The Beauty of Humanity Movement (62 page)

He could see no water buffalo in the fields, no conical hats floating above the green paddies, no women moving down the track carrying buckets of water balanced on either end of bamboo poles. Only the dead ancestors in their marble tombs remained in the rice paddies. Nothing but the frogs that croaked at night was audible, as if day and night had been reversed.

He was relieved to see the rise of the pagoda just ahead, the landmark at the edge of the village. A thin stream of incense, woody and sweet, reached his nose.

H
ng carried more than a month’s worth of earnings in his pockets. He stuffed a fifth of that total into the wooden box at the foot of the pagoda, reached up to rub the toe of the gleaming white Buddha, bowed his head and raised his hands. Mid-recitation, he heard someone grunt to his left. An old woman was shuffling down the path, head bent, firewood weighing down her shoulders, feet gnarled and splayed.

“Grandmother,” H
ng faltered, dropping his hands in abandoned prayer.

She did not look up, simply waved him aside as if to speak or alter her gait would cause her to lose the balance of wood upon her shoulders.

“Grandmother,” he repeated. “It’s H
ng.” She slowed and whispered, “Go back,” through teeth stained sepia by betel nut. She tilted slightly to the left, and H
ng reached out, pushing the wood sliding off her shoulder to the middle of her back so that she could right her balance. The wood was smooth, lacquered red, no ordinary firewood. He moved aside to let her pass.

The temple, he realized, as he watched her hobble away. She was carrying wooden beams from the temple on the other side of the village. What would drive an old woman to such desecration?

H
ng lingered with a sense of dread behind the bamboo hedge that surrounded the village, in that hidden place where he had first discovered what it was that made him a boy. He looked to the sky for the courage to step through and onto the village road, a road built by bricks given by men from elsewhere who had married and taken village women away.

He held his breath in the silence, one foot following another until, approaching the ochre-walled
đình
, the communal hall and home of the village spirit, he heard laughter from inside. He drew back at the sight of the row of soldiers’ boots at the entrance. He stood by the communal well. The stretch of wall to the left of the entrance to the
đình
was pockmarked by gunfire. Below that riddled surface a cloud of flies swarmed above a dog licking sticky bloodied ground.

Suddenly he could smell it—the tinny scent of fresh blood, and beyond it, the older stench of decaying bodies. He could smell it so acutely that he could taste it, like rust in the mouth. He broke into a run, loping toward the other end of the village, past buildings with collapsed mud walls, houses whose thatched roofs had gone up in flames, past the charcoal-stump residue of trees that used to offer nuts and bark and shade.

The Chang family house was nothing more than a scorched outline. His own family’s house, though without its roof, at least remained. He pushed the front door open with his foot and stepped onto the dirt floor. The squat stools were tucked under the wooden table, the blankets were all neatly stored away in the chest, everything in the room lay in order—covered in a fine black dust, but otherwise as if ready for a new day. In the pantry beyond the main room, pots and bowls sat stacked on the wooden shelf and a fistful of fragrant herbs hung from the ceiling.

The bowl of shrivelled fruit and the maggots in the rice pot hinted at a lengthy absence, as did a certain smell his nose refused to interpret.

H
ng lifted the photo of his grandfather from the ancestral shrine but then thought better of it. He put the photo back in place, then closed the door quietly, as if people lay sleeping and he wished to disappear forever from their lives.

He exhaled on the threshold, then broke into a run down the track, past Widow Nguy
t’s beaten, collapsing house, toward the house of the postmistress who had showed him rare kindness when he was a boy.

He burst through her front door, tearing through cobwebs, wanting to scream, and threw himself down upon the dark, wooden planks of the floor. He inhaled the smell of rot in the village while a bird beat itself selfless in the rafters overhead. He thought of birds he’d called friends as a boy in lieu of human companionship. He thought of tadpoles and lotuses, things he used to wade through water to collect. He remembered the flute he’d once carved from a piece of bamboo and how he’d tried to communicate with the birds through its whistle.

Then, between heaving breaths, he heard a muffled thump below the floorboards. He sprang upright, ran back outside the house and pulled up the door to the root cellar, casting alien light upon a face he knew from his boyhood, wizened now, crumpled and petrified.

The postmistress raised her hands so as not to have to see her executioner, but when the blow did not come, she peeked from between her gnarled knuckles and cried, “Oh my God, H
ng. H
ng!”

He reached his arm out to her, but she would not take it.

“Please leave me, H
ng,” she said, her voice vestigial, fading. “I am old. It is better if you just leave me. Everyone is gone.”