Butterfly's Child Read online

In the reception room, she set a bowl of irises on the tokonoma and hung a scroll of a mountain shrouded in mist. At one side of the room was a folding screen, on it a river of plum trees; Suzuki helped her move it to the center, dividing the space. The sword—a souvenir from one of her patrons—she placed beside the tokonoma, on a fresh white cloth, then went outside.

  Benji was in the garden, watching a frog in the pond. On his face was the solemn expression that she found uncanny and a little frightening: At such times he looked like a man in a child’s body. He would need his wisdom now.

  “Benji, Papa-san will arrive soon. Come dress in your Western clothes to greet him.”

  “Papa-san!” Benji jumped up and skipped into the house with her. He practiced his English phrases again as she helped him dress in the white sailor suit she had made for him.

  They went to the reception room to wait.

  She set the string ball before him on the tatami and put in his hand the small American flag she had bought at a shop by the harbor. “Sit here and play with your toys. Papa-san is coming soon. If you be very good and quiet, Papa-san will buy you new toys.”

  She wanted to grab him and run. Perhaps they could go to another city, but she had no training other than that of a geisha and no connections elsewhere; they would be paupers.

  In the distance, there was a long yowl. “What is that?” Benji asked.

  “Shh. It is nothing.”

  She embraced him as long as she could bear it, then rose and went to the other side of the screen to kneel beside the tokonoma. She stared at the scroll, the brushstrokes meaningless. Pain seared her chest. He would see her dead, lying in blood, but it was the only way. In America he would become a successful man. She must be stronger than the blade of steel.

  Suzuki entered, very pale, carrying a ceramic sake bottle. She placed it beside the tokonoma, then bowed and left the room.

  “Mama?” Benji called. “Is he here?”

  “We must wait a little longer,” she said. “We must be patient.”

  Benji fell silent behind the screen. She had taught him to be obedient.

  She bent forward, a sob trapped in her throat. For his sake. He had been born without good fortune; she must provide it for him.

  A grasshopper on the tatami, pale green as a young leaf, made a tiny clicking noise as it jumped. She closed her eyes.

  She knows how it will be, like a scene from a Kabuki play. They will climb from the harbor, Pinkerton and the blond wife; already they are on the way. Suzuki will come to announce them, then begin to wail. When Pinkerton runs in, there she will be, lying on the tatami, a bloody sword loose in her hand, her geisha face turned toward the side, his Cio-Cio-san, looking just as she did the day she met him, and beside her will be Benji, staring down at her, the flag of his new country in his hand.

  Pinkerton:

  Oh, the bitter fragrance

  of these flowers

  spreads in my heart like poison.

  Unchanged is the room

  where our love blossomed.

  But the chill of death is here.

  My picture … (He lifts a photograph from the table)

  She has thought of me.

  Kate imagined how odd they must appear to people who strolled past them on deck, casting covert glances their way: a blond, blue-eyed man and woman sitting in silence, on the man’s lap a child with a Japanese face and light hair. All three of them motionless, staring out at the sea like revenants, the boy immobile as a statue, clutching a multicolored string ball.

  She drew her blanket more tightly about her shoulders. She should say something. They would look less strange in conversation.

  “How can it be so cold in May?” she asked, trying to smile.

  “The black current,” Frank said. “Kuro—kuroshiwo.” He made a snaking motion with one hand. “It’s a mysterious, shifting current that runs along the coast of Japan and then out to sea. We should be leaving it soon.”

  She gazed out at the gray water, the dark line of Japan receding, then at the boy. Yesterday they had carried him kicking and biting to the hotel, but he hadn’t made a sound since recovering from the sedation. The doctor said he was in profound shock—how much did the doctor know about the circumstances? she wondered. Poor child. She looked at him, his small hands gripping the ball as if his life depended on it.

  “What shall we call him?” she said. They were to sit at the captain’s table tonight and hadn’t discussed how to introduce the boy. “He can’t remain Benjamin. It would be a clear signal to the world that he’s your child. Everyone knows you were named for Benjamin Franklin.”

