Undertaker, Undertaker

I

The day after Willa died, a weeklong rainy spell began, where the Irrawaddy

broke free from its banks and swamped our barren sugarcane fields like something out of

the Old Testament. When it was hot and rainy like that, steam would rise from the

water’s surface and shroud our view of the tenants’ huts. If they ever wanted to do

anything secret without us finding out, that was the time. But they never did, at least not

to my knowledge.

In the early morning, after long periods of rain like that, we’d stand on the porch

facing the river, watching them climb into their fishing boats through the windows of low

stilted houses. They’d move like spectral figures across an indiscernible wasteland, their

features erased by the mist, though we could always pick them out by their silhouettes

and gaits – the loping grace of Chit, tall, hard, and lean, wading toward our house with a

basket of dried fish perched on her head. Willa would point out Thet, Chit’s eldest son,

half of his left arm lopped off in a childhood threshing incident, though I was too young

to remember that. Somehow the remnants of that arm were still wrought by labor, though,

still working in unison with the other arm and hacking steadily at the branch of a banana

tree, loosening bunches and bringing the best ones to us, then distributing the rest among

the other tenants. Watching them wade toward our house always reminded me of an

ambush, because of the way they had to move through the water waist-deep, like they

were approaching us with the intent to seize or kill. But, again, they never did.

The day Willa died, though, we hadn’t had rain in weeks. She died before noon.

By then, the flies had already started to come, their buzzing as standard as the oppressive

1

heat, and Papa had already seen the infant’s face. We all had seen her face, Benji and

Alphie and I, and then we looked at Papa’s, and then at our sister’s, which was already

blue-pale and covered with sweaty knots of hair, twisted into a permanent grimace with

snarls of that hair caught in the teeth. We waited to see what he’d say, the air in the

dining room hot and heavy and silent, except for the dripping of blood from the table to

the floor. We waited, because there was no doubt he noticed. The rest of us did.

Instead he stalked from the room, his soles thundering hollow across the wooden

slats, through which you could touch the mud under the house if your finger was skinny

enough. Then there was the sound of the back screen door being ripped off its single

remaining hinge, and he returned, flung it to the floor, transferred Willa’s body from the

tabletop to the makeshift cooling board, and ordered Alphie to pick up one side.

“Where are you taking her?” I asked. Alphie stood cradling the swaddled child.

Her too-tiny yellow face peered from between the folds of a faded blue blanket, the black

almond-shaped eyes cracked open and watching Papa adjust her mother’s limbs,

centering Willa’s weight so all parts of her were evenly distributed across the door.

“The cellar,” said Papa. “It’s too hot to keep her anywhere else until the priest

comes.” He went around to one end and seized the top of the door, hoisting it up. Willa’s

head lolled to one side. Alphie still hadn’t moved.

“What priest?” I glanced at Alphie. The Jesuits ran a mission and school over

twenty-five kilometers away in Pathein, where you could buy parasols and prostitutes in

the same marketplace while waiting for an appointment with the regional minister of

security, or even the regional outpost administrator for the Imperial Burma Office,

maybe. Every month a herd of nuns and monks arrived in the village with Bibles and

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writing tablets, knocking on the doors of the shanty-houses and lurking in areas where

they knew women waited for fishermen. Once they ventured to our property on foot,

books and slateboards piled into a wheelbarrow, and unloaded the Gospel onto our

tenants who lived along the bank. Their sermons were delivered to Papa instead, at the

other end of his shotgun barrel.

“A priest will come from Pathein,” Papa said. “Pick up the other end.”

“Alphie, let me hold it,” Benji said, tugging at Alphie’s shirttails.

“The Jesuits?” I asked. “But we’re not Catholic.”

“Pick up the other end.”

“How will we get to Pathein?”

“Alphie, give it to me.”

“We’ll send Chit. She’ll take the bicycle now and be back with the priest by

tomorrow night. Pick up the other end.”

“Chit has to cook,” I said. “We could send Thet.”

“Alphie, let me see it,” Benji said, still tugging.

