The Hummingbird (20 page)

“Uh-oh.”

“He said it was operable, in which case my troubled appendix had just saved my life. The following day a surgeon opened me to excise the tumor, but the growth was not as firm as they’d expected. The thing burst, sowing progeny throughout my innards. He performed suction, I was told, meanwhile observing that the entire lining had white dots of metastasis. He took the offending appendix, then sewed me up without having removed any of the cancer.”

The Professor pointed one rigid finger at the ceiling. “I will never forget that scan image, and the inflammation sticking upward.
J’accuse.
”

With that, his hand flopped in his lap like a dove taken down by a hunter.

I leaned forward and placed an arm on his bed. I was still wary of touching the Professor, but I wanted to be closer, for both our sakes. “Thank you for sharing that story.”

“Yes, well.”

“As you would say, Professor: Blast.”

He sniffed. “As you would say, Nurse Birch: Ouch.”

And there it was: The fact of his mortality. I felt a swell of compassion for this strange, brilliant, difficult man.

When Barclay Reed had asked me a few weeks back what the purpose of suffering was, I should have answered by saying that it had the potential to create this very moment. Because this was the place where my work always arrived, every patient, every time.

If you think of a person, anyone, even someone you dislike, if you imagine for a moment how one day they will lose everything—family and home and pleasures and work—and people will weep and wail when they die, you cannot help it: You feel compassion for them. Your heart softens. What’s more, every single human being is going to experience this same thing, without exception: Every person you love, everyone you hate, your own frivolous struggling self. It is the central lesson of hospice: Mortality is life’s way of teaching us how to love.

The path before the Professor would not be a long one. My job was to make the journey as good as possible for as long as possible. How to do that would unfold one moment at a time.

I pointed at his dinner. “You’re not going to eat any of that, are you?”

He studied his fork before laying it down. “Apparently not.”

“Let me get it out of your way then.” I scooped the plate from his tray. “Is there anything else I can get you? Anything you think you could eat?”

Barclay Reed grinned at me, his head tilted forward like a boy asking for seconds on ice cream. It was as playful as I had ever seen him. And we had just reached such a trusting place.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

He raised his hands as if in prayer, then drummed the fingertips on one another. “Might there be any more strawberries?”

MICHAEL WAS CURLING DUMBBELLS
in the driveway when I came home. The weights looked cartoonishly large, like balloons connected by pencils. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt, his arms engorged by effort, his face radiant.

What I felt, plain and simple, was lust. He was so strong. There in the car I remembered a time when I climbed away from Michael in the middle of lovemaking and stood at the bedside just to ogle him there.

He smiled. “What’s up, Deb?”

“Oh lover, I’m just admiring you.”

He held out his hands. “Do it closer.”

As I climbed out of the car, he finished his curls without turning my way. Yet it made him sexier. He was concentrating. At a previous time, I would have pawed him shamelessly, pulling him into the house, hiking myself up on the kitchen counter. Instead I watched him finish. He put the weights down and wagged his hands as if to dry them.

“Hi, lover,” I said. “How was your day?”

“Not great,” Michael answered. “Frustrating.”

Well, good-bye lust. Once upon a time, arriving home meant I could recover from my day by spilling about it. Now whatever happened at work was obliterated by whatever I found in the driveway. I suppose I was learning to live in the present, but sometimes it felt mighty tiring.

I gave him a kiss on the neck, tasting salt. “What was frustrating?”

“Gene. Or his plastic leg, anyway. I decided to help him out, you know? Getting the replacement screw. But it’s classic Defense Department contracting. The prosthetic uses a rare gauge. We drive all over town, finally find one the right size, and then the slot turns out to be reverse-threaded.”

“What does that mean?”

“Normal screws tighten when you turn them clockwise. His leg’s slot is designed for a screw that tightens counterclockwise, don’t ask me why in hell.” He picked up the dumbbells again. “We spent the whole day, literally nine to five, chasing one screw, and we totally struck out. I came out here to lift so I wouldn’t go smashing things in the basement.”

Michael began pumping again, alternating arms in sets: three with the right, three with the left. His chin pointed forward on each curl, as if his jaw could pull the weight upward. And his breath came loudly in the rhythm of each lift and drop.

“You know, sweetheart,” I began.

“Yeah?”

