Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  We turned from the dust of the road and began the ascent to the ridge. Dense grass, taller than our heads and with edges that drew blood when they hit your skin at the wrong angle, slowed our walk even more. For this we had all worn long sleeves and sturdy trousers despite the warmth of the sun. I walked behind the men as they slashed a path with their machetes through this grass that had earned the name Ya Ka, or Communist grass. The grass got its name because during what is known to Americans as the Vietnam War, Communists were infiltrating Thailand and hiding in the jungles and mountains. The grass, like the Communists, increased rapidly where planted and no matter how many times it was cut down, it always came back. I hoped the commotion would scare away any cobras that might be nearby.

  After a long climb, when the sweat began to trickle down my neck and the skin at my wrists itched from the stinging edges of the grass, we emerged into a yellow field of broken stalks at our feet. Above us the sky spread blue and vast as ahead of us the mountain dropped suddenly away into a valley, thirty kilometers across to where distant hills lined the horizon in blue waves. We walked across the field, listening to Cam talk about the black beans he’d plant in time to harvest before the next rice crop was sown.

  Below us the long sloping wall of jungle fell, trees and vines growing thick and lush, harboring countless kinds of insects and reptiles and mammals. Tigers and elephants had not been seen here in the last couple of years. They were safer across the valley in the national park where the mountains were. Guards patrolled there to keep poachers from the big animals and the orchids. Orchid hunters came here to comb the jungle, and the villagers from here went there to hunt. The men we knew would not kill an elephant or tiger. They hunted for food, not for the international market. They brought wild boar, deer, anteaters, or mole rats home to feed their families and neighbors.

  Cam pointed out a line of road that wandered across the valley floor and led to Tong’s mother’s village, a nineteen-kilometer walk that he and Tong and their three-year-old daughter made regularly. While Cam and Dtaw talked, I wandered down the ridge. Still not fluent in the language, I needed translation from Dtaw to keep up, and I sometimes had to interrupt him so he could explain things to me. Sometimes it was easier to be alone. I came to a grassy place like a small lawn that curved out above the jungle. In the middle of this clear space stood a freshly cut tree stump, hip high. I went to it and followed the urge to climb up and sit. As I settled myself cross-legged, feet resting on thighs, on the newly cut surface, I felt a quiet rush of stillness. I felt a clean emptiness.

  In the past months I had become a student of Buddhism and meditation, and to sit and feel something that approached nothing was a thrill. I sat, enjoying the new sensation, gazing out at so much muted green and blue and spacious sky and earth. I sat for a long time. It wasn’t until years later that I wondered if I had been the beneficiary of all those years of energy from the earth flowing into the trunk of the tree; perhaps the energy was still surging upward despite the tree being gone. I don’t know the explanation, but I know that day I fell in love with that place, that piece of land. And in my childish desire for endless bliss, when I had climbed down from my perch, and Cam and Dtaw came walking down the path, I said to Dtaw, “Oh, can’t we live here? Can’t we just stay here forever? Do we ever have to leave?” He smiled, as usual, an answer without an answer.

  Consent

  Two years after our first date, I agreed to let Dtaw’s parents host a spirit-calling ceremony before we left for the US. I said I would do it only if it was not a wedding. After three years living in Thai rural culture and two years living as an almost-member of Dtaw’s family, I knew that the community looked at us as a married couple and would love to celebrate our union with a good wedding. Whether for a house raising, naming ceremony, wedding, or to end an illness, a spirit-calling ceremony varied only in the words spoken and the intentions of the hosts and guests. It always involved elders, a special sculpture of oiled and curled banana leaves, jasmine blossoms, chanting monks, crowds of neighbors, family and friends, and plenty of food and whiskey. Even though we’d applied for a fiancé visa for Dtaw after he’d been refused a tourist visa by the US consulate, I was not ready for a wedding. I had little faith in the institution of marriage, and I didn’t see why our love needed government approval.

