Butterfly's Child (14 page)

Keast spotted Frank and the Swede and Benji at the pump, washing up for supper. Frank turned to look, scratched his head, said something Keast couldn't hear.

Keast was nervous. He should have asked Frank first but had been afraid he'd say no. He hadn't been honorable in that. He did know there was an empty stall and plenty of hay and oats for another animal. Frank couldn't object on those grounds.

Benji came running toward him.

“Look behind me,” Keast said. “He's yours.”

Benji let out such a yell that Keast was surprised the roof didn't lift off the house. The horses shied to the left.

“Can I ride him?” Benji said. But he was already on his back.

“Be careful.” Keast got out of the buggy, adjusted the stirrups, and untied the reins. “He's not experienced.”

The pony bucked a couple of times, then tore off down the road. Benji stayed on as if he were glued there, reared back like an Injun.

Frank had come over to the buggy. He stared down the road. “What in thunder is that?”

“A friend of mine had a colt he wanted to get rid of,” Keast said. “He's healthy—I don't expect he'll be much trouble.” No more than your “orphan” has been, Keast wanted to add, but held his tongue.

He named the colt
Kuro, which meant black, one of the few Japanese words he remembered. He liked to ride bareback, Kuro's muscles flexing beneath him, their sweat mixed together. He was Tsuneo, and Kuro was a Japanese horse, his mane and tail flying as they galloped down the roads.

Sometimes he pretended he was riding all the way to Japan, where he would find the house he had lived in and his mother's family, and sometimes he rode into the past, before she died, when she'd say, “Wake up, Benji,” but it didn't matter which as he soared past the blur of golden fields, his mind floating, riding into the life that was coming to meet him.

One year passed, then
two, and there were no more children, not even a false start. Kate blamed herself, for resenting Franklin at first; this was God's judgment upon her. It wouldn't have mattered to her; Franklin was enough—such a beautiful, affectionate child—but Frank needed more boys for the farm.

And he was unhappy. Ever since she'd known him, Frank had enjoyed the occasional drink—a sup, he called it, of bourbon or rum, a habit from his days at sea. His mother didn't approve, but Kate had found the smell of whiskey manly, and at first it had made him expansive and more affectionate. But lately he often came to bed reeking of liquor and—she couldn't help it—she turned away from him.

One fall evening he came from the threshing red-eyed and unsteady. During supper he snapped at Franklin and Benji for playing at the table; he threatened to whip them both.

Kate sent the children outside with their dessert. “This is too much, Frank. You can't work in an inebriated condition. You might lose a foot next time.”

His mother agreed; she suggested prayer and more regular attendance at church.

He rose abruptly and climbed the stairs to his office. A few minutes later, Kate followed him.

She found him at his desk, staring out at the fields. He hates farming, she thought, and he wishes he had never married me. She felt a spike of tenderness as she touched his face, his creased neck. He took her hand.

“I'm not the right wife for you,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

He stood and embraced her, enveloping her in the odor of whiskey. “You're the perfect wife,” he said. “I adore you.”

“Please stop drinking so much,” she said.

He murmured something that sounded like assent.

That night he entered her and, to their astonishment, she became pregnant, a pregnancy that held. She gave birth, though with much difficulty, on a rainy June evening in 1904, to a seven-pound girl named Mary Virginia, after Frank's mother. Frank celebrated with a magnum of champagne—a gift from the Moores—toasting his daughter, Kate, Franklin, Benji, his mother, the Swede, the Moores, the Cases, the cows, the Percherons, Daisy, Kuro, and the next child, who would most certainly be a boy.

Eli and Jonas often
came home with Benji, the three of them sitting at the kitchen table near the stove while Benji helped them with long division and fractions. Benji wished Grandmother Pinkerton would leave so they could keep talking about girls—Eli was sweet on Helen, and Benji wanted to ask if they thought Flora favored him—but she stayed in the kitchen cooking and washing pans that didn't need washing and watching them work. “My, my,” she sometimes said, looking down at Benji's paper full of figures. “We didn't know so much in my day.”

