A Million Shades of Gray

  “My father says there’s a meeting of the whole village today,” Tomas said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard. Are you scared?” Y’Tin asked.

  “No … yes. Yes, I am. What about you?”

  “Yes. I just want the war to be over. Then we can go back to our regular lives.” Yet even as Y’Tin spoke, he knew he was wrong. They would never go back to their regular lives.

  Y’Siu climbed to the top of Y’Tin’s hutch and slid across Dok’s back. Then the three of them took the elephants down the wide path to the river. At the river the elephants drank and drank the way they did every morning. Elephants could drink two hundred liters a day. That took a while.

  “I’m not leaving without the elephants,” Y’Siu announced.

  No one replied. Of course Y’Tin wouldn’t leave without the elephants either. But where would they go? After drinking their fill, the elephants wandered over to a bamboo grove, where Lady picked young shoots and then pushed them around on the ground for a few minutes before eating them. Usually, Y’Tin was the last to leave the river, but this time the others lingered as well. Y’Siu lay atop Dok. Suddenly, tears were falling down his face. Though Y’Siu was fifteen, Y’Tin always thought of him as the youngest. His voice hadn’t changed yet, and you always had to be careful what you said to him because you might hurt his feelings.

  Y’Tin and Tomas glanced at each other, then Y’Tin said, “It’s okay, Y’Siu.”

  “I’m scared.” He was sobbing now.

  “We’re all scared,” Tomas said. “Everyone is scared. Our fathers are scared. Our grandfathers are scared. The chief is scared.”

  “Y’Siu, we’ll live in the jungle. We know how to hunt. We’ll be safe,” Y’Tin said, trying to comfort Y’Siu. Anyway, it was possible that they would be safe.

  “I don’t want to live in the jungle. I want to stay here with Dok.”

  The elephants finished eating before Y’Siu finished crying.

  Back at the pen Tomas said, “Don’t chain your elephants. If the enemy comes, the elephants may need to flee into the jungle.”

  “Go ahead and wander, Lady,” said Y’Tin. He patted her pregnant belly. “I’ll be right back.” But he knew she wouldn’t wander. She would walk only as far as her chain would have let her. She was so domesticated, he worried that she might not be able to survive in the jungle if something happened to him. For the first time in his life, he regretted that Lady had ever been captured.

  Y’Tin, Tomas, and Y’Siu walked across the empty fields. Y’Tin had never seen the fields like that in the morning. Everybody always started working before Y’Tin headed for school. The Rhade prided themselves on how hard they worked. Their whole lives revolved around working. But that didn’t matter now.

  Chapter Five

  Y’Tin had expected to find all the villagers talking animatedly about the big meeting. Instead, an eerie silence had fallen like ashes from the sky. The yellow, grass roofs of the houses shivered in the wind. The private gardens and rice paddies were unattended, and nobody seemed to have remembered to let their chickens out. Usually at this time of morning, chickens were clucking everywhere.

  At his own house Y’Tin found everyone gathered on the floor of the large room at the entrance. All his relatives had closed their eyes and were holding hands. He had never seen this before, so he did not think it was a ritual. It was more like they could not stand to face the world at this moment.

  He sat down. Jujubee immediately came over and leaned against him. Apparently, she’d gotten a nosebleed, for a small piece of cloth was sticking out of her right nostril. She was usually full of energy, but when she got nosebleeds, she suddenly grew docile and wanted to lie on Y’Tin. Ami kept a supply of small pieces of cloth handy for when Jujubee got one of her frequent nosebleeds.

  “Is it a bad one?” Y’Tin asked Jujubee.

  “Yes, we’ve had to change the cloth four times.”

  He put his arms around her and pulled her in close.

  A gong sounded, but at first nobody moved. It was as if no gong had rung at all. His mother did not even open her eyes. Then Y’Tin’s father stood up, and everyone except his mother followed. As the others headed down the ladder, Y’Tin stood uncertainly. “Ami?” he said. “We’re going.”

  Finally, she opened her eyes. She pushed herself up slowly, as if she were an old woman. Y’Tin waited until Jujubee and Ami had climbed down the ladder. He gazed around the room. He needed to soak in the moment, to remember his house. Then he headed to the meeting by himself.

