by Ninie Hammon
When Butterflies Cry
By
Ninie Hammon
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Chapter 1
On Monday, August 11, 1969,
two events on different sides of the planet
happened at precisely the same instant.
One of them was in the
Vale of Amberclewydd, Wales,
where it was 10:33 a.m.
Ten-year-old Andy Shelbourne was squatting on a three-legged stool, milking a Welsh Black, squirting the warm white liquid—splat, splat, splat—into a gray metal bucket, when a song rose up out of the fog that lay like clotted cream in the valley below. On the first day of the school year, the six-, seven-, and eight-year-old children in the Gaynor Junior School were singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” and their voices, drifting eerily up through the thick white mist into the bright morning sunshine, were the voices of angels.
A smile started on Andy’s face but melted like wax beneath a candle flame when the song was drowned out by a sudden rumbling, grinding noise that was coming from the gigantic pile of coal slurry on the mountain above the village. Above the school.
The pile was—how could it be?—moving!
One heartbeat.
Two.
Then the slag heap collapsed with a mighty roar, and millions of tons of coal waste thundered in a black avalanche down the mountainside, plunging in great liquefied waves into the fog.
Andy went numb all over, then lurched up, knocking over the stool and the bucket. Even before all the milk had poured out onto the grass, Andy had kicked off the heavy muddy Wellies and was sprinting barefoot toward the gray stone building in the puddle of fog where the sound of children singing had begun to falter, replaced by a great rumbling roar.
Andy raced through the front door of the school just as a wall of liquefied coal waste that had already gobbled up two farm cottages and a barn slammed into the back of the building and surged out over the roof. The ceiling buckled and came crashing down. There was only time and breath enough to call out, to wail, a single word—Baby Girl’s name.
With that cry, a sound echoed in Andy’s head, as if the name were ricocheting off the stone walls in the ancient village church. But the echoing voice was not Andy’s. Someone else had cried out, and the two anguished voices melded to produce an agonized wail so loud and powerful, it ripped open the very throne room of heaven itself, and for a frozen moment, it drowned out the roar of the black monster hurling down the mountainside.
Only for a moment, though. Then the rumble swallowed the world, and the avalanche buried the school and everyone in it beneath more than a million tons of sticky black coal slag.
***
The other event was six thousand miles away,
on the east bank of the Song Dong Nai River in South Vietnam,
where it was 4:33 p.m.
At the instant a little girl’s name rang out above the roar of black death in a Welsh village, U.S. Army Chaplain Grayson Addington fell to his knees outside another village on the other side of the planet. He tilted his head back and called out another little girl’s name.
“Saaaadie!”
When the word left his lips, the name reverberated in his head, echoing like it was bouncing around in an oil drum. More than that, he heard another voice cry out a name, too, in perfect unison, and the combined voices produced a great roaring sound.
There followed a moment of such profound silence that surely the universe held its breath; the globe of earth stopped revolving on its axis and ceased spinning around the sun. Something happened in that moment. Something fearful and powerful. Grayson sensed it but didn’t know what it was.
Then he slumped and whispered, “Almighty God, please! Protect her!”
Life slowly let out the gasp it had sucked in and breathed a tormented sigh. Grayson felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Padre?”
He opened his eyes and for a moment saw nothing but bright light. Then the reality of the steaming jungle, the river stink of black mud and dead fish, the harsh staccato bark of Vietnamese voices, and his pack straps cutting into his shoulders slammed down around him with a clang, like the door of a jail cell banging shut.
“You okay, sir? You were yelling.”
“Yeah, I’m…” He struggled to his feet and bent to pick up his helmet. The small silver cross on the front was barely visible through the encrusted mud.
Beside Grayson was one of the replacements, the new guy, Washington. They called him Dollar Bill or sometimes just Dollar. The soldier looked at him with obvious concern in his eyes. Young eyes. Nineteen, maybe. Greenhorn. It didn’t take long here to learn how to stifle your give-a-damn, and when that happened, Dollar Bill wouldn’t allow himself to care about anything—even about the guy next to him getting his leg shot off—let alone worrying about Grayson’s momentary brain burp.
