Once We Had a Country (35 page)

Her father in the film is brave and caring, innocent of any wrong. He offers himself as a sacrifice, leads Yia Pao in an escape, then is the first of them to cross a swollen river. Maggie would like to believe that this is the man her father became in the jungle, but she can’t. He sat at a desk or in front of a TV all his life. How natural it would have been for him to stay in the pit as ordered. It probably wasn’t courage that drove him out but the sight of Yia Pao clambering away from him with the baby in one arm. It was probably a terror of being left there on his own.

The documentarian has filmed a fantasy, a fake, one that’s all the more offensive for having been made with a technical skill Maggie envies. This woman wanted a saint, so she created one; she boiled down the last week of Gordon Dunne’s life to a few minutes of action. No wonder she was content to leave the farm so quickly. She had probably come up here hoping for footage of drugs and orgies. How disappointing to discover only a few acres of trees and a single abandoned woman.

Then the scene changes, and the person looking back at Maggie from the television set is Gran, the genuine one, sitting in the parlour of her house in Syracuse, though the room is brighter than usual and Gran looks different too, all made up and her hair newly permed. When did they
shoot this footage? Gran never breathed a word about it. Maggie watches and listens as Gran talks about her son, describing a devout boy with his eyes upon the Lord. While she speaks, the screen shows photographs of him as a child, then as a teenager. Finally there’s one of him holding a newborn baby, though he looks not much older than a boy himself. As the screen lingers on the image and the voice-over tells of him becoming a father, Maggie realizes the baby is her. She has never seen photographs of herself at that age, because neither her father nor Gran kept any in the house. Maggie always assumed they didn’t wish to be reminded of her mother’s bad end. Now, as she looks at the photograph, she notices something. Her father’s neck. It isn’t covered by a high collar. There isn’t any scar to hide. But that doesn’t make any sense, because Maggie was born three years after the war.

Before she has time to contemplate what this means, the film leaps forward, gaining colour and motion. Onscreen, a young Lao man with an empty shirt sleeve is gesturing down a track of trampled, slimy-looking undergrowth. The voice-over says it’s the trail her father took after making his escape. The surrounding forest is darker and more riotous than in her dreams.

In the next shot, they show the trap that caught him. The young man explains the mechanism while a translator interprets what he says. Apparently the trap wasn’t set for her father in particular, just for any poor soldier making his way through that territory. They don’t even know who set it, whether it was someone from the Hmong army or the Pathet Lao. There’s a cut to a shaky hand-held shot
moving down the trail, as if from her father’s perspective, then a close-up of three barbed prongs driven through a slender strip of bamboo. The voice-over describes the tripwire, the spring action, and the fact that the trap was designed to be so excruciatingly painful as to make freeing oneself impossible. When the screen returns to the hand-held shot, Maggie feels a throb of anticipation. Surely they won’t show it. They mustn’t. But they do.

She watches a foot catch on a wire stretched across the ground. Then a shot of the camera swinging wildly toward him, as though propelled by some elastic force. A moment later, standing before Maggie’s eyes is her father, pinned against a tree. The whip trap has caught him just below the ribs. The baby in his arms looks toward the wound as if it understands profoundly what has transpired. A dribble of blood travels down her father’s shirt. The man still has his salt-and-pepper beard, still is not her father, yet somehow now he is. The scene has been lit to resemble certain paintings of martyred saints, all deep shadows and alabaster skin, so that he has an appalling beauty. It shouldn’t bother her as much as it does; she already knows most of the details from the priest at the mission. The sight of him is different, though. The sight is obscene.

The shot goes on for hours, as if the filmmaker is determined that Maggie absorb every detail, every nuance of pain and impossible ecstasy on his face, as if she wants Maggie to feel the sensations with him. Finally there’s a release that her father was never granted, and the scene changes to a medical office, where a physician testifies
that shock must have been what kept Gordon Dunne from moving during those last hours; his lack of struggle must have kept him alive. The doctor says it’s highly unusual for a man to survive that long after such a wound. Then the doctor is replaced by the priest from the mission, who says it had to be a miracle, because no power but God’s could have kept Gordon upright all that time and still able to protect his young charge.

