Later that afternoon, when she stirred, he began to patiently spoon the miso-taki into her mouth. After several spoonsful passed her throat, he was rewarded by seeing her irises. Yet he was not lulled into relief. Too often he had seen the signs of an addict, and the path to recovery was not so easily traveled. The eyes had the dull cast to them so that the irises were more a flat pewter than the deep meadow green . . . which alone told him so much.
He let the woman rest while he attended to the chores that had accumulated in his absence. But within the hour, before the evening’s darkness had even covered the deep gulch below, he took up his task of restoring the woman’s health . . . a warm bath administered by hot towels, followed by a vigorous massage that took in handfuls of muscles running from fingertips to toes. He used the shiatsu finger-pressure method that was an art in the old land.
When he concluded, the woman collapsed like a doll that had had the stuffing removed. Barely audible grunts and whooshes and groans emitted from her, and a slight smile crossed his generous mouth.
For the day he was finished, and he retired to the meticulous washing of his own body—as golden-hued as the woman’s and incredibly muscled by the years of working with the pick and ax. That night, as in the nights that followed, he placed his own tatami floor mat next to hers so that instantly he was there when she began to mumble or moan.
And moan she did over the days that came and went as slowly as the shadows across a sundial, days and nights punctuated by the woman’s belligerent shrieks and agonizing screams. He neglected his work at the mine, his garden, everything but his determination to save the woman.
At times she was lucid, and she would look about her, never speaking, never moving—only the eyes that had that old-young look in them. After a few minutes, minutes that grew into hours as the days passed, the woman would ask for the opium, softly, persuasively at first. “I must have it, don’t you understand— whoever you are? It makes me feel better, you know.”
Taro would shake his head, sadly, it must seem to her, and a new tactic would begin. Her hand would slide up to cup one of her breasts suggestively or rub sinuously at her pelvic area in a pathetic attempt at seduction. “If you will get the opium for me,” she would ask in a voice made hoarse by her intermittent screams, “I will give you myself—and no man has had me.”
He saw the sudden uncertainty of her last statement pass across her face, and he repressed a smile. “I could easily take you without getting the opium for you.” he pointed out.
It had to seem to her he was impervious to her agony—and her tricks.
And her screeching would begin again. Vile curses and crude, coarse language echoed in the cabin—-obscenities that she must have picked up at the saloon, for despite her dissolute surroundings, he felt she was unsullied. The nights and days he had trailed her, watching her—guarding her—she had never taken a man to bed that he knew of. And always he would ask of himself that final question, did it matter if she had?
Although her lucid moments were punctuated with salacious phrases, the other times were even worse. Taro was forced to straddle her and pin her arms to the plank floor as she tossed and bucked, clawing at her own skin in her torment. If he had to leave the cabin for any length of time, he bound her hands and feet with rawhide so that she would not injure herself. If she was awake while he tied her up, she shot volley after volley of bawdy oaths at him, which he ignored, as he did the furious glares.
One morning early, before the sunlight had barely dappled the floor, he was gifted with the first genuine smile. The woman looked at him, studying him as he lay near her.
“Yes?” he asked, turning his narrow-lidded gaze on her.
“Why have you done this—why have you cared for me?” she asked in a voice that was no stronger than the spring breeze outside.
“I would not see something of beauty die,” he replied simply.
CHAPTER 37
Against the harsh light that invaded the room each day the man’s slender figure moved about like some ghostly presence. A benevolent one, though, Jessie thought, as she tried to separate reality from the nightmares. For in the fog of serpents and rodents and, of course, the incredible pain, there was the man . . . and his hands. In all that time of drifting and sliding and writhing she subconsciously had wanted only the relief of the opium, and if not that, then the man's hands.
She covertly watched him now from beneath the veil of her lashes as he moved quietly about the room, and she realized his slender physique was deceptive. Below the three-quarter-length sleeves of the black ceremonial tea robe he wore, his forearms rippled with sinewy muscles, and she remembered the strength in his hands. The shoulders were broad, the chest deep. She smiled, thinking how the description better fit a stallion, and he said, “Your smile lightens my home.”
So, he had known all along that she was awake, watching him. She blushed, bringing the first glint of color to the long-deprived skin. As if sensing her embarrassment, he turned back to the hot liquid he poured in china cups. “Where am I?” she asked him.
He crossed the room, carrying the two cups on a tray. Only then, as he sat before her, legs crossed, did she realize the man was the Oriental who had so often played fan-tan at her table. “In my house,” he replied as he passed her one of the cups. “Have you enough strength to drink on your own now?”
The cup, beautifully fired with tints of flat green and black, had no handle, and Jessie held it in both hands as she struggled to support herself on one elbow. She had not realized how weak she was. Past the man, through the open wooden shutters, she could see the scattered juniper and scrub oaks and, beyond, tips of distant mountain peaks. “But where is your house? And exactly who are you?”
Taro smiled. “I can see you are better. Drink your tea, and I will answer all your questions.”
