Frank took a draw of the whiskey: smooth bourbon. “There was a small uprising in Samoa,” he said, which wasn’t quite true. “The presence of our ships was usually enough to forestall trouble.”
“Frank’s been all over,” Red said. “Spain, Brazil, all those islands, the Orient …” He leaned forward with a wink; Frank could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“You the one that brought back that mongrel Jap,” Burdett said.
Frank straightened and handed him the flask. “Japan is a superior country, very civilized and mannerly. Yes, my wife and I have taken in an unfortunate orphan. He’s a bright boy and already a help on the farm.”
There was a stirring inside the house. Kate came out the door, her face vivid with excitement. Frank made introductions while Burdett—none too subtly—assessed Kate’s figure. No doubt his own wife resembled a blancmange.
“There’s to be a tour of the house,” Kate said, taking Frank’s arm. “Mrs. Moore is doing the honors.”
Frank took his leave with a smile and a slight bow. “You’ve rescued me from a beast,” he whispered as they joined the throng.
She squeezed his arm. “I anticipate the details.”
They shuffled along with the crowd as Aimee led them through the frilly parlor, the sunroom, the music room, with its gleaming piano; her husband’s library, lined with law books and dominated by the mounted head of a rakish-looking moose, and a large expanse of kitchen, the stove decorated with tile imported from Belgium—“at tiresome expense,” Aimee confided.
Upstairs, they peered into fancy bedrooms and had a glimpse of the famous privy—a water closet, Aimee called it, quickly opening and shutting the door. Frank was disappointed; he’d wanted to see how the thing worked. Aimee led the way to the bath.
It was a spacious corner room; the light, filtered through the stained-glass windows, was yellow with streaks of red. The bathtub, gleaming porcelain with a wide lip and bowed legs that tapered to monstrous paws, stood on a rose-patterned carpet. Mrs. Moore demonstrated the miracle to appreciative murmurs, turning the water on and off several times. As she bent forward, a band of ruby-colored light fell across her neck.
Kate was silent as they descended the steps.
“Someday we’ll have one of those,” Frank whispered. “An even finer one.”
His mother was waiting at the foot of the stairs with Benji. There was a red gash across Benji’s face, and his clothes were streaked with dirt.
“Goodness, what’s happened?” Kate cried.
“He won’t tell me. Some trouble with the children, I believe. He wants to go home.”
Benji stared at the floor. “Be a little soldier,” Frank said, squeezing his shoulder; the small bones beneath his hand, delicate as a bird’s, brought him close to tears.
“Captain Pinkerton.” Frank turned; he’d forgotten Mrs. Moore behind them. “If you want to take the boy home, my husband and I will see that your wife is safely returned.” She gazed at Benji. “Poor little fellow. Did you fall?”
He shook his head.
“I’ll come too and get us some supper,” his mother said.
Frank’s mother sat beside him in the buggy; Benji was curled up on the backseat, his eyes closed. “Hey, bud,” Frank said, reaching to shake his foot. “Why don’t we stop by the drugstore for a sarsaparilla?” Benji didn’t move.
“Let him be,” his mother said. “I’m not surprised—that was as snoot-nosed a crowd as I’ve seen.” After a pause she said in a low voice, “I don’t know what you were thinking, Frank, bringing him to Plum River.” He glanced away and pretended he hadn’t heard. “Your wife is a saint,” she added.
They passed through town and into the countryside. Dark clouds were gathering and a wind had come up; the air smelled of rain. He’d felt there was no choice but to take the boy, and Sharpless had insisted on it. But maybe Benji would have been better off with his own kind. Frank stared out at the cornstalks stirring in the breeze, his mother a dark weight at his side. She would never understand what he had to contend with—the pitiless life of farming, Kate’s delicacy, and the boy, trying to do right by the boy.
He glanced back at Benji. If the boy was going to turn out to be a sissy, he’d never survive here. An image of his father flashed into Frank’s mind—the time he’d called Frank a pantywaist because he’d cried at a hog-butchering. I’ll give you something to whine about if you don’t dry up, he’d said.