  Y’Tin watched the men pour out of the bachelor longhouse. Some of them were old, in their late thirties. He wondered whether it might be better in times of war to have no family to worry about. But he couldn’t imagine having no family.

  The meeting was being held outside because the entire village of five hundred would not fit into the meeting hall. Y’Tin sat in the front because he wanted to see the proceedings up close. The shaman sat near him with his stick. It looked just like a plain stick such as you might find lying on the ground in the jungle. But that was only a disguise. The shaman used this amazing stick to communicate with the spirits. No doubt it would be the stick that would tell them what kind of sacrifices they would need to make today.

  The shaman was tall for a Rhade. He was almost as tall as the Americans had been. He was lean except for his stomach, which formed a small mound, like when Y’Tin’s mother was first pregnant with Jujubee. But his face was what Y’Tin studied now. One eye was bigger than the other, and his mouth curled up more on one side than the other. The result was otherworldly.

  Some of the men somberly smoked pipes. Y’Tin overheard two old women talking of making a sacrifice to Yang Lie, the great evil spirit. Once, last year, Yang Lie had chased Y’Tin down—Y’Tin had sprained an ankle tripping over a rock one week, and the next week he’d sprained a wrist tripping over another rock. His parents had sacrificed a couple of chickens to Yang Lie, and then Y’Tin didn’t get hurt again. So he knew that Yang Lie was susceptible to sacrifices.

  The Rhade spent much of their time thinking about the spirits. Every living and nonliving thing was inhabited by at least one spirit, so you had to watch your step all the time. Sometimes his mother worried so much about the spirits that she couldn’t sleep at night. Every so often Y’Tin liked to boil an egg and give it as a private sacrifice for his family. So far it seemed to be working, since his family had been prospering for several years. His family was very lucky indeed.

  The village chief, dressed head to toe in khaki army clothes, arrived and scowled at the crowd. Everyone fell silent. The chief was very dramatic, and his face was rarely at rest. He gestured a lot when he talked. It was just his way. He could be talking about, say, whether to eat eggplant or corn at dinner, and he would gesture dramatically and talk very loudly. In fact, his nickname among the boys was Monsieur Loud. Now he cleared his throat and shouted out, “Many of us have been talking informally about what our next move should be. According to our own spies, the North Vietnamese are nearing our village. Every day they are in violation of the Paris Peace Accords, and yet the Americans still don’t come to offer us aid.” He leaned forward and paused dramatically. Y’Tin found himself leaning forward too. “We will now ask the shaman for advice about where to go, how much to take, and when to go.”

  Y’Tin waited for the shaman to ask the stick. “Asking the stick” meant that the shaman would ask his stick for advice. It was a special stick, and the spirits would speak to him through its movement. He would hold out the stick in front of him, and he would concentrate as the stick shook. Once, one of the Americans drank a lot of rice wine and tried to explain why asking the stick didn’t make sense. But it made perfect sense to Y’Tin. How was it different from what the Americans said about electricity? The power in electricity went through a wire. In the same way, the power of the spirits went through the stick. Simple.

  And the village boasted one of the most talented shamans around. Sometimes visitors
from other villages made the long trek here to ask the shaman for advice. Y’Tin was pretty proud to live in the same village with such a talented shaman. Now the shaman raised his stick as if his arms were magically floating up, and for all Y’Tin knew, they really were magically floating up. The dark part of his eyes disappeared, leaving only white balls for eyes. Y’Tin sat very still, staring at those eyeballs. The chief asked loudly, “What should we sacrifice to appease the spirits?”

  The shaman’s tongue stretched out of his mouth and wriggled. Once, the shaman’s tongue had grown so long, it reached the ground. Y’Tin had not seen it, but he knew several people who had. The shaman brought in his tongue, and his eyes normalized. His hands, which held the stick, began to shake. This went on for quite a while. And then it went on for quite a while longer. Y’Tin had never seen it go on so long. Finally, the stick stopped shaking. Y’Tin could not hear a single noise from any of the five hundred people present.

