The Man Who Gave His Wife Away
  By Tom Ireland

Chaw dumped a wheelbarrow full of corncobs on the
fire and made a lot of smoke. This was Asia, and in any
season Asia did not come without smoke: smoking fields
of rice stubble, smoking timber slash, smoking motorbikes,
old men and women smoking cheroots.

His two brothers had left home when they were young
to look for work in the city, but Chaw stayed in the village.
He had seven children and another on the way, he
said, rubbing his potbelly. It was hard to guess his age.
His face was too smooth and free of worry for a man with
seven children.

The couple from the Alps and finally the sisters from
South Africa, quieted by the unexpected cold and overnight
nicotine withdrawal, joined us around the smoky
fire to smoke. Today we would climb higher in the mountains
and visit Chaw’s friend—”if he’s home”—a scheduled
stop on the two-day trek.

“Who was snoring last night?” said Frédéric, a florist
from Toulouse.

“It couldn’t have been me,” I said. “I was awake all night
with the roosters. It must have been Andre.”

An electrical lineman from the Italian alps, Andre knew
no English, but he knew he had been accused of something
and wore a mask of innocence.

“Maybe it was a panther,” said Chaw. “They can make a
sound like a man snoring.”

“Right,” I said. “One of those blonde South African
panthers.”

The two sisters, Simone and Shantelle, clutched their cell phones and
smoked. Shantelle was under suspicion: she had the more pronounced
nose of the two and wore braces on her teeth. It was a little disappointing to have come all the way from America, to have sought out a corner of Thailand where few tourists went, to walk for a day through tropical forest and sleep in a thatched hut, and in the deadest, blackest hour to hear only the manic roosters and the dainty snores of a girl from Johannesburg. No jungle noises. Not so much as a bird or an insect. I’d seen and heard more wild nature on the streets of Chiang Mai.

“Sometimes a panther will come into the village to steal chickens,”
said Chaw. “A boy was attacked not far from here, in another village.”

“Really?” said Simone, the blonder sister. “Was he hurt?”

“Only a little. The panther bit his neck and let him go. Maybe it
thought he was a big chicken.”

The trail followed a steep, sparsely forested ridge. From up there we
could see the congregation of thatched roofs that was the village, the smoke from half a dozen morning fires rising blue in the still air, a boy launching himself on a bicycle from a plywood ramp, oblivious to the foreigners watching from the hillside.

Chaw stopped often to rest: “I must go slowly because of the baby.”
He carried a machete on his belt and a basket with our food and water on his back. Where the ridge leveled out he stopped again to cut two lengths of bamboo for walking sticks. He carved one end of each stick into a whistle, kept one for himself, and gave the other to me. Because I was the slowest? The oldest? Did I look like a man who needed a walking stick?

I’d seen this kind of thing before in Thailand. On another walking
tour, the guide had stopped repeatedly to make toys from plants: a
winged crane from a blade of grass, a hairy flower head transformed
into a spider that did pushups, a branch from a banana tree fashioned
into a hobby horse, a tiny seed pod that snapped open in your hand
when it touched water. Plants were interesting in the eyes of tourists
because of the amusements that could be made from them; animals,
like those little crabs that lived under rocks in the stream, because they could be eaten.

Chaw blew into one end of his stick and made a soft green sound.

“Now you,” he said. After a few tries my whistle made the sound too.

We continued along the trail, Chaw in front, me at the rear, talking
back and forth on our whistles. Of course, this was why I had come to Asia—to walk along a trail in the forest playing a bamboo flute.

Where the slope eased and the shade thickened, Chaw stopped and
blew three long notes. He waited a minute and blew three more. From
a place far down the dark side of the mountain a voice answered. Then I saw the faint track, a slight parting of the leaves, a barely perceptible flattening of the ground that led us down into deeper forest along a tributary ridge, the line of slowest descent. Every now and then Chaw shouted down the mountain, and each time the answering voice was closer. I couldn’t tell if actual words were being exchanged or only shouts, but their meaning was clear: “I am here. Where are you?”

