Stephen Evans writes

On the Town Road

The slight figure of a child sobs down the townroad the black hulk of a water buffalo plodding alongside Mother says if she doesn’t sell Henry they’ll starve. Orchid doesn’t care about the other part. The part about getting rich like everytime Mother sells another piece of land there’s money again notlong Orchid is stealing rice again from the neighbors. It’s wrong to doubt Mother. The first time she was glad there were pretty new clothes food sweets. Mother was ecstatic about the Money and played Hi-Lo to make more. Orchid was nine then. Now she is eleven she knowsthestory: It is the curse of bad luck that came upon them when Father died.

A buffalo named Henry content to follow the girl who has led him to graze in the fields and to wallow in the river for -- forever he doesn’t even mind plowing if he is with Orchid. In the bare early morning dirt road through the forest around the monastery full of the spirits of the cremated tree spirits and Others Henry has no fear but even at mid-day Orchid will hurry through muttering protective verses. Now they dawdle along Orchid oblivious beyond the monastery the forest opens out into cleared fields and you can see the town in the distance.
   
“Anyway, Henry, there’s no more land for you to plough.” Orchid trying to sound sensible. “There’s no reason to be so sad.” Henry flicks his ears and smiles. “And Mother says we’ll be rich.” Orchid realizes afresh that we will not include Henry.

“I can’t do this!” whispering stopping in the road “I can’t. Why don’t you run away? Go!” Henry smiles Where are we going today? Will there be sweet grass? Will there be cool mud? He reaches his massive head to nudge Orchid with a nose bigger than her hand she steps back “Why do you trust me, dumb-as-a-buffalo?” shouting now “Go!” and tries to push him away pushing hard on his flank but his huge bulk absorbs her anger and she falls against him sobbing trying to wrap him in her arms.
   
“Not to a butcher!” she whispers. “No. Never to a butcher.” Of course not, dear, Mother said Only get a good price.

“Mother is wrong” it is wrong to say so but Orchid can say anything to Henry. She told him about standing under the stairs to peek up the monks robes when they come to chant at funerals and weddings about her friend’s taunts about stealing rice she has cried hunger and humiliation into his infinite black flank and it all dissolves in his inexhaustible contentment. It all finds its place among grazing lounging in the river plowing. Mother is thin and sharp it’s not her fault.

They started down the townroad before light because Orchid didn’t want anyone to see to know. And it wasn’t so bad then they were not in the town then it was only a road on a morning now was only now then with a sort of evil magic they go forward fifty meters more and the forest gives way and you can see the town. Now is now.

When everything is impossible Orchid tells Henry “I have to go to school” “I have to help Mother” and she can even if it means stealing even if it means being called a little thief.

“I have to help Mother.” Out loud, standing straight.
  
“Good girl.” A massive ancient treetrunk twisted with vines branches hanging over the road a man-figure thinner than thin tall pale black tattered sarong tied up in the old style Orchid screams hides behind Henry peeking under his neck as long as she touches him she feels safe.
 

“But can you sell your only friend?” the voice is gentle and sad the eyes seem to smile in the same way as Henry’s.

Orchid stands up straight “Every good child takes care of its parents” she says proudly “And is obedient.”

“But to whom would you sell Henry? Not to a butcher! But listen!” the sound of a tractor “No one wants buffalo anymore. Soon they’ll all go to the butcher, like Henry. Your mother is wise to sell now. In a few years he won’t be worth two baht.”

Orchid makes no move Henry idly snuffles the stranger.

“Here,” holding out a yellow slip of paper “I will purchase Henry for this. He will be happy with me.”
 

“Cheat!” Orchid shouts coming back to herself “That’s a lottery ticket poverty ticket” that’s what Father used to say Mother brings fistfuls saying, “We’ll be rich” Orchid steals rice from the neighbors.

“No!” the stranger says with shuddering force “It is a winning ticket! Besides, what do you think your mother will do with the money?”

“She’ll kill me.”

“She may beat you today. But tomorrow, when the ticket wins ten million baht...”

Orchid knows not to look into the eyes of a spirit, but the eyes are everywhere and everywhere empty her hand reaches for the ticket then she remembers. “Henry!”

But Henry slips his tether and shakes his head in a gesture of freedom Orchid has never seen. Henry and the man-figure vanishing into the shadows of the forest Orchid in the townroad yellow ticket and empty tether in hand. 

“You what?” Mother screams. Like a leafless old tree with a monkey screeching in the branches.

Holding out the yellow slip “I got a lottery ticket. For Henry.”

“You? Don’t make me laugh. Orchid doesn’t knowthestory,” snatching the ticket, “128576. Stupid. I dreamed of a lion that means 497. The last three’ll be 497. Orchid didn’t even bow to the Buddha first did you. Did you?”

Orchid stands dumb Mother crumples the ticket and tosses it to the floor “Where’s the money? You didn’t spend it all on one lottery ticket!”

She said for Henry didn’t she or did she only think it she cannot think inside this misery pointing blindly at the crumpled ticket Mother’s face changes sarcasm for horror as the truth dawns Orchid flies for the door and down the stairs as Mother reaches for the stick.

After dark Orchid creeps back under the house and lies in the dirt still gripping the empty tether she sleeps. In the morning there is boiled rice with pork she leads Henry out across fields fallow in the dry season toward the river he noses the dry stalks looking for grass Father working early waves from across the way Orchid knowing it’s a dream because Father’s dead.

Middleofthenight aching with reality light leaking through floorboards Orchid peeking through the cracks Mother sits rocking smoothing and crumpling the ticket. In the morning when the lottery is announced over the radio Mother will tear up the ticket and sleep. She whispers to Henry’s tether how stupid she was a thin pale figure haunts her sleeping.

In the truemorning Orchid awakens to Mother’s shouting in her face shaking her she’s sure to get a beating now but Mother is shouting “We won! We won! My pretty little girl we won!”

There really was boiled rice with pork purchased with the very last twenty baht. On the way to town to claim their winnings, Orchid told Mother the whole story excitedly proud of herself Mother praising her remarkable good fortune as they passed by the monastery not feeling the dread of the woods but at the ancient tree Orchid’s heart fell suddenly. Nothing. There was nothing but trees.

“Here” she said pointing.

Mother knelt hands in the prayerful gesture Orchid imitating for the first time feeling awe at what happened.

On the way back from town mother and daughter happy in new store-bought dresses the taxi loaded with gifts for the monks. When you give to the monks you make Boon. Boon is power it is things going your way it is goodness like Money only more powerful with Money to buy gifts for the monks they would make enough Boon never to be poor again. But first. Hanging flower garlands on the big tree a deeper magic Mother muttering fortune lighting incense a cup of whiskey for the Spirit but as they kneel in the prayerful way Orchid feels Henry’s presence the sudden precipitous fall of his absence a hole in the world sobbing softly.

