Butterfly's Child (26 page)

Willa and Benji said goodbye that night in the kitchen, after she'd been given her final wages. “I'll pray for you,” she said, her eyes watering, “if you'll pray for me.” They shook hands, and she was gone.

That night, before he could be mournful, he packed his things and the next morning, Shin and Fumio and their wives saw him off at the station. On the platform they pressed gifts into his hands—envelopes of money, charms for good luck. Fumio gave him a carefully wrapped package: a kimono and haori jacket to wear in Nagasaki.

As the train pulled away, Benji leaned out the window to wave at them. He sat down hard and balled up his hands, digging the nails into his palms. He was always leaving; his whole life he had been leaving.

But as the train began its ascent, following a long curve that hugged the side of a mountain, he felt a surge of elation. Ever since he had seen the range of Rocky Mountains in his schoolbook, he had thought of it as a wall between him and Japan. Now he was crossing that wall.

They went through a series of tunnels in rapid succession—dark, light, dark, light, like days and nights sped up, hurtling through time.

The train slowed as it climbed higher. Although most of the car was full, there was no one in the seat opposite Benji, so he took off his shoes and stretched his legs straight out. He glanced across the aisle at a middle-aged couple watching the scenery from their window. The woman wore glasses like Grandmother Pinkerton's; he wondered what she would think of this trip—she'd never been out of Jo Daviess County in her life.

He imagined writing to Frank, informing him that he was going to find the family of the woman he'd killed as surely as if he'd shot her with his rifle. He thought of Frank with his belt after the cow and calf died, the first of several whippings. When he found his Japanese family, he would tell them everything; he pictured them sitting around a low table like the ones he'd seen in books, his grandparents perhaps, an aunt or uncle, cousins. Maybe they would have heard of him, had even seen him after he was born, or he might be a complete surprise. He'd better wait to make the memorial stone for his mother until he had shown her picture to the family, as proof he was her son.

Shin's wife and Fumio's wife had each packed him boxes of food. In the lunch box was rice topped with fish, and dried seaweed, which he ate with chopsticks. The couple across the way dined from a basket of fried chicken, biscuits, cherry pie. When she saw him eyeing it, the woman offered
him a slice of pie. He thanked her and she passed it to him on a napkin. He devoured it—delicious, as good as Grandmother Pinkerton's. He was going to miss American food. And Grandmother Pinkerton, Franklin, Mary Virginia. Keast. He felt a tightening in his throat as he thought of Flora, probably engaged by now or married. He'd better not start feeling sorry for himself. No point in it, as Keast said; you only get sorrier.

The woman asked about his origin and destination; she had a kind, open face, so he confided that he was headed to Japan, to find his mother's people. “It must be real interesting there,” she said. “We saw the Japanese exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair, and they had such quaint little buildings. Didn't they, Horace?”

Horace looked directly at Benji for the first time. “Yep,” he said. “How do they make those tile roofs curve up like that?”

“I don't know,” Benji said, and Horace turned back to the window.

“Come sit with us for a spell,” the woman said. “Horace knows all the sights.” There was no polite way to refuse; Benji left his bag on his seat and moved across the aisle to sit beside the woman. She smelled like starch.

They were the Stones, from Winnetka, Illinois, and had made this trip twice before to visit their daughter in San Diego. Mr. Stone said they'd soon be coming to the Continental Divide, but it turned out that most of the places he knew about had to do with calamities: a runaway freight car full of corn syrup, which rolled off the tracks and into a fancy house in Tolland; the collision in '04 between a freighter and a passenger train racing for the same siding. “Fifty killed,” he said, nodding with grim satisfaction.

“And it wasn't far from here”—he tapped Benji's knee—“a young couple got off the train at a depot and wandered into the woods for a little smooching and she got eaten by a grizzly. They never found the remains.”

“At one time I was planning to cross the mountains on a horse,” Benji said.

“Oh, you'd never have made it.”

“The pioneers did. And the forty-niners.”

“Not all of them. Some got caught in the snow and ate—”

“Horace, that's enough,” his wife said.

