Death at the Crossroads (4 page)

“
Tadaima!
I’m home!” he gruffly shouted as he entered his house, which was bigger and grander than that of the peasants in the village. He sat at the entryway and untied his sandals. His wizened mother-in-law came to greet him, instead of his wife, as was proper. She curled up her nose as she approached him.

“You smell of that place again. You’ve been up to see the Lord. Wash your dirty body before you come into the house,” the old woman ordered.

Nagato’s lips twisted with frustration and hatred, but he stepped outside to comply.

“F
ood?”

“Yes.”

Jiro ladled out some porridge made from millet and brown rice into a bowl. He begrudged the use of rice in the meal, but he thought he should add it to the millet or the samurai might get angry with him.

Both men were in Jiro’s farmhouse, sitting on a raised wooden platform that formed the main flooring for the hut. The farmhouse was perhaps eight paces long by six wide, with a high thatched roof, the underside of which was made black with soot. In the joists of the roof, crude platforms of bamboo were built to act as storage places. The walls of the hut were planks hand sawn but painstakingly fitted together so the biting winds of winter would not cut through the joints to freeze the inhabitants of the hut. The planks fitted between posts and beams, many of which were left in a seminatural shape: the bark and limbs trimmed off, but the natural shape of the trunk remaining. Like the underside of the thatch, all the wood had been smoked to a dark color by countless fires used to provide heat and to cook food. The entire house was put together with cunning joints that locked it together, along with a few pegs.

The fire was made in a gap in the center of the platform that Jiro and Kaze sat on. There, in an open square in the floorboards, a charcoal fire was glowing on the exposed ground below. Hanging over the fire, from a rope thrown over a beam in the roof, was an iron pot with the bubbling porridge. By raising or lowering the other end of the rope and tying it off, Jiro could control the cooking temperature.

A steady stream of gray wisps rose from the fire and curled past the pot, wafting up into the recesses of the thatched roof. It was supposed to escape through a hole in the eaves, but the truth was that a great deal of the smoke remained to permeate the entire farmhouse, causing watery eyes and drying the throat to a leathery consistency.

High in the rafters, on the ridgepole of the roof, was a black-painted arrow pointing northeast, the
kimon
, or devil’s direction. The arrow was tied with hemp rope, a Shinto ceremonial article, and it was designed to keep away evil spirits. Jiro’s grandfather and the carpenter who supervised the building of the house had tied the arrow there as part of the construction rites more than ninety years before. The entire village had participated in the construction of the house, just as Jiro, his father, and his father before him had participated in the construction of all the other houses in the village. If a house survived earthquakes, fires, and war, it might stay in a family for hundreds of years, little bits of it being constantly renewed and replaced as age and rot took their toll. In that way it was like a family or the village itself because the long-term survival of the whole was more important than the survival of any individual piece.

Jiro handed the bowl of porridge over to Kaze. As Kaze accepted the bowl, he did something astonishing. He gave a small nod of his head to acknowledge the food and thank Jiro. In his entire fifty years, Jiro had never had a samurai thank him for anything, much less give a bow to him, however small. He almost dropped the ladle.

Kaze acted as if he had done nothing unusual. He brought the bowl to his face and, using a pair of
hashi
, chopsticks, he shoveled
some of the porridge into his mouth, sucking air in along with porridge to cool the hot mixture. “It’s good,” he said.

Jiro stared at this unusual man, not sure what to make of him. When they returned to the village of Suzaka, the Magistrate went off to report to the District Lord. Jiro had offered Kaze breakfast, but Kaze refused, saying he had eaten some toasted rice balls when he started on the road that morning.

Jiro spent the morning delivering charcoal to his regular customers. Kaze also roamed the village, looking as if he were searching for something. His presence made the villagers nervous, and in a way this was good for Jiro because it took attention away from his news about the increase in charcoal prices.

As Kaze looked around, he realized that Suzaka was more like a
buraku
, a hamlet, than a
mura
, a real village. The buraku was a relatively small grouping of farmhouses, and groups of buraku would form a mura. Here in the mountains, the land could not sustain a large number of buraku.

