“It’s only a bird.”
“Maybe it saw something.”
“It saw us,” I said, and continued toward the towers. “It got nervous.”
Sausage waited behind me. I walked slowly around the first guard tower, then around the second. I passed a side tower. Then I stood on the floor of the main tower. There was nothing here. We were alone in our castle.
I went back to Sausage.
“There’s nobody here but you and me,” I said.
“But what about the footprints?”
“They must have been left by someone who walked through here yesterday. A hunter maybe.”
“What if he comes back?”
“I don’t think he will.”
“Maybe he’ll tell everyone.”
“Why would he do that?”
I turned around to face the castle. I tried to see it like a grown-up would.
“He didn’t even realize what it was. All he saw was a hut, if he even saw that much.”
“If Matron finds out, she’ll come here and destroy it,” said Sausage.
“She won’t find out,” I said.
“But what if she does, Kenny?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think about Matron when I was in the castle.
“What if?” Sausage repeated.
“Then there will be war.”
The moon blade had grown fainter once we were back in the dorm, as though someone was slowly rubbing out the light with a rag. Soon the sun would rise again. This summer it always rose.
Nobody saw us as we snuck back up to the dorm. Not that we noticed anyway.
Were the footprints a sign? Was that what the moon wanted to show me? Was it even a footprint at all? We would have to examine it in daylight.
I closed my eyes. I must have fallen asleep. I dreamt something, but whatever it was, I had forgotten it by the time I woke up.
After the morning wash, I remembered it. The cold water on my head perked me up and I could think clearly, and the sun in my eyes quickly brought me back from the kingdom of sleep.
I had dreamt that I was riding in a car with my dad. We had never had a car, and I didn’t have a father anymore, so it was definitely a dream—especially since I was the one driving. We were going really fast, but I never saw any sign of a road. It was just sky and pastures. When I turned the wheel, the car followed just as smooth as silk. It was like flying. I hadn’t ever done that either. “You’re doing just fine,” said Papa. “Where should we go?” I asked. “Out of here, just out of here,” he answered. So we got out of there, just out of there. High above lakes, fields and tractors, over treetops.
All of a sudden, we were parked in front of a castle. It was ours and it was finished. It was almost an exact copy of the powerful Matsumoto castle from the 1500s. There were several smaller towers that together formed a main tower. “I’ve been here,” said Papa. “You have?” I asked. “Didn’t you see my footprints?” he answered.
“Should we go look at the footprint now?” Sausage was done with his pretend washing. He waved at the sky with his unused toothbrush. “It might rain and then the footprint will be washed away.”
The sky was blue, just like the sky I’d driven the car through. I hadn’t noticed what kind of car it was in my dream. I hoped it was American. A new Ford Thunderbird.
“There won’t be any rain this summer.”
“But shouldn’t we head over there?”
“Gather the troop,” I answered.
Sausage’s face lit up like the sun. It was the first time he had been assigned that task.
We marched out to the edge of the forest behind the building. There wasn’t going to be any burnball today. And I didn’t want Kerstin to see us either, or Ann. I didn’t know how I’d be able to explain them to the rest of the troop. I still hadn’t solved that problem.
The glade looked like it did last night, only lighter. Not a lot of sun made it down here. That was why we had chosen it. From thirty feet away you could hardly even tell there was a glade.
Sausage led us to the moat. He had been along last night after all. It was only fair.
“There it is!” he said and pointed at the ground. “See it?”
“No,” said Micke.
He looked annoyed. He must have thought that he wasn’t ranked second after me anymore, that Sausage had been given that position. But if Micke couldn’t understand that it was just for now, just for this short moment, then maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a samurai lord, a daimyo. A daimyo has to understand several things at once. Understand that things change, and change back.
“Of course you can see it,” I said. “It’s a boot print.”
“Mm-hm,” said Lennart.
“Whose could it be?”
That was Janne.
“It’s a big one,” said Sven-Åke.
“Must be a man’s,” said Lennart.
“Or Matron’s,” said Mats.
Janne let out a laugh.
“Not even she would dare come out here in the middle of the night.”
Sausage looked proud when Janne said that.
“Probably some farmer who got lost.”
That was Micke.
“In the middle of the night?” asked Lennart.
“Day or night makes no difference to them,” said Micke.
“What, like a sleepwalker, you mean?” said Janne.
“Farmers plow day and night,” Micke continued, ignoring Janne. “It’s light all the time.”
“Only right now they’re taking in the hay,” said Lennart.
“They haven’t been doing any plowing anyway.” Janne looked around. “And there’s no hay here either.”
“It could have been a hunter,” said Sausage.
“Anyway, he’s not here now,” said Micke.
“He might come back,” said Sausage.
“Then he’ll lose his head,” said Micke.
“Gotta be a big one,” said Sven-Åke, “judging by his shoe size.”
