She Weeps Each Time You're Born Read Online Free PDF Page B

drank a fermented rice wine dark as soy sauce. The Americans would provide everything, and why labor in the paddies when you might be relocated again at any moment? When someone could walk through the fields that you had planted by hand and with a flamethrower reduce all your work to ash in a matter of seconds?
    Suddenly the leech dropped off his leg. He looked for it on the tree limb, but when he didn’t find it, he realized it must have fallen all the way down to the ground, somewhere down there his blood pointlessly coating the grass. He tried not to see it as an omen, but there was no way his wife and mother could stay on in the free-fire zone, not after a full night of bombing. He could feel the birthmark on his face begin to smolder. Through the peasants in Cong Heo he had left word that if his family arrived, someone was to come find him. He would hug his mother and receive her blessing, then whisk his bride away deep into the jungle, maybe to the cave he had found by the falls. Afterward, they would wash each other in the thundering water. She would kiss the diamond red birthmark on the edge of his scalp, and then he would probably want her all over again.
    He had learned about the baby from another man living in the jungle. He didn’t know the man. There had been no joy in the telling. The man had simply said the women in the markets east of the Song Ma say you will be a father. When Tu had looked around in the darkness at the other faces climbing up into the trees for the night, all he had seen was fatigue. All night he lay in his hammock worrying he’d be shot—his face beaming, his happiness radiating outward like a beacon.
    An hour after his small dinner of tapioca he could hear someone coming through the elephant grass toward the tamarind tree. A head popped up out of the brush. The sun’s fading light reddened the landscape. It was a young girl, her hair in unevenbraids. The girl pointed up at him. Uncle, she said, and smiled. Her front tooth was missing, the head of the new tooth just starting to break the skin. The time for daydreaming was long over, the birthmark on his face as if on fire. Tu shimmied down out of the tree and began to run.
    From Cong Heo it was twenty miles to the river and then another two to the hamlet. It was the night of the full moon; he would be easy to spot regardless. He figured she was probably too big to move easily, though Vietnamese women had a way of working in the paddies right up until the moment arrived. The last time he’d seen her was by the Song Ma, her face still as a statue’s and impossible to read. He wondered if she were angry. He had promised he’d be home well before this, and here it was almost three full seasons, more than eight months.
    After only a few miles on the road, he saw an American convoy speeding his way. His first impulse when he saw the dust billowing up in the distance was to get off the road without being seen, but by then it was too late. He knew he’d been spotted. Running would only make him look suspicious. The first two trucks whooshed by. He had to close his eyes and cover his nose, the dust was so thick, so fortuitous.
    It wasn’t until a series of jeeps began to pass that one of them stopped. There was an American driver with an important-looking man sitting in the passenger seat, the man’s silvery hair cropped close around his head, the cut so sharp Tu imagined it would draw blood if he touched it. The man didn’t have on any of the colorful bars the American officers wore around their own bases, which made Tu realize how important he was—only those of high rank needed to hide who they were. In the backseat, a Vietnamese soldier sat next to a haggard-looking Vietnameseman in the loose black clothing of a peasant, the man’s hands tied together.
    Ask him where he’s going, said the driver. The Vietnamese soldier cleared his throat. In the fading light Tu could see there was