Butterfly's Child (29 page)

While waiting for his documents to arrive, Benji taught English, rounded up dogs and cats that were homeless after the earthquake, and accompanied men to possible places of permanent work on farms in Watsonville and Sacramento. When Mr. Matsumoto put Benji in charge
of the construction of a new house on a nearby street, Benji protested. “I know nothing about building.”

“In this way you will learn. You must be skilled at enterprises beyond farming.”

One foggy morning in November, Mr. Matsumoto brought a pot of tea to the construction site. He and Benji sat on the just-completed steps; Mr. Matsumoto poured tea and looked up through the mist at the rafters. “I see you are progressing. Very good.” He patted Benji's knee. “I have come to tell you of a prospect. We Japanese intend to bring wives from Japan. All our young men must have women,
ne
? And they can bear children on American soil and there can be no dispute about their citizenship. You are citizen, but you have no wife. What will you say to a wife?”

“A wife? Here?”

“Perhaps you might be wise to stay, Benji-san, and take a wife in America. It may be difficult for you in Japan—forgive me for saying so—not being pure Japanese.”

“But I am Japanese, dammit,” Benji exploded.

“With an American father.”

“Now I have a Japanese one.”

“This is true in our hearts, but some biology is involved, I'm afraid.”

“I'm not going to Japan to find a wife, anyway.”

Mr. Matsumoto looked into the distance. “You are fixed on Japan,” he said.

“Yes. I'm sorry. You've done so much for me … but I must find my family.”

“
Daijobu
.” He waved his arm and, after a silence, cleared his throat and turned to Benji, smiling. “What about myself? Do you think I shall have a wife?” He pretended to preen, smoothing back his hair, as before a mirror. “Am I too old for a woman to admire me?”

“Women will fight over you,” Benji said with a laugh.

Mr. Matsumoto's smile faded. “Maybe a sweet wife can take away my sorrow.” He shook a finger at Benji. “But she must be a good cook! No more noodle soup.” He stood and gestured for Benji to rise. “Now. I must give you a lesson. Since you will go to Japan, you must be as Japanese as possible. Number one, no swearing. Very polite, please.”

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

“Bow from the center of your body for an important person, such as
your father.” He demonstrated; Benji made a deep bow. “Yes. And you must be disciplined and work hard.”

“I've worked hard all my life,” Benji said, trying to keep his voice even. “I'm working hard now.”

“Please continue to do so. And respect your elders.”

“Yes, sir,” Benji said with another bow.

Mr. Matsumoto looked at Benji's hair. “There is also your appearance to consider. I am hatching a plan.”

The next night, after dinner and the washing up, Mr. Matsumoto asked Benji and Murata, the cook, to remain in the kitchen. He rummaged in his brown satchel, took out a bottle, and, with a flourish, handed it to Benji.
Grierson's Hair Dye
, the label read;
Permanent coloration for the sophisticated gentleman. Results 100% guaranteed. Color: black
.

“Much better than shoe polish,” Benji said.

“Yes, it's a good timing for you, this invention. Maybe I will use some myself, when I take a picture for my bride.”

Mr. Matsumoto spoke to Murata and then to Benji in Japanese. “Did you understand me?”

“A little. Mostly. You were giving directions for the dyeing.”

“Not good enough. From now on we speak only in Japanese.”

Benji leaned over the sink and Murata poured some dye onto his head, then scrubbed it into his scalp, with Mr. Matsumoto talking in Japanese—exclamations and corrections, as far as Benji could tell. Mr. Matsumoto was right: He knew the cadence of Japanese from his childhood and had regained some of the basic vocabulary in Denver, but there were many words he didn't know.

Murata wrapped Benji's head in a towel, dried and combed his hair, then Mr. Matsumoto held up a mirror. “Transformed,” he said. “
Kurata
. There's a word for you to learn.” Benji stared at himself; the dye was an improvement, but there was nothing to be done about the nose.

When the passport arrived in the spring, Mr. Matsumoto reserved a second-class berth for Benji on the
Toyo Kisen Kaisha
, bound for Nagasaki with calls at Hawaii and Yokohama en route.