At home, he left his mother to tend to Benji, changed to coveralls, and went to the barn. The Swede hadn’t mucked out the stalls. Furious, Frank banged on the bunkhouse door, then opened it. Empty. The Swede had gone off on his own Fourth of July toot, probably to the whorehouse near Elizabeth. There was a bottle of white whiskey on the nightstand. He sampled it—corn liquor; it burned like Hades—then returned to the barn, where he looked for the bottle of bourbon he’d hidden in the haymow. Gone, damn that Swede. He gave Daisy a few swipes with the currycomb and, cursing, attacked the Percherons’ prodigious heaps of excrement with the pitchfork. The cows came jangling across the road, their udders full. He milked them savagely—what this family needed was another hired hand, not some prissy servant. He carried the milk to the cistern, then went back to the Swede’s place for the bottle. As he walked to the farmhouse, a light rain began, raising dust on the road. No fireworks in Stockton this year. “Ha,” he said aloud.
In the house, assaulted by the odor of liver and onions, he went up to his office and sat at his desk, gazing out at tree limbs thrashing in the wind. There was a crack of thunder, a bright fork of lightning. It was going to be a hell of a storm. He uncorked the bottle, took a long drink, then another. Likely Kate would spend the night. She’d enjoy that, one of those satiny bedrooms and the bath in the morning. He took another draught from the bottle. He could see her naked, stepping into the tub, then Aimee, the two of them together in the water, breasts floating, Kate’s flesh-colored nipples, Aimee’s dark ones, her dark thatch like Butterfly’s. He’d have them take turns, bent over the edge of the tub. He rose to lock the door and relieved himself in private, as rain hammered against the windows and the dark closed in.
Benji went to his room and took out the kimono. He wanted to talk to Mama in his room, but Grandmother Pinkerton was close by, in the kitchen. “Let’s see to that cut,” she called. His hands moving so quick that he didn’t get to see Mama’s face, he took the picture from the kimono and slipped outside. It had started raining, so he put the picture under his shirt.
He ran to the privy and sat down. No one would come until the rain stopped. He took out Mama’s picture and covered the other face with his hand so he could look just at her.
“The Sunday-school children are meaner than Marvin,” he told her. They were playing a game with long sticks, hitting balls across the grass. One ball came to his feet and he picked it up but they yelled at him so he dropped it. A boy with stuck-out ears made a face, pulling the skin back until his eyes almost disappeared, and said he was a Jap and a Chink.
“I hit him and he hit back,” he said. “I butted like a goat and he fell down so hard he cried like a little sissy, even though he’s bigger than me. Two other boys threw rocks and dirt but I didn’t care.”
He leaned closer to the picture. “I’m a samurai. Are you proud of me?”
He wagged the picture to make her say yes, but her face didn’t answer. The writing didn’t answer. There was only the angry sound of rain.
Kate had felt separated from God ever since the events in Nagasaki. Praying at the mission church there, she had been moved to rescue Benji and to forgive Frank, but that inspiration had faded during the years on the farm. She could have borne the hard work, she thought, she might even have seen it as a trial God set for her, if she had any sense of His presence. One should never allow oneself to fall into the Slough of Despond, she remembered her father saying; “Despair is a shutting out of God.” So it was her fault, and not God’s, that He had left her.
Her sense
of melancholy deepened after the Moores’ party that summer and continued into the fall, when Frank’s shifts in mood became more pronounced; he was alternately distant and effusive. She no longer believed in his affection, which seemed an effort to cover a growing indifference. He spent many evenings in his office, going over the farm ledgers, he said, but these days he seemed more careless with the farm; even his mother had noted it during haying season, when he left the sheaves in the field to go sour in the rain. They’d had to buy hay for the livestock from Bud Case and other farmers nearby. Once, when Kate had taken some tea to his office, he was looking out the window into the dark.
“What is it, darling?” she asked.
He shook his head as though to clear it. “The railroads,” he said. “The tariffs will kill us.” But his expression had not to do with railroads.
