The ruma’s eyes bore into mine. He starts to shake, and the little pieces on his headdress and clothes rattle with him. My teeth chatter, I shiver, and I want to pee.
“A-ma Mata was the mother of humans and spirits,” the ruma says in tones so quiet that we all must lean in to hear him. “A-ma means mother and Mata means together, and once upon a time man and spirits lived together in harmony. A-ma Mata had two breasts in front, where her human children could nurse. She had nine breasts on her back to nourish her spirit children. Humans always worked during the day, and spirits always worked at night. The water buffalo and the tiger, the chicken and the eagle, also lived together. But someone must always destroy paradise.” He points to me with his staff. “What was the result?”
“Humans and spirits, water buffalo and tigers, and chickens and eagles needed to be separated,” I recite nervously.
“Separated. Exactly,” he says. “Since the decision to divide the universe happened during the day, men were first to pick in which realm they wanted to live. They chose the earth with its trees, mountains, fruit, and game. Spirits were given the sky, leaving them angry forever after. To this moment, they have retaliated by causing problems for humankind.”
I’ve heard this story many times, but knowing that he’s telling it on my behalf makes my heart hurt.
“In the wet season,” he goes on, “spirits descend to earth with the rain, bringing with them disease and floods. In spring, as dry season begins, noise is made to encourage malevolent spirits to move on. But they don’t always leave. They’re especially active at night. That is their time, not ours.”
My family and our neighbors listen intently. Here and there, people click their tongues to show disapproval for what I’ve done. I don’t want to look at anyone too closely, because I don’t want to be forced to acknowledge the shame they feel for me. Nevertheless, somehow my eyes find Ci-teh. She looks at me in pity. Nothing will hide the dishonor searing my flesh.
“We worship many gods, but none is greater than A-poe-mi-yeh, whose name means ancestor of great power. He created the world and this soul before me.” The ruma takes a moment to make sure he has everyone’s attention. “We have many taboos. Men must not smoke nor women chew betel nut when they walk through the spirit gate. A pregnant woman, like Deh-ja, must not go visiting to another village or she might miscarry there. A woman must never step over her husband’s leg on his sleeping mat. We’re always careful, and we always try to propitiate our wrongs, but please, our Li-yan did not hope to offend.”
Is he saying nothing bad is going to happen to me?
Then he puts his forefinger under my chin and tilts my face up to him. What A-ma couldn’t see in me, he sees. I know he does. Everything. But what he says to the others is very different.
“She is just a hungry little girl,” he explains. “As the sun always comes up, as the earth is forever under our feet, as the rivers flow down the mountains and the trees grow into the sky, let us together put Li-yan back on the proper Akha path.”
He stamps his staff on the ground three times. He sprinkles water over me and pats my head. He has shown me such mercy and forgiveness that I decide I’ll never be afraid of him again. But when he turns away to perform the rite that will finish my purification, my stomach once again sinks. He takes the chicken from First Brother’s fingers, presses its body to the stone that Third Brother cleaned earlier, and then cuts off its head. My family has so few chickens, which means very few eggs. Now I’m the cause of the loss of food in my family. My sisters-in-law glare at me. But then . . .
A-ma takes the chicken from the ruma and swiftly plucks the feathers from the twitching carcass. Then whack, whack, whack. The chicken pieces are thrown into the pot that dangles over the fire First Sister-in-law has been tending.
Twenty minutes later, A-ma ladles the soup into bowls. The men gather on one side of our family home; the women gather on the other side. We sit on our haunches to receive our bowls. The sounds of greedy slurping, sucking, and chewing are among the happiest I’ve heard in my life, yet frogs, mosquitoes, and night-calling birds alert me to how many sleep hours we’ve already missed. As I gnaw gristle from a bone, little sparks of ideas fly through my head. In my dream last night, the bad omen of seeing a dog on the roof told me I was going to get into trouble. And I did. But right now, in this second, each person in my family, as well as the ruma, has a piece of chicken to eat and rich broth to drink. That’s just like in my dream too. My fake dream . . . The one I lied about . . . But in that dream we each had a whole chicken. Still . . .
No coincidence, no story.
A WATERFALL OF HEAVEN’S TEARS
We are a people who like to roam, traveling from place to place, using the traditional practice of slashing and burning forests to create fields to plant, and then moving on when the gifts of the earth have finished being used for crops. But during the last few generations, it’s become hard to claim new land on Nannuo or on any of the tea mountains in Xishuangbanna prefecture, so we—and others—have stayed. Permanent, A-ba says, even though the idea is against our natures. Still, our home, like all structures in Spring Well Village, was built to be temporary. Before I was born, my father and grandfather went into the forest to gather the thatch that is our roof. They cut bamboo, tore off the leaves, and then tied the poles together with handwoven lashing to create the walls that would become the separate quarters for men and women. Our house is built on bamboo stilts, providing a protected area under our feet for our livestock, although we have no pigs, oxen, mules, or water buffalo, only a few molting chickens, a rooster, and two ducks. The main residence and our three newlywed huts compose the only home I’ve known, but something in my blood makes me long to leave it behind for a new and different location, where my kin can place our ancestor altar and build a new dwelling as loose and with as much air flowing through it as we have right here. This restless feeling heightens during monsoon season—the months when spirits hold sway.