Wayne Karlin
A Red Thread
Emmett thanh yêu,
Do you remember this book? This “Gateway to English” you gave me when I took your class? When I first opened it, the rules of grammar and usage it presented struck me as if they were magical incantations that told my life like the vaguely suggestive words of a horoscope.
I have had.
I should have had.
I have been
I should have been.
I will have.
I will be.
As you discovered, I didn’t need this book, nor your class. I had learned English before, in a previous incarnation as the entitled daughter of a privileged family in a city that once upon a time was called Sài Gòn. I had learned that language and used it as a weapon against you, against your army, used your words to slip inside your defenses just as our sappers would grease their bodies to slide through your barbed wire. But in the end the words had lost their meaning. Liberation had brought me no liberation. Peace had brought me no peace. Betrayal brought betrayal. I was a basket case. A phrase you taught me that was not in this book.
You carried me like a basket. Filled me with the bounty of this river and these forests and with necessary lies.
Anh yêu, once upon a war, if we had met, we might have tried to kill each other. And so, once upon the end of a war, when we did meet, we mourned each other as if we had succeeded. And out of that mourning my human face formed from jungle and drifted up through the canopy of leaves to hover outside of the door of your helicopter. And your human face unshelled itself from the carapace of your helmet and armor and the dark lenses that covered your eyes. So it is that we rebuilt ourselves, each taking our missing pieces from the other. I thought we had succeeded. I wanted it so badly I fooled myself into believing it was enough. That the future tense was real. That we will live within a circle of light. That we will bring our children into that circle. That we will keep out the darkness. But the darkness was in us. The curse is too strong. The curse that began in the past continued into the present and will continue into the future. It has taken our child.
And today is Tết Trung Nguyên, a time to give ghosts rest, and I decided to again write in this book that you had given me at what we hoped was the “gateway” to our lives. You will remember how I had used the exercises as prompts for my journal. Narration, Cause and Effect, Compare and Contrast. How I had wanted to write myself onto your soul. To show you myself. Show and tell. But the sentences I wrote then seem now like runes written in ash. And I don’t know what will happen now, I’m still so fucked up, anh, but I do love you.
em yêu anh
Xuân
*
Emmett Wheeler sat with his back against a huge and ancient pin oak, clutching his wife’s old English journal in his hands. Near him was a mound of grass-covered earth his son and daughter had insisted was an ancient Indian burial mound. They had turned out to be right.
He pressed his back against the tree. If he pushed hard enough it would take him into some patient, timeless consciousness. It occurred to him that the mound looked like a sort of breastwork. Or maybe, with its gentle curvature, simply the first part of that word. A friend of his, an archaeologist, always begged him for the opportunity to dig into it and he’d always refused, a decision supported by his wife, perhaps because of Xuân’s fear of disturbing whatever hungry, unappeased ghosts pressed into the mound. Sometimes bits of what may or may not have been bone worked their way to the surface, making him think of pieces of shrapnel emerging years later through skin, working out from some clench in the body. Dennis and Tuyết had made that swell of earth into their own shrine, appropriating Native American culture eagerly, romantically, inaccurately, out of some need, he thought, for a different origin myth, maybe, than the confusions of their own mixed heritage. That their kids would feel that way had once bothered him, but Xuân had just laughed when he brought it up. Brother and sister would stand next to it, swaying, singing made up chants. Dennis, just before he’d left for Iraq, said he wanted his ashes put there, if he didn’t make it back. He’d said it as if a joke, with the kind of bravado Emmett recognized as prayer from his own war.
He focused on the mound, on the small impression left where he’d dug into it with his hands in order to fulfill at least part of his son’s wish, though the rest of Dennis’ ashes he had scattered over the waters of their ancestry, that intricate, fecund mix of the saline and the pure that sustained life, the blood of this estuarine place.
He closed his eyes, pushed against the cold hard ridges of the tree, and listened.
He thought of something he’d once read about a primitive tribe who, when asked if they believed in the soul, said of course, the soul is what sees the dream.
His wife had been a refugee from Việt Nam. Xuân had always insisted on him writing the name of the country that way, with the proper diacritic accents, as he did now, writing after the note she had left him in the textbook she had used for her English lessons when they had met and he tutored her at the community college. Gateway to English: Exercises for New Immigrants. Not “Veeetnam,” she joked, in a passable Lyndon Johnson drawl, when she would still joke about such things. Or anything.
Should he write the “Vietnam” in the phrase “Vietnam veteran” the same way? Maybe that was OK. The difference between the country and the war. Their country, his war. Veeetnam.
He looked over at his pick-up, its bed stacked high with crab pots which should have been in the water, at the porch, at the emptiness of the place. His gaze fled it, the distracting busyness it would bring him. The shadows of the pines crenellating behind the house flowed onto the roof until the house seemed to edge out of its own reality, like an afterimage of itself. A memory of his wife he strained to bring into his mind dissipated into shadows gathered in the corners of the porch, the scatter of beer cans, styrofoam take-out containers, and crusted paper plates on the long coffee table in front of the porch couch.
He stopped. Their property bordered the Zekiah swamp, a braided creek, with one branch of it meandering out of the marshland and forest, cutting through their twenty acres, and flowing into Allen’s Fresh. He could smell, on the edge of the sweet resinous scent of the pines, the warm, fetid breath of the swamp.
He heard a low murmuring, the sound elusive, broken by the trees so he couldn’t pinpoint its origin and it seemed to come from everywhere. He realized it was coming from him. A chill went through him. His ass hurt from sitting on the ground. He was cross-legged in front of the tree, looking up at the Indian mound, and then down at the open book on his lap, his shoulders swaying back and forth.
