Waiting On the Riverbank
Framed in sunset, the father seemed an
Asian portrait. Behind him, sundown colors illuminated him. In front of him,
the dark river was gilded gold with the brightness of the sun sinking in the
skies. Tonight, the father sat atop a bag of sandbags, while tipping a coconut
half into his mouth to drink from it sweet watery milk. He laid the shell down,
and with his hand shielding the sun’s glare, he again took up his watch.
Through the grey before sunrise, he sat. Through bright mornings that baked
into long, afternoons, he watched. Waiting yet when the first stars of night
hung onto the curtain of twilight.
‘And so,’ he thought, ‘another
day without my son.’
The father’s face was etched with
the furrows of the many years, of which his eyes had given over their color.
His face reflected his sad longings: both for his son, and for the hut that he
and his boy left behind when they were herded up and drug into what was called
a hamlet by these round-eyes from across oceans and seas. Mixed-up in his
thoughts were his forsaken hut and his lost son. One intertwined with the
other: both wrestling with his creature-struggle for survival. His time on
earth too lonely and sad to go on: versus an indomitable need to live.
On the days of futility when
despair blackened into clouds hanging heavy in his heart, the father told
himself that by now his hut would have been taken overtaken by the rapacious
growth of mountain jungles. ‘There will be sappers behind the trees, and
My-My (American) bombs overhead. I have no one to go back to, or with; so what
would be the use of returning?’
But on the days when his need to
exist was strong and vibrant, the father’s being filled with longings that took
him back to the hut: free and beautiful under wide skies. He loved most the
bygone hut’s mossy roof studded with wildflowers. When he thought of it,
involuntarily his hands wavered in the air. They were stroking the velvety moss
of the hut’s roof. On those bright days of wildflowers, and his son’s
spontaneous laughter ringing clear and true, the father took despair and
processed it into faith. Those were the days that he saw his hut just as it was
when he and his son left … on a beaten path and protected by the long shadows
of the Sip Sang Mountain
Sometimes hope and despair merged
to become one overwhelming emotion: a vital need for the father to sit by the
riverbank and wait. Wait with his gaze stretched across the horizon, and down
the river of time.
Gently, he called out to the boys
at the river’s edge. He saw them beating schools of catfish into hand-held
nets. “Have you seen my boy?”
They called back, “In a dugout
canoe rowing round a bend in the river.”
“When?”
“Many days ago.”
‘Yes, that could be my son,’
thought the father. ‘But I can’t be certain. Yesterday, a fisherman on a
sampan told me he saw a young man being captured my Kurilian Pirates, and taken
downstream to work the rubber plantations recently overtaken by the Viet Cong.’
So many false sightings, so many
conflicting stories: the father grew more confused every day. But his fierce
and inexplicable, his infinite patience kept him to the riverbank where he
watched the boys with their nets. He was still on the riverbank at dusk when
the boys headed for their nearby village. On the riverbank searching and
waiting when drifts of monsoon clouds dusted the moon. And while waiting, the
father fell asleep and dreamed into the night. In his dreams, the river churned
into a spunky water child that skipped over rocks and swirled with foamy shoals
of fish, then widened into currents too wild for him to overcome,
Wakened by his own sobbing, the
father knew before he could bring himself to say it, either silently or aloud;
yes, his son was gone.
Susan Dale’s poems and fiction are on
Eastown Fiction, Ken *Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Feathered
Flounder, and Hurricane Press. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from
Oneswan.
