Butterfly's Child (13 page)

They climbed higher up. Tsuneo swung out on a trapeze, then Sachiko leapt into the air and caught his legs. The crowd's cheers faded as Benji watched them swing like a pendulum, their shadow moving back and forth on the surface of the ring.

There were clowns—one with a blond wig who made the audience laugh. Benji hated them for thinking a blond Japanese was funny. Next was a lion tamer, then a snake handler, but Benji kept thinking about
Tsuneo and Sachi. At the end, all the performers came out and began to walk around the ring, bowing. Benji ran down the steps and wedged himself in front of a crowd of tall men, where Frank couldn't find him.

Tsuneo appeared before him. Up close, he looked older than Benji had imagined, with lines at the corners of his eyes. “I'm from Japan,” Benji said, pointing to himself. “Nippon.”

Tsuneo shook his head. “No English,” he said.

“Nagasaki?” Benji said, but he had moved on.

Sachiko was next. “Nagasaki?” he said to her, and she shook her head but said something in Japanese that sounded like music. She bowed and was gone.

Going home, the train was more crowded. Benji looked out at the fields and thought about Tsuneo. He wished Tsuneo was his father.

“Did you like it?” Father Pinkerton said. “The tickets were expensive, and I took a day off planting.”

Benji stared at him. Father Pinkerton came and went in his vision. “Why did you adopt me when you're already my father?” he said.

Father Pinkerton's face got red, and he gripped his seat as if he were about to fall off. “I was not already your father.”

“I used to call you Papa-san.”

“That was to make you feel at home.”

“Why do I look like you?”

“Be quiet,” he hissed, glancing across the aisle. A man who had been watching them retreated behind his newspaper; a woman in a feather hat continued to gaze at them through an eyeglass on a stick.

“I could prove it,” Benji said.

“What are you talking about?”

Benji looked back out the window and closed his ears against Father Pinkerton's angry whispers. They passed a herd of cattle, a barn, a woman in a sunbonnet chopping weeds. He couldn't show him the picture, because he would tear it up.

“You killed her,” Benji said, his heart racing like the train. The landscape became a blur.

Father Pinkerton jerked him up and pulled him to the end of the train car. They stood between the cars on metal plates that bucked and scraped against each other. “Now, you listen here.” He took Benji by the shoulders. “I didn't want to tell you, but this is the truth: She killed herself. Hara-kiri, they call it. It's considered noble in Japan.”

“No!” Benji shook his head until he was dizzy. “She wouldn't do that, she wouldn't leave me.”

“She left so you could have a better life in America.”

“I hate you,” Benji yelled. “I hate America.”

Father Pinkerton raised his hand, dropped it. “Ungrateful little bastard,” he said, and went back into the train car.

Benji burned Father Pinkerton from his mind. He would never think of him as his father again. He would call him Father Pinkerton, but he wouldn't mean it. He stood balancing on the platform without holding on, like the Japanese on their horses. Maybe he would fall and maybe he wouldn't.

For three days after
the circus there was heavy rain. Frank was late planting—as his mother had reminded him several times—so he set out to the fields the first fair morning and guided the Percherons through thick mud with the plow. Given his luck, there would be a dry spell after he dropped the seeds. Farming was like being at sea: So much depended on the fickle weather.

Once the chill of early morning lifted, the sun was warm. The fields would dry out in a day or two; maybe he should wait, he thought, but pushed on, struggling to keep the plow at the proper angle. After he finished one row, he paused to take a breath and turned the Percherons in the opposite direction. As he went on, pulled by the powerful horses, his mind wandered to Sachiko, her glowing face and muscular legs, the way she arched her back when she let go of the trapeze and reached for her partner. Tsuneo was surely her partner in all ways.

Butterfly was smaller than Sachiko, more delicate. She would have a filmy multicolored costume, to suggest a butterfly. He could see her floating through the air toward him. Later, in the circus wagon, they would lie together, he slipping into her quietly so the others wouldn't hear.

“Butterfly is dead, you fool,” he cried aloud. All around him stretched the empty fields and the merciless sky.

