Sophie and the Rising Sun

by Augusta Trobaugh

  Still, by the next morning, he was much better. But when the doctor started asking who he was and where he was going on that bus, Mr. Oto just smiled and shook his head and said nothing—except to touch his chest and say, “Oto.” That’s how come the doctor figured he didn’t speak any English. So he communicated with Mr. Oto from then on by using his hands a lot and short, simple words, too, which he yelled—just as if the man were deaf.

  Eulalie certainly went into a flurry of cooking over the next few days, and all in Mr. Oto’s behalf. Always like that, Eulalie was—had a big heart for creatures that were sick. Or lost.

  Why, one time, she had a whole bunch of seven or eight stray cats she fed all the time. And she had names for every single one of them, too. Used to cook up a concoction of pigs’ livers and oatmeal for feeding to them. What a smell that was! And it was only after all the doctor’s patients started complaining to him that he had to put his foot down about that.

  And I’d expect that the minute the sheriff brought Mr. Oto in, the good doctor knew what was going to happen, as far as Eulalie was concerned.

  She sure lived up to her reputation that time, because for breakfast she fixed steaming bowls of grits, platters of fried eggs, and plates piled high with hot, buttered biscuits. For noontime dinner, she made fried chicken or chicken with dumplings or meatloaf and always a big bowl of mashed potatoes that towered above Mr. Oto’s smiling face where he sat at her table. For supper, she served cold fried chicken and potato salad, or country ham and cornbread, and Jell-O salads that were thick with fruit cocktail. And always, a platter piled high with cornbread and plenty of butter to go with it. That Eulalie sure loved to cook, and she’d been missing it, what with the doctor always being on some kind of diet and trying to watch his weight. Not that it ever did him much good, though.

  So Mr. Oto ate and ate, as if he could never get enough, Eulalie said. And the good doctor ate and ate, too—and gained a full six pounds in only a few days. He was already a big man, you see, and with all that good food, he got even bigger in a hurry.

  But anyway, that’s how Mr. Oto regained his health, so much so that a few mornings later, he swept out the doctor’s office and washed all the windows in the whole house, unasked. Then he trimmed the bushes in the front yard, and he found some tomato plants in a can of water on the back porch—the doctor had meant to plant them the weekend before—and he carefully set them out in the back garden. So that the doctor’s office was sparkling clean, the garden well-tended, and Eulalie’s kitchen just roiling with the good smells of her cooking.

  It was no wonder to me that although Mr. Oto was certainly well enough to travel again, he didn’t seem to understand that the doctor was trying to suggest that he do exactly that. In fact, whenever the doctor tried to talk with him about it, Mr. Oto looked at him with a blank look on his face, and, of course, Eulalie snorted and glared at the doctor whenever he tried to bring it up.

  Finally, the good doctor came to me with his problem, because we’d been friends for many years, and, too, he knew about the gardener’s cottage on my property. And, as he said, Mr. Oto couldn’t go on forever sleeping on the cot in the back of his office. Of course, I had been expecting it, really—what with all the fuss Eulalie was making over Mr. Oto—so I agreed to let him stay in my cottage until he was ready to continue his journey. And besides, the doctor knew I wouldn’t mind if Mr. Oto was a foreigner. And that he wasn’t white.

  But because I was never one to receive charity or to give it, I said he’d have to earn his keep by working for me—replacing that broken faucet in the backyard and the cracked windowpanes in the sunroom and by painting the front porch, too.

  Poor Eulalie put up a terrible fuss when the doctor told her Mr. Oto would be leaving their house, and finally, the only thing that would stop all her crying and carrying on was that the doctor and I agreed that she could continue providing Mr. Oto with sumptuous meals. For a while, at least.

  All in all, it seemed to be a pretty good solution, and so the doctor delivered Mr. Oto to me. I hadn’t seen him before myself, and I’ll have to admit that I’d never seen anyone who looked quite like him before. Still, he looked quite nice in the doctor’s freshly washed and ironed, outgrown clothes and carrying a bulging, brown-bag lunch. Just to tide him over until Eulalie could deliver his supper.