“Stop it now,” says Mother. “Do you want him to think we’re ungrateful? He might come and take our pretty dresses away.”

“Henry.” The girl says, catching a sob.

“Oh, hell. He was just a filthy old buffalo.”

She carries the hole in the world in her heart following Mother into the Buddha Hall with the purity of her burden curtseys politely but disinterestedly as the monks exclaim over Orchid’s pretty new dress. Spontaneously she kneels before the golden Buddha gazing into the smile her heart eased by the third bow the eyes seem to sparkle that all is well. As the monks chant over the gifts the Boon which wafts freely about the Buddha hall gathers into a powerful buoyant force flowing from the mouths of the monks into the simplicity of Orchid’s heart, lifting her into the pure joy of the present moment. But for big gifts the monks chant long and the girlchild dozes and awakens suddenly into a trueworld shrieking of loss far from these mouthing figures.

The Boon is good and notlong there is a car Mother hires men in the village to drive them. Almost every day they make Boon gifts for the monks and leave flowers and whiskey at the tree even in the dry season Orchid finds sweet new grass an offering to leave for Henry.

One old monk is particularly friendly Father Wiset asks eagerly about Orchid’s Good Fortune Spirit. Mother says he knows about spirits casting them out and calling them up she says asking so many questions shows he does not understand this one. Orchid enjoys his attention, his praise when she tells him about dreams the Spirit hovering at the end of a familiar road waiting. She dreams sometimes too that she is in the fields with Henry Father in the distance and awakens aching to go back and the old monk listens and smiles. Father Wiset tells her to leave grass for Henry.

“But you leave gifts like that for ghosts.” Orchid cannot say out loud for the dead.

“No. Henry did not die.” 

“Then he is still alive!” A sudden anxious pained hope. 

“No,” says Father Wiset gently. “He is just gone. But Father Wiset is sure that it will make him happy to leave grass.”

Orchid and Mother move into a pretty little house like the pictures in shiny magazines with screens on the windows and doors that lock. The old house like most houses is just a rough room ten feet up on stilts the new house has a real ground floor, a closed in tiled room with a kitchen in the back. Uncle Ned shows them how to use the gas stove you mustn’t build a fire in a Modern kitchen he says laughing for some reason when the fire runs out you wheel the tank over to Uncle Ned’s big barn where his boys recharge it. Sleeping in a bed behind screens cooking and eating inside, the insect bites and dirt of Orchid’s eleven years fade like the harsh heat of the sun fades at dusk. Skin softens with Mother’s creams and glows to match the soft cleanliness of their new dresses. 

Relaxing into the certainty of the next meal.

Mother orders from catalogs in town and as the little tables and sofa arrive the room on the ground becomes more and more like the French sitting room in the photograph Mother tore from a magazine and taped to the wall. Orchid twirls about the room as in a magic palace and loves to make the tile floor shine, the wood furniture glow. Mother gives tea parties the village wives exclaim their admiration and gulp tea with betel stained lips. The photograph remains taped to the wall by the front door.

One of the upstairs rooms they make into a shrine room a golden Buddha sitting, as big as Orchid Ganesh elephanthead roundbelly beautiful white faced Mother Kwan Yin. Mother even makes a shrine to the Spirit with a yantra a magic design from Father Wiset squares curlicues strange letters. Orchid makes a little shrine for Henry, a table she begged Mother to buy with the old tether arranged on top. They light incense and candles everyday for each image. Mother fills a cup of whiskey and lights a cigar for the Spirit Orchid places bunches of fresh sweet grass before the tether. They do not neglect to make offerings at the big tree by the townroad it is only there that Orchid feels Henry’s presence a mute and musty upwelling of life mingled with a presence that belongs to the Spirit a dread that is not hostile an icy feeling that is also earthy and warm. When she tells Father Wiset she misses Henry he makes a yantra that she pastes on the east wall of her room. Henry comes into her dreams they plow new green fields in gentle rain and play old games a warrior princess and her faithful elephant steed Father watching in the distance. The aching to go back to stay in the dream is so strong that Father Wiset makes a yantra of forgetting that Mother pastes on the west wall of Orchid’s room so that Orchid may move more easily between the worlds of dreams and of waking.

The best part their of new life is going to the movies. Orchid runs out to find someone to drive the car who has to wait while they make themselves pretty. “My brother would make a good husband for you,” the driver sometimes says as they bounce over the dirt road. Or, “I’ve got a fine piece of land for sale.” But Mother gaily refuses and if the driver is ever alone with Orchid he might say, “What’ll she do when the Money’s gone?” But all is forgotten in the magic plush seats Marilyn Monroe large on the screen as her breasts or Audrey Hepburn mouths moving strangely to the words sometimes they sit through the movie twice just to see that it is the same. Afterwards they go to the department store labyrinths of clothing racks lace blouses pink skirts petticoats three way mirrors every color of lipstick creams to make your skin white the fat saleslady with pins in her hair all smiles and curtseys (not like that first time are you buying something severely Mother still earthlined caressing silk skirts lacy lingerie the girl looking down ashamed at her own dirty toes and torn trousers Mother’s coarse sarong). Laughing and playacting together they dress themselves like the people in the movie glamorous for the rest of the day.

Sitting by the window of her room Orchid delighted by occasional sprays of water through the screen the sky hurling barrages of water at the earth through the roar Mother’s screams screech like a monkey in a tree Orchid runs to the head of the stairs. “I’ve been calling you!” The sitting room is under a foot of water. Afterwards the water stained, mildewed furniture shoved against the walls there are Hi-Lo parties the village ladies chewing betel and sitting in circles on the floor, throwing down dice and cash. Orchid more and more goes to the monastery alone a princess in the back seat of the chauffeured car, seeking the warmth of Father Wiset’s attention now as much as the Boon.

Kneeling in a new dress placing the grass and whiskey gazing sadly past the tree though she cried at first and thought she would promised herself she would cry every time she wonders now what it was like to cry. Bits of sunlight fall among the drifting leaves in the forest she seems to sense a sudden movement a rustling a snapped twig heart throbbing with a sudden rush of dread she sees the figure of the Spirit deep in the shifting shadows of the forest suddenly oddly convicted by the harsh reality of her former life and the depth of the change the feel and the smell of the tether images of the night after selling Henry and before vistas of open fields riding tall on Henry’s shoulder. The sonorous cry of a buffalo. “Henry!” she cries leaping to her feet, it’s just a farmer in the townroad his buffalo pulling a wagon complaining. The spell broken the girlchild goes shaking with feelings too strong to name into the monastery with her gifts. The chanting of the monks has become monotonous but today she looks forward to it and to the attentions of Father Wiset she will tell him about this vision and the pain and fear will go away.