“Should we send Thet?” I asked.

“No,” Papa said. “We’ll send Chit.”

“But Chit has to cook.”

“You’ll cook.”

Alphie handed the child to me. I folded her into both arms and her face pressed

against the front of my dress. Immediately she began to nurse at a fold of the thin light-

green fabric, which had stretched against my ribs and shoulders as I grew taller, longer,

though not fuller. I didn’t like how the wetness felt against my skin, how the child’s body

3

felt against mine, warm and solid and wrapped up stiff and tight like a leg in a plaster

cast. The stained rags still on the tabletop testified to how I’d wiped as much blood as I

could from the plump boneless arms, the round cheeks, but still the smell was there. An

earthy, coppery smell rustled up from the blanket whenever she moved or let out an

occasional hungry bleat. She would never taste her mother’s milk, I thought then, and

certainly not mine.

I watched as Alphie stooped next to the opposite end of the door, took the rough

wooden frame into his hands, and began to lift. He emitted a barely audible squeak from

the back of his throat, trying his hardest to avoid letting Papa see any signs of strain. The

veins in his thin arms bulged out and eventually the door was off the ground, suspended

between father and son, blood still dripping through the mesh and onto the floor from

between Willa’s thighs. Her nightgown, still bunched up around her hips, was soaked

through, the tiny lace eyelets at the hem stained a deep burgundy.

“Vesta, let me touch it,” Benji cried, thumping at my arm with his small fist.

“Papa, wait,” I said as Papa and Alphie slowly began the trek to the cellar. They

stopped and Papa looked at me blearily as if realizing I was there for the first time. “Wait.

Let me clean her up first. I’ll get some more rags. I can –”

“Find Chit and tell her to take the bicycle to Pathein and find a priest,” Papa said.

“It’ll only take a moment,” I insisted. I wanted to run into the bedroom we shared

and hunt for the tube of waxy lipstick that came from Paris, the powder puff that Mum

had left behind when she went with the vice consul to Hong Kong and never came back. I

wanted to sweep the hair away from her teeth with her ivory-handled hairbrush – the

4

prized one, which she hid even though no one else brushed their own hair – I wanted to

close her mouth, her eyes, wipe her face, restore its color. “Just let me –”

“Find Chit and tell her to take the bicycle to Pathein,” Papa said.

“Let me hold it, Vesta,” Benji said.

“No,” I said. “You’ll hurt her.”

“I won’t,” he said indignantly. “I’m not going to hurt it.”

Alphie grunted. His arms trembled. Then they started to move again, slow and

halting like the gigantic riverboats that inched and bobbed up the Irrawaddy bound for the

oil fields at Chauk. Their feet shuffled along the floor; every now and then Alphie’s hand

would slip and the door almost went crashing onto their toes. Papa would explode into

curses, Alphie would whimper and regain his grasp, and they continued like this, passing

through the now-doorless opening and on to the cellar. I gazed down into the child’s face,

at the elegant slanted eyes and buttery golden skin, and wondered if Papa had noticed. He

had to have noticed.

“I’m not going to hurt it,” Benji said.

II

Chit was in the kitchen, picking flies off a cured fish and muttering rapidly to

herself. She’d come running earlier when Willa tripped on the loose floorboard and hit

the ground hard. Lying there, splayed out next to an enormous spilled water jug, her long

shawl having fallen off, the nightgown wet and taut around her middle – I noticed the

hump for the first time, her swollen breasts. Then Willa started screaming, and Benji and

I screamed, and Chit came running. I’ve helped birth children before, she said. I’ll help.

Then, when all the blood came, she disappeared for hours.

5

“Papa wants you to take the bicycle to the city,” I said as I walked in, still holding

the child, my arms aching now. “And bring back a priest.” Benji trailed in sulkily behind.

“Priest?” Chit said, looking up from the meat but still somehow finding flies with

her nimble brown fingertips. “Priest where?” Her accent made everything she said sound

like an insult or an imperative, but since Papa was the one who’d taught her English, that

seemed to make sense.

