Linh had experienced visions ever since she could remember. Sometimes they took the form of dreams, sometimes they came as sudden, direct thoughts, most of the time they manifested themselves as vague feelings – a tingling lightness, a giddiness, if good luck was in the offing; an uneasy, shivering shudder if misfortune lurked in the shadows. Over the years, her neighbors in the little fishing village where she and her husband lived had developed a habit of seeking her advice before pursuing any significant undertaking. Her husband was annoyed by their whispers that Linh could predict the future.
She tried to explain it once to a neighbor. “When I close my eyes and let myself float, I become aware of this vast, incredibly intricate, extremely beautiful, complex web that connects all places, all people, and all times. Events are unavoidable because the web draws us in, pulling, pulling, pulling us inescapably to a convergence within the web itself. And like a spider’s web, certain places on the web dazzle with dewdrops in the morning sunlight, but other places are dark and deadly. Sometimes I am aware of the entire web, but only vaguely; sometimes I perceive a certain area of the web, but not clearly; and sometimes I feel myself dancing on a single strand of the web and feel its vibrations go through me. Those are the times when I have my clearest premonitions.”
One night, just before the New Year’s Tet holiday, quivering fragments of dreams chased her like hungry, howling hounds through the misty blue-green jungle. Serpents raised their heads. Birds pecked at the window. In her wakeful somnolence, she instinctively wrapped her arms and legs around her husband, clasping him tighter, ever tighter. For some moments she awoke completely and gazed on his rugged, wind-carved, salt-seasoned face in the copper moonlight. A tear seeped from his eye in slumber. The surf broke rhythmically, restlessly, breathlessly on the rocky shore.
In the morning, she begged him not to go out in his boat. Her premonitions were usually vague, she admitted, but this time she was sure the dreams were a warning to avoid the sea. He dismissed her apprehensions with his usual impatient jeer. “I have to earn a living, do I not? I am a fisherman, am I not? Save your dreams for your superstitious friends. I am a man of the world – this world. And I cannot be bothered with dreams.”
She cried the entire day. When they carried his body back into the village in the early evening, she was already dressed in white.
With no children and no near relations to take care of her, Linh began a new life in middle age as a roaming fortune-teller. She traveled from town to town, village to village, and hamlet to hamlet, staying for two or three days in the smaller hamlets, two or three weeks in the larger towns. She laid a white cloth on the ground, placed incense sticks in a goblet filled with sand, placed thirty coins in three rows of ten on the cloth, kept pencils and slips of paper nearby, wrapped a silken red scarf around her neck, and put her conical non-la hat on her head in preparation for her customers.
Linh did not use all the paraphernalia that some other fortune tellers used, although she understood the importance of “putting on a show” for the customers. Sometimes, she gathered the coins in her cupped hands and requested the customer to take out a handful. Then she would have them place the coins they had chosen back down on the cloth where she would feign to “read” them. Sometimes she asked her customers to write down their date and time of birth on a slip of paper. Sometimes she would go into a trance to communicate with the spirits. All these activities were part of the show. The real fortune telling began when she examined her customers’ hands – the tactile contact often induced the intuitive sensation she sought for genuine premonitions. These sensations usually were so vague as to border on being nonexistent, but occasionally, the impressions produced vivid glimpses of half-formed figures that fluttered before her eyes like dreams in wakefulness – vibrating strands in the web.
Once, a young mother – most of her customers were women – came to have her fortune told. After chafing the woman’s hands a few moments, Linh suddenly felt an urgency and blurted out, “Go home! Run! Your daughter! She needs you now!” Frightened, the woman ran down the dirt road to her home about a mile away to find that her ten-year-old daughter had cut her hand badly with a knife while slicing onions to help prepare the evening meal. The mother was able to stop the bleeding and bring her daughter to the village clinic for medical attention. That incident made Linh something of a local celebrity. Word spread, and she thereafter never had a shortage of customers wherever she traveled.
One hot, sultry mid-morning, Linh walked past sparkling emerald green rice paddies to the local community house of a small hamlet near the sea. The dinh was a small structure of bamboo and thatch, surrounded by banana and coconut trees. Two water buffalo lolled in the grassy area in front. A monk lived there, and Linh received his permission and his blessing before she spread out her sheet. A crowd of twenty or thirty women had gathered before she had even finished lighting her incense sticks and lining up her coins – nearly all of the men had already left for their work in the fields.
