Once We Had a Country (25 page)

Abandoned by both of them, she thinks of calling Gran. It’s too late in the evening for that now. When she tries to read, her mind keeps drifting to the barracks. What does he do out there with his evenings? For her own part, she’s still only halfway through
Middlemarch
, and she can barely keep her eyes focused. The lines turn to caravans stretched across the white desert of the page. What kind of marriage must it be for George Ray and his wife, sleeping so far apart for months every year? What would he say if Maggie told him she was pregnant? She forces her attention back to the page.

Finally she gives up and turns on the television to let the ions flow over her. The familiar intonations of
reporters and news anchors on the U.S. channels are a solace, though all they have to tell her is bad news. No wonder the people up here have their little left-wing haven with its free health care and its pacifism; every night they can study the States on TV and learn what not to do.

She watches until they play the national anthem. When she turns off the set, its picture condenses into a white pearl occupying the centre of blackness. In contrast with the departed TV studios, the house seems shabby, a hodgepodge, poorly lit. She staggers upstairs but can’t sleep. The walls creak, and something scurries across the roof. Finally she decides the only thing left for her is to seduce herself. She thinks of Fletcher and, at the end, of George Ray.

In the morning, she has forgotten about it until Fletcher calls. Then it returns and shames her into silence. When he asks how she’s doing, she says she’s fine. Sounding tired, he explains that things have gotten complicated, that he needs another two weeks in Boston. Reluctantly she acquiesces, thinking it will serve as some kind of expiation for her. Before he hangs up, she says she loves him. It may just be the bad connection that produces a slight delay before he says he loves her too.

Yia Pao carries the baby as he and Gordon follow muddy paths up and down the side of the valley. Sawtoothed mountains loom on either side while monkeys scream from the trees. Rain drums on the foliage overhead, striking them in
fat, heavy drops, and orange worms stretch across the trail, their spiny backs slick with slime. Gordon flicks them out of the way with a long stick. Whenever he and Yia Pao reach an open place, he searches the sky.

“No one’s looking for us, Gordon,” says Yia Pao.

“But we still might flag down a plane.”

“We need to keep going, or it will be Sal and his men who find us.”

The rain lessens, then stops, and a thick fog settles in, reducing visibility to a few feet. Eventually they arrive at a clearing where the trees are shattered, trunks snapped in two and branches flung everywhere, the ground pocked by craters filled with water. Tadpoles wriggle at the borders of the pools. Leading the way, Gordon trips over a jutting length of metal. It’s the tail of a jet. The wreckage is spread across the clearing and covered in vines.

“This is a bad place,” murmurs Yia Pao. “A ghost place.”

Gordon gazes into the fog. From somewhere in the jungle comes the deep-throated call of a bird.

“It isn’t Christian to believe in ghosts,” he says.

“Have you never seen your wife’s ghost?” asks Yia Pao. “Mine visits me often.” His tone suggests the visits aren’t happy ones.

Gordon takes a few more steps through the blasted clearing. “Not her ghost. She used to come in dreams. She’d plead with me to die too.”

“Gordon, I’m sorry.” They pause beside a crater, and Yia Pao soothes Xang in Hmong.

“I told her I couldn’t because we had a daughter,” says Gordon. “My wife wouldn’t give up, so I started to take
sleeping pills at night. They made her go away for a while.”

“Did she bring you to Laos?” asks Yia Pao. “Did you come here to die?”

Gordon frowns and doesn’t respond. “I leaned too hard on Maggie,” he says after a time. “She went to college and it nearly finished me.” A few seconds later, he brightens. “That’s the thing about God. You can lean on Him as much as you want.”

Yia Pao turns to survey the plane’s wreckage, the shredded trees and torn earth. He passes Xang to Gordon and bends to massage his own calves. “Is God in this place? I would like to lean on Him now.”

As if in answer, there’s a low whine that grows louder, and the men raise their eyes. The jungle reveals only a small area of sky, so that the plane is almost right above them before they see it, bright white, propeller driven, flying low. Gordon shouts at it but is drowned out by the engines. A moment later the plane has passed out of sight. The men listen as its roar fades.

“He didn’t see us,” says Gordon dolefully.

“Wait,” says Yia Pao.

