Butterfly's Child Read online

  No one spoke; the forks scraped against the chipped blue plates. The table looked just as it had when he was a boy: the white oilcloth with its raised pattern, the chicken and rooster salt and pepper shakers, the blue milk pitcher. The taciturn, white-haired Swede sat in the same chair he’d occupied when Frank was a child, ever since he’d wandered to the farm–nameless and apparently without a memory—and Frank’s father had taken him on.

  Frank glanced at Kate, wan and exhausted; there was a streak of flour on her right temple. She gave him a brave smile. She hadn’t expected any of this—his mother, the boy who sat mutely staring at his plate of scrambled eggs and corn mush, the grinding work. When they’d visited the farm last April and sat on the porch holding hands, the intoxicating odor of flowering plums drifting across the meadow, they had decided they could be happy here, independent, in their own house. He’d promised Kate a servant girl, but he hadn’t reckoned on all the expenses to start up a farm that had lain fallow for two years, since his father took ill.

  His mother—as she intimated at every possible opportunity—had saved them by leaving her comfortable situation with Frank’s sister’s family in Cicero in order to teach Kate how to run a farmhouse.

  “These are very good biscuits, Kate,” Frank said. “Best I ever had.”

  “In time of drought,” his mother said, “it’s the Guernseys will turn a profit. Your father always said as much. Ought to get another one.”

  “Can’t afford it this year.” Frank leaned over Benji’s plate to show him how to break open a biscuit and butter it.

  “Cut back on some fineries, you could.” She didn’t glance at Kate, but Kate went rigid; she’d just ordered drapery material for the parlor.

  “We have to be civilized,” Frank murmured, though he agreed with his mother. He and Kate had argued over the draperies; nothing wrong with the old ones, that he could see.

  “It was Christian of Bud Case to take care of the Guernseys for us,” his mother said, as though Frank had been expecting to return to the farm all along.

  “I imagine he made his Christian profit,” Kate said, with a tight little smile.

  Frank laughed in surprise.

  His mother’s face turned pink. “No doubt he turned a fine profit,” she said. “Thanks to his wife. Olena can churn more before breakfast than some women do in a day.”

  The women rose simultaneously, bumping elbows, and began to clear the table. “Thanks for the meat,” the Swede mumbled, and skedaddled to the barn. Now, there was a Christian man, Frank thought, staying on after his father’s death—not that the Swede had the initiative to move on.

  As Kate picked up Frank’s dishes, she gave him a dark look.

  He shrugged and took a sip of coffee, cold now. He’d had words with his mother and had explained his mother’s character to Kate. What more could he do?

  He looked at Benji’s plate, untouched except for one bite of biscuit. “Eat!” he said, pushing at the biscuit.

  The boy stared at him, those licorice eyes just like hers.

  Frank spooned up some scrambled eggs and held them to the boy’s closed mouth. “Eat!”

  “Leave him alone,” Kate said, turning from the sink.

  “He has to eat.”

  “He does eat,” Frank’s mother said. “He’s partial to my cherry pie—ate half of one yesterday.”

  “The boy needs some work to build a real appetite.” Frank hoisted Benji from his chair, limp as a sack of feed.

  There was a chorus from the women: not in the fields, far too hot.

  Frank carried Benji out the door and down the steps. Kate came running after him with a straw hat for Benji and a jug of water. The hat fell over the boy’s eyes; Frank snatched it off. “That’s no good.”

  “Don’t take him—he’s too young. He can help me in the garden.”

  “I was in the fields at five.”

  Benji gazed back and forth at them impassively.

  “What must he be thinking?” Kate said. She laid a hand on his forehead as if to gauge his temperature.

  “He’ll be fine. Daijobu, ne?” Frank said, jiggling Benji.

  No reaction, just those eyes boring into him.

  They walked along the edge of the pasture where the Guernseys—milked at daybreak—had already found their way to the hill on the other side of Plum Creek. When Frank was a boy with ideas of running away to sea, he had liked to think of that hill as a cresting green wave and the Guernseys as clots of foam. The grass was patchy now, browning in the drought; the cows’ cream wouldn’t have much butterfat, no better grazing than this.