Linh felt somewhat queasy as she took her seat on a small plastic stool. She ascribed it to the heat and humidity. She called over the first woman in the queue, a smiling woman wearing a green smock over a red shirt and black ankle-length skirt, who looked to be between 30 and 35 years old. “What is your name?” asked Linh as she took the woman’s right hand in her own.
“My name is Quy, Ha thi Quy,” said the woman with an eager expression. She and all the other women here and in the surrounding hamlets had heard about Linh’s powers, and were anxious to learn what the future had in store for them.
The unsettled feeling in Linh’s stomach worsened. Beads of perspiration dropped from her face. She continued to hold the woman’s hand and closed her eyes. She heard a kind of rumbling – a mechanical rumbling – loud, deafening, horrendous, reverberating with a rhythmic insistence. Then, as if far in the distance, she heard screaming – not actual screams, but more like far-away echoes of screams, awful, agonizing, appalling – emanating from a ditch of misery.
Linh opened her eyes. She looked around at the other women who had gathered about. She looked from face to face. Some of them were younger; some of them were older. All of them were smiling. All of them were eager for a glimpse into the future. Linh continued to hold the woman’s hand. She suddenly felt dizzy and disoriented. She momentarily lost her balance and nearly fell off her stool. She faintly heard the voices of the women murmuring with concern. Linh closed her eyes again and saw flashes of light; she heard small bursts of explosions in rapid fire. She saw flames and heard them crackling from burning straw buildings, and she smelled smoke, and she smelled blood. She saw groups of people, women and children, huddled together, frightened. She saw strange looking men with foreign faces, some with blue eyes, some with black skin, and some with red hair. And she heard the screams again, this time not as echoes, but unmistakable, frantic screams of terror, and crying, and loss, and grief, and despair, and devastation.
Linh opened her eyes. She was pale and trembling. She told the women she was not feeling well. She was ill and could not go on. A wave of disappointment swept through the assembly. Most of the women walked back to their homes. A few stayed – one of them brought Linh fresh, cold water to drink, another brought steamed dumplings, yet another brought lukewarm green tea. The woman Quy was disconcerted. After Linh had composed herself somewhat, Quy asked her, “Was it something you saw in my hand? Is there some evil in my future?”
Linh took a deep breath. “It was not just you,” she said. “It was everyone here. I don’t know. I’m not sure what it was I felt. It was so strange, so frightening. I felt that there are these people, these men, these foreign men, and that they are coming here. They are coming from a great distance, and they are being drawn here by forces beyond their control. And yes, there will be evil – a great evil.”
Two or three of the women gasped. They all passed glances among each other, some fearful, some incredulous. Quy said, “That can’t be right. That can’t be true. Why should any foreign men come to this little farming village? What forces could be drawing them here?”
On the same day, a little known Viet Minh general by the name of Vo Nguyen Giap was commanding the bombardment of an airstrip at a place called Dien Bien Phu nearly six hundred miles away.
A world away, in Washington DC, a United States Senator named Joseph McCarthy continued his campaign to frighten Americans about the dangers of Communism. Across town, U.S. President Eisenhower fretted about the situation of the French in Indochina, and contemplated the “falling domino principle.”
Little Rusty Calley, small even for his eleven years, was hoping his father would take him to see one of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ spring training “A” games at the stadium not far from his family’s two story stucco house in Miami.
Five-year-old Varnado Simpson, lay asleep in the small house where his family lived in the poorer section of Jackson, Mississippi, perhaps dreaming of angels.
Seventeen-year-old Earnest Medina of Springer, New Mexico, fifteen-year-old David Mitchell of Saint Francisville, Louisiana, eight-year-old Paul Meadlo, eight-year-old Jerry Smith, seven-year-old Charlie Hutto, Mike Terry, Gene Oliver, Tommy Willingham, and many other little boys lay snug asleep thousands of miles away, safe in their homes.
– All of them caught on strands in the web, and the web drawing them in, slowly but inexorably, its pull almost imperceptible, but finally inevitable.
