Revering Remains
Casey Bognore

At eight-fifteen on the morning after Labor Day, Dennis Brooks looked up at the tops of the maple trees shimmering golden in the early sun, their premature decay the result of an exceptionally dry summer. Beneath his gloved hand, breaking the stillness of the alley, gears ground noisily hauling the dumpster end over end into the rear of his trash collection truck.

He had seen it all during his sixteen years in the business, all the leavings of humanity, rich and poor, stuffed once into paper bags and now into plastic. He still peered into the dumpsters before he hooked them with chains and thudded their noisome contents into his truck — treasures could be found on any given day — but long gone was the dream of finding something of worth among the debris. Born and raised in the inner city, Dennis Brooks didn’t have to look for his dream anymore: he was living it. His wife and his daughter in a modest house were his treasure, they and servicing a moderately affluent suburb with his own truck.

By habit alone, then, he checked the spilled contents as he pulled the compacting blade lever to scoop the refuse into the truck’s innards. He thought at first it was just a broken rail from a chair, a nut-brown stick of wood poking out from between dark green trash bags. Then he spotted the fingers, and halted the machine just in time.

* * * * *

Cramped along the northern edge of Rogers Park, Chicago’s northernmost lakefront neighborhood, was a residential oddity three blocks long and two streets wide known among the locals as “The Jungle.” Bound on the east by Lake Michigan and cut off on the west and south by the rapid transit yards, “The Jungle” was starkly bordered on the north by the eight-foot high concrete wall protecting Calvary Cemetery. Topped with barbed wire and embedded shards of glass, the wall was overgrown in spots with ivy rooted on the other side — nature’s attempt at softening reality. Ho Dihn Sie’s family lived in the basement of one of the row of apartment houses lining the cemetery wall.

Bà nôi, the grandmother of Ho Dihn, called the concrete alley separating the wall from the apartment entrances “the cement river.” Along its crowded banks trash receptacles overflowed year round. In the summer months, the smell from them was so noxious that visitors on the cemetery side of the wall questioned the techniques involved in the interment of their departed. In one of the apartments this day after Labor Day, Ho Dihn and his family were waiting anxiously for Bà nôi to return.

“Where could she be?” he asked his father, but the thin man who was sitting on his heels before a small table said nothing. The air in the tiny apartment was stifling, and Ho Dihn tried to cool himself with a worn paper fan.

The original buildings of the Jungle had been chopped up to make hundreds of apartments out of dozens. Along the cement river dim alcoves led to a tangle of stairways that stretched upwards like a wooden net. The units were so small that there was an entrance at the width of every room. Some units had only the single room, others had two. A few — the “luxury” ones — had three. Ho Dihn Sie lived in one of the “luxury” basement units with his three brothers, two sisters, his mother and father, and his grandmother.

Nine years ago he had been born in the larger of the two sleeping rooms — the first true American in the family — emerging into the dark world of The Jungle two months after his family had fled the Old Land, as his grandmother called North Vietnam. Ho’s grandmother, Bà nôi, had started the family business in America with nothing more than peasant tenacity. “In this New Land,” Bà nôi had announced at the beginning, and then reminded the family often over the years as they worked together, “streets are not lined with gold, as was said in the Old Land. But money lines the alleys. It’s called aluminum.”

Every day Bà nôi, her son, and her two eldest grandsons combed the alleyways to the north and south, returning in the early afternoon laden with plastic bags brimful of soda pop and beer cans. They often carried three and four bags apiece, staggering under the sheer size, if not the weight. Then the working line would form: the strongest handled the tampers — heavy wooden blocks lashed to broom handles — while the youngest slipped fresh cans into position and quickly pulled their tiny hands away as the tampers smashed them into flat, shiny disks. Ho Dihn’s mother, often pregnant, was excused from the more arduous tasks, but even she, a baby on one hip, took her place daily on the line, usually stacking the disks atop one another in cardboard boxes for transport at the end of each day to the recycling center that paid the family cash for their efforts.

Ho Dihn’s family operated its line right along the cement river outside their door or moved it up a block to the empty lot next to the rapid transit car park. Sometimes the building manager, Mrs. Johnson, a gigantic black woman who lived on the top floor, would holler down that they had to “Stop that god-awful racket!” Ho preferred to work near their door because people always stared and pointed at them when they set up the line near the public transportation station.

