A woman died an unquiet death the same year my mother's baby brother was born.
The woman had awakened breathlessly in the middle of the ghostly night, clutching her thin yellow blanket to her chest. Uneasily she lifted off the blanket and crawled over cautiously to where her husband slept, one arm cushioning his head, the other resting agreeably on his chest.
"Chao, please, will you come outside with me? I need to go to the bathroom," the woman pleaded.
Her husband grunted a harsh refusal and turned onto his stomach. Seared by his cold rebuff, a frightened Xeng hesitantly staggered through the darkness and felt her way out of the thatched hut door. Led only by the thin light of the moon she stepped into the night and tread slowly toward the edge of the breathing jungle.
At the edge of the jungle, Xeng quickly finished and scrambled to return to the hut. She scolded herself for her unusual anxiety and remembered that she needed to accept fate and let things happen the way they were bound to happen---the way the shaman woman had predicted. Let death come, she thought. Death was bound to be better than the everyday hell of old Chao who, earlier today had kicked her in the stomach and pushed her out the door into the burning fields to work even though the shaman woman had specifically restricted her to the hut for her safety.
"I don't care what a smelly old medicine woman has to say!" Chao had screamed at Xeng, who lie doubled over in the red dust as the horrified neighbors gathered to watch. No one stepped forward to help. My grandmother, then a gentle young woman with three trailing children and one more on the way, was among the appalled neighbors who assembled to witness the yelling.
"I am not allowing you to idle inside all day while my fields roast in the sun. Don't you know that the fields need weeding, you lazy bitch!" Chao sputtered angrily, a few feet from where my grandmother stood, heartbroken and speechless.
"But it is my life that is at stake!" Xeng had reasoned, naively believing that Chao valued her life even a little. "You heard her yourself! The shaman says it isn't safe for me to be out of doors! The spirits will be angry---I can feel it, they are coming for me!"
Chao had remained unmoved by her pleas. "You're going to let a few ghosts scare you in broad daylight?!" he sneered.
With tears stinging her eyes, Xeng slowly picked her frail bones up off the dirt and limped over to where the garden hoe waited dejectedly. The sooner she left for the fields, the better, Xeng decided. The villagers would not like their peaceful morning disrupted for long.
A sigh of relief had swirled throughout the village as old Chao stalked into the dark abyss of his hut and Xeng's dismal figure disappeared among the path between the trees.
Now, alone in the dark, Xeng realized that anything---even the awful consequences the shaman had predicted---would be preferable to this life. Anyway, it was too late to heed the shaman's warnings, for she had already violated the restriction of remaining indoors for three days. She knew unwaveringly that she would not be spared. This realization barely flitted through her mind when suddenly the ghastly smell of fresh blood filled the night air, and Xeng had a terrible urge to look down at her feet. Her tiny feet were barely discernable in the near darkness, but she peered reluctantly down at her right foot---and there Xeng discovered a perfectly rounded pool of blood. She spun around, mania mounting, when she saw that at every step she had taken, a pool of thick seeping blood lay grinning hideously back at her.
Terrified, Xeng ran screaming towards my grandparents' hut, the nearest one to where she had made her petrifying discovery. Xeng banged fiercely on the door and in a small whirlwind the house awoke, a baby began wailing, lamps were lighted, and she was ushered inside.The women of the house, led by my mother's mother, washed and calmed Xeng as my grandfather ran to get her husband.
The women of the house---mothers, daughters, sisters and sisters-in-law---all knew Xeng's story well, and some even feared her. Xeng was descended from a line of women plagued by curse and restless spirits. Each woman in her family died young, her spirit coming back to take the next until one by one each had gone mournfully into the world of the dead. My mother, Ying, remembers scrambling away, sometimes tripping and falling onto her scrubby five-year-old knees, whenever she saw Xeng, the woman of the unquiet and most shameful death of all her predecessors.
Xeng was the childless second wife of a cruel and lazy man. While the other men of the village labored in the fields, hunted in the thriving jungle or busied themselves around the village, Chao sat smoking his opium pipe every day in the shade in front of his hut. His laziness kept his large, noisy family mired in poverty and incurred the disrespect of the villagers. People were sorry for Xeng, but there was little they could do to help, because she had no close relatives to defend her rights. She lived as an outcast, existing from day to day in the isolated Hmong mountain village. Without friendship and familial ties in a society that measured wealth by the number of one's relatives and friends, Xeng was poorest of all.
