Two Crows on the Spirit House

By Jack Freeman

This is the story of two people, one skilled in technology but out of his depth socially in an exotic location; the other uneducated but resourceful and patient when fate is cruel. They are not epic hero and flawless lady but Bob finds courage to make an alliance with the hill men and fight the local mafia when his project is threatened and he is honourable enough to feel remorse and try to make amends when he misuses a poor local girl. It is about the building of a bridge linking two banks of a river, and about the building of a loving relationship between people from different cultures, with the help of sometimes mischievous spirits, but the final result is dictated by the vengeful nature of the birds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 10, 2005
• ISBN: 9781467023481

Jack Freeman

Jack Freeman has given motivational seminars since 1997. He's headlined the renowned Successapalooza Tour for six years and currently resides in Dayton, Ohio.

Book preview

Chapter 1 

It was a bright sunny day and he was looking down from the sky on a small cottage hospital set among lawns and rose beds. There were birds on the mossy tiled roof and in the trees around. They made him afraid and he tried to shut them out of his vision, without knowing why. His feeling of anxiety grew and now he was looking down inside one of the wards at an old man asleep in a bed with a curtain drawn around it. The skin on his face, once deeply tanned by hot sun and wind, was grey against the pure white pillow. There was character in the face; both strength and weakness too, and hard lines carved by grief and strange experiences. The watcher above knew he was looking at himself, and that he was dying.

There was no doubt of this. It was why the birds were happy. He could hear them all: the blackbirds singing in the tangle of rambling roses along the gravel drive, the thrush pouring out his beautiful, triumphant song from the top of the laburnum tree in the middle of the lawn, the score of pigeons gathered on the sunny slope of the roof, cooing in a very self satisfied tone. Most significant of all, the rooks in their undertaker black plumage, had come from the copse on the hill to circle high above the hospital. He could hear the hateful cawing sound drifting on the wind.

The watcher looked down again and saw a weak smile on the old face. He was thinking of the red, gold and white spirit house set on a post in the corner of his garden at the edge of the village. He had shipped it from Thailand a lifetime ago. It seemed to him that all the happy times and all the good things that had happened to him were associated with it, or perhaps with the spirits who inhabited it.

The old eyes smiled too. They were remembering someone, but now the hospital was receding and he could see a panorama of the whole village and the rolling Kent hills beyond. He was rising away, leaving, for the last time –

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There was a stiffness in his back. He rolled over in bed and woke up frowning. Had he dreamed his own death? Hardly! Was he superstitious enough to believe that the birds wished him ill and that the spirits, who allegedly lived in those gaudy little houses in Eastern countries, could bring good fortune? That was not rational.

He lay dozing for a few more minutes and the dream went out of his mind. When he woke again, his head was aching as well as his back, so he got up, went to the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. There was no towel, so he returned to the bedroom and found it on the floor by his shoes. He put on his old clothes. Downstairs, he ate some corn flakes and drank water from the jug he kept in the refrigerator. The kitchen was a mess but that could wait. Taking his jacket from the back of a chair, he checked to see if he had any cigarettes left in the pocket. There were enough for the morning, so he took his twelve bore out of its bag, put a dozen cartridges in one jacket pocket and picked an apple from the basket on the floor and dropped it in the other. Fresh air would help his hangover.

He walked down the garden path, which divided the overgrown front lawn into two equally scruffy halves, went through the open gate and turned away from the village. In ten minutes he was striding over a freshly reaped wheat field toward a thickly wooded ridge on the edge of the North Downs. The sky was overcast and the wind was cool but he was walking briskly and he soon felt perspiration under his arms. Lapwings dived and cavorted in front of him as he walked.

Things had not been working out well lately and he felt resentful. At these times, his only relief was to take long walks over the fields with his gun.

In country parts especially, there were old people who believed that certain creatures held the power to influence the lives of men and women for good or evil. They still said of magpies, One for sorrow, two for joy. The old village midwife hated to have a black cat cross her path, especially when she was on her way to a delivery, and she would not dare to remove the jackdaws’ nest from her chimney.

These thoughts went through Bob’s mind as he tramped across the stubble. What if the rooks would one day orchestrate an appropriate revenge for all their number he had shot? In his present mood, he did not care if they did - not that they could. He was a Western man with a rational education, an engineer trained in logic - not superstition. He lay no stock by omens, magic or luck, and he could not understand why so many oriental people invested time and devotion on their dead ancestors and the spirits. For how could they bring riches, happiness or mischief? Wasn’t man responsible for his own fate, within the limits of natural disaster and a certain amount of pure chance? How could spirits arrange meetings between people or influence a man’s destiny? Could they break down the barriers of culture and tradition, bring together a man and a woman, cause floods and friendships to rise and wane, and if so, why, and what were the limits of their powers?