“Who cares?” said Micke. “So much the better.”
“How many heads have you collected so far, Micke?” asked Lennart.
“What do you mean by that?” said Micke. He spun around toward Lennart.
“How many heads have you chopped off so far?”
“Thirty-eight, counting yours,” Micke answered and grabbed at his sword.
“Stop it!” I shouted.
Micke hadn’t managed to pull out his sword yet.
“You can fight later,” I said. “Right now we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Half the troop was out in the forest collecting fir branches and brush. The other half was working on the inner wall. There was plenty of stone. All you had to do was dig a little and you found some. Beyond this part of the forest there were fields surrounded on all sides by stone fences. They were like walls. You would have thought there wouldn’t be any rocks left after the farmers had built all those walls, but there seemed to be tons of them still in the ground.
If stones had been worth something, we’d all have been rich. But none of us knew what it was like to be rich—no one here at this camp. This was a place for poor people. You only had to speak to anyone here for half a minute to realize that. You just had to look at the moms and dads who came and visited once every summer, if they came at all. And none of them came in a Ford Thunderbird. Hardly anybody came in a car at all. Most of them walked from the turn-off and huffed and puffed their way through the front gate, just as drenched in sweat as Mama had been.
Janne didn’t have a mom or a dad. Not that he lived with, anyway. He had been living at an orphanage and now he was here. Then he was going to be sent to live with a foster family that he hadn’t even met yet. They had a farm up north somewhere.
“You’ll probably get to drive a tractor,” said Sausage when Janne told us.
Janne nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Maybe they’ve got horses,” Sausage continued.
“If they
don’t, they’re not really farmers,” said Sven-Åke.
“Do they have any kids?” asked Mats.
Janne just shrugged.
“Then you’d have brothers and sisters,” Mats continued.
“I’ve already got brothers and sisters,” said Janne, and walked off.
Just when I was thinking about that, Janne came back into the glade with an armful of fir branches. It seemed like my thoughts had made him come back. He laid the branches on the ground and walked up to me.
“Do you really think we’ll get the castle finished before the end of the summer, Kenny?”
“Of course,” I answered.
He looked like he doubted it.
“We get to decide when it’s finished.”
“And then what?” He opened his arms wide and said, “Then we’ve gotta leave all this. Just when we’re done, we have to leave it.”
“That’s true for all samurai,” I said. “You’ve gotta leave the castle sometimes.”
“But they come back, Kenny.”
He turned to me again. He looked me right in the eye. We were the same height. I wondered if we’d still be the same height when we were grown up.
I can’t remember how tall my dad was compared to other grown-ups, and Janne had no idea what his dad looked like.
“We’re never coming back.” He pointed with his hand again. “The castle’s just going to stand there and rot.”
“There’ll be other summers.”
“Not for us, Kenny. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll be too old next summer.”
I didn’t answer.
“This is the last summer,” he continued. “The last samurai summer.”
“There will be others after us,” I said. “Sausage will be coming back and so will Sven-Åke and Mats.”
“Yeah, yeah. But for us it’s over.”
“Camp, maybe, but not everything else.”
“What do you mean ‘everything else?’”
“There will always be another summer. And you’ll still be a samurai.”
Just as I said that, I heard a distant rumbling in the sky. We looked up but didn’t see anything. Then the airplane appeared. It was gliding along, right above the glade, like an eagle. It was on its way to secret places, new places. I thought about my dream. I was imagining myself sitting up there looking down at myself. Big Kenny looking down at little Kenny.
“I’d like to become a pilot,” said Janne. We were still gazing upward even though the plane was gone now. The rumbling from the engines lingered in the sky like thunder. The airplane was a thunderbird. A Thunderbird.
“Go ahead and become one then,” I said.
“On a farm?” He lowered his head and looked at me. “I’ll be lucky if I get to drive a tractor.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
“A tractor isn’t an airplane.”
Don’t be so sure about that, I thought, and I remembered my dream again.
“I may not even get to drive the tractor,” said Janne in a low voice. “Besides, maybe they don’t even have one.”
Now we heard a different kind of rumbling as a few of the troop entered the glade with more branches.
“I don’t want to leave the castle,” said Janne. He looked me in the eye again. “I mean after the summer.”
“No,” I said. “Who does?”
“But they’re gonna force us.” He waved his hand, this time toward the camp.
“Matron. The counselors.”
I didn’t answer.
“If they didn’t exist…” said Janne and fell silent.
I waited.
“If there weren’t a camp at all then we could stay on here. As long as we wanted.”
I still said nothing. I thought about him and how it would be for him to arrive at the strangers’ farm for the first time. At least I had a mother.
“Right?” he continued. “If it didn’t exist?”
“But it does,” I said and nodded. “It’s over there behind the trees.”
