The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  I went through the bowing routine again and smiled at her. The poor kid had fought that snake just as hard as I had and she must be just as tired. I unwrapped Ahn’s stump and he woke up, hissing. My old fatigue shirt sleeve was thoroughly be-nastied.

  I turned back to the little girl, who was sitting on her heels watching with the expression of a nursing instructor checking to see if I was doing everything right. Disinfectant was too much to hope for, but I made motions of pouring some over Ahn’s wound and bandaging it up again. My other fatigue shirt sleeve was grimy and slimy from the snake fight.

  She dipped out of the house, and a few minutes later, an elderly man dipped back in and sat down on his heels. He was holding a bottle, from which he took a swig before handing it to me. It was Jim Beam. He passed it over, indicating that I should take a swig. I only pretended to, because the last thing I needed was a drink that would knock me on my can, and wiped off the bottle mouth before pouring a good inch of the stuff over Ahn’s stump. He winced and hissed and started to cry.

  The old man winced and hissed and started to cry when I poured his booze over Ahn’s stump. I handed it back to him and made the steepled-hands bow again. I couldn’t remember how to say thank you in Vietnamese.

  He nodded wisely and looked me up and down in the manner of dirty old men everywhere. “Mamasan beaucoup,” he said. He sounded a little awestricken.

  “No,” I said, grinning and shaking my head. “No, papasan tete.” Which was perfectly true, of course. Walking along beside me on the way back to the village, he stood only as high as my bust line, which might have been what led to the personal remarks. He laughed and shook his head at my incomparable wit and he and the Jim Beam disappeared.

  The little girl was gone a long time and I began to think that bandages were too much to hope for. People probably didn’t have any spare clothing that was in better shape than mine, which was pretty sad. I used the rest of the basin of water to rinse the mud off myself and tossed the thick residue into the ditch surrounding the house. A regular moat. Well, I’d already met the monster.

  The old man was out in front of the house, admiring the snake again. He had technically killed the thing, though he’d never have made it without the rest of the village, Ahn, and me. But he walked around it and nodded to himself. I thought he was preening until I paid attention to his aura. It was the gray I was coming to associate with grief. I left Ahn for a moment and stepped across the ditch.

  “Some snake, eh, papasan?” I asked, nodding to our kill, which still made my vertebrae stand at attention.

  “Yes, numbah one snake,” he said sadly, pronouncing snake uncertainly, a new English word.

  “I’ve never seen one that big,” I said inanely. He continued staring down at the snake as if I hadn’t spoken. “Beaucoup snake,” I said and spread my arms and rolled my eyes for emphasis. “Are there more like that around?” I asked, and indicated our snake, plus another beside it and another.

  The old man shook his head sadly. “Snake fini,” he said and repeated my gesture to indicate that he meant all the snakes were gone, then threw his arms up like a child imitating a bomb, making the appropriate explosive noises. It should have been funny, but the grieving gray and sparks of red in the aura belied his smile, and the whole demonstration was as grotesque as if he had plucked out his eye and asked me to laugh at him.

  I looked down and nodded. Bombs might make you nostalgic for the comparative harmlessness of enormous snakes at that. He picked up a stick and drew a few deft lines in the mud and a hungry crocodile slithered within them, mouth open and tail lashing. The old man threw his arms in the air, miming the bomb again, and tapped the picture of the crocodile. “Fini.”

  As the mud oozed back together and the crocodile sank into the mire, he flourished his stick again and eels, otters, huge fish, and a hungry tiger populated the mud. “Fini,” the old man said each time, his voice grimmer with the vanishing of each species. The tiger had figured in our word games on the ward, however, and I thought I might use it to change the topic to a lighter one.

  “Mao bey?” I asked, pointing at the picture.

  He looked at me as if I’d done something astonishing and now his smile deepened and some of the gray sank back into him in the same way his pictures sank into the mud. He nodded enthusiastically. An educable American. How astonishing.

  I drew a picture of a house cat. “Mao?”

  He nodded. I was on safe ground. Maos had come up frequently in the word games Xinhdy, Mai, Ahn, and I had played.

  I said, “In English, Mao same-same cat same-same Kitty same-same me,” and pointed to myself.

