Butterfly's Child

by Angela Davis-Gardner

  After his friends left, Benji brought in coal for the stoves, did the milking, and fed and curried the horses. After supper, he told Franklin a story, an ongoing saga he’d made up for his brother about two samurai boys, one Japanese, one American, then went to his room to study. It was the best time of the day, at the desk beside his stove, Kaki in his lap or curled at his feet, studying books that carried him away from the farm. By the time he was fourteen, he was ahead of everyone else in arithmetic and reading and knew the history books almost by heart. He liked American history, especially the Indians and the Gold Rush, but was more drawn to other civilizations—the pharaohs and pyramids of Egypt, the Spartans of Greece, the Roman Empire.

  There was nothing about Japan in the school history text, so Miss Ladu ordered a book on the history of Japan and he learned about the lords and samurai who used to rule Japan, and about Commodore Perry, who sailed his black ships into the bay of Tokyo and made Japan trade with America. When Japan began a war against Russia that September, he kept up with it in the newspapers—excited that his small country was fighting the Russian bullies. Miss Ladu had him present a report on the war, which he illustrated with a map showing Port Arthur, where the surprise attack had been, and the sites of the other battles.

  “I liked your report,” Flora said at recess. “I think you’re very intelligent.” She looked straight into his eyes and smiled. She had a chicken pox scar at one side of her mouth, but on her it was pretty.

  When class started again, he couldn’t pay attention but sat looking at Flora two rows ahead of him: her thick braids, the slightly crooked part in her hair, and the little bones in her neck when she bent over her work. She was left-handed and wrote with her left arm curved around the top of the desk; all her letters slanted backward. Miss Ladu had tried to make her use her right hand, but it was hard and she made a lot of blots. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be writing, she put her pen on her desk and sat with her head bowed. Today, though, she was writing, very slowly.

  After school Benji caught up with Flora as she was walking down the road to Morseville. She was wearing orange button shoes and a coat that was too big for her. “I have to go to the store for my grandmother,” he said.

  “That’s nice.” She smiled at him. “You’re a considerate boy.”

  He felt like skipping. “You’re considerate too. I’m sorry you’re left-handed.”

  She looked at him, startled.

  “Because it’s more trouble for you, I mean.”

  She didn’t say anything. He kicked a rock. Now she wouldn’t think he was smart.

  “Do you like long division?” he asked. Her class had just started on it.

  “No,” she said.

  “I could help you with it. Mathematics is my best subject, after history.”

  “Thank you,” she said. There was a silence, just the sound of their feet on the road. He couldn’t think what to say.

  “Is it nice in Japan?” she asked.

  “Yes, but the girls aren’t as pretty.”

  She looked down at the road, but she was smiling.

  He jammed his hands in his pockets and, to keep from grinning too much, began to whistle.

  When they got to the corner a block from her house, she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She didn’t say, “at school,” so maybe that meant he could walk her home again.

  But the next day, when they were talking at recess, Marvin came up behind them and started making kissing noises, and after school they went their separate ways.

  Sometimes on the weekends he went into Morseville and walked past her house, hoping she’d come out. It was a gaunt house, painted yellow, with a shed out back where her father made coffins. Her father was a sour-looking man with a glass eye, and because he looked a little peculiar and because he made coffins, the boys at school made up mean stories about him—how he sometimes measured the coffins wrong and had to cut off the dead person’s feet. Marvin swore that he’d seen blood leaking out of a coffin at a funeral. Benji wondered if Flora had guessed about the stories; if he heard Marvin tell another one, he’d beat him up.

  In the spring Miss Ladu had a few students stay after school one day to recite their pieces for the end of the year. After Benji practiced his memorized report on Japan—expanded to include Confucianism and the primitive Ainu people of Hokkaido—he sat and waited for Flora to say her lines from Hiawatha. They left together and, since there was no one else around, he walked with her to Morseville.

  She asked how long he’d lived in Japan.

