CHAPTER
thirteen
I’d never been one to read the morning newspaper. In fact, I’d sometimes wondered why Norman subscribed to the State Journal when the LaFontaine News came free once a week. He’d just said that he liked reading about more than who won the church softball league or which neighbors had gotten a new roof.
As much as I thought getting the Journal was a waste of money, I couldn’t bring myself to cancel it after Norm passed. Most mornings I’d collect it from the doorstep and promptly take it downstairs to where a good stack of papers was collecting. At the end of the summer the scout troop would hold its annual paper drive. I’d have quite a contribution for them.
That morning I’d been too preoccupied by running errands around town that I’d forgotten all about the paper until much later in the day.
“Goodness, Betty,” I whispered when I stepped outside to collect the mail and saw the rolled news still on my doorstep. “You’re really slipping.”
When I finally retrieved it, I pulled off the thick rubber band, slipping it around my wrist, and unrolled the paper so it could lie flat on the stack with all the others.
The story that took up most of the front page caught my eye.
Printed large was the photograph of a man sitting cross-legged in the middle of a street, a crowd all around him, watching. Behind him was a car, the type of which I’d not seen before. It looked foreign, different. In fact, everything about the picture did. The shaved heads of the people in long robes, the words I couldn’t read that had been painted on the building behind him, the children lined up along the street all dressed as small monks. All so very unfamiliar.
My eyes roamed the picture, unable to look away. The man was on fire, the blazes seeming to come from inside him, although I knew that couldn’t have been possible.
Sitting in my chair, one leg folded up under me, I read through the article twice, trying to understand it.
It seemed the Vietnamese government had a habit of mistreating the Buddhists. Persecution, strong-arming, denying rights. The man had allowed gasoline to be poured all over him before he lit a match, engulfing himself in flame.
It was grotesque, horrifying, shocking. I had never seen anything like that in all my life and it turned my stomach sour. For the very first time I was grateful that the State Journal wasn’t printed in color.
In all honesty, I thought about Vietnam very little. Rarely did I watch the news, and when I did, there wasn’t much said about the country, let alone our involvement there. Much to my embarrassment, I wouldn’t have been able to point to it on the map if my life depended on it.
The picture, though, somehow made that far-off land seem a whole lot closer. It reminded me that even though that man had lived thousands and thousands of miles away from me, we still shared the same world.
Every feeling of the morning melted when I looked at that picture. No matter how I tried to fill my mind with other things—to find the sunshine—I couldn’t extinguish the burning monk from my eyes. The afterimage of the flames rising from his body refused to leave me.
I turned on the evening news after I failed to eat a good dinner, hoping to hear more about the monk. For some reason I couldn’t have explained, I found myself fascinated by the story, as well as utterly horrified.
But there was no mention of him. Instead, on the screen was a house that looked like it would belong in any neighborhood in the United States. That one, though, was in Jackson, Mississippi. And outside that house a man named Medgar Evers—a man I’d never heard of before—was murdered in his driveway with his family inside. He and his wife had three children. Two boys and a girl.
“Evers was just returning home from a NAACP meeting when he was shot in the back by a sniper hiding in the brush across the street,” the reporter said. “He died at the hospital in Jackson.”
The camera focused on a police officer standing by the house and pointing at what the reporter said was a bullet hole in the window.
“His wife and children were sleeping inside the house.” The reporter’s voice remained matter of fact, calm, even. “They were left unharmed.”
I leaned forward, covering my mouth with one hand, willing myself to watch the rest of the news, hoping for a story that was at least marginally happy.
Nothing.
I got up and switched off the television, wishing I hadn’t turned it on in the first place. Wishing I hadn’t seen the paper that morning.
“Now that I know,” I whispered to myself, “I won’t be able to forget.”
They were left unharmed, the reporter had said of the man’s children.
I supposed the same could be said of the children in that faraway city in Vietnam who watched the man light himself on fire.
Left unharmed in respect to their arms and legs and heads. They weren’t injured. Didn’t catch a spark or a grazing of a bullet.