I leaned back on my car. The thought was: Assume a casual pose, and perhaps the message will arrive more lightly. “That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Smashing things?” Michael continued lifting as he grunted his reply. “Cause I haven’t broken anything, Deb. Not a toothpick.”

“Well, sweetheart, you broke that guy’s car—”

“He had it coming.”

“—and almost every morning there’s a few pencils.”

“Look.” Michael paused, both arms down, the weights pulling his shoulders into a curve. “If it is now a problem when I break a freaking pencil—”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just thinking about the other night.”

The right arm started again, a slow upward grind. “Which night?”

“The thunderstorm.”

He switched to his left, eyes fixed ahead, but I knew that was not about lifting anymore. Michael did not want to look at me.

“You were upset,” I continued. “Which is fine, of course. Except that you took out your gun.”

“And did nothing.” Lift, drop. Lift, drop. “Not even load it.”

“How was I to know that? Sweetheart, it scared me.”

“In the hands of a responsible person, a gun is nothing to be afraid of.”

He was making me do this, forcing me to reason with him about something that should have required no argument. “Would you say you were a responsible person that night?”

Michael dropped both weights on the lawn. “You can’t give me one second’s peace, can you?”

“Actually, peace is exactly what I want to give you.”

“After I already said I was frustrated.” He pointed a stiff finger at me. “Nagging is not peaceable.”

I let that one go. Michael regretted saying it, too. I sensed it in the way he strode away across the lawn, swinging his arms out and back like a giant bird. I stood there on that lovely July night, still in work clothes, just wanting to step out of my clogs and drink an iced tea, maybe sit a moment before making a dinner I would probably eat alone.

In a minute he had flapped his way back. “Tell me,” Michael said.

“Tell you?”

“Come on.” He waved his hands in invitation, though it seemed more like a boxer taunting his opponent from across the ring. “You’ve got a bone to pick, I should hear you out. Dr. Doremus says that all the time, that people who care about me are worth paying attention to. You go ahead.”

“Really?”

He held his arms wide. “I’m not lifting.”

“Well.”

I tried to picture it then, the meeting room or restaurant where Soga gave away his sword all those years ago. What it must have taken for him to decide, to make a personal surrender, to give up a defining part of his past. But this time the idea would not come from the warrior himself. Would Soga have offered his sword if his wife had suggested it?

“I think you should get rid of your gun.”

He staggered backward as if taking a blow. “You think what?”

“It’s time to quit being ready for a fight. Give up your gun.”

“Jesus, Deb. Talk about left field.” He pressed both palms against the sides of his head. “You are even more out of touch than I thought.”

“I think that weapon is a danger. I think you will not rest until it is gone.”

“Do you know what it takes to do that? Find a buyer for a firearm as powerful and expensive as the .50, background checks, the works?”

“I didn’t say it would happen easily. But as a first step—”

“Stop it. Just stop.” Michael grabbed his weights and headed for the house, pausing by the screen door. “You are completely fucking clueless.”

I stared at where he had been standing. The door hissed closed. A robin darted out of the trees and across the yard. I heard kids calling to one another down the street. But then I remembered that moment under the kitchen table, and something inside me turned into heat.

“I am not the clueless one, damn it,” I said, yanking the door open. “I am the one keeping this household—”

Michael stood in the kitchen, a weight in each hand. He seemed gigantic. I sympathized with the guy whose car he had crushed. What it must have been like to see that big pickup bearing down on him.

But then I noticed something worse: He had gone white, his face and chest and arms, so ruddy red a minute before, appeared almost bloodless. Milk.

“Say it again,” Michael growled.

“Lover, please calm down.”

“Tell me to get rid of the gun again.”

“All I am saying it that I do not believe a person who owns a military assault rifle is making himself an instrument of peace. The war is over.”

“War is never over in the minds of the people who fought it.”

I paused at that. “Probably you’re right. Which makes me very sad for you. Sad for our country, too, if you think about all the veterans out there. But carrying a gun in the mind is very different from carrying one in your hands.”

He shook his head. “Do you honestly think we would be safer if I got rid of that world-class weapon?”

“With all my heart.”

“You are wrong, Deborah. Dead fucking
wrong
.” And as he said the last word, Michael drove the weight in his right hand into the wall.

The drywall gave, of course, a pair of round holes each about the size of a compact disc. He was lucky not to have punched a post, or the night would have involved an ER trip and a month with his hand in a cast.