  “Until I was five,” he said. “My mother died, but I’m not an orphan. It’s a secret—don’t tell anyone.”

  “I’d never tell.” She looked at him solemnly. “I hate my stepmother,” she said.

  “I hate mine too,” he said, even though it wasn’t quite true.

  Again they said goodbye a block away from her house; she didn’t say, but he guessed her parents would disapprove of her walking with a boy, especially a Japanese. After supper, he drew a picture of her and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, beneath his arithmetic papers, where no one would find it.

  At elocution day, Benji gave his report to a crowd of parents and townspeople. He was nervous, so he pretended to be talking just to Flora, who looked at him intently, nodding. She had on a soft-looking brown dress, and her hair was loose from the braids.

  When the program was over, Benji wandered through the crowd, looking everywhere, but he couldn’t find her; her father must have taken her home. He tried to look as if he didn’t care.

  The family and Keast came to congratulate him. Franklin pulled at Benji’s shirt; Benji picked him up. “You were the best,” Franklin said.

  “Excellent,” Mother Pinkerton said. “We were amazed.”

  “I wasn’t,” Grandmother Pinkerton said. “I always knew he was smart.”

  Father Pinkerton shook his hand, slipping a silver dollar into Benji’s palm. Benji stared at it, the most money he’d ever had at once. “You’re a scholar now, aren’t you? Don’t get too biggety.”

  “A scholar indeed,” Miss Ladu said, joining them. “He could be a teacher in a few years if he wanted to, or go to a university.” She and Keast exchanged glances; Benji could tell they’d talked about it.

  “A university,” Benji said.

  “Yes—you could study anything you wanted to. A Japanese boy graduated first in his class at Yale a few years ago.”

  “Sounds expensive,” Father Pinkerton said.

  “There are other schools,” Miss Ladu said, “right here in Illinois. You might win a scholarship.”

  At home, Benji lay on his bed, pretending Flora had heard the conversation. She would think him all the more intelligent if he went to a university, and maybe her father would let him marry her then. Maybe she’d like to go with him to Japan. He’d get rich and they could have houses in both places.

  The next Saturday, when Keast took Benji on his rounds, Keast asked what he might like to study.

  “I don’t know. Mathematics, maybe. I want to get rich and go to Japan. Do you think I can get rich before I go to Japan?”

  “Not with mathematics—as a businessman, maybe. But I believe you can do anything you set your mind to.”

  “Could I marry an American girl?”

  Keast smiled. “You’ve got a sweetheart?”

  “No—I was just wondering.”

  Keast was silent for a while before he said, “Some people might disagree, but I don’t see why not. Isobel was part Injun, and my mother never minded.”

  Benji looked at Keast’s rough face, the stains on his coat. He hadn’t thought of Keast having a mother.

  “I bet your mother was nice.”

  “A noble woman,” he said. “After my father died, my mother raised us three children on her own.” He looked at Benji. “We all have our fortune and misfortune,” he said. “When you come up against fortune, don’t let it pass you by. It might not come again.”

  For Benji�
�s fifteenth birthday, Keast gave him a globe on a stand like the one in the schoolroom: the seas white, the continents and islands various shades of brown, the mountain ranges slightly raised. Benji put the globe beside his desk and traced his path across America and the Pacific Ocean over and over. Nagasaki was on the far side of Kyushu, at the tip of the carp’s head.

  He asked Father Pinkerton for the Japanese–English dictionary he’d taken to school when they went to visit that first day. Father Pinkerton claimed not to know where it was, but one morning when he’d gone to buy some farm equipment, Benji looked for it in his study. He found it in the cupboard, beneath a stack of ship’s logs, old seed catalogues, and a musty tartan blanket. It was a large black book with thin pages that smelled slightly of spice. As he flipped through the pages, a butterfly wing fell out, blue and black with patterns that looked like eyes. He picked it up with care, but it was old and fragile and came apart in his fingers. Maybe Father Pinkerton had been with his mother when he found it. Damn him. He sliced cuts in the tartan blanket with his penknife. If Father Pinkerton asked, he’d say it must have been moths.