Now, with the sun down and the evening meal cooked, Jiro didn’t know what to expect from this samurai. He worried about what might happen, because he had never had a samurai stay in his farmhouse before. In fact, since his wife died, he rarely had people in his house at all. He fretted over possible scenarios in which the samurai would be demanding or threatening. He even thought the samurai might beat him because the fare he was offering was so meager. He would never have predicted that the samurai would actually thank him.

“
Chotto matte, kudasai
. Wait a minute, please,” Jiro said. He hesitated a moment, then moved over to a corner of the platform. He lifted up one of the floorboards. The use of a metal nail or wooden pegs to hold them down would have been an unthinkable luxury. The floorboards were simply laid on the floor joist.

Jiro reached under the board and lifted out a pottery jar with a piece of coarse cloth covering the mouth. Jiro removed the cloth and offered the jar to the samurai. “
Tsukemono?
Pickles?”

The samurai peered into the jar and quickly jerked his head back
as the pungent odor assaulted his nostrils, overpowering even the smell of smoke and the loamy smell of earth. Inside the jar were small eggplants and cabbage leaves fermented in bran and salt. He gingerly picked some of the pickles out of the jar with his hashi and nibbled at one.

“Good, but powerful enough to kill flies.”

Jiro laughed. “It’s my own recipe. It’s my secret to long life.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty years.”

Fifty years was positively ancient. Boys could see their first battle at twelve, people were often married at fourteen, and a woman past thirty-five could expect to be addressed as
obaasan:
grandmother. A peasant living through his forties was unusual. Kaze was thirty-one. He had lived through the dangerous year of twenty-nine, but that year had indeed been a fateful one, just as the folk belief said it would be. So much of his life had been lost or changed since then; he had no wish to catalog the changes. He dipped his hashi back into the pungent jar and fished out some more pickles.

“The village looks run down,” Kaze said as he continued to eat small bites of pickle with his porridge.

“It might as well be taken by devils,” Jiro answered.

“Why?”

Jiro’s wariness, temporarily dispelled by the samurai’s politeness, quickly returned.

“Problems,” he said vaguely.

“What kind of problems?”

“Our District Lord is a little … strange.”

“In what way?”

“I’m sorry. I’m very ignorant. I shouldn’t talk of my betters.”

“Why are you suddenly acting stupid when I can tell you’re an intelligent man?”

Jiro bowed. “Please forgive me, but …” He let the sentence trail off. A clear sign he didn’t want to continue. Kaze turned his attention back to his porridge and didn’t press the charcoal seller.

Jiro surreptitiously examined the man eating his food. Kaze was of normal height for a man of his time, which would make him five foot one or five foot two. From the swell of his forearms and the bulge of his shoulders under his kimono, Jiro could see that Kaze was very muscular, but he was also exceptionally agile, as Jiro had witnessed when Kaze came down the mountain to the crossroads. The samurai’s face was square-cut and had high cheekbones, with dark brows that almost met above the bridge of his nose. His face was burnt brown from the sun, the result of a long time on the road. Kaze didn’t shave the front part of his head as other samurai did. Instead he drew his glossy black hair back into a ponytail. Jiro decided this strange samurai was handsome.

Despite an outwardly casual manner, one aspect of the samurai did bother Jiro. Kaze seemed to keep his sword close at hand at all times, as if he expected an attack at any moment. Jiro knew that samurai considered their swords to be extensions of their souls, but he found it strange that Kaze never had his sword farther away than a short stretch of his arm. He also found it strange that Kaze only carried one sword, the long katana. Samurai usually carried two swords, the long katana and the shorter
wakizashi
. The short wakizashi was used as an auxiliary weapon and for other tasks, such as ritual suicide. Samurai called the wakizashi the “guardian of honor.” Jiro wondered why Kaze didn’t carry one.

After closing off any conversation about the Lord, Jiro tried to make amends through small talk. It was an effort for him, but he decided civility was the right tack to take with this particular samurai.

“Have you been on the road long?”

“Too long.”

“Where is your home?”

“I no longer have a home. I’m a ronin, a ‘wave man.’ Like the waves of the ocean, I call no land home. Like water on rocks, I can’t mix in and settle. I am always pulled back to flow to the next shore.”