Approaching the Buddha Hall the soles of her feet eager for the cool marble they are chanting already someone must have brought gifts already but then she recognizes the death chant:

Kusaladhamma akusaladhamma...

Orchid knows the meaning

there are good things and bad things

happy things and sad things

all suffering

all impermanent

all without self

Father Wiset died the night before. 

Orchid kneels in the light of the great golden Buddha’s eternal smile inside the litany of all that exists all suffering impermanent without self the sound of the litany like a temple in which there is no place for ghosts or for the multitude of damp earthy feelings loss sorrow dread for seven days Orchid returns kneeling wide-eyed inside that litany and every day the abbot speaks a little about Father Wiset always “Since there is no thing that lives there is no thing that dies. Go therefore beyond suffering.”
  
Beyond suffering. 

Orchid at the Monastery every day making Boon and morning and evening at home in the shrine room flowers and incense before the Buddha the glow of the Buddha’s golden smile the purity of the chanting fills her days and months. When she is thirteen Orchid with a few other girls spend a week at the monastery in white robes the sweetness of cooking and cleaning for the monks of listening to the precious teachings of the Buddha. A pretty young monk teaches them to meditate Orchid continues at home sitting every day like the Buddha watching her breath, settling into the lucid purity of a stillness beyond suffering.

“The money ran out after three years,” Orchid said, telling her story. “Mother sold the car to Uncle Ned and mortgaged the house. Orchid had to work. There wasn’t time for school with running around to different houses doing laundry and cleaning. Doesn’t matter. It was making money for Mother and that made me happy. Uncle Ned fondled me.” She demonstrated, caressing her own breasts, “Like this. They were just tiny then.” Orchid giggled. The man tilted his head slightly, checking the recorder. “He couldn’t do more because his wife was always around and he gave me money to keep quiet. The best thing was Orchid could demand more money and he had to give it. That way there was more for Mother. It was good to make her smile.”

“How did you wind up in Bangkok?” The man asked, he was an American writer looking for a good story that hadn’t already been done to death. As long as he had been here, he still found the Thai habit of referring to themselves in the third person a bit disconcerting.

“Oh. Well. You see, Orchid saw the Spirit one more time. Mother had Hi-Lo parties in the house. Orchid played too. You know how it is -- you’re sure you are going to win, and you usually lose, but you’ve touched something. Something real.”

“Like you touched fate...” He said. She shrugged.

“Anyway, we heard a high-stakes dealer was coming to the village. Everybody was trying to come up with enough cash to play. Uncle Ned loaned people money. Some people mortgaged land. Mother was desperate. She was sure that this was our chance and I thought so too. I prayed to the Buddha and Mother offered extra whiskey to the Spirit. We even scraped together something for the monks and walked down to the monastery. To make Boon. I asked Uncle Ned but he said for that kind of money I could say he raped me. What are servants for anyway?

“In the end, Mother made some kind of deal and he loaned her the cash.

“I was outside doing laundry at the edge of the village when I saw the slim figure of the dealer on the townroad dressed all in black a case slung over his shoulder. Orchid’s heart fell all of it, the dealer was the Spirit that took Henry. It was just like my dreams, at the end of the road, that same odd feeling of fear and sadness. He wasn’t wearing a sarong like before; he was wearing modern clothes. Black silk. Tailored, expensive. Orchid squatted there with the wash. I couldn’t move. When he got close enough he looked right at me and it made me think of Henry. It felt like looking into Henry’s eyes and suddenly I missed him again, like at first. Then something changed and the eyes were empty. I jumped up and ran as fast as I could for home.

“Mother said we were sure to win. I went upstairs and lit incense for the Buddha and filled the Spirit’s cup with fresh whisky. Then went out and found grass, sweet new grass and put it in front of Henry’s tether. I hadn’t done that for a long time.”

“Why not?” the man asked, thinking these people and their damn superstitions.

Orchid shrugged. “I guess with all the meditation and chanting, I just kind of forgot. It was sweet. People say it’s too hard to meditate and chant all the time but it’s sweet and you don’t think about anything. After a while you don’t even dream anymore. So everything is for the Buddha...”

“So the dealer came to town?”

“Oh. Yes. The dealer came straight to our house and set up the Hi-Lo board in the center of the room. Mother offered him a glass of whiskey making the prayerful gesture bowing like he was a high monk. He said don’t do that it’s bad for business. But he drank the whiskey and asked for something to eat. All the time there was this strange feeling that made you a little afraid. While I fried rice in the kitchen other people came in -- some with money to play; more to watch.

“There were only about ten people with enough money and some dropped out after a couple of rounds before they even ran low. You know how it works? The dealer shakes the dice in a bowl, then slaps it down, over the dice. People put their money on the number they want then the dealer lifts the bowl to see who won. If nobody had the right number the dealer gets it all. It’s really more complicated...

“The bowl went down again and again the piles of money grew and shrank. Uncle Ned tended to win. And Mother too. The dealer kept losing but he seemed to have an endless supply of money and the pot kept getting richer. They played for hours. The ones who dropped out early said that there was something creepy. Mother had me keep the dealer’s whiskey glass full but no one thought about stopping for food. Finally the luck shifted and the dealer started winning and players started going bust. By nightfall it was just Uncle Ned and Mother. Then just Mother. Uncle Ned quit while he was ahead. He’s smart with money. Nobody went home; the house was packed, people were even standing in the yard. Mother had a fair pile of cash, I think couple hundred thousand, we all thought it was a million. But she was playing for everything. As the dice and the money were slapped down Mother’s pile dwindled. I knew Mother. She was getting frantic. Finally she called a break and went upstairs. She came back down with incense and a fresh whiskey bottle. ‘Faith,’ she whispered to me and went back to the board, kneeling on the floor opposite the dealer. She filled his whiskey glass and lit the incense. Then she bowed to him, three times. People laughed. Like she was cracked. But the dealer smiled peacefully. 

“He drank the whiskey down in a gulp, shook the bowl and slapped it down. At the same time, Mother took one bill and, eyes closed, slapped it down on the board. 4. She put her hand over the bowl. ‘Everything.’ she whispered. I’m sure she still had five or ten thousand, but the dealer nodded, ‘Yes, it is time.’ Then loudly, Mother said again, ‘Everything.’ She held the bowl down for a moment. Reciting incantations.”

Orchid closed her eyes and stopped talking. “And?” The man said eagerly. “What was it?”

“3, 5, 6.” She stopped again, staring vacantly. “Mother just sat there rigid like, eyes wide open. The dealer gathered up the money, folded the board and went out without saying a word. We were all stunned. I pushed through the crowd and caught up with him on the townroad. He heard me coming because he turned to face me. Those same empty eyes.” Orchid shuddered. “He said: ‘I always win. In the end.’ Like that. Slow and sad. He turned again and he was suddenly down at the end of the road.