  Keast let him keep the dictionary at the boardinghouse. On weekend afternoons, after he’d finished his chores, Benji took a notebook and sat on the balcony outside Keast’s room, writing Japanese words and their definitions in English. It was disappointing that there were no Japanese characters in the book for him to compare with the writing on the picture. The dictionary—with the words spelled out in Roman letters—was obviously for tourists. But if he studied the words in the notebook every day, he would be able to make himself understood in Japan. When a few words came back to him—neko for cat, gohan for rice—he began to feel Japanese.

  It was his country that was winning the war against Russia, and people in Plum River and Stockton respected him for it. After Benji began—at Keast’s recommendation—working part-time in Red Olsen’s store, some of the customers, even grown men, talked to him about the fight in the Far East. They said if Japan didn’t keep Korea open, it would be bad for American exports, including agriculture. One day, when Father Pinkerton came by the store, he joined in the conversation at the butcher counter, bragging about the import/export business he’d had in Nagasaki, suggesting that the Japanese ships wouldn’t be winning if it wasn’t for training by the American and British navies. He’d been an instructor himself, he said, when he was in Nagasaki.

  Later that evening, when they were walking up from the barn, Benji asked Father Pinkerton to tell him more about the naval training, but he shook his head and said that the details were secret.

  “When you were doing the training—was that why you lived in Nagasaki with my mother?”

  Father Pinkerton stared at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  The cleared space around the Pinkerton farmhouse, though large, had for vegetation only trees—including the oaks, apples, and a stately walnut Frank’s grandfather had planted—and a thin circle of daisies and sweet william around a neglected birdbath.

  When Kate had difficulty falling asleep after an exhausting day of housework and tending to Mary Virginia and Franklin, she’d summon up images of her mother’s garden in Galena: in summertime, a sea of flowers on which the house seemed to float. In the backyard was a bed of white flowering plants, designed to show to best advantage in the moonlight from the bedrooms and the sleeping porch at the back of the house. She remembered being put to bed at dusk as a child, in the years before they went to China, how the delicate fragrances wafting up to her room became entwined in her sleep. It would bring her peace, she had decided that spring, to make a garden here.

  With the help of a colored boy who worked as a handyman in Galena, Kate transplanted from her mother’s house a variety of flowers. By that summer, white lilacs, peonies, fragrant flowering stock, and snowball bushes formed the white garden in back of the house. Coneflowers, larkspur, hollyhocks, and snapdragons flourished along the iron picket fence and near the two-seated glider beside the well. In fall, a variety of asters made a meadow of the yard, along with the goldenrod Kate had planted in spite of her mother-in-law’s insistence that goldenrod was a common weed and made her nose itch.

  Kate’s garden attracted an alarming number of butterflies: black swallowtails with yellow markings that flitted from flower to flower, tortoise-shells, and an occasional dazzling blue Diana.

  Frank was in his office on the Sunday afternoon in early autumn when the great river of monarch butterflies poured down around the house. He glanced out the west window, where only minutes before there had been nothing but the familiar limbs of the bur oak. The branches were covered with orange butterflies—perched on the surfaces of leaves, hanging from the smallest twigs. The wings were veined and rimmed with black, with a pattern of white dots about the edges; those that caught the light were iridescent and silken as a kimono. The tree was alive with their movement. He thought of Cio-Cio’s bent legs opening and closing and opening, inviting him in. His heart began to race.

  He edged past his desk to stand by the window. The ground was as thick with orange butterflies as if they had been painted there. They lined the iron fence and clung to the milkweed in the ditches; on the dirt road, clumps of butterflies flickered in puddles from last night’s rain. The air congealed; he could hardly breathe. He pushed up the window and leaned forward to shake the closest branch of the tree. Butterflies swirled upward, resettled. One lit on his arm. He shook it off, slammed the window down, and, holding on to the desk, returned to his chair, where he sat slumped, head in his hands.