That’s what it’d been. A brief blackout. It wasn’t the first. A kind of flashback, though it wasn’t like all the others. They had been reenactments of his ever-growing repertoire of horrible experiences. What he could remember of this one—it was fading blessedly fast—was utter darkness. Then the darkness moved, writhed, rumbled, and he realized it was a thing, a living thing with dumb, evil intent, rushing toward Sadie! The toddler lay sleeping peacefully in her “big girl” bed in her grandmother’s house in the mountains of West Virginia, and the huge monster was after her, its mouth open, ready to—
Head injury. Combat fatigue. Exhaustion. Shell shock. Take your pick.
“Father, I—”
“Do I look like your father, soldier?” Grayson growled. He pointed to his neck. “You see a white collar?”
“No, sir. It’s…I understand why you…” He glanced back over his shoulder at the village, where a little girl stood beside the last hut.
Grayson turned then, and his eyes met hers.
“Go on,” he told Dollar Bill and shrugged the young soldier’s hand off his shoulder. “Give me a minute.”
Grayson was nailed to the spot by Nguyen’s gaze. He could only look, though. He couldn’t do anything to help her. He couldn’t protect her when the Cong slipped into the village tonight or tomorrow or the next day, flushing out collaborators and summarily executing anyone who’d gotten chummy with the Americans.
Had Nguyen been careful to throw away all the candy wrappers, the ones she folded and put in her pocket? Had she—?
“Gotta go now, Padre,” KFC, the radioman, called out. The squirrelly little chicken farmer was as jumpy as spit on a griddle.
“All the APCs are gone but ours,” Haystack put in. “We don’t hurry, we’re gonna be flyin’ solo.”
Dollar Bill put his hand on Gray’s shoulder again, and this time Gray reluctantly allowed Dollar’s grip to urge him toward the armored personnel carrier. But he kept looking back. His gaze was hooked to Nguyen’s until she lowered her head, turned and walked slowly into the village. As he stumbled toward the waiting APC, he frantically tried to banish Nguyen’s face, tried to replace it with the face of his own little girl. He hadn’t held Sadie, touched her soft skin and golden hair, since she was eighteen months old. He had watched her grow into an adorable toddler in pictures. But he couldn’t find those images, those frozen slices of reality, anywhere in his head. He only saw Nguyen, imagining her face a mask of terror if somebody in the village ratted her out to the Cong.
***
Two days later
Wednesday, August 13,1969,
Vale of Amberclewydd, Wales,
where it was noon.
It was the fog. Maybe if it hadn’t been foggy that morning down in the valley…maybe…
“Maybes’ll drive ye daft.”
Andy Shelburne’s grandfather, Alastair, spoke the words aloud in Welsh, but nobody heard him and most wouldn’t have understood him if they had. Only the old in Gaynor still spoke their native language.
He stood in the tiny vestibule of the small Welsh chapel, the cold of the ancient stone floor seeping up through the holes in his shoes, the smell of wet dirt mixed with the cloying aroma of death in his nostrils.
Stretched out on the hand-carved oak pews in the sanctuary were 109 bodies from the school, laid feet-to-head, four to a pew, some of them, because they were so small. The cemetery would soon be full of freshly cut headstones, white teeth among the centuries-old gray stones so pitted and weathered the names had long since worn away.
There’d be 131 new graves once they recovered all the bodies. They’d dug out Baby Girl. His precious grandchild lay in there beyond the wooden doors, her face waxen—only six years old! His other grandchild should have been safe! But Andy’d rushed into the school to save Baby Girl. Alastair let out a shuddering sigh. Now Andy was gone, too, still entombed with more than a dozen other children and two teachers in the rubble of a school buried under a pile of coal slag fifty feet deep! They wouldn’t dig down to the bottom of it, wouldn’t dig out the nearby cottages or the post office or…
Half the children in the village were…dead.
Alastair strangled back a sob. Wasn’t seemly to cry in public, though he was alone in the vestibule with no one there to see. Both his grandchildren, his only kin in all the world, were gone.
