Tree of Smoke (62 page)

They all three sat on the tiled floor barefoot, drinking tea and eating candy from a big golden plastic bowl modeled after a king’s fairy-tale crown. Aunt Giang asked him about his love life and his prospects for marriage, about the air force, about the great General Phan, and never about her brother Hao. Uncle Huy hardly spoke. Minh saw no need to mention the house, the unpaid rental. After so many years away, he could only be back because Hao had dispatched him here on business.

After half an hour Uncle Huy said, “What about the food?”

“I’m going,” his wife said, and they all three got up from the floor.

Uncle took him around by the paths and introduced his nephew proudly to people Minh had known since childhood. Everyone asked why he wasn’t in uniform today, the anniversary of his aunt’s birth. At the home of Huy’s youngest brother the women left them alone while several male relations gathered to greet the returning pilot. This brother, Tuan, though called Minh’s uncle, was not Minh’s blood. Tuan seemed to have changed. Nothing about him was right. Maybe he’d suffered a stroke. On his right side he looked melted—eyelid, shoulder, his right leg seemed to cave at the knee. His left eye seemed propped wide open. Maybe he’d been wounded. The VC, according to the Americans, operated all over the Mekong ever since the Tet push, though Minh wasn’t so sure. Perhaps his Uncle Tuan was VC. Minh didn’t mention his disability. No one did. The men smoked cigarettes and drank tea from demitasse cups. When one of the men asked Minh about his aunt and uncle in Saigon, Uncle Huy interrupted Minh’s polite description of their happiness: “He rents me a house without land. I have to rent land from old Sang. Sang gets forty percent of my crop. And Hao thinks he suffers.”

They went back to the house, and Minh lay down for a nap in the bed of his childhood.

He woke up confused. Somewhere a descendant of the roosters of his childhood yodeled like a strangled infant, and for a second he thought it was dawn. The voices of children laughed and called. The family had arrived—it must be late afternoon. The room, tin-roofed, of rough boards, was more window than wall, and he swept the bed net aside and sat up to see, meters away, the monuments covering two of his great-uncles. In this bed he’d slept with his little brother. The sheets smelled new and clean but they covered the same bedding and its musty tang of old perspiration and feathers, and overhead was the same baking galvanize under which he and Thu had come to live when their mother had died, in the family that wasn’t their family. To be outsiders had made them close as only children are close, without any sense that time could shake them loose from one another.

At 5:00 p.m. Minh’s Uncle Huy called the family together in the front room.

They waited while he lit candles at the shrine out front of the house, moving among his avocados and kumquats, past the neighbors’ pants and blouses and T-shirts drying on colorful plastic coat hangers on the chain-link fence. He offered his obeisance, came into the front room greeting no one, and went through the house to stand out back before the grave monuments, and afterward came back in and placed two pillows on the floor at the head of the parlor. He crossed his legs and lowered himself to sit straight-backed before them all. The others, the children, the aunts, the cousins, the family of which he was the head, sat against the walls, the littlest ones just beyond the bounds of the room, circling the two porch pillars with their backs against them, like prisoners tied to trees. The family listened without a word. It was Minh whom he addressed. “My sister and my sister’s husband have always been unfair to this family,” he said. “You, also, are unfair to this family. Your father went to high school while I plowed and harvested. When he died they called it a sickness that he got from visiting the mountains, but I believe it was a direct blow from the spirit of our father, who died of his labors rather than give up the rice paddies where his son, my brother, your father, should have worked instead of going to high school. My sister married your Uncle Hao, a businessman, in order to give her sons a life in the city and an education in the schools and make them ready to prosper. Her husband, Hao, had no use for this house. His father left it to him. My sister’s husband, Hao, never lived here. He visited as a child, and then he stopped coming when his grandparents died. Then this house was empty. Then Hao’s father died. My sister’s husband, Hao, is the last of that family. He had no sons to prosper after him. He has no family anymore. He calls us family, but treats us like horses and buffalo. The people you see here in this room looked after this house for my sister’s husband, Hao. This house would have crumbled and washed away in the monsoons, the vines would have broken the walls, nothing would be standing now if not for our labors every day. Do you see the pads on my hands? Do you see my wife’s crooked back? Did you see my wife brushing the dust from the walls this morning after she walked to the paddies and back? Did you see her cooking you a wonderful meal to share with all of us? Do you see the table laid out? Can you smell the delicious soup? Look at the chicken, the dog, the fruit, and smell the steam from the rice—do you see the sweat on her face from the steam? Everyone you see in this room works every day like that so the rest of you can live in the city. We do not pay rent. That is our arrangement with my sister’s husband, Hao. My sister’s husband told us our care for the house paid the rent. We’ve all worked more than we should have. Instead of working like horses and buffalo we should have paid rent and let the building fall to pieces around us. I am planning to set fire to this building. I will burn this building down. This man Hao sends you to tell me I have to buy my own house, and you come without any honor or love for your family to give me his message. This is a time of wars. We have nothing to count on but our family. You are a person without love, without honor, the son of a thief who robbed me of my chance at education and the lackey of a thief who robs this family of our home. Everyone here will die when I burn this building that is not a home because he steals it. Your aunt made you a wonderful meal. Eat a meal under this roof and then go back to the city and tell the man my sister married that he has no family except his wife because this building is ashes, and every one of us is dead.”