  Frank said nothing. He was uncomfortable, of course, she thought, racked with guilt, but they had to discuss this bizarre situation; it was his responsibility, after all. God help me, she prayed silently. She must remember that he had married her and not that awful woman.

  “It would be one thing if he looked completely Japanese,” she said. “Remember your promise.” The condition under which she’d agreed to take the boy home with them was that no one would know his parentage. “Frank?”

  “Yes, darling.” He looked at her. Today his eyes were gray, but they could be blue or blue-green depending on the surroundings and his mood. From looking at the sea so many years, he’d told her. He reached beneath the blankets to take her gloved hand. “I agree—anything you say.”

  “What about a simple Japanese name? Surely he has one. Ask him.”

  Frank spoke to the boy in halting Japanese.

  “Benji,” the boy said. It was the first word he had spoken.

  “You could give him a Japanese name,” Kate said.

  “It would make life harder for him in America to have a Japanese name.”

  “Well … an American name, then.”

  They considered William, David, Michael, then settled on Tom—one syllable, easy for the boy to learn.

  “What do you think, Tom?” Frank said, giving the boy a little shake. “Anatano namae wa Tomu, desu ne?”

  The boy turned, holding up his ball so that it blocked his view of Frank’s face. “Watashi wa Benji!” he screamed. He rolled off Frank’s lap and went flying down the deck. Frank took off after him; Kate unfurled her blankets and followed.

  She found Frank at the back of the ship, gazing about frantically. The deck was empty, the boy nowhere in sight.

  Perhaps he had leapt overboard. Anything was possible; he was in a state of lunacy. She scanned the wide fan of wake behind the ship.

  “Here he is,” Frank yelled. He had found him squatting behind a large spool of rope. The boy was sucking on his ball, his eyes closed.

  Frank lifted him out. “Benji it will have to be, for the time being,” he said.

  “He shouldn’t get his way with tantrums,” she whispered, glancing at a couple walking past. The woman, wrapped in fur, stared at them avidly; the man tipped his hat with a slight, superior smile. “He’ll be spoiled beyond salvation.”

  “It’s not just a tantrum,” Frank said. “Remember what happened to this boy.”

  “I’m not likely to forget.” She made her way back down the deck to the cabin.

  Later that afternoon, the ship began to roll, rising high, slapping down hard. Kate lay in her berth, dizzy and nauseated. The cabin was claustrophobic and the motion relentless; she felt as if the pitching of the ship and her nausea and the voyage were never going to end, that she would be mired in this torment forever.

  Frank opened the door to the cabin, leading the boy by the hand. “I’ve been mulling it over,” he said, leaning down to peer at her. “What’s the matter, darling? Seasick?”

  “Wretched.”

  “I’m so sorry. Do you feel like hearing my idea about the name?”

  She nodded. Frank and the boy were going up and down in her vision. The boy was staring at her with those black eyes. She shifted her gaze to the left and fixed on the sink.

  “We must call him Benji, because eventually he’s going to let slip that
was his name. So I thought I could tell people this: The priest at a church, where we can say we found him, called him Benji after me, having no other choice at hand, and by the time we came to fetch him, the name had stuck. He simply had no other name that we were aware of. What do you think?”

  “Fine,” Kate said, closing her eyes.

  “Sleep if you can, darling. The boy and I are going back up on deck—I’ll see if I can make a sailor out of him.”

  The door closed.

  “Benji,” she said. The name was bitter in her mouth.

  The name was the least of it. There was the shock of learning about Frank’s vulgar liaison—and then, after the tragedy, suddenly having his child to raise.

  But he was just an innocent child, she reminded herself. None of this was his doing. He couldn’t help it that he had a mother so cruel as to butcher herself before his very eyes.

  The American consul, Sharpless—who had insisted that the boy was Frank’s—told them that as a mixed-race child he would be unadoptable. He would live on the streets, prey to disease and criminals. Frank said he would feel guilty all his life if he left the child to such a fate. He begged Kate to forgive him and to consider what he knew to be a heavy burden.