We came out of the trees onto a knob, just a momentary leveling of
the slope. Sitting on a floor of banana leaves under a lean-to of sticks and banana leaves were five dirty people: a man, a woman, two boys, and a girl. The three children looked about the same age, none of them older than eight. They sat before a dying fire with a thick rind of white ash around it. It had been cold enough in the village where we had slept on a raised floor of wooden planks with mattresses and blankets; it was colder here. The five people sitting in their house of banana leaves, really just a surface to reflect the heat from the fire, had no bedding and little in the way of clothing. The man wore only a rag, the woman a cotton skirt and T-shirt, the children T-shirts and nothing more. None of them wore anything on their feet.

The man grinned when Chaw spoke to him—a bony little guy with
folds of loose skin hanging over his ribs. He sat at ease, his feet out in front of him. A fringe of hair circled his otherwise naked skull. His face looked shrunken and collapsed, like the face of a man who had forgotten to put in his dentures, but when he grinned you could see his white and perfectly even teeth, the teeth of a film star. One ear lobe opened in a wide loop: an earring made from an ear; the other had no hole in it but had been stretched in such a way that it hung in a doughy ball and swung free.

The woman was not comfortable. She wasn’t used to visitors and did
not look at us. She sat crumpled next to the man, her legs folded back and under to one side so that the weight of her body seemed about to topple her. We stood there gawking, wanting to hide ourselves from her embarrassment—or was it closer to outrage?—not yet able to see, much less comprehend, who and what we were seeing. There was no way to leave until it was time to leave, no way to turn away and stop looking, to relieve her of the painful weight of our attention. She picked something out of the girl’s hair. The children looked at us with more fear than wonder. We were new but not in any way entertaining. Like their mother, they had not learned to disguise their wish for us to go away.

Chaw took a package wrapped in a banana leaf from his basket and
handed it to the woman. She said something but did not look at him,
either—this man from another tribe who had been born in these mountains and lived his whole life here and even spoke a little of her language. He was yet another foreigner, although not quite so foreign as the rest of us with our expensive cameras and hiking shoes and packs sewn in Thailand and sold overseas before returning with us to their native country. She opened the banana leaf and took out the gleaming strips of pork fat—a gift, or payment in exchange for services? The woman loaded the fat into a length of green bamboo, plugged the open end with the banana leaf, and placed it to steam on the fire.

“They only want the fat,” said Chaw. “They won’t eat pig meat.”

Shantelle offered the woman a bag of snack food she’d brought from
the city, the Thai interpretation of something made in America. The
woman took it without a word or a hint of recognition—no curiosity,
no sign that something had been given and received. She did not once examine the present but held it in her hand and looked to the right and the left and behind her, as if searching for a place to put it away, some way to deal with its strangeness, and finding none, let it drop unprotected on the ground.

Chaw lectured. There were not many Mabry people left, perhaps fifteen or twenty families. They lived in the mountains and hunted,
sometimes in Thailand, sometimes in Laos. They went back and forth
between the two countries without passports. They didn’t have villages. They didn’t raise animals or grow food. They didn’t wash. They didn’t get sick, or if they did, they knew which plants would cure them. They didn’t trade with strangers or touch money. They moved from place to place according to the season and what they could find to eat. The forests that were their home were being cut down. The government of Thailand had tried giving them houses to live in and rice to eat. They didn’t want houses or rice.

Chaw spoke to the man in the man’s language, which he had learned
from him the way he was learning it now, one word at a time: knife,
food, rain, child. He spoke to each of the children and made them say
their names.

“They don’t keep the same children all of the time,” he said. “The
children go back and forth from one family to another.” They married
with the same kind of liberality, until the woman decided to go with
another man, or the man with another woman. This was ordinary behavior for them. They never got jealous. They knew sadness, he said, but not jealousy. Once a Mabry man’s wife died. In sympathy the man’s brother gave him his own wife. The brother missed his wife so much that he cried for three days.