His uncle uncrossed his ankles and rose to his feet, his hands folded before him.

Minh said, “Thank you, Uncle.”

Uncle Huy clapped his hands together and proceeded to the table and picked up a china plate from the stack. The others followed him in silence, filling their plates or bowls from the massed fruit, the steaming rice and the soup, the shreds of dog and chicken.

Some of the children were too small to have understood the speech. They ate fast, left their bowls on the floor, ran in and out of the yard laughing, returned for more food. Older children began to play too. The adults talked of other things, first out of graciousness and embarrassment, then with true interest, finally with a certain enthusiasm. The young women sang songs. His uncle suggested to Minh that perhaps he could tell Hao the house and it occupants had been destroyed by an American bomb. Minh thanked him once more.

When he woke the next morning, his uncle had already gone to the paddies. Minh had coffee with his aunt and some cousins, one by one embraced them all, and set out along the path beside the canal toward the road to the city, where he’d have to explain to his Uncle Hao that getting money out of Uncle Huy looked like more trouble than it was worth.

S
kip on his knees at an open footlocker, lifting out the troughs of card files—a musk of paper and glue, slight nausea, anger, those many months with these odors in his mouth, all of it a waste—and found the
T
’s and flicked through the cards by their edges and plucked out three entries in his uncle’s block printing:

Six weeks now in the Villa Bouquet since the colonel’s death, a state of disarray and pointless aftermath, a new flavor to his imprisonment. Hao came once a week with magazines and cards of sympathy for the death of Beatrice Sands. No movement from RSC, or whoever Crodelle worked for, as to the question of Skip’s participation in a doubtful scheme. Surely with the principal schemer dead and gone, some sort of pardon approached. He waited for Hao to bring a summons. No word from anyone in power.

Sands thought it fitting, in the meantime, that he compile notes for some sort of biography for the Agency’s
Studies in Intelligence
organ, something more extensive, more deeply illuminating of Colonel Francis Xavier Sands than the single-paragraph death notice in
Newsweek
’s “Milestones” ten days ago. He sat at the desk in the upper room occupied lately by the colonel’s double agent Trung and opened a notebook to a blank, lined page. What did he know that
Newsweek
didn’t? Bits from here and there. His Aunt Grace, who’d married into the family, said they were Shaughnesseys out of the County Limerick, and why his great-grandfather Charles Shaughnessey had elected himself a Sands, and whether, actually, he’d even been a Charles, had never come to light. Charles had arrived in Boston on an American ship, because everyone did, Aunt Grace had explained, because planes, she informed young Skip, weren’t invented then; maybe the new immigrant had come ashore with the crew and presented himself as an American citizen, borrowing the name of the captain. He’d worked on the docks, married as soon as he could, fathered two children, a girl and a boy, and died in his thirties having seen no more of the country than Boston Harbor. Fergus, his son, Skip’s granddad, had worked harder than Charles, made more children—Raymond, Francis, and William, and then two girls, Molly and Louise—and lived longer, into his fifties. The three boys had all attended the St. Mary’s grade school, and here the family’s history, as Grace retailed it, had become mainly the history of Francis, the middle brother. Francis had been expelled for unnamable mischief and banished for a couple of years to a public school also unnamable, then returned for high school to St. Mary’s, where he played line positions on the football team, behaved honestly, studied hard, and gained admission to Notre Dame. By his plunge and redemption Francis had rendered himself a bold figure, the one to watch, the one to follow, the one who fell on his face and got up and headed for Notre Dame.