Some lines came back to him from Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’.

"Know then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,

The light militia of the lower sky;

These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,

Hang o’er the box, and hover round the Ring:"

The wheat field was separated from the neighbouring pasture by an ancient hedge made up of many varieties of tree and shrub. At this season it was rich in blackberries. Clusters of elderberries hung on the tree by the six bar gate and he could see toadstools among its roots. There might be some early mushrooms in the pasture beyond.

Bob put down his gun, leaned his arms on the top rail of the gate and looked into the next field. He could see mole hills but no mushrooms. His head still ached and now the wind had made his eyes water. He rested his head on his hands.

Almost immediately, the aerial view of the village came back to him once more, just as it had been in his dream, but this time he could not see into the hospital. He saw the roof and the gardens, the village, the jigsaw of small fields and beyond, the North Downs but the vision was becoming misty. The sound of a single church bell wafted across the field with the wind and the vision he saw now was not of the Kent countryside but that of a flat plane far below him, hot and dusty, with a strange walled city shining in fierce sunlight. The air was hot and his throat was tight with an awful, desperate feeling of grief.

The coarse cry of rooks overhead brought him back to Kent and the gate, and the top rail of the gate, wet with his tears. This was bad. He really would have to cut his drinking right down. What was it they used to say? You know it’s the DTs, when you see red rats with straw hats on. Well, that could be next. He climbed over the gate, reached back through it for his gun, and continued his walk.

Mostly, it was the rooks he shot in Hagueley Wood. He had sympathy for the rabbits and hares but no pity for the black, evil-eyed creatures, which made such an abrasive, irritating sound every moment of the day. He felt a deep unhappiness today, and so he shot them on the wing and where they roosted at the tops of the old elms. With each blast, the whole colony would protest and take to the air, circling in confusion until they all settled once more, except for the one bleeding on the ground. With each death, the score against him mounted.

Chapter 2 

A minibus crammed with young people was taking the decrepit ferry across one of the tributaries to the Mekong river in the north of Thailand. The wind was blustering from the south and the surface of the water hissed under heavy rain. The current, strong at this season, was also from south to north. Listing heavily to port, the rusty iron box ploughed slowly across, with the square prow pointing at forty five degrees upstream. A few stray logs of teak had broken away from a holding area upstream and were giving the boatman a problem. He throttled the engine back to let two of them pass ahead of him and, as a result, almost missed his chance of docking on the far jetty.

The minibus carried a mixed group, ranging in age from fifteen years old to the late twenties. They came from Laos, Northern Thailand and the mountainous area on the border, which owed allegiance to whichever side offered the less interference. The boys and young men came from poor, farming families. They were putting on a brave face. They were destined to work on the building sites in Bangkok or the new Eastern Seaboard harbour complex. They were going to earn money for their families and they would return in a year or two. The girls were more subdued. They were leaving behind not only their families but most likely the chance of ever having a decent family life for themselves.

The oldest of the girls was feeling sick. She was nearly three months pregnant, undernourished and anaemic. She was also suffering severe cramps in her stomach.

With the tattered ropes straining to hold the boat against wind and current, the boatman lowered the ramp and the minibus lurched down it onto the concrete jetty, pulled off to the left and stopped. The driver and his mate lit cigarettes, got out and strolled over to some wooden huts set up to cater for the needs of travellers. The largest one was in good condition and contained benches and stocked canned food, drinks and tee shirts with pictures of palm trees. They went into the little hut with a Coca Cola sign nailed on one wall at the end of the row. The side facing the river was open and an old woman was stirring a pot of rice on a brazier in the corner furthest from the driving rain. She looked up as the men entered but she did not greet them.

A boy with sharp elbows leaned across the pregnant girl and struggled to open the side door of the bus. It grated as it slid open and they all climbed out. The girls went together behind the hut and the boys turned to face the river and urinated. The rain was not cold but it drove them all into the little hut. The girls squatted in a group on the floor and combed their wet hair or fidgeted with their clothes, while the boys stood looking out at the rain and the direction they had come from.

The old woman scooped rice into two large bowls, put a few small fried fish onto two plates and the travellers ate with their fingers, except for the pregnant girl. She sat cross legged on the earth floor fingering a boil just below her right ear, crying quietly. If only her poor father had not been so unlucky playing cards, he would have been able to pay for a proper wedding for her. If she had had a real wedding, perhaps Sathip would not have left her. If he had not gone, her father would not have been able to sell her to work for a year in Bangkok.

As soon as the food was finished they were all shooed back onto the minibus for the journey south.

Two weeks later, they were all working. The boys were labouring on the construction of a large condominium in Bangkok and the girls were working in various tourist resorts. The anaemic girl had had her boil lanced and she was no longer pregnant.