“A Catholic priest. From the mission.”

“Why a priest?”

“Willa is dead.”

“But why a priest?”

“I don’t know.”

“Vesta says I’ll hurt it if I drop it,” Benji said. “I’m not going to hurt it.”

“I tell my son. He will go.”

“Papa said to send you.”

Chit looked pointedly at the puffy little face that stared back at her blankly from

its cloth cocoon, like the larvae who used to bore deep into the stalks of our cane plants,

rendering them blighted and useless. She studied the face for a long time. Again the child

yelped in hunger, a brief but staccato puff of breath. She had not cried yet, not at all.

“Then I will go,” Chit said, setting aside the fish but not taking her eyes off the

child. Suddenly her mouth stretched into a sort of conspiratorial grin, her teeth stained

blood red from the betel nuts she chewed. This had always scared me when I was

younger, and now it scared Benji, who was convinced she ate the raw hearts of the

chickens she slaughtered for us. He gasped and ran from the kitchen.

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“She’s going to eat my heart,” Benji cried as he ran away.

“This child is a Mon,” she said when we were alone, the red teeth like a raw,

gaping wound. “She looks like me. Not like you.”

III

In the evening Papa chopped the dining room table into pieces and burned it in the

middle of the grassy lawn that ran straight into the empty sugarcane fields, forming an

expanse that stretched all the way to our tenants’ huts along the riverbank. The grasses

were at their longest in August, and every year they seemed to grow taller and more

savage – I dreamt of waking up one morning trapped in the house because the grass had

grown up over the porch, knitting itself over the open doorway, then down through the

yawning hole in the roof and into the widening gaps in our walls.

The table was so big and heavy that Papa chopped it up in the dining room, the

thwack of the axe head boring into the teak, and burned it chunk by chunk. He used the

rags to mop up the blood on the floorboards, then burned the rags, too.

I sat on the porch steps holding the child, nursing her from a tin cup of coconut

milk sweetened with a pinch from our sugar stash. The fire roared and spat, the flames

and smoke and sky blurred together with the cane fields, like you couldn’t tell where one

ended and another began. Even from where I sat, far away enough so the child wouldn’t

have to breath the smoke, the heat was intense, doubled by the setting sun which still

smoldered over the tops of the mangrove forest. The smoke rose high and the wind

carried it toward the river, so that our tenants on the bank emerged from the bamboo huts

and looked for the source, shielding their eyes against that evening sun. The people on

the fishing boats that passed by looked too.

7

“It’s going to rain,” I said, pointing toward the cloudbank that lurked on the

horizon across the river.

Papa looked for a long time, more at our tenants than at the clouds overhead, then

ventured back into the house. Every time he emerged from the back door he had another

chunk to burn. It seemed like these were too many chunks to come from only the table

and I wondered if he was burning all the rest of the furniture now. The next time he

returned to the house he ordered Benji not to go near the fire, then he came back and

tromped over to the sandy-haired boy who stabbed the embers with a stick and swatted

him hard across the back of the head. Alphie trudged out then, a much smaller chunk of

wood in tow, and heaved it onto the fire with a wheeze.

“Why’d you hit me?” Benji whined. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

Again Papa turned his watery eyes, reddening from the smoke, toward the natives,

and spit a stream of tobacco juice from between his teeth. Beyond the riverbank the

clouds hung low and purplish, promising the kind of rain that stayed around for days,

gentle but steady and consuming.

“Thet,” Papa said, setting his jaw in the way he often used to before striking Mum

across the face. “I see him.”

I looked too, straining despite my nearsightedness to make out the distinct shapes

of each tenant, and finally saw Thet, a narrow brown line with a shock of black hair at the

top. He stood apart from the rest of the observing group, one hand on his hip, the left arm

tucked behind his back. From where I was he looked like a sapling, knobby lithe limbs

and a neck straight and long. He was handsome, “for a native,” Willa would say those

mornings we stood on the porch watching them across the flooded fields, and she’d

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always blushed, smiled, looked away when he came around to deliver eggs, fish, fresh

tobacco leaves for Papa. Once she asked me if I thought any of the tenant boys were

handsome, and I didn’t know what to say, because Papa had always told us they were

hideous, that their faces had been flattened and mutilated by the hand of God as

punishment for being heathens. When I didn’t respond immediately she frowned and

asked me not to tell Papa what she’d said. I didn’t.