The documentarian seems out to prove her objectivity, but Maggie isn’t fooled. The woman wants to believe in Gordon Dunne’s holiness. Now it’s clear why she came to visit the farm. She knew he didn’t get the scar on his neck from the war, so she wanted Maggie to clear up the mystery, to affirm or sully him, to steer her out of doubt. Maggie wonders what the woman would say if she knew about the roll of bills in the clay statue. Would that be enough for her to lose her faith, or would she think of the money as another miracle?

In the kitchen, the telephone has started ringing. Maggie thinks she’ll just ignore it, but then she remembers what time it is and realizes it could be George Ray phoning from Jamaica, already breaking their agreement not to call.

When she reaches the kitchen and picks up, it’s Father Josef. He tells her that on television there’s a programme she should be watching.

“Yes, I’m doing that already,” she says. Stretching the cord back down the hall, she can just see the TV through the living room doorway. It’s unnerving to think that the priest has been viewing the same things she has.

“Is touching, yes?” he says.

“I didn’t need to be touched.”

“No, of course,” he replies quickly. “I was only thinking you might wish to know.”

She asks him if Lenka’s watching too, and he says she went to bed a long time ago. Onscreen, there’s another shot of the river that carried away Yia Pao, and the documentarian’s voice-over admits that his being swept downstream is only speculation, that no one knows what has become of him since he was kidnapped. The whereabouts of his son are also uncertain. The people who found the baby in the arms of Maggie’s father know only that the child was taken to an orphanage somewhere.

The priest has been speaking in Maggie’s ear. What is he talking about? With her eyes still on the television screen, she tries to comprehend him. Then she hears him refer to the money. Suddenly he has all her attention.

“You must forgive Lenka for telling me,” he says. “She is worried about you.”

The treachery runs through her like poison.

“You talk of going to police, yes?” says Josef. “I think this is wise.” Is he making a threat? He could have told the police already. She wants to say it’s none of his business. “No doubt,” he continues, “they will say the money is yours to do with how you wish.” But his tone seems odd. It’s as if he’s trying to hint at some possibility.

“What would you wish me to do with it?” she asks.

“Me? Is not question of my wishes.” He waits a beat. “Perhaps, though, is question of your father’s.”

“What would he want, then?” she says, feeling lifeless.

“Maybe he wants it given to Church.”

It isn’t a surprise, but still she’s unnerved by the gall of it. “You mean given to you.”

“No, not to me! It is parish that has needs. Church roof is old, robes are worn and frayed.”

“You think my father would want you to have new robes?” She has spoken so quickly that he doesn’t understand her words, but the comment doesn’t bear repeating.

“You must come to Mass on Sunday,” he says. “I know some part of you is wanting this.”

“You’re wrong. No part of me wants it.”

“You are full of grieving. Church can help you.”

“I don’t know how it could.”

The priest goes silent. “In September, you come to dinner that time,” he says finally. “Lenka talks to you about abortion, yes?”

Maggie’s dumbfounded. Is there any confidence Lenka hasn’t betrayed? Maggie wants to be outraged with her, but she can’t quite manage it. She pictures Lenka facing another night in the rectory with Josef as her only companion, drinking too much at dinner and blurting out all manner of secrets to him, then apologizing over and over to an absent Maggie, sick from booze and regret while her brother comforts her. The scene is so vivid and dismal that Maggie can almost forgive them both. Almost, but not quite.

“Yes, Lenka and I talked about it,” she tells him.

“I do not wish wrong impression,” says Josef, “so I must explain, is not Lenka who has abortion, is another girl in Prague. My girl, when I am sixteen. You understand?”

“Yes,” she replies. She doesn’t know why he’s telling her the story. Does he think she’s been judging Lenka all this time?

“I do not ask the girl to do this thing. I want big family, yes? But I am no fool, sixteen is too young, so I do not stop her, either. A boy this age, he is frightened easy.”

As he speaks, she finds her impatience growing. Maybe this is his way of seeking intimacy, but she has no interest in playing his therapist.