Ho Dihn’s family was not working its line this Tuesday. Since Labor Day meant nothing to them, they had intended to work right through the holiday weekend, taking only the usual Sunday afternoon off when Bà nôi would conduct a simple Buddhist service for the family in the small sleeping room. But on Sunday afternoon Bà nôi did not return home with her bags of cans, and as evening fell, the family began to worry. After searching the dark alleyways for tense hours in vain, Ho Dihn’s father — a son sick with worry — waited up all night for Bà nôi. On Labor Day morning he went to the police station to report a missing person, but he was told he had to wait another twenty-four hours. The family searched to the north and the south all day Monday, but Bà nôi was not to be found. Early this Tuesday morning Ho Dihn’s father returned to the police station to make out a report.

“How much longer must we wait?” Ho Dihn now asked no one in particular.

No one answered.

* * * * *

The Evanston police had cordoned off the alley and yellow-taped a barrier around Dennis Brooks’s truck. An evidence team was carefully examining the contents at the rear. A short while ago the woman’s frail body had been removed by ambulance after the medical examiner performed a cursory examination.

“Ever seen her before?” a detective questioned Dennis who was slumped against the side of a parked car as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

“I think so,” he told the official, staring at the ground. “I can’t be sure, though — her face all contorted like that. How can he be sure it was a heart attack?” he asked, indicating the departing coroner.

“It’s not a rare cause of death. I’ve seen a few myself that looked worse. Depends on how fast they go. The ones that die with the pain, lots of ’em look like that. So, who was she?”

Dennis stared at the overweight, middle-aged white man. If there was compassion anywhere in the puffy face, it remained hidden in the folds. “I think she was a trash-picker. One of them who went for cans. Sometimes I’d see her — or another one a lot like her — strippin’ the alley ahead of me. Short little thing, she could just about lean over the edge of the dumpsters. If they were only half-full, she’d actually climb up over the side and drop down into them. Made me sick to see her doin’ that. But we all have to make a livin’ best we can, I guess. That was her bread and butter.”

“Won’t be for long. Picking up cans’ll be illegal next month when the mandatory recycling program starts.”

Dennis shook his head, his dark brow creased with concern. “What’ll happen to people like her?”

“Who knows?” the detective shrugged. He clearly didn’t care. “She’ll likely get arrested once or twice, her and her kind, then they’ll find some other way to survive.”

“She oughtn’t to have gone like that — not inside one of them.” Dennis bit his lip. “It’s terrible. Just plain terrible. Makes me feel sick inside.”

“Any idea what her name was? Where she lived?”

Dennis shook his head. “She was a trash-picker. Could’ve lived anywhere. And maybe even nowhere. Just terrible, you know?”

* * * * *

Ho Dihn grew increasingly impatient waiting in the small room with the others. Finally, he slipped out of the vigil on the pretext of going to the alley for a breath of air. Once outside, he headed for his favorite place to think through problems: the other side of the cement river — Calvary Cemetery.

For most of his young life he had only seen the burial grounds when Bà nôi allowed him to accompany her to the top floor to pay Mrs. Johnson the monthly rent. On the way up the back stairs, he would peer secretly over the splintery railing as the high cement wall receded below and beyond the barbed wire a silent, strange, grassy field of stone structures came into view. He would hang back as Bà nôi knocked at Mrs. Johnson’s door because from the top floor, five stories up, the acres of dead were fully visible, laid out with streets and walkways like a village for living people but devoid of all color except for the green grass and an occasional red-ribboned wreath.

Then two years ago at age seven, during his first year of schoolmates, his only acquaintances outside the family, he had taken a dare one day after school and entered the cemetery grounds. He did it alone, and the next day when he told the boy who had dared him, the kid shrugged, “So, big deal.” He never mentioned it again to anyone. Certainly he never wanted Bà nôi to find out. She would be most angry.

“In the Old Land,” she had told him when he was six and had asked about the other side of the cement river, “we washed and anointed our dead and brought them to the priest. He prayed over them, and then stood with the family at the funeral pyre where the flames cleansed the spirit of our loved ones. Later, he helped the family scatter the ashes in the rice fields. In this way, we kept our ancestors in our crops.

“Here, they put the body in a box and plant the box in the ground like a seed. Then to make sure the spirit does not grow, they put a heavy stone on the ground above the box. Some even build houses of stone over their dead.”

“Why?” he had asked her. “Why don’t they do like we do?”