Her lack of family, her despised husband and her sinister background isolated her from the other women whose husbands warned their wives that association with Xeng would only bring dilemma. But the sadness in Xeng's eyes had troubled my grandmother's heart in a way that nothing else had. Therefore, after much initial hesitation, she had defied standards and extended an awkward, but nonetheless genuine comradeship to Xeng. My grandmother did not know how much her kind words and encouragement, usually uttered only in passing, meant to the other woman until after Xeng's death.
The women cleaned Xeng's bloody feet that night and later the men carried Xeng---deliriously pleading that the spirits spare her---back to her husband's hut. Her agonizing screams echoed deep into that night and died out slowly towards the break of day, only to began again the next evening. The grief-stricken cries continued for three more nights.
On the fourth night, my grandmother lay on the floor of her home giving birth to a baby boy, just a few huts down from the delirious shrieking. The beautiful newborn cries of her new brother echoed in Ying's tiny ears, as she lay awake on the thin mat that she shared with her sister in a different corner of the hut. Just for this tiny moment, with the baby's cry echoing in her ears, she was happily distracted from the terrifying cries of the dying neighbor woman. Ying's mind drifted to the tree climbing race that her sister had challenged her to . . .to the cornhusk doll Uncle Neng had promised he would make for her. . . to the frogs that Uncle Neng promised they would go catch later tomorrow night if the moon was bright enough. But suddenly Ying remembered that there was a reason why they had not gone to pick frogs by the pond the past two nights---the awful shrieking from a couple huts down had kept everyone indoors at night.
Just as suddenly as Ying remembered this, she noticed that the village was strangely quiet. It was impossible! The baby had stopped crying, and Ying strained her ears to listen, sure that the shrieking would begin again, but it did not. An eerie, foreign calm clamped down on the tiny mountain village.
The village found out the next morning that Xeng had died that haunted night. The village men solemnly carried Xeng off to be buried, and later the keej player's heartbreaking music lamented over her grave, guiding her spirit back in time through the short years of her life and directing her finally towards an eternal resting place. It was the last anyone expected to hear of Xeng . . . but as all ghost stories go . . . that was not to be.
During the middle of the very next night, a wispy breeze snuck from one sleeping hut to another, then grew more forceful until suddenly a horrifying wind engulfed the entire village. An unmistakable and resounding thump as if something had thrown itself onto the roof of her parents' house forced Ying's tightly closed eyes to fly open.
Suddenly Ying was no longer looking up at the hut, but at the open night sky and a furious swirl of stars exposed by a newly gaping hole in the thatched roof. Then Ying screamed in terror when she saw one distinct pair of orange eyes glowering down through the hole. Ying's father, jumped up and grabbed his rifle, yelling angry curses interspersed with prayers, and dashed outside.
Two shots rang out, then five, then six. My grandfather chased the creature---long stringy hair, shadows and movement---until it vanished into the jungle.
The wind's fury slowed, then calmed and died down, but the roof of the family's home was no longer intact. My grandfather rushed back, sweating and exhausted, to gather up the women and children. My grandmother protectively wrapped her newborn baby in his bedclothes, and with the other children still whimpering, the family dispersed itself among the neighbors' homes for the night.
Morning broke clear and bright and it was then that the roof was inspected. Strips of the gigantic hole in the thatch covering had scattered all over the village. Only a thing of supernatural fury could have wreaked this damage, the anxious elders concluded. Sacrifices were made to appease the spirits and prayers were offered for the well-being of the family.
But while all remained alarmed, my grandmother cradled her new little boy and smiled sadly to herself. After the windstorm that night, Xeng had come back to her in a dream. "What was the fuss all about, Jou? I am very sorry that I scared everyone, but really, I do not think I deserved to be shot at like that. I merely came back to see your baby, to find out if it is a girl or boy. How wonderful that you have a son! It just is not fair that the other women will get to help you take care of him, but I will never get to."
My grandmother assures me that she never heard from Xeng again. "I hope wherever she is, Xeng is finally contented. I cannot help but think back on this woman's life and remember how it was all a little eerie, but mostly just a sad, sad story."