Butterfly's Child (8 page)

One morning Frank came in from the barn, leading Benji by the hand. Both of them were grinning. “He said
cow
,” Frank said. “Just as plain as day.”

“That's nice,” she said. “Good boy, Benji. I've pointed out cows on many occasions,” she added. It wasn't fair he'd speak his first new words with Frank, after all the effort she'd made.

Over the next few weeks, there was a flurry of nouns—
foot, bath, dog
—and, before long, verbs—
run, eat, sit
. He had trouble with
l
and
r
sounds, but Miss Ladu thought this would pass in time. By Thanksgiving he was doing so well that he could name several of the pictures in his Sunday school book, but, to Kate's disappointment, not Jesus.

One snowy evening as they were clustered around the parlor stove, he said his first sentence: “Benji want milk.”

“Listen to that!” Mrs. Pinkerton said, nodding her approval at Kate.

“Isn't he a smart boy?” Kate said, looking at Frank. Surely he would recognize her hard work with Benji.

“An
American
boy too,” he said. “Finally wanting his milk.”

In the kitchen, while Kate was waiting for a pot of milk to warm, she opened the door and looked out at the snow slanting down in the dark, a cold, melancholy sight. It hadn't been a baby yet, Dr. McBride had told her; she shouldn't continue to grieve after all these months. There would be another before long.

It was bone cold
in the shed, where Frank sat scraping dirt and rust from the point of the turning plow. It was snowing again, but December's ice had sealed the cracks in the walls; he started a fire in the stove and waited, chipping at the bolts with his penknife. It was a relief not to be in the parlor, Kate still morose over losing the baby, even after three months. He had tried to reason with her, to no avail. She snapped at him for the least thing and seemed to have no regard for his own disappointment. It was unnatural.

His mother was patient with Kate; trouble and illness always brought out her best. When he had earaches as a child, his mother would put him to bed, a boiled onion in the throbbing ear, then sit by his side, knitting. His father had complained that she was coddling him. Nothing made the old man angrier than a show of weakness, unless it was disregard for the farm tools and equipment. The used blade is always sharp, he liked to say, quoting Benjamin Franklin. He would be disgusted with Frank, not to have tended to the plow right after planting season.

He opened the stove and tossed in a shank of wood. The log caught quickly, buds of flame along its length. For surviving the winters in Japan, there were kotatsus: an open pit in the house where coal was burned; over the pit were a table and a heavy quilt. He thought of sitting at the kotatsu with Butterfly, heat spreading up through their bodies. They carried the warmth with them to bed.

It was wrong of him to think of Butterfly, disloyal to Kate, but scenes
from the early days in Nagasaki rose in him unbidden—her fragrant hair like satin, her legs wrapped around him.

“Damn you.” He scraped harder at the rust. She wouldn't leave him in peace; it was her revenge.

The door swung open and the Swede blew in like Jack Frost, his hat and coat muffled in snow. He must have seen the stove's light from the bunkhouse. “Better get up there,” he said, gesturing toward the house with his thumb. “Looks like a blizzard.”

Frank closed the stove after he left and stepped outside. The house was barely visible through the white curtain of snow; his father used to tie ropes between the house and outbuildings during the winter, so they could find their way during a blizzard. He'd scoff at Frank for having forgotten. Sloth is a fool's virtue, he could hear the old man say.

He bent forward, leaning into the river of wind and snow, the ghostly light from the parlor his guide. When he stood on the porch stamping his boots, his mother peered out at him, her face tight with what looked like anger but he knew to be concern. “Go sit by the stove,” she said. “I'll bring cocoa.”

He looked into the parlor. “You were so long,” Kate said. He hadn't noticed before how pale and thin her face had become.

“Got caught up in work,” he said. “Didn't realize how bad it was out.”

Benji was squatting by the stove. Frank had never liked that Japanese way of sitting, like doing your business. Even some women sat that way, but not Butterfly.