Bà nôi shook her gray head in bewilderment and consternation. “It is one of the many foolishnesses of this country that we must protect ourselves from and take pains to avoid.” Other foolishnesses, she taught him over the years, included all fast foods, television, shiny cars, rock music, and women with paint on their faces.

“Why must we not go in there, Bà nôi?”

“Those poor souls who lie in that ground are not happy, Ho Dihn. It is not wise to walk among them. The dead must be happy, or there will be misery around the place of their unrest. Remember what I tell you, my grandson.”

But instead of unrest, Ho Dihn found a quiet peace in the place with trimmed grass and rows of stones and sculptures. Some graves had only a flat stone nearly buried in the grass, but most had at least an upright stone with their names and the dates of their births and deaths cut into the rock. Others — many of them — had statues or houses to commemorate their passing. Ho Dihn had three favorite sites.

Entering through the back gate across from the lake, Ho came quickly to the first grave he liked to visit. Atop a white granite stone stood the small sculpture of a child scattering flowers over the resting site of Lina May Xelowski, who was born on December 6, 1915 and who died exactly two years later. Ho Dihn liked that she had a name which did not sound American — not like Hooley or Collins, or Sanders, or even Hogg. Lina May Xelowski! Why, it was not so different than Ho Dihn Sie. And he thought it poetic that her brief life lasted two years, precisely. To die on your birthday, that was something.

The second site he called the Grave of the Unknown Child. In the left wing of the grounds on a tiny plot a small alabaster angel, less than a foot high, guarded an unnamed spot. Ho Dihn felt that it must be the grave of a child, although there was no way to be certain, and he spent many minutes of his visits standing before the angel and wondering what the child it memorialized had been like. Once in a while, but not too often, he pretended that the grave was his. Nameless, it could be. He wondered what it would be like to be buried in the cool damp ground.

The third site was Ho’s favorite. Flanked in death by his mother Catherine (1912) and his father George (1922), Josie Lyon had died on December 4, 1891, at the age of nine, the same age as Ho. The dead boy must have been much loved by his parents, Ho believed, because besides arranging their graves protectively around his, they had erected a kind of shrine to his memory. Inside a hollowed-out, domed cylinder of stone five feet high and protected by a heavy glass door stood a white marble statue of Josie. Virtually the same size and height as Ho, the marble Josie was dressed in American clothes from the last century and leaned against a pedestal with his elbow. In his other hand, he held a lily. Thanks to the sculptor’s art, he looked out through the glass with a delicate smile and eyes filled with trust. From the first moment that he saw the statue, Ho knew that he and Josie would have been friends had they lived at the same time. At least, Ho hoped they would. Josie had the kind of American face that Ho wished would befriend him.

Usually Ho simply stood in front of the shrine and looked at the statue. Once, however, he had reached out and touched the handle of the glass door. The metal was cold and green with age. He tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. This day he extended his arm and touched his hand to the glass right before Josie’s face, as if to caress it. The glass felt chilled against his palm even though the air was quite warm. A shiver ran up Ho Dihn’s arm and down his back, and the image of Bà nôi’s face popped vividly into his mind. He briefly saw a vision of her standing alabaster-white inside the glass in place of Josie Lyon’s statue. He grew deeply frightened.

Where was she?

* * * * *

The missing persons report was still on the blotter of the Rogers Park desk sergeant awaiting assignment when the Evanston police bulletin came over the wires. Their Jane Doe fit the description given by Mr. Sie right down to the mole on the left earlobe. The desk sergeant called Evanston and arranged to have Mr. Sie picked up and brought to the nearby suburb for a positive identification of the body.

That night Ho’s father discussed the funeral arrangements with the distraught family, as Ho listened through his grief. There was to be an autopsy — it was a matter of law, the police had said — and the city of Evanston would pay for that because they needed to have a cause of death for their records. But to reduce Bà nôi to ashes, as she would have wanted, was going to take nearly all of the family’s meager savings. That meant they would have to work harder than ever at their business. That meant there would be little time to mourn Bà nôi.

“What will be done with her ashes?” Ho asked. “We have no rice fields.”

“We will set them adrift on the tides of the great lake,” his father told him, “at the spot where the cement river ends.”

“Then we will lose her forever,” Ho worried. “We need rice fields. Or some place of importance. This is Bà nôi.”

“If you can find a suitable place,” his father conceded, “we will consider it. If not, it is the lake.”