  But the funny thing was this: As soon as the doctor left—and all that leave-taking required a lot of smiling and bowing on Mr. Oto’s part—he turned to me, and bowing once again, he said in the softest possible voice... and in perfect English, “I am most grateful for your generosity.”

  At that, I pounced on him with a lot of questions—after finding out that he could speak English as well as an American. But instantly, he retreated into all that silence and bowing. So in that quiet way, he let me know that he wasn’t going to say much about his past. Or his future either, for that matter.

  Well, I accepted that about him because I don’t like telling people my business, either. So he moved into the small stone cottage behind my garden wall and seemed to be pleased with it. It was almost a year before he asked me for anything other than what I put into the cottage for his use: a cot, a table, two chairs, and—to his obvious delight—wood for the fireplace for when the nights would be cool in winter.

  Within the first few days, he fixed the broken faucet and replaced the cracked windowpanes in the sunroom and painted my whole front porch without spilling so much as a drop. When all that was finished, he started in to weeding the big back garden—without being asked. And he did a beautiful job of it. Why, the flowers fairly leaped into bloom under his hands. And goodness knows, no one had cared for that garden in years. Not since my husband passed on. Made me feel so good to see it pretty and clean again, and with the flowers just blooming to beat the band.

  From the very beginning, Mr. Oto was such a completely delightful man—quiet and unobtrusive, and above all, exquisitely polite—that I really became quite fond of him. So I bought a straw carpet to cover the bare, plank floor of the cottage and gave him a small electric plate so that he could make tea for himself.

  For the longest kind of time, good old Eulalie continued to deliver at least one sumptuous meal to my house every day, and Mr. Oto dined, alone, on my back porch. Later, when the winter came and some of the days were quite chilly and very rainy, I fixed a card table for him on the sun porch, so that he sat among all those neglected plants I meant to find time to work with—and he always took a few minutes before he ate to pluck the dead leaves from them and to loosen the packed and dried soil in their pots. Soon, they were blooming also.

  Finally—somehow—both Mr. Oto and I seemed to take it for granted that he would stay. And he did.

  Chapter Four

  After Sophie’s footsteps faded away, Mr. Oto went on with the work he had planned for that day, placing six new pink dogwood saplings almost tenderly in the wheelbarrow and pushing it along the driveway, gazing somewhat sadly at the young trees, at their leaves shivering with the bumping of the wheel, almost as if they were shuddering of their own accord. For he knew, as he always knew, that Miss Anne would have him plant them without thought of line or composition or texture or meaning.

  Better, he was thinking, to have one and only one such tree, with silence and space around it, so that in the spring, its blossoms will be like pink stars in an empty sky.

  That’s how he would have planted the garden. But he could not say that to Miss Anne, because it would be rude of him to try to tell her. And after all, she had befriended him, so it would seem to be ungrateful as well. And besides, he was only a gardener. So it wasn’t his place to say anything like that.

  But the trees know. And so do I.

  He knew because of his father’s small garden behind the house in California, where he had grown up. So that from the time when he was very young, his father had taught him how to work with the soil and the plants and to create something that would be beautiful to gaze upon. How could he ever forget
the beautiful little pool right in the garden’s center, and the few, beautiful goldfish in it? Then he imagined Sophie’s face—solitary in his mind against a background of sheer emptiness—his having finally found someone whose face was worthy of that shrine within his being. Someone incredibly beautiful—but found too late in his life. And a woman unattainable to him anyway.

  That’s what was on his mind when he pushed the wheelbarrow into Miss Anne’s back garden, and he was so intent upon his vision of Sophie’s face that when he looked up and saw a great crane of Japan standing there, it took more than a few moments for him to realize exactly what was right there before his very eyes, standing just as still as a statue at the very back of the garden, its feathers as motionless as if they had been painted onto the backdrop of the black-green camellia leaves.