  She had gone to the Oura Church to pray about her decision and afterward went to the cliff where the sixteenth-century Christians had been crucified rather than abandon their faith. It had been a fiercely beautiful day, the sea a smooth blue shroud. If those souls could give up their lives for Christ, she could make the modest sacrifice of finding room for this boy in their home.

  Frank had covered her face with kisses. She would be glad, he predicted, that they would have help on the farm until they had boys of their own.

  Kate shifted from her back to her side and stared down at the steel floor. She felt as queasy now as she had that month of her pregnancy, not long after they were married. When she lost the baby, Frank had been so dashed it was almost unbearable, and there had been no sign of another these two years. Maybe her sickness now was not just from the motion of the boat. Perhaps she was with child again.

  The ship rose, a high, slow climb, then fell with a shudder. Their large trunk slid across the floor; Frank’s shaving mug fell from the sink and shattered.

  She thought of that woman lying in blood, and the child beside her, restrained by the maid from throwing himself on his mother’s body. God was calling on her to enlarge her soul. She would learn to care for him as if he were one of her own children, and she would help him to forget.

  Galena Gazette, June 1, 1895

  Plum River, Illinois. There is much commotion and merrymaking these days in our community as Lt. Frank Pinkerton (son of Elmer, who died last year) and his wife, Katherine, have settled in at the Pinkerton farm. As if the presence of the refined Mrs. Pinkerton—the daughter of Galena’s late missionary pastor, the Reverend Timothy Lewis—were not excitement enough, this Christian couple has brought with them, to rear as nearly their own as possible, a Japanese orphan boy rescued from the lowly society of Nagasaky, Japan. In his sermon Sunday last, Pastor Marshall Pollock called upon his flock to excite in their breasts all the human compassion of which they are capable and to extend every possible kindness and instruction to this heathen child in our midst.

  Benji was given new clothes, scratchy pants that ended below his knees and a shirt with a long row of white circles he was supposed to push through holes. There were stiff heavy shoes to wear outside and inside. When he tried to leave them by the door everyone laughed and Blue Eyes made him put them back on.

  Papa-san said this was a farm where they grew good things to eat but the food made Benji sick, the big pieces of red meat, the hill of white mush with a thick brown soup running over the top, and the little green things that ran away from the stabber he had to use. Papa-san said he couldn’t use the chopsticks he’d found in his trunk.

  Outside, everything was too wide and stretched-looking. When he saw the river he understood that he was in the kappa world. He had been bad and the kappas had brought him here. He had never seen a kappa but Suzuki had said they were green with long arms and a shallow dish of water on their heads. Unless you knocked the water out of the dish, they were very strong. Once when he swam in a river in Nagasaki and went down deep to get a rock, Suzuki told him never to do that again. The kappas hid in rivers and they could reach inside your bottom and pull your liver out. Even if you weren’t in the river but you were naughty, the kappas could take you there when you were asleep and carry you under the water to their world. Two times he hadn’t come when Mama called and once he had kept a frog in his bed to scare her. Then Mama was lying on the floor with her eyes shut and she wouldn’t wake up. Suzuki said she would never wake up, that the red on the floor was her life coming out of her breast but he would see her again someday in the Land of Spirits and he should pray for her. Suzuki said it was an accident, but he knew the kappas had killed her because he was bad and then they had brought him to this place. That’s why this strange talking sounded like voices through water.

  He squatted near the river and looked down at it to see the kappas. The water ran fast and carried sticks and leaves, and once he saw a fish. There was a long-legged bug on top of the water. He poked it with a stick. It could be a kappa in another form. Animals could take other shapes and fool you, Suzuki said, foxes and badgers and birds.