“Coming back somebody came running. They told me,” she stopped again. Struggling. “They said that Mother is dead.” The man saw tears streaming down her cheeks as she made the prayerful gesture toward a little shrine, a ledge high on the wall: a Buddha image, an old photograph, fresh flowers.

“Orchid is so sorry,” she said forcing a smile.

----------------

Uncle Ned takes Orchid in you’re mine now his wife ships her off to Bangkok to keep house for a relative on the road to now neither hoping nor despairing down the road to now. Now drying her eyes making the prayerful gesture towards the little shrine high on the dirty wall the room windowless barely wider than the bed ceiling fan busily blowing back the heat. She pushes the man down with the lighthearted laughter of infinite sorrow infinite resignation.

Lying back for the non-descript woman thirty years old she says undoing his pants he looks down momentarily ashamed of those flabby legs gazes up at the little shrine the Buddha the photograph hanging over the edge he can see now a piece of rope among the flowers a bundle of fresh green grass. Despairing of finding a good story that hadn’t been done to death he gives himself over to Orchid and her rites of guilty redemption.

Stephen Evans writes

TRUE WORD

Part I

“Hello, Ben.”

Father Boon looked up from the earth he was hoeing, shocked by the now strange form of address, the once-familiar voice. He smiled automatically, as one does upon encountering an old friend, feeling simultaneously a surge of anger. A virtuoso of the mind, he at once recognized the anger, and, recognizing it, dissolved it. Almost instantaneously he had composed himself in the attitude of equanimity.

“Hello, Jane.” He said easily, calmly. “What a surprise. How are you?” It was odd, even a bit disturbing, how easily the English fell from his lips.

“You weren’t easy to find.” She brushed a leaf from her arm. Her hands were slender, almost bony, the flesh stretched too thin over long fingers, perpetually tensed for action. Jane had been one of his students in the States. Unmarried and childless she was an attractive, well-formed woman of fifty or so. Her cropped pale-blond hair framed an intense face, thin lips perpetually pursed, a permanent line between her brows, wide, piercing blue eyes. She was deliberate and earnest in everything. Earnest in her meditation. Deliberate in her career. Deliberate in her natural beauty, her refusal to wear makeup, her simplicity. She stood before Father Boon now, deliberately herself in expensive hiking boots, pressed blue jeans and khaki blouse hanging loose, yet revealing the curves of her body. “You have no idea how many monasteries I’ve been to. I’d almost think that you were hiding out.”

But of course he was. Why else had he moved, world to world, back to his native Thailand after so many years in America? Why else had he taken residence in this forest monastery in his home province, deep in the Northeast? Without Internet. Without even phone service. A tiny garden, a tiny hut on stilts, lost among tangles of vines as thick as arms, in the still, leafy twilight among the trees.
--
“Something is wrong,” he had said to the meditation group gathered at the monastery for Thursday evening meditation, seated in a semi-circle before Father Boon, a giant golden Buddha looming over them, glowing in the failing light. “Just not right.” It was already mid-winter and snow was sifting down outside the windows. He shivered slightly in the chill.

“What is it?” One of the men had asked.

Why had he said anything? he thought in agony. He suddenly had no idea why he was here, here in America, wearing monk’s robes, who these people were, sitting before him, looking up to him expecting everything from him. Thirty plus years, and suddenly he had no idea. They would be thinking that he wanted to adjust the meditation schedule. Or that there was some trouble in the monastery. Something objective. A vague unease had come over him (How long ago? Months? Years?) and grown into a heaviness that finally oppressed him with a perpetual feeling of disgust, like nausea, like decomposition.

“What is it Ben? Are you ill?” Jane had asked.

“Oh, no. Nothing like that.” He said, but flatly. Not ill in body, which was what she meant, but ill in himself, what a Christian would call soul-sickness: he himself was not right. But how could he say that to these faithful few who admired him, emulated him, followed him? His every word had always been geared to the culture of the mind, straining always to discover what a student needed to hear at any moment. He had earned some small fame as a meditation master, and it was whispered, though he was pleased to deny it, that he was fully enlightened. Some of the ten or so meditators sitting before him had been with him for years. Jane had moved halfway across the country to have his guidance always at hand. And the rest, more newly come to the Path, hungry for instruction and guidance—he could not disappoint them. He could not allow his private unease to interfere with their meditation practice, to endanger their faith.

“I’m tired,” he said at last. And he was tired. Perhaps that’s all it was, exhaustion after a lifetime of teaching in a language not his own, and of guiding these brash, opinionated Americans along a Path that they persisted, insistently, in misunderstanding, reduced finally to teaching bare meditation techniques with the faint hope that they would thus come to understand for themselves and in spite of themselves. He was tired; but the word felt like a lie on his tongue and the sense of oppression enveloped him, so that he felt insulated, separated by a palpably thick distance from these sudden strangers gathered about him and hanging on his every word.

“I’m tired,” he repeated nevertheless. “I think it’s time for me to go home.”

Maybe it’s just the season, he mused after they had gone; he had never grown accustomed to the winter, the unnatural cold, the beautifully sinister snow, now blowing thick outside the window. But the idea grew over the following weeks. They begged him not to go. They felt abandoned. Betrayed. But the more they begged him to stay the more he needed to go, until he felt it as a kind of panic. “I’m old,” he said in the early spring sitting in the Buddha Hall on another Thursday evening, surrounded by his closest followers. “Even the Buddha, when he was old, left the cities for a backwards, backwoods town and died there. You don’t need me anymore.” He smiled. “You are all well advanced in meditation and in understanding. Every one of you is capable of teaching others. Carry on!” He didn’t like comparing himself to the Buddha like that, but it placated them. In a week he was on a plane back to Thailand.  The disgust, the nausea, remained in America.
--
Now, here he was, a year later, hoeing his garden. Doing so violated at least two of the ancient rules: digging in the earth and cutting plants. Some rules, however, are taken more seriously than others, and, he had realized with something of a shock, he simply didn’t care. The other monks, intimidated by his international stature, left him to his devices.

He had worried that life in a rural monastery would become monotonous, but he found it comforting. Chanting at sunrise and sunset. Sweeping his hut and feeding the birds. Working in his little garden. Early-morning, the women walked up from the village bringing the daily meal, which was duly offered, Father Boon and the other monks chanting the power of the offering, the boon, the goodness, back to the women. He socialized little with the other monks, but occupied his hours pouring over Plato, the Sutras, the Upanishads, Heidegger. For too many years, others had looked to him for answers. But he too had questions, and he plunged into the origins of thought; What had become of the world? What had become of himself? Someday he would write an open letter to his former students giving at least partial answers to the questions he had too easily answered before. In short, he was happy. He scarcely thought at all about America, and after only a year, his circle of followers were no more immediate to him than characters from children’s stories heard decades before.