Lying on his mat in the large sleeping room beside his brothers and sisters, Ho Dihn endured Bà nôi’s loss in deep sadness and thought late into the night about an appropriate place to scatter her ashes. It was because he was awake that he heard his father’s muffled sobbing from the small sleeping room and his mother’s words of comfort. At one point between the grief and the consolation, in a terrible moment of shocked comprehension, Ho Dihn discovered the truth about where his grandmother had died. He fought the indignation that swelled his chest for as long as he could, and then he rose, dressed, and slipped silently outside, holding back his anger and his tears until he was running along the cement river, running as if he would never stop.

* * * * *

Like Ho Dihn that night, Dennis Brooks was also unable to sleep. Like Ho, the thought of the dead woman in the dumpster made his stomach turn and his chest ache. In the dark of his bedroom in Rogers Park not a mile south of The Jungle, the shameful circumstances of her death became an obscene symbol of the injustices of urban life, especially for minorities.

“What’s the matter?” asked his wife, Celia, turning on the bedside lamp. They both blinked away the brightness for several seconds.

“That woman today. It should never have happened. Human beings shouldn’t die like that. Not there. Not on my route. Not in my customers’ bin.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Celia said to him. “You didn’t tell her to go through the trash to make a living.”

“Yeah, I know. But in a very real way, she did what I do. I go through people’s garbage for a living, too, don’t you see? What’s to say I won’t have a heart attack one day when I’m at work? I could just keel over at the edge of a dumpster and fall in — ”

“Stop it.”

“You’re always sayin’ I work too hard, I put in too many hours, always tellin’ me I need a helper.”

“Dennis, stop it.”

“Oh, they’d find me soon enough, my truck blocking the alley would call attention, but, Celie, I could still die in a dumpster!”

“Dennis, just stop it! I mean it! You’re not gonna die in some dumpster. That poor woman was just unlucky, and besides she lived a very different lifestyle. It’s a wonder she lasted as long as she did, living like that.”

“We can’t judge her.”

“The judgment’s already been made by where she died.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. It’s unfair.”

“Then hire an assistant. You know you need one.” She tried to chide him out of his funk. “And tell him to pull you out if you keel over into a dumpster. At least before he calls me.”

“Aren’t you the consolin’ wife tonight.”

She switched off the light and snuggled up against her husband. “Life’s always been unfair, baby. Not you or anybody else can change that.”

“But I don’t have to like it.”

“If you want to worry about something you can do something about, try figuring out how we’re gonna handle your daughter’s newest boyfriend. He wants to marry Tina and move them to Israel.”

“Israel?”

“He’s Jewish. She met him in Dramatics class.”

Dennis kissed his wife. “They don’t have dumpsters in Israel, I hear. They still burn their refuse. People pile plastic bags at the edge of the road. I read an article in Sanitation News last month.”

“Does that make you feel any better?”

“Not the slightest bit.”

* * * * *

Ho Dihn’s shirt was ripped at the elbow where it had caught on the barbed wire. Both of his hands were bleeding from the jagged glass on the top of the wall. He took no notice of the pain. He felt nothing but his anger. Sliding down the ivy vines, his small figure was suddenly inside locked Calvary Cemetery.

Mindful of the night security guard in the gatehouse at the front entrance, he made his way cautiously to Lina May Xelowski’s grave. Above the granite stone the alabaster child was strewing flowers in the moonlight. Ho took the cold figure in his small hands, smudging its sides with his bloodied palms, and shoved. At first it would not budge, but then Ho conjured up an image of Bà nôi at the bottom of a dumpster and, with a surge of anger and outrage, quickly toppled the statue. The alabaster child broke in two on the grass.

He moved on to the angel that marked the Grave of the Unknown Child. With one kick, he knocked it on its side. The grass caught one wing at the tip, leaving the other jutting up at an odd angle like a small white flag frozen in mid-surrender.

At Josie Lyon’s memorial Ho whispered his rage at the encased white statue. “Why is it that a lifeless thing like you stands in a better place than where Bà nôi died?” He tried to kick in the glass, but the pane was too thick. “I hate you, Josie Lyon, you and all your money! I bet none of your family ever died in a — in — ”

He looked around for something to help him desecrate the shrine, but found nothing. The site stood at the edge of the main avenue, and suddenly in the distance the watchman’s flashlight began bobbing toward him. Ho reached up and scraped the palms of his hands on the stone to reopen the cuts. Through the pain he coughed up some phlegm. Dragging his palms down the glass, he spit at the spot directly in front of the statue’s face. “That’s what I think of people dying no better than rats.”