“Well, it's a fact. And there was a Japanese fellow …” Mr. Stone paused
for emphasis, his eyes glittering at Benji. “A cook for the men who were building the railroad—this happened on the other side of the mountains, near Glenwood Springs—who was killed for his stash of money.”

“That was a long time ago,” Mrs. Stone said, frowning and shaking her head at her husband. “It wouldn't happen now.”

“Maybe not, but people still go prospecting for that money. The conductor told me, our last trip.”

Benji glanced around the car. There were no other empty seats, so he moved back across the aisle and stared out the window, picturing Mr. Stone being devoured by a grizzly.

Mrs. Stone leaned across the aisle. “He didn't mean anything by it,” she said in a low voice. “Would you like some more pie?”

Benji shook his head and turned back toward the window, trying to ignore the Stones' tense, whispered conversation. They were going through high mountains now, along a ridge, glistening snow-covered peaks as far as he could see. He touched his waist, the wide cloth money belt beneath his shirt that Fumio's wife had made for him. It had secret pockets that held most of his money—five fifty-dollar bills. It was as safe a way as there was to carry money, Fumio said, and once he got to Japan he wouldn't have to worry, because there wasn't any theft there.

Digby Moffett had made a lot of his being Japanese; he probably thought that gave him more of a right to steal Kuro. What was a Jap doing with such a fine horse?

Most people in Plum River hadn't cared that he was Japanese, after they got used to him. Except Flora's father.

He looked down at his hands, thinking of the honeysuckle rings he and Flora had made for each other. They had been children then, naïve; of course Flora's father wouldn't have let him marry her. He wouldn't have been able to marry any white woman in America, even Willa.

He stared back out the window. In general, Japanese women were better, he decided, prettier and more refined. He thought of Fumio's wife, the gleaming rosy skin of her face, the way she bowed, the slender hips beneath the kimono. He closed his eyes and thought about her, letting himself rock with the train, and went to sleep.

When he woke, he could see below them a wide, winding river, from this distance like a flattened snake; it must be the Colorado. The river straightened as it cut through a gorge. The train rattled over a shaky bridge, then began to descend, jerking and bucking, the brakes squealing.
Benji thought of the runaway syrup car—Stone wouldn't live to tell about the catastrophe if they derailed here—but soon they were moving beside the river, green and beautiful and wild, no people, just deer grazing beside it, an elk, and a red fox running along the bank.

The train moved away from the river and then, in late afternoon, joined it once again. Benji opened his bag and took out the box of food Fumio's wife had packed: onigiri rice balls, bean cake, and an orange. As the train moved through a landscape of steep red canyons that glowed in the fading light, sculpted rocks standing alone like chimneys without houses, Benji ate slowly, storing up images of America to describe for his family in Japan.

Lena came with gifts
for the babies: silver rattles, a complete set of the Book of Knowledge, and a large jigsaw puzzle of the United States. “My husband thinks ahead,” Lena said with a laugh. “Already he's visualizing them at their studies.”

Kate and Lena sat in the parlor with tea, on opposite sides of the small table. Marriage had made Lena prettier; her face was softer and her eyes more expressive, shining, taking everything in.

Kate closed her eyes. There was something terribly wrong with her that she had no interest in marriage or her babies and that even Franklin and Mary Virginia seemed distant to her. Frank had hired a servant girl, Sylvie—the only condition under which his mother would stay—but, still, the least thing exhausted her. Soon she could excuse herself and go back to bed.

“How are you, Kate?” Lena asked.

“Not quite well.” Yesterday Frank had taken her for a ride in the buggy to give her a change of scene, but she didn't want to go to town, where people would see her, and the sight of the fields made her eyes go out of focus. She was in the wrong place. Somewhere in life she had taken the wrong turn and had not entered the portal into the world where she was meant to be.

“I think you need stimulation.” Lena turned to look at the bookcase. “Are you reading?”

“No.”

“I'll bring you the new Edith Wharton. We're discussing it at the next
women's circle meeting—they recently asked me to join. I'd be so pleased if you'd go with me.”

Kate's face burned. “And have them gloat?”