The blow must have stung anyway, given how Michael fluttered his fingers and sucked on a knuckle. Almost immediately, though, he grabbed the dumbbell’s handle and pulled, but it was stuck in the wall.

“Michael, wait—”

He set his feet to try again, yanking hard, which shook the wall, and—yank, yank—likewise the shelf above it, where I kept my reliable old mixing bowl, a yard-sale soup tureen I used twice a year, and on a little wooden stand, my great-grandmother’s blue china plate.

When the weight came free of the wall, Michael staggering backward, it was like slow motion how the plate wobbled off its perch, tipped forward, did one complete somersault, and fell on the table with a clear, high shattering note.

“Oh perfect,” Michael said, gesturing with the dumbbell at the scatter of broken china. “Perfect.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Ouch.”

“Now I am the true shit,” he said. “Asshole of the century. You know, I have been really trying, Deb. Really truly.”

I had nothing to say in reply.

“I stifle myself all day long, I stuff it all down, and still I break something precious to you. I could say I’m sorry till a month from now, but we both know no apology will put that thing back together.” He looked back and forth between the dumbbells in each hand. “Swear to God, Deb, sometimes I think I ought to just fucking die.”

Then he was past me, storming out the door, heaving the weights onto the lawn where they landed with brute thuds. Through the screen I saw Michael stomp away up the street while his body twisted and turned as if he were wrestling his way free from a nest of vines.

I stood there in the kitchen, taking it in. With shards on the table, chairs, and floor, the plate clearly was miles beyond repair. I felt as if all I had ever been was tired.

Even so, I wanted to yank back the door and shout at Michael—no words, no argument, just one great blasting scream—to yell out all the anger and frustration and impatience that I swallowed like poison day after day.

But he was gone, and I was not the screaming kind anyway. There was nothing else to do but get a wastebasket and, one more time, try to pick up the pieces.

ICHIRO SOGA DID NOT RETURN
to the United States of America for ten years. During that interval he opened a hardware store in Tsuchiura, a town eighty miles north of Tokyo. Business grew slowly, paralleling Japan’s glacially incremental economic recovery. Soga invested his entire savings, precluding the expense of further foreign adventures.

He did, however, maintain a correspondence with town leaders in Brookings. Indeed, after his visit in 1962, three hundred and fourteen people received personal thank-you notes, their tone formal but appreciative, and written in English thanks to the translation and penmanship of Soga’s son.

The debate about his visit, although quieter, did not entirely fall silent. Letters to the
Pilot
continued with passion unabated.

When word of Soga’s visit reached Beth Issacs of West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, she mailed an epistle to enlighten her fellow Americans in the opposite corner of the country: “I feel compelled to condemn you for your complete lack of integrity and charity.”

There were no full-page advertisements, however, or contentious selectboard meetings with signs carried and voices raised. Mayor Campbell continued to serve, the Azalea Festival crowned a new queen each May, and World War II blurred further in the soft focus of memory.

If Donny Baker III maintained any ill will toward Soga and those who had championed his visit, his opinions remained out of the public record. He too suffered the preoccupation of business necessity, though in his case the circumstances were of success beyond any expectation.

The explosion of 1960s suburbia in California’s Bay Area sent ripples far up the coast, as residents of the Golden State spilled into southernmost Oregon. Erecting houses by the score, they needed trees, shrubs, plants, topsoil, reflecting globes, trellises, bird baths, bulbs, shovels, rakes, hoes, seeds—all supplied by the prodigious inventory of Baker’s Nursery and Garden Supply, two miles south of Brookings. Around this enterprise lay the quiet fields and rich soils of the nation’s largest source of Easter lilies. While the nation raged over civil rights and Vietnam, their white blooms opened dependably, silent trumpets through the tumultuous springs of the late 1960s.

Donny prospered, joining the local Chamber of Commerce, and—despite his disdain for the group’s invitation to Soga—the Jaycees. Donny also became a philanthropist, albeit on an extremely modest scale. A bench in Azalea Park bore a brass plaque honoring Mrs. Donny Baker III on the occasion of her tenth wedding anniversary.

His priorities were best illustrated, moreover, by Donny’s single appearance in the
Pilot—
after his daughter’s performance in an elementary school Christmas pageant. He stands awkwardly beside Heather, a beaming youngster who holds a clutch of carnations. The news item quotes an unnamed parent declaring that Heather has “the voice of an angel.”

