Butterfly's Child (11 page)

“I hit him and he hit back,” he said. “I butted like a goat and he fell down so hard he cried like a little sissy, even though he's bigger than me. Two other boys threw rocks and dirt but I didn't care.”

He leaned closer to the picture. “I'm a samurai. Are you proud of me?”

He wagged the picture to make her say yes, but her face didn't answer. The writing didn't answer. There was only the angry sound of rain.

Kate had felt separated
from God ever since the events in Nagasaki. Praying at the mission church there, she had been moved to rescue Benji and to forgive Frank, but that inspiration had faded during the years on the farm. She could have borne the hard work, she thought, she might even have seen it as a trial God set for her, if she had any sense of His presence. One should never allow oneself to fall into the Slough of Despond, she remembered her father saying; “Despair is a shutting out of God.” So it was her fault, and not God's, that He had left her.

Her sense of melancholy deepened after the Moores' party that summer and continued into the fall, when Frank's shifts in mood became more pronounced; he was alternately distant and effusive. She no longer believed in his affection, which seemed an effort to cover a growing indifference. He spent many evenings in his office, going over the farm ledgers, he said, but these days he seemed more careless with the farm; even his mother had noted it during haying season, when he left the sheaves in the field to go sour in the rain. They'd had to buy hay for the livestock from Bud Case and other farmers nearby. Once, when Kate had taken some tea to his office, he was looking out the window into the dark.

“What is it, darling?” she asked.

He shook his head as though to clear it. “The railroads,” he said. “The tariffs will kill us.” But his expression had not to do with railroads.

Sometimes when she went to his office after that, the door was locked, and often he was late coming to bed.

She increased her prayers morning and evening and while she went
about the housework, but her words felt as rote as a child's Sunday-school recitation, and her sense of God's absence left her hollow.

In late October, she met with Reverend Singleton in his study at the First Presbyterian Church in Stockton. Though she had often thought of consulting him, shame about her peculiar marital difficulties had held her back.

He sat behind his desk, his hands clasped together as if in readiness for prayer, a well-nourished man with a lap of flesh over his clerical collar and kind gray eyes.

She had intended to begin with her crisis of faith but instead blurted out, “I have some family difficulty … my husband …”

He cleared his throat and rearranged some pencils on his desk. She couldn't speak her heart; she couldn't mention that woman.

“He is disappointed in me—it seems I can have no children of my own. We … have grown apart.”

“There are many unfortunate children in the world,” he said, looking up at her. “You have brought one into your home already. Perhaps God's intention for you and your husband is to continue this Christian work.”

No, she wanted to scream, that's not it, but instead politely excused herself and said she must be going.

One winter afternoon she sat alone in the sanctuary of the church. It was cold and dark, no light filtering through the stained-glass windows above her pew.

“Dear God,” she whispered, “help me, give me back my faith. I need You.”

She waited. Nothing but the sound of the wind.

She pulled her coat tighter about her and closed her eyes. God had carried her through earlier crises in her life. When her missionary parents sent her home from Harbin at age nine, because they were convinced she could not receive a proper education in China, she had lived with her spinster aunt Nora and attended the schools in Galena. The first months were agony; though Aunt Nora tried hard to be a mother, Kate felt bereft and abandoned. Pastor Williams, an erudite silver-haired man who resembled her father, had prayed with her day after day. Kneeling beside him, the ruby and honey colored light that streamed through the stained-glass windows bathing their hands and arms, she had come to feel God's enfolding presence.

Later, she had undertaken a study of the Bible with Pastor Williams,
and he introduced her to secular writers as well, particularly the Transcendalists; they had a number of enlivening discussions about the Over-soul. It was Pastor Williams who had suggested to her aunt that Kate attend college, where she might train to be a teacher as well as further develop what he called the life of the mind.

She had returned from Ellington Women's Institute in Iowa prepared to teach, but during her first week in Galena she met Richard McCann at a dinner party. Richard had recently moved to Galena to take a position in the bank; he was said to have a brilliant future and Kate found him enticing, with his broad shoulders that made her trust him—an impulse that she now saw as childish—and his dark, adoring eyes. He had pursued her ardently, squiring her to dances and to orations at the Desoto Hotel, and they began to speak of marriage.