And now, absurdly, Jane, dear earnest Jane, stood before him, a stray scrap of middle-class America displaced in the midst of the Southeast Asian jungle.

The year of freedom collapsed. The feelings of vague disgust that had driven him from the West flooded in upon him again. But his years of meditation served him well. Automatically, mechanically, he recognized those feelings as they arose, and in recognizing them neutralized them, becoming perfectly equanimous in her presence.

Jane had been one of his best students, certainly his most loyal. She had spent some years experimenting, as she called it, with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, but was finally drawn to the straightforward simplicity of the Theravada as Father Boon taught it. She had been with him for 15 years, meditating, teaching, organizing retreats.

“I have not yet arrived,” she said. “I require your wisdom. I demand transmission.”

Father Boon looked down at the lumpy, not very fertile soil and resumed hoeing, working vegetable matter and chicken droppings into the hard red earth. That’s what he wanted to do, and for Jane to vanish. But she did not, and under her eyes even the simple activity of hoeing became performance: a display of indifference or distain, a Zen-like word, an image of Enlightenment.

“It’s time for the meal,” he knocked the dirt off the hoe and leaned it against his hut. “Why don’t you wait in the Hall?” he pointed up the path through the woods. The monastery stood on several acres of the old jungle that used to carpet all of Southeast Asia. It was thick with trees and a chaos of vines, teaming with ancient spirits and the ghosts of the men and women who had been cremated there. Chickens ran wild in the brush along with various rodents. As recently as Father Boon’s childhood, there had been man-eating tigers, but as the great forest was cleared for farmland, retreating behind the walls of the monasteries, the tigers disappeared. There was a snake, or snakes, here large enough to swallow a chicken, or, some said, even a child, in one gulp. Behind Father Boon’s hut there was a small clearing with enough sunlight to barely nourish his rows of basil, cabbage and tomatoes. The trees and vines closed thickly about, allowing him to feel gratefully lost in the great forest.

Father Boon waited for his irritation to dissolve before mounting the steps to his hut, a room on stilts three or four feet off the ground, just big enough for a man to lie down in. It was nothing more than planks nailed to a frame, with a corrugated iron roof and a small window in each wall. High up on one wall was a shelf with a Buddha image amidst spent incense and candles and with a small vase holding a fresh spray of wildflowers. The musty odor of burned-out incense permeated the room.  Several books lay open on the straw sleeping mat, Plato’s Timaeas, a Greek grammar, notebooks filled with Father Boon’s own scrawls. That morning, the books had been alive with challenges, teasing him with elusive meanings. Hoeing the garden, he had struggled with the Demiurge: what exactly did Plato have in mind? He had been eager to continue the wonderful game of ideas and words but now the books lay inanimate on the mat, like a lover who has turned away without moving or ceasing to look at you. I’ve lost my place, he thought.

The Buddha Hall was about 20 meters long, an unpainted wooden structure on stilts high enough to accommodate a cooking area underneath. Every day, the women from the nearby village brought food for the monks. Usually they brought it already prepared, but sometimes they cooked it there, and you could see them through the spaces between the floorboards. A low dais ran along one side of the Hall. A large Buddha, painted gold and surrounded by smaller Buddha-images sat at one end. The walls reached only halfway to the eves and sunlight and breezes drifted easily in and out.

Ten or fifteen women from the village were sitting about on the floor as Father Boon entered, gossiping and arranging steaming bowls on trays. Several folded their hands in the prayerful gesture as he passed and he smiled in return. Jane was sitting against the wall, looking confused, but also proud. She stood, smiled broadly and waved as he entered. He groaned inwardly as he joined the other monks on the dais and bowed three times to the Buddha. The Thais would not approve of Jane’s familiarity. Jane would not approve of the ritual. Even more, she would not approve of the monks sitting higher than the laity, which, since all the laity were women meant: the men sitting higher than the women. “One of my old students,” he remarked to the abbot in explanation.

“Yes, I know.” Was there a snigger in his voice?

A young woman, bending low so as not to be physically higher than the monks, approached him. “Hello, Nok!” he said. “How is your mother?” Chatting with the appropriate kind of familiarity in his own language he nearly forgot Jane.

“I dreamed about Grandfather,” she said. “I want to make boon for him.”

He smiled as he sat up straight and pulled one leg back in the chanting posture. He adjusted his robe slightly. She held her gifts reverently before her face for a few moments, muttering words of affection, then placed them before him: candles, incense, a spray of flowers, an envelope with a small amount of money (another rule violated). Then she placed a bowl of coconut milk and bananas before him. That must have been her grandfather’s favorite sweet. Father Boon smiled gently as he touched the gifts in acceptance, then folded his hands in the prayerful gesture and recited the incantation sending the boon, the goodness, along with the sweet bananas, to the ghost of her grandfather. He loved these little rites, these gifts to the dead, the incantations calling upon the deities and protecting against malevolent spirits, the chants that, whether you understood the words or not, traced the endless rhythms of life. Jane glared, disapproving, from across the room.

The meal was offered, the village women bowing as they placed the bowls before the monks. They sat about gossiping as the monks ate. A group gathered around Jane, chatting gaily as they stroked Jane’s bare arms. She looked terrified. Father Boon chuckled to himself.

“They are so wonderful,” Jane gushed, when everyone else had gone. Father Boon was sitting casually, legs dangling over the edge of the dais, Jane sitting cross-legged on the floor. “If only we could communicate!”

“They were fascinated by the whiteness of your skin,” he said with an ironic grin.

“Oh!”

“They’re jealous.”

“Oh!”

“They want white skin like yours.”

“But isn’t that...?” Jane began. “But they’re so lovely just as they are!”

Father Boon laughed.

Stephen Evans writes

TRUE WORD

Part II

He hoped that the strangeness would frighten her away. But she came every day with the women and by the third day had traded her jeans for a brightly-colored sarong that made her seem large and awkward among the slight women for whom it was designed. In spite of the language barrier, she had managed to hire a room and meals in the village.

She continued to wave and call out, “Good morning, Ben,” when he came into the hall, militantly, it seemed to him, refusing to bow either to the monks or to the Buddha image. She was one of those “rational” Western Buddhists who thought Buddhism was all about self-fulfillment and the rejection of superstition. For several days she did not approach him, but remained sitting in meditation in the Buddha Hall after everyone else had left. Finally, he called her to him, sitting formally on the dais and motioning her to sit below. She came, moving with an air of self-confidence and knowingness that he found irritating.