The colonel’s own reminiscences weren’t histories, but merely anecdotes. They didn’t constitute a biography. He’d entered Notre Dame, if Skip remembered correctly, in 1930 or ’31. Again good grades, a freshman tackle for Notre Dame during Knute Rockne’s final year as its football coach. Of Rockne he hadn’t told much, and Skip had gathered the famous coach had paid no attention to the freshman squad. Francis had moved to the first squad halfway through his sophomore year. He’d graduated high in his class, having done nothing, up to this point, to distinguish himself from any number of strong, earnest young men, save in his education, which placed him beyond the obvious choices of his lower-middle-class Boston origins—the docks, the police force—but which he seemed to shed with his graduation gown, striking out after adventures.

Whatever Francis had met with to make him a madman and a hero had found him sometime, Skip concluded, between 1935 and 1937, a period of biographical darkness. Apparently he headed west. Skip had heard mention of freight cars and hobo camps, mention of a rodeo, a Denver whorehouse, a prison term, a brief mysterious marriage—most of this from Skip’s mother Beatrice, none of it from the colonel himself. More than once, however, the colonel had alluded to experiences with aircraft—engine work for barnstormers and crop dusters, work around airfields and hangars, nothing he seemed to think worth elaborating on—and to some association with Chinese laborers in San Francisco during this same period, when Japan was making war on their homeland. Whether some person among the fliers or some event involving the Chinese had caught him by the head and pointed him toward the rest of his life Skip simply didn’t know; at the end of 1937, however, young Francis, now about twenty-six years old, had returned to Boston, found work at the docks, and enrolled at the City College for night courses designed to assist in passing the army air force’s aviation cadet exam. He entered the army, trained in Tennessee on Stearman biplanes and in Mississippi and later Florida on low-wing Vultee Valiants, and by 1939, with a rank of captain, was flying P-40 Warhawk fighters and training, when he might have slept, for larger aircraft, including bombers.

In 1938 he married Bridghed McCarthy, a childhood friend. By 1940 he had a daughter, Anne, and a son was on the way—Francis Junior, who drowned in the summer of 1953 while sailing in a race from Boston Harbor to Nantucket. Not once had Skip heard his uncle mention the tragedy.

Early in 1941 Captain Sands resigned from the military under an arrangement among the Chinese, the U.S. government, and the paramilitary Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company to fly, along with nearly a hundred other American pilots, as a mercenary for the Republic of China Air Force in Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, with a mission to protect the Burma Road supplying Chinese troops. Each American volunteer was promised eventual reentry into the military at his former rank and paid $600 a month in salary and $500 for each Japanese plane he shot down. Here the captain flew his P-40 on over a hundred missions, and earned his share of the bounty. However, in December 1941—days after the death of his own brother at Pearl Harbor—having offered to replace a comrade down with malaria as pilot of a modified DC-3 on a parachute run of British commandos, among them Anders Pitchfork, the captain had been surprised on the return trip by fire from a rare Japanese antiaircraft battery and had crashed in the paddies, but not, he claimed, until the second wing had been shot off. Despite help from the locals, he’d been captured by the Japanese and forced—along with Pitchfork, also captured, and sixty-one thousand other prisoners—into labor on the Siam-Burma railroad: sickness, beatings, torture, starvation. Once he’d been given an egg. Inexplicably placed on a ship out of Bangkok for transfer, perhaps to Luzon, possibly to Japan itself, the captain had escaped overboard off the coast of Mindanao by a terrible ruse. A fellow prisoner had gone mad during their confinement in a nearly airless hold belowdecks, and their captors had promised to shut the hatch and suffocate them all if his cries didn’t cease. Captain Sands, chosen among them by lot, had strangled the man to death. Escape was forbidden; those left behind would be punished; but the captain, having soiled his soul in aid of the others, demanded the right to make an attempt by having himself handed up through the hatch along with his victim’s corpse. If the Japanese threw him overboard for dead, as he hoped, his escape would go undetected. The ruse worked. Though weakened by a year’s mistreatment and hard labor he swam for miles, subsisted for weeks in the jungle, and lived for two years in a series of island villages in the Sulu Sea before managing to get space on a freighter that took him to Australia. Immediately he rejoined the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned to Burma for secret aerial missions, often with British commando units. He earned impressive citations, rose rapidly in rank, and came out of the war a colonel,
the
colonel, the iron figure that had broken the hammers.