“What about him?” I asked, looking back down at the child’s face. She was too

young to coo, but she made tiny oinks like the newborn piglets Willa and I traded in the

village last summer. In return we got sugar and rice flower to make cakes, and when Papa

found out he nearly broke a bamboo switch across our backsides, but not nearly as bad as

when Alphie came back from the school in Rangoon with news of his expulsion.

“Thet,” Papa said again.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Benji to me, as if I was the one who’d hit him. He

was still grasping and swinging that stick.

“What about him?” I asked Papa. The child gurgled.

Benji whinged.

“Shut up or you’ll get hit again,” I told him.

IV

Night came, but it was still hot, unbearably hot in our bedrooms, so Benji and I

spread blankets on the cool wooden floor of the foyer and slept with the doors opened

onto the porch. Alphie wouldn’t sleep on the floor no matter how hot it was, so he slept in

the bedroom where part of the roof had been torn off in a squall last month. Papa slept

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there too, convinced the entire roof would collapse if he slept anywhere else, or that

maybe Alphie would run away, or something.

We lay in the dark, searching for grotesque faces in the cracked ceiling, with a

broom between us to beat away snakes that found their way in. The stray cats tried to

huddle around us, eager for morsels and company, but we kicked them away because

their fur stuck to our sweaty arms and faces. In the corner the child still gurgled

restlessly, her crib the blanket-lined washtub that only Willa ever used.

Mornings, Willa would get up earlier than the rest of us, barefoot and in her

nightgown, always with that shawl wrapped around her, hiding what I now knew were

her ripening belly and widening hips. I’d lie on the floor, awake, watching her. She’d

haul a huge jug up and down the staircase, in and out the front door, fetching bathwater

little by little from the well out front. She was the only one of us who cared to keep clean

during the summer, while the rest of us allowed the river-grit to mix with the humidity

and infuse itself into our skin and hair. Sometimes she urged me to wash my stained

dress, my face, but I dismissed her obsession with cleanliness as something I’d never

understand about her, like thinking Thet was handsome. Instead I turned brown in the sun

and dirt like the boys did, and Papa said that was a disgrace for an Englishman’s daughter

to look so dark and filthy. Now I wished I’d accepted all the times she urged me to let her

braid my hair, weave in threadbare ribbon and tuck ingyin flowers behind my ear.

“Vesta,” Benji said, his wiry frame curled into a strange catlike position that I

couldn’t even imagine folding myself into. “What’s wrong with Alphie?”

“Nothing,” I said. I lay on my back, following the flight pattern of an enormous

winged insect that bounced frantically from wall to wall.

10

“Why does Papa hate him?”

I thought about the afternoon last October, where Alphie arrived home from the

Rangoon School for Anglo-Burmese Boys bearing a condemning note from the

headmaster, addressed “TO MR. AND MRS. FRANCIS EAMES BECKETT IN

REGARDS TO THE MATTER OF ALPHEUS EAMES BECKETT,” which had been

burned before I could read it, detailing some repugnant punishable transgression I wasn’t

told about. And then Willa and I weeping and huddling in the corner of the room we

presently slept in, while Papa broke one bamboo switch after another across Alphie’s

back, then the repeated swoosh and thwack of the rattan cane until that broke too, like the

axe boring into the table in the dining room. Benji clung to Mum, who implored that Papa

stop, but never lifted a hand in fear that he’d turn the cane on her. It was the month after

that when Mum took us four aside and told us about the British vice consul in the village,

his sleek black car that he drove along all the new roads that cut through the Delta. How

we couldn’t come along to Hong Kong just yet, but she’d return for the four of us before

the rainy season ended.