She raised a questioning brow. “All of my questions?”
“Whatever you wish to know.” He set the cup aside, and she was momentarily diverted by the grace of his movement—-smooth, fluid, liquid—so out of character with the rough, clumsy men who frequented the gambling saloons.
“I have brought you to my house, which is in the Mule Mountains south of Tombstone, because you were very ill.”
“From the opium,” she stated more than asked, wondering about Dan—if he knew what had happened to her. But then in his own way he had become just as addicted to it, so that he cared for little else. He had only controlled his intake better.
“Now drink your tea,” Taro told her, “unless you have any more questions.”
She had many, but she was afraid she knew the answers. He alone had to have undressed her—and seen her nudity. She blushed again, crimson spreading across her face to the roots of her hairline.
“I did not take unfair advantage of you,” the man across from her stated quietly. “You are as you were.”
“Not quite,” she said sadly, her gaze falling on her hands that clutched the cup like bird’s claws. “Perhaps you should have let me die. I wanted to.”
“And you will want to again, many times before your karma dictates your wish, but you won’t—so you must make the best of living until that time comes.”
She looked up into the granite-smooth face with the undecipherable gaze. "That sounds pretty much like a speech.”
He smiled, showing the teeth that were whiter than pearls. “I have labored long for your life. Therefore you cannot so lightly regard it, for it belongs to me now. You must excuse my excess of words. But I . . .”
She belonged to him? What a quaint thought . . . and a disconcerting one! “Who are you?” she murmured.
“I am Taro Shima, from the southern prefecture of Kumamoto, Japan.”
“Then you aren’t Chinese? But who are you? I mean, it is so odd to find a person like you—here—in the middle of nowhere.”
“You still have not drunk your tea," he reminded her.
The tea was excellent, much better-tasting, she decided, than the sarsaparilla
-root tea Nellie Cashman made. Taro Shima began to talk to her. Quietly he told her how he had come to the United States four years earlier at seventeen. “The steamship that brought me from Japan was unable to dock in Hawaii because of a plague raging the islands,” he explained, “so the steamship was forced to transport myself and the other ninety-two Japanese laborers to San Francisco. When it arrived, thirty-seven of the laborers were dead—from ill treatment.”
He spoke of working on the railroad as a gandy dancer and rail layer to support himself; of keeping his money until he had enough to buy the land the Lotus Land claim sat on. The softly spoken words, the mesmeric gaze of the those slanted eyes, soon lulled her into a deep sleep unmarred, at first, by the hellish dreams of dragons and serpents and crackling flames.
When next she awoke, she found the man was kneeling over her. A soft darkness enveloped the two of them. His long fingers pressed in concentric circles at her temples. “What are you doing?” she whispered in a nervous croak.
“You were having unpleasant dreams. Your hands beat at your head. The headache—it is gone now?’’
She remembered now the pain that had throbbed in her head like a sledgehammer, threatening surely to crack open her skull. But now beneath the gentle pressure of the man's fingers the intense pain had miraculously subsided. “Yes.” She sighed. “The headache is gone. Taro.”
Her lashes fluttered closed, her mind drifting into the netherworld once more with the nebulous thought that she should be afraid, alone with the man. But somehow, with his fingers massaging her temples, her mind, it did not matter. Nothing mattered.
“You are ready to eat something today?” the voice asked.
Reluctantly Jessie forced her eyes open to the clean, sunlit room and to the man who stood over her, seeming taller than ever. Slowly she nodded, for indeed the flavor that wafted by her nostrils was tempting.
“Good,” Taro replied. He set the tray he carried on a low table that he moved between Jessie and himself.
She looked at the fluffy brown food in the bowl. “What is it?” she suspiciously asked.
"Ochazuke. Rice with tea poured over mushrooms. And these,” he said, passing her two wooden sticks with blunt tips, “are hashi.”
She watched, fascinated as the man began to eat, deftly moving the two sticks with the fingers of one hand. Then she tried, but the rice kept sifting through the awkwardly held utensils. After a few moments, Taro said, “You will have to use your fingers until you master the hashi.”
“Oh, but I won’t be here that long,” she protested.
He said nothing but continued to eat, and she asked, fear rasping her voice to a whisper, “You will let me go, won't you?”
He set down the bowl of half-eaten rice. “You are free to go at any time, Lotus Woman. But wherever your footsteps may take you, your soul belongs to me, now . . . and always.”
A rose-scented candle burned low, casting dancing shadows. In the hush that fell she could see only his face, the jet eyes that held her as truly as chains.
Another hour. Another day. She could only measure the passing of the time by the slow inching of the sun’s slanted rays across the plank floor, by the curious but tasty meals that Taro prepared for her, and finally by his comings and goings. The intervals he was away became longer as she grew stronger – strong enough to stand, though she was still unsteady on her feet.
