Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (21 page)

“I like it when it's hot and I like it when it's cold but I don't appreciate these in-between days,” said the samurai. “They seem indecisive, and remind me that there's too much indecisiveness in men as well.”

He laughed, but stopped when Manjiro didn't join him. He knew he was taking advantage, but riding along alone these last few days had made him anxious for camaraderie.

“Don't monks like anything?” he asked, his bombast suddenly gone. “I know you don't like women or drink, but aren't you even fond of playful language, a repartee, a friendly exchange on the road?” He saw the saké bottle and said, “Wait a second, perhaps I spoke too fast.”

“It's only water,” Manjiro told him, “I get thirsty during the day.”

The samurai took the bottle, uncorked it, put it to his lips and tipped it back and drank. When he returned it to Manjiro he said, “It's almost empty. Why is that, so early in the day?”

Manjiro could see that this young man had eyes that didn't carry the weight of too much disappointment. He could also plainly see that he rarely talked with so much authority. “I filled it only partly,” he answered. “So it would be easier to carry.”

“But if it's that kind of ease you want, why not carry water in your belly,” asked the samurai, “and refill it when you come to a stream?”

Manjiro turned the bottle in his hands, wondering what was keeping Kyuzo in that village. He was learning nothing from this exchange, yet one wrong word might give him away.

“Some men like saké,” he admitted. “Never mind their vows.”

“Ah ha,” said the samurai. “I thought that might be the case.”

He was pleased with Manjiro's confession. He'd seen something odd in Manjiro, perceived some secret, and was glad to discover it was an ordinary human weakness, like dependence on drink. He turned to bring his horse around, ready to remount, when something else occurred to him.

“Where do you get the money for saké?” he asked. “And in such an expensive bottle? When a man begs for food he can expect that if he fails at one house he'll succeed at another, but do people have sympathy for a monk with a vice?”

Manjiro glanced at the bottle's bottom, as if looking for the answer, and said, “In some there is a readiness to see a man fall.”

“What is your name?” the samurai asked. “When you knock on people's doors, who do you say is calling?”

“I am only a wayward monk,” said Manjiro. “I never say my name out loud.”

“Well my name is Ichiro,” said the samurai, “and you cannot deceive me. I can see that you are a man of rare intelligence. I can also see that you are still young, not much older than me in fact, and I'll tell you something I believe. Japan will change greatly in our lifetimes. There are good chances coming, and not just for aristocrats and samurai, but for peasants and merchants and even for monks like yourself. My advice to you is to seize this chance when it comes, be ready for it, my fine fellow. You are smart enough and young enough to lead a better life than you have led thus far.”

He paused and added ruefully, “And so, of course, am I.”

Manjiro stared at the ground, both in order to make the samurai think he was ashamed and to defeat the urge he had to glance toward the trees where the Americans were hiding. And that made the samurai not only take pity on him, but also take his bottle. “As a first step toward strength I'll leave you empty-handed,” he said. Then he swung onto his horse again and galloped up the road.

Manjiro stayed where he was until he could no longer hear the sounds of Ichiro's departure. He had been impressed with the young man, had liked him despite the fact that he was no doubt working for Ueno, whom Kyuzo had discovered the night before, was after them. Of course he knew that samurai were like other men and thus visited by numerous imperfections, but meeting the young man had shown him something he had never before thought of: that in these days when a man could wander for years with no lord to whom he might attach his loyalty, and with so little money that he might as well be a monk as a warrior, he could just as easily be hired for a bad cause as a good one. It was the second insight he had had in two days, however disconnected it was from what he'd learned from Ace Bledsoe and Ned Clark.

He lifted his eyes and looked back down the road the samurai had just come up, and there was Kyuzo, too late for anything, limping along.

24
.
Whoa
,
Nellie

MYUZO WAS NOT ONLY
limping, as he walked, along the road toward Manjiro, but simultaneously using the tip of his short sword to try to dig a deep sliver from his palm. It wasn't working very well. “I can't get at it because my hand keeps shaking,” he said. “Here, you give it a try.”