Chapter 3 

Bob had been in engineering for twenty years. He was, by nature, a quiet mannered man, originally from Yorkshire. His straight, fair hair was now white above his ears and his waist was beginning to expand. He could remember only one funny story and he wondered at the way some of his colleagues seemed to have a fund of hundreds. When he was not on assignment abroad and time permitted, he was a member of the local dart team and he met his friends at the pub when he could get away. He could still give the younger men a good game on the tennis court.

He had worked in many places around the world. In some, staying only long enough to check prices and work-rates, and have preliminary meetings with potential customers. In others, he had been part of a team building a large bridge or docking complex. Sometimes his wife had travelled with him and sometimes she had stayed in Maidestone with the children.

If she had stayed at home when he went to work in Bandung she would not have contracted the virus that nearly killed him. They were both in intensive care for weeks and only he survived. Diana became the little mother, as well as coping well with her school work. Andrew rebelled at doing anything helpful and bob somehow coped with his job at Head Office, housework and fatherhood. It had been a truly hectic time but, looking back now, it seemed wonderful compared with the present.

Now he was on his own feeling lonely, not just for the moment, but in a long-term sense. He was alone. At twenty two his son Andrew had gone to live in the United States and five months later his daughter, Diana, had died of a brain tumour. She was seventeen.

The doctors had seemed positive, quite hopeful, at first. Later they stopped talking of recovery percentages and the blackouts became more frequent. He hadn’t liked taking her to the hospice day centre in Maidstone at first but it seemed to help her. She always came away looking brighter. It was clearly the best place for her to spend her last days.

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Hard work he could cope with; the odd piece of bad luck did not bother him too much, but the loss of his daughter left Bob a smaller man, withdrawn, uninterested in people.

He hadn’t realised how much Diana had filled his life in recent years, until she was gone. She had had a golden complexion and dark brown eyes, which seemed able to speak for themselves. She had learned to walk gracefully on her long legs and had excelled at school, because she’d had a lively intelligence and could absorb facts easily. She had also been simply a joy to be with. She would sit on the green with the vicar, discussing past cricket matches, and he would go back to write his sermon a happier man. She was the one whom matron liked to see at visiting hours in the cottage hospital. She would say outrageous things to the old ladies, and they adored her. Bob had stopped taking her to the pub on dart match evenings, because she had attracted such a following that he thought it would be bad for her. Andrew had been his mother’s boy. Diana had been Bob’s girl.

When it was over, he felt empty, almost a non-person. There was no-one for him to please and no-one to avoid upsetting. No-one expected anything of him. For a time, he expected nothing of himself. He could see no reason to take care of himself, so he anaesthetised his bitter memories with whiskey and hardly bothered to eat at all.

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Usually, when he was shaving, Bob only looked in the mirror at where the razor was scraping but one morning he looked up into his own eyes. He was so shocked that he had to sit down on the lavatory seat. He looked at his hands. They were leaner than he remembered and the skin over them looked thinner and transparent. He wiped his face on a towel and went out to the garage to find the weigh scale that they had once kept in the bathroom. He had lost ten pounds in two months. He felt ashamed. He was throwing away what was, as far as he knew, the only life he would ever have the chance to live. He had been so angry and frustrated when Diana had lost hers, and here he was wasting his.

He decided that he must eat, even though all he wanted was a glass of whiskey and soda for breakfast. He could not face tinned food but there was some stale bread, so he walked down to the gate and found two bottles of milk in the dairy box. He heated a pint of it and broke some of the bread into the saucepan, adding a little sugar. Once he started to eat, he felt hungry and he finished it all, and rewarded himself with just one glass.

He dressed carefully and went out to wait for the bus. When it came, he took a seat at the front, where he would not be distracted by seeing the other passengers, and tried to think. He really ought to stop feeling sorry for himself and make the best of what he had, instead of taking what was left and throwing it all away. But this required an adjustment and he knew he that could not make it in the place where they had all lived together. He took a week off from work and concentrated hard on one problem. What was he going to do - now, next week, and next year? What was clear was that he had to make a break from his current way of life. What he needed was a complete change.

After long deliberations and consultations with numerous bottles of scotch, he decided that the best thing would be to take one more tour abroad. After all, the new owners would be moving into the house soon, so he would have to find a new home. He phoned all the colleagues he could remember working with, until one told him of a job that his company had won to build a bridge in the hill country near the border between Laos and Thailand.

It was not a prestigious job. His new firm had signed a contract to build a bridge over one of the tributaries to the Mekong river. It was to be part of a new highway being built to encourage trade between the two countries - and help to control the opium trade from the Golden Triangle. The company had quoted a low price, just to get a foot in the door in an area they judged to be a promising market in the future. A low price meant only one ex-patriot engineer.

