Butterfly's Child (9 page)

Halfway between Plum River and Morseville, the school was a small stone building in the middle of a pasture dotted with white and yellow flowers. It had hardly changed since Keast was a boy—the same flagpole out front, the bell over the door, and, along the edge of the pasture, an Osage orange hedgerow that stretched all the way up the slight hill.

Miss Ladu had given Keast the key to the school, but he sat down on the steps to wait for Benji and Frank. They were late. He took out his watch several times, fogged the face with his breath, and rubbed it on his trousers. When they finally appeared, they were walking on opposite sides of the road, Benji kicking a small rock in front of him, Frank frowning, his hands in his pockets. Benji's face had that bee-stung look he got after he'd been crying, and his hair was flat and dirty. His hair had lightened during the summer in the fields so that it was only a few shades darker than Pinkerton's.

Keast rose as they came toward him. Frank took a large book out of his satchel and held it up to show Keast. “A dictionary,” he said. “English to Japanese. There will be things he doesn't understand.”

Keast said nothing as he turned and went up the steps to unlock the door, but in his opinion Benji knew a lot more than he let on to some people.

The schoolroom was cool inside because of the stone walls. The desks were just as he remembered—the teacher's up front, across from the woodstove, then rows of desks gradually increasing in size to the back of the room. He found the desk where he'd sat his last year; there was an ink stain on it in the shape of a half-moon. Isobel had sat in front of him; he could still see those gleaming black braids. Their Horatio would be in the third grade now.

“Let's find your seat,” Keast said to Benji. Frank had located his own last desk—he'd been a student a decade after Keast—and sat down. Benji followed Keast to the front of the room. “This is where you'll probably sit.” Keast pointed to the desk at the end of the front row. “Near the teacher. Sit down—see how it feels.” Benji slid into the desk, rubbed the top of it with one hand, and put his fingers in the empty inkwell. “Look: There are the letters and words you already know.” Keast pointed them out, colorful pictures arranged on three walls of the room.

He went to the chalkboard and wrote an arithmetic problem—7 + 8—and waved Benji forward. Benji wrote the answer quickly.

Frank joined them at the board. “Sharp boy you've got,” Keast said.

“Yes,” Frank said with an odd smile. “Where did he learn to do that?”

“We've had a lesson or two,” Keast said.

“They didn't ease his mind,” Frank said. “But you're going to be a scholar, aren't you, buddy?”

Benji nodded.

“Dr. Keast and I were both students here at one time, can you imagine that? Right here in front of the room is where I gave my senior recitation—one hundred lines from Coleridge's
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. I still remember it too.”

Frank had begun to declaim when the door opened and Miss Ladu came in. A thin woman with a long neck and dun-colored hair, Miss Ladu was considered plain, but Keast liked her sincere smile and the complicated expressions of her face. They'd had several conversations about Benji during mealtimes at the boardinghouse.

“Hello, gentlemen,” she said. “So this is my new student. Are you ready for school, Benjamin?”

“Just watch this.” Keast wrote some arithmetic problems on the board, then stood back as Benji completed them.

“Perfect,” Miss Ladu said. “Benji, I think you're a star pupil already.” She bent down to study Benji's somber face. “Don't mind if the big boys tease you,” she said. “They always do that.”

“He won't mind,” Frank said. “He's tough.”

“Is that so?” Miss Ladu gave Keast a private smile that said they understood this boy in a way Frank did not; they would be allies on the lad's behalf.

Mother Pinkerton
gave him his lunch pail and Benji started off to school, walking slowly down Plum River Road. Maybe if he walked slow enough, it would be over by the time he got there.

In the ditches at the sides of the road were red and blue flowers; butterflies darted and drifted above them. Butterfly, Papa-san had said, Cio-Cio. Mama would be glad he was going to school. Benji is one smart boy, she had taught him to say, his first English. She said he would be a rich man in America but that first he would go to school and learn everything American.

He sat down for a while at the edge of a ditch and played a game with the butterflies. If one lit on his finger, Mama was thinking of him. An orange and black one dipped near him but did not land. That meant she was thinking of him a little bit.

He took the small wooden horse from his pocket. It was dark brown with legs raised like it was running. Dr. Keast had whittled it for him as a present for going to school; it was the best thing he'd ever had except for Mama's ball.