  He thought that was pretty funny and catcalled at me.

  The little girl ran toward us, her black hair flying like a scarf behind her. In her hot little hand was a roll of gauze bandage, still in its white wrapper with the red cross in the blue circle.

  “Co, co, see, see!” she cried. She was such a gorgeous child, like a doll with that Kewpie mouth and little pointed chin and that shining hair.

  “Co Mao, Co Mao,” the old man said.

  It was no good trying to get him to go ahead and say my name untranslated. I ducked back inside the house to bandage Ahn’s leg. He was sitting up now, and supervised while I wrapped his stump. The little girl again watched as if her life depended on it. I smiled at her when I was done.

  “Ahn, we should introduce ourselves.”

  He looked dubious but said his name and a string of words after, looking as if he had just been elected to the dubiously honorable office of President of South Vietnam.

  The little girl pointed to herself and said, “Hoa,” and bowed to me and said, “Co Mao.”

  Ahn shook his head furiously. “Mamasan Kitty, chu—” I shook my head at him before he could say “chung wi.” These people didn’t need to know me by my rank any more than American civilians did.

  “Ahn, I have Vietnamese name here. I like Mao.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, as if I were very upset about it, and looked at Hoa as if to say, Americans, who can tell what they’re going to want next?

  She nodded gravely, as if, because of his advanced age, his position and wisdom were unquestionable.

  I wanted to rest a little longer, but thought I should first check on my other patient. She seemed to be asleep as I poked my head in the doorway, but as soon as I set foot in the room she jerked awake and glowered at me. Ignoring the glower, I knelt beside her.

  Her aura was mostly a muddy jumble of anger, grief, fear, and pain, but the basis of it was an appealing brilliant aqua and clear yellow, with tendrils of spring green and a bloom of pink. The brighter colors were smothered beneath the layer of muddy ones, like the rainbow in an old slick. She looked at me with a rebellious hatred that struck me as totally unfair, considering I’d helped save her life twice.

  “Okay, be that way,” I said aloud. She looked healthy enough now, her aura bright and strong despite all the muddiness surrounding it. This village had managed its ob. problems before I came along and I wasn’t about to intrude on the privacy of a woman who obviously didn’t want me there.

  I was turning to leave when the woman who had brought me to the hut stepped into the doorway. Ahn squeezed in beside her. She seemed chagrined and bowed two or three times. I reciprocated. She started speaking rapidly to Ahn, gesturing toward the woman on the bed with lifts of her chin, watching me anxiously. Clearly, she had expected the girl to be rude and was apologizing for it.

  “What did she say, Ahn?” I asked.

  “This one name Tran Thi Truong, very please to meet you,” Ahn said, inclining his head to the woman beside him. “Truong say that one Dinh Thi Hue.”

  Dinh Thi Hue interrupted suddenly, with a spate of imperious questions, her words sounding harsh and accusing.

  “Well, what did she say?”

  “She want to know where are other American soldiers.”

  I started to say there weren’t any more and then thought maybe that
wasn’t such a good idea.

  “What’s it to her?” I asked Ahn.

  Truong pulled us outdoors and started talking again, in low, emphatic tones, her eyes full of apology, but also some anger.

  Ahn looked wise and said, “Last time Americans here they boom-boom Dinh Thi Hue.” He made a graphic gesture with a circle of the forefinger and thumb and the forefinger of his other hand as casually as an American eight-year-old might wave hi. “Make babysan. She no like American soldiers.”

  No wonder. I turned back to her with more sympathy, which I had no idea how to express. I murmured, “Sin loi, Dinh Thi Hue.”

  Ahn was defensive on my behalf, however, and hobbled over to Hue’s bedside and regaled the girl for several minutes, nodding at me, slapping the thigh above his stump with a gesture that said it was now sound as a dollar owing to my expert intervention, and clearly told her I was a GI of a different kind than she had known before. I hoped he wasn’t telling her I was the only one of my kind.

  She let out a long sigh and lay back against the pillow, her face sweaty and her hair still matted with mud and blood. Her face seemed familiar to me, but I thought that was because she reminded me of one of the patients. She had a banty toughness about her that reminded me of Cammy Dover, a four-foot-eleven biker I’d met at a folk club in Denver.