  He liked the funny birds here. Chicken. Papa-san read the real word from a big book and then made him say it in kappa language. It was his job to feed the chickens inside their fence. He put corn in the pan and scattered it around him in a circle for them to pick up. They made funny noises, especially the one with the red mushrooms on his head, and he felt sorry for them because of the ugly feet they couldn’t help and the loose necks that went back and forth too much. Their feathers were pretty but hard. Papa said someday they would have babies, little soft ones, and he could have one for his own. He always gave the chickens clean water after their food and Papa said he was a good boy to take care of them so well.

  Benji’s room was near the kitchen and in his room was a bed where he was supposed to stay all night. He was not to pull off the covers and sleep on the floor, but he did, when he could stay awake until the house was quiet. The floor was hard beneath the sheets and thin quilts, but as he fell asleep there, holding the string ball Mama had made for him, it was easier to pretend that he was at home and that when morning came Mama’s voice would wake him. Breakfast would be waiting at the low table that looked out on the garden, and there would be miso soup with bits of mushroom he had helped Mama find in the woods, and rice with dried seaweed. This would be in the Land of Spirits, but it would look just like home.

  One night when he had a bad dream, he pulled his trunk out from under the bed. It was dark but his hands knew where everything was. The ivory chopsticks with the foxes on the end, the lacquer rice bowl, the kite with the tiger on it. At the bottom was his winter sleeping kimono. He took off the itchy nightshirt and put on the kimono and lay back down. The kimono was soft with thick padding and the silk lining reminded him of Mama. His skin began to feel warm, and when he went to sleep this time he had a good dream. He woke up in the morning before Blue Eyes came in and put everything back into the chest except the kimono, which he folded and slid beneath the mattress where it would be easy to find in the dark.

  They went once a week to a place Papa-san said was a temple but it was not quiet and didn’t smell like incense. He had to sit on a hard bench with a lot of other people, and the girls in front of him turned and looked quick at him and laughed. On the platform was a big ugly man who talked loud and waved his arms around until his face was red. Papa said this was the priest, who was very interested in Benji. Someday the priest would come to eat with them and Benji should learn many new words so he could talk to him. Benji shook his head because he didn’t want to learn kappa language, but Papa frowned and said he must so he could get along in this world.

  The day before the priest cam
e to eat, Blue Eyes and the old woman wore long white aprons all day while they cooked. Papa was in the field working, so Blue Eyes told Benji what to do by pointing—at the bucket so he would fill it with water; at the woodpile outside so he would bring more wood for the stove. The house smelled good with pie and cake cooking, and in the afternoon the old woman let him have some warm apple pie with fresh cream on it. Their sweet food was the only kind he liked.

  The next morning when Benji was feeding the chickens the old woman came out to the pen. When she reached down to one of the chickens Benji thought she was trying to pet it but she took it by the neck and began to swing it around and around with its body and feet making circles in the air and it made a terrible noise and all the other chickens ran away and tried to fly. Benji shut his eyes and put his hands over his ears and screamed as loud as he could to be heard on the other side of the kappa world and didn’t stop until the old woman stuffed her apron in his mouth.

  Just his luck, Frank thought, to begin farming in a year of withering drought. By late June, the corn and wheat planted in April had collapsed in the fields. Farmers gathered at Red Olsen’s store, talking of rain and rumors of rain, crop insurance, dwindling silage for the cows, bank loans. Bud Case, the burly redheaded farmer whose land adjoined the Pinkertons’, said Frank was lucky he’d been late to plant: a smaller investment in money and labor. “Some of that corn won’t come back even if we get good rain,” Bud said. “But next year will be better.” He clapped Frank on the shoulder. “The lean year is usually followed by the fat. The Lord sees to it.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Frank’s mother said, as they sat at breakfast with Kate, Benji, and the Swede. “As long as the well holds. Frank, you remember what your father used to say.”

  He sighed. Here came Benjamin Franklin, the great man for whom he’d been named, though his father had said more than once that he wished he could take it back.

  “ ‘In time of drought,’ ” she quoted, raising one finger, “ ‘we know the worth of water.’ That’s the silver lining.”