Don't Hang Your Soul on That, page 1
Don’t Hang Your Soul on That
Essential Prose Series 190
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Don’t Hang Your Soul on That
Robert Hilles
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2021930893
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Don’t hang your soul on that / Robert Hilles.
Other titles: Do not hang your soul on that
Names: Hilles, Robert, author.
Series: Essential prose series ; 190.
Description: First edition. | Series statement: Essential prose series ; 190
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210110015 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210110023 | ISBN 9781771836081 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771836098 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771836104 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8565.I48 D66 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.
—RAIN HILLES
If you hang your soul on what is impermanent you will suffer.
—BUDDHA
A commotion in the mind.
—KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
For Rain Hilles who gave me the title and whose stories anchor this and who has shown me love’s clarity.
And for Austin, Breanne, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Kyle, Cathi, Robert, Camille and Ben And for the faculty, students, and staff at Vancouver Island University. And for all my friends in Nanaimo, on Salt Spring Island, and in Thailand.
Prologue
WHEN TUUM IS ten, his father and he are in a serious motorcycle accident and Tuum is in a coma for two weeks. After he comes out of it, he can’t move his arms and legs and his parents take turns feeding him until he regains the use of his arms a month later. He returns home then from the hospital but it’s another two months before he has feeling in his legs.
Then every day, his father carries him on his back to the field across the street from the house. There, Tuum walks behind his father but keeps his arms around his father’s neck for support. Eventually, Tuum is able to walk on his own and, when he turns twelve, he runs and plays as though the accident never happened.
CHAPTER 1
Khon Kaen, Thailand 1970
BY THE TIME she inspects a third papaya, he’s already certain that it’s no coincidence that she’s across the street from him right now. Even from here, he feels an instant connection. This means that they have known each other in a past life. His father has said that: The full influence of karma is only understood through dedicated, daily meditation.
He ignores those words and watches as she hands the papaya to the vendor who wraps it in newspaper and hands it back to her. She lowers it into a wicker basket and then turns slightly away from Tuum to pay. With her back to him, he notices that her skirt nearly touches the ground. She wears flat sandals and her hair is gathered in a single knot at the back.
She lifts the basket with one hand and with the other raises her skirt above her ankles and walks briskly north and doesn’t stop at any of the other vendors.
He pays for his meal and hurries after her, uncertain what he will say when he catches up with her but will come up with something. He works as a teacher so is used to thinking on his feet.
She is too far ahead for him to catch up, so he stops and watches her upright posture and quick steps and wonders if she’s a dancer. She alertly pivots her head from side to side—likely to take in each vendor’s wares. When she reaches the main gate of the market, she vanishes in the crowd.
It’s a Wednesday in mid-June and for the next month he eats lunch in the market every day but doesn’t see her. He wonders if her long absence means that she lives in one of the neighbouring villages.
He twice dreams of her. In the first dream, she hurries past riding an elephant. Any dream with an elephant means good luck. In the other dream, he’s departing the very bus she’s waiting to board. When he wakes from that dream, he tries to remember what bus he was on but can’t.
Then one afternoon he emerges from school after a day of many difficult pupils and pauses halfway down the front steps just as she passes, riding in the back of a samlortiip, or pedicab. She turns and looks in his direction. Her glance is brief but long enough to indicate interest. He hails another pedicab and follows hers and, when his is a few lengths behind hers, he asks his peddler to slow down.
Her pedicab stops in front of a large white cement two-story house with red ceramic roof tiles. An eight-foot-high brick and cement wall surrounds the house and hides the first story. The house is significantly larger than any of the others on the street, most of those constructed from wood. The backyard contains four towering eucalyptuses and one massive yang na tree, and behind those and along the back of the property is a tight row of taller palms.
He recognizes the house and has heard much gossip about it and its owners—a high ranking local official and his wife. He’d ridden past it on his bicycle only three months earlier for a salacious peek. He didn’t see her then and knows that the couple has no children so she must work there.
She pays her driver and gets out of her pedicab and comes over to his. She wais—a customary greeting and sign of respect consisting of a slight bow with hands together in front of the chin—and he does the same.
“You know where I live, but I can’t be seen talking to you,” she says.
He watches her hurry across the street and through the front metal gates past the guard station. She continues through a second gate and down the short driveway to the main door. She doesn’t enter there but goes to a smaller side door farther down.
