Butterfly's Child (12 page)

He dropped beside her and tried to push the leg back in, but blood gushed out and Ivy bawled louder, her eyes rolled back in her head.

He sat on her back, as he had once when helping Keast, and felt the calf through her hide. It wasn't moving. But that was all right, he told himself, it wouldn't breathe until it had some air. He had to get the leg back in. He knelt on the ground again and pushed harder. Ivy made terrible sounds and blood poured out of her so he stopped, holding the calf's hoof in his hands, staring down at the muck of blood and manure, the spears of red grass.

“What the hell?” Father Pinkerton was there; Benji hadn't heard him come. “Where's Keast?”

Benji tried to say there wasn't time, but Father Pinkerton yanked him up by the collar. “You think you can birth a calf? Where are your trousers?”

Benji pointed down the stream.

“You just lost me twenty dollars, maybe more, on this calf, and the mother looks like a goner too. Why in Hades were you swimming when you were supposed to be watching?”

“
Okasan …
”

“Your mother's gone.” Father Pinkerton gave him a shove. “She's as dead as these cows. Go get Keast and the Swede. I'll deal with you later.”

Benji took off across the field, pressing his feet down hard on small rocks and anything else that hurt.

The Swede and Keast were in the house. Benji burst into the dining
room and yelled at them. They didn't move. Everyone stared. Grandmother Pinkerton was holding the gravy spoon in the air.

“Speak English, Benji,” Mother Pinkerton said. “What's happened?”

He looked at his arm, smeared with blood. “Mama,” he said, and everything went black.

Keast and Pinkerton
and the Swede carried the dead cow and calf behind the barn. The Swede went to fetch shovels.

Pinkerton took a long pull on a flask of corn whiskey. “God damn that boy,” he said.

“There was nothing I could have done,” Keast said again.

“If he'd been watching you would have had the chance to try.”

Keast shook his head. There was no use talking to Frank Pinkerton when he didn't care to listen.

They started digging. The sound of shovels doing this work was always the hardest part of it. He'd dug Isobel's grave himself.

When the hole was big enough, they laid in the cow and her unbirthed calf.

“There goes a fortune,” Pinkerton said, as they started covering them with dirt.

“I'm sure the boy was doing his best,” Keast said. “He loves the animals.”

Pinkerton snorted. “Not enough to keep him from skylarking in the creek. He's caused us nothing but trouble.” He held his shovel under one arm to take another slug from the flask.

Keast wanted to ask if he regretted bringing the boy with him from Japan. Instead, he said, “Would you have any objection, Pinkerton, if I occasionally took the boy with me on my late-afternoon rounds from time to time? Following the completion of his chores, of course.”

“What in tarnation for?”

“He might learn some things useful to you here on the farm.”

“If you're trying to spare him a licking, Keast, you're wasting your breath.”

“It wasn't his fault.” Keast dropped his shovel and began walking to the house. “You bred her to too large a bull.”

Benji was sitting at the kitchen table, pale as a haint. There was an untouched stack of hotcakes before him. Old Mrs. Pinkerton was trying to persuade him to eat; Kate was busy at the stove.

“How you doing, fellow?” Keast asked as he sat down.

Benji said nothing.

“That calf was too big to come out,” Keast said. “I couldn't have saved it or the mama.”

Kate set a plate of hotcakes before him. Keast had no appetite, but he dug in, to encourage the boy.

“I killed them,” Benji said in a small voice.

“You did not,” Keast said. “Let us make this clear. The calf—”

Frank stumbled in through the door. He had a peeled switch in his hand and he reeked of whiskey. “Time to get this over with,” he said, grabbing Benji's arm.

“No!” the women cried.

“The bull was too large,” Keast said, rising from the table. “Wait … It wasn't …” but Pinkerton ignored him.

“You're lucky it's not a whip,” Keast heard him say as he pulled Benji out the door. “If it were my father, you'd have a whip.”

The next morning Keast came to collect Benji for a ride. “I felt in need of a companion,” Keast said when they started down the road in his buggy. “I hope you don't object.” He gave him a striped jawbreaker; Benji thanked him and put it in his pocket.

“What would you say to being my helper with the animals?” Keast asked. “After school and your chores, that is. I could pay you a little.”

“Why?” Benji said.