Donny’s other marks in the public record came in 1969, after he purchased a used single-engine aircraft and began filing flight logs. Cruising at low altitudes, he flew as far up the rugged coastline as Tacoma, as far south as Santa Rosa.

Donny rarely ventured inland, with one exception that subsequently merited an inch of news space. When the Brookings-Harbor High School football team made the regional playoffs in 1970, Donny flew over the game, towing a banner that read G
O
B
RUINS
G
O
.

In sum, these were hardly the behaviors of a man engaged in, much less passionate about, geopolitics. Nevertheless, it took only one thing to heat his ardor back to a boil: an item in the
Pilot
in November of 1971 announcing that the following spring, Ichiro Soga would be visiting America again.

A decade after his first visit, Soga arrived attired precisely as before: a pressed suit, wing tips, and black glasses, albeit with appreciably thicker lenses. The welcome assembly contained fewer dignitaries, but if Soga had emotions about that diminution he made no comment to the
Pilot
—which apparently assigned one Piper Abbott to chronicle the visit, since every story of his trip bore her byline.

What differed from Soga’s first visit? First, his daughter, Yoriko, served as translator. Attired in modest dresses, she stood at his elbow like an acolyte. The softness of Yoriko’s voice had a diplomatic effect; people in conversation with Soga had to lean forward in order to hear her. From the photographs it appears as though his daughter’s modesty caused others to bow.

Second, on the initial visit Soga’s expression had been uniformly stern, whereas Piper Abbott’s photographs from 1972 portray a man wearing a nearly constant smile—on the beach, outside a movie theater, in the foyer of the public library where he made a donation toward the purchase of new children’s books.

Inside, in a private moment apart from his retinue, Soga stood before the sword. It hung in a glass display case, beside a scale model of the I-25 submarine. He bowed low and long. When he returned to the assemblage outside, Piper Abbott photographed him smiling once again.

One other image is emblematic: At an evening gathering, someone handed him a copy of the
Oregon Journal
of Portland from September 10, 1942, with its giant headline: “FOE BOMBS OREGON!!”

In the 1972 photo, Soga holds the newspaper high. It is a moment the equal of “Dewey Defeats Truman” from 1948—although Soga’s smile is possibly even more toothsome than that of the man who won the presidency despite the
Chicago Tribune’s
erroneous headline.

Third, Soga no longer played the role of silent warrior, a mask of inscrutable Asian reserve. Through his daughter, he spoke. He conversed. Above all, he asked questions.

Banking in particular received close attention. Piper Abbott filed numerous photos and articles about his willingness to try American convenience foods like potato chips and ice cream on a stick, and his visit to the giant redwoods ninety miles south in California’s Humboldt County. Yet fully half of the pictures of Soga’s second visit show him standing outside a bank, asking questions at a breakfast with bankers, or peering into the opening of a vault, the foot-thick iron door swung back to display whatever fascinations lay within.

Although Brookings’ bankers embraced their fellow capitalist, not everyone responded as warmly. Soga was scheduled to give an address in the school gymnasium, with posters thumbtacked around town advertising the date and time. Some enterprising booster had placed topmost on the posters a large 1941 photo of the bomber pilot in battle gear: a fur-lined leather jacket, the thick leather hat with flaps over his ears, the goggles. On the morning of Soga’s speech, Brookings awoke to discover that all the posters had been decapitated.

Recall that thirty years had passed since his Oregon mission. In 1972 Toyota sold its one-millionth vehicle in America. In 1972 Honda introduced the first tiny Civic automobile, which likewise subsequently sold in the millions. America and Japan were now allies, if only because of the imperatives of commerce.

Moreover, geopolitics had turned the nation’s attention elsewhere. An arms race with the Soviet Union shaped American defense policy. Oil shortages orchestrated by a Middle Eastern cartel created a growing economic dirge.

Nevertheless, some people continued to fight the battles of yesteryear. Once an enemy, always an enemy. A sheriff visiting the local rifle range found several missing poster heads stapled to targets. They were riddled with bullet holes.

School officials canceled Soga’s speech. An armed deputy attended all of his remaining events.

But here a fourth difference appeared in the pilot’s conduct. He was sixty-one now, father of grown children, a man of business. When Piper Abbott asked his response to the vandalized posters, the answer that Yoriko translated was immediate:

“I cannot fault a person for maintaining anger. War leaves deep scars. In my small view, however, the world has learned since then. Now we see that we can coexist. More: We can prosper. This, if I may say, is preferable to enmity.”