He pays his driver and gets out and walks home because on his teacher’s salary he can’t afford a pedicab both ways.
The next day is Sunday, which he has off, so he rides his bicycle to her street but stops a block south and on the opposite side of the road. He knows enough about the house that he can’t simply knock on the main door and ask to see her. Nor would the local official take kindly to him loitering out front. So he walks as close to the house as he dares and sits in the shade of a tamarind tree.
In the late afternoon, she comes out of the main gate and walks down his side of the street and joins him. She carries a small basket and retrieves two plastic bags from it. One of them contains pork laarb—a popular ground pork dish, and the other, hot sticky rice. She takes out two sets of forks and spoons from the basket and hands him a set.
She says that she noticed him from the second story window of the prayer room and brought leftovers from her mistress’s afternoon meal. He asks if she works as a cook there and she says she doesn’t but that her mistress likes some of her traditional dishes and insists that she prepare those whenever the mayor and his wife visit.
He learns that her name is Roong, which means rainbow. She is from a village near Chum Phae, west of Khon Kaen. Her village is only two away from his father’s village, so he assumes that his father has been there before, but Tuum hasn’t.
“My mother died when I was fifteen and my father died last year,” she says. “It’s his debt that I am working off.”
He tells her that his father is still alive, but his mother died when he was fifteen.
When they finish eating, she repacks her basket and says she must get back before her mistress notices that she is gone.
“I work from sunrise to sunset seven days a week. She gives me one day off a month and it’s usually a Wednesday or a Sunday. All other days, I’m only allowed out on errands.”
It’s another month before they spend a Sunday together. In the afternoon, they take a pedicab to Kaennakhon Lake in the middle of the city and sit on a bench near the water and eat chopped mango and papaya and a fist-sized ball of rice. Later they rent a rowboat and he rows them to the middle of the lake and they talk under the shade of the flowered umbrella she’s brought with her. This is a traditional courtship although neither of them speaks about it that way nor have immediate family to please beyond his father. But Buddha specifies that lovers must maintain propriety.
The afternoon heat bears down on them despite the protection o
The heat doesn’t wane when Roong and he are back on land. They escape it as best they can by sticking to the shaded side of each street as they walk back to her mistress’s house. They talk comfortably and laugh often.
Less than ten blocks from the house, the street is less crowded, the buildings bigger, many with gates and walls so high it is impossible to see over them. On a corner a woman sells Kai Pahlo from a cart—a dish of boiled eggs and cinnamon, cilantro, and soy sauce—but Roong says that she gets a bad feeling from her, so they don’t stop to buy any. Farther along, the street is lined with more vendors selling either hot food or Kha Nom Thai—various popular Thai desserts. They stop at one and he buys them each a bowl of coconut milk and chopped mango.
They sit on a low cement wall to eat, and after they finish, she says that she’s ashamed to be working at her mistress’s and then tells him how she’s ended up there.
“One afternoon, I came home early from harvesting with my father. I wasn’t there long before she knocked. When I opened the door, the first thing she said was: ‘Aren’t you lovely.’ Those were also the kindest words she’s ever said to me. She then stepped back and asked where my father was. I told her that he was in the final rice paddies north of the house. She thanked me and walked in that direction. I watched her go and was struck by how straight and proper she walked despite wearing high heel shoes—better suited for sidewalks than our gravel road and the uneven footing of the rice paddies. That day, I’d thought she was a good and kind person.
“When my father finished work that evening, he told me that she’d seen me riding my bicycle through the village a week earlier and had asked after me. She told him that she knew people in high society and that she could give me a better life. She would pay for me to go to school and study to be a nurse and make sure I married someone well off. I told my father I wasn’t interested in leaving him or our village. He said he would think about it.”
Roong tells him how her mistress returned the following week. “This time my father introduced her formally to me. She spoke forcefully in Thai and not Isaan. She was very insistent that a wonderful life waited for me if I was willing to choose it. I remember thinking that her insistence made her seem less kind. After she left, my father said that she told him that she’d make sure I was well married and any debt he incurred would be a minor investment in my happiness. Those words should have been a dire warning to us. He told me then that what mattered most to him was that I was happy and had a good life.”
Not long after her mistress’s second visit, government agents appeared at their farm asking to do a full inventory of her father’s crop, something that hadn’t occurred in many years because her father kept meticulous records. He’d answered all their questions astutely from memory never once needing to consult his ledger, as most farmers would have done. The agents complimented him on this and said they could find no fault with his accounting. Her father had beamed for hours afterwards. Neither of them guessed that he only had a month to live.