  His parents had the invitations custom-printed with pink hearts. They consulted the seer for the most auspicious date and the right number of monks to attend. Dtaw’s great-aunt provided the handwoven silk sarong and matching shoulder scarf she had worn for her own wedding. Dyed garnet, from the luminous nest of a wood-boring insect, and with intricate patterns of gold and black woven into the sparkling threads, it dazzled me, and I relented. I went to Dtaw’s cousin, the best seamstress in the province, to be measured for a shirt of raw cream-colored silk, and prepared myself for a wedding.

  * * *

  That first year of marriage, I often wondered about living so far from home. I missed my friends, I missed speaking my language. I felt alone. Yet I also felt held, part of a strong web of community, each strand clearly defined by age and gender. I knew immediately when I was introduced to someone where I stood in relation to him or her. Each name was preceded by a word defining this. Older brother, maternal aunt, great-grandmother, little sister, little child. My own role as the young wife of a good man in a well-respected family was well-defined. I was meant to be a respectful, kind daughter-in-law, aunt, neighbor. And, in turn, I was shown respect and kindness from those around me. But I worried that this was not what I had been raised for. I was smart. I was a feminist. Was I wasting my skills and education here in this place so remote from my own people?

  I was working­—busy teaching at the local schools when their budgets allowed them to bring in a native English speaker for stints, and helping Dtaw run the small guest house he had turned our home into—but I still felt I needed to find my true calling.

  I thought graduate school back in the US might be the answer and began sending off for catalogs on dance therapy programs. I read them and imagined our life in the US where we would both work while I went to school. In the midst of this planning and dreaming, I stood washing dishes one afternoon, cool water running over my hands, heat from the crackling hot tin roof warming the top of my head. As I reminded myself to keep my mind on my task, to sustain awareness of my current movements rather than letting it wander, I realized I had been learning from books since before kindergarten. I wanted now to learn from life. I realized I did not want to go back to a world of achievement and striving.

  It wasn’t that living in Thailand didn’t require work. Dtaw and I both worked, we both looked after the foreign travelers who stayed in our home, and I taught English—but the pressure to get ahead, to climb the career ladder, to be a “success,” was not there for me in Thailand as it always had been in the US. This was partly because I felt anonymous. There was no one to impress or please as there was at home. My identity in the eyes of the people in my community, beyond being Dtaw’s wife, was simply being an American. To them I already was a success. I had made it karmically; I had found rebirth as a white US citizen, the pinnacle of privilege and happiness. Their view of karma offered a tacit support for the privilege I enjoyed despite my awareness of it. It made it comfortable for me to rest there. Living in Thailand allowed me to avoid the pressure I felt to do something impressive with my career. I didn’t think of all this consciously. I only knew that I wanted to stay in this community, learning the lessons of generosity and interconnected living that were all around me. I wanted to have children with this man I loved and raise them inside his big family with doting aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors. I wanted my children to have the kind of childhood I did not.

  Raised in a sterile affluent suburb of Chicago by a mom forced to work when her husband left her with two children under six, I had spent too many hours of my childhood alone. My companions after school most days were the characters I saw on television. Gilligan�
�s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Flintstones. These imaginary people were more real to me than the neighbors in the houses on our street. In this safe, clean, quiet neighborhood, I had been lonely.

  Now, in this small town by the river, loneliness dogged me too, but in a different way. I could always hear the neighbors through the thin walls of our houses, so close we could have reached our arms out the windows and touched. I could look down the lane to see the moving water of the river, alive and soft as a companion. I could look up the lane to the temple where the monks moved slow and steady, sweeping, chanting, listening. I could not really feel alone, even when I was lonely.