The plow was listing to one side. He stopped the horses and jumped down to adjust the trace chains on the off-side Percheron, then slapped its flank. The horses began to move before he got behind the plow, before he could think, and the point of the plow ran over his foot, cutting through the boot and his flesh.

“Whoa!” he screamed. The horses stopped and waited. He looked down at the boot, already leaking blood. Not fit to be a farmer, his father had always said. The pain was searing, but he climbed back on the seat and worked the ground to the end of the row, then turned the horses back toward the barn. He put the horses in their stalls and went hobbling to the house, calling for Kate.

It was a deep, nasty wound, with black dirt embedded in the flesh. Dr. McBride was summoned; he cleaned and bandaged the cut, ordered Frank to keep his foot elevated. Kate was to bathe the wound every few hours, to guard against infection. No one mentioned lockjaw, but the possibility hung in the air.

For days, Frank lay on their bed, his swollen foot throbbing. Perhaps he would lose the foot; perhaps it was God's punishment. Sharpless had said he was callous with Butterfly, that her death was his fault. Now here he was with her son, but, like a Judas, he'd denied him. He shifted in the bed, closed his eyes, and tried to pray. He was in a thicket of sin and consequence.

One afternoon, when Kate came in with bouillon and toast and felt his forehead, Frank said, “You're an angel. I don't deserve you.” He clutched her hand. “Don't ever leave me.”

“Don't be silly.” She bent down, kissed his forehead. She smelled of roses.

When Dr. McBride came later that week to change the bandage, Frank imagined telling him the whole story, the reasons for his injury, his history beginning with the day he'd met Butterfly, but he said nothing as the doctor took ointment and gauze from his bag and wrapped his foot again. “You're going to be fine, Frank,” he said.

But he was not fine.

Not long after the
circus, Benji dreamed that he looked at the picture and it was blank. He woke up, his heart thudding, lit the candle, and took the picture from the kimono pocket. She was still there gazing at him. He thought of the blood, her closed eyes. “Why did you do it?” he shouted. “What about me?”

He shoved the picture back in the kimono pocket and put it on the floor of the closet. He would never look at it again.

But the next day at school, he worried that Mother Pinkerton would find the picture and show it to Father Pinkerton, who would throw it in the kitchen stove.

He told Miss Ladu he was sick and ran home to put the kimono back under his mattress. The following day at school he worried that they might turn the mattress for spring cleaning and the kimono would fall out and the picture too, because he'd never sewed back the top of the pocket.

That night he took a needle and thread from Mother Pinkerton's sewing room and fixed the pocket, but he couldn't stop thinking about other things that could happen when he was gone. The house could catch fire like the Olsens' barn and he would never see her face again. Or a tornado could carry her away.

He remembered that four was a bad number in Japanese, the same word as for death; if he saw four of anything—four cows standing together, four birds in a tree, four pieces of bread on the table—he had to take out the kimono and look at the picture. He came home sick from school so often that they had Dr. McBride take a look at him, but the doctor said he was as sound as an American dollar.

It was a Sunday
afternoon in June. Though the air was sunny, a soft rain rustled the leaves outside Keast's window. If Isobel were here, they would go for a drive and look for a rainbow, but somehow he couldn't stir from his chair. He was content enough—church was over, and an afternoon of leisure lay before him. He was whittling aimlessly, waiting to see what form would emerge from the block of cherry he was working. A fawn, perhaps. Maybe he would give it to Miss Ladu, though he didn't know what Isobel would think about that.

There was a knock on the door. Benji. “Now, here's a welcome surprise,” Keast said. “On your way home from church?”

Benji shook his head.

Keast asked if he'd like to go for a drive, but the boy shook his head again. They went out to the back balcony of the boardinghouse and sat down in rocking chairs.