He left on May 15, seen off by Mr. Matsumoto and Murata. Mr. Matsumoto gave him a packet of money and a bag filled with bottles of hair
dye. “Some men depart with whiskey bottles,” he said in Japanese, “but you with dye—this shows you are unique.” Then he added in English, “But you are unique in many ways.”

When the ship was under way, Benji went on deck and watched the coast of California until the details blurred and it was a viridescent stripe, then a line of gray, then gone. He was severed from America.

The next day he sat on deck, gazing out at the water. He thought of the voyage to America: a nauseating terror, and Mama's ball, holding Mama's ball.

He had watched her make that ball, winding and winding the colored threads and then rolling it toward him, smiling.

He saw her lying on the tatami, her eyes closed, her face chalk white. A grasshopper jumped along her bloody sleeve. His body jerked; the book fell from his knees. He bolted up and began to walk the deck, holding on to the rail as the ship rose and fell, then went to the bar and drank beer after beer until the image of her face was gone.

That night he lay turning from side to side in his bunk, a man named Kazu snoring above him.

He got up and went to the deck. There was no moon, just streaks of light from the ship on the dark ocean. He imagined jumping. It made him shudder, the thought of plummeting down, water filling his lungs, trying to claw back to the surface, too late. He lit a cigarette, his hands shaking, glad for the warmth of his feet in his shoes.

In the morning, lying in his bunk, he took out his mother's picture and looked at her beautiful, sad face. She had wanted him to remember her, he reminded himself; she had carefully stitched the picture into the kimono.

Kazu looked in and Benji showed him the picture. “Ah, your mother. She will be glad to see you, I think.”

At breakfast Benji told Kazu the story of his mother's death. Kazu shook his head. “Very tragic,” he said. “Why did your father come with his wife? This is cruel,
ne
? It caused your mother a terrible shock in the heart.”

“Yes,” Benji said.

“But she behaved in unusual way. I think often if a Japanese mother must kill herself, she will take her child too. So she must have some special hope for you.”

Benji stared down at his bowl of rice. He could have been lying on the
tatami too. He thought of his mother's soft eyes. She could not have brought herself to do it. And perhaps what Frank had said was true, that she thought he would become a successful businessman in America.

The ship docked in Hawaii for a day, to refuel. Benji walked along the beach, looking at the breakers without seeing them, impatient to be going.

The night after they left Hawaii, they encountered a violent storm. For two days the ship pitched; waves crashed onto the deck, and water trickled through windows in the lower cabins of second class. Benji, nauseated and dizzy, gripped the edge of his bunk as Kazu prayed above him in Japanese.

After the storm passed, the ocean was calm again for more than a week, then there was a quieter turbulence—dishes sliding off tables, men walking like drunks. It was
kuroshiwo
, the black current, Kazu said, that ran out from Japan; they were getting close.

Benji stood on the foredeck, looking into the distance, his eyes blurred by the wind, thinking of the times he'd ridden Kuro, pretending he was flying to Japan. Kuro galloping so fast, as if he understood, had given him hope that he'd get here, and Keast had helped by giving him Kuro, and in so many other ways. Kate had helped too, he realized with a start. It must have been hard for her, taking him in. She hadn't always been kind, but mostly she had tried. Once, she'd told him she knew what it was like to suddenly be wrenched from home; she'd felt abandoned, sent away from her parents in China.

He felt a surge of gratitude for her and for Grandmother Pinkerton, and for Keast—both of the Keasts. For the kind people in Iowa, and Shin, Fumio, Willa; Mr. Matsumoto, his father now—they all had helped him survive. Without them, he would not be on this voyage. He wished Eli could see him leaning over the railing, looking out at the Pacific Ocean.

He didn't go ashore in Yokohama; he wanted Nagasaki to be the first place he walked in Japan. They sailed along the coast, the land in and out of sight, for two days. Much of the time, he stayed on deck, unable to sleep or eat.

When the ship arrived in Nagasaki Bay, it was raining and the hills around the water were shrouded in fog. The water beside the wharf was
too shallow for the ship to dock there, so Benji and the other passengers climbed down rope ladders in the rain to small boats that ferried them ashore. Benji stepped out of the boat, his legs shaking. He had an impulse to kneel, to touch the ground with his forehead; instead, he looked up the hill at the tile roofs in the mist. He was home.

