Beauty Rising (2 page)

He stopped again. I had for a moment forgotten where I was. It wasn’t my father I was listening to. Not the father I knew. It was someone magical, unbelievable. Someone I wanted to hear more from. Someone I didn’t want to die.

“And then,” his voice broke up and tears began streaming down his face – the face of a stranger. “Johnson jumped up over the embankment and into the rice field and,” he paused again. “He disappeared. The rice field swallowed him. He sank. The hell-hole of Vietnam swallowed him up.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. But he paused for a long time and wiped his face coughing a few times. He was severely agitated. His right hand shook up and down.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“Dad, the doctor said…”

“I don’t care what the doctor said, I’m dying. Ah…” He leaned back again and took a deep breath. “You see, he had jumped right into a B52 shell hole. He was killed by his own army. Those B52s would rip a huge hole out of the ground. When it happened to be in a rice paddy, the flooded field would cover right over the damn hole. It was completely invisible. Then along comes some sorry sack like Johnson, and he hops right into the hole with a seventy pound pack on his back and sinks right to the bottom drowning in five seconds. I had jumped over too but hung onto the side of the embankment after I saw Johnson go under. I shimmied over about twenty yards and carefully slid down feeling with my legs to see if there was dirt under the paddy water or not. There was, and so I curled myself up in a ball and just laid there in the mud and water for hours. I thought about Newbert, and I vomited all over myself. Then I thought about Johnson laying just fifty feet away at the bottom of the shell hole. Get it. Shell hole. Hell hole. All the same. I wished I was in the hole with him. Then I thought of that girl – the angel. Her skin. Dark and soft. So smooth. It had to have been a dream. I longed for her to come to the paddy. I longed for her to be with me in the mud and water. I longed to stay with her forever. She was so beautiful. I have never forgotten her face.”

He looked so white, like he was living his last breath. I felt as if he was talking the life right out of him.

“After dark, I finally got up out of the mud, climbed up the embankment and weaved my way through the fields toward the flickering lights to the north. I don’t really remember walking back to my unit, but I remember getting there and telling my commander about Newbert and Johnson. He told me we’d need to go out in the morning to find their bodies. You know, before that night I never drank a lick of alcohol in my life. Your grandma went to the Methodist church over on Main. She would have whipped me if I ever tried the stuff here in Lyndora.”

Two images I couldn’t grasp – my dad going to church and my dad not drinking.

“But that night I had a whole lot of whiskey. A whole lot,” he faded out for a moment. “A whole lot. Martin, that was the last day of my life. There in the banana trees, that was the last time I ever lived. I’ve been dragging you and your mother through the muddy rice paddies of Vietnam for 40 years. I married, I had a child, and I’ve lived my whole life in this town, but I left everything in that hell-hole of Vietnam. My future wife, my future child, my religion – they all drowned with Johnson that day. They all sank with him and laid there on the bottom.”

Dad paused again, but he had barely any expression on his face at all.

“Martin, I’ve been a terrible father.”

“No, Dad,” I tried to say something encouraging to him, but he glared at me with venomous eyes as if he would not accept any more lies in this house. Not on his death bed. He would not be comforted; especially not from the one he hurt the most. I couldn’t hold the tears back anymore, and I wiped my eyes ferociously trying to hide them.

“Martin, will you do one thing for me?”

“Anything Dad. Anything.”

“I want to be cremated. I want you to take my ashes to Tay Nguyen. Find the little lake just southeast of Ban Me Thuot and pour my ashes between the banana trees. Will you do that for me son?”

“I will.”

“Your mother won’t allow it. She will try and…”

I stopped him before he could say another word. I knew what he would say, and I knew he was right. My mother would never allow me to go. Even though I have celebrated thirty six birthdays, I had hardly grown into a man. I knew it. There was never any time to grow up in this house. I was a thirty-six-year-old junk food eating child, who let his mother belittle him and his father make fun of him. I had never even been across the Pennsylvania border let alone in a foreign country. I worked in the stockroom of K-Mart for the last nine years. I spent Tuesday nights bowling and Sunday afternoons watching NASCAR. I hadn’t had a real talk with a girl in ten years. Hadn’t dated one in fifteen. I was 250 pounds with a scraggly red beard. I was convinced that besides Tuesdays and Sundays I had the most miserable existence in the world. I was the buffer between two people who hated each other for as long as I could remember. Now this stranger – this father I never knew – was leaving me by telling me stories that made it all somehow make sense. He had died in Vietnam. I was another consequence of the war – a by-product of a time period that nearly drowned a whole generation.

“Dad, don’t worry. I’ll do it. You can count on me.”

Then he looked at me and said something else so strange, so wonderful, so life giving that I couldn’t help but cry some more.

“Thank you, son.”

The Lake

The taxi driving kept saying “Nui Coc, Nui Coc”.

