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Hoa crouched beside me and Tho next to her, anxious still, I knew, and my daughter turned her face up to me and then away and I leaned near and her hair smelled of the rain, smelled of the water that we gathered in a great stone pot, as is our way here, and we believe that the spirits of our ancestors come close to us and need our prayers, the prayers in our houses with the smoke of incense rising, and I understood how odd and wonderful the air of this village was now because I came here and married and made this child. The air here was filled with the spirits of Tho’s coffee farmers and tobacco farmers and woodcutters but also filled with the spirits of my clothiers and newspapermen and bankers, all drawn into this place, into my house, by our incense and our prayers, all brought together by my child, the confluence of families who were, in that invisible realm, astonished to find themselves together.

And I said, “Each new year when I was a child, the god of the hearth went to heaven from my house in America. He came to the council of the gods and he said, There are children in this house and they sleep each night in great fear and they have places on their bodies that are the color of the sky in the highlands of Vietnam just after the sun has disappeared. And they pray, even the youngest of them, a boy, for escape and when they love each other, these children, it is to pray that each of the others escapes. And they know that this will happen for them, if at all, one at a time. And this house is empty of incense. And this house sees no spirits in the world. ”

And I stopped speaking and the faces in the circle lowered their eyes in deference to me and they understood and they said no more and we all rose and we went away and that night I lay in the dark on a straw mat and my wife lay awake next to me.

I could hear her faintly jagged breath and I said, “There was no woman in that life. ” And my wife sighed softly and her breathing grew as smooth as her body when I first touched her and I closed my eyes.

And I thought of this place in Vietnam where I lay and how it grows coffee and it grows tobacco, and in that other life there was a time in the morning when I could slip out of the house and there was no one around but me and I knew that one day I would escape, and inside they drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and read the newspaper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam in 1971 as a Vietnamese linguist. He is the author of nine novels and two collections of stories. The short stories in this collection have appeared in such places as The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Francis Eppes Professor of English holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.