Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (33 page)

He spoke softly, and glanced at the closer, sleeping samurai, to make sure he hadn't awakened them. He looked out at the ships again, touching Manzo's shoulder.

“So much change is taxing,” he said. “Our way of life will be over before we know it.”

But though soldiers might sleep through such nearby peasant chatter, even drunks like the ones Ueno had hired woke quickly to the sounds of horses' hooves, and the
slap-slap-slap
of a barefooted runner. Manzo and his father heard it too, but didn't look to see what was making the clatter until half of Ueno's soldiers were standing, belching and sheltering their eyes. It was Momo, of course, the furious and filthy riders almost upon him.

“Damn you, peasant scum,” one of them yelled, but by then Ueno's men had recognized their prey.

“Well, well,” said their leader, “what do you know?” and as Manzo stood out in the road, ready to roll under the hooves of horses if he had to, to save his brother, the soldiers pulled their swords and spread themselves out, like the floats on a net.

“Hurry up Momo!” screamed the father, and he grabbed Manzo's sleeve saying, “Let's go this way!”

The beach bulkhead was high, but the father jumped upon it with ease, pulling Manzo up beside him as if he were a child. “Now let him see us,” he ordered. “Wave your hands, Manzo! The tide is in, so let's get ready to dive.”

“Over here Momo!” bellowed Manzo.

His voice rose above those of the others like rolls of rumbling thunder, but twice more it seemed the riders would catch Momo, killing him with easy swings of their swords.

“Momo! Momo!” their father yelled.

It was difficult to tell whether the riders saw Ueno's men or not, so intent were they on running Momo down, but Momo saw them, and darted past their waiting swords like a bait fish, to leap over the bulkhead and into the frothing sea, in the arms of his brother and father.

“Swim for your lives!” screamed Manzo, but in a moment they were wading away, in only about three feet of water, while behind them they could hear shouts of joy.

“Tie their hands, men! That's right, bind them up! What do you know? We've actually caught them, just as the master ordered! What in the world do you know?”

The leader had placards, which, through all these recent days of searching, he had somehow remembered to keep on his horse, and when the captives were sufficiently bound he placed one on each of them.

“75” and “111,” the placards said.

As they moved out of town toward the inn where Ueno stayed, it didn't seem to matter to anyone that the placards were reversed, each on the wrong man's neck.

42
.
The Omen of the Crows

FOR LORD OKUBO'S ENTOURAGE
—with the notable exception of Ned and O-bata—things were getting worse, not better, by the time they arrived in Shimoda later that same morning. During the eight days since Einosuke's death they had found that they were unable to easily speak to each other or eat together, unable to do anything save follow the Buddhist prescripts concerning Einosuke's burial, fall into the bottomless pits of their broken hearts, and prepare their swords for battle. From the moment after Lord Okubo put his seal on his note to Ueno, in fact, he and Manjiro had found it difficult even to bear the sight of each other's faces. Manjiro continued to blame himself, in long and crazy prayers to his ancestors, and Lord Okubo, in order to avoid another trip to his secret room until revenge was done, blamed Manjiro, also, and took to having rambling conversations with his two already dead sons, Toshiro and Einosuke, alone at the beach where Einosuke had lost his head.

Generally speaking the women fared better, for they could deal with the men, if not very well with each other. Fumiko, for example, would allow herself to be summoned by her father-in-law, but she would broach no contact with Tsune, except through the door of the room that she shared with Masako and Junichiro. All she could manage was to care for her infant son, placing him before her on the tatami and trying to teach him to speak by repeating the word she most wanted him to utter first, and to remember forever:
“Tochan, tochan, tochan
. Daddy, daddy, daddy. Father, father, father.”

“Say it!” she commanded, and when he wouldn't do it she said it herself, trading two syllables for four, and crying them out the window into the rain:
“Einosuke! Einosuke! Einosuke!” Oh
, how could she have been such a despicable wife?

As for Keiko, she stayed outside from dawn until the guards called midnight each day, pacing the perimeter of her father's half-formed garden in her mourning clothes. She liked the feeling of the fabric against her skin and soon began dancing to the song in her head,
“Three tulips grow down by the river, red, yellow, and white… Three tulips grew in a bed of a thousand, then one day a boat came by…
” Oh sadness! Oh sorrow!