The day her father died she hadn’t gone to work with him as she usually did. Instead they’d both agreed the night before that she should stay behind to clean the house. They’d been working so intently on the harvest that the house hadn’t been cleaned in several weeks. She scrubbed the windows starting with the two in her father’s bedroom and then cleaned every room and finished with plenty of time to prepare dinner.
Her father didn’t come home for the evening meal, and she waited a full hour thinking that he was working to finish the harvest that day.
“When it got completely dark, I went in search of him. I hurried toward that final paddy and I shouted his name as I went but he didn’t answer. That wasn’t like him and dread quickly knotted in my belly. There was a full moon that night so I broke into a run and called his name as loudly as I could while running. When I reached where the harvesting stopped, I circled the area and shouted until I heard him cough and then moan.
“I spun in that direction, but it took me a few seconds to locate him in the dark. When I reached him, he was lying on his stomach with his head turned toward me. He raised his head as much he could and I bent down and put my ear near his lips. He said: ‘Thank you.’ I told him everything would be okay. He nodded. I’ll never forget how vague his eyes were and how long they took to focus on me.”
Roong stops now and Tuum sets down his empty dessert dish beside him on the cement wall.
She sets hers next to his and then closes her eyes and keeps them closed for several minutes. When she opens them, they are welling with tears.
He wishes he could reach over and take her hand but that wouldn’t be proper. Instead he reaches in his pants pocket and retrieves a napkin he always carries with him and offers it to her.
She takes it and daubs below each eye and then straightens her back and squares her shoulders. She rests her hands on either side of her. After another long pause, she says that, when she found her father, she fully believed she could save him and that everything would be fine. Her father was the strongest person she knew, and she couldn’t imagine anything harming him. She says that she wishes now that she’d simply stayed and talked with him at least they’d have had that time together.
Instead she encouraged him to sit up, which he did after much wheezing and coughing. She offered to help him stand but that proved impossible, so she suggested that he crawl the short distance to a mango tree. She then helped him to sit up and lean against it for support.
She told him that she wouldn’t be long and ran back to the house tripping several times in her haste. Each time she fell, she got right back up and kept running, not even taking time to catch her breath. At the house, she quickly located the wheelbarrow. It was full of rice harvested the day before. She dumped that on the ground and pushed the empty wheelbarrow ahead of her. It bounced erratically over the uneven ground and flew out of her hands twice and turned over on its side. Each time, she grabbed the handles and righted it and pushed it even faster.
When she reached him, his head had lowered to his chest and his breathing was very shallow. She raised his head gently and he opened his eyes and fixed them on her. Even in the moonlight she recognized terror in them. She’d never seen her father afraid before that day. His forehead was covered in sweat. She wiped that away with an edge of her skirt.
“He said: ‘There’s just one more day of harvesting left.’ I told him to save his energy and after a short rest I got him to crawl to the wheelbarrow and then I helped him lean in headfirst and I picked up his legs and rolled him the rest of the way inside. He had to pull his knees to his chest to fit in it and even then his feet stuck out the front of the wheelbarrow.”
Her father shook violently, and she rubbed his forehead and told him again that everything would be okay. He smiled briefly but that quickly faded. Then he smiled a second time and said: “I haven’t always strived to be good, but you are my true goodness.” She thanked him but didn’t encourage him to say more, wanting him to rest, but wishes now that she’d let him talk. Then, she’d been solely focused on saving him.
She gripped the handles of the wheelbarrow and lifted it and pushed but the wheelbarrow wouldn’t move. Although her father was short and thin, he weighed more than she could manage in the wheelbarrow and she wondered how she’d ever get him back to the farmhouse. She lifted the handles a little higher and pushed again and this time she felt a surge of power enter her body and the wheelbarrow moved. At first the soil was so soft she made little progress even with that surge of strength. But she persisted and eventually she reached firmer ground and the wheelbarrow moved freely. She was running then and pushing the wheelbarrow as though it were empty.
At the house he shook even more violently, and she felt the back of his neck and it was icy. She lifted each of his legs out of the wheelbarrow and then helped him sit up and asked him to put his arms around her neck and lean on her. This way she was able to lift him out of the wheelbarrow and set him on the ground. He then crawled to the house and up the two steps and inside.
