bruise
By the River
Better
Meeting the Horses
PART 5
The Mountain
Time
Horses
Closer
Reliving
Staying
Quiet
Dap
Soup
Near
Too Much
Sweet Things
Change
Scared
Departure
PART 6
Funeral
Fire
Remains
PART 7
Back to the Mountain
Acknowledgments
About Catharine H. Murray
About Ann Hood
Copyright & Credits
About Akashic Books
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth (IV, iii)
To all those living with loss.
May you find a way to let your grief speak.
PART 1
River
It was September 1989, the end of the rainy season, when the Mekong runs quick and mighty, flooding its banks and carrying huge limbs, sometimes whole trees, off like plunder. A dangerous flow of flotsam and force, the river is said to harbor, below the surface, a serpent-monster, especially greedy this time of year.
I didn’t know that then. Twenty-three years old, jet-lagged, and knowing next to nothing about Thailand, I had arrived from my home in Maine only a week before. There I stood, in a line of searchers holding hands with other young volunteers—Japanese, Thai, British, and Canadians, who, like me, had come to work at the nearby refugee camp.
We were searching for a body.
The day before, a young man had left the confines of the camp to come here. Had he come to swim or to look back toward the land he pined for?
They found his shirt and trousers folded on the shore.
We stepped into the fast-moving river, so cloudy with silt that our feet glowed ghostly apparitions before vanishing from sight. The ceaseless current slurred any words in my head so that I kept silent, only wading in deeper, feet questioning riverbed with every step.
On the other side, half a mile across, fringes of jungle treetops sagged in the glare of midday sun. At our backs, mudbanks—heat-baked hard as stone that sometimes crumbled underfoot—rose up under a cluster of bamboo, wood, and thatch houses gathered at the river’s edge.
The fierce sun burned our cheeks and beaded the sweat on our necks as we advanced. To the left, the river stretched west and then north to Tibet; to the right, it rolled east and south through Cambodia to the sea. Swirling water cooled backs of knees, thick of thighs, as we walked, slow with searching, hoping and dreading to feel something other than mud underfoot.
It seemed odd to me then that if we did find the boy’s body, we would be giving the grieving mother what she most wanted and most feared.
New Home
A week earlier, I woke with my head against the cool glass window of the bus that carried me overnight from the airport in Bangkok to this northeastern edge of the country. I rubbed my eyes and looked out, the curiosity that had brought me waking me at once to a world as far from my own home as I could get.
On either side, a patchwork of rice paddies spread shimmering, reflecting lavender and gold of early-morning pastel skies. Brown water buffaloes leaned hulking bodies forward on spindly legs knee-deep in rainy-season mud, and a wavy line of blue hills stretched northward, all the way to our destination, a small town on the edge of the Mekong River, the border between Thailand and Laos.
As I marveled, I wondered what kind of place I had come to, so far from my New England home and the ivy-covered walls of the college I had finally graduated from, escaped. At last my life was my own, and I was ready to really learn.
The bus sank and rose through puddles in potholes, rocking us into town, and pulled up next to a bustling market. Tattered umbrellas tilted over squares of cloth laden with piles of fruits and vegetables I’d never seen. Over each, a female vendor presided, arranging her wares or laughing or arguing with the women around her.
I staggered sleepily off the bus where a crowd of men, drivers eager for business, pressed in close but did not touch me. I chose the nearest tuk-tuk, a motorcycle with a covered cart built onto the back, climbed in, and lifted my bags onto the polished aluminum floor. The driver looked at me, his face questioning as he realized I spoke no Thai. I repeated the phrase I had committed to memory before leaving home, “Suk Somboon,” until he understood the name of the hotel where I wanted to go, where my new landlord would give me the key to the house I had arranged to rent. As he twisted the throttle to pull his machine out into the street, I held tight to the chrome bars behind me and looked around at this place that would be my home for a year, two at the most, I thought. “Suk Somboon.” I didn’t know then what it meant: Perfect Happiness.
Looking at the houses, I was disappointed not to see huts with thatched roofs perched on stilts under papaya trees, elephants striding by. Instead, two-story wooden buildings jostled for space on each side of the busy street. Men, women, and children strolled up and down, dressed in neatly ironed, pale yellow or pink or blue pajamas, chatting with neighbors, as nonchalant as if they were fully dressed. Women traced graceful arcs with short grass brooms, sweeping dust from the street in front of their houses as if the thoroughfare was as much theirs as the floors of the house behind them. Men smoked their first cigarettes of the day.
The sound of creaking and banging drew my attention to the houses where people unbolted and unfolded, accordion-style, hinged panels that made up the whole front walls of their houses, to be neatly split and collected at both corners of the buildings. I couldn’t imagine exposing my home, my life like that.
At the end of the street, a quarter-mile from the bus stop, beyond an empty yard, lay an expanse of flat blue-gray water. The Mekong River.