Benji looked skittish, glancing at old Mr. Green at the end of the porch. Clearly something was troubling the boy. Keast took up his whittling again, to give him time. Benji had grown into a fine specimen of a boy—still short for his age, but that was natural given his race. He looked pure Japanese when he wore a cap, as today, with his light hair pushed out of sight. Miss Ladu said he was a wonder in school, already on the third reader, and he'd written a remarkable report on slavery and abolition. The only trouble was, he was shy and made few friends. Keast had found that, if not pressed, he would occasionally open up and talk a mile a minute. Sometimes on their drives to visit the animals, Benji would tell him about school, a girl named Flora, and his ambition to go to Japan.

The boy sat still in his rocker. Mr. Green got up and limped inside.

“Something on your mind?” Keast asked him.

Benji reached into his pocket, pulled out a photograph, and handed it to Keast quick, as if it were on fire. “It's a secret,” he said.

Keast put on his reading glasses to look at the picture. “By golly,” he couldn't help saying. There was Pinkerton, sitting next to a Japanese woman in her native dress; she was standing, looking straight into the camera. The photograph was scored with vertical creases and a small nib was missing in one corner.

“Your mother?” Keast said.

“Yes.”

“And your father.” He looked at Benji; the boy nodded.

Keast refrained from saying he'd thought as much.

“No one at my house can see it,” Benji said.

“I understand,” Keast said, nodding.

“My mother killed herself.”

The block of wood Keast was holding between his knees fell onto the floor. He stared at the boy. Benji was gazing out at the garden as calmly as if he'd just made a comment about the weather. His hands were in fists, though.

“I saw her,” Benji added, and turned to look at him. They sat in silence for a moment; Keast could feel the confiding and the receiving settle in.

“You're some boy,” Keast said, “to have come through all that.” He looked at the picture: She was a pretty woman with something sad about her face. He wanted to ask about the circumstances, but perhaps Benji had said all he could. Isobel would have known how to comfort him.

“There's writing on the back,” Benji said.

Keast turned it over. Lines of chicken tracks.

“I wish I could read it,” the boy said.

“Probably their names and a date.”

The boy sat somberly looking at the writing, then his face brightened. “With her whole name, maybe I can find her family someday.”

“I bet you can.”

“Where can I keep it?”

Keast thought a minute. “The store and the bank are closed. Let me see what I can rustle up.”

Keast went into his room and from the bottom drawer of his dresser
took out a blue tin box filled with mementos of Isobel: some photographs, an onyx ring, two handkerchiefs, a lace collar, and, in an envelope, a lock of her beautiful black hair. He took the things out of the box and put them back in the drawer, carefully wrapped in a sweater. Tomorrow he would buy a new box. The key was in a dish at the top of the dresser. He went back to the porch, laid the box in Benji's lap, and put the key in his hand.

“This should do,” he said.

“Thank you.” Benji carefully laid the picture in the box and stared at it.

“Looks kind of lonesome in there, doesn't it?” Keast said. He went inside to his desk and brought back an empty soap tin that had belonged to Isobel. A picture of flowers—lilies of the valley—adorned the cover. Benji laid the picture in the tin and put it in the box, then took from his other pocket a small leather pouch. “Money,” he said. “I saved it from my allowance. Someday I'll go to Japan and put her picture on her gravestone.”

“Well,” Keast said. “That's a noble thing. It's a long way, but I'm sure you can make it.” He watched as Benji laid the pouch into the box with the picture and locked it.

They talked about where to keep the box. It could be found at his house, Benji said, and he didn't want to bury it in the ground. If he put it in the bank, someone might mention it to his father. Keast said he'd be honored to keep it if Benji would trust him. They put the box in the bottom drawer of the desk, and Benji kept the key.

As Keast drove Benji home, he kept glancing at the boy, thinking of all the sorrow he had endured. Too much sorrow could deform the spirit.

After he dropped Benji off at the farm, Keast started toward the cemetery for his weekly visit to Isobel, but at the fork he turned his horse and headed back to the boardinghouse. It was almost dinnertime, and Miss Ladu would be there, pretty as a sunflower in her seat across the table.

It was the end of the day, almost evening, when Keast went to the Pinkerton farm a few days later. Tied to the back of his buggy, trotting along at a fine gait, was a black colt with a white blaze on his nose—four years old and broke to the saddle, though he hadn't been ridden much yet.