Jiro, who was not an articulate man, found this rush of words both peculiar and pleasing. The play off the meaning of “ronin” was
something he could easily understand but which would have been beyond his power to invent. It gave him a feeling of both awe and sadness.

“That’s good. I wish I could think like that.”

“It’s true. I wish I had no reason to think like that.”

Jiro had no response. He sucked air through his teeth, cocked his head to one side, and smiled. The samurai smiled back.

“Tell me something,” Kaze said.

“What?”

“Are there many farmhouses outside the village?”

“A few. No one lives in most of them. Too many bandits.”

“Do you know the families that do live there?’

“Yes.”

“Have any bought a girl recently? She’d be around nine years old now. She would probably be sold as a servant. She might have a kimono with a
mon
, a family crest, of three plum blossoms.”

“No one has money here but the bandits. They take what they want, not buy. No one here has servants, except the Magistrate and the Lord.”

“How long has the bandit problem been so severe here?”

“There’ve always been a few, but the last two years have been terrible.”

“Why has it gotten so terrible in the last two years?”

“No reason,” Jiro said warily.

“No reason at all?”

“No. It’s just gotten bad in two years.”

“Several bands of bandits, or just one?”

“One. They killed off the others, or made them join. Boss Kuemon is in charge.”

Kaze put down his empty bowl of gruel. Jiro pointed toward the pot with his chin, to see if Kaze wanted more. The samurai shook his head no. He found a clear spot and seemed to be settling down for the night, sleeping, Jiro noted, with his sword tucked in his arms. Jiro banked the fire and settled down himself.

“Want a
futon
?” Jiro asked, digging out one of the sleeping mats for himself.

“No. I’m used to sleeping on the ground.”

“All right. I have to wake up early to sell charcoal.”

“I wake up early, too. By the way, how many years has the new Lord been in charge of this District?”

“Two.” As soon as he spoke, Jiro knew the reason for the question. This was why he didn’t trust words. It was too easy to say more than you wanted to, even with a single one of them.

Jiro awoke very early the next morning, long before the sun was up. He lay still, listening to the breathing of the still-sleeping samurai. When he was sure that the stranger was sound asleep, Jiro quietly got up and crept to the door of his farmhouse. It was so dark he couldn’t see his guest, but he had lived his entire life in the house and knew its every cranny. At the door he paused once again to listen for the slow, rhythmic breathing of the ronin and heard it. Reassured, Jiro took the stick out of the sliding wooden door that jammed it shut at night. Then, with painstaking care to assure he wasn’t making a sound, he slid open the door.

Once outside, Jiro slid the door shut with equal care. Then he stealthily made his way from the farmhouse and the village.

Kaze continued his slow breathing as he listened to Jiro’s receding footsteps. He expected Jiro to make his way to the privy. That would almost always be to the south of a farmhouse. Kaze had noticed a
nanten
bush growing south of the farmhouse, something usually planted next to a privy as a symbol of ritual purification, so he was sure that’s where the facilities were. But the charcoal seller was walking west, not south. That meant he was walking into the surrounding woods.

Kaze lay still, slowly listening to his breathing, and tried not to be curious about the strange nocturnal journey of the charcoal seller. He counted over a thousand breaths before Jiro painstakingly slid the farmhouse door open again and crept inside. In the dark, Jiro made his way back to his spot on the farmhouse’s platform floor and
settled back to sleep, congratulating himself on making his nightly trip without the samurai noticing.

The next morning, Kaze shared a breakfast of hot miso soup and cold porridge from the night before with Jiro without complaint. The breakfast passed without any comment on the charcoal seller’s peculiar behavior. Kaze finished his food, then he put on his
tabi
socks and started strapping on his hemp sandals.

“Looking around the village again?” Jiro said, frankly curious.

“I’ve seen the village. I’m moving to the next village.”

“You’re leaving?” Jiro said, alarmed.

“Yes. There’s no reason for me to stay.”

“But the Lord hasn’t decided what to do about the murder.” Fear made words tumble from Jiro’s mouth.

“The murder has nothing to do with me.”

“But the Magistrate told you to stay here.”