What the River Keeps

Mak left when the rice was still green. I remember because I stood at the edge of the paddy with one hand on the curve of my belly, and the stalks reached my knees. The men who came to take him would not look at me. Their eyes were on the canal, the clouds, and the dog asleep in the shade beneath our house. They looked at anything except a woman who was about to lose her husband to a war in the north that none of us could have found on a map.

"Come home before the harvest," I said.

He laughed the way he always did, with his whole chest, as if laughing were honest work. "Before the harvest. Before the baby. Before you finish scolding me for going."

That was the last promise he made me while I was alive. I have had more than a hundred years to turn it over in my hands and still believe he meant every word.

The months after he left were long and wet. I poled the little boat to market alone. I mended the roof alone, badly. At night I lay on the mat and talked to the child inside me, telling it about its father, how he could not sing but sang anyway, how he once carried me across the flooded path so my sarong would stay clean and then dropped me in the water on purpose. The child kicked when I laughed. I took that to mean it agreed with me that its father was a fool, and a good one.

The pains came early, in the middle of the night, with rain on the thatch. The midwife arrived with her lamp, herbs, and her calm, practiced hands. For a while, her composure was enough for both of us. Then, I remember her face changing. The women in the doorway began to whisper, then immediately pray. I remember thinking very clearly, the way you think when a boat is tipping, and there is nothing left to grab: My husband is not here. He does not know.

There is a moment I cannot describe properly, even now. It was not like sleep. I felt as if the floor of the world gave way and I fell through it, keeping the shape of myself all the way down. I heard the midwife say my name once, softly, the way you say a name to someone who has already gone into another room.

They buried me beneath the big tree at the edge of the temple grounds, with my son. They did not burn us. A woman who dies with her child is too heavy with unfinished things; everyone knows this and is afraid. I know because I watched them do it. I stood among the roots in my wet sarong, holding a baby who did not cry, and watched my neighbors shovel earth over a mat-wrapped bundle as quickly as their arms would allow. Not one of them saw me. Or perhaps they did, and that is why they hurried.

I went home. Where else would I go?

The house was as I had left it. The water jar. The betel tray. Mak's second shirt folded on the shelf, waiting for his shoulders. I lit the lamp. sat by the window that looks down the canal, with my son against my breast, and waited. That is the part people always leave out when they tell my story in the markets, with their wide eyes and hushed voices. They talk about the long arm, about the screaming and the dead. They never talk about the waiting. Every evening the light went orange and then purple over the water. I tirelessly watched each boat that came around the bend, none of which was his.

I want you to understand that I did not feel like a monster but like a wife.

Mak came home at the end of the rains. He was thinner, with a scar along his side where a blade had opened him, and he moved stiffly, the way old men move, though he was not yet thirty. He told me later that he had lain for months in a temple in the capital, burning with fever. The monks had nursed him, he said. Every night he had seen my face when he closed his eyes. He poled up to the landing in the blue part of the evening, and I was standing there already, with the baby, because of course I would.

He dropped the pole. He climbed the ladder too fast and nearly fell. Then he had his arms around both of us, and his face was in my hair, and he was saying my name over and over as if he had been afraid it had worn away.

"You're cold," he said at last.

"I've been standing in the wind," I said. "Waiting for you."

He held the baby up to the lamp and stared at him with an expression I had never seen on any man. "He's so quiet," he said.

"He's a good boy," I said. "He takes after me."

That made him laugh. The sound filled the house and went out over the canal in the dark. I have heard many sounds since then. Temple bells. Fishermen's songs. Women in labor in houses up and down this water for generations. None of them has ever sounded the way my husband's laugh did, that night in our own house.