When he extended his sword toward Manjiro however, the hand in question didn't seem to shake in the slightest. The Americans were with them again, both had their hats off, and were staring at the sliver like they were trying to read Kyuzo's palm.

“I should have brought my sewing kit,” Kyuzo said, “or at the very least a needle. An old man gets lazy, that's a lesson I've learned these last few days on the road.”

The sliver had been driven into his palm at a forty-five-degree angle, falling away from its surface like the body of a carp does from the surface of a pond. “I hurt my toe, too,” Kyuzo explained. “I was walking on an overgrown path, looking at the mountain view, and caught it on a protruding root.”

He lifted his left foot up so that all three men could see his red and swollen big toe. His toenail was wrenched loose, gaping at them like the sprung lid of a soybean jar. Manjiro had taken the blade and was bringing it to the sliver cautiously when Ace, seeing the clumsiness of the approach, sighed.

“Oh, please, give me that thing,” he said, “I'll go cut a proper needle.” And without waiting he grabbed the sword and plunged across the stream into the forest.

Kyuzo and Manjiro looked at each other, both thinking that maybe the sword, plus one of the Americans, was gone for good, when Ace came splashing back again with a length of dried bamboo in one hand and an entire young bamboo sapling in the other. He used Kyuzo's knife to slice the dried wood into finely beveled spikes.

“Close your hand a bit now and maybe look down yonder,” he said. “The trick to this technique lies in not using any one needle for too long.”

Ace had Ned hold the extra needles he had cut, then carefully dug a trough around the sliver, flicking bits of stringy flesh away. He used two more needles to hook the sliver's end, pulling steadily until the head came out, then he pressed down around it with his thumbs, bent to grasp it with his teeth, and pulled the sliver out. It was a full inch long and still as sharp as the unused needles he had cut.

“That was well done!” said Kyuzo. “It was artful! Did your father teach you that or do all Americans know how to do such things?”

He showed his hand to Manjiro, pointing at the hole in it as if it were a medal, but by then Ace was busy with the bamboo sapling. He used Kyuzo's knife to strip it of its outer skin, making lengths of fibrous bandage, laying them across Ned's arm, while he knelt to examine Kyuzo's toe. It was in far worse condition than his hand, with a distance as long as the sliver's length between the end of the nail and the toe it was supposed to cover.

“You really ought to rest after this,” he told Kyuzo. “No more walking until it heals up.”

While Manjiro translated, Ace took the longest of the strips he had made and tied a hangman's noose in the end of it, lowering it over the wounded toe, slowly working it down as if over a condemned man's head. He then yanked on it with one hand and pushed on his noose with the other, lest there be more resistance than he expected. He held on tight when Kyuzo first tried to get away, then held on tighter still when he attempted to reach for his sword. Kyuzo would have killed Ace quickly had he got it, but instead both his hands flew to his temples and he howled a howl not heard in those parts since the extinction of the howler monkey. He jumped into the air two or three times, landed hard on his good right foot and sat down.

“Whoa, Nellie,” said Ned, but Kyuzo was up again in an instant, bellowing his outrage into the forest. Ace, however, only took a second bandage from Ned's outstretched arm and knelt in the dirt, catching Kyuzo's instep, and guiding his foot until it rested along his own left thigh. There was a bit of new blood around the replaced nail, but otherwise it was once again properly aligned in the bed of his toe. When he loosened the first bandage Kyuzo felt an echo of the earlier pain, but in a minute his toe was so completely wrapped in strips of bamboo that it looked like something to eat, like a delicacy one might find in a cake shop. He bent and grabbed his ankle and pulled his wounded foot up, until it hovered under his nose. His kimono split, exposing his other leg, which was thin and straight, like a cranes at the edge of a pond. He worked his fingers in beside the bandage, and between each of his other toes, his grounded leg like a fence post.

