Bamboo People (13 page)

The old man doesn’t want to make any plans until the healer’s finished. “We have to know how the boy is faring,” he says.

It seems like hours before she’s done. Ree Meh quietly cleans and orders the hut. Her grandfather sits in silence. I pace the room, stopping every now and then at the window to listen. Only the sounds of the jungle are out there, noises I’ve heard since I was a child. I grip my bamboo pole tighter. I have to protect these girls and their grandfather. That’s my new mission.

Finally the healer places both hands on the boy’s chest and bows her head. The hut stays silent until the soldier stirs and opens his eyes.

This time he’s fully conscious. One hand reaches to clasp the pocket of his shirt; the other gropes for his leg. “Is it there?” he asks in Burmese. “I can’t feel it.”

“I pray you keep it, my brother,” the healer answers. It’s the first I’ve heard her speak. Her voice sounds like music, even making the ugly sounds of Burmese.

“The pain’s gone,” he says.

“I’ve given you medicine for that. But I think … I think you may lose it.”

The boy takes a deep breath before speaking. “The whole leg?”

“You’ll keep your knee. It’s the part below it and the foot. I’ve splinted it and stitched it up, but it might still get infected.”

The healer turns to me. “Is Auntie Doctor in your camp now?”

I shrug. “Yes. She’s with us for a bit longer, I think.”

Even though Auntie Doctor’s getting older, she still travels from camp to camp half the year. The rest of the time she’s based in a clinic in the largest camp, treating people who trek for miles to get help. Amputating torn limbs and fitting prosthetic replacements are a big part of her job.

“I’ve been wanting to meet her,” the healer says. “They say her healing is as good as her heart.” She and her sister start putting away the unused bandages and medicine.

The old man squats beside the soldier. “What were you doing on the Thai side of the border, young man?” He’s fluent in the boy’s language. The Burmese government and military make sure most of us understand enough to obey orders.

The boy clears his throat before he answers. “Our captain sent us on a mission. We were supposed to find a Karenni hut full of weapons.”

“But there is no such place around here,” Ree Meh says, also speaking Burmese.

“His crew was heading here,” I say. In Karenni. “It’s the only hut around for miles. I’m sure more soldiers will be sent to find it. We have to get to camp.”

The girls exchange glances. “Will they let us stay there?” Ree Meh asks. “Space is so tight.”

“I’m sure they will,” I answer. The Thai government puts a limit on the number of us who can live inside the camp, but our council reserves a few precious spaces for emergencies. Well, this is an emergency, isn’t it?

“Will they let the soldier in, too?”

What? I can’t believe she’s asking this. “Absolutely not,” I say. “They’ll think he’s a spy. Sent to find where people are hiding. To discover plans. To identify leaders. In fact, how do we know he
isn’t
a spy?”

I’m still speaking our language—Sa Reh and I swore we’d never let a word of Burmese come out of our mouths. Not until we have our own country back and every last one of the intruders is outside our borders.

“He’s not a spy,” says Ree Meh, speaking to me in Karenni again. “He’s just a boy.”

“He’s a soldier,” I say, and I can’t keep the stick in my hand from pounding the floor. “We leave him here.”

“The camp council might let him in,” Ree Meh says. “He wasn’t carrying a weapon, right?”

“This one wasn’t, but the others were. Besides, I don’t trust any of them.” I’m sure the leaders will agree with me, especially the ones who train our defenders, like Sa Reh’s father.

“He won’t be able to do much spying with his leg torn up like that,” Ree Meh says. “No weapon and an injury—they can’t turn him away.”

I stand up. “We’re not going to take him along! I’m telling you, they won’t let him in. Besides, if the Burmese find the dead bodies back there, and then this empty hut, they’ll think we’ve taken this one hostage. They’ll come after us. They might even overtake us.”

“He needs to get to a doctor fast,” Ree Meh says, lifting her chin.

“His leg is sure to get infected if we leave him, Tu Reh,” the healer adds. “That wound needs to be cleaned and treated, and his bandages changed. The soldiers who come probably won’t know how to do that.”