“I don't have an assistant and I could use one.”

“Okay,” Benji said.

“What will you do with the money?”

“Buy a cow.”

“Ho, now. You don't need to buy anyone a cow any more than I do. No human can save a hog from cholera or a horse from glanders or a heifer carrying an outsize calf.”

“Okay.” Benji was staring out at the cornfields, blinking—trying not to cry, Keast could tell.

They rode on a ways without speaking. Keast turned in to the cemetery of the Plum River church and stopped the buggy. Benji followed him through the grass, past the gravestones and cedar trees to the monument.

“This is where my beloved wife, Isobel, rests,” Keast said. He showed Benji the picture near the top of the stone. “Our son lies here too,” Keast said. “They perished in childbirth on June nineteenth, 1887.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and gently dusted the picture. “For years I scalded myself on account of their deaths, but this was only vanity. Sometimes there is nothing a human body can do on behalf of another creature, human or animal. Whether or not it is God's will, or only Nature's whim, it is a fact of existence.”

“My mother died,” Benji said.

“That's a hard thing for a young fellow.” Keast put his arm around his shoulder.

“I have her picture.”

“That's good. A picture can be a comfort.”

“Don't tell anyone.”

“I won't mention it. You can count on me.”

Benji edged closer to Keast. “Was it an accident with Ivy?”

“Yes, it was Mother Nature's accident. Nothing about it was your fault.”

Kate gave birth to
a boy one morning in April 1900. At last she was a normal fecund woman who could please her husband.

“Darling,” Frank said, kissing her and the baby—his name was Franklin—and thanked her again and again.

“He's beautiful, isn't he?” she said, even though he was no such thing—red-faced, with little bandy legs—but he would be.

Frank went to town to spread the news of his boy, and his mother arranged the pillows so Kate could sit up to nurse the baby.

The labor had been arduous—twenty-eight hours—and she was weary. The baby sucked hard at her breast, but the milk would not come. “Only because I'm tired,” she said.

“Just relax, dear,” Mrs. Pinkerton said, patting her arm, “and the milk will come.”

Mrs. Pinkerton appeared often, with blancmange and aspics; sometimes Benji carried the tray. He liked to watch the baby and touch his tiny fingers, but Benji's presence made Kate nervous. She needed solitude to make the milk come.

Kate thought of the cows, how easily they let down, morning and night. She began to worry that her milk would never come. By the end of the second day, the baby was limp from hunger and crying. She felt the house in suspension, waiting. She imagined the long parlor below her an empty teat, and the kitchen a dark mouth.

Dr. McBride advised compresses for her breasts and said that if the milk did not come soon, the baby would need a wet nurse.

She began to cry. She cried and cried and then, at last, the milk let
down. The baby sucked peacefully, making her breasts tingle, and when he was away from her, in his bassinet, her milk spilled out, wetting the front of her gown.

He was a sweet baby, healthy, with navy-blue eyes that wobbled in an effort to focus on her. She should be joyous, thanking God, but a heaviness settled into her. She didn't want to get up and lingered in bed, even though she needed to help her mother-in-law with the diapers and the other washing, the cooking, the cleaning. The thought of another layer of chores, the years of motherhood stretching before her, was enervating.

After his day in the fields, Frank rushed up the stairs to hold the baby. It wouldn't be long, he said, before Franklin was helping on the farm. The next child would be a boy too; should they name him Timothy, after Kate's father? Fine, Kate said; she was too exhausted to think about it.

The first night after Kate's convalescence, Frank eased into bed, extinguished the lamp, and lay close to her, caressing her arm, then touching her waist, her thigh. “We should start another one,” he said.

“Not yet,” she said, turning away from him. “I'm so tired.”

The boys at school said
people mated the same way animals did; they talked about it in the outhouse and compared their wieners. Jonas and Sam laughed at Benji's wiener, but Eli said that was because he was short and he'd do fine with a short girl. Eli, Jonas, and Sam let Benji watch in the woods while they rubbed themselves to see who could make jism the fastest. Benji couldn't do it, but Eli said that was okay, he was too young.

Benji spied on Mother Pinkerton behind the screen on bath night. In bed he thought about Father Pinkerton putting his wiener into her before Franklin was born and then he thought about Mama. Father Pinkerton had done that to her too.