Chapter 4 

An unusually large number of pigeons spent their days on the roof during his last week in the house. Hosts of starlings came to roost each evening in the apple and pear trees in the back garden, leaving a stinking mess in the long grass. The pretty little bird table he had made for his daughter’s ninth birthday, with a little house for blue tits and a delicate swing, had been taken over by a pair of magpies.

The surviving rooks from Hagueley Wood were gliding high above in wide, satisfied circles, when Bob shut the door on the house for the last time and said goodbye to his garden. He left England a week earlier than he needed to, partly because he didn’t want to hang about in an hotel, and partly so that he could make a sentimental journey from Singapore, up through the Malay peninsula, southern Thailand, Bangkok, north to Chiang Mai and then across to the remote area just south of the Mekong river, where he was to work.

He knew that Thailand and Laos were no longer at war over this territory but not all the land mines dropped indiscriminately during the Vietnam war had been cleared. Wherever the Viet Kong had used trails through Laos, thousands of the lethal little canisters had been dropped and they were still maiming and killing people every month. That was mostly to the East of where he was to work but they were turning up in unexpected places too. He was also aware that there would be a number of different power influences to watch out for. Opium and heroin still flowed from the Golden Triangle in large quantities. There would be the national police and the army, who were making a good profit from illegal logging operations, the local hill tribes, who grew the poppies and controlled the smuggling trade with Burma and China, probably a business baron, and possibly a separate drug trading group linked to a Hong Kong triad. Any of these could form temporary alliances with any other. As far as possible, Bob was determined to avoid them all.

The plane took off from Heathrow, banked over the Staines reservoirs and climbed through cloud, shaking a little. The map on the screen at the front of the cabin showed their location, as they flew eastward over Surrey and then Kent, far higher than the rooks of Hagueley Wood could fly. Bob looked out of the window at the fluffy, white carpet of cloud and tried to imagine the landscape below, but instead of seeing the tight, irregular patchwork of green fields and dark hedges, what came to his mind was only a misty vision of a dry plain and a feeling of deep despair. He rested his face in his hands. Could he hear a church bell or was it a gong? He was feeling unbearably hot and he tasted salt tears at the corners of his mouth.

The dark haired stewardess wheeling the drinks trolley smiled sympathetically. Some people could not help being nervous about flying. She poured him a stiff whiskey and left another miniature for him on the little shelf on the arm rest.

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In Singapore he was torn between buying a nearly new Toyota or an old Riley Kestrel and decided on the latter, knowing that he was likely to be sorry later when spare parts were required, but he wanted a car with character. He bargained enthusiastically with Mr Than Hoa in his immaculately clean showroom in Queenstown, paid cash, removed the stuffed green parrot from the parcel shelf, dropped it into a bin of worn out exhaust pipes in the yard and drove back to his hotel feeling elated, as he always did with a new car.

The next day, he drove across the bridge into Malaysia, followed the slow traffic through Johor Bahru and took the road north between dark plantations of regimented rubber trees. It was oppressively hot, with the sun shining vertically down on the road from a clear blue sky, but he felt good. He was driving a car with character toward a new life. He turned off the car’s air-conditioner, opened both front windows and enjoyed the warm air blowing on his face and arms.

The rubber gave way to oil palms, then there were small rice fields, plantations of mango trees and villages with small wooden bungalows set well back from the road, with decorated steps leading to front verandas. Rural Malaysia was much as he remembered it, and that pleased him too.

He paid no attention to the birds that monitored his progress every mile of the way; swarms of squabbling sparrows swooping in front of the car, predator kites gliding high in the hot moist air, and pied crows, which waddled off the road as he approached, giving him resentful looks.

He stopped to fill the tank at a gas station at the far end of a village. On either side of it were ranged stalls selling fruit and bottles of forest honey. One of the stalls was set beside a vast heap of coconuts and a chopping block. An old man with a dark wrinkled face deftly trimmed the husk from a coconut with a long knife, sliced deeper to open a hole in the top and inserted a plastic straw. Bob gave him one ringgit, drank the milk, and gave his change to the boy who was washing insects from the Riley windscreen.

His first real stop was in the old city of Melacca and there he visited once more the old Portuguese fort and chapel. Walking around the solid little ruin, he tried to imagine what life had been like there four centuries earlier but gave up when it started to rain. In the museum across the road, he looked again at the old treaties written in the Malay language, the earlier ones using Arabic script and the more recent ones using the alphabet brought by the British colonialists.

The only part he liked of the modern city of Kuala Lumpur was the food and the impeccable service he received at the Merlin hotel. Further north, he found Penang island had many more tourists than he remembered and he spent a day sitting under a thatched sunshade, looking at the sea, but the sight of people enjoying a sandy beach bored him and left him feeling dissatisfied,