It was in this way, through the utterance of a wayward wife's pet name from one, and the issuance of this good medical treatment from the other, that the two Japanese finally began to think of the Americans as individual men, and not as merely cargo on its way to Shimoda.

And a short time after that, when they came down out of the foothills that led into Odawara proper, Kyuzo was in the lead again and hardly limping at all.

25
.
Come to Me, My Dear, Come

MEANWHILE IN THE CASTLE
above Odawara Fumiko fell asleep on the tatami of the room she shared with Einosuke and had a very disturbing dream. She was at a wedding and dressed so formally that at first she thought she was the bride. She could feel the stiff material of her kimono, heavy against her shoulders, could hear the complaining rustle of it when she walked, and could see an old Shinto priest out of the corner of a thickly powdered eye. It was worrisome, since in the dream as in life she was already married, but presently a bride and groom stepped into the picture before her, followed by a dozen attendants and flanked by rows of formally dressed aristocrats. They were somewhere in the mountains, with storm clouds threatening and banks of impending fog, but the priest performed the ritual as if everyone were enveloped in quiet and calm.

Though she couldn't see the bride and groom very well, Fumiko knew that this was the wedding she had worked toward for years, constantly pressing for with both her sister and Manjiro, as well as Lord Okubo. She felt her breasts swell with gladness and her eyes grow moist, and she looked about for Keiko and Masako, so that she could bring them into the folds of her pleasure, share with them the success that they all three hoped for. She walked forward, to better see the looks upon those two wedded faces, but as she did so the stiffness of her kimono departed. Now she was wearing the sheerest of sleeping gowns and instead of treading upon a mountain path she was inside an inn facing a series of delicate doors. She was the bride again, she knew it for she could hear her husband singing out,
“Come to me, my dear, come.”
Each time she opened a door she thought she would find him, but the pattern of rooms was unending and she was always disappointed.

“Call again,” she whispered, “let me hear the direction I should go.”

Why he was singing she had no idea, but she found it slightly bothersome.

“This door
,” sang the voice,
“open this one
, “but she couldn't tell which of the doors he was talking about. So instead of opening more doors she did a strange thing, very much unlike her. She untied her sash, letting her gown fall away until she was naked in the hall. She had never acted so rashly, not even in the garden with Einosuke that night. She had never been so excited, either, or feared less what those in the neighboring rooms might think about it.

“Why not open it from the insider” she suggested. “Why not come out and find me if I am such a prize?”

When she spoke a door to her right opened to reveal her American standing just as she was, naked, his own bed clothes folded behind him on a futon. There was nothing fearsome about him, he was handsome and smiling, his Japanese was perfect and his body stood out toward her.

Fumiko's desire overwhelmed her even in her dream. She felt it first in her thighs and then, like the pleasant component of a mild fever, it surged through her torso. She remembered she was married, she even remembered her daughters and her infant son, but she went to him with no hesitation and felt the boundaries of their bodies mingle until everything turned into a growing circle of heat with an achy kind of longing at its middle. She had the sensation of
hanabi
, of colors falling silently earthward after a series of beautiful explosions.

“My love!” she whispered, wondering, as she said it, if she ought to try to say his American name.

She was not finished, not in the least desirous of awakening, but someone was knocking on the door, someone else was lost in that hallway and calling out, “Hello? Hello?”

Fumiko squeezed her eyes tightly closed, and would have put her fingers in her ears to block out the voice, were her fingers not engaged elsewhere. It was her husband who called her, she knew it was Einosuke, but when the door opened again and a hand tapped lightly on her shoulder, there did not seem to be any outrage or anger in it, only her husband's voice saying, “Get up and come properly to bed. If you sleep here all night you'll be sore all over tomorrow.”

She didn't want to do it but Fumiko opened her eyes.

“Really, my dear,” said Einosuke, “our beds are waiting for us. Why don't we retire?”

In her husband's smile there was no knowledge of her betrayal, but Fumiko closed her eyes again anyway, willing herself to reenter that other world so the betrayal could go on.