Lena studied her. “People have a much higher opinion of you than you might imagine.”

Kate looked at her hands, arranged politely in her lap. No one knew what she imagined. Giving tonic to the babies until they slept and never woke up.

“Why don't we take a little excursion,” Lena said, “once the babies are old enough to be without you for a day? We could ride the train to Chicago, just the two of us. Wouldn't it be delightful?”

Kate nodded. She thought of the train plunging forward, devouring the miles, carrying her away from here.

Mrs. Pinkerton and Sylvie brought the babies in for Lena to admire. Lena held them up one after the other, proclaimed them perfect rosebuds, and handed them back to Sylvie. “How they've grown!” she said.

“They still have no names, I'm afraid,” Mrs. Pinkerton said, with a glance at Kate. “We haven't even been able to send birth announcements.”

“Names are difficult, aren't they?” Lena said, smiling at Kate. “There's so much to consider.”

“They do have names,” Kate said. “The girl is Rose and the boy is Wharton.”

Mrs. Pinkerton stared at Kate. “The next boy's name was to be Elmer. Surely Frank doesn't agree.”

“Of course he does.” Kate dropped a lump of sugar in her tea and stirred it briskly. “He's my husband, you know.”

Lena murmured something and took a cookie from the tray.

“Oh, I like Rose,” Sylvie said. “What do you think, Rosie-posy?” She kissed her nose.

The Swede had found Sylvie somewhere. She was fifteen, with braids the color of pale wood wrapped around her head, wide-set brown eyes, and pimples on her forehead. She was a terrible cook—corn mush that turned Kate's stomach, and eggs scrambled too long, and muffins hard as rocks. But she knew how to turn a carpet, Mrs. Pinkerton said, and she was good with the babies. Kate hated the sight of her.

When Mrs. Pinkerton and Sylvie left with the babies, Lena came to sit beside Kate on the davenport.

“What a pretty watch,” she said, looking at the oval pinned to Kate's shirtwaist.

Kate glanced down at it: the ornate gold bow at the top, a sprinkling of daisies on the face. “It was Frank's gift to me for the babies,” she said. “I can't read it, but anyone who looks at me can tell what time it is.”

There was a silence. Kate stared at the crusted sugar in the bowl.

“Forgive my directness,” Lena said, “but you must set the incident of the photograph aside. You've nothing to be ashamed of. You've been a stalwart wife and raised Benji under the most difficult of circumstances.”

“I tried.” Tears spurted from her eyes.

Lena placed a handkerchief in Kate's lap. “You can't let a few gossips ruin your life. This is your time, Kate.” Lena's expression was fierce. “Your life.”

Kate held the handkerchief to her face, then placed it on her skirt, folded and refolded it. Embroidered kittens. Her tears stopped abruptly.

When Lena began to talk again, Kate saw them from a distance, two women on a sofa, one leaning forward, like a painting, and later she could not remember what more was said.

After several delays, the christening date was set for a Sunday morning in mid-September 1906, when Kate had agreed to the names Elmer and Margaret Rose.

It was a lovely day for the ceremony, Mrs. Pinkerton said when Kate came down for breakfast, and didn't big brother and sister look fine? “Stand up,” she said to Franklin and Mary Virginia. “Let Mother see.”

Franklin was wearing new knickers and a starched white shirt; Mary Virginia, a pink dress with flounces at the hem.

“Very pretty,” Kate murmured. The room was spinning and her legs felt flimsy. She gripped the back of a chair.

“Someone will have to stand in for me at the ceremony, I'm afraid,” she said. “I'm not well.”

“You only need to eat,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “She hasn't been eating,” she said, looking around the table.

Frank helped her sit down. “You're my princess,” he whispered. He was wearing his naval dress uniform, now too tight around the middle.
He looked absurd, and the uniform would only inflame people's thoughts of his past.

It was all absurd, the five of them at the round table as though everything was quite as it should be. The thought of the roundness of the table made her dizzier.

“No,” she said, “I won't be able to manage.”

Mrs. Pinkerton gave her a stern look. “Doesn't she look lovely, Frank? Such a lovely mother.”