The noise from the engine grows louder again. Yia Pao pulls off his shirt and whirls it above his head. The baby is crying, but Gordon whoops.

When the plane reappears, it’s even lower than before. The men are yelling and waving for it. Then there’s a clap of thunder. The earth falls away. A tidal wave of mud carries them across the clearing, while a ball of flame roils over the treetops.

Lying on his side with Xang still in his hands, Gordon
tries to shield him from the debris showering on them. The air fills with a dirty, suffocating smoke. The baby starts to cough, but when Gordon gains his feet, the smoke grows thicker and he falls to the ground again.

When he looks up, he sees Maggie striding out of the jungle. She wears an iridescent blue dress untouched by mud and rain. The smoke melts away as she approaches, even though the trees around her are on fire.

Smiling at her father, she spreads her arms wide. Gordon reaches to take her hand. She vanishes just as she’s about to touch him.

Xang coughs and cries against his chest. For a time Gordon weeps with him. Finally he struggles upright, looks himself over, examines the baby. They’re both filthy but seemingly unhurt. He turns in search of Yia Pao and sees him getting to his feet a few yards away.

“You all right?” he says, and Yia Pao nods. “So are we. It’s a miracle.”

“He had terrible aim,” says Yia Pao. He points toward the smoking crater on the other side of the clearing.

“Why did he bomb us?” says Gordon.

Yia Pao shrugs. “They do whatever they want.” He makes his way over to Gordon, takes Xang, and kisses him on the cheeks. Then he starts toward the trees and gestures for Gordon to follow. “We must hurry. Before he returns to finish us off.”

The doctor in Virgil is squat with buckteeth and tufts of white hair sprouting from his ears. In the examining room,
as Maggie lies on her back, her feet in stirrups, he prods her without much interest.

“Five weeks late, you say? Temperature’s high.”

“I’ve been ill. I had a fever.”

The doctor tuts as if this fact is medically uninteresting. “Have there been mood swings, headaches? Cervix feels a little soft. No spotting, but morning sickness, you said. Well, the chances are pretty good. Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out soon enough.” He draws a vial of blood and dispatches her to the bathroom with a plastic cup, saying it will be a week before the results come in.

When she exits the office, there’s a cluster of people just outside beneath an awning, watching as rain pours down before them in a solid sheet. Few vehicles pass by, and no one speaks. They all stand and wait, their numbers swelling with more patients from inside. When a man in a suit rushes down the street into the awning’s sanctuary, drenched from head to toe, those already gathered smile in sympathy, and the newcomer smiles too as he wipes himself off. Above them, a swallow perches on a strut, silent and unmoving.

Eventually the rain abates. One by one, at some sign known only to themselves, people begin to depart and continue on their way. By the time Maggie leaves, a patch of sun is poking through the clouds.

W
hen the little blue Volvo comes up the driveway, Maggie’s first thought is that it’s Fletcher. She’s on the porch beating out rugs and George Ray is working close by, humming tunelessly as he plants saplings along the edge of the lawn. She’s not expecting Fletcher for another ten days, but he must have bought another car and come back early. The silhouette behind the wheel doesn’t look like his, though, and when the driver exits the Volvo in his golf cap, she sees with a sinking heart that it’s the priest from the stone church.

“Pardon intrusion,” he says, ambling up the steps. “Lenka tells me I must call first, but telephone is its own intrusion, yes?”

Maggie agrees that it is.

As the priest reaches the top of the stairs, he hands her a brown paper bag. “
Buchty,”
he says. “Lenka makes it for you.”

Maggie takes the bag and thanks him, worried about what kind of obligation she has just accepted.

“Is very quiet,” says the priest, turning to take in the property. On the lawn, George Ray’s hammering a stake into the ground, while the moon hangs just above the orchard, tiny and pale in the afternoon sky like an egg laid in the treetops. At first Maggie assumes the priest’s being sarcastic, given the hammering. Then she figures out his implication.

“Yes, most people have left,” she says. She can’t bring herself to admit that everyone has gone.

“Is nice man from grocery store still here?” asks the priest. He means Wale, she realizes, and she laughs at the idea of Wale as a nice man. The priest seems puzzled by her reaction.