The old farmer turned and stepped out of the church into air so wet it left moisture on every surface it touched. He lifted his shotgun. A small man with short arms, he could still reach the length of the barrel with the end of it in his mouth.
The rifle barrel felt cold on his lips, cold as death. Then he squeezed the trigger.
***
Wednesday, August 13, 1969,
North of Long Binh, South Vietnam,
where it was late afternoon.
The sound of a single gunshot startled Grayson Addington awake. He didn’t pass through any of the intermediate stages, didn’t go from groggy or fuzzy to bleary-eyed alert. He simply went from sound, dreamless sleep to hyperawareness in an instant.
Well, there was a moment of confused disorientation until he figured out that he had, indeed, fallen sound asleep standing up. He dug at his swollen red eyes with knuckles cracked and oozing pus from jungle rot. Shook his head. He had only blinked—or so he thought—as he leaned against a post that supported a piece of roof and the last remaining wall of a hut in—nope, it was gone. The name of this particular village was nowhere in his memory banks. It looked, smelled, sounded and felt the same as the previous half-dozen villages they’d passed through in the two days since he’d climbed into the last APC in a convoy and driven away from a dark-eyed little girl. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours snatched here and there since then, couldn’t close his eyes without seeing her face.
At least Grayson hadn’t dropped his rifle when he nodded off; he still clutched the M16. Well, technically it wasn’t his rifle, of course. Grayson was a chaplain; chaplains were noncombatants.
“They’re pulling out,” he whispered to Haystack, incredulous.
One shot meant they were leaving, didn’t it? Full-scale frontal attacks came at dawn and dusk when it was hard to see movement in the undergrowth. Sneak attacks came at night, when you sometimes didn’t find out Charlie was there until you felt the cold steel of a bayonet.
Haystack was crouched in the bushes in front of a tree a few feet away, a gangly farm kid with hay-colored hair that went every which way—even wet. He’d said the only time in his life he hadn’t had to slick it down with Vitalis was when they’d shaved his head in boot camp. But it had grown out long now.
Haystack’d gone boots-down out of the same gunship as Gray, the first chopper carrying Charlie Company of the 151st Infantry Kentucky National Guard, and now his short-timer’s stick was so short he kept it in his pocket! A short-timer’s stick was a tree limb, a branch, or whatever a soldier could get his hands on to mark every day so he could keep track of his time in-country. Gray had left his…somewhere. But Haystack had sat down that first night and carefully carved on four small sticks every day he had left—deep groves evenly spaced from one end to the other. Then every morning after that, he cut off the end of a stick at the last mark. Now, he was down to one stick, and it was the size of a harmonica.
Which meant, of course, that Haystack, Gray and the remaining members of Charlie Company were thirty-days-and-out, so they weren’t even supposed to be on this patrol. Short-timers like that were unreliable. Once you’d made it through eleven months here and the end was in sight, you got to acting funny. The fatalism that kept the terror at bay began to evaporate as soon as you could see daylight at the other end and could actually consider life and people and a world beyond. Some short-timers would start wearing two flak jackets and would sleep in their helmets or keep their faces ash-blackened even when they weren’t on patrol. Haystack had stopped brushing his teeth because he said he didn’t want them shining, making a target. He had completely stopped smiling, too.
“Haystack, you reckon they’re gone?” Gray whispered.
Haystack still didn’t answer. Gray turned to look at him. He saw the bullet hole in the center of his forehead, right below the lip of his helmet, and the gray slime of his liquefied brains on the tree trunk that held him upright, like he was just sitting there, staring at the sky.
Well, that explained the one gunshot. Sniper.
Gray looked away, sucked in a breath and tensed for the agonizing blow of grief. But it didn’t come. He felt nothing at all. And that scared him almost as bad as the gooks still hiding out there in the trees. He couldn’t muster so much as a wisp of sorrow, let alone shed a tear for a poor kid who still had a trace of adolescent acne and had admitted shamefacedly that he was still a virgin at nineteen.