  “You should leave the village within two days,” the shaman finally said. “Women, children, and the elderly should leave as well. That is the message of Ai Die, great spirit of the sky, most powerful of the spirits, ruler of our world. Each family should sacrifice a buffalo if they have one, a pig if they don’t have a buffalo, and a chicken if they don’t have a pig.” Then it was as if the shaman turned back into a normal man again.

  When he turned normal, everyone jumped up at once, all running madly here and there. Y’Tin sought out his father and asked him urgently, “What should I do?”

  “Dig up the rice wine,” Ama said, then turned his attention to the other men in the family.

  Y’Tin ran toward his house.

  The clan’s many big jars of rice wine were fermenting beneath the ground under and around the house. That was the way to let the wine ferment perfectly, or so Y’Tin had been told. Y’Tin used his hands to dig the jars out of the ground. He dug like a dog, kneeling on his knees and digging one hand quickly after the other, dirt flying everywhere. He didn’t know how many jars his father wanted, but he decided to dig up all twenty of the jars. If they were leaving in two days, they might as well drink what they could before they had to leave it all behind. Y’Tin concentrated on his task, as if his family’s life depended on how quickly he could dig out the jars. While his body was busy digging, his mind was busy thinking. Where would they all go? Would they ever return to their village? How long would they need to hide in the jungle? Would he be able to take good care of the elephants? Would they all stick together, or would they all spread out?

  When he saw the men in his clan carrying a dead buffalo to the longhouse, Y’Tin paused. Blood poured out of the animal’s lungs. Y’Tin watched as his father started a fire with one of the lighters he had bought during his last trip to the biggest Rhade city of Ban Me Thuot. One of his uncles began slicing the buffalo into sections.

  As Y’Tin was finishing the digging, the scent of roasting buffalo filled the air. Y’Tin did not feel even slightly hungry. He told his father he was going to the elephant pen. As if they had all read one another’s minds, Y’Tin, Tomas, and Y’Siu were walking through the gate at nearly the same time. Y’Tin called out, “Tomas!”

  Tomas waited for him impatiently. “Hurry!” Tomas yelled, and then he suddenly turned around and began running toward the elephants, leaving Y’Tin behind. Y’Tin ran as well, and Y’Siu followed. It was a good time to take the elephants for another drink at the river. Y’Tin saw that the elephants had not strayed from their pen.

  It would feel good to walk to the river. Normal. Y’Tin found he loved the thought of doing something normal.

  “What do you think would happen if we all stayed in the village?” asked Y’Tin. “I never worked for the Americans.”

  “But your father did,” Tomas said neutrally. “And Y’Siu’s father did. Anyway, how would the enemy know who worked for the Special Forces or not? They might suspect all of us because of a few—” He stopped, and Y’Tin wondered what he had planned on saying. To Geng, Tomas said, “Nao!” Geng immediately began the trek to the river. Geng was very obedient, but she listened only to Tomas.

  Suddenly, they heard shouting. Y’Tin’s sister and Tomas’s mother were racing across the field crying out, “Hurry! The North Vietnamese have been spotted nearby. The chief says everyone must leave immediately.”

  Y’Tin sprinted toward them. “What? What, now?” he asked.

  “Ama said we need to leave now!” H’Juaih burst into tears.

  Y’Tin grabbed her hand, and they ran back to their longhouse. Their father was stuffing canteens into a bag. He turned to Y’Tin and said angrily, “Go take care of your elephant. Go now.”

  H’Juaih screeched at him, “He said to go! Ama said to go now!”

  For a moment Y’Tin couldn’t move. “But what about Ami and Jujubee?”

  “I’ve taken care of them,” Ama said, slowly this time, as if Y’Tin had a learning impairment. “You need to go now.”

  So Y’Tin grabbed his crossbow, all seven arrows he owned, and a beautiful woven bag that his mother had made for him. “Now!” H’Juaih cried. She grabbed an empty bag and spun around as if she didn’t have the slightest idea what to put in the bag. She tried to run down the steps, falling down the last two. The pathways were strangely empty, but Y’Tin could hear shouting inside the longhouses. He rushed behind his sister, but at the gate they both paused. “Travel safely,” she said.

  “Travel safely,” he said.

  He ran toward the elephant pen and she toward the jungle.