  Ahn picked up her hand and la daied me over to her, and put our hands together. She didn’t look into my eyes but inclined her head a bare half inch and muttered something in English.

  “She say, ‘Thank you, Mao,’ for helping her when big snake have her. She say thank you to Ahn also, because Ahn bite big snake, make him let her go. She say Ahn and Mao numbah one team and she love us too much.”

  I laughed and patted his shoulder. “I say Ahn numbah one bullshitter and full of wishful thinking, but thanks for trying.”

  “Com bic? What means ‘wishful thinking’?” he asked.

  But about then Hoa came to the door and gestured urgently to Ahn to la dai. He turned away from the peace conference and hobbled toward the door, negotiating the ditch with more agility than I would have thought possible. I wished we’d been able to save his crutch during the crash.

  The little girl appeared in the doorway again and this time la daied me. Truong frowned at her, but the child didn’t notice.

  Dinh Thi Hue watched all of this through slitted eyes, as if taking notes.

  “It’s been great having such a warm friendly chat with you,” I said, “but I gotta go now. Kids. You know how it is. Probably want me to car-pool them to the Little League game or take them to the Dairy Queen.”

  She blinked, mildly puzzled. Her aura looked a little less muddied now. I thought I would be able to tell from it if she was losing blood. It would be dimmer surely. The way she felt about Americans, I didn’t want to invade her privacy to check under the Army blanket someone had laid across her. Truong bent over her, murmuring something.

  The rain started again, a thin gray drizzle. It made a pewter backdrop for the wet brilliance of the jungle.

  As soon as I was outside, Hoa took off at a run, leaving me standing beside Ahn.

  In a few minutes, Hoa returned, her pace slow and solemn this time, her arms cradling something that turned out to be a puppy.

  “This Hoa’s friend, very fierce tete guard dog, Bao Phu,” Ahn told me. “Protecting Hoa, Bao Phu is hurt. Hoa want Mao to make better.”

  Wow. Snake charming, faith healing, and veterinary medicine all in one day. Ought to look great on my résumé.

  17

  The funeral procession for the old woman was a slow, thin line of people bareheaded and barefoot, people in conical hats and B. F. Goodrich sandals, people in what seemed like patched Sunday best, trudging, sometimes slipping, up the muddy incline, carrying smoking incense that refused to stay lit and stubs of guttering candle protected by open palms or a leaf shield. Children blew noisemakers and pounded on things—a shell casing, the basin I’d used to clean Ahn’s wound. The noise, I’ve learned since, was meant to frighten away demons. I got the feeling from the auras of those around me that having a funeral so late in the day was irregular—that there might be more demons out than usual. Hue limped, with Truong anxiously offering support and mostly being spurned. Both women wore white with bits of gilt paper and red cloth attached to their hair and clothing. Hue, who should have been in bed after her miscarriage, walked with the help of two friends. She walked hunched over and I guessed that was because the snake must have broken some of her ribs. Ahn and I joined the procession, and he leaned on the old man, Huang, for support and knocked another stick against his makeshift crutch to make noise. I caught up with them and it was all I could do to keep pace with an old man and a crippled boy. I was that exhausted, and the path was very slippery.

  Ahn looked up at me with the lugubrious expression of an amateur undertaker doing his best to look depressed about an improvement in business. He wasn’t pleased about the old woman’s death, I knew, but with the practicality of the poor and dependent, he knew she was dead and he was alive. The cause of her death was also a chance for him to fit in, get himself adopted and become one of the villagers. He didn’t want to dissociate himself from me, exactly. My world had been his home for some time. Together we had done something that earned him a place in this world. But although he was a child, he could not afford to be an innocent. He was hedging his bets for his own survival. His faith in my omnipotence was not what it once had been. Which was in line with my assessment of the situation. I patted his shoulder and trudged beside him.

  I didn’t understand many things about that funeral, but the need for the incense was obvious, and not just for symbolic or religious reasons. The body already stank—the crushing from the snake would have ruptured the organs and hastened the decomposition. It was carried on a board and draped with a red cloth, jungle flowers scattered on top of it. Fortunately, the pallbearers walked very slowly and were as sure-footed as mountain goats. There had apparently been no time to build a coffin.