“I need to find the lake of ‘Thai Win”,” I kept saying repeatedly.

“Nui Coc, Nui Coc. Lake of Thai Nguyen. Here it is. Only lake in Thai Nguyen.”

My emotions struck me hard. The sight of the water pierced my stomach. I don’t know if my father really believed me – that I would actually come to Vietnam and fulfill his wish. I got out of the car and looked at the rolling hills around the lake, thick with trees. It was truly beautiful and so serene. I imagined my father as a young man trudging through the countryside, finding the girl that smiled at him; the girl that randomly invited him to leave his soul here. I imagined him kissing the girl goodbye and telling his naked swimming friends about his encounter. I imagined them telling him to stop his BS and excitedly trying to make him come clean with the truth. Then I imagined Newbert taking the bullet in the head. It was so peaceful now. Everything seemed unreal.

“Where are the rice fields?” I asked the driver. This was not the spot; it was too hilly, and there were no banana trees.

“What?” asked the driver.

“Are there some rice fields around here? I need to find some rice fields on the edge of the lake.”

The driver looked completely perplexed.

“You want to go down to city; we see rice fields. I know good restaurant too. You hungry? Eat?” he replicated the eating motion with his hands and mouth.

“No. I need rice fields. Or banana trees. Rice fields or banana trees by the lake.”

We drove around for another thirty minutes; forested hills spread out in all directions. As we approached what must have been the northern tip of the lake, we pulled off to the side and the driver led me down through a small grove that covered the embankment heading down to the lake. When we reached the water, I looked out and saw a low expanse of land leading off into the horizon, and on the far side stood a large grove of banana trees. My heart pounded,
could this be it?
There were not any rice fields, but perhaps this land used to have them? It was over forty years ago. I trudged along the edge of the lake. The ground was soft and my shoes quickly began sinking into the mud, but I kept moving.
Could this really be the spot?
Would there be a large rock jutting out like my dad said?
I reached the edge of the banana grove. There was no one around. The driver squatted by the edge of the lake, smoking, about a quarter of a mile away. The trees were full of green banana bunches. I started walking up through the grove looking intently for any rock that could fit the description. The ground was smooth, but damp. My shoes were completely black with mud. I scoured the entire grove over and over. There was no rock. There were no rice fields. But could this still have been the place. After all, it was the only lake in Thai Win and these were the only banana trees we could find around the lake. I went down to the beginning of the grove and sat flat right in the moist dirt. Removing my backpack, I pulled out the Rubbermaid container that held the ashes.

“Dad. I did the best I could.”

I looked down at the remains.

“I know you never thought I would amount to anything. You were always disappointed in me. But look Dad, I’m in Vietnam. I’ve never even crossed into Ohio, and now I’m sitting under a banana tree in Vietnam. Dad, I did it.”

I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The tears flowed, like every other night when I was young in my bedroom listening to dad yell at mom.

“It doesn’t matter Dad. It doesn’t matter. I’m here. I’m here for you.”

I unsealed the red lid on the two quart container when suddenly a light wind blew ashes all over my jeans.

“Ahh,” I jumped up wiping my pants with my left hand while balancing the Rubbermaid top over the container in my right.

“I can’t even dump out ashes. Idiot.”

I backed up two feet when a banana tree branch pierced through my right hand and knocked the Rubbermaid onto the ground, dumping the ashes all over. I stood frozen, having a hard time believing what I just did, though I wasn’t totally surprised.

“Sorry, Dad. You know I’ve always been a little clumsy. Sorry. But I made it, Dad. I made it to Vietnam.”

Cremation

Dad died the morning after he told me his Vietnam story. Mom didn’t react or say much of anything. I went for a walk. I stopped in front of the Methodist church on Main Street and thought about young dad and grandma walking through the arched front doors on a Sunday morning. The parsonage was set off to the side about a hundred feet further back from the street than the church. I walked right up the three cinderblocks used as steps for the front door and knocked firmly. I felt especially calm. An elderly man with a bald head and a rim of white hair from ear to ear smiled as he opened the wooden door.

“Hello, son. What can I do for you?”

“Hello, Reverend. My name is Martin Kinney Jr. My family lives over on Home Avenue.”

“You’re a Kinney. Martin Kinney, you say. Well I know your father. Or knew your father a long, long time ago. Come in, come in. I’m so glad you came. Your father is still a member here – inactive that is. But we never close the doors on reconciliation.”

He brought me into his small living room. There was a red painted piano in the corner and a well-worn sofa opposite it where he sat me down as I pondered the shocking fact of my father being a church member.

“So how is your father Martin?”

“He died this morning,” I said without any emotion. I still didn’t know what I felt.

“Oh Martin, I am sorry. How could I be of assistance to your family during this time?”

“I never knew my Dad had ever gone to church. But last night, he was talking to me about when he was a boy and he said my grandma would take him every Sunday.”