  Motherhood

  I was in no hurry to have children despite my dreams of grandparenting. It was three years after marriage before I got pregnant, and then it was not planned. But when my first son was born, I was shocked by the depth of maternal love that had been waiting to pour out of me with his body. Because it was my first baby, and I wanted a home birth, we flew home to Maine. I labored at home, but when our midwife Schyla realized he wasn’t coming quick enough, she decided we needed to move to the hospital. He was born healthy and strong enough to return to Thailand at two months old.

  Twelve days after Cody was born in the US, Dtaw’s sister Jum gave birth to a little girl, Jew, at our local hospital in Thailand. Jum was the family’s big-city businesswoman. She had lived in Bangkok since going to boarding school there before college. But Bangkok is no place to raise a baby, so, as so many young parents do in Thailand, she had long since planned to leave the baby with the grandmother to raise in the village, while she and her husband made money in the big city and prepared for when their child would live with them to attend school.

  From the start of my pregnancy, I had hoped for twins and had dutifully eaten every pair of fused bananas I saw, as my neighbors told me if I did, I might have twins. With Jew’s birth so close to Cody’s, my wish had mostly come true. They spent every waking hour together. Every time we went to the market or for bike rides or walks, we took the two of them, and when people asked if they were twins, I always nodded yes.

  I loved Jew. I nursed her at my breast beside Cody. I rocked the two in one big wicker basket suspended from the porch beams. I sang lullabies to them before they slept in the afternoons. Side by side, the babies sat in the big trailer behind my bike when Dtaw and I took evening rides along the Mekong. At home, Dtaw’s mother and I kept each other company as we sat and watched the two of them while they napped, waving cloths over their bodies to keep the mosquitoes away from their tender skin.

  Mei Ya

  Mei Ya means paternal grandmother, and that is how I addressed my mother-in-law. She and I had plenty of time to talk during those years when Cody and Jew were little. Together, we sat for hours, swinging them in the bamboo cradle to keep them sleeping, watching them play in the clean-swept dirt of the yard, safe under the mango tree. Sometimes I asked her about her life. Judging from her replies, I don’t think anyone else ever had. She’d raised five boys, Dtaw the fifth, and one girl, Jum, the last baby. As a mother, she had cultivated a fierce and effective vigilance. Despite dengue fever, malaria, poisonous snakes, and living only a few meters from the Mekong River with its greedy spirits and often fatally capricious currents, all her children survived, and all but one, my husband, the rebel, went to college in Bangkok, the city of refinement and money, a world away.

  When we shared meals together at her table, her sons barely spoke. As far as I could see, only when they shared a bottle of beer or whiskey with other men did the talk begin and never falter, conversation clicking along, picking up speed, whirling around corners of phrases, tumbling through tunnels of laughter and stories. With their mother, though, they were mostly silent. Jum would address her with more familiarity, but still reverence. I did not ever hear Jum pose questions about her mother’s past.

  With me it was different. As the daughter-in-law and a foreigner, I was not only one step removed from the rules of the family, I was usually forgiven when I was oblivious to them. I was able to get away with what people within the culture would be blamed for as disrespectful. So I asked a lot of questions. What was it like, I wondered, to grow up in a dusty village on the Mekong River, to live through Japanese and American presence during two wars? What was it like to be a young mother in a place so remote that seeing a doctor required a two-day ride on the back of a plodding water buffalo through jungle where tigers waited for fresh meat to wander by? But more than these things, I wanted to know my mother-in-law’s mind. I wanted to get past the fear and petty resentments and preoccupation with daily tasks of cooking and sweeping and laundry and hear about her inner world. So I asked more questions. And because I knew that the earliest experiences so strongly shape our psyches, I pressed her mostly about those.

  One day, while the babies slept, she told me about the little brother she adored when she was a child. She doted on him, taking him everywhere with her and her other little sister. They would fight over who got to carry him and hold his hand. She bathed him and dressed him and fed him. At twelve, she was almost old enough to have her own children, and her mother was busy with all the work the house and farm and monks in the temple down the street required. So my mother-in-law mothered the little boy she loved.