Setting aside emotion—terror, grief—to do what had to be done was what soldiers called doin’ the necessary. Gray had gotten way too good at it.
Then the edges of the world around him began to soften, darken. Long shadows stretched out toward him; sound dialed slowly down until he could hear nothing at all. He shook his head furiously to clear it. Battle fatigue. Exhaustion. Like what had hammered him outside Nguyen’s village. No, not like that. Not at all. Something had happened then. Some great force, some pulsing energy had—
He froze, staring at the road with wide, unbelieving eyes. Then Grayson Addington forgot all about the power he’d felt two days ago that was destined to change the course of every day of the rest of his life. The power that was, in fact, at work at that very moment on a West Virginia mountainside. He forgot about everything, his attention riveted to the apparition that had materialized on the other side of the road.
Nguyen!
At first, Grayson thought he really had blacked out, that he was dreaming or hallucinating. But then KFC hollered, “Look, it’s Nguyen!”
It couldn’t be, but it was. The little girl he’d abandoned two days ago in Yan Ling, leaving her at the mercy of the other villagers to protect her from the murderous wrath of the Viet Cong, that little girl had just stepped out of the jungle. She merely stood there, looking at Grayson.
“How’d she get here?” Dollar Bill called out. He was crouched beside an overturned cart, next to the bloated carcass of a dead pig. “We left her thirty klicks back.”
A klick was a little over half a mile.
“She couldn’t have walked this far,” Beanie said from the other side of the cart. “Somebody brought her—”
“And it wasn’t us,” Bagpipes finished for him from his spot a few feet back, hunkered down behind a stack of firewood.
Grayson’s heart began to hammer in his chest, and every explosive pump shook him. As he watched, hypnotized, Nguyen took a couple of steps in their direction, then stopped.
“Hi, Grape!” she called ou
t. Her lips parted in a huge smile, so wide it seemed to split open the whole bottom portion of her face. Belying its presence were twin streams of tears running down her cheeks.
Grayson felt a hole open up beneath him, felt himself begin to topple down into it.
“I find you,” she said cheerily, paused, then continued just as cheerily, “Now you un-ray.”
Un-ray. Pig Latin. Run!
Chapter 2
Sadler Hollow, West Virginia
Wednesday, August 13, 1969,
where it was morning.
Piper Addington knelt on the shiny hardwood floor, tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear and took the crying toddler into her arms.
“Shhh, Sadie,” she crooned, hugging the little girl tight to her chest and rocking back and forth. “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s got you. Shhhh.”
The little girl continued to cry, great heaving sobs of terror, and clutched her mother’s neck so tight Piper could barely catch her breath. She looked out over the child’s shoulder at Marian, who shook her head sadly.
“It was the m-m-mailman, that new young fella, one of Charley Bishop’s boys, come to the door ’cause the catalogue wouldn’t fit in the mailbox,” Marian said, indicating the thick book marked Sears on the kitchen table. “P-p-poor little thing. Never did see a child feared of strangers as she is.”
Piper could feel the toddler trembling, almost vibrating against her chest. “Did he say something to her? Startle her?”
“He was only bein’ friendly. He leaned over and said hidy through the screen, and she commenced to squallin’.”
Sadie was frightened of everybody and terrified of men. And that was a significant problem because Sadie was—what was it Carter’d called her?—a fairy child, so strikingly beautiful she could literally take a total stranger’s breath away. Her eyes were extraordinary. Piper had read somewhere that Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes. Sadie’s were darker than violet, a shade of blue that was almost purple. They were huge, wide and sparkling, cradled in lashes so long and thick they lay like twin fans on her rosy cheeks. Her oval face was flawless, with a heart-shaped mouth, bright-red full lips, and dimples in each cheek so deep you could eat pudding out of them. At not quite two-and-a-half years old, her hair was a thick cascade of shiny, honey-colored natural curls that hung down past her waist. Sadie’s was an enchanted, ethereal, otherworldly beauty that everyone who saw her gawked at or gushed over—which never failed to send Sadie into hysterics.