  Everyone made lots of noise chanting and weeping, but since I was brought up to think that funerals were hushed affairs where it was almost bad taste for the bereaved to weep in public, I kept still. Mostly I attended out of curiosity, and, of course, to pay my respects to the family. My own family believed that even if you didn’t know or hated the deceased, if you knew someone in the family you turned up at the funeral to show your concern for them. But it was awkward. I not only didn’t know the deceased, I didn’t know the family, really. And I didn’t know anything about Vietnamese funeral rites except that they had them rather often.

  This was apparent from the number of stone-covered graves on the breast of the hill. There were probably a hundred times as many graves—just the newer ones—as there were villagers. Many bore small shrines of red-painted wood, rain-sodden paper, and framed photographs, or other objects. We wound our way through them to what seemed to be the old lady’s ancestral burial plot where the fresh hole, already filling with water, waited to receive her. The pallbearers were excruciatingly gentle as they lowered her, but the body still splashed a little when it hit, and the red cloth began darkening where the edges sucked in the water.

  The people with incense wove tendrils of smoke in graceful arcs around the body and laid things beside it: a rice bowl and chopsticks, a cracked cooking pot, and a book with a French title. Old men in black pajama bottoms, dirty white tops, and coolie hats chanted prayers. Children in shorts and shirts, some of the younger ones wearing shirts with no pants, kept beating on their pans and artillery shells, crying and wailing ceremoniously, and looking up at their elders to make sure they were performing their roles properly. Their auras were bright as tropical birds against the gray sky, the silver rain, and the collectively dull aura of the adults. Huang lit a stick of incense and after what sounded like a sentence or two would circle the incense over the body. A young pregnant woman tossed flowers, one at a time, on the cloth-covered corpse.

  At the prop
er time, when the old lady had apparently been given the respect due her by her own rites, Hue came forth carrying a small bundle, the remains of her baby, wrapped in a scrap of silk. Her friends helped her kneel. Her breath came in quick gasps. Her face was ravaged with pain and anger, and wet with sweat, rain, and tears as she leaned far into the grave and laid the bundled infant beside its grandmother. Hue’s friends helped her to her feet again.

  I waited for the people to start shoveling the dirt back into the grave, but after what seemed a time of communal prayer, Huang, Truong, and a couple of the others I recognized from the snake killing started talking among themselves, then broke off and looked expectantly at me. Ahn said something to them that sounded questioning, received a short answer, and turned back to me. “Mamasan, people want to know: what Americans do when bury dead?”

  I was so tired I felt momentarily annoyed by the question. What did they think we did? Obviously, we dug a hole and buried people, or cremated them, same-same Vietnamese. But Truong, Huang, Hoa, and the rest of the village obviously wanted an answer, so I said, “Well, it depends on your religion, or the uh—loved one’s—religion, but generally we say prayers, bring flowers, and sing a hymn.”

  Ahn relayed this information. They held another discussion, then Huang said something to Ahn that sounded like an order.

  “Papasan say, you sing for Ba Dinh,” Ahn told me.

  I started to protest but caught papasan’s eye. He nodded once sharply, his aura rigidly contained in a red-violet binding of pride, the pride of face. He and the others were trying to do me an honor by including me in the service. If I declined, he would lose face. The only problem was, I never learned hymns. They were usually pitched too high for me. I stared into the grave. The barest glimmer of aqua leaked around the saturated scarlet cloth, and from the baby’s a tinge of blue. I remembered reading on the back of an album cover once that in New Orleans, the slaves used to have parades and parties for the dead because they believed that it was a sad thing to be born into the world, a happy one to escape it. That was why “When the Saints Go Marching In” didn’t sound like a funeral song. I sang the chorus and the only verse I could remember as well as I could by myself, resisting the urge to ask everyone to sing along. I doubted Ba Dinh had been a saint, but her next life, next world, whatever, could hardly be any tougher than the one she’d just left. And the snake had probably spared the baby a sad life as an unwanted Amerasian child of rape.