And I stopped and I sat on a knoll and I looked at my hands darkened by the sun, not as dark as my wife’s skin or Binh’s or any of the others in the circle I’d broken but as dark as the skin of a Vietnamese child, that dark. This could be the skin of a Vietnamese child. Except for the blond hairs on my knuckles, and I looked at my arms and there was a forest of blond hair on this dark arm, and I was on the porch swing, in the very center, and my arms were taut, my legs were just long enough now to touch and push and lift and my arms were rigid grasping the lip of the seat, and for a moment there was only the cry of the chain above me: I pushed and the chain cried out, over and over, and it seemed painful to this thing for it to carry me, and I rose but always came down again and I never did move from the porch, and I stopped and I sat and still there was silence from the house but I knew I would go in. Against all that I desperately desired, I would go in.
Binh was asking me to go in. They all asked me that now. Just to have me speak. I was to walk into the great bland jaws of that house and what I feared was this: perhaps a family scattered even to the other side of the earth did not truly cease. Once I went in again, perhaps I could never return to Vietnam. I sat now and waited and trembled and nothing came to me to do.
But I could not sit in the woods and I rose and I went back down to the path and I walked again into the village and I went past the vegetable garden and there were three women there in conical straw hats and I knew their names and I knew their children and I passed the house of Tri and the house of Quang and the houses of others whose names I knew, whose children I knew, and I stopped in front of Tiên’s house and there was the smell of wood fire from her kitchen and the smell of incense and the dragon’s head was sitting in her doorway now and smelling of paint. There was the smell of fresh paint in her doorway and they all came, gradually. Tiên first and then Binh and then the others, all of them came, and my wife came and Hoa was with her and about to go away and I shook my head no and then nodded her to the circle that was forming.
Hoa crouched beside me and Th
o next to her, anxious still, I knew, and my daughter turned her face up to me and then away and I leaned near and her hair smelled of the rain, smelled of the water that we gathered in a great stone pot, as is our way here, and we believe that the spirits of our ancestors come close to us and need our prayers, the prayers in our houses with the smoke of incense rising, and I understood how odd and wonderful the air of this village was now because I came here and married and made this child. The air here was filled with the spirits of Tho’s coffee farmers and tobacco farmers and woodcutters but also filled with the spirits of my clothiers and newspapermen and bankers, all drawn into this place, into my house, by our incense and our prayers, all brought together by my child, the confluence of families who were, in that invisible realm, astonished to find themselves together.
And I said, “Each new year when I was a child, the god of the hearth went to heaven from my house in America. He came to the council of the gods and he said, There are children in this house and they sleep each night in great fear and they have places on their bodies that are the color of the sky in the highlands of Vietnam just after the sun has disappeared. And they pray, even the youngest of them, a boy, for escape and when they love each other, these children, it is to pray that each of the others escapes. And they know that this will happen for them, if at all, one at a time. And this house is empty of incense. And this house sees no spirits in the world.”
And I stopped speaking and the faces in the circle lowered their eyes in deference to me and they understood and they said no more and we all rose and we went away and that night I lay in the dark on a straw mat and my wife lay awake next to me. I could hear her faintly jagged breath and I said, “There was no woman in that life.” And my wife sighed softly and her breathing grew as smooth as her body when I first touched her and I closed my eyes.
And I thought of this place in Vietnam where I lay and how it grows coffee and it grows tobacco, and in that other life there was a time in the morning when I could slip out of the house and there was no one around but me and I knew that one day I would escape, and inside they drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and read the newspaper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam in 1971 as a Vietnamese linguist. He is the author of nine novels and two collections of stories. The short stories in this collection have appeared in such places as The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Francis Eppes Professor of English holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.