“Going to get out of these clothes,” he said, and went upstairs. After he changed, he went into his study. It was cold as the dickens, with only the heat from the stove below filtering up into the room. He sat at the desk and flipped through one of his father's ledgers—meticulous accountings of outlay and profit. There were occasional brief notes between lines of figures:
Corn done well this year; Grasshoppers wiped us out
. He found the ledger for the year he'd left for sea, 1881 it had been, summer, July; his father had whipped him one too many times. There, July 18, was a notation:
Frank gone
. Nothing more.

Seven years later, Sharpless had introduced him to Butterfly on a warm autumn evening in Nagasaki. A few more years, and here he was, back at the farm with Butterfly's son and an American wife. His father would have plenty to say to all that.

There was a knock at the door and Benji came in, carrying a cup of
cocoa; he handed it to Frank without a word and stood staring. His eyes, like hers, accused him.

“What do you want?” he shouted. The boy darted away.

There was a bottle of whiskey in the closet. He found it, took a long draught, and another, then laid his head on the table and slept.

The leaves on the trees
were as big as squirrels' ears, Father Pinkerton said, so it was time to plant. This spring he would show Benji how.

Benji sat in Father Pinkerton's lap, both of them holding the traces as the horses pulled the plow back and forth and back and forth across the field, getting rid of last year's crops and making the dirt smooth. Then they started over to make hills in the ground. Benji thought of the hills in Nagasaki; these were nothing but poked-up places in the dirt. Father Pinkerton said what a good job he was doing, making straight rows without any cricks, and that the first time he'd plowed on his own when he was not much older than Benji, his father had said it looked like a drunk had got loose in the field. Father Pinkerton smoothed Benji's hair; it made him feel sleepy, then tired.

The land was so wide it went on and on and the sky came down to it, and there was nothing to look at except the horses' rumps and their shiny tails that sometimes lifted up so the manure could fall out, and nothing changed.

Mama didn't know America was like this.

“Will I always be here?” he asked Father Pinkerton.

Father Pinkerton was quiet and then he said, “People die and leave the earth but they go to heaven.”

“Like Mama,” Benji said.

“Yes. But you won't go for a long time. Don't you worry about it.”

“I want to go to Japan.”

Father Pinkerton didn't answer; he was pulling on the left trace to make the horses turn, and they started down the flat space again.

“Why did Mama die?” Benji said.

Father Pinkerton didn't answer, so he asked again.

“We don't know exactly. We found you at a church with a note pinned to your coat. It said to please take you to America.”

It was the same lie Mother Pinkerton told. He looked up at Father Pinkerton's face, like the one in the picture. “Mama died,” he said, “and you came. You and Suzuki said Mama was dead.”

“That must have been the church people who came,” Father Pinkerton said. “It's easy to be confused at a time like that.”

Mama said Papa-san was coming and then she was dead. “It wasn't church people,” Benji yelled.

“Calm down now, and I'll tell you what I know about your mother. She was a geisha, the church people said, which means singer, and she was named Cio-Cio—that means Butterfly in English. She left a note asking for some kind people to take you to America; she signed it herself. They said she was the daughter of a samurai—a brave warrior—and that means you come from good stock. Look, I spy an arrowhead.” He stopped the horses. “Want to get it?”

Benji jumped down and started running back to the house, stamping on the hills and spitting on them. Father Pinkerton called after him, but his voice got smaller and then stopped. Benji went through the back of the house where no one would see him and into his room. The women were in the kitchen, so he jammed a chair against his door and took out the picture. The man was Father Pinkerton. He turned the picture over and stared at the writing. It wasn't the church people, the writing said, Papa-san is a liar.

Although Kate had
to host the first meeting of the women's reading circle, Aimee Moore prevailed. Her house in Stockton was centrally located, she said, and her parlor could comfortably accommodate the dozen women they had chosen to invite. Kate was miffed—the circle had been her idea. In addition to providing intellectual stimulation, reading and talking about books would be a welcome diversion from the disappointment at home. There had not been another pregnancy, in spite of Frank's grim determination.