But then Kate's father died and she went to China for the funeral. When she returned two months later, she found that Richard's attentions had shifted to Emily Kettering, in Galena to visit her cousin.

Emily was a molasses-voiced Southerner, adept at the art of flattery. Kate thought that Richard would eventually reject her as insincere. When Richard came that final afternoon to tell her he had proposed to Emily, Kate disgraced herself by weeping, but Richard was unmoved. He admitted that he was leaving the better woman, but the heart works in illogical ways, he said.

Again she was plunged into despair, through which she was led once more by Pastor Williams. He said it was God's will that she had parted from the ignoble Mr. McCann; she was destined for a finer man. She believed him and gave over the burden of her pain to God.

That finer man had seemed to be Frank—handsome in his naval uniform, on leave to visit his ailing father. They met at a church social to which he had been invited by another woman, but he bought her lunch basket instead and they sat on the lawn, her muslin skirt spread out about her, he leaning back on his elbows, smiling up at her. When he began to call on her, he told her that he was weary of the wayfaring life, and he spoke of the possibility of establishing a branch of his Nagasaki import/export business in Galena. The town had once been a thriving port, but the Mississippi had narrowed there over the years and trade was less brisk than it had been a half century ago. Still, Frank thought there were opportunities in Galena, and his eyes told her that he was speaking not merely of business. Although Kate's first pleasure in Frank's pursuit
of her was the dignity of having a suitor, she could feel herself beginning to fall in love with him.

Her mother, soon returned from Harbin, did not share her enthusiasm about Frank. She wondered about his business prospects and his past life as a seaman and thought Kate should marry the pastor, whose wife had died recently; though twenty years her senior, he was a good man, her mother said, and would provide for her. A sailor, accustomed to roaming the world, was not likely to be steady.

She had proved her mother wrong, those first two years; she and Frank had been happy until the tragedy in Nagasaki. The circumstances of Frank's dead mistress and her child were sordid and humiliating, but as she knelt in the Oura Church, praying so hard that she felt her head and heart would burst, she had felt God's presence in the unfamiliar odors of incense and wet stone. Her mind had cleared as she rose, with God leading the way.

Now here she was, doing as God had wished, but somehow she had lost Him. She thought of the farmhouse garden, the wet dirt in her hands, the well with its dark hole. The bed she shared with Frank, a feeling of being chafed and unrecognized. Her fear that the only child in the house would be Butterfly's. She had been near despair for some time, she realized, but she had not called on God.

The time was always ripe, Pastor Williams would say. But what would he know of true despair and spiritual dryness, in the comfort of his rectory, with his new Nordic wife, their brood of blond children?

“Oh, God, you must help me. Please save me. Please give me a child.” From elsewhere in the church came a sound, a cough. Had she been speaking aloud?

Mortified, she stood and walked down the aisle, pulled open the heavy door, and stepped out into the frigid air.

There was snow on the ground, and she had brought the cutter with Daisy to pull it. On the way home, it began to snow again. She imagined it snowing harder, the whiteness blurring her vision; Daisy might lose her way in a storm, with the roads and familiar scents obscured.

But they arrived at the farmhouse without incident, a little before supper time. She unhooked Daisy from the cutter and poured oats into her manger.

As Kate walked to the house, she saw the silhouette of Frank in his study, his head bent over his desk. She stood looking up at him through
the snow. She wished she could tell him about her loneliness, her sense of failure as a wife. She wished they could discuss their difficulties in a spirit of forgiveness. If only they could talk about Butterfly, she would tell him her theory about his obsession: guilt that he must overcome.

She waved and called, but he did not respond. At one time, not so long ago, he'd have been on the porch looking out for her in this weather. She stared at his motionless figure. She was locked out by Frank as well as by God.

