Free God's Fool by Mark Slouka Page A

swimming in the river. And the time he got angry at Li.”
    “That’s all?” My brother, I realized, had buried him too.
    “I remember when he died,” he said quietly.
    But he didn’t really. He remembered—as I did now—the smell that filled the rooms when the cholera came. He remembered how very quickly they all went—our brother, our sisters, entire families—how the living, too weak to bury the dead, had thrown their bodies into the river where the current slowly turned them like huge fish, soft with mold. He remembered my mother washing and cleaning for days, mechanically. When our father died she took the small sack of baht and anything else worth money and went to the temple priest. In the name of the bodhisattva he took it all.
    To see him dying would have burned a hole in our hearts. But even if neither of us could bear to look at his death directly, enough years had passed that we could at least see the ghastly light it had shed around it. Lying in the dark next to my brother, I remembered now how high our father’s coffin had seemed to me on its wooden bier beneath the white canopy woven through with dying flowers, how distant the flutes and drums and gongs had sounded in the thick, scented air. I remembered the Buddhist priest reading a prayer, and the crimson cloth that was taken from the head of our father’s coffin and cut into five pieces—one for each of us left. I could see again the lighted tapers, flickering against the green of the jungle, the strange coolness of my mother’s hand.
    The priests took the coffin inside the temple. When at last they brought out our father’s body, washed and purified, and laid him on the wood, it wasn’t him at all, but someone much smaller and thinner, and when the priest lit the taper and the mourners set the wood ablaze, the vague dark mass at the center of the flames no longer seemed human at all but a crude effigy, nothing more, set there by the priests to fool us all.
    The year was 1819. The uparaja , the king’s brother, had died two years earlier. Across the river from the carved gold gables and the serpentining nagas of the Grand Palace, the Wat Arun—the Temple of the Dawn—was rising out of the earth as steadily as the event it was named for. We neither knew nor cared. Had someone come up to us as we stood by our father’s selling table in the weeks following his death—our hands slick with fish and smelling of the blachang we sold for ten baht a bowl—and told us that the king, who had designed the temple himself, had less than five years to live, or that Wat Arun would be completed only after his death by his son, it would have meant nothing to us. The capital, less than three days’ journey down the river, was a separate world: remote as the stars, vaguely mythical, as indifferent to our fate as a tiger to the snail beneath his paws. The earth spun, kings died, stomachs rumbled.
    That was the year we went to work. We never stopped. Our mother, desperate to feed the four of us who had survived, had first tried extracting oil from coconuts. Finding the labor hopelessly slow and unprofitable, she began gathering broken earthenware, fixing it as best she could, and selling it for a few baht in the marketplace. It came to nothing. And then Ha Lung, who had been a friend of our father’s, and who had lost two of his own children, hired us to help him with his catch, and our fortunes changed. Eng and I worked well together, pulling or lifting nearly as much as a grown man, able to clean two fish at a time. A year later, we bought our own boat with the small amount of money we had saved and went out on the river alone. The other men, amused at the sight of us double-poling up the khlong , made room for us to pass. Our income increased.
    It was Eng, who had always had a nose for money, who first suggested we use our boat to buy cheap goods up along the river, then ferry them down to the floating marketplace. He had seen the other merchants selling