After his friends left, Benji brought in coal for the stoves, did the milking, and fed and curried the horses. After supper, he told Franklin a story, an ongoing saga he'd made up for his brother about two samurai boys, one Japanese, one American, then went to his room to study. It was the best time of the day, at the desk beside his stove, Kaki in his lap or curled at his feet, studying books that carried him away from the farm. By the time he was fourteen, he was ahead of everyone else in arithmetic and reading and knew the history books almost by heart. He liked American history, especially the Indians and the Gold Rush, but was more drawn to other civilizations—the pharaohs and pyramids of Egypt, the Spartans of Greece, the Roman Empire.

There was nothing about Japan in the school history text, so Miss Ladu ordered a book on the history of Japan and he learned about the lords and samurai who used to rule Japan, and about Commodore Perry, who sailed his black ships into the bay of Tokyo and made Japan trade with America. When Japan began a war against Russia that September, he kept up with it in the newspapers—excited that his small country was
fighting the Russian bullies. Miss Ladu had him present a report on the war, which he illustrated with a map showing Port Arthur, where the surprise attack had been, and the sites of the other battles.

“I liked your report,” Flora said at recess. “I think you're very intelligent.” She looked straight into his eyes and smiled. She had a chicken pox scar at one side of her mouth, but on her it was pretty.

When class started again, he couldn't pay attention but sat looking at Flora two rows ahead of him: her thick braids, the slightly crooked part in her hair, and the little bones in her neck when she bent over her work. She was left-handed and wrote with her left arm curved around the top of the desk; all her letters slanted backward. Miss Ladu had tried to make her use her right hand, but it was hard and she made a lot of blots. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be writing, she put her pen on her desk and sat with her head bowed. Today, though, she was writing, very slowly.

After school Benji caught up with Flora as she was walking down the road to Morseville. She was wearing orange button shoes and a coat that was too big for her. “I have to go to the store for my grandmother,” he said.

“That's nice.” She smiled at him. “You're a considerate boy.”

He felt like skipping. “You're considerate too. I'm sorry you're left-handed.”

She looked at him, startled.

“Because it's more trouble for you, I mean.”

She didn't say anything. He kicked a rock. Now she wouldn't think he was smart.

“Do you like long division?” he asked. Her class had just started on it.

“No,” she said.

“I could help you with it. Mathematics is my best subject, after history.”

“Thank you,” she said. There was a silence, just the sound of their feet on the road. He couldn't think what to say.

“Is it nice in Japan?” she asked.

“Yes, but the girls aren't as pretty.”

She looked down at the road, but she was smiling.

He jammed his hands in his pockets and, to keep from grinning too much, began to whistle.

When they got to the corner a block from her house, she said, “I'll see
you tomorrow.” She didn't say, “at school,” so maybe that meant he could walk her home again.

But the next day, when they were talking at recess, Marvin came up behind them and started making kissing noises, and after school they went their separate ways.

Sometimes on the weekends he went into Morseville and walked past her house, hoping she'd come out. It was a gaunt house, painted yellow, with a shed out back where her father made coffins. Her father was a sour-looking man with a glass eye, and because he looked a little peculiar and because he made coffins, the boys at school made up mean stories about him—how he sometimes measured the coffins wrong and had to cut off the dead person's feet. Marvin swore that he'd seen blood leaking out of a coffin at a funeral. Benji wondered if Flora had guessed about the stories; if he heard Marvin tell another one, he'd beat him up.

In the spring Miss Ladu had a few students stay after school one day to recite their pieces for the end of the year. After Benji practiced his memorized report on Japan—expanded to include Confucianism and the primitive Ainu people of Hokkaido—he sat and waited for Flora to say her lines from
Hiawatha
. They left together and, since there was no one else around, he walked with her to Morseville.

She asked how long he'd lived in Japan.

“Until I was five,” he said. “My mother died, but I'm not an orphan. It's a secret—don't tell anyone.”

“I'd never tell.” She looked at him solemnly. “I hate my stepmother,” she said.

“I hate mine too,” he said, even though it wasn't quite true.

Again they said goodbye a block away from her house; she didn't say, but he guessed her parents would disapprove of her walking with a boy, especially a Japanese. After supper, he drew a picture of her and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, beneath his arithmetic papers, where no one would find it.