Its cover was faded and ripped at the top, the tear splitting the word Gateway right at the e. Xuân really hadn’t needed the course. She was well-educated in Vietnam—Việt Nam—and had come from a wealthy family. “She dropped the course,” he had always joked to people, “but kept the instructor.”
He’d taken a part-time job as an adjunct instructor at the college after leaving a reporter’s gig at the Washington Post, coming back to the county and his family roots to work the water, though after their marriage, as the crabs and oysters diminished, he’d become more of a middleman, buying other watermen’s catches and selling them to local restaurants and some in Northern Virginia and D.C. Xuân had conceived and organized the business, cultivating the Vietnamese and Thai restaurants that became its best customers.
He rose creakily to his feet, turned to the pin oak and pushed his face close, and then a little closer, the ancient damp smell of the bark thick in his nostrils. Next to the trunk the temperature seemed to drop thirty degrees, as if it were sheathed in a cone of coldness.
She was in California now, with their daughter and her relatives in San Jose. Visiting? His friend Russell Hallam, the local sheriff, had asked when he’d come for a visit. Come to check on him.
You might say that, he’d replied.
Fucking hell.
Amen.
Once, when his daughter was fifteen, she’d complained at the way he and Xuân hung onto each other. You’re always touching each other, like you want to make sure you’re both still there. Like you’re the 15-year-olds, not me, 15-year-old Tuyết would say indignantly, though Dennis had just grinned and called them old goats. Some days later, Emmett had overheard him try to explain their parents to his sister.
It was because once they would have tried to kill each other, he’d said.
What do you mean?
It means she was the enemy, Tuyết. Our Mom the V.C. At least I think so; she would never talk about it much except to dad—he’s the one who told me. What she said was their lives were tied together with a red thread. Whatever that means. Dad said she was with the student anti-war movement in Saigon.
Whatever that means, Tuyết had said.
She worked for the Americans but she passed on information to the other side and then was arrested and tortured by the Southern government, Dennis had said. Dad told me what he knew must have happened: confining her in a tiger cage—they would throw lime down on the prisoners—hooking field telephone wires to her body to administer shocks. All that. Our Mom.
His wife. It was all true, or as true as anyone’s stories from that war. He knew that afterwards, she got in trouble with the winning side. They were going to arrest her too. She and her brother had fled the country as boat people.
Their son had said this to their daughter: Mom told me that because she and Dad had once been enemies only they could both understand and forgive each other.
Well, that had been the hope. The initial excitement of it all, at least, though it would not have been enough to be anything lasting, not that intense symbolizing of themselves. The lasting came with the years, with the discoveries of everything they found to delight them about the other, with the forgivings of all they had found to disappoint. But, yes, like any marriage, and just maybe even more because of their histories, they had started because of hope.
Hope that drowned in a canal in Iraq, in that alien water far from the Bay and river that held his son’s boyhood.
His pen hovered over the page, the last, previously-blank page in the book, circling the air above the last words his wife had written. em yêu anh, Xuân.
What could he write? What could he put on this blank page as an answer to Xuân’s letter?
I had never given up being a writer, he wrote in the Gateway. He’d enjoyed, cultivated the image of the waterman author, authorially flannel-shirted, stubble-bearded, doing man-work, not just the effete business of moving words around—all of that ironic, a joke Xuân teased him with. He kept writing even as the business grew, the occasional Style section piece for the Post, articles for journals, even some short stories and poetry he’d had published in literary journals read only by the writers and the friends and families of writers published in those journals. He wrote. He wrote about the war, about finding forgiveness, about finding love, about learning how to live by learning how not to live, about learning to live by learning how not to kill. He wrote because he loved it when he found the words and because he had to get it out of himself and because he felt it was owed. He wrote to contain and to prevent. All the lovely rage of his words. He did not allow himself silence, not with his words. He sought it elsewhere. He found it on the water, early in the morning, the mist rising off it like breath, the lap of it against the hull. But he would not give himself to silence. It had all cost too much. He would not be among the damaged old men whose silence and secrets sent children to die.
I never stopped being a writer, he wrote.
How’d that work out, pops?
Fuck me.
He wrote: Here’s a war story. A friend who had just gotten a dear John letter from his wife had wandered distraught outside the perimeter and was shot and killed. The North Vietnamese dragged his body in front of their position. They knew we would try to get him. They used his corpse to make more corpses. It wasn’t the only time they did it. They understood us. They used our love of the dead to make more of us dead. That’s what me telling my stories did for my son. He wanted his own stories. That’s what my fucking stories did for my child.
Stories saved. Silence killed. Stories killed. What was a poor boy to do, ‘cept play in a rock n’roll band?
He was sitting near the mound, an altar of silence. Heaped over its own silence.
He rose and went over to one of his sheds, brought back a small folding shovel, an entrenching tool. He opened a small hole in the side of that ancient burial mound, and he placed the book, The Gateway, inside it, and then he closed the earth mixed with the ashes of his son and whatever else was resting in that place back over it.
“‘A Red Thread’ is one of a series of stories I’ve been writing concerning the cross-generational damages of war on families, triggered by seeing how some of my own experiences as a Vietnam veteran were echoed in the experiences of several of my students, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the period 2005-2010, while I was teaching at a community college. Several of those veterans had fathers who were also Vietnam veterans and I wondered what we had not been able to teach our kids, and our country, about how dear the cost of that failure was.”
Wayne Karlin has published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and three non-fiction books. He has received several State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction.