Moonrise
The night of her grandmother’s funeral was moonless. All the almanacs and newspapers and calendars said so.
Nevertheless, Bian O’Kelly saw the moon rise at dusk that night.
No one else had the time or the inclination to look at the sky. Her mother was flying around getting dressed, making sure everyone else was dressed, and making sure her mother’s old friends were comfortable. Her father was very much occupied with staying out of the way.
Bian’s surviving grandmother, Marilyn O’Kelly, alternated between pinching Bian’s cheeks and whispering scandalized rumors to anyone who would listen. Her whisper was certainly loud enough that Bian could hear her.
The very idea of a nighttime funeral was outlandish and improper, but there had never been any reasoning with her daughter-in-law, or with the deceased.
Those Vietnamese were always odd, anyway.
Bian couldn’t say that she didn’t begrudge her grandmother her perverse enjoyment of the event, but it was something she had always been accustomed to; it was the way things had always been. Grandmother Marilyn was distant (unless something was juicy enough to catch her gossip-loving eye), and she was disapproving of anything that had anything to do with her daughter-in-law’s Asian heritage.
Bian had always thought that her grandmother must have been horrified when her eldest son had chosen to marry a Vietnamese refugee and migrant worker.
Marilyn O’Kelly had certainly always avoided her son’s strange household, composed of the boy she had raised, and the women she had never had anything to do with, nor anything in common with.
Marilyn had been born a reasonable looking, Irish Catholic girl, and she had married a reasonable looking, Irish Catholic boy her parents had approved of. She’d had three reasonable looking, Irish Catholic children, two of whom had neatly followed in her footsteps.
Only her oldest, Tom, had broken with expectations, and so she always floundered around him.
Marilyn O’Kelly was about rules, restrictions, and expectations.
On the other hand, her mother’s mother had always been about stories and magic. On countless evenings just like this one, she had curled up with the old women on the front porch and listened while she told her tales.
With Ho Tha'm, the stories weren’t so much told as they were merely spoken. It had always seemed to Bian that stories were already out there, quivering in the night, and they only needed her grandmother’s low, lisping voice to bring them to life.
Her favorite stories had always been the true ones.
***
“Tell me a story, Granna.” The voice was light and lisping, and imperious in the way that only young children could master.
It was just after twilight, and the two were seated on the front porch, a throw wrapped around thte to ward off the chill.
They had about twenty minutes until Mai O’Kelly came to fetch her five-year-old daughter for bed.
“What kind of story do you want to hear, Bian?” asked her grandmother. She was sixty-five years old, and for all of her slender appearance, strong and tough. Her hair was mostly silver now, but her eyes were still sharp and black. Her skin was amzingly smooth for a woman of her age.
She did not look like a woman who had lost three sons to a brutal war, and who had managed to spirit herself, her youngest daughter, and all the belongings they could carry across an ocean.
“I want o hear about when you were a girl.”
Ho Tha'm chuckled. “You want to hear about the Moon Festival again.”
Bian poked her grandmother in the arm. “It’s you’re favorite too, Granna.”
“So it is,” smiled the older woman. She paused, gathering her memories.
When she spoke again, it was with the voice she reserved for her stories.
“When I was a girl, the year was marked by the festivals.”
Tha'm had grown up in a remote section of Northern Vietnam that had been very close to the Chinese border. The people there had stubbornly clung to Chinese traditions, even after they had ceased to be traditions in China proper.
Every spring, there was a festival of the Moon.
Unlike most Western holidays, those in Asia didn’t have set dates for celebration. The Star festival was held in the dark of winter, when the stars were brightest in the sky. The Festival of the Sun for in high summer, when the sun burned the brightest.
The Moon Festival was celebrated in the Spring, on the first night that the Moon rose again after being missing for three days.
It was the first celebration Tha'm’s tiny village had after the winter rains finally ceased, and thus it was beloved by everyone there.
But few loved it as much as Tha'm herself did.
The year she turned sixteen, she was chosen to be the Moon-Maiden. It was hardly the most prestigious title a marriageable young woman could have haid; it was more commonly desired to be the either the Sun-Maiden, the representative of the lush summer, or the Star-Maiden, the representative of the light in the dark winter. It was the post that young Tha'm desired most, however, so she was more than content.
She spent three months practicing her dance, in the cold, wet woods behind her family’s house.
That was where her future husband first saw her--a slim girl with flying black hair, dancing under the moonlight. He was entranced, half-convinced that she was no mortal, but perhaps the moon goddess herself.
Weeks later, when he saw her dance again, this time in the traditional white and silver silk robes, he approached her father to ask for her hand in marriage.
And on the night that Tha'm danced so perfectly for the sake of the Moon, she became an engaged woman.
“And that is how I met your grandfather,” Tha'm finished.
“Did you love him?” asked Bian.
Tha'm hesitated. “Not at first. At first he was a stranger to me. But I grew to love him very much
And the time of the Moon Festival was always very special to us.”
***
Each time she told her granddaughter a story, Ho Tha'm would give Bian many reasons for choosing the Moon Festival as her favorite--the feel of the still cool air on her skin, the dewy grass under her feet, the light mist that shrouded the everyday world in mystery, the memories of her husband.
The truest reason was because she had always been drawn to the Moon itself. She loved to dance under the Moon, no matter the season, and she rarely missed a moonrise.
The Moon was vital to her, and Bian thought that her grandmother was, perhaps, vital to the Moon.
And that was why, Bian thought with a soft smile, the Moon was rising on a dark night. To say farewell to one of her last children.
“What are your smiling at?” inquired a soft voice behind her.
Bian craned her neck and looked at her mother. Mai O’Kelly was always so beautiful that strangers commonly stared, but on the night of the funeral she was unusually so. Her hair was twisted back into a chignon, and she wore one of the few dresses that had survived the log boat voyage from Saigon to America. It was midnight blue silk, and embroidered delicately with silver stars.
It had been her mother’s wedding dress.
Bian wished that she had something so beautiful to wear, but her only traditional dress was a brilliant scarlet, and Mai hadn’t been willing to scandalize her grandmother to that degree. So Bian wore a simple black dress.
“The moon is rising,” replied Bian as she finally turned her eyes away from her mother, and back to the windowpanes.
“Ah.” Mai smoothed back her daughter’s long black hair. “Your grandmother always loved the moonrise.”
“Yes.”
Another voice spoke from behind them. “It’s time to go, now,” said Tom O’Kelly. “We don’t want to be late.”
***
The funeral was traditionally Vietnamese, with glowing candles surrounding the dead, and a service by a priest dressed in bright red ceremonial robes, extolling the classic virtues of a Vietnamese woman.
Bian thought that her grandmother would have laughed had she been there to hear it. She had never been a paragon of the Asian virtues; instead she had been stubborn and strong and a trickster at times. Without all of those qualities, she and her daughter would not have survived the war.
Ho Tha'm had never been anyone’s idea of perfection, and had never wanted to be. But the priest’s words didn’t matter, because Bian’s grandmother wasn’t there.
She was dancing again, under the rising Moon.
~fin