Though they had drifted back a little toward civility by the time they arrived at the Kanaya Inn, up the Inozawa River from Shimoda, they were each still clinging to the ruin of their lives by the fringes of an unraveling madness, with revenge the medicine that kept them each alive.

WHAT HIS HOW THINGS
stood when Keiki, Kyuzo, and Ichiro, burdened by three horrid hangovers, but enlivened with the news of Einosuke's murderers' capture, which was all over town, came upon Lord Okubo in the inn's side garden late on the afternoon of the family's arrival.

“Where is Manjiro?” asked Keiki. “Where is young Kambei of the posters?”

Keiki held the misplaced belief that news of the capture, combined with his father's betrothal note, would mend just about everything, while Kyuzo, who had been given the note when he and Ichiro awakened Keiki a few hours earlier, wanted to put it on hold for a while and immediately discuss a battle strategy with Lord Okubo.

The old lord, however, was not alone in the garden. Keiko and Masako were with him, their stricken faces cast toward the ground. So the men had to pause, adjusting their ill-timed sense that things would now go well. No one, in fact, even bothered to answer Keiki's question, save Junichiro, who wobbled out from between his sisters, peered up into Keiki's face, then turned and laughed and ran back toward Masako.

“He gets tired so easily,” she said. “Once I wouldn't let him stop walking for an hour and a half.”

She said it as if it were a confession. She seemed to have no idea to whom she was addressing her comments, and Lord Okubo, too, disheveled and unbathed, only turned toward Kyuzo and croaked, “They wouldn't stay in Odawara when I asked them to. All of our women insisted on coming here, even Fumiko. And these two won't stay away from me now.”

He had a teacup in his hands and when he gestured toward his granddaughters tea spilled out of it. A litter of skinny white kittens had just come from beneath a nearby shrub, but they ran back under it when the tea landed on the path.

“Show everyone back to their rooms,” Lord Okubo told Keiki, whom he had mistaken for the innkeeper. “And you, Kyuzo, tell me what you've discovered of our enemy.”

He tried to stop squinting but his head shook on his neck. He put one hand upon his forehead, the other one up to tell Kyuzo to wait until Keiki and his grandchildren, and Ichiro too, had gone inside. For his part, though, Keiki was disappointed at his reception; his father's representative was usually treated more civilly, but he wanted to find Tsune anyway, so he could get some medicine for his headache, and begin to feel at home.

“Ueno is settled at a nearby inn,” Kyuzo said when they were alone. “We heard that he caught the renegades this morning.”

“We heard it, too,” said Lord Okubo. “A runner has come to say he will bring them here tonight. Do I look unready for battle? I think I look unready. Maybe I should rest again and bathe.”

At the nearest end of the garden there was a bench under a trellis, where Kyuzo led Lord Okubo so they could both sit down. Lord Okubo put his teacup in the dirt between his feet and bent forward to peer into the small amount of tea that remained. Kyuzo thought they would sit there like that for a good long moment, that like himself, Lord Okubo believed in the silent communion of men before discussing the details of a battle, so he was a little bit startled when Lord Okubo spoke.

“You are strong, Kyuzo, a famous warrior, but do you think you could go on living after the death of a son? Tell me honestly, I don't want platitudes. Do you have that kind of strength? Most men do not.”

He didn't look at Kyuzo but kept trying to find his reflection in his cup.

Kyuzo sat forward, too, in order to gaze at his still-painful toe, its foreign-made wrapping still somehow clinging to it.

“I have enough trouble going on living even as it is,” he said. He regretted the answer immediately and began again. “It's true that I am strong, I guess, if you define the word narrowly, but my kind of strength is so old-fashioned that during these times of rampant change it begins to seem a great deal more like weakness.”

He was thinking of his talk on intransigence the previous evening, but decided not to mention it to Lord Okubo.

Two large crows flew into the garden, landing in a tree about half way between the men and the reemerged kittens. Lord Okubo nodded and said, “Change is the real issue, isn't it? If a man lives long enough he is sure to lose everyone, so maybe it's a kind of false grief, to overly mourn the passing of a son.”

Kyuzo loved a philosophical discussion as much as anyone. He knew Confucian doctrine and Zen parables, and had memorized dozens of poems, but when he looked at this wounded old man he understood that this was not a time for philosophy.