You couldn’t see it from here, but you didn’t have to go more than a few hundred yards through the forest before you could make out the closest building.
“But what if…” he said.
What if there were no “if?” I thought. Maybe you could take away the “if.” If there were no camp. If it didn’t exist at all… There is no camp. It doesn’t exist at all.
I looked around. The entire troop was assembled. Everyone was working on the castle. Everyone looked strong.
We could do it.
It was Janne who had said it, but I had probably just been waiting for someone to say what was already in my head, inside my brain.
If there were no camp, then we could stay on here. As long as we wanted. If there were no grown-ups telling us what to do anymore.
6
It was morning again. The sun rose on good and evil alike. This morning, the evil had cooked up something new. Anyone who didn’t eat everything on their plate would get it back the next time they sat down at the table. No one would get a fresh helping until they’d eaten the old one. There had been cold oatmeal and blue milk in my dish. When it was taken back to the kitchen, the oatmeal was even colder and the milk bluer still. I hadn’t even lifted the spoon.
“You know what’s coming, Tommy,” said the counselor when she went off with the dish.
I didn’t answer. The oatmeal wouldn’t taste any better or worse in the morning or in the evening. The milk would probably go sour, but I actually preferred sour milk. But I wouldn’t eat that either. I was never going to eat it. It was like the start of a new battle. I looked around the mess hall but differently than I had before. I seemed to be seeing everything through new eyes. I had become someone else—someone who was even more unlike the boy who had once been Tommy.
The sun burned our eyes. We stood lined up on the grounds in two columns. We were going to march around the lake to the big swimming area on the other side. They called it a swimming trip, but I called it a swimming trek. The counselors kept a close eye on us from both sides. When the smaller kids got tired we had to carry them.
We marched. The lake glittered to the right through the trees. The ground smelled good. The smell of the forest was my favorite smell. With it filling my nostrils, I felt like a free warrior. Well, not right then, of course, walking in line but otherwise.
All of a sudden, I tripped on a root, fell, and slammed into the ground.
A few choice words flew out of my mouth.
Someone giggled behind me. I quickly jumped up and turned around.
“What did you do that for?” It was Kerstin.
“Do what?”
“Throw yourself to the ground?”
I saw that she was just kidding around so I started walking again. She took two quick steps and started walking next to me.
“Why do you swear so much?” she asked.
“I don’t swear much.”
“Really?”
“I used to do it a lot more.”
“Wow. You must have had a really foul mouth.”
“It’s not always bad to swear,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Sometimes there are no other words you can use.”
“Thou shalt not swear,” said Kerstin. “It says so in the Bible.”
“Mm-hm.”
“One of the Ten Commandments.”
“Thou shalt not force children to eat pig swill,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That’s worse,” I said. “Worse than swearing.”
“I mean, is that a commandment too?”
She smiled. When the sun hit her eyes they got lighter. They turned a different color—green almost.
“You bet. One of the most important ones.”
“Do you know any more?”
“Thou shalt not steal a kid’s bag of Twist,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“It doesn’t
matter.”
“Sure it does,” she said. “I can hear that it does.”
Before long we had marched around half the lake. In a while we’d be able to see the big swimming area. The rays from the sun transformed the water into silver, and I could see a sailboat out on the lake. The sail was as white as our sheets the night before the moms and dads came to visit.
“What, did somebody steal a bag of Twist from you?” asked Kerstin. “You had a whole bag of Twist?”
I didn’t answer.
“It sucks if you can’t say it,” she said.
“Now who’s got a foul mouth?”
“Hmm.”
“Okay, my mom brought me a bag of Twist and they took it.”
“They? Who’s ‘they’?”
“The grown-ups.”
“Are you sure about that?”
One of the counselors appeared alongside us. She had probably been eavesdropping from behind and wanted to hear more.
“You’re moving too slowly,” she said. “The line isn’t staying together.” I looked up and saw that we’d fallen fifteen feet behind those ahead of us. I picked up the pace and so did Kerstin. Her stride was bigger than mine. Her legs were longer.
“Did they really steal it?” she asked. “Would they really do something so awful?”
“It’s gone,” I answered. “I didn’t get one single piece.”
“Maybe it’s been forgotten somewhere,” she said.
“A forgotten bag of Twist? You believe that?”
“No.” She smiled again.
“Shouldn’t that be one of the Ten Commandments?” I continued. “Thou shalt not steal a kid’s bag of Twist.”
“That’s included in the other one,” she said. “Thou shalt not steal.”
“It should have its own commandment.”
“Have you asked them?”
“I’ve even looked for it,” I answered and told her the story.
“Weren’t you scared?” asked Kerstin after I’d finished telling her.
She looked scared herself as though Matron had suddenly appeared and was standing there panting right next to us.
We were approaching the swimming area. I could hear children shouting all across the wide bay as they swam.
Samurai Summer Page 5