Truong looked back in cautiously, and hissed again, but touched the amulet with a fleeting, reverent poke as if she was afraid its power would electrocute her. For a second I felt a flash of terror, followed by acceptance of the terror, resignation to it, feelings that I knew from her face belonged to Truong, not me. When her hand dropped, she gave me a hard, quizzical look as if she couldn't quite believe something she'd just been told, then drew close and took my hand.
We knelt in the mud beside the first patient, a deep scalp wound and left-sided enucleation (the eye had been poked out). Hue, Truong, and I made very slow progress alone, and no one stepped forward to help us until a couple of the children leaned forward and began to play with the amulet dangling from my neck as I bent over the patient, clasping hands in a ring-around-the-rosy with Hue and Truong. I felt a blast of the children's curiosity and energy, and the circle enclosed by our hands filled with rosy light. The eyeball could not be replaced, of course, but the bleeding stopped.
With the closing of the scalp wound, the rose light drained to a dirty pale pink. There were still four more patients to be treated.
I was aware of people standing around and watching, of Ahn doing his carnival-barker best to get help for me, but everyone else seemed afraid. The next patient had so many wounds it was a wonder she had any life left in her. I crawled through the mud to reach her. A girl of about fourteen, she was so covered with mud and blood that it was impossible to tell what she might have looked like if half her face hadn't been missing. I tried. Hue, Truong, and Ahn tried to help me.
But we were all so drained. The girl's ragged breathing stopped. Maybe we managed to ease her pain a little before she died; I don't know. I had told Ahn that what we had to do when trying to heal these people was think about them as they might have been when well and wish hard that they be that way. The other two women, to whom he had passed on these instructions, stared at the girl in the mud. Hue's aura waned for a moment until it looked as if she was coated all over with two inches of mud that flowed out of her skin. Truong's flared, and she took the girl in her arms and began to rock her. I crawled to the next patient, looked into the face of an eight-year-old and the devastation of another gut wound, and turned away again. Ahn scooted on his butt to my side and patted me on the shoulder, but his hand didn't have much force behind it. He looked as if he was about to cry too. He kept patting me and I kept bawling. Truong was still silently rocking the dead girl, but Hue crawled over beside us. Her face was stricken, stunned with pain, but she plastered her tough look over it and started to harangue me in a slow, angry voice, trying to snap me out of it, I suppose.
"Babysan, tell her I'm sorry, but it's no good. We need more help.
There's not enough magic in me to do it alone, not enough magic in all four of us."
Hue leaned over and touched the amulet as I said this and her tough face dissolved into remorse and more confusion that pierced me during the contact, so that I could hear her asking herself a jumble of angry, bewildered questions.
She raised her muddy hand to my cheek and touched it, then turned to her fellow villagers and spoke to them beseechingly, almost begging, but with an underlying steeliness that insisted on respect, insisted on attention, even while she was apparently imploring the compassion of the village.
Although I was far too wasted to consciously translate facial expression, tone, and aura in combination, something began clicking, and I became aware of what she was saying to the others. She told them that they were being shamed, that they were handing over the lives of their loved ones to a foreigner and then refusing to help her save them. The rain washed clear streaks in the mud on her face, and her plastered hair made her look as if she had drowned and returned as a banshee to haunt them.
Huang, who had been hauling bodies, was the first to react. He quieted her, patting her hand, but she placed the hand on my shoulder. Behindhim came Hoe's mother, and the little girl who had carried her sister on her hip, and her brother. Ahn took Hoe's hand and put it on my shoulder.
She pulled away from him for just a moment, but as the others crowded around her, her face took on a rapt look. The power flowed, flooding from the people all around me, touching me, Hoa, the patients, and one another. Then Hue spoke again and I knew without needing to know Vietnamese that she was telling them, "These are not bodies. These are not corpses. These are not merely wounds. These are your daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends. Remember them working in the fields beside you, helping you build your home, doing business with you in the market, celebrating holidays with you. This child has played with your children. This child could be your child. Comfort her."
The people stood around me, or sat on their heels beside me, their hands on my shirt, my bare arms, fingers in my hair and touching my knees, my back and waist, one or two pressing too hard, most of the contact more tentative. Two of them, men I didn't recognize, touched the amulet, and from them I received an initial stab of suspicion and anger, rapidly followed by a rush of excited, strengthening energy, indecipherable amid the rest of it. I wedged my fingers between theirs and the amulet and their fingers closed over mine.
And then I remember the little girl I was touching, her gut wound healing, the skin coming together smooth and even clean, and her breathing slowing, the look of pain fading to one of fear and childish anger at being abandoned. When she started demanding her mother, I noticed the next patient. There wasn't enough room for all of the villagers to touch the girl or me, so some of them were jammed up against their neighbors but touching the other patients. All but the girl who died were already healing.
I wanted to go back to sleep, right there in the mud. But two young men helped me inside another hut. just before I fell asleep I thought: These young men must have come from the other village, with the patients. There were no young men in this village yesterday.
Nothing should have been able to wake me, but the voices did. For one thing, they weren't the voices I'd become familiar with in the last twenty-four hours. For another thing, as tired as I was, my nerves were taut and I had a series of half-waking nightmares. A Russian in a tall fur hat was bending over my mom. I knew it was my mom, even though she didn't have a head. It was under her arm and she kept saying, "I hate to put you to all this trouble, sir. Really, my daughter can take me to the doctor in the morning." But the Russian had a secret invention, and I understood it had something to do with what Sputnik had found in space, and he was going to use this to put Mama's head back on except he didn't know which way around it was supposed to go.
Our neighborhood was up in flames and the Vietcong were marching into Bethel and pretty soon they'd cross the bridge over the gully down by Foster's house, but I knew they didn't know the land as well as I did, see. I seemed to be at home alone in our house. The family had gone someplace, or maybe had already been killed. I slunk through the backyard, past the crab apple tree, down the broken cement sidewalk, through the garden, and into the gully. I could hide in the gully and the Vietcong would never find me because they hadn't grown up on our street and only kids who had knew about the gully. Later, I snuck down to Foster's house in time to see them march across the bridge, and I crossed under it and ran way down the gully behind Foster's house.