The driver swung the tuk-tuk left around the corner, cut the engine, and I looked up to see my new home. Two-story, with boards gray from years of hard heat and rain, the house looked to me like all the rest.
I handed the driver a silver coin with a copper center. He slipped it into the pouch belted at his hip before kicking his bike back to life and leaving me and my bags by the door. I looked toward the hotel across the street, where wooden railings, dry and faded blue, trimmed the upstairs balconies above the street. From the cool darkness underneath, a short woman, top-heavy like a peahen, called to me.
She stepped into the light of the morning, already rising to a whiter glare than minutes before, hurried across the empty street, and, pulling a bunch of keys from her pocket, unlocked the heavy brass padlock and folded the door panel back on its hinges. I stepped over the threshold and breathed in the quiet stillnes
s of the house. Then, following her example, I took off my shoes and walked behind her up the stairs.
A stream of unintelligible words flowed from her as she gestured first to the windows then the furniture, a heavy wooden table and two chairs with cushions. Dumb without her language, I could only smile and nod to show I was delighted with the place and the furnishings. I followed her through a flimsy aluminum screen door into the small bedroom, closing it quickly before the mosquitoes could dart in behind us. I had read in my guidebook on the plane that Dengue fever was common.
Against the wall of thin unpainted plywood, a folding cot stood on rusty legs. On top lay a thin pad, sections tightly packed with feathery puffs from the pods of the kapok tree. On the opposite wall, a screened window with bars but no glass afforded an expansive view of corrugated tin roofs below in various stages of rust. Under my feet, the wide unvarnished floorboards shone with the polishing of decades of footsteps and scrubbings with oily halves of fresh coconut.
Someone else might have been disappointed in the austere furnishings. But I was delighted. It was my own place. Finally, I could live alone. I could enjoy quiet. No one to bother me. No one to interrupt me. No one to please. When I came home from work, I’d be able to write in my journal, write letters. Be quiet. After all the striving and endless talking and listening of eighteen years of school, I was at last in a world of my own, without language, without understanding. I could simply be.
I wanted to collapse on the bed to sleep. But even this far north of Bangkok, even in the rainy season, fifteen yards from the Mekong River and a half-mile from the jungles of Laos, it was hot and I was sticky. I needed a bath.
The smiling woman led me down the stairs and out the back door of the house to the bath area. Two doors of corrugated tin nailed to rotting wooden frames hung side by side. They opened onto dark, low rooms built of unpainted cinder block walls and smooth cement floors with only enough space to stand or squat. Behind the first door a long rectangular cement tank, chest-high, was built into half the space. It was filled with cold water from a single spigot. Even without words, I could read the woman’s body language as she opened and closed the spigot so that only one drop of water at a time fell. I understood that I would need to be careful to keep plenty of water in the tank by leaving the spigot always dripping. The water was needed for bathing and, more importantly, flushing.
A lightbulb hung from the ceiling by its cord, and the woman dried her hands carefully before flicking the switch on the wall, as the exposed wiring was not well-insulated. I would soon develop the habit of using my elbow, a reliably dry body part, to turn wall switches on and off.
The toilet was new to me. A shiny porcelain oval bowl sunk right into the cement floor, its edges on two sides wider for the feet. The woman, with her experience cleaning at the Perfect Happiness hotel, was used to foreigners unfamiliar with Thai toilets. She knew how to handle this. Stepping across the toilet, she squatted to demonstrate the proper orientation for elimination. Then the flush lesson.
She picked up the thin red plastic bowl floating on the surface of the water, dipped one edge to fill it, then poured the water from shoulder height. The water swirled and burbled in the toilet, and I could see that her approach would be effective in a nonsimulated situation.
She then splashed several more bowls full of water all around the floors to clean up any imaginary splatters. In such hot, humid weather, this would be important to keep the bathroom smelling clean. She didn’t seem to mind wasting water. With a whole river just beyond my doorstep, I guessed there was plenty.
“The important thing,” a friend would later explain when we were discussing the finer points of bathing, “is that you never touch the water in the tank with your hands. Use the bowl to dip up the water because you don’t want to contaminate water that might have to be used for cooking or tea. And don’t let the bowl sink.” I imagined having to step into the dark cold water to retrieve a sunken bowl and shuddered.
Commute
After a week of waiting for my paperwork to be sent from the Catholic Offices of Emergency Relief and Refugees in Bangkok, I started work at the camp. It was a one-hour commute from the town where we lived to the camp fifty-six kilometers downriver. In the backseat of the minivan each morning, I gazed at the green jungles of Laos on the other side of the river, a sight that changed each day with light and season. I never tired of the commute before and after a hectic day of work.