“I don’t see what this has to do with you wanting the money,” she says.

“I tell you, is not for me! Parish is what matters. I am trying to explain about the needs of others. Surely you understand this. You are the girl who tries to start commune, no?”

The question takes her by surprise. She would never think to describe herself in such a way. It makes her out as more ambitious than she is. It also makes her out as a failure.

“I should go,” she says. “It’s late.”

“But you will consider what I say?”

To be done with the conversation, she says she will.

When she returns to the living room, the television programme has departed Laos and the silver-haired man in the red sweater has reappeared, now sitting by a fireplace. He says that one day Gordon Dunne could be recognized as a modern-day saint. He says the followers of Freud would have you believe that the age of saints is over, that because we all have unconscious motives, there can be no purity and thus no holiness. But the unconscious of the
saint is God. The saint is a projection of God’s mercy, a sign of our ability to transcend our fallen state.

Hearing this, Maggie only feels more powerfully than before that her father is lost to her forever.

The next morning, she passes through the farmhouse half a dozen times without settling on what to do. She considers going to the barracks and removing every trace of George Ray, but it would be painful to see how complete a job he has already done. She should check on Brid. She should rake the lawn. She should do anything that will make her feel needed in the world.

When the phone rings, she picks it up and a woman speaking another language asks her a question. Maggie comprehends a single word: “Wale.” Not quite believing it, she accepts the charges. There’s a click, and then his voice comes on the line.

“Maggie, I’m sorry, I fucked up.” He sounds drunk. He sounds as if he has been drunk the whole time since he last called.

“Where are you?” she says. “I thought you were dead.”

“I found them, Maggie. I found them both.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was too late for your old man. He’d escaped by the time I got to Sal. We spent days in the jungle looking for him.”

“You and Sal?” The idea of it is sickening.

“It’s not like Sal’s my friend, all right? I’ve been doing my best to make up for what he did. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I found Yia Pao and his baby.”

“What? Where?”

“The kid was in an orphanage right here in Vientiane. Sal told me to watch the place, thinking Yia Pao might show. It was a long shot, but guys like Sal don’t give up so easily.”

“You were helping Sal?”

“Listen, will you? Today Yia Pao turned up, just like Sal hoped. So I grabbed him and the baby. I didn’t hand them over to Sal, okay? I’ve got them stashed in a safe place.”

Maggie can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Can I talk with Yia Pao?”

“There’s no phone where he’s staying.”

“Then take him where there is one.”

“It isn’t that easy. Sal has guys out looking for us.”

“I’ll come to you, then.” She’s thinking of the money, how she’ll give it over for the care of Yia Pao’s son. Then she’ll have washed her hands of it.

“You can’t come to Laos,” says Wale. “It isn’t safe. Sal has friends all over Vientiane.”

“So bring Yia Pao and the baby here.” She hasn’t thought it over; it simply comes out of her mouth. “I’ll wire you money for the tickets.” She almost tells him about the clay saint, but she doesn’t trust him.

“I can’t just put a couple of Hmong on a plane.” He sounds unsure, though. “I have a friend here,” he says after a time. “He might be able to handle the papers. Give me a few days, will you?”

She’s tired of waiting for letters and phone calls. “How can I get in touch with you?”

“You can’t. I’ll call you.”

A suspicion comes over her. “Have you asked Yia Pao about Sal’s money?”

“Not yet. I don’t want him getting skittish and taking off.”

But Wale must assume that Yia Pao hid the cash somewhere; she can’t believe he wouldn’t ask about it. She can’t believe he was really looking for Yia Pao all this time just so he could help him.

“Wale, why didn’t you call until now?” she asks.

A hush comes over the line. She knows he’s still there because she can hear his breathing grow uneven.

“I couldn’t talk to you,” he says. “I felt too bad about your old man.” There’s the sound of drawn air, as if he’s taking a drag on a cigarette. “I thought I could get there in time, Maggie. I really did.”

A part of her wants to console him, tell him not to sweat it, but she isn’t quite big enough. “You should come here too. Brid needs you.” There’s no way to explain further, though, not with the line crackling and foaming as it is.