Sometimes when she went to his office after that, the door was locked, and often he was late coming to bed.
She increased her prayers morning and evening and while she went about the housework, but her words felt as rote as a child’s Sunday-school recitation, and her sense of God’s absence left her hollow.
In late October, she met with Reverend Singleton in his study at the First Presbyterian Church in Stockton. Though she had often thought of consulting him, shame about her peculiar marital difficulties had held her back.
He sat behind his desk, his hands clasped together as if in readiness for prayer, a well-nourished man with a lap of flesh over his clerical collar and kind gray eyes.
She had intended to begin with her crisis of faith but instead blurted out, “I have some family difficulty … my husband …”
He cleared his throat and rearranged some pencils on his desk. She couldn’t speak her heart; she couldn’t mention that woman.
“He is disappointed in me—it seems I can have no children of my own. We … have grown apart.”
“There are many unfortunate children in the world,” he said, looking up at her. “You have brought one into your home already. Perhaps God’s intention for you and your husband is to continue this Christian work.”
No, she wanted to scream, that’s not it, but instead politely excused herself and said she must be going.
One winter afternoon she sat alone in the sanctuary of the church. It was cold and dark, no light filtering through the stained-glass windows above her pew.
“Dear God,” she whispered, “help me, give me back my faith. I need You.”
She waited. Nothing but the sound of the wind.
She pulled her coat tighter about her and closed her eyes. God had carried her through earlier crises in her life. When her missionary parents sent her home from Harbin at age nine, because they were convinced she could not receive a proper education in China, she had lived with her spinster aunt Nora and attended the schools in Galena. The first months were agony; though Aunt Nora tried hard to be a mother, Kate felt bereft and abandoned. Pastor Williams, an erudite silver-haired man who resembled her father, had prayed with her day after day. Kneeling beside him, the ruby and honey colored light that streamed through the stained-glass windows bathing their hands and arms, she had come to feel God’s enfolding presence.
Later, she had undertaken a study of the Bible with Pastor Williams, and he introduced her to secular writers as well, particularly the Transcendalists; they had a number of enlivening discussions about the Over-soul. It was Pastor Williams who had suggested to her aunt that Kate attend college, where she might train to be a teacher as well as further develop what he called the life of the mind.
She had returned from Ellington Women’s Institute in Iowa prepared to teach, but during her first week in Galena she met Richard McCann at a dinner party. Richard had recently moved to Galena to take a position in the bank; he was said to have a brilliant future and Kate found him enticing, with his broad shoulders that made her trust him—an impulse that she now saw as childish—and his dark, adoring eyes. He had pursued her ardently, squiring her to dances and to orations at the Desoto Hotel, and they began to speak of marriage.
But then Kate’s father died and she went to China for the funeral. When she returned two months later, she found that Richard’s attentions had shifted to Emily Kettering, in Galena to visit her cousin.
Emily was a molasses-voiced Southerner, adept at the art of flattery. Kate thought that Richard would eventually reject her as insincere. When Richard came that final afternoon to tell her he had proposed to Emily, Kate disgraced herself by weeping, but Richard was unmoved. He admitted that he was leaving the better woman, but the heart works in illogical ways, he said.
Again she was plunged into despair, through which she was led once more by Pastor Williams. He said it was God’s will that she had parted from the ignoble Mr. McCann; she was destined for a finer man. She believed him and gave over the burden of her pain to God.
That finer man had seemed to be Frank—handsome in his naval uniform, on leave to visit his ailing father. They met at a church social to which he had been invited by another woman, but he bought her lunch basket instead and they sat on the lawn, her muslin skirt spread out about her, he leaning back on his elbows, smiling up at her. When he began to call on her, he told her that he was weary of the wayfaring life, and he spoke of the possibility of establishing a branch of his Nagasaki import/export business in Galena. The town had once been a thriving port, but the Mississippi had narrowed there over the years and trade was less brisk than it had been a half century ago. Still, Frank thought there were opportunities in Galena, and his eyes told her that he was speaking not merely of business. Although Kate’s first pleasure in Frank’s pursuit of her was the dignity of having a suitor, she could feel herself beginning to fall in love with him.