 “I’ve followed you and your instructions for fifteen years now,” she said at once. “I’ve followed you here. I am prepared. I am ripe for the Word.”

Father Boon hesitated. “The word?”

“The True Word. The Enlightenment Word. I am ready. Give it to me.”

Father Boon squinted. “There is no True Word,” he said, “That’s just Tibetan superstition. You know that. I thought you gave all that up long ago.”

“I know that it is a secret and that is how you keep it. But is it not time for transmission?”

“This isn’t Zen. No one can transmit enlightenment to another. Go and meditate,” he said, repeating words that he had repeated countless times before. “Just sit and observe the rising and falling of existence. Any secrets that there are will reveal themselves to you.” He hated himself for falling back into the role of a teacher and for repeating these old formulas. He felt trapped, but he was not constituted such as to simply order her away.

“That’s not enough anymore,” she retorted. “I’m not a beginner. I demand the full teaching.”

“But dear Jane, I’ve taught you everything I know. There’s nothing more I can say. Nothing.”

She meditated for a moment, then said, “Thank you,” and rose. “Thank you.” Father Boon left her sitting in meditation in the middle of the Hall.

She was impossible to avoid. If he worked in the garden she would appear, demanding the True Word. If he was reading in the meager library she would appear. She was almost always present for the morning meal in the Buddha Hall, after which she would importune him for transmission. In self-defense, he agreed to a daily instruction session.

Every afternoon after a short nap he went to the Buddha Hall, bowed to the Buddha and sat on the dais. Often the smell of incense lingered from morning devotions. He had always found it pleasant to go through the motions of devotion and to sit quietly in the presence of the Buddha. Now, however, he was anxious. What could he say to this woman? Easy as it was to give meditation instructions, appropriately tuned for whatever she was feeling on any given day, he did not want to. He felt compelled. Compelled to come to the Hall, compelled to say something profound, compelled to perform. And however much he dissolved these feelings by observing them and letting them go, the compulsion remained. Gradually he recognized in the sense of compulsion part of the unease he had felt in America.

“What is the secret of Enlightenment?”

“How do birds fly?”

“Aerodynamics.”

“The birds know nothing of aerodynamics. Yet they fly.”

He felt inspired when he came up with this kind of thing, and she seemed inspired as well. But he hated himself for it.

Jane grew visibly more strained, almost frantic at times. “It’s all so charming!” she would say one day. “The little village. The green, so much green. The frogs singing all night.” The next day she might blurt out: “Raw meat! They eat raw meat. Even the children! It’s...it’s, unhealthy. Its wrong! And frogs! And bugs! They eat bugs!” She complained about the old women and their betel nut. “The disgusting stuff dribbles down their chins. And they come up and shout in my face, spewing that awful stuff, and grinning like idiots with their red-stained mouths and rotten teeth!” On any given day she might speak enthusiastically about the people, “So friendly! So open! So respectful!” or burst out in frustration, “Everybody talks at me. Making noises at me and expecting an answer but its just noise! And the slavish bowing and scraping. To each other. To the Buddha statue. To you!” Father Boon tried to explain and told her to meditate on the confusion and frustration, hoping inwardly that the disorientation would drive her away. But she hung on, becoming more and more insistent in demanding transmission of the True Word.

Realization grew gradually. The more she dragged answers out of him, the more he detested his answers. The greater her faith in him, the more he sank into self-doubt. He was not, after all, enlightened. Neither had he pretended to be, but only to be far enough along the Path to lead others to their common goal. But what if that way were wrong? It occurred to him now for the first time, that for all these years he may have been going down the wrong path. But in that case, he had wasted not only his own life, but the lives of others as well, unrecoverable years committed to him, following him—to nowhere. That was too much to entertain. Easier to imagine that the Buddha had been a delusional lunatic or a charlatan, like Jesus. Thoughts and feelings arose; he observed them and they dissolved. Nevertheless, realization grew till he longed to tell one simple truth: “I don’t know.” In that, he knew, would be release. Yet he continued to give her more nonsense, day after day, feeling more and more miserable, waiting for the day that she would pack up and go home.

He dreaded her coming. Often he would hide in his hut at the appointed hour thinking: I’ll never come out. I’ll slit my wrists. I’ll starve myself to death. Usually he dragged himself to the Buddha Hall, arriving late and despondent, half determined to tell her the truth. He could not carry it. “There is no secret,” he might begin, but he always ended with something like an exhortation to find it for herself. Once he went so far as to venture the truth: “I don’t know.” But she insisted on knowing exactly what that meant, and how it contributed to Enlightenment. He ended by telling her that knowing is a barrier to being. That one must not know in order to truly Know. He felt that she had forced it out of him, this nonsense, with her questions, her leading questions. And to some extent she had. But he knew too that it was his own cowardice that allowed him to be forced.

Sometimes he did not go at all. Brash as she was she would stride over to his hut and call to him and he would sit huddled and miserable with the door locked, pretending not to be there.

There came a day when Father Boon was sitting on the floor of his hut, Parmenides and a Greek grammar spread out before him. Whatever is, the sum total of existence, according to Parmenides, is undivided, unchanging, perfect. What did he mean? Parmenides was evidently no fool: what did he mean by this absurdity? But Father Boon could not concentrate. It was nearing the time to meet with Jane and he was growing increasingly anxious. He was not undivided and the rest. For example, before Jane’s arrival, his studies had been aimed at knowledge. Now they were a distraction from Jane. He closed his eyes, observing his anxiety in order to neutralize it. He did not want to teach: teaching made him feel at odds with himself, duplicitous, dishonest. He stood suddenly, stunned by the explicit realization: The feeling that he had fled in America and that had followed him in the person of Jane, was precisely the cloying, hateful feeling of dishonesty. Some people lie easily, as it were with a clear conscience.  Father Boon did not. Whether by virtue or defect, every lie left him with a taste as of vomit on his tongue and a feeling of deathly corruption in his bowels. Why had he not recognized the feeling before? The answer came at once: because he was not lying. He had not lied, indeed, yet his duplicity all those years came clearly before him. The duplicity yesterday, the duplicity he was just now girding himself to repeat. And recognizing the duplicity, he also recognized the lie: It was not that he did not know, but that he did not believe. His faith had fallen away little by little over the years even as he fell willy-nilly into the role of enlightened master. Without his noticing it, his life had become performance, a lie. Anger welled up—anger at himself, anger at Jane, anger at the world. There was no Secret. No Enlightenment. There was nothing. He snatched the Buddha off its shelf and hissed in its face: “Liar!” and flung it to the floor. The flowers and incense followed. “There, now.” He said out loud, standing legs apart in a kind of proud satisfaction. “That’s something: the truth!” And that was the one way forward: the truth. But with this thought he fell back into despair. Telling the truth, this truth, would be faithless to one who had faith in him. It would be to tell Jane that she had wasted the best years of her life and then to abandon her. She was 50 more-or-less, never again to be 30 and full of hope and trust and possibility. To tell the truth, this truth, would be cruel, and he was incapable of cruelty. He sank to the floor in burning paralysis. He sat for some time, unable to think. Unable to move. Longing for death. A knock on the door roused him and instinctively he grabbed the Buddha and placed it back on the shrine, “Yes?” he said in what he tried to make his normal tone. “Your groupie is waiting!” One of the Brothers. The jest was made lightheartedly, but it cut Father Boon to the quick. Yes, that’s what she was.