The night watchman called out a warning in his direction, and Ho took off running, spurred by rage and hurt, fleeing through the rows of menacing stones to the far corner of the graveyard where, like a fevered animal, he climbed the ivy, shedding bloodied leaves behind him. Within seconds he was over the wall.

* * * * *

Dennis Brooks usually started his route at seven in the morning. This day he was on the road before five. Unable to sleep, he decided to try to make up the time lost the day before when the police had detained him. As the truck rumbled through the pre-dawn alleyways, he knew he was waking up customers by the blockful, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Several times his eyes played tricks on him. Dreadful visions shaped themselves from cardboard boxes and plastic trash bags caught in the truck’s headlights. Propped up against dumpster after dumpster, the lifeless bodies of trashpickers panicked him time and again. Even real rubbish seemed sinister and grotesque in the dark. Discarded dolls were the worst. Atop the cover of one garbage pail someone had positioned a ratty-haired, decapitated doll’s head, one eye closed in a sardonic wink. Dennis looked away quickly and drove on past.

Then, just before sunrise, in an unguarded moment as he began to pull a dumpster from its darkened gangway toward the truck, Dennis froze with fright and incredulity. There between the dumpster and the brick of the apartment building hid the slumped body of a young boy. With his hands arrested in their reach, Dennis stared and stared, his vision blurred into blindness by the terrifying thought of looking more closely at the child. He stood unmoving for what seemed an eternity. The twitch of a small finger finally released him, and with a gasp of relief he leaned down and gently shook a thin, bony shoulder.

“You all right, boy?”

Ho Dihn opened his eyes and looked into the contorted, tear-stained face of a large black man. He pulled back from the thick hand on his shoulder. As the man straightened up, Ho struggled stiffly to his feet.

“You didn’t sleep there all night, did you?”

Ho shook his head.

“You got a home? Folks?”

Ho nodded, his eyes averted. He wanted to run, but there was no escape. He was trapped between the dumpster and the building. The only way out was through this big black man who was trying to smile, despite his tears.

“C’mon. You can talk to me.”

Dennis could make out clearly in the growing dawn light that this was a small, young boy, but he couldn’t shake the notion that he looked so much like the old woman. So much like! But it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.

The man stared at him so intently that Ho Dihn was overcome by a shivering fear — of this stranger, of the consequences of the things he did last night, and of the aching sense of loss inside him.
“My Bà nôi is dead — my grandmother,” he said in a whisper, and the words unleashed a flood of tears.

Dennis reached out to him, and Ho Dihn leaned into the rough material of his work clothes. Holding the sobbing boy, Dennis knew instinctively the coincidence was real. “I know,” he said, fighting his own tears. “I’m the one who found her.”

They stood together, sharing their grief in silence, holding each other. At length, Ho Dihn pulled back and looked up at Dennis Brooks. “You found Bà nôi?”

Dennis nodded. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Joe,” Ho Dihn told him. It was the name he used at school because it sounded more American. But when Dennis called him that, he stopped him. Looking down at the ground, he said quietly,

“No — I lied. It’s not Joe. It’s Ho. Ho Dihn.”

“Okay, Ho Dihn. Listen to me.” Dennis put his hand on the crown of Ho’s straight black hair. “Your grandmother loved you very much, am I right? And you loved her very much, isn’t that right? And you know she was working hard for you when she died, don’t you?” Ho nodded to each of these questions. “Good. Now listen carefully. There’s no shame in a person’s work, not even if it’s working with garbage. Do you understand?”

“But Bà nôi died — she died — ” He pointed at the large metal container.

“We can’t choose where we die, Ho Dihn. We can’t choose how we die. It doesn’t matter where or how you die — what matters is how you live.”

Ho wiped the tears from his cheeks. There was something familiar in what this large, kind man was saying. Ho thought several moments about it, and the smiling image of Bà nôi filled his head.

“That’s the kind of thing my grandmother always says,” he finally realized. “Always said,” he corrected himself softly.

Dennis nodded. “You listen to what’s in here,” he reached out and tapped a thick brown finger gently on Ho Dihn’s small chest, “and she’ll always speak to you.”

Ho managed a weak grin. “She could have said that, too.”

“What do you s’pose she’d say to my giving you a ride home? Ever sit up in the cab of one of these monsters? You can see over the tops of garages.”