“Why does Papa hate Alphie?”

Finally I sighed, and said, “he doesn’t.”

“Yes he does. Remember when –”

“Stop talking,” I said.

“Nobody ever wants me to talk,” he said. “But I could find that journal again. I

know where to look. And I can read better now.”

“No you can’t,” I said. “Stop talking.”

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The insect pinged against the walls, becoming more flustered with each collision,

then at last resigned itself to eternal imprisonment even though the open door was only a

few feet away.

“Willa is dead,” he said. “Willa’s dead and Mummy’s gone.”

“Yes,” I said before turning onto my side. “Both of these things are true.”

V

The rainy spells happened every August, the river creeping across the fields

where nothing had grown in years, turning the entire plantation into a shallow marsh, an

extension of the river until the waters receded. With it came more mosquitoes and flies,

the water snakes that leapt into the overgrown hanging plants on the porch and dangled

over the doorways, taunting the cats.

Usually the water never reached our house, but this time it did. Our tenants lived

in homes on stilts, but we did not, because Papa said you wouldn’t find a self-respecting

Englishman anywhere in the colony whose family lived in a house on stilts. Whenever he

referred to himself as an Englishman I wondered if he knew that the real English, the

ones who had afternoon tea and lived in towns with high streets and market streets, would

probably never consider us to be English. I’d never been to England, but I knew it rained

a lot there, too, and I wondered what they did to keep their houses from flooding. Instead

of stilts we had a low stone wall around the perimeter of the house, which usually kept

out the water, but not this time. This time it only lasted until the third day.

Papa stood on the porch while streams of water spewed off the tin roof, his entire

body facing the river which for the time being included most of our empty sugarcane

fields. He was looking toward the bank, the huts of our tenants. There was Thet, climbing

12

from the window and into a small boat tethered to one of the wooden poles that supported

the house. Then he shoved off and rowed in the direction of the village. Papa’s eyes

followed him, yellowed around the edges and watery, always watery.

“Thet,” Papa said.

“What about him?”

Thet rowed around a bend where the tree branches drooped low along the bank,

and then he vanished. I shifted the weight of the child to my other hip, resigned to the

dark spot of wetness that had become a fixture on the front of my dress. Willa would

have been able to feed you, I thought. But not me. Not ever.

“The river’s getting closer,” I said. “The cellar’s going to flood.”

“It won’t flood.”

The brown water lapped at the stones. It was going to spill over.

“It’s going to spill over.”

“It won’t spill over.”

Within an hour the water slipped over the wall, and Papa and Alphie went down

to the cellar to move the door, and Willa still on it, up onto the porch. Before going into

the cellar, Alphie brought down an old bedsheet and threw it across her so Benji wouldn’t

have to see, because he was watching from the porch with me, and still begging me to let

him hold the child. They reemerged, Alphie tottering under the weight of the door and

Willa. Immediately the rain soaked the sheet all the way through and clung around the

outline of her face, like the funeral shrouds the villagers sometimes used in their burials.

When someone died in the village, the family and neighbors built a funeral pyre

with sticks, set the body on fire, and set it floating down the river. That was what this

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reminded me of, except we were bringing her away from the river, back into the house,

and so the river came to us instead. As the day went on the water surrounded the house

and gradually submerged the porch. We moved the door and Willa into the dining room,

and the next day we were wading knee-deep through the foyer and dining room, so we

again moved her to the only upstairs bedroom without a leaking roof. We left all the

doors open downstairs so the water could leave easier and quicker when it finally decided

to, and the cats crouched under the rafters looking wet and pitiful.

I sat on a mattress in an upstairs bedroom across from the side that leaked, feeding

the child coconut milk, and Benji begged to have a turn at it.

“You’ll spill it.”

“I’m not going to spill it.”

Through the window I could see the river, and Thet rowing his boat back toward

his hut. He tethered it to the wooden pole and climbed in through the window. The child

gurgled and Benji looked down into her face.

“It looks like Chit,” he said.