Father Boon forced himself up the stairs to the Buddha hall, mechanical flesh bearing an empty but infinitely heavy consciousness. Jane was sitting alone in the Hall, cross-legged before the Buddha. She turned quickly as he entered, rose and strode to meet him, eyes flashing with steel-hard determination. He hated her. Her confidence. Her determination. He hated his inability to say so.

“I will wait no longer,” she cried with what was both desperation and demand. In one quick movement she pulled off her blouse and her sarong fell to the floor, leaving her naked before him. “Give it to me!"

Father Boon was shocked. Not the least at the fact that he felt in his loins a stirring of the desires he had renounced so long ago. At 61 that desire was not strong, but the possibilities ran quickly through his mind: He could have sex with her just to make her happy; or to disillusion her so that she would go home; or to make her think she had got the Secret, with the same result. No. More than aroused, he was angry. He had demurred from crushing her fantasies; must she assault his?

“Cover yourself!” he said. “And sit.” He spoke with such force that she instantly pulled her clothes back on and sat before him. “Listen to me! It’s all nonsense. Nonsense! There is no secret. Period. No True Word. Period. No Enlightenment either. I’m sorry dammit, but you’ve wasted precious years of your life for a stupid dream. You think I left America to meditate full time? I left because I couldn’t stand the lies. Because it’s all a scam and a waste of time and I couldn’t keep up the pretense. There is no Enlightenment. There is no Buddha. Nothing. Go home already and try to enjoy what’s left of your life.” He stood over her as she sat looking at the floor. As she raised her face, he could see the conflict of anger, disappointment, and grief. “Go!” he cried, resisting the temptation to answer the conflict on her face with one of his profound teachings. “Get out of this place: there is nothing here for you!”

She rose, white-faced, and went slowly, weaving like a drunk out of the Hall. Father Boon felt good. That’s right! He thought to himself. You don’t own me! That night he fell asleep thinking about his garden, and how he would mulch the new plants, how he would ask the villagers for pig droppings to make compost. Why had he been so easy all those years?

The next afternoon, out of habit, out of a sense of obligation, or perhaps out of a perverse anticipation of Jane’s farewell, he took up his post in the Buddha Hall. She would excoriate. She would blaspheme. Then she would leave. Oh heaven! She would leave.

She came indeed. She came into the Hall slowly, head bowed, and did something she had never done before. She knelt in the midst of the Hall and bowed three times to the Buddha image. Then she turned to Father Boon, remaining on her knees and bowed three times, head touching the floor. “Thank you,” she murmured, kneeling before him, hands in the prayerful gesture before her face. “At last. I was dull, but now it is all clear. At last, I have found the joy of Enlightenment. I have received your transmission. The True Word is now mine as well.”

Stephen Evans writes

Pretty

The light begins to go from the sky, graying further the faded, cracked concrete of the nearly empty street and of the low buildings running along one side. It is the last street in town, and opposite the buildings there are open fields, bare now in the dry season. Across the fields, the sun sinks large and listless toward the horizon. Dust drifts indifferently in the air and a single coconut palm, leaves drab with dust, leans over the street. Folding tables are set up at intervals along the curb. Over each table an incandescent bulb dangles from a wire held precariously aloft by bamboo poles. At the last table two girls sit eating noodle soup. One, just old enough to be pretty, is striking with her bright red tank top, streaks of red hair, bright lipstick and blush on her scrubbed cheeks. The other, younger, with a smudge of dirt on her face, is acutely aware that she is not pretty; even the movie star emblazoned on her T-shirt has faded almost beyond recognition. As the sun falls into the earth it sends out a brief, volcanic flare as long scraps of cloud on the horizon gleam suddenly like sharpened steel. The children’s faces shine in the glow. There seem to be sparks in the air, and the top of the palm tree erupts in flame.

 
The bulb comes on. The proprietress stirs her kettle of broth and watches her tables from the open front of one of the buildings. The girls are, for the moment, her only customers. 

 

“It’s not funny,” the older girl said, sitting up very straight and making a serious face. Melanie, bent over her bowl, noodles dangling from her mouth, looked up into her friend’s face. She enjoyed gazing at Gay’s soft round features, her full red lips, her wide searching eyes. Melanie knew very well that it wasn’t funny, and she had serious business of her own besides. Still, she could not stop giggling.

Slurping up the noodles and trying to look serious and smart like Gay, Melanie said, “The other girls say it’s fun.”
 

“It’s not.”

“Ever?”

“D’you care?”

Melanie shrugged. She had known Gay for two or three years, since Melanie and her mamma took the tiny room in the same ruined apartment house as Gay, but Melanie had never thought to press for details.

“Sometime. When it’s a regular customer you trust, you know it’s a good man, and he bring you presents and talk to you real nice. Then, sometime it’s fun. Alot.”  

Gay leaned forward, looking straight into Melanie’s eyes and smiling a little. “But sometime they don’t want to pay. Sometime they want to hurt you.” 
  
With a slight movement, a stiletto appeared in Gay’s hand; the blade flew open with a clean snap as the handle settled gracefully into her palm. The dusk was deepening and the light from the bulb glinted in the blade as it moved toward Melanie’s throat. “That’s what this is for.” She said, eyes gleaming. Gay glanced quickly about. People were beginning to come into the street, but the other tables were still empty; the proprietress was fussing about her kettle. “It’s a secret.” 

Not long before, they had been playing hopscotch on the broken concrete slab next to the apartment house, two tattered children, content in the androgyny of girlhood. The freedom to play, however, meant that there was no laundry and no laundry meant no money and with every toss of the stone Melanie remembered and forgot again her mother’s desperation, the urgency of her need: Money! With every hop, skip and jump, she remembered and forgot again the desperation of her own plan.

Melanie’s heart fell when Gay turned away. 

“Take me for noodles?” She begged. 

“Sure!” Gay laughed. “Wait’ll I change.” 