  The Swede was waiting outside the barn with the stone boat—a shallow wooden receptacle with high sides and a seat for the driver—hitched to the Percherons.

  “We’re getting the rocks out of the field,” Frank said to Benji, miming the action. “They push out of the ground in winter; any one of them could break the plow. You’ll see how to do it. Easy. Fun.” He called up the Japanese word for fun. “Tanoshii.”

  He hoisted Benji to his shoulders and, with the Swede driving the boat, they went down Plum River Road and headed into a cornfield—flattened stubble now. Frank intended to plant winter wheat here later in the season, after the drought had passed; it might bring a good price next spring.

  He set Benji on the ground, and they followed the stone boat as it bucked and clattered over the furrows. Frank picked up a rock and threw it into the boat—it landed with a thwock—then put a small stone in Benji’s hand and helped him pitch it in. “See?” He gave him another stone. Benji hurled it at the boat with such force that it bounced up and out. Benji turned and grinned at him. Frank felt a catch in his throat; his smile was like hers, the same glint of mischief.

  “That’s it. Good boy. Daijobu.” He ruffled Benji’s thick blond hair, already warm from the sun. “Not so hard, though. Easy now.” He demonstrated a slow underhand pitch.

  They went on down the row, then another, developing a rhythm. Occasionally there was a large rock that had thrust its way up through the soil; Frank let Benji help him wrestle it out, and they carried it—Frank pretending to stagger—to the boat and set it down.

  Benji was a stout little worker. Maybe he’d make a farmer. Stranger things had happened. Frank had never intended to farm, yet here he was. If his brother John—groomed to take over the farm—hadn’t died of tetanus not long after their father’s passing, Frank would still be struggling to make a go of the import/export business in Galena, and living with Kate at her mother’s house. His own mother was a peach in comparison to that woman.

  Benji held out a flat rock in his palm.

  “Smart fellow,” Frank said, looking at it closely. “An arrowhead.” He repeated the word; he should have brought his Japanese–English dictionary, though it was cumbersome to manage in the field. He took the arrowhead from Benji’s hand. “An Indian used this,” Frank said. “A hunter.” As they went on, he began to talk about the Indians who used this land before the white man—maybe Benji would begin to absorb some English this way, as Kate kept insisting. He became so caught up in his story about the fierce Blackhawk war that had raged here not so many decades ago that he forgot to look for rocks, and Benji stopped picking them up, walking slowly beside him.

  “Papa-san?” Benji said.

  Frank knelt beside him. “Benji-san.” It was the first time the boy had addressed him directly since that miserable day, when Frank had rocked him to sleep in the hotel room. Benji said something in Japanese he couldn’t understand, then stared at him, his face unreadable. Frank gave him a quick embrace. “You’re going to be fine. You’ll come to like it here. I promise.” When they returned to the house, he would look up some words of comfort in his dictionary.

  The stone boat was pulling away from them. “Pinkerton?” the Swede called.

  As they hurried to catch up, Benji stubbed his toe on a rock and fell; the string ball rolled out of his pocket. Frank watched as he scooped it up and carefully brushed it
off. It was like a rainbow, every color of string imaginable. She must have spent hours making it. Benji scrubbed at it with his hand, frantic; there was a stain he couldn’t remove. Frank soaked his bandanna in water from the canteen and dabbed at the ball. “See, it’s better now. Daijobu,” he said, though he couldn’t tell for sure. “We’ll wash it some more when we get home. Water—mizu—and soap.”

  Benji was sniffling, and his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. Frank wiped the boy’s forehead and neck with the wet bandanna, gave him a drink. “Time to unload,” he yelled to the Swede. He hoisted Benji to the seat beside the Swede, and gave him the canteen. The boat dragged around in a wide circle, and they drove back across the field to dump the rocks on the pile already there, then they headed back toward the house.

