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By Root 356 0

her, and he loved her body. He loved it until it started to show. Her hair grew thick, shiny with oil, and smelled of the fresh orange peels that she used to mist her comb. Her face glowed, the color of sand, warm and clean. Her breasts grew tender, sore with milk. She was carrying her fourth and his first. The schoolteacher told her that he was going abroad for further studies. To France, he said. He gave her a small amount of money and no way to contact him. She could have sworn, though, that she saw him a few months later walking out of Saigon's Notre-Dame with a young woman by his side. It was Ash Wednesday, and they each had on their forehead a fingerprint the color of a monsoon sky. My mother took some of the money and bought a bolt of white muslin and an áo dài made of gray silk. For the future, she thought. She knew that it would have been impossible to keep the money in its paper form. If she had hidden it, the Old Man would have found it. He takes everything of value from me, she thought. My mother was eighteen, about to turn nineteen when she gave birth to her last son. She was a young woman, and she had three boys by one man and one by another.

"Please, please, please," my mother begged. She had given what was left of the schoolteacher's money to the midwife, but she was afraid that the woman would renege on their deal.

"Are you sure?" the midwife repeated.

My mother nodded, yes, exhausted from my birth. The midwife stuck her hand inside her, and then there was an unfamiliar pain. When my mother woke up she heard: "She'll survive, but she'll never give birth again." My mother's husband was standing over the midwife as she washed her hands in a basin of water. His arms were folded across his chest. His rosary was caught in the crook of his bent arms, and the cross was pushed up and out. From across the room where my mother lay, she could see the man nailed onto it, the man who had given Himself for her sins, as Father Vincente had told her. For my sins? she had thought.

Her husband approached her, and she turned her head abruptly to one side because she thought he was going to hit her. He held out his right hand and said, "Give them to me."

She heard him say, "Give him to me." But I do not have the baby in my arms, she thought. The baby, she should have known, was of no interest to him. I was a boy and that was good, but otherwise he was through with her.

"I want the earrings," he said. "How am I supposed to pay the midwife?" he asked.

But I have already paid her, my mother thought, for different services, though. The midwife had asked for her payment many months in advance for performing an act of mercy. The midwife had promised to give her a reprieve for the rest of her life. "No more pounding, no more collapsing belly, no more breasts swollen with milk," my mother had begged.

My mother and I liked this ending best:

The night that Father Augustine died, the captain had the man's frail body wrapped in an old tablecloth and dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. Father Augustine's shoes went with him because no one else on board had such small feet. A day later when the ship docked in the harbor of Marseilles, the captain woke up, soaked in his own guilt. The Indochinese whom he had robbed was not just a man but a priest. The captain hastily arranged for Father Augustine's travel journal to make its own arduous journey back to Vietnam and to the Bishop of Saigon. A note from the captain accompanied the journal and declared in a shaky hand: "The Father's dying wish was, of course, respected."

My mother and I enjoyed this version because the last words did not belong to Father Augustine but to the man who took the gold chalices home with him. We wondered how they must have looked displayed on the windowsill of the captain's house. We imagined that they must have caught the glint of the sun and poured its light all over the room. Beautiful, we thought.

When I now think about the story of Father Augustine, I tell myself that the Bishop of Saigon must have known—not about my mother's blasphemous endings