She Weeps Each Time You're Born by Quan Barry Read Free Book Online Page A

hadargued about what to do if the central highlands fell. Would it be safer to be part of the fleeing millions pushing south all the way to Saigon on Highway 1, or should they stay clear of the masses and use forgotten trails like this? Bà had said it ran all the way from Cambodia to the coast in one form or another. From her girlhood she remembered new recruits arriving at the rubber plantation near Kontum, the people trudging in from a week’s march on the trail, their faces haggard. How the overseer would immediately hand them each a tin bucket and send them out.
    In the end Huyen decided they would go as far as they could on small trails following the Serepok east until it hit the Song Cai. From the highlands it was seventy-five miles to the coast. Nights they would sleep in what remained of the brush. In the coastal city of Nha Trang they would join the masses on Highway 1 and push south. Secretly Huyen feared the highway. She had seen mass exoduses before. The lawlessness, the air like tinder. The population realigning itself because somewhere far away somebody had drawn a line on a map, the population fleeing because everyone else was fleeing.
    Huyen surveyed the trail ahead of them, the terrain jungly and overgrown. From the looks of it the journey would only get tougher. If you put in the work to sharpen steel, eventually it will turn into needles, she growled, but the adage didn’t lift her spirits. Silently they trudged forward, the only sound the cart’s wheels rutting the earth as Qui pulled it along.
    Their fourth day on the trail was hot, but they were used to it. The elephant grass scratched their necks. Small brown burrs stuck in their hair, the sound of the Serepok always in the distance. The full face of the lidless sun shadowed them on their way. Each day their skin grew darker, except for Qui, who stayedthe same ghostly hue as she pulled the cart along using a wooden bar built for an animal. The baby sat in the cart along with Huyen and some bamboo mats, a few utensils including a rusty cleaver which they used on chicken they were able to catch on the outskirts of abandoned villages. On the second night of their journey, outside the hamlet of Son Trinh, Bà had brandished the cleaver when they heard something rustling in the elephant grass. Who goes there, Bà whispered, but nothing appeared. As a precaution she had taken to sleeping with the cleaver under her head. Already if she lay down without it she couldn’t sleep.
    Mornings she blamed her dreams on it. Ever since her eyes had soured, her dreams had dissolved into fuzzy splotches of color. But since sleeping with the cleaver under her head, Ba’s dreams had taken on a new brilliance, images clear as day. An orange spider the size of a crab lurking in the trees. A white horse grazing under a colony of bats. The French Foreign Legion officer coming toward her with his cold gray eyes, the tip of his burning cigarette that already smelled of scorched skin. Each night, dreams like a river of memories bearing her away in the current.
    It was almost noon. Tomorrow they would reach the coast. Qui stopped for a moment and wiped her forehead. She could feel the ends of her braids tickling the backs of her calves. Her breasts hurt. The baby was taking less and less, but her body was producing more and more. Evenings the milk ran silver in the light of the fire as it leaked from her nipples. Along with her ghostly white skin it was her one miracle. Her chest burned day and night. Mornings the ground was damp where she’d slept.
    Already the baby was no longer a baby. She was four in the ancient system of reckoning, the months counted in which the unborn are forming in the dark caves of their mothers. Traditionally it was said babies arrived fully one year old with theirlittle old-man faces wrinkled and red, their old souls hardening in new vessels.
    When he had first pulled her from the body bag buried in the ground, Tu had held