  Frank stared at the ground, still scanning for rocks, but his mind had come untethered. He thought of Butterfly’s delicate fingers wrapping the strings around the ball, then laying it out by Benji’s futon as a morning surprise—in such a way, she had given him a fan that he now kept in a drawer of his desk. He could see her quiet smile as she anticipated Benji’s reaction, then his delight, throwing the ball up and down, the two of them chattering in Japanese. Now he had no one to talk to. If she could have known how her boy would suffer without her, would she have taken her life?

  Sharpless seemed to think it was his fault, that she had cared for him more than he knew, was in such despair that she drove the sword into her breast. He shuddered, pushed away the image, went back to a time before that, when they lay on the futon one morning at daybreak, listening to birds in the garden. If he had been true to her, perhaps they would be a family now.

  But then he wouldn’t have Kate. He wouldn’t even have known Kate, but he wouldn’t have known that he didn’t know her. He concentrated on her face, the iridescent blue eyes, the slightly crooked smile. He thought of her hand in his, the first time they’d danced, the long, serious conversations as they walked the hilly streets of Galena in the rain.

  He was deluding himself to imagine that he’d have returned to Butterfly, the man he was in his earlier days. He’d been footloose then, with girls in Cuba, Brazil, California. It had taken Kate to make him want to settle down. She was intelligent without making too much of it, they had interests in common, had both lived in the Orient, and she had an appealing feminine warmth. During their walks, her intimate gaze had invited confidence: He’d told her about his yearning to go to sea ever since he’d read Two Years Before the Mast as a young man; about the falling-out with his father and his flight to Hampton Roads; and he confessed his disappointment in the Navy—the inertia of the top brass, the leaking dinosaur of a ship to which he’d been assigned.

  He looked at the expanse of land, the island of trees in the distance like a mirage in the shimmer of heat. For a moment it seemed to him that much of his life had been a dream and it was only lately, with the shock of Butterfly’s death, that he had wakened to his foolishness, his vanity, and his lust—a no-good, his father had called him—and that now, as if in punishment for his sins, he walked a furrow in the ground behind his father’s Percherons, reaping a harvest of stones.

  The farmhouse parlor was a lugubrious room, long and narrow, which made rearrangement of the furniture impossible, Kate found. A hideous pump organ favored by Frank’s mother dominated the room. There was a love seat of punishing horsehair, a platform rocker with frayed upholstery, and a wicker rocker better suited for the porch. The room faced westward, so that only wan light fell between the dusty brown draperies, and in the summer it was airless and hot. Kate had added to one corner of the room a curio cabinet filled with souvenirs of Frank’s travels and of her childhood in China; it would make an interesting focus of conversation when she began to entertain. In the basement she had found a rather handsome bookcase with glass doors. She had Frank carry it upstairs and, after she had dusted and polished it, she placed in it her sets of Dickens and Trollope, her Emerson and Thoreau, and the collected works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Situated between the windows, in lieu of the plant stand with its spindly ferns, the bookcase was a welcome and cultivated addition to the room. Kate planned to replace the wall decorations—a morbid hair wreath; a foxed print titled The Stag at Eve—with examples of her own handiwork. Her first sampler, made in childhood—an alphabet with a cross-stitch rendition of Mary and her lamb—now hung above the love seat; she hoped Benji would eventually learn his letters from it.

  Benji seemed observant and bright, but he had yet to make progress with English. Of course, it was early for that. He must be frightened in his isolation, and perhaps bored. In the pocket of his overalls he always carried the string ball from Japan. Kate often saw him seated beneath a tree or on the porch, shifting the ball from one hand to the other. The boy needed some new playthings.

  On the afternoon that two boxes arrived from Montgomery Ward, Kate sat on the parlor floor with Benji while she opened the larger box. “Toys,” she said. “All for you.”

  She took out a stuffed bear, golden brown with fuzzy ears, and held it out to him. “Bear.”

  He looked at it, then at her. That stare of his was unnerving. She rocked the bear in her arms, then arranged his arms around it. He looked down at it and set the bear carefully on the floor. Had he never seen a toy animal before? She should have waited until Frank was here with his dictionary to translate, but she wanted Benji to know that the toys had been her idea.