A wagon rattled down the road behind him. It was Mr. Case, on his way to the creamery with his jugs of milk. “Hey, boy.” Mr. Case stopped the wagon. “Ain't you going to school?” Benji stood, dusted off his pants. “You'd better get in here.” He gestured toward the seat beside him. “You're going to be late. That teacher will tan your hide.”

Benji shook his head and started walking again, in the ditch, so Mr. Case could drive on.

After a while he moved back to the road, walking in the dust from the wagon. He walked down the hill, then on the flat part for a long way, and up another hill. His stomach hurt. Maybe he was sick and would have to go home.

Soon he saw the schoolhouse. The walk seemed shorter than yesterday. There were no children outside, so school must have started already. He would have to walk past all the big children on the way to the front.

But he was a strong boy. Mama had said that too. No one would know what he didn't like.

He trudged up the steps and opened the door a crack. There was a mumble of voices. Miss Ladu came over, smiling, and led him down the aisle between the desks. “This is Benji, a very bright boy from Japan. He'll be in the first grade, but you second-graders had better watch out!”

Everyone was too quiet while Miss Ladu showed him his desk, the same one where he'd sat yesterday, and gave him a book. “Your first reader,” she said. At the desk beside him was a girl in a red dress and a bow in her hair. She stared at him.

“The third-graders are reciting a poem,” Miss Ladu said. “Continue, please.” The children lined up near the blackboard started talking again, all together.

After the third-graders went back to their seats, Miss Ladu wrote an arithmetic problem and waved Benji forward. He felt shaky as he walked to the front, like crossing a skinny log over the river.

She put chalk in his hand. It was an easy problem, but the chalk squealed when he wrote the answer.

For the rest of the morning, children who came forward to recite turned to look at him. Benji pretended not to see; he stared at the grain of wood in his desk.

Miss Ladu rang a bell and the other students jumped up, pushing and talking as they headed for the door. “It's time for lunch,” Miss Ladu told Benji. “Go on out with the others. You'll have fun.”

Outside, Benji looked for Eli but didn't see him. A girl with long brown braids smiled at him, so he sat down on a rock next to her. She didn't have on a fancy dress or shoes like the girl with the bow, and there were freckles under her eyes. “My name is Flora,” she said. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he took out his horse to show her.

“It's pretty,” she said. He put it on the rock beside him to show how it could stand up even though two legs were raised.

Two big boys came over, grinning down at Benji; one of them snatched the horse.

Benji leapt for it, but the boy dangled it over his head. He had mean little eyes and a missing front tooth. Another boy grabbed Benji between his legs.

“Give it back, Marvin.” Eli stepped into the circle and shoved the boy who was holding the horse. Marvin dropped the horse in the dirt for Benji to pick up.

“Let's play Osage ball,” Eli said, motioning to Benji.

Benji followed him to the other side of the Osage orange hedge where a group of boys were yanking green, warty-looking balls from the thorny branches. When they divided into teams and Eli chose Benji, some others yelled, “Eww. Don't pick me.”

“Shut up,” Eli said. “Benji can throw better than any of you.”

“They just don't want to be on a Jap's team,” Marvin said.

Benji hadn't heard “Jap” before but it sounded bad. “I'm Japanese,” he said.

“That's what makes you a Jap,” Marvin said. “Jappie Jappie Jappie,” he chanted, and others joined in.

Benji shoved Keast's horse in his pocket, grabbed an Osage orange and aimed it at Marvin: The ball splatted on his forehead. Eli and a boy named Jonas cheered.

Marvin ran at Benji and pushed him down. “Say ‘Jap.' ” He sat on Benji's back and scoured his face into the dirt. “Say ‘I'm a Jap.' ”

Benji tasted dirt and blood and his nose hurt, but he wasn't going to cry and he wasn't going to say “Jap.”

Eli kicked at Marvin, but another boy tackled him. They were all scrabbling on the ground when the school bell rang. Marvin jumped up and ran inside with everyone else, except Benji and Eli.

“Don't tell Miss Ladu,” Eli said.

She was waiting at the door. “What happened?” she asked, bending down to look at Benji.

“I fell down.”

She frowned. “Was someone picking on you?”

He shook his head.