  A butterfly was in the room. It swooped before him, inches from his face, then flitted to the ceiling and down to the filing cabinet. He turned, watching it, feeling he would faint. When the butterfly returned to him and sat pulsing on the ledger, he swiped at it, hardly noticing as ink spilled across the page and the edge of the desk, soaking into the leg of his trousers.

  Benji was returning from Keast’s place when he noticed butterflies floating around him, dipping, dropping onto fences and the leaves of trees. He held out his arm; an orange-and-black butterfly perched on his wrist—a slight tickle. His skin aflame, he reined in Kuro. Butterflies filled the air as far as he could see, like weather in a dream.

  * * *

  At supper, Grandmother Pinkerton said the butterflies were monarchs migrating south. “I haven’t seen them since the year Elmer broke his leg. Usually they pass through east of here.”

  “I hate them,” Kate said.

  When Frank came late to the table, smelling of whiskey, Kate rose, saying she had a headache, and went upstairs. Frank ate quickly, ignoring Franklin and Mary Virginia’s bickering. He asked Benji if he’d done the milking; when Benji said no, he was going to do it soon, Frank said never mind, jammed on a straw hat, and went to the barn.

  That night in bed, as Kate slept beside him, Frank cursed the butterflies coating the roof of the house, the ground, the trees. His chest felt odd, as though thousands of tiny wings were fluttering beneath his skin.

  He pushed back the covers and went downstairs, out the front door. At first, in the light of the rising moon, he could see nothing but the bulk of the house and the dark trees. He touched a clematis vine on the fence; butterflies rushed up at him. He walked down the road toward the barn, sensing them around him, in the ditches and the meadow grass. They seemed to give off a faint perfume in the night, a dusty sweetness. It was Cio-Cio’s revenge; she was haunting him still.

  In the barn he leaned against a stall door, opened another bottle of corn whiskey, and drank until the sensation in his chest was gone.

  In bed again, he fumbled for Kate.

  “No,” she said. “You’re thinking of her.”

  He yanked up her nightgown.

  “Stop.” She pushed at him.

  He straddled her, pinning down her arms, and forced himself inside.

  When he lay spent, he heard her weeping. He reached for her. “What’s wrong? I didn’t—” but she fl
ung his hand away. “I’m your husband,” he said.

  As he fell into sleep, he felt the mattress shift and then heard, faint, as if from a great distance, a door click shut.

  Benji woke from a dream he could not remember. It was nearly dawn, the sky beginning to go gray. He went outside, to the back garden where dark triangles of butterflies slept in the flowers, and knelt among them. His mother hadn’t wanted to leave him, but she had wanted him to come to America. She had put the picture in the kimono so he would know that. When he closed his eyes he could hear her singing—“Sakura, sakura,” a song about cherry blossoms, he remembered—and he remembered walking hand in hand with her along the edge of the bay as she sang, her voice as pure and clear as water.

  Keast’s room was stifling, with no cross breeze through the windows on the warm Indian summer night, and he lay sleepless and sweating in a bed made uncomfortable by his restlessness. He hadn’t had a spell of insomnia since the year after the deaths of Isobel and Horatio. This time the cause was desire rather than grief, but the two states were not dissimilar, Keast thought, as he pitched from side to side, battling his mattress. Longing was a torturous affair, no matter what the cause.

  A few evenings ago after supper, as he and Lena sat on the porch looking out at butterflies in the garden, she had touched his bare wrist. He couldn’t recall what she’d been saying, but his skin still held the memory of her light touch. Could be it was a message, though likely not. She had taken his arm several times, when alighting from the buggy. And she was a woman who had the general impulse to touch, he had noticed that, smoothing her skirt or her hair, running her hand over a page she was about to read. Still, he should have been man enough to cover her hand with his, lift it to his lips.