Little Thuc looked at her dead baby brother’s corpse and suddenly began screaming again. Dzung rocked her for a few more seconds and then carefully handed her to Quoc. She was almost too big for Quoc to hold, but the young boy who in his heart was already a man managed to clutch her to him. Quoc patted her almost mechanically on the back, his face a terrible mix of confusion and duty.

I must have been very bad in my last life, thought Dzung as he silently moved forward to embrace his wife.

At that moment he missed his father more deeply than at any time in his life. And he found himself wondering if his mother might somehow still be alive. So many things had happened since those young days on the sandy banks of the Han River just outside Da Nang with his father walking and singing in the fields among the mulberry bushes and his mother at the cook pot, watching from the house on the road just up the rugged, red-clay hill. And his grandmother looking after him, with her twist of tobacco always dangling low from her lips, beneath her chin. And his brothers, like sentries at the edge of the far road, waiting. And then in the time it takes to say good-bye, all of them together gone like chaff blown by a sudden wind, off to be soldiers, refugees, prisoners, corpses, ghosts.

So many things, so many people gone. But no tragedy could have prepared him for staring at his own dead child.

His wife eased little Vong from her lap, leaving the young girl on the bed, and walked over to Dzung, embracing him. They said nothing, for there was nothing left to say. A ritual as old and deep as the culture that spawned them drove them instead to action.

As the children sniffled and watched, Dzung and Tu began moving silently through their home, as if propelled by unseen commands. Dzung found a small rice bowl and filled it with uncooked rice, placing it just above the baby’s head. His wife boiled an egg and put it on a plate next to the rice bowl, along with a small mound of salt. They lit two white candles, placing one above each of the baby’s shoulders. Dzung brought three joss sticks, lighting them in a candle’s flame and placing them into the bowl of rice. The three joss sticks glowed in the dim, ever-darkening room, filling it with sweet, sad smoke, a wispy fog over their tiny dead son.