“They’ll have to learn how,” I say. “Let the Burmese doctors take care of their own.”

Ree Meh’s arms are folded across her body. So are mine. The healer looks from her sister to me. “Grandfather must make the decision,” she says finally.

The three of us turn to the old man. Once again he squats beside the soldier. “Any medics in your training center?” he asks.

The boy shakes his head. “No, sir.”

The grandfather stands and eyeballs me, long and hard, before he speaks. “We take the Burmese boy with us,” he says.

I can’t hide my frustration, and my pole smacks the ground again. No wonder we’re losing this war!

The soldier calls out something.

“What, my brother?” the healer answers, hurrying to his side. I wish she’d stop calling him that.

“Where’s the boy who carried me here?” he’s asking.

Ree Meh takes hold of my sleeve and pulls me over. “Here he is,” she says. “His name’s Tu Reh. What’s yours?”

“I’m Chiko.”

The healer taps herself. “Nya Meh,” she says. “And that’s Ree Meh, my little sister. Although the way she bosses me around, you’d never guess it.”

The boy manages a smile, his eyes traveling from my face to the girls and back again. “You saved my life,” he says. “How can I repay you?”

“Be well,” the healer says, tucking the sheet around his chin. She’s as gentle as if he really were a brother.

He takes her hand. “My mother says there’s a special glow that marks a healer. I used to think that was an old wives’ tale, but I saw it on your face. You remind me of my father. He’s a doctor—a healer, like you.”

“Me? I have so much to learn,” Nya Meh says.

Ree Meh brings the soldier a glass of the same kind of coconut milk she poured for me. “Hungry?” she asks him.

He shakes his head no. “Maybe in the morning,” he says, and drinks the milk.

I go to the window and open it again, leaning out to listen. Were they marching through the night? Would they get here before we left?

After they eat and wash, the girls spread their mats in a corner of the hut and hang a shawl across the room. Talking to each other in low voices, they disappear behind the homemade curtain.

I walk to the Burmese boy and lean close to his ear. “Repay them by staying here,” I tell him, breaking yet another promise to Sa Reh by speaking the enemy language. “You put all our lives in danger if we take you along. Tell the old man in the morning.”

The boy’s eyes widen, but he nods.

I spread out on a mat near the grandfather and try to sleep.

In the dim, dark green light of dawn, I walk to the privy, keeping my eyes on the branches of the tall teak trees, where mud-colored snakes like to slither.

When I get back, the girls and their grandfather are packing clothes, pots, pans, tools, and medicine into bags. The soldier is still sleeping.

“Tu Reh, will you cut two bamboo poles for me?” Nya Meh asks.

“Yes,” I say. There’s something about the way she asks a question that makes it hard to say no. But why does she want bamboo?

“Please make them about the same length and width,” she says. “There are nice ones by the river.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ree Meh says, frowning. “Because of the mines.”

I can, however, say no to this sister. “I’ll go alone, thanks. I know how to find a marked path.”

Thickets of bamboo line the river, but the light, strong branches are easy to cut. Deer graze nearby. They stare at me with startled eyes.

I bring the bamboo back, and Ree Meh ties four corners of an old blanket securely to the two poles to make a stretcher. “Our grandmother wove this cloth,” she says. “It’s tough enough to lift a horse.”

“I wish we had my mule here,” I say, eyeing the large packs waiting to be carried.

“You have an animal?” Ree Meh asks.

“The only one in camp,” I say. “She carried my sister all the way from home.”

The soldier is awake. He needs to go to the bathroom. “Will you take him, Tu Reh?” the healer asks.

I’m impatient to get on our way, but I agree, hoping she won’t ask for a cloud or something. I’d probably jump as high as I could to try and get it. And it isn’t because she’s a girl and I’m a boy. It’s the same thing that makes it so easy to obey Peh. They make you
want
to help them.

We manage to get the boy up on one foot, and he loops an arm around my shoulder. He winces as he hops to the privy.

On the way back he stops me and says quietly, “You’re right about me putting you in danger. I’ll stay, Tu Reh.”