The pork fat was ready to eat—still white and raw, but hot. We stood
there in the clearing that was no more than a slight opening in the
trees, hardly enough room to park a pickup truck, and watched them.
When he was done eating the man took out his pipe and loaded it with some dry leaves from a pouch. His fire kit consisted of a flint; a rectangular piece of steel that had been cut from a machete blade; and a wad of cottony tinder, the fluff from a seed pod, kept dry in a bamboo tube. He held the flint in his fingers, the tinder nesting just below it in the bowl of his left hand, and struck the flint with a sharp swipe of the steel edge. Fire leapt into his hand. The tinder began to smoke.

Certainly it would have been easier to light his pipe with a burning
stick from the fire, but then we would not have seen him perform his magic, and he would not have had the pleasure of showing it to us.
Chaw managed to strike a spark, but it wasn’t enough to catch the tinder on fire. If I had tried, I would have missed and cut my hand to the bone with the wild man’s steel.

Besides the clothes they were wearing, the fire kit which they carried in a bamboo flask, and the pipe that the man was smoking, they had two machetes, both lying on the ground on the floor of banana leaves. There was nothing else—not a single cooking pot. The few objects before us were all that they possessed, with the exception of a spear with a hafted steel blade which the man no longer showed to anyone from outside. He had shown the spear to a Thai person once before, and allowed him to touch it. After that the hunting was bad. Now he kept it hidden, to save it from corruption. When the family moved from one place to another, they took everything they had with them.

“Maybe this is why they have so little,” said Chaw, “so they won’t have to carry it.”

Then it was time for us to continue on our trek and the Mabry family to resume their ordinary, unseen life. I wanted to know what they planned to do for the rest of the day, now that their appointment with Chaw and his clients was over. If they were walking to another place, would they carry on a conversation as they walked, or sing, or make jokes, or be very quiet and listen for the voices of birds and animals? Did they follow known paths through the forest, or was it better for any reason, or none, to go a new way? Were they afraid of snakes? Did they know ahead of time where they would sleep that night, or did they just stop when they were tired? Did they have names for each other that were different from the names they told other people? What was the very last thing the woman would say to her husband before they slept that night? But none of it was my business.

Frédéric asked permission to take pictures, and the rest of us fell in alongside him with our cameras. I had a throw-away Fuji I’d bought in Chiang Mai, a small concession to the law that one must take pictures when visiting a foreign country. The man and woman and their children sat impassively as we snapped away, as if they didn’t know they were having their picture taken, or didn’t know they were participating in whatever we were doing, or knew and didn’t care.

We left the family sitting where we had found them and climbed back up to the ridge, to the place where Chaw had warned them of our approach with his bamboo whistle, and walked further along the trail. Each of us wanted to make some private sense of what we had just witnessed, to find something to compare it to in previous experience. No matter if they had already gone on their way, paying the careful attention to where they stepped that people without shoes do, or were still sitting in their house of banana leaves, talking about where they would go and sit next. They were always at home, couldn’t help being home, except when people came to look and put them in a strange place.

Shantelle saw a vine that looked like a snake. “It is a snake,” said Chaw. Bright green, it hung head down from a green vine so that the two of them, vine and snake, looked like one and the same being. Chaw probed it with his walking stick until it dropped to the ground and disappeared.

We came out of the trees into a sunny clearing, a lychee orchard, where I took a picture of the expedition. The trail went down steeply from there, and then we were walking on a dirt road. We entered the village where our driver was supposed to meet us. Soon I would be returning to the States—my house, my job, my cat—ordinary life.

In the village we waited for our ride in the shade of a small pavilion
with a corrugated steel roof, which served as a place for town meetings. A few teenagers stood around drinking Cokes. There were a couple of benches, and some of us sat on a low adobe wall out of the worst of the heat. The chill of that morning was the memory of another place and time.

“Thank you,” I said to Chaw, handing the walking stick back to him.

“Maybe someone on your next trek will need it.”

Flying home over the Pacific, I thought of my musical walking stick and wished that I hadn’t parted with it so casually.