The Notebook on the Seventh Terrace

Mai had been home three days and had not yet climbed to the seventh terrace. She told herself it was the funeral arrangements, the relatives who needed feeding, the endless small forms that follow a death like stray dogs. But on the fourth morning, with the mist still sitting in the valley like milk in a bowl, she took her father's rubber boots from beside the door, pulled them over her socks, and went up. The tea hills of her childhood were not what she remembered. The bushes on the lower terraces looked scorched, their young leaves curled and rust-edged, as if someone had held a match under each shoot. She knelt and turned a leaf over. Tiny green insects, pale as lime juice, scattered from its underside and vanished. Leafhoppers. Four years of agronomy school and two years as a field agronomist for an agricultural company in the city, and she could have named them in her sleep. What she could not have explained was how bad it had become. "They came early this year," said a voice behind her. Mr. Sinh, her father's neighbor, stood on the path with a backpack sprayer strapped to his shoulders and the sour chemical smell of the afternoon already on his clothes. He was seventy and had the weathered stubbornness of a fence post. "How many times have you sprayed?" Mai asked. "Every week since June." "Every week?" "They keep coming back." He shrugged. "So I keep spraying. What else is there?" Mai opened her mouth to tell him that this was exactly why they kept coming back: that each spray killed the spiders and ladybirds along with the pests, that the leafhoppers bred faster than their enemies could recover, that she had given this lecture to a hundred farmers and not one had listened. But she had been awake for three nights and her father was in the ground, and she did not have the strength to be right. "I'll look at the seventh terrace," she said instead. Mr. Sinh gave her a strange look. "Your father's terrace? Don't expect much. He stopped spraying altogether last year. Stubborn old fool." He said it with an odd roughness, and walked on. The seventh terrace was the highest, a narrow shelf of tea bushes cut into the hillside where the wind came off the ridge. She climbed the last stone steps with her breath tight in her chest, and stopped. The bushes were green. Not the green of the lower terraces, bruised and burnt, but the deep glossy green she remembered from childhood, new shoots standing up like small flames. She walked into the rows and lifted a branch. A few leafhoppers, yes. But among them, a tiny red beetle with black spots, a ladybird, working its way along the stem. And on the next bush, a spider's web strung between two branches, beaded with dew, a small brown body waiting at its center. Mai sat down on the stone edge of the terrace because her knees would not hold her. Her father had been a man of few words. He had worked this hill for forty years and had never once asked her about her job, never once looked at the photographs she mailed home of the fields she worked in. When she called on holidays he said "Have you eaten?" and "Is it raining there?" and passed the phone to her mother. After her mother died, he passed it to no one, and the calls grew shorter. She had thought, with the cruelty of someone who is young and busy, that he simply did not care. At the edge of the terrace, wedged under a flat stone beside a tin of tea leaves, she found a plastic bag, and inside it a notebook with a cardboard cover swollen from the damp. She opened it. His handwriting was square and careful, a farmer's hand. Dates ran down the left margin, and beside each, short lines in pencil. April 3. No spray. Many hoppers on the east side. Spiders on the west. April 19. Rain two days. Hoppers fewer. Counted 11 ladybirds on row four. May 8. Left the grass between rows uncut. More spiders than last year. June 2. Sinh says I am crazy. Hoppers on my terrace not worse than his, and I spent nothing on spray. She read until the mist burned off and the sun climbed over the ridge. He had counted. For two years, alone on a mountain, with no one to tell, he had been running the experiment she had spent a thesis describing. Rows with grass left uncut. Rows with a patch of weeds along the stone wall where the spiders sheltered. A column of numbers, dates, small hopeful tallies of the things that hunt the things that eat. The last entry was dated three weeks before he died. Mai will be home for Tet. Show her the terrace. She will know what it means. She pressed the notebook against her chest and stayed there a long time, while the tea bushes moved around her in the wind. When she came down, Mr. Sinh was sitting on the low wall outside her father's house, the sprayer at his feet. "Well?" he said. He did not look at her. Mai sat down beside him and put the notebook on the wall between them. "He wasn't crazy," she said. "He was counting." Mr. Sinh turned the cover with one thick finger, read a page, then another. His lips moved slightly. She saw the moment he reached the entry about his own name, and the way his jaw tightened. "I called him a fool," he said at last. "He knew." "He should have told me what he was doing." "He did," Mai said gently. "You didn't listen." She waited a moment. "Neither did I." The old man was silent for a long time. Down in the valley, a motorbike coughed along the road. "The lower terraces," he said finally. "Can they be saved?" "Some of it. Not this season. But if you stop spraying every week, if you let the spiders come back, if you leave the grass between the rows..." She stopped, because she was talking like a lecture hall again, and he was looking at her with the patient blankness of a man being lectured. "Show me," he said. She blinked. "Show you?" "The seventh terrace. Show me what he saw." He stood, slowly, as old men do, in stages. "I have forty years on this hill and I never once looked under a leaf for anything but what to kill." They climbed together, Mr. Sinh in front, Mai behind carrying the notebook. At the top, the old man knelt among the bushes with the stiffness of a bad knee and lifted a branch to the light. A ladybird walked calmly across his thumb. He stared at it as if it had spoken. "Eleven on row four," he murmured. "He wrote that down." "He wrote everything down." Mr. Sinh nodded slowly. Then, with a care she had never seen in his hands, he set the little beetle back on its leaf. "Teach me how to count," he said. That night, in her father's kitchen, Mai opened the notebook to the first blank page. She did not know yet how to tell the whole village, or the company in town, or the farmers who had never believed a young woman with a diploma. But she knew where to begin. She wrote the date in the left margin, square and careful, the way he had taught her without ever teaching her. October 11. Mist in the morning. Eleven ladybirds on row four. She looked at it for a while, and then, beneath it, she added one more line. Ba, I showed her. She knew what it meant.