And it was Father Pinkerton's fault that Mama was dead. She had said Papa-san didn't know about him yet and when he did he would be happy, but then he came to Nagasaki with Mother Pinkerton. It wasn't an accident with the sword. He had killed her himself because he was married to Mother Pinkerton.

After that it was hard to look at Father Pinkerton or talk to him. In the fields, when Benji walked behind him, he imagined sticking a pitchfork into his rear and knocking off his head with a baseball bat, smashing it like an Osage orange. The thoughts made his teeth hurt.

No one knew exactly when Benji's birthday was, but they celebrated it at the end of April. The year after Franklin was born, Father Pinkerton said he was going to take Benji to Galena on his eleventh birthday for a big surprise.

On the train they sat opposite each other. Benji stared out the window, ignoring Father Pinkerton's badgering him to guess what the surprise might be. It was probably nothing special. He thought about his real birthday. It could be any month, and all these years he'd lived through the day without knowing. He looked at Father Pinkerton's reflection in the window, his large ears, the nose that was like his. Maybe his birthday really was in April and Father Pinkerton didn't want to admit how he knew. Benji could ask him what month he'd left Nagasaki and then add nine months, but if he asked, Father Pinkerton would say, what did that have to do with the price of onions? And if he told him what, he'd get a whipping later.

Benji turned and looked at Father Pinkerton jouncing up and down in his seat. They stared at each other; Father Pinkerton looked away and looked back again.

“What's got into you?” he said. “I took a day from the fields to give you a good time, and you look about as pleased as a mule eating briars. Shall we get on back home?”

“No,” Benji said. “I'm just thinking about something at school.”

“You have a girl already?” Father Pinkerton grinned. “When I was your age I had a girl.”

Benji looked back out the window and imagined asking him how many girls he'd had in Japan. If he said none, Benji would kick him in the stomach.

“I hope you're looking forward to your surprise,” Father Pinkerton said.

“Yes,” Benji said. “Thank you.”

In Galena, they walked with a crowd of other people from the train station down a road that led along the river into the country.

Ahead, Benji saw a tent—maybe one of those religious tents, he thought, but then he heard the jaunty music. “A circus,” he said. The circus he'd seen once in Stockton had smelled bad, and the freak show was fake.

“Not just any circus,” Frank said. “It's Japanese.”

“Japanese?” Benji felt a jolt of excitement.

“Yes, sir, all the way from Nippon.”

“The people are Japanese?”

Frank laughed. “I knew you'd like it,” he said.

Benji ran toward the tent, his heart thudding. The man taking tickets
wasn't Japanese, but there was a billboard that said
SATO AND SONS' JAPANESE CIRCUS
. Benji tried to look inside the tent, but the ticket seller pushed him back.

When Frank got there, they went inside, into the odor of mildew and popcorn. The tent didn't have a top; there was an irregular circle of blue sky instead.

The front seats were taken, so they sat halfway up a rickety tier of benches. A bald man in a kimono was sweeping the ring with a large broom. A Japanese man. Benji could hardly stay in his seat.

The ringmaster was an American in spangled clothes and a tall hat. Benji didn't listen to him, because right then a line of horses trotted out, a man standing balanced on each one. They were all Japanese, with dark hair and black eyes, just like he wanted to look. His heart was going so fast he could hardly breathe. As the horses went around the ring, the men did somersaults on the horses' backs, then leapt off and back up again. Benji imagined doing that on one of the horses at home. If he practiced in the pasture, it wouldn't hurt so much to fall off.

There were jugglers and contortionists next, then the trapeze artists. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the ringmaster bellowed. “Welcome the Elixir of the East, the Orangutans of the Orient, Soonayo and Sachi. For this performance only—I repeat, for this performance only—these daredevils of the ether will perform without a net.” There was loud drumming as the man and woman scaled the rope to the high wire. They stepped onto it and bowed in a way that Benji remembered, first in one direction, then the other. As they went across the wire together, the man skipped like a child and pretended to fall, making the audience gasp, but Benji knew he wouldn't fall. He was strong; he was Japanese. The woman had long, gleaming black hair, the prettiest woman Benji had ever seen. He read her name in the program—Sachiko; the man was Tsuneo. Soonayo, he remembered the man saying. He whispered it to himself, looking at how the name was spelled.