Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange by Vietnamese Writers

Thirteen Harbors

฀ 31฀ suong฀nguyet฀minh thirteen฀harbors I took a new wife for my husband. Maybe the strangest thing ever to happen at Yen Ha village, I chose my good friend to be the bride, a woman who had passed the age for marriage but for a long time had desired a child and wanted a husband. Besides making the match, I helped my husband’s sister andmotherduringtheengagementceremonyandwedding,preparing dishes for their celebration. Of course, for the others, the wedding had its share of happiness, but for me it held only humiliation and sorrow. Just at the moment when my husband took his new bride to the bedroom, I slipped silently through the back door and into the garden. Bag in hand, I wept while walking the road down to the river. I called for a ferry and crossed back to my mother’s home. There is a saying, A girl has twelve harbors, meaning only at the last will she find shelter. It took me thirteen. 2 I had gone into labor the first time at noon. It was the fifth lunar month, and the harvest was nearly finished. I had brought rice and corn and sweet potatoes to the harvesters in the field. Grasshoppers swarmed over the paddy, their wings clacking and sputtering. The harvesters had to throw down their sickles and chase after them. Kicking through the stubble, I waded into the paddy too. Suddenly I had a pain in my belly that very rapidly 32฀ suong฀nguyet฀minh became worse and worse. I threw my grasshoppers into my hat and held my belly. My water broke, soaking my trousers before I reached the field’s edge. I called to my husband. Bewildered, he dropped the unfinished sheaf of rice plants from his hands, ran over and lowered meinhisarmstotheground.Mymother-in-lawnearlylostherhead sending our nephew for a midwife. But it was too late. I gave birth right there on the wet earth, surrounded by the new rice plants on one side and the stubble of the old on the other. “There’s so much . . . the earth is soaked . . . oh!” cried my motherin -law. Terrified by my mother-in-law’s mournful cry, I raised my head to look at my belly, and nearly fainted when I saw what I had given birth to: instead of a baby, just a piece of bloody, red meat. It had a dark mouth that looked like a fish running aground and yawning before dying. The mud-spattered harvesters gathered round, splashing and tramping in from all over the field. “Put it in a pot and bury it in the Serpent Mound,” said someone . “No, put it on a banana tree raft and float it down the river,” said another. After this, I didn’t leave the house and cried all the time, my silent husbandlookingaftermeascarefullyasalittlechild.Tearsbrimmed in my mother-in-law’s eyes when she looked at my emaciated face. She treated me like her own daughter. One day, I asked her sadly, “Mother, how have I come to this?” She breathed a sigh and said, “All the members of our family are kind-hearted people. We did not sow the breeze that resulted in this whirlwind on your body.” Just then, my husband accidentally dropped a pot of medicine. The pot broke and the wet yellow medicine plopped all over the floor, its steam rising. I lost sleep frequently. Sometimes in my dreams I saw the harvest- thirteen฀harbors฀ 33฀ ers wearing conical hats, sitting on the lawn and smoking tobacco while waiting for that piece of meat to stop yawning. After a while they put it in a terracotta pot. Then they took it to the Serpent Mound and buried it. Sometimes I had another dream in which they put my piece of red meat on a banana tree raft and floated it down the Hoang Long. Then a serpent monster with long black hair would surface from the depths and push the raft back to the riverbank. After either of these dreams I would wake with a start, yelling, “Give back my baby! Give me my baby!” Opening my eyes, I’d find my husband holding me in his arms, my body cold with sweat. He held me this way through many nightmares . 3 During the summer of the year of the rooster, there was little rain in our village, but the water roared in from upstream...