  “Here—you’ll like this.” She took the wooden top out of its box—it was shiny, with red, white, and blue stripes—and set it to spinning in front of him. The colors blurred as the top whirled, then it listed and sped across the floor, knocked against the rocker, and fell over. Benji laughed—you darling, she wanted to say; she had never heard him laugh before—but he made no move to retrieve the top.

  She took out a book of Mother Goose rhymes and a silver spoon with his name engraved on the handle, the latter a motivation for him to learn to use table utensils properly. Neither of these items evoked any interest.

  He liked the blocks, though, light wood with a high varnish, made in three different sizes. She helped him build a wall, and he began to make stacks of his own. She sat for a few minutes watching him as he carefully placed one block on top of another; he seemed to be counting under his breath.

  “I’m glad you like the blocks,” she said. He didn’t look at her. She hadn’t expected a thank-you, but she thought there might have been a glance of understanding, or a smile. Maybe he would never learn to love her, and she might never have a child of her own. The nausea on the journey had been a false alarm, nothing but seasickness, and Frank was disappointed in her once again.

  “What’s all this?” Frank’s mother stood at the parlor door, hands on her hips. Mrs. Pinkerton was a doughy woman, her face a web of wrinkles. Her vanity was her nut-brown hair, which had not a trace of gray in it.

  “Benji needs some amusements.”

  “My children never had any fancy playthings.”

  “He’s lonely,” Kate said. Mrs. Pinkerton gazed at the boy without speaking, but Kate knew what she was thinking—that they should have left him where he was. She and Frank had managed to convince her that they had saved an abandoned orphan and intended to make a Christian of him, but Mrs. Pinkerton took a dim view of the enterprise. Soon they would have their own children, she said, and why name the boy Benji? That name should go to her grandchild. Nevertheless, she had a soft spot for the boy and was forever feeding him sweets, ruining his interest in healthful food.

  “There’s supper to get on the table,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.

  “I’ll be there presently.” Kate waited until Mrs. Pinkerton had returned to the kitchen before carrying the other box upstairs to her bedroom. She ripped it open and laid out on the bed a blue flowered print dress that would set off her eyes and an embroidered white nightgown trimmed in eyelet. She would wear the gown tonight with her hair brushed over her shoulders and some of the scent that Frank li
ked dabbed on her neck.

  She took off her apron, changed into the blue dress, and sat at her dressing table, leaning toward the mirror. The color was becoming, and it gave her a pleasant little shock—as always, these days—to see that she looked much the same as ever. A cloud of golden hair, intense blue eyes, a complexion without flaw—in spite of the relentless labor in the house and garden, in spite of Frank’s eyes no longer reflecting back what he used to call her luminous beauty.

  Ever since their visit to Japan, Frank had lost his appetite for her love. He had suffered a terrible jolt, but so had she. She had thought they could take comfort in each other and, after a few weeks, return to their old habits, albeit with the changes necessitated by Benji’s presence. The first two years of their marriage, Frank had been devoted and their lovemaking passionate; they had taken a secret delight in coupling under her mother’s roof, where they had lived until they decided about the farm, stifling their laughter with kisses.

  Frank was having a difficult time managing a farm for the first time—she understood that. But as the weeks passed, he receded further from her. He often seemed distracted, silent, looking into the distance. No more embraces or kisses except in the bedroom, where he seemed a stranger, no intimate conversations, no words of love.

  He must be consumed with guilt over that woman, his senses dulled by shame. Kate had tried to help him with his burden, encouraged him to talk, but he evaded her. Only reluctantly had he told her the woman’s name: Cio-Cio, Butterfly. A name for an exotic beauty, she had thought, but pushed aside the nettles of jealousy. Men sowed their wild oats, and this was in the past, except for Frank’s suffering. She would have to be patient and resourceful to bring him back to her. She must try harder, and with God’s help, their union would be revived.

  “Kate,” her mother-in-law called up the stairs. “The men will be in shortly. I’ve done everything but snap the beans.”