“That man abandoned his girlfriend and his daughter,” she tells him. His expression falls, and he asks how the woman and the girl are doing. Maggie merely says they’re back in the States now. She doesn’t feel like talking about Brid and Pauline with him.

“I must tell you,” says the priest, “I come as courtesy to your grandmother.”

“My grandmother,” Maggie repeats.

“She writes nice letter to me asking how you are.” The priest sees her look of incomprehension and goes on. “You tell her you come to church, so she makes inquiry about this parish and discovers my address.”

“I didn’t tell her—” Then Maggie remembers what she said to Gran on the phone. She can imagine Gran’s excitement at the thought of her attending Mass.

“Your grandmother writes nice letter,” says the priest. “She has great worry for you.”

“Well, you didn’t need to come. Gran and I talked on the phone last week.”

The priest nods as though he’s up to date regarding contact between her and Gran. “She says you do not tell her very much of yourself,” he explains.

“We’ve had other things to talk about.”

“Yes, she tells me that too. Your father. She writes me that they are finding out if he is in village upriver. You have had more word?”

She shakes her head. “You know as much as I do. Maybe I should be asking you for news.” For a moment she mulls what would happen if she told him that the nice man from the grocery store has gone to Laos.

“Is dangerous, the mission work,” says the priest. “Your father has great courage. He is like the Jesuits in this place many centuries ago.”

“I didn’t want him to go over there,” she replies. “I didn’t want to be worrying about him. If it’s okay, I’d rather not talk about it. Thanks for coming over, though. You can tell Gran I’m fine.”

The priest looks disappointed. Probably he thinks she’s a selfish, ungrateful child.

“Before I leave,” he says, “Lenka asks me to tell you that she wishes to see you again. But she is embarrassed from night of party.”

Maggie remembers Lenka kneeling at the toilet with her brother beside her. Suddenly the brown paper bag brought by the priest seems less like a demand and more like penance.

“She shouldn’t be embarrassed,” Maggie says. “It was something she ate, right?”

The priest looks at her as though to ascertain whether she’s being serious. “You must understand,” he says, a certain fatigue creeping into his voice, “before we come here, our parents are taken. They are dissidents, yes? Lenka, she is almost thirty, but she lived with them. Is difficult. She is not great lover of life here.” His face grows troubled awhile before it brightens. “She asks that I invite you for the Sunday dinner. Will you give us this honour?”

Maggie tries to picture herself alone in a dining room with the priest and his alcoholic sister. He appears to have forgotten that the first time he saw Maggie, he accused her of stealing from a poor box. No, it would never work. Still, standing before her with golf cap in hand, he looks hopeful, almost needy. And what else does she have going on?

Then she remembers George Ray. He’s acting as if busy with a length of twine, but from the tilt of his head she suspects that he’s been listening all this time, that he’s waiting with the priest for her response.

“I’ll come if I can bring him,” she says, nodding toward George Ray. She says it thinking George Ray will appreciate the gesture, but upon the words leaving her mouth, she worries he’ll consider it patronizing.

When the priest turns to look, George Ray waves at him. She takes it as a good sign.

“Our hired man,” she says. “George Ray.” Tentatively, the priest waves back. “He’s Jamaican,” she adds, not quite knowing why. The priest raises an eyebrow, whether at the
fact or at the oddness of her mentioning it, she can’t tell.

“Of course,” he says. “Hired man is very welcome too.”

The rectory is a small bungalow clad in aluminum siding and sufficiently tucked away behind the church that all the times Maggie has driven past she’s never noticed it. Now, arriving at the front door, she stands with George Ray on the little concrete stoop, she in her nicest dress, he with a bottle of wine in hand. There’s only a moment of panic that the whole thing is a mistake before Lenka answers, carefully made up and wearing a necklace of thick wooden beads. She greets Maggie with a kiss on the cheek, and then, as she leans in to kiss George Ray, he chooses the same moment to thrust forward the wine. She hops back in surprise and laughs.

The priest acts pleased to see them too. The sweater he’s wearing seems meant to draw attention from his priestliness, but his collar serves as a reminder that he’s still not quite one of them. Behind him on the wall is an oleograph of Jesus prying open his chest to reveal his flaming heart.