  Mr. Oto staggered to a stop and gazed at it, while the full realization of what he was really seeing came very slowly, along with the memory of his father’s voice, speaking very long ago, saying: “When I was just a child, my father took me once to the island of Hokkaido. And there, I saw the great cranes of Japan dancing in the snow.”

  He blinked several times, as if to clear his vision, and then he began arguing against the very existence of that distinct, clear, and majestic creature.

  It could be a blue heron, perhaps—a larger one than I have ever seen before. Or

  maybe an egret with very strange plumage. But not a great crane of Japan. Impossible!

  Indeed, herons and egrets sometimes came into the gardens and yards of the houses in that small town so close to the salt marshes—great blue herons and snowy egrets came, but never a great crane, such as Mr. Oto had never seen, but that his father had described to him in great detail.

  But the crane still stood in his direct view—absolutely real, to the denial of all other possibilities. So that finally, he knew that he was not dreaming. It was real. A great crane of his father’s homeland. The slender neck and the unmistakable red spot on the white head and the gash of black feathers against the neck and along the tail.

  And the sheer size of it! At least five feet tall, Mr. Oto guessed. Exactly as tall as Mr. Oto himself.

  “Mr. Oto? Mr. Oto?” Miss Anne’s voice called his name not once, but twice—as always. So that no matter how close he was, he never had time to answer her until she had called him a second time.

  Behind him, the screen door slammed and Miss Anne’s gardening boots clumped noisily on the wooden steps. She was coming to give him minutely detailed instructions about where she wanted him to plant the dogwoods, and how deep she wanted him to dig the holes, and how often he must water them.

  And the crane, hearing the noise, looked once more directly at Mr. Oto for a long moment before it moved slowly in and among the camellia bushes until he could see it no longer.

  “Mr. Oto? Mr. Oto?” Miss Anne called again from the bottom of the steps.

  “I am here, Miss Anne,” he finally said in a voice too low for her to hear. “I am here. But I am not here.”

  I am with my father when he was a child in faraway Japan, a place where I have never been; and with my father’s father, whom I have never met; and watching the great cranes—which I have never seen—dancing in the snow.

  “What on earth are you doing, Mr. Oto?” Miss Anne came to stand directly in front of him and to lean forward, studying his face in nearsighted concern. “Are you ill? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”

  “No, miss,” he finally managed to say, but still, he did not look at her, but leaned a little to see the camellia bushes and to wonder if there was something hiding in them.

  Or am I becoming a dream-laden man who can’t tell what’s real? Like my old father before me?

  Miss Anne looked at the bank of camellia bushes against the wall. Nothing was there.

  “Well, then, if you’re sure you’re all right, let’s get these dogwoods planted before the roots dry out any more,” she said, striding off toward the other side of the yard and then looking back at him expectantly. Like an obedient child, he followed her. But to himself he said, What can it mean that a great crane has come to me here? And what message does he bring— of my father and of my father’s ancestors?

  Chapter Five

  Miss Anne said:

  Only once in the two years Mr. Oto lived in the gardener’s cottage did he ever ask for anything other then what I provided for him. But one Sunday evening at dusk—about a year after he came—he called to me from the back steps and stood with his hat in his hands and asked me if he could build a small hut behind the cottage.

  “A hut?” I wondered if I had heard him right. “Why on earth would you want a hut, for goodness sake? You have a nice cottage to live in.”

  That’s what I asked him.

  As usual, Mr. Oto was gazing down at his shoes. It was always hard to get him to look me right in the eyes.

  “Not a hut for living in, please,” he said. “A hut for thinking.”

  That sure didn’t make any sense to me at all, so I tried a different tack: “What kind of hut?” I asked, and to be truthful, I was feeling a little bit alarmed, because I was thinking that maybe he would nail together a bunch of old boards or something like that. An eyesore to the neighborhood, even though the land behind the gardener’s cottage wasn’t easily visible from the street. Still, I had a responsibility to the town, you see.