  He was the first one back to the pen, but he did not wait for Y’Siu or Tomas. His father had said to leave now. If his father said it, then it must be done. He grabbed everything he kept in the hutch: the special brush for washing Lady, a pipe his grandfather had given him, rope, and his hook. He rammed the hook into Geng’s leg. “Nao!” Next he jabbed Dok. “Nao!” he cried. “Nao!” Dok hurried off, but Geng did not. Y’Tin rammed Geng’s leg one more time. He threw the rope around Lady’s neck, tied the bag to her, then scrambled to the roof of his hutch and slid across to Lady’s back. “Nao,” he said. He poked her with the hook, but she hesitated, no doubt surprised at the poke. “Nao!” She broke into a trot toward the jungle. He looked back at Geng, still waiting for Tomas.

  Y’Tin heard murmuring, then realized it was himself, murmuring in English, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” He looked back toward the gate and saw people pouring out of the gateway, as if they had all finished shouting in their houses at the same time and now were all rushing toward the jungle at the same time. He thought he spotted his favorite auntie, but it was hard to tell in the rush of people. His heart started to pound. He wondered whether his father’s heart was pounding as well. Maybe Ama was so brave that his heart never pounded at all.

  Y’Tin’s heart went directly from pounding to stopping, for Jujubee was crying all alone by the fence. He slipped off Lady and jabbed her with the hook. “Nao, Lady! Nao!” he cried out. She hurried away. He had to check to make sure Jujubee was taken care of. He just had to.

  He ran toward the fence, tripping twice. He was running as fast as he could, but it seemed to take forever to span the distance to his little sister. As soon as he made the turn for the gate, he dropped to the ground in fear. North Vietnamese soldiers swarmed all over the gate like ants. Y’Tin got up again and started to run, but a soldier shouted, “Stop! Stop! Lie down!” Y’Tin fell to the ground and braced himself as he saw a foot lowering. Pow—it smashed against his nose. Ah, the pain in his face was excruciating. “Don’t move!” said a voice that sounded almost like a girl’s. Y’Tin froze; he felt desperate to stay alive. Surely this soldier must have more important things to attend to, but he was focusing on Y’Tin for some reason. Y’Tin peeked up and saw that the soldier seemed even younger than him. Maybe he didn’t know what else to do other than harass another kid.

  Then he became aware that the whole village was erupting. Guns were firing and people were running into the jungle and so m
any people were shouting that Y’Tin couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. When he tried to turn his head to look, the boy soldier’s foot crashed against his face again, making a strange cracking sound. Y’Tin wondered dazedly whether his nose or cheekbone was broken. His whole face hurt. He lay there, not moving, not knowing what was going on.

  Finally the village grew quieter, and all the shouting was now coming from only the North Vietnamese—Y’Tin could tell by the accents. What did that mean? Did that mean the North Vietnamese had taken over the village? He felt dizzy and needed to close his eyes. He murmured as before, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Then he braced himself again, turned his head, and opened his eyes . . . and saw the butt of a rifle smash down repeatedly on the head of one of the village bachelors. Blood and brains spurted out of his skull. “Ah,” Y’Tin grunted. He retched and needed to close his eyes.

  “Boys and men over here!” shouted a soldier from inside the fence. “Now!”

  The boy soldier kicked Y’Tin more softly this time. “Go on. Get up,” he said. When Y’Tin got up, the boy was suddenly angry. “Go on!” he cried out. “Get inside the gate!”

  Y’Tin hurried through the gate, the boy pushing the rifle into his back the whole time. He saw some of the Ayuns and the Buonyas and the Krongs, but he did not see any of his family. He thought that was a good sign . . . wasn’t it? It meant his family had escaped . . . didn’t it? A rifle jabbed his stomach. “Pay attention!” someone told him. The boy soldier had disappeared.

  Y’Tin tried to strike a subservient pose. He knew that all he had to do was wear the wrong expression and he could be shot.

  Another soldier—there were so many of them!—ran over to the one who appeared to be in charge. “That house is big enough,” he said, pointing to the Buonya longhouse.

  “All right, put them all in there,” said the man in charge. “Check it for weapons and food first.”

  A couple of soldiers cleared the Buonya longhouse of guns, ammunition, and food. Y’Tin was shocked at how many guns they’d owned—maybe ten or twelve.