Gay will help, Melanie thought as she sat on the stoop. She is beautiful and wise. She’s been all the way to sixth grade and can read and write and add and subtract. Besides she’s older: she’s fourteen-fifteen and she knows things. She’ll know what to do. And she likes me. Melanie looked down at her skinny legs, feeling useless. Mamma said that she was ugly and they’d always be poor. The other girls, the girls who dressed up pretty and went out to make money, those girls said that Melanie was ugly, too. And dumb. But Gay said that Melanie would be prettier than any of them. She would, she said.
  
Melanie may not have fully understood her situation. She knew that when Daddy died they had left the house she had always lived in. She had left school in order to go door to door begging for laundry to lug home and to wash with Mamma. She knew the humiliation of begging the mothers of her former friends, of washing their school uniforms. She knew that there were such things as borrowing and paying back and rent. And she knew that men had come and frightened Mamma. Most of all she knew the desperation in Mamma’s voice: Where we gonna get the money?
  
“Sexeee!” Melanie said when Gay emerged, transformed. Gay posed in her black mini-skirt and red tank top, hands on her hips, breasts thrust forward. She had them, Melanie knew, though she also knew that she stuffed rags in her bra. That was what seemed so funny to her later, slurping noodles at the folding table under the bare light bulb. If she had to undress, wouldn’t the rags fall out?

The stiletto danced, blade flashing, among Gay’s narrow fingers. Melanie stopped giggling. Then, as swiftly as it had appeared, the knife was gone. “It’s a secret!” Gay hissed. Hungry, Melanie had already finished her noodles and asked for another bowl.

They ate silently as the day ended. The street began to fill with people, and the two girls were no longer the only customers. Gay would soon go into the night, leaving Melanie alone and helpless.
  
“I got a secret, too,” said Melanie, pulling a rag from her pants pocket and laying it on the table between them.

“Ooo! I love secrets!”
  
Slowly she unfolded the rag to reveal a gold necklace. “My God!” Gay gasped as the heavy gleaming squares were exposed. Quickly, she covered it again and looked about. “Don’t let nobody see!” Then slowly exposed it again. “My God! Where’d you get this!”

Gay took the bracelet up and hefted it in the cup of her hands. With an affected air, she smelled the metal and tasted it. “It’s real!” She hissed. 

Melanie said nothing. She was immensely pleased with the impression that the necklace was making on her friend.
  
“Where you get it?” Gay repeated.
   
“It’s a secret.”

“Found it in the laundry. Stole it from somebody’s house.”
  
“Huh uh.”
  
“Some man likes little girls.” Something like respect came over Gay’s features. “That’s a gold mine.” 
  
Melanie hated to disappoint her. “No.” She reached for the necklace and held it for a moment. It wasn’t like any of that.
  
“Daddy gave it me.” She said finally.
   
Gay cocked her head. “I never seen your daddy.”
  
“He died. Before we come here. He was in the hospital with TB and he come home ‘cause he wanted to be close to his Melanie. That’s me. Mamma kept sayin’ we got no money. Then Daddy died and we moved here. We used to have a house and I used to go to school and everything.”
  
“But the necklace?”
  
“Daddy called me while Mamma was out. He put it on my neck. Like this.” And Melanie, forgetting to be cautious, held it up to her throat. “He said keep it, don’t tell nobody, even Mamma. He said ‘It’s your future’; he said ‘It’s our secret.’ like that. Between Daddy and me only. And I ain’t told neither. Only now.” She laid the necklace back on the table where she could see it, then picked it up again and clutched it tightly.
  
“Wonder where he got it?”
   
Melanie brightened. “From the princess.”
  
“Huh?” 

“Yeah. He was a soldier and he was in the Capital. And he saw the King and Queen and the palace has a canal all the way ‘round and trees and grass and flowers and soldiers in little houses and you can walk all the way ‘round it but it’s miles and miles. And Daddy got to stand in one of those little houses and guard the palace. And there’s not just one palace either. There’s the red one and the green one and the white one. Daddy always talked about the Capital. There’s movie stars and everybody lives in a beautiful big house and got a pretty car to drive.” 
  
“What about the princess?” said Gay, excited.
   
“I’m getting there. Daddy says she’s beautiful. Tall and thin and long hair night-black and dark deep eyes, and pure white dresses and she used to come and see Daddy in the little house all the time. Daddy was real handsome. She gave it to him to remember.”

Gay’s eyes were shinning, “The princess,” she sighed, and gently pried open Melanie’s hand to touch the prize.

“Know what else? Daddy always say someday he’ll take us to the Capital and we’ll live in a big house next to a movie star and we’ll picnic along the canal around the palace and maybe the princess will come too.

“When he give me this he said I’ll be pretty like that; like the princess.”
  
“Then he died,” Gay whispered.
  
Melanie did not speak. She clutched the necklace till it cut into her palm. As on the day that Daddy died, Mamma’s insistent cries forbade the luxury of grief: We don’t have no money!

“My daddy just went away,” said Gay. “I don’t remember much.”
  
Melanie remembered everything, however, and had to make herself hard before she could say it: “Can you sell it for me?”
   
Gay nodded as though she had already guessed.
  
“I got to help Mamma. She says if we don’t get money she’ll be dead and I’ll be under a bridge begging coins. I got to help Mamma.”
  
Gay took the necklace from Melanie’s hand and wiped it carefully with the rag; then she lifted it reverently and clasped it around her neck. Melanie gasped. It was fully dark now and the incandescent light from the dangling bulb cast Gay’s form in angular contrasts of light and dark, her chin, her lips, her nose sharply drawn in black lines of shadow. Her eyes flashed like the blade of a stiletto. The heavy squares of gold were embers in the earthy fire of her flesh.

“You’re beautiful!”
   
Gay smiled happily, “I am, aren’t I!”

Then she took off the necklace and wrapped it in the rag again. “Looks like it come already.”

“What?” Said Melanie.
   
“The future.”

 Melanie thought about that. They were surrounded by darkness. The table, she noticed for no reason, was green. “Daddy’s a dreamer, Mamma always said.” Melanie was thinking of the banks of the canal around the palace planted with flowers and sweet green grass and cool shade trees; she was hearing Mamma’s cries: How we gonna live? How we gonna get money? She pushed the necklace toward Gay. “Can you get lots of money?”
   
“Alot.” Then, “Twenty percent.”
   
“What’s twunny p’cen?”
  
 “I keep twenty cents out of every dollar. It’s dangerous. They’ll think I stole it. I could get my throat slit.” She quickly scooped up the necklace and dropped it into her clutch. “It’s called,” She hesitated, either for effect or because she had trouble remembering the word, “commission.”
  
“‘Mishun,” repeated Melanie. It was a big word. An important word and she was proud to be a part of it. Daddy would be proud.

“There’ll be enough money to last till you’re pretty.”

As Gay walks, hips swinging, into the darkness, the gratitude, bordering on love, shining on Melanie’s face changes to grief and she begins to sob.