  “A hut of wooden poles and a roof of palm fronds that have already fallen from the trees. A very simple hut, please,” Mr. Oto persisted.

  “A hut?” I asked once again, because it was really confusing to me, you see.

  Mr. Oto just nodded, very patiently, it seemed.

  “Well, if you must,” I finally conceded. “But what do you want it for?”

  “For thinking,” he repeated.

  “You’re not going to worship some kind of idol in there, are you?” I asked right out, because I didn’t know much about people from China, you see. But one thing I did know was that Mr. Oto didn’t go to church on Sundays and didn’t seem to be interested in ever going. Because he never once asked me about the time of services or anything like that. Still, I couldn’t say a thing about it, because I didn’t go to church either. Never have, not since I was a young woman. Seems to me that I can look out my own window and see the flowers and the trees and feel real happy that I’m on this earth, and God and I both seem to like that kind of churchgoing just fine. And it’s honest. I’ll say that much for it.

  So I’d never thought much about Mr. Oto’s beliefs except once before—right after he came to live in my cottage. Ruth stopped by one day and said she needed to talk to me about him.

  Because Ruth kind of made every single thing that went on in town to be her business. Maybe like a town spokeswoman or something like that. Self-appointed. So it really didn’t surprise me that she showed up at my door soon after Mr. Oto moved into the cottage.

  Said she wanted to suggest, right off the bat—that’s the way she put it—that I get Matilda to take my foreign man over to the African-Methodist-Episcopal church with her. Because that’s where he belonged. It was a little church out on the edge of town. A colored church.

  Ruth wanted to suggest that right away, she said, before I could tell him it was all right for him to go to the white church. I guess Ruth was just assuming that, eventually, he would want to go to church somewhere, just like everybody else in this town. Except me. And Eulalie, too, come to think of it.

  “And what’s wrong with him going to your church?” I asked her that day. Of course, I knew what she thought was wrong with that, and truthfully, I came right out and asked her because I wanted to see her squirm. And sure enough, she started squirming right away, and I’m sorry to say that I enjoyed every minute of it.

  “Why, Anne!” she fairly sputtered. “He certainly can’t come to our church!”

  “But why not?” I asked in an innocent voice, and I particularly enjoyed driving that nail home.

  “You know perfectly well
why not!” She lowered her voice, as if she were revealing a deep, dark secret. “He’s not white!”

  “And he’s not black, either,” I whispered back, as if that, too, were a secret. Then I paused for a moment before I added, “And I strongly suspect he’s not even a Christian, at all, so you can stop worrying about him wanting to come to your church.”

  Well, that certainly set her back, I should say, and I could see a terrible struggle going on inside her—between her “Christian duty” to bring this errant lamb to the fold of Christ’s flock and her blatant determination that he not enter that fold on a path that led through the white church.

  But I couldn’t bear watching her dilemma any longer, because somehow, all the pleasure had gone out of it. “Just leave him alone, Ruth. I don’t think he wants to go to any church at all.”

  About that time, Mr. Oto knocked on the back door, and Ruth followed me as far as the kitchen and waited there while I went to the door. And the whole time Mr. Oto and I were discussing what to do about a diseased oleander, she watched him as if—given the right opportunity—he would drink blood and howl at the full moon.

  Why, if he had said Boo! she would have run right into the doorjamb! I guess by that time, though, she’d made up her mind to forget about trying to save his soul, because she never brought up the subject of Mr. Oto’s going to any church again. In fact, I don’t think she ever looked at him after that day. Maybe she decided to pretend that he didn’t exist. That certainly relieved her of her “Christian duty!”

  But anyway, that’s why I had to make sure that if I gave him my permission to build this hut of his, he wouldn’t be worshiping an idol in it or anything like that. For it might have attracted Ruth’s attention and maybe even brought her descending upon me once again. I certainly didn’t want that to happen.