But I thought of the Evers children, maybe at that very moment getting ready for bed—the first night without their father—the shots of the sniper still booming in their ears and the cries of their father too.
Unharmed, the reporter had claimed.
Unharmed.
I wondered if I’d ever think of that word the same way again.
I couldn’t sleep that night. It was no use trying. I simply couldn’t drift off. Whenever I closed my eyes, I just saw the Vietnamese children in my mind, their eyes fixed on the burning man. If I tossed and turned, all I could think of was the family in Mississippi, wondering if their sleep was even more disturbed than mine.
After a while, I flung aside the covers, swung my feet off the side of the bed, and grabbed my robe. Flannery made a groaning sound but didn’t lift her head.
“Don’t get up on account of me,” I said, smoothing the fur on her back with my hand.
She didn’t purr. Instead she lifted a paw to cover her face.
I didn’t know what came over me, but I pulled a little corner of the covers up and around her, tucking it under her warm little body. If I’d not caught myself, I might have planted a kiss on the top of her head.
Oh, would Norman have teased me for doing such a thing!
I decided to fix myself a cup of chamomile tea, hoping it would make me sleepy enough to get at least a few hours of rest. I put the kettle on to boil and took down one of my pretty pink cups from the cupboard. But when I went for a tea bag, I found that I was completely out.
Rummaging through the cupboard, I found all manner of things that were not tea. A stray birthday candle, a scrap of aluminum foil, more dust than I would ever admit to. Not so much as a single leaf of tea, let alone a full box.
I turned off the flame under the kettle just as it hinted at a whistle.
As a last-ditch effort, I got up on my tiptoes and felt of the shelf just above where I usually kept my tea canisters. It was where Norm kept his baking supplies. Flour and baking soda and other things that I never bothered with. My fingers landed on a little piece of paper.
Curious. I took it to the sink, flipping on the overhead light.
As I looked at that yellowed, aged card, my eyes grew watery. Afraid a tear might smudge the writing, I held the paper to my chest, wondering at how emotional I could get over seeing Norm’s handwriting again.
Norman had given me his family’s secret recipe for their popular Sweet Bread one morning as he walked me to school.
“Mom said it was all right,” he’d said. “Just so long as you don’t share it with anybody else.”
“Thank you, but I don’t know how to make bread.” I’d stopped on the sidewalk to read the instructions. “I’d only ruin it.”
“Nah. You’d do fine.”
“Why do you have to knead it?” I pointed at one of the steps. “Can’t you just stir it?”
He’d cringed and shook his head. “You have to knead it to activate the gluten.”
“Oh.” I started walking but then halted. “What’s gluten?”
“It’s what gives the bread its stretch, it’s what holds it together.”
“Oh,” I said again, still not understanding.
“If you don’t knead the bread enough, it won’t rise right. It won’t hold its shape,” he said. “If you knead it too much, it’ll be tough.”
“You sure do take bread seriously.”
“You got that right.” He adjusted my books in his arms. “There’s nothing quite so bad as bread that’s not been made properly.”
“I’m afraid that’s the only kind I’d ever be able to make.”
“I’ll teach you,” he said. “It isn’t too hard. It’s all about patience, especially at first. And it’s all right if you ruin a few loaves along the way.”
Over the years I’d spoiled more than my fair share of bread. After a while, I just let Norm bring it home from work.
I left the light on over the sink and the mess of odds and ends that I’d pulled from the cupboard and went back to my room. Opening the drawer of my bedside table, I placed the recipe card in, on top of the square jewelry box where I’d put Norman’s wedding ring.
Eventually I did fall asleep, and even though my dreams were unsettled, I woke the next morning feeling nearly refreshed.
As I made my coffee, I prayed that the Evers children would find comfort in good memories of their father. When I washed my breakfast dishes, I prayed for the little ones a world away in Vietnam, that they would be able to forget the monk on fire somehow, even if I suspected that was impossible.
I went through that rainy day, my heart feeling more than a little bruised.
I rubbed at my chest, willing the ache to go away.
It stayed right where it was, feeling as much like dread as loss. I couldn’t seem to shake it no matter what I tried.