Her mother, soon returned from Harbin, did not share her enthusiasm about Frank. She wondered about his business prospects and his past life as a seaman and thought Kate should marry the pastor, whose wife had died recently; though twenty years her senior, he was a good man, her mother said, and would provide for her. A sailor, accustomed to roaming the world, was not likely to be steady.
She had proved her mother wrong, those first two years; she and Frank had been happy until the tragedy in Nagasaki. The circumstances of Frank’s dead mistress and her child were sordid and humiliating, but as she knelt in the Oura Church, praying so hard that she felt her head and heart would burst, she had felt God’s presence in the unfamiliar odors of incense and wet stone. Her mind had cleared as she rose, with God leading the way.
Now here she was, doing as God had wished, but somehow she had lost Him. She thought of the farmhouse garden, the wet dirt in her hands, the well with its dark hole. The bed she shared with Frank, a feeling of being chafed and unrecognized. Her fear that the only child in the house would be Butterfly’s. She had been near despair for some time, she realized, but she had not called on God.
The time was always ripe, Pastor Williams would say. But what would he know of true despair and spiritual dryness, in the comfort of his rectory, with his new Nordic wife, their brood of blond children?
“Oh, God, you must help me. Please save me. Please give me a child.” From elsewhere in the church came a sound, a cough. Had she been speaking aloud?
Mortified, she stood and walked down the aisle, pulled open the heavy door, and stepped out into the frigid air.
There was snow on the ground, and she had brought the cutter with Daisy to pull it. On the way home, it began to snow again. She imagined it snowing harder, the whiteness blurring her vision; Daisy might lose her way in a storm, with the roads and familiar scents obscured.
But they arrived at the farmhouse without incident, a little before supper time. She unhooked Daisy from the cutter and poured oats into her manger.
As Kate walked to the house, she saw the silhouette of Frank in his study, his head bent over his desk. She stood looking up at him through the snow. She wished she could tell him about her loneliness, her sense of failure as a wife. She wished they could dis
cuss their difficulties in a spirit of forgiveness. If only they could talk about Butterfly, she would tell him her theory about his obsession: guilt that he must overcome.
She waved and called, but he did not respond. At one time, not so long ago, he’d have been on the porch looking out for her in this weather. She stared at his motionless figure. She was locked out by Frank as well as by God.
By his third year on the farm, Benji was old enough to be in charge of the milking. It was the chore he liked best, especially on warm mornings with the sun slanting in through the barn door and high windows, and the smell of grass, wet with dew, drifting across the meadow. A samurai wouldn’t do this job, but milking had made his arms strong. He wasn’t afraid of anyone now, and his samurai grandfather and uncles would be proud.
He rested his forehead against each cow’s side as he milked, his hands on the teats gentle and sure; the cows let down easily for him. The Swede had taught him to drink from a teat and to squirt milk in Kaki’s mouth; Father Pinkerton said he could get kicked that way but he had never been kicked. Even Bossy, with her bad temper, regarded him with unblinking eyes, and her hide seemed to shudder with pleasure when he drew up his stool beside her.
After the cows were milked, he and the collie Skip led the herd across the road to the meadow, Kaki and the two calves frisking in the high grass. Both calves were heifers, but Father Pinkerton was hoping for a bull from Ivy, because a bull brought a higher price. It was sad to see the calves so high-spirited, because they didn’t know that before long they’d be taken away from their mothers. At least they wouldn’t be slaughtered like beef cattle; Guernseys were the best milkers money could buy, Father Pinkerton said.
Ivy was a two-year-old heifer in her first breeding. She was near her time, and one morning in late April Father Pinkerton allowed Benji to stay home from Sunday school to keep an eye on her, because she might have difficulty with her first labor. If she started licking her side or switching her tail fast, Benji was to fetch Keast from the Plum River church.
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