The room fell silent except for the rain and the sound of Alphie’s pencil scribbling

at his notebook, one of the ones issued to the pupils by the Rangoon School for Anglo-

Burmese Boys.

For the first few weeks after he came home, he wouldn’t go anywhere without it,

he trembled like a leaf when anyone showed any sign of curiosity over its contents. One

night, when Mum had already left and Willa had begun to wear her shawl all the time,

Benji woke me up, standing over me breathlessly.

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“I want to know why Papa hates Alphie so much,” he’d said. He was holding the

journal.

“Where did you find that?” I asked.

“He hides it. He doesn’t think I know where he hides it, but I do.”

“Where?”

“I watch him. Will you read it to me? I want to know why Papa hates him so

much.” He thrust the book at me, soft and worn around the edges with a fading official

seal on the cover, Alphie’s birth name printed in neat penmanship along a line at the

bottom.

I’d thumbed through the pages by the light of a candle stump, the paper rustling

and Benji mouth-breathing loudly into my ear as he stared blankly at characters that

meant nothing to him. I watched as the pages went from prim notes on British mercantile

history, the establishment of the Indian colony, to more furtive scribblings, no longer

outlines, a diplomat’s son named Nicholas from Bangkok, an only friend, the only other

boy who didn’t play cricket or boast about kissing girls at the nearby School for Young

Anglo-Burmese Ladies. Then, even smaller, hardly legible, a seemingly endless

deliberation over the possibility of confessing love through a letter.

“Does it say why Papa hates Alphie?” Benji asked, his little hands on my shoulder

vibrating with impatience.

I shut the journal and handed it back to him.

“Put this back where you found it.”

“But what’s it say?”

15

I blew the candle out and curled on my side. “If you ever ask again you’re getting

a smack.”

VI

A week passed and the river receded, leaving a few centimeters of sludge on the

first floor and a dark water line on all the walls. The house stank of earth and wet silt, just

like the child still had that lingering scent of blood even though I’d bathed her. Chit had

not returned with a priest.

Papa walked to the village in search of tobacco, having depleted his arsenal. We

ate the cured fish in the kitchen, swatting at flies.

“It stinks,” Benji said.

“I know it does.”

“She stinks.”

I chewed slowly to delay my response. We’d moved the door and Willa back into

the dining room because it quickly became too hot upstairs. The same sheet covered her,

crinkly and stiff from the dried rainwater. On the dining room floor, this time, because

the table had been burned. We were almost back to where we’d begun.

“It’s not her.” I swallowed hard. “It’s the river water. Dead fish and seaweed.”

“No it isn’t. It’s hot in here and it’s all wet everywhere and she stinks.”

Alphie began peeling a mango.

“When the priest comes we’ll bury her,” I said. “Papa won’t let us without a

priest. Chit should be back any day now.”

“Chit isn’t coming back,” Benji said.

“She’s coming back.”

16

“The baby looks like Chit.”

I looked down at the girl’s face. “I know.”

In the afternoon a horde of fishing boats flocked toward the village port up the

river, which was again bounded by its banks, calm and brown again like nothing had

happened. I heard the shouting first and we three went onto the porch, shielding our eyes

against the sun. Our tenants had emerged from the huts and stood at the banks, some

waist-deep in water, gesturing and shouting unintelligibly with the men on the boats.

“What are they talking about?” Benji asked.

The shouting continued. Repeatedly they pointed in the direction from whence

they came, the shouts becoming more and more frenzied as they went on. Thet was there,

one of the men who had waded in waist-deep, but he faced us, not the fishing boats.

“Where are they all going?” Benji asked.

“The port,” I said.

When Benji went back inside, I walked out to the tenants’ huts, the silt squelching

under my bare toes with each step. Thet was back in front of his hut, his single hand

nimble and slim like his mother’s, passing expertly over a pile of mangos, plucking out

the rotten ones. When he saw me approaching, he straightened, a mango still in his hand,

tobacco-stained fingers curling around the tough red-green skin.