“Go wash up at the pump then and come to my desk for a writing lesson.”

All afternoon Benji sat at his desk writing lines of the
O
Miss Ladu had taught him to make. He filled in one of the O's, making it big and lumpy until it was Marvin's liver, and drew a kappa eating it. Marvin would cry and beg for Benji to make the kappa stop and then he'd die. Benji ground the chalk on his slate until the girl with the bow said stop or she'd tell the teacher. When Miss Ladu said it was rest time for the first-graders, he put his head on his desk and felt in his pocket for Keast's horse. A leg was broken off. He took it out and held the leg in place. Tears came to his eyes, so he rested his head again and put the horse away.

When school was over, Benji walked away fast, then ran down Plum River Road. In the woods beyond the Cases' farm, he ran at a small tree, tearing at the branches and letting his screams out. He kicked up moss and threw chunks of it in the river and hurled rocks at the trees, pounding them into Marvin's face.

He sat on the ground and took out Dr. Keast's horse and looked at it for a while, trying to stick the leg back on. It was ruined. He lay down on the ground, holding the horse, and went to sleep.

When he got home it was almost dark. Father Pinkerton was at the table, and Mother and Grandmother Pinkerton were putting out food.

“Where in Hades have you been?” Father Pinkerton said. “You think just because you're a scholar you can ignore your chores? I did the milking and mucked out the stalls myself.”

“Look at him!” Grandmother Pinkerton said. “He's black and blue.” She and Mother Pinkerton put down their dishes and came over to him.

Mother Pinkerton pushed back the hair from Benji's forehead. “You're all scraped up. And your nose …” She touched it with a finger. “Does that hurt?”

“No,” he said, although it did.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I fell down.”

Grandmother Pinkerton and Mother Pinkerton looked at each other.

“Mighty hard fall,” Grandmother Pinkerton said. “It was some of those sorry town boys, I'd wager. They deserve a good whaling.”

“Don't mollycoddle him,” Father Pinkerton said. “He has to handle it on his own, just like I did. Come here, boy.” Benji went to stand beside
him. Father Pinkerton took him by the shoulders and gave him a little shake. “Remember that your mother's people are samurai. That means warrior, fighter.”

“He's too small to fight,” Mother Pinkerton said. She took his hand and led him into the kitchen. Her eyes were nice while she washed his face and put on some smelly medicine that stung.

At supper, Mother Pinkerton and Grandmother Pinkerton kept telling him to eat, but everything tasted like dirt, even the lemon pie.

The next day, Eli and Jonas, who wore a knit cap pulled down to his ears, walked Benji to school.

“You don't have to worry about Marvin,” Jonas told Benji. “He's just a stinking bully. He calls me Wormie.” He pulled off his cap to show his head, bald because of ringworm, then put it back on. “I'm gonna put a poison snake in his desk.”

“And cow plop,” Eli said. Eli and Jonas laughed about how Marvin's face would look when he reached into his desk.

“Then we'll beat him up,” Jonas said. “Three against one. We'll smear him into the ground.”

Benji's stomachache got worse. He saw an orange butterfly and tried to think about Mama, but she wasn't there.

At school, Miss Ladu had made a big map of Japan and propped it on the blackboard. “We're going to have a special lesson on Japanese geography and culture,” she said, “for every grade.”

Some boys in the back made shuffling noises with their feet. Miss Ladu stared at them and they stopped. “Any boy who misbehaves will be punished,” she said, “and I will visit their parents.”

She took up a long stick and pointed at the map. “Japan is comprised of four islands,” she said. Benji hadn't known that; he repeated the names of the islands in his mind after Miss Ladu said them:
Ho-kaido, Hon-shoe, Shi-ko-ku, Kew-shoe
. There was a red star at the bottom of
Kew-shoe
. “This is Nagasaki,” she said, “where Benji was born. It's the most interesting city in Japan. Many foreigners live there …” She turned to look at the class. “In Japan, Americans are foreigners. Many of the Japanese people in Nagasaki are Christians. The notable trades of Nagasaki are shipbuilding and manufacturing.” She took down the map and began to write on the board. “And there are several well-known arts:
cloisonné—which is a kind of metalwork—turtle-shell jewelry, kites, and glassware. These words are tomorrow's spelling homework for third-graders and up.”