Is he trying to trick me? I look closely at his face, but he’s concentrating hard on every step. I can tell he’s in more pain than he was last night. He’s breathing hard when we reach the old man. “Leave me here, sir,” he says. “I can care for my leg. Nya Meh will show me how.”

“No, my son,” the grandfather replies. “You’ve never seen an infection taking over. You won’t be able to think straight. You could die.”

“Listen to him, please, Grandfather,” I urge. “They’ll come after us.”

The old man lifts his chin, reminding me of his younger granddaughter. “Take the Bible out of my pack, Ree Meh. Turn to the book of Ecclesiastes. You know the passage.”

Long ago, when people brought the Holy Book here, most of our ancestors learned it in Burmese. Now we’re translating it into Karenni, but the old ones still know most of it by heart in our enemy’s language. The grandfather mutters along as Ree Meh reads the words aloud:

There is a right time for everything: A time to be born, a time to die; A time to plant, a time to harvest;

Old habits are hard to break. Peh and Mua like us to stand silently for a minute after a reading, letting the words settle into our minds and hearts. It seems that the girls grew up with the same practice, because they’re also silent.

I know the words the old man intended me to hear:
a time to kill, a time to heal.
Will there ever be a time for me to kill? What about to defend and protect? We don’t even have a weapon handy in case we need it on the way to camp.

The soldier kept his eyes on the old man during the reading. “It’s not the right time to take me with you,” he says, breaking the silence. “I’ll put your lives in danger.”

“We need to get you to camp,” Nya Meh tells him as she ties the top of her pack closed. “The doctor there can amputate; I can’t.”

Again the soldier spreads a palm across the pocket of his shirt. What’s in there that’s so precious?

“Let’s go, Tu Reh,” the old man says. I want to keep arguing, but he gives me such a stern look that I know I have to obey him.

The girls and I move the soldier to the stretcher. Once he’s settled I take his glasses from my pocket and toss them onto his lap. “Here. These must be yours.”

The soldier’s face lights up like fireworks as he grabs for the glasses. “This is the second time I’ve lost them since I left home! A thousand thanks, Tu Reh.”

He puts them on. One lens is cracked, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. I can’t help noticing that his grin looks like my sister’s when I whittle her something or tell a good joke.

“We have to hurry,” I say, turning away.

Ree Meh stoops to grab the bamboo poles on one end of the stretcher, and I bend to take hold of the other end.

“One, two, three!” Nya Meh calls, and we lift on three, somehow keeping the stretcher fairly flat. Ree Meh is strong; the boy doesn’t feel heavy with the load shared like this.

Nya Meh lifts the blanket and checks his leg. “It looks okay, Chiko,” she tells him. “The splint is holding, and so are the stitches.”

The soldier doesn’t answer. He’s fallen back into an exhausted sleep, one hand still over his pocket.

Nya Meh holds the door open, and Ree Meh and I carry the stretcher out of the hut. “They’ll probably burn everything,” Ree Meh says, swiveling her head to take one last look at the place she’s been calling home.

“You didn’t build it, right?”

“No. And it wasn’t built well.” But I can see her profile. Her eyes scan the chili pepper and tomato plants, the papaya trees, the bamboo-shaded path to the river behind the hut.

The old man comes out last and bolts the door. I can’t believe what he’s carrying along with his pack.

It’s an assault rifle.

And he’s got ammunition slung across his chest.

Plenty of it.

I’d clap my hands if I weren’t holding the stretcher. I’m ready to fight to the death to defend him and the girls, but it’s good to know I’ll have some backup.

The grandfather trots nimbly through the hidden mines to where we’re waiting. “There’s a right time for everything, my boy,” he says, noticing my close look at the rifle. “A Karenni man must decide for himself when to kill.”

It’s almost exactly what Peh told me. Did schools used to teach sayings like that in the old days?

We get on our way. It helps that both Ree Meh and I know the trail well. After an hour or so, we’re moving like one unit, our steps keeping perfect time. Her braid swishes in front of me like Mango’s tail.