In that first month, I learned from my Thai coworkers enough of the language to haggle with tuk-tuk drivers and market women. After weekdays spent in the refugee camp, trying to tame the rules of English grammar for the two dozen Hmong staff who taught the children and teenagers of the camp of 42,000 refugees, I needed the quiet of the ride. For most of the teachers, English was not their second language, as I had assumed when I first arrived. Many spoke not only Hmong, Thai, and Laotian, but Chinese, Russian, and French as well. All day words buzzed past my ears in lines of sound with rhythms and tones unique to each language. Some of it I tried to understand and remember.
I was surprised by how much I loved this, my first real job. In leaving home to follow the do-gooder’s dream of teaching in a refugee camp, I had thought I was coming to teach poor, backward people. As a bright young American, educated in the best schools, I had been taught to believe that I held the key to success for the “less fortunate” people of the world.
I wasn’t long in the camp before I realized I might have gotten that wrong. In trying to learn the ways of the new cultures I was in—Hmong, Lao, and Thai—I began to feel like I was the backward one, the uncivilized one. I noticed the way the teachers in the camp and the people around me in the town took such care with simple tasks—erasing a chalk board, wiping deep into each corner, stepping through a door, ironing a shirt—and the way they paid close, calm attention when I spoke.
Riding home in the van a few months after starting work at the camp, I was absorbing the peace that the view of hazy curves of the Mekong offered, and I realized the daily commute would be perfect for biking, I wrote to my mother asking her to send my road bike back with a friend who was coming to Thailand to work.
It arrived at the end of the rainy season.
Meeting
I had been working in the camp for a year when one night my friends and I walked into the small restaurant where we usually ate, a collection of rickety tables set up on the first floor of a modest house. In front of the house, the owner presided over her section of the street, cooking at her huge wok, caked underneath with layers of black sooty grease, but gleaming silver inside. Beside it stood a glass case with plucked chickens and ducks hanging by their throats. Customers greeted her and gave their orders as they walked in before making themselves at home in front of her television.
That night a group of Thai men sat by the far wall. One of my friends walked over to talk with them. He called me over and introduced me to the one he knew by name. I immediately felt the familiar sense of superiority and judgment I often experienced when I saw groups of men together like this. In the year I’d been there, I’d noticed rudeness only from drunken men. Sober, they would have barely acknowledged me and kept their distance, but drunk, they always smiled too eagerly and called out, “Byootifun! Byootifun!” waiting for some response. I always returned a glare. I concluded that many Thai men simply drank too much. The empty bottles of Mekong whiskey on the table beside the half-eaten plates of food and bowls of soup indicated that these men were no different.
But they looked different. Wearing clothes reminiscent of American cowboys, tight jeans, denim jackets, cowboy shirts with snaps, and leather vests, these men did not look like any I had encountered in this small town so far. Almost all the other men I’d met here wore their hair in neat crew cuts, but these had long hair, pulled back in unruly ponytails or tucked behind their ears. The one I’d been introduced to had hair that hung long and loose, silky and black over the back of a leather bomber jacket worn to softness and
covered with an eclectic collection of patches. When we met, he turned his gaze to me, and I was surprised to find myself pulled into the warmth of an open and inviting smile. He politely offered his hand in the Western style, not waiting for me to bow respectfully, as a woman meeting a man not obviously younger should have. He then introduced me to each of his rowdy friends. I didn’t think anything of it.
A few days later, I was riding home from work in the back of the minivan. It was October, the end of the rainy season. We were curving around a particularly scenic bend when I spotted a cyclist who’d stopped to take in the view.
“Hey, look, there’s that guy we saw the other night. I told you he was a biker,” my friend said to me. I remembered. In the moment that we sped past, I took it all in: his sleek road bike, his figure looking out over the river, the fact that his round-trip bike ride would be over sixty miles, and that he had incredible legs.
* * *
A week later, I was riding alone after a dusty day at work to clear my head and take in the beauty of the hills and river at sunset when I saw the same longhaired cyclist jogging on the road ahead. I had no interest in a romance, but I did think a riding buddy would be nice. As I pulled up behind him, I noticed his sweat-drenched shoulders and the curves of his calf muscles on legs that bowed like a lobsterman’s. I slowed to his pace and said hello.
Immediately his face, drawn in concentration and effort, brightened into that magnetic smile. I offered him some water from my bottle, which he politely refused twice before I convinced him to have some. He kept up his pace while he tilted back his head and put the worn plastic spout between his lips. I was amazed anyone could sweat that profusely, but on his smooth skin it only looked inviting. In as off-hand a manner as I could manage, I started a conversation, asking him about his biking routine. He didn’t speak much English, and I spoke even less Thai, so our conversation was short. I said goodbye and rode off ahead.
When I was returning in near darkness, I was surprised to look up at the bridge into town, not far from where I’d met this man, to find him standing next to his bike, facing me, waiting. He smiled and mounted his bike to join me for the ride back to town. We chatted a bit more and reintroduced ourselves. We decided to meet the next night to play badminton on the local court.
Now You See the Sky Page 1