* * * * *

On the wooden table in the Sie family’s large sleeping room rested a black metal box about the size of a loaf of bread. Bà nôi was in that box. Even the smallest child of three knew that. The family kept a silent vigil beside it for four hours. Then Ho’s father announced it was time to scatter the ashes on the lake’s peaceful waves.

“Please,” Ho asked his father. “Can I put some of the ashes in a special spot I have found? Just a little.”

Ho’s father looked at his first American-born son. Three days before, Ho was not to be found when the family rose to start its morning. Before anyone could worry much, though, he was delivered to their door by a trashman in a great truck. Watching Ho jump down from the cab, Mr. Sie had returned the driver’s salute. Could it be? he wondered for a moment, and as quickly dismissed the idea. The man leaned out of his cab and extended a piece of paper to Mr. Sie. As Mr. Sie reached to take it, the man said, “I need an assistant. Ho tells me you know about the trash business. You want to give it a try, give me a call. The number’s on the card.” Then with a wave the man drove off, gears grinding in the early morning quiet. Ho explained that he had taken a walk in the middle of the night to think about Bà nôi and, seeing the sun rise while he was quite a ways from home, had accepted the offered ride in order to be back before anyone became alarmed. Mr. Sie knew that his mother’s death had stricken the boy deeply, maybe even more than it had him. He granted Ho’s request now, asking, “Is it a suitable place, my son?”

“You will see,” Ho assented.

The family walked single file behind Mr. Sie down the cement river to the lakefront. In their best thriftware the members of the funeral procession moved to the traffic light and waited in silence for the crossing signal. On the other side of the road they climbed the huge rocks of the seawall and disappeared from the view of passing cars. The family carefully arranged itself, and Mr. Sie led them in silent prayer.

After several minutes, Mr. Sie opened the metal box and allowed an outgoing breeze to take Bà nôi away into the lake’s calm. Ho almost called out, thinking his father would forget and release all the contents, but Mr. Sie righted the box before that happened. He turned and passed the box to Ho Dihn, who took it with great reverence and care.

Ho Dihn led them back across the roadway, but instead of returning up the cement river he continued along the grass beside the iron fence that fronted the lake side of Calvary Cemetery. Entering the back gate, Ho averted his eyes from the warning sign and quaked inside as he coaxed the hesitant family into the grounds.

Ho looked anxiously at Lina May Xelowski’s grave as they passed. The alabaster child was back on top of the stone, clean and whole, as if nothing had ever happened, but Ho could barely make out the fracture line where glue was visible. At the Grave of the Unknown Child the angel was also righted back to normalcy, and farther on Josie Lyon’s glass shield had been wiped clean. Ho felt the restorations like his grandmother’s own forgiveness, and the box trembled in his fingers.
Still in single file, Ho’s family followed him into a side avenue. Past row after row of graves, they traced the walkway along the wall that fronted the apartment buildings across the cement river. It was the first time that any of them other than Ho had been inside the cemetery, and they stayed together in a tight group as if they were trespassing.

As they neared the place where, on the other side of the wall, Mrs. Johnson’s bright red kitchen curtains could be seen on the top floor, Ho stopped. With a quick check to see that they were alone, he motioned the family toward the wall and arranged them in an arc. The few stones here were the inexpensive kind of rock plaque at ground level. Everyone used caution not to step on any.

“Will this do?” Ho Dihn asked his father, nodding toward the wall.

The man saw his son’s intent, and inclined his head in a silent blessing.

Ho reverently approached the wall. Squatting down slowly, he reached gingerly through the ivy at the base of the cement, searching carefully until he felt the several places where the vines entered the ground.

He opened the metal box with care. “Now, Bà nôi,” he whispered, gently emptying the contents at the ivy’s feet, “enter these plants. Nourish them and help them grow strong with your spirit. Next spring, show them the way through the barbed wire and past the broken glass. Once over the wall, guide them, Bà nôi, down the other side.” He bowed his head. “We will be waiting for you.”

Born and raised in Boston, I spent my adult life in Chicago where I taught Creative Writing at Northwestern University for 10 years. Several years ago I moved here to Maine to live in the woods and pursue my fiction ambitions. I’ve owned my own business for over 25 years, making my living as a public relations and science writer, numbering among my clients, Business Week, and Forbes Magazine. I also continually write fiction and have just completed a new novel.