Then Soga issued a spontaneous invitation. “I would welcome conversation with anyone who sympathizes with defacing the posters. I would like to learn whether there may be some means by which we could understand one another.”

“Soga Answers Vandalism with Invitation,” read the headline in the next morning’s
Pilot.
Two days later, a local citizen replied in a letter to the editor.

“Challenge accepted,” the letter said. “If the Jap pilot shows up at my place of business, I’m willing to stop work for a couple minutes. But this will be no formal tea ceremony. Soga can expect an earful. You don’t bomb my town, then win my friendship with a few polite bows and a fancy suit.”

The signatory of that letter to the editor? Donny Baker III.

THE CARAVAN ARRIVED at Baker’s
Nursery and Garden Supply at 7:45
A.M.
, shortly before it would open for business. Piper Abbott rode in Soga’s car, beside his daughter. Soga was silent for the whole ride.

As the group disembarked, Donny emerged from behind a stack of wheelbarrows. He wore blue work pants, a gray t-shirt, and a battered tractor cap. While Soga tugged his jacket sleeves snug, Donny stood with fists on his hips.

“Good morning, sir,” Soga said through Yoriko.

“Morning,” Donny replied.

“Might we tour your company?”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Compared with other places Soga had visited—the factories, restaurants and banks eager to display every detail with pride—this presentation was perfunctory. Donny waved an arm at the shrub display, stood briefly in the doorway of the tool shed, marched through the greenhouses without pausing for questions. The group was back by the cars in fifteen minutes.

Soga clasped his hands behind his back, then murmured to his daughter. “Honored sir, my father says it is his impression that you are unhappy with him, and his visit to your town.”

Donny bristled. “Tell your dad I am unhappy with the Japs who bombed Pearl Harbor, and their war, which killed something like a hundred and ten thousand American soldiers and sailors, and wounded another quarter million.”

Many of the Jaycees shifted uncomfortably. Piper Abbott memorialized the conversation in her reporter’s notebook. Yoriko translated, her mouth to her father’s ear while he nodded gravely. She delivered his reply in so quiet a voice, Donny was compelled to step closer in order to hear.

“My father says, these are terrible numbers. Terrible. Likewise the Japanese suffered. More than two million military deaths and three hundred thousand civilian deaths. Also terrible.”

“Yeah, but they brought it on themselves, by attacking us.” Donny poked at the air in Soga’s direction. “Without even declaring war first.”

Soga listened to Yoriko, then bowed to Donny deeply. She leaned near, waiting while her father pondered. Then she translated his reply.

“My father says, with the battles over, now we must choose whether to continue to fight in our hearts, or recognize the dangers of all war—”

“Kinda late for that, don’t you think?”

She continued without translating Donny’s interruption. “My father says, would you rather I remain across the ocean, your adversary forever?”

“I guess I’d like it if your whole damn country stayed out of our business. Selling cheapo cars that otherwise would have been bought from American companies, and coming around here so everyone can suck up to you.”

“My father says, I am too insignificant to speak for my nation. I represent only myself, one small Ichiro Soga.” When she said his name, he bowed. “I did not choose to fight in war. I was conscripted. Also I believed it was virtue to serve the emperor, and honorable to uphold the Soga name. Today, I believe it is beneficial to make reparations between people. That is the only reason I have come.”

Donny scratched his neck. “Last time, you know, they spent three thousand dollars to bring you here.”

“I am most grateful.”

“Ask me, it sounds like the list of things you need to repay is getting longer, not shorter.”

As his daughter translated, Soga stiffened. She scrutinized his face, then murmured something further. He shook his head no, but at that moment Piper Abbott stepped out of her role as reportorial witness.

“Yesterday he gave that exact amount of money to the public library,” she said. “For children’s books.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Donny said. “Seems fishy.”

For a moment, the two men regarded one another: Donny a full head taller, rounder, scruffy, his eyes squinted, Soga impeccable and reserved. He scanned the nursery, peering down aisles as if it were an inspection, then whispered to Yoriko.

“What is your pride?” she translated.

Donny drew back. “What in hell does that mean?”

Father and daughter conferred before she answered. “What is the one thing you make or sell, of which you are most proud?”

“I don’t know.” Donny turned, regarding his business: the greenhouse, the sheds, the day’s first customers arriving. “I guess it’s my trees. I sell damn good trees.”