The circle met on a Sunday in midsummer. There were a dozen fashionably dressed women, all of them from town except Kate. She was glad for her new summer dress, lawn with a sprigged print; it looked as fine as anyone's. Aimee's parlor was pleasantly cool; the open windows, in the shade of large trees, provided relief from the heat. The room was large and expensively decorated, with Turkish carpets, clusters of velvet chairs and love seats, two large stained-glass lamps handmade by Mr. Tiffany of New York—works of art, Aimee informed them—and bouquets of flowers in porcelain vases. There was on one table a framed woodblock Japanese print of two women, which Aimee had displayed in Kate's honor.

She served charlotte russe and tea and passed plates of almond cookies and petits fours. Most of the women had not read the assigned novel, George Eliot's
Middlemarch
, but listened placidly while Kate, Aimee, and Beth Moss, the spinster librarian of Stockton, discussed the themes of the book. Interest picked up when Beth Moss mentioned that George Eliot was a pseudonym; the writer was in fact a woman named Mary Ann Evans.

“Why would she use a man's name?” asked Mrs. Robert Cassidy, an overweight woman whose rings and bracelets cut cruelly into her flesh. She looked around the parlor at the other ladies. “Doesn't that seem a little peculiar?”

“She wanted to be accorded full respect as a writer,” Miss Moss said. “She felt that only a man would have been taken seriously.”

“If she couldn't enjoy the respect that is associated with being a woman,” Mrs. Cassidy said, “I don't know why she'd want to be a novelist.”

“Maybe that's why she
was
a novelist,” Kate said. “Because she was accorded little respect in the first place.”

Aimee called attention to the Japanese print. It had been given to her, she told the group, by a world traveler of considerable means, a classmate of hers at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Aimee made reference at every opportunity to having attended Mount Holyoke; the only wonder, Kate thought, was that she had restrained herself so long this afternoon. Aimee gave a short disquisition on the influence of Japanese woodblocks on Western art—Whistler, most notably, she said—then asked Kate if the scene portrayed in the print seemed true to life.

Kate glanced at the picture of two women in kimono seated outside a Japanese house, its sliding doors open to reveal straw mats, a low table, and a large vase.

“As far as I can tell,” Kate said, with a nervous laugh. “But I wasn't in Japan long, just a few days. I did live in China, however, as a young girl.”

“We're all so interested in your little orphan boy,” Mrs. Cassidy said. “You were so brave to take him in.”

“We're fortunate to have him with us,” Kate said. “He's a wonderful boy.”

“How did you find him exactly?” Beth Moss asked.

Kate told the story she and Frank had concocted—Benji being left at the Catholic church, the appeal to their charity, the reason for his name. She said it all calmly, with appropriate animation. She should have been an actress, she thought.

“He's such an unusual-looking child,” Mrs. Cassidy said, reaching for a cookie.

Kate's heart fluttered.

“But appealing,” Aimee put in. “Really quite appealing.”

“If you're referring to his blond hair and his Japanese face,” Kate said,
“that is unusual to see here, but not in Nagasaki. Nagasaki has a long history of exchange with the West—the Dutch, for instance, have been in residence there since the seventeen hundreds.”

A shy woman whom Kate didn't know raised her hand. “Was it a hard choice for you?”

Kate took a deep breath, then told how she'd searched her heart, gone to pray at a church commemorated to Japanese Christian martyrs. “I decided it was the Christian thing to do,” she concluded, “and the right thing for a woman to do.”

The ladies applauded.

“We don't need to read novels,” Mrs. Cassidy said, “when we have such interesting
true
stories to hear.”

Before school started,
Keast taught Benji his numbers, using marbles and a slate he'd borrowed from Miss Ladu. The boy was a whiz; by September he even understood the concepts of addition and subtraction, though he seemed leery about the prospect of school itself. When Keast suggested to Frank that they let the boy have a look at the schoolhouse, Frank agreed—acting a little huffy, but Keast knew Frank wouldn't have thought of it on his own. Not that he didn't care for the boy, but he lived in a world unto himself.