At elocution day, Benji gave his report to a crowd of parents and townspeople. He was nervous, so he pretended to be talking just to Flora, who looked at him intently, nodding. She had on a soft-looking brown dress, and her hair was loose from the braids.

When the program was over, Benji wandered through the crowd, looking everywhere, but he couldn't find her; her father must have taken her home. He tried to look as if he didn't care.

The family and Keast came to congratulate him. Franklin pulled at Benji's shirt; Benji picked him up. “You were the best,” Franklin said.

“Excellent,” Mother Pinkerton said. “We were amazed.”

“I wasn't,” Grandmother Pinkerton said. “I always knew he was smart.”

Father Pinkerton shook his hand, slipping a silver dollar into Benji's palm. Benji stared at it, the most money he'd ever had at once. “You're a scholar now, aren't you? Don't get too biggety.”

“A scholar indeed,” Miss Ladu said, joining them. “He could be a teacher in a few years if he wanted to, or go to a university.” She and Keast exchanged glances; Benji could tell they'd talked about it.

“A university,” Benji said.

“Yes—you could study anything you wanted to. A Japanese boy graduated first in his class at Yale a few years ago.”

“Sounds expensive,” Father Pinkerton said.

“There are other schools,” Miss Ladu said, “right here in Illinois. You might win a scholarship.”

At home, Benji lay on his bed, pretending Flora had heard the conversation. She would think him all the more intelligent if he went to a university, and maybe her father would let him marry her then. Maybe she'd like to go with him to Japan. He'd get rich and they could have houses in both places.

The next Saturday, when Keast took Benji on his rounds, Keast asked what he might like to study.

“I don't know. Mathematics, maybe. I want to get rich and go to Japan. Do you think I can get rich before I go to Japan?”

“Not with mathematics—as a businessman, maybe. But I believe you can do anything you set your mind to.”

“Could I marry an American girl?”

Keast smiled. “You've got a sweetheart?”

“No—I was just wondering.”

Keast was silent for a while before he said, “Some people might disagree, but I don't see why not. Isobel was part Injun, and my mother never minded.”

Benji looked at Keast's rough face, the stains on his coat. He hadn't thought of Keast having a mother.

“I bet your mother was nice.”

“A noble woman,” he said. “After my father died, my mother raised us
three children on her own.” He looked at Benji. “We all have our fortune and misfortune,” he said. “When you come up against fortune, don't let it pass you by. It might not come again.”

For Benji's fifteenth birthday, Keast gave him a globe on a stand like the one in the schoolroom: the seas white, the continents and islands various shades of brown, the mountain ranges slightly raised. Benji put the globe beside his desk and traced his path across America and the Pacific Ocean over and over. Nagasaki was on the far side of Kyushu, at the tip of the carp's head.

He asked Father Pinkerton for the Japanese–English dictionary he'd taken to school when they went to visit that first day. Father Pinkerton claimed not to know where it was, but one morning when he'd gone to buy some farm equipment, Benji looked for it in his study. He found it in the cupboard, beneath a stack of ship's logs, old seed catalogues, and a musty tartan blanket. It was a large black book with thin pages that smelled slightly of spice. As he flipped through the pages, a butterfly wing fell out, blue and black with patterns that looked like eyes. He picked it up with care, but it was old and fragile and came apart in his fingers. Maybe Father Pinkerton had been with his mother when he found it. Damn him. He sliced cuts in the tartan blanket with his penknife. If Father Pinkerton asked, he'd say it must have been moths.

Keast let him keep the dictionary at the boardinghouse. On weekend afternoons, after he'd finished his chores, Benji took a notebook and sat on the balcony outside Keast's room, writing Japanese words and their definitions in English. It was disappointing that there were no Japanese characters in the book for him to compare with the writing on the picture. The dictionary—with the words spelled out in Roman letters—was obviously for tourists. But if he studied the words in the notebook every day, he would be able to make himself understood in Japan. When a few words came back to him—
neko
for cat,
gohan
for rice—he began to feel Japanese.