Beauty Rising (28 page)

“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 from 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.