Books were not
allowed, the doctor told Kate; reading agitated the mind. She must rest and benefit from the salubrious treatments.

Several times a day a nurse brought brown drops to her room and a tincture that tasted of licorice, making her sleepy but not sleepy enough, so she pretended to be deranged in order to have more medicine, in occupational therapy insisting that she would crochet a book, at meals quoting in a loud voice passages from “The Over-Soul” in response to any question, and the medicine was increased, along with the duration of the baths, where she lay with her eyes closed, her mind floating away from everything around her—the faint stench of urine, the loony in the next tub—and from the circumstances that had brought her here.

Some women fought the baths, but Kate liked them. Even when the water had gone tepid and her skin was wrinkling, her mind drifted to a town in California where she had stopped with her parents on the way to China, and she lived there now with her father, in a small sunlit house tended by servants, a lady's maid, a cook, and a gardener, and although the gardener labored at the digging and pruning, each day before dinner she went with Father into the yard and gathered lemons, oranges, and a basket of sweet-smelling lavender and roses for the table and before going inside sat in a chair in the golden light, holding the flowers, her eyes closed, the sun bathing her face: paradise.

One day she fell asleep in the bath and slipped beneath the water. When she woke, retching, slung over the edge of the tub, someone was pounding her back, and for a time the baths were discontinued.

Kazu had suggested
that Benji stay at the Seamen's Home, an inexpensive boardinghouse operated by missionaries, until he could find permanent lodging. He recognized it by the signs above the door and on the porch:
CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR HOME FOR SEAMAN; HOT TEA COFFEE AND COCOA ALL HOURS; ICE CREAM SUNDAES MADE TO ORDER
. On the hill overlooking the bay, the home was a two-story white clapboard house like those in Illinois. He'd expected to begin his time in Nagasaki in a Japanese house with tatami floors; at the noisy dining table where beef stew and potatoes and watery cabbage were served, it was as if he hadn't left America.

He was disappointed to find that most of the houses on the two hills overlooking the bay were owned by Westerners, and the street beside the water—where he walked the first morning after his arrival—was lined with expensive Western-style hotels and shops with signs in English.

But the street itself, and the view of the water, seemed familiar: He must have been here with his mother, watching for Frank's ship. He looked down at the packed earthen street, damp from last night's rain; his footsteps could be touching hers.

People flowed past him in both directions: Japanese men with bare legs pulling jinrickshas, foreigners in most of them; a man balancing two buckets on a long pole; two self-important-looking Western men speaking a language he'd never heard. A Japanese woman approached, a baby on her back. Her kimono was dark blue, with thin white stripes, her face rosy and delicate. “A beautiful baby,” he said in Japanese; she gave a bow without looking at him, but when he turned to watch her after she'd
passed, she gave him a curious backward glance. His mother would have been about that age when she carried him on her back. Waiting for Papa-san. How could Frank have come here with Kate? If they hadn't come, his mother would still be alive, and he'd have lived in Japan all his life.

Wandering through the other streets at the base of the hill, he found more fancy hotels and shops that catered to tourists and consulates of several countries, including America. He went inside the office of a newspaper, the
Nagasaki Express
, and placed an advertisement:
Bilingual gentleman seeks employment in import/export concern; experience in bookkeeping and all aspects of office work. Please contact, in person or by letter, Matsumoto Benjamin, residing at the Seamen's Home, 26 Oura, Nagasaki
.

He walked away from the water and up a steep hill, then down. The flagstone street led through a hilly, crowded neighborhood of dark wooden houses, all Japanese houses, he saw with exhilaration, their paper sliding doors open to the light. The morning was already warm and perfumed by the flowers that spilled here and there over the stone walls. A pretty young woman in kimono dumping a pail of water in the street smiled up at him, and he felt a surge of happiness; this was the beginning of his real life.

At the foot of the hill was a cluster of shops with cloth curtains hanging at the open doors, Japanese characters written on the cloth. He peered in—two women examining bolts of material in one, barrels of sake in another. There was a tofu shop—he recognized the gleaming slab of custard from a similar store in Denver. Tangy odors drifted out the doors of restaurants; he chose one, noisy and crowded, and took a seat at a low table.