“A cyclone,” he said when I asked. His voice was gentle and soft, carrying none

of the menace of his mother’s English. Willa was the one who had taught him the

language, not Papa. “Coming toward the coast.”

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“Why were you talking to Thet?” Benji asked when I returned to the kitchen. He

had already eaten one of the dried fish we were saving for dinner and I swatted his hands

away.

“If you tell Papa I’ll tell him you ate the fish,” I said.

“What are we going to do with Willa?” he asked.

“We’ll bury her,” I replied, “when Chit comes back with the priest.”

“But Chit isn’t coming back,” he said.

“She’s coming back.”

That night Benji and I slept on the back porch because the rooms upstairs were

too hot and the floors downstairs were still covered in sludge. I grasped the handle of the

whisk broom, ready to beat off any snakes that ventured near us or the child, who slept in

the blanket-lined washtub between us. Whenever I closed my eyes I imagined the

cyclone, brewing out over the ocean somewhere and moving toward us, like the ambush

that we always thought was coming but never did. I wondered if it would hit Hong Kong,

or Bangkok, where that diplomat’s son lived, if it would destroy the Rangoon School for

Anglo-Burmese Boys. I thought of the holes in our roof, our missing screen door.

“I’ve never seen a cyclone,” Benji said from the other side of the washtub. His

feet thumped against the metal when he shifted position.

“Me neither.” I rolled onto my back and slept, the broom still in my hand.

VII

A gunshot rang out across the fields, rattling my brain awake. Then another. Then

screaming, like the screaming when Willa fell with the jug and Chit came running, only

18

this time it came from the riverbank, skipped across our tin roof and on to the mangrove

forests and back. The child was crying.

I remained still, waiting to hear Papa’s footsteps or see Alphie burst onto the

porch from the open doorway. Neither of these things happened. Then Benji appeared

over me, fidgeting and twitching like he was brimming with some kind of news. I

realized he had not been asleep.

“Alphie did it,” he said, beaming.

I sat up. “Did what?”

“Thet.” He lunged forward, knocking over the washtub, and seized my arm with

two hands. He tugged until I rose to my feet, weightless, like in a dream.

“What about him?”

“That’s what Papa said he’d do,” Benji said breathlessly. “But Alphie did it first.

He told me not to follow him, so I didn’t see, but I know that’s what he did, because he

said he was going to do it. Will Papa still hate him now?”

The child was crying. I crouched down and scooped her into my arms.

“Don’t touch it,” Benji said. “It looks like Chit.”

“She’s our niece.” She began to suckle at my dress, the wet spot spreading hot

against my chest.

“But it looks like Chit.”

VIII

The morning was cloudy and the river was like brown glass, empty of fishing

boats just as our fields were empty of sugarcane and our dining room was empty of a

table. The huts of our tenants were sealed up like neat little freight boxes, the windows

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covered, the fishing boats tethered to the wooden stilts. Papa sat on the porch steps eating

a mango, and Benji on the other side, watching the clouds roll across the horizon,

advancing toward us across the Delta.

“Thet is dead,” Benji said when I approached, my feet squelching with the mud

still on the floor. “Alphie killed him and now there’s a cyclone coming.”

Papa let the skin of the mango hit the porch with little wet plops. Alphie was

crouched in a corner, scribbling into that notebook with a stub of pencil.

“Is the cyclone going to hit Hong Kong?” Benji asked.

“It’s going to hit everywhere,” Papa said.

I sunk onto the stairs, hugging the child to my chest. We had no more coconut

milk. The oblong eyes stared up at me and I noticed the nose, the lips. She looked like

Willa.

“Chit should be back any minute now,” Papa said, a stream of tobacco juice

squirting through. “With the priest.”

“And then we can bury Willa,” said Benji, “because she stinks.”

“She doesn’t stink,” I said.

“Yes she does. Papa, doesn’t she stink? With the flies and all?”

The wind picked up, creating ripples along the surface of the river.

“Pathein isn’t far,” Papa said. “They won’t be long.”

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