  He was six or seven when he was playing on the porch one day, she told me. He leaned against the railing, rotted from years of rain. Then he leaned too hard and fell through to the earth below where he lay still and silent. Panicked, Mei Ya ran to him, bending over him to find him alive, with only the wind knocked out of him. But after that, he grew sick and the fever came. His parents bathed him in cool water, muttered prayers over him, asked the monks to intervene, rubbed him with coins, and tied strings on his small wrists to call back the spirits that had gone wandering, leaving him sick and fading. Nothing worked. Day by day the infection spread until his skin became a solid bruise and he died.

  As she told me this story, Jew and Cody lay next to each other, plump and clean, on the cotton quilts she’d sewn for them, under the safety of a mosquito net covering them like cakes in a Parisian bakery. The electric fan purred as it swung side to side, blowing the mosquitoes from us and keeping the babies cool in the afternoon heat. I watched her face, surprised and gratified to see her eyes moisten as she talked of her little brother’s death. I didn’t want to cause her sadness; I wanted her to heal from the hurt of those losses.

  Later that night as Dtaw and I lay under our mosquito net, our baby asleep between us in the dark, I told him the story. He was quiet, then said, “I never knew about that.” After a long silence: “I’d heard my grandmother had twelve children, ten of whom died. Whenever anyone asks her how many children she had, though, she always says two.”

  A Place on the Mountain

  When Cody was six months old, we returned again to Cam and Tong’s village. It was early January, and in Thailand New Year’s is the time for gift giving. “I have a present for you,” Dtaw had told me as we prepared to leave our house by the river. “You’ll see when we get there.” I didn’t think much of it. Dtaw wasn’t big on gifts, so I didn’t expect much.

  The first morning after we’d arrived at Cam and Tong’s, we again made the walk up from the village to the mountain. I carried Cody on my back and told him about everything we saw. When we passed the pond, Dtaw pointed to the ridge of Cam’s new land. At the top sat a small brown square topped with a triangle. A new hut. I didn’t think much of that either. Farmers were always building shelters for the planting and harvesting of a crop. They needed shade and sometimes a place to sleep. When we reached the top of the ridge and approached the structure, I saw it was more than a simple bamboo hut. It was made of wooden planks, rough cut but solid and squarely laid, with a thatch roof and front porch with as much floor space as the room inside. All of it was raised high off the land to keep snakes away and the floor dry when the rains came. The porch was enclosed by a low railing. Dtaw led me up the five short planks that were the steps so t
hat I could stand and admire the view, its calming vastness.

  “For you” he said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “This is for you.” When I only looked at him in astonishment, he came closer, took my hands, and said, “I asked Cam to give us the land. When I came here last time, the neighbors helped me build it.”

  It was so like Dtaw to do something so generous and perfect, always without words.

  “I love it,” I said, knowing these words were inadequate for expressing how touched, how delighted, how amazed I was. But I didn’t need to worry about the words. He could feel my happiness. I couldn’t imagine someone giving away such a prime piece of land, but I knew enough of this culture to know that simply because I didn’t understand something, that didn’t mean it wasn’t rational. And I also knew that with patience and attention, I might someday understand.

  We spent the next few days reveling in our piece of paradise. We listened when the birds woke us before dawn, our baby between us, all of us lying on the thin grass mat, waiting to watch the first bright beams of sun cresting the horizon. Dtaw had built the cabin to face east. We made fires on the dirt to cook our simple meals of rice and dried meat. Over the fire we boiled the tea we drank while we sat in stillness as Cody slept or we attended to his needs. All of this added to the happiness I was already swimming in from the shock of maternal love that had become my life. I don’t think I would have enjoyed mothering so much if I had expected to. Before having children, I had always thought babies, with their unattractive bodily functions and eating habits, were only just this side of gross and annoying. The idea that I could be so absorbed in the love of mothering was a double delight.