We had some weeks. I will not apologize for them. I cooked for him. I bathed him and rubbed oil into the scar. At night I lay beside him, listened to his heart, and counted the beats the way I used to count the boats. I let myself believe the counting could go on for many years. We sat together on the steps in the evenings, as Mak talked about the war, the mountains, the cold, the men he had seen die. He said the strangest thing about coming home was the quiet. No one in the village came by. No one called out from the boats. When he poled to market, people turned their faces away from him, and the old women made signs with their fingers.

"They're jealous," I told him. "They don't like to see a man so happy."

I knew it was not true. I knew what they were saying, because I could hear them. Death made my ears very sharp. I heard them in their houses at night, deciding who would be brave enough to break the news. When a man was either brave or drunk enough to come near our landing and shout, I made sure he never finished his sentence.

I am neither proud of that nor ashamed the way the storytellers want me to be. Think of what they were trying to take from me and of what I had lost. A tiger will not let you walk into her den and carry off her cubs, and no one calls the creature evil.

The lime is the part everyone knows.

I was pounding chili paste on the kitchen floor, the way I had a thousand times, the mortar between my knees. Mak was dozing on the mat in the other room. I reached for a lime to squeeze over the paste, when it slipped from my fingers and rolled. It dropped through the gap in the floorboards and landed in the dirt beneath the house.

I did not think. That is the honest truth. I did not choose anything. I simply reached for it, the way you reach for a thing that falls, and my arm went down through the gap in the boards, longer and longer, down into the shadow under the house, and my fingers closed around the lime in the dirt, and my arm came back up again.

When I turned, he was watching me through the slats of the wall.

He did not scream. I will always love him for that. His face went gray and still. We looked at each other, and neither of us said anything for a long time. Then he stretched and yawned, saying he needed to go out for air. His voice was almost steady.

"Don't be long," I said. "The food will get cold."

I listened to him go down the ladder slowly. I heard his footsteps cross the yard toward the latrine, easy and unhurried. Before long, I heard them break into a run.

I followed him, of course. Through the paddies with the mud sucking at his feet, through the banana grove, across the little bridge to the temple. I called his name. I begged him. I told him I was his wife, that I had waited and kept the house, that Daeng was his son. He ran into the temple, where the monks gathered around him with their sacred thread and chanting. I stood outside that wall all night and screamed until the dogs of three villages howled with me.

Afterward I did terrible things. I will not list them. The village knows the list by heart.

They brought a sorcerer in the end, a man with tattoos and a high opinion of himself. He placed his bag of charms near me, dug up my bones, caught me in a clay jar, sealed the lid, and threw the jar into the canal. I sank into the brown water for a long time. It was dark and quiet. I could no longer hear Mak breathing anywhere in the world. That was the worst of it.

Some fishermen found the jar and broke it, hoping for gold. They found me instead.

What finally stopped me was not a sorcerer. It was Somdet, the high priest, who had helped heal Mak’s war wounds, all those weeks ago. Somdet came up the canal in a small boat with no fear in him at all. He did not shout at me. He did not curse me or brandish anything. He sat beside my grave in the moonlight and spoke to me the way you speak to a grieving woman, which is what I was. He said that love which cannot let go is not love any longer but a kind of hunger. Anicca (attachment) eats the one who feels it first. He said Mak was alive, but not I. This was not a punishment but simply the way the river runs.

Then he asked whether I would let my husband go.

I asked for one thing: to see Mak one last time. The monk allowed it.

My husband came to me at dawn, at the grave under the big tree. He knelt in the wet leaves, crying. I put my hands on his face, and for once he did not flinch from the cold.

"In the next life," I said, "will you be my husband again?"

"Yes," he said. "In the next life, Nak."

Then the old monk took a small piece of bone from my forehead, from the place just above my eyes where Mak used to kiss me goodnight, and carved it into something he could carry on his belt. It holds me still. It holds what is left of me in this world, quietly, the way a hand holds a sleeping child.

I am not angry anymore. Quite a bit of time had passed.

But some evenings, when the light goes orange and then purple over the water, I still find myself watching the bend in the canal.

Old habits. A wife's habits.