By his third year
on the farm, Benji was old enough to be in charge of the milking. It was the chore he liked best, especially on warm mornings with the sun slanting in through the barn door and high windows, and the smell of grass, wet with dew, drifting across the meadow. A samurai wouldn't do this job, but milking had made his arms strong. He wasn't afraid of anyone now, and his samurai grandfather and uncles would be proud.

He rested his forehead against each cow's side as he milked, his hands on the teats gentle and sure; the cows let down easily for him. The Swede had taught him to drink from a teat and to squirt milk in Kaki's mouth; Father Pinkerton said he could get kicked that way but he had never been kicked. Even Bossy, with her bad temper, regarded him with unblinking eyes, and her hide seemed to shudder with pleasure when he drew up his stool beside her.

After the cows were milked, he and the collie Skip led the herd across the road to the meadow, Kaki and the two calves frisking in the high grass. Both calves were heifers, but Father Pinkerton was hoping for a bull from Ivy, because a bull brought a higher price. It was sad to see the calves so high-spirited, because they didn't know that before long they'd be taken away from their mothers. At least they wouldn't be slaughtered like beef cattle; Guernseys were the best milkers money could buy, Father Pinkerton said.

Ivy was a two-year-old heifer in her first breeding. She was near her time, and one morning in late April Father Pinkerton allowed Benji to
stay home from Sunday school to keep an eye on her, because she might have difficulty with her first labor. If she started licking her side or switching her tail fast, Benji was to fetch Keast from the Plum River church.

There had been hard rain the past few days and Plum Creek was swollen, carrying on its surface brown leaves and sticks scoured from the edges of the bank. Benji sat with his feet in the water, enjoying his freedom and the sweet odor of plum trees in blossom beside the creek. These plum trees were different from the ones in Japan—they made purple instead of yellow fruit, and their smell was stronger—but Mama would like them anyway. She had gone every day to the fox shrine when the plum trees were flowering there.

Something red bobbed past on the surface of the water. Benji jumped up and ran alongside the creek, dodging around clumps of trees. It could be Mama's ball, or part of it; maybe it had been hit upstream that day and gotten stuck behind a rock and the rain had loosened it.

He glanced back at Ivy, grazing peacefully, and went on.

The current carried the ball faster than he could run, so he jumped into the water. It was deeper than he thought, over his head, and he let himself be carried along with the creek. He kicked his feet to go faster, but his clothes weighed him down, and with his face at the surface of the water he couldn't see the ball. He went past fields of young corn and wheat and empty places. An old man squatting beside the creek grinned at him; it was crazy Ike on the Olsen farm—that meant he'd gone past the Cases' land. It probably hadn't been the ball anyway, just a piece of cloth. He turned to paddle toward the bank, but the muscle of current held him back. He imagined a kappa dragging him down and tried harder, churning his arms. Water filled his throat; he coughed and sputtered, his heart racing. Be a samurai, he told himself. Ahead was a plum branch leaning over the water; he aimed toward it and managed to catch on, then inched along with his hands, squeezing the flower shoots and stickery bark until he was able to leap onto the bank. His legs were weak as a baby calf's. He peeled off his shirt and trousers and lay on his back at the edge of a corn row, the ground a relief beneath him.

The sun was almost directly overhead; they'd be home from church soon. He jumped up and ran along the creek, leaping out of Ike's way when he held out his arm and laughed. Maybe it would be faster to go on
the road, but he was in his underwear. He pulled on his shirt, realized he'd left the trousers behind, kept going. The lines of corn flashed past; a low place in the ground set him stumbling, but he recovered and ran on. When he saw the scarecrow wearing Grandmother Pinkerton's old bonnet, he was back on their farm, and then he was in the meadow. From a distance it looked just as he had left it, the cows grazing, Kaki pouncing in the grass. One of the calves was suckling her mother.

Ivy wasn't in the herd. He looked near the river, then ran back toward the barn and saw her high in the meadow, in the shade of a cottonwood tree. She was lying on her side and moaning; he should go for Keast. Then he saw something poking up from her, a big stick; she'd gotten caught on something. But when he reached her side he saw that it was a calf's hind leg. In a breech birth, Keast had taught him, both legs had to come out together.