“Those crows,” he said, “do you know why they have come?”

When he spoke the crows seemed to turn on their perches, looking at him out of crooked heads, just like Lord Okubo.

“To pluck at the carrion like all thieving scavengers!” shouted the lord. “To reap those benefits which should rightly go to others!”

His answer made him furious again, and he hissed at the unperturbed crows.

“Often so,” Kyuzo calmly admitted, “but that is not why they are here just now. They have come, as creatures will, because of the easy pickings. Soon they will fall out of that tree and snatch up one of those kittens.”

He pointed up the path and gave a dark chuckle. “It is nature turned on its head, for most of the time cats eat birds, that's why I think it's interesting.”

Kyuzo truly did feel sympathy for Lord Okubo. He believed that having a son and losing him was a far worse fate to suffer than his own sad circumstance of never having been a father. So he decided to stop talking about the crows and wait for Manjiro to join them, before turning to what their posture ought to be against Ueno that night. He looked when he heard the doors opening behind them, as if his thoughts might have brought out Manjiro, but it was only a couple of maids, carrying futon.

Lord Okubo spoke quietly, repeating his refrain about needing to rest and bathe. “What you see before you will subside, I think, if I can only sleep for a few hours. During this last week I've done nothing at night save wander the halls of my castle. And I've spent my days like the man who suddenly discovers that his country is an island, and stands at the edge of the promontory, blaming the ocean.”

He did not take his eyes off the crows as he spoke, but his words sounded somewhat sane again and relieved Kyuzo, who turned to dig into the bottom of his satchel.

“I don't often mention this,” he whispered, “but fighting insomnia has been the longest-running battle of my life. I always carry a number of excellent potions. Take one.”

He turned back toward the lord and opened a folded paper, revealing two large mounds of white powder, neatly separated by a thin bamboo divider.

“Either will work,” he said, “and they have never failed to make me sleep when I take a small amount of both.”

The smaller of the crows was eyeing them, while the larger had fallen to the ground about ten feet away from the kittens. Kyuzo kept a steady hand while Lord Okubo reached down to get his teacup. He surprised Kyuzo greatly, however, by pouring all of his powder into the remaining half-inch of tea, swirling it twice, and drinking it down. Had there been time, Kyuzo would have told him that on each side of his bamboo divider there was a three-night supply, but as it was he kept quiet.

Lord Okubo wiped his mouth and stood, silently advancing on the crows, the teacup tucked into the palm of his hand like a stone. The crow that remained in the tree watched him curiously, but the other one began advancing on the unwary kittens, every bit as single-minded as Lord Okubo. Kyuzo got up and slipped his short sword from its scabbard. They could both hear the maids behind them, beating the futon.

“You take the high one,” said the lord, “I'll get the impudent little bastard on the ground.”

Absurd as it was, both men felt that this was an ominous moment, a rehearsal for the evening to come, and full of portent. The odds were against them now, just as they probably would be tonight, and trickery played a role.

Lord Okubo walked away, careful to rotate his teacup in a manner that would make the crow in the tree continue to watch it, while Kyuzo judged the branch on which it sat to be about eight feet off the ground. The other crow had chosen an angle that mirrored Lord Okubo's, and, with an equal amount of nonchalance, advanced upon the kittens, all the time looking somewhere else.

Kyuzo knew the key was in the treed crow. His plan was to appear to be passing beneath the tree and then to fling his sword upward, aiming at its feet. In his youth he had performed similar tricks, in games with other samurai, but now he not only worried about his diminished speed, but also about the available arc in his progressively arthritic shoulder. Had young Ichiro stayed outside, he grimly realized, he would have served Lord Okubo's purposes far better. Kyuzo kept his eyes on the lord, hoping for a signal, but when the inn's doors opened again and Keiki came back out, he acted on his own, leaping toward the tree and flinging his sword upward with such vigor that he nearly released it into the sky. He jumped higher than he had in two decades, turned his sword in midair, and sped it along the barren tree branch toward the crow. The crow's beak fell open, but it sprang into flight an instant too late, and paid a price for its slowness, by leaving its legs and feet behind. They clung to the branch for a second, then swung around in opposite directions to dangle and fall like a fortune-teller's sticks, landing with implicit softness on the ground.