He was unfailingly kind, unfailingly polite in her presence. Still, she blushed each time he entered the cabin, his tall, slender frame dominating the small room. She recalled the intimate tasks he had performed for her—changing the straw mats, leaving them outside to air, when, in the deeper throes of withdrawal, she had been unable to control her bodily functions; then later he had seemed to know and unobtrusively provided a porcelain chamber pot.
With him gone from the cabin her thoughts seemed to linger on him more than when he was present, and she decided that there could be nothing more unromantic than what passed between the two of them; yet each time he entered the room she instantly knew it, though she might be asleep, by the way the air seemed to crackle—as if charged, like the electrical storms that lashed the deserts and canyons, sending the wind howling up through the mountains’ saddlebacks and fissures.
She was coming to know the cabin as thoroughly as a prisoner his cell. It was a spare, austere, but immensely peaceful room. There were the immediate things—the rough-textured mat beneath her. the porcelain jar of Indian paintbrush that wafted of spring sitting on the low black lacquered table nearby.
Farther away stood the ornately carved chest with gold handles. In it she had glimpsed exquisite ivory carvings, golden bowls, and jade vases. In a corner on a raised platform stood a large cypress tub. A bamboo bird feeder hung in the open window, rendering the occasional sight of a hummingbird or a fragmentary song from the mockingbird.
That afternoon, when Taro at last returned, his arms burdened with chopped wood, she felt for the first time really alive. Isolated as she had been, her senses picked up things that went unnoticed before—from the sighing of the breeze outside as it winged its way down through the interlocking gulches to the pungent taste of the green tea she drank.
“So that’s where you go every day,” she murmured.
He began stacking some of the logs in the fireplace. “Not always, Lotus Woman," he said as he added small chips of kindling. “There are other things which need my care besides you.”
She tilted her head to better study the man whose profile was to her. He held a bamboo match to the chips, and the wood caught fire. He looked directly at her then, and she caught the slightest curve in the carved lips before he turned back. “There are the burros to be fed, the garden to be tended to, the mine to be worked.”
“I’m a lot of trouble to you, aren’t I, Taro?” she asked in a teasing voice.
He stood and crossed to her, looking down at her recumbent figure. “Your presence gives me great pleasure. My house will be empty when you leave.”
Before she could consider some sort of reply to his solemn words, he left her to bring in two large buckets of water, which he poured into a great caldron suspended from the spit in the fireplace. “It is time for a complete bath for you,” he explained when he saw her quizzical look.
Once a week she had used the boardinghouse’s public tub located in a room back of the kitchen. It had been a hurried necessity that accomplished little more than the surface cleaning of the dust from the skin and hair, a routine that she often thought more trouble than it was worth, especially struggling to rinse the soap's film from her tangled mass of hair. Her daily ablutions had consisted of a quick sponging from the basin of tepid water in her room.
But watching Taro as he moved about the room preparing for her bath, she began to realize his motions took on the aspects of a ritual. On a short wooden stool he placed a dried gourd, a small lava rock, a wooden bowl of what she learned was wet rice bran, and a large porous washcloth.
After emptying the hot water into the tub and replenishing the caldron over the fire, he came to kneel at her side, hands flat on his thighs. “I am ready to bathe you.”
She clutched at the neckline of her robe. “Well, I’m not,” she said fiercely.
“Do you think I will see anything I have not already seen?” he asked patiently.
Her lower lip thrust out petulantly. “It’s not that.”
“Then do you think what I shall see will stir in me desires this time that I did not feel the first?” Without giving her an opportunity to consider, he continued. “A person who cannot control his mind as well as his body is weak. What I do for you is an impersonal service. Please think of it as no more.”
When she made no reply, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her across to the tub, sitting her on the stool, which had been cleared of its bath utensils. He began to talk to her, explaining what he did, as if he sought to ease the tension between them. “The geishas are women in Japan who are hostesses— entertainers—and the
y devote much time to daily bathing.”
“Daily?” she asked, so incredulous that she was not really aware that he lowered the neck of the embroidered robe to bare her shoulders.
“Yes, daily.” He smiled at her naiveté. “And it is the women in my land who perform the task of bathing the men, not as I am doing for you. The same holds true of eating. It is the women who eat last and wait on the men and walk behind them.”
“I don’t think I would like your country,” she snapped.
“But you like what I am doing, don’t you?” he asked as he moved the wet, warm cloth across her shoulders, lifting the mass of her heavy, snarled hair to scrub the long column of her neck.
“Yes,” she admitted in a whisper, wishing that she could divorce herself from the task he performed as easily as he seemed to do, for she was all too conscious of his nearness and her own near nudity.
Taro moved around in front of her, hunching on his heels, so that his face was even with hers. She was struck by the sheer masculinity of his features—the harsh planes and angles, the narrow-lidded eyes that seemed to smolder with black smoke.
His hands parted the robe, and, rewetting the cloth in the warm water once more, he began to run the cloth over her throat and shoulder bones. “You are as delicate as a hummingbird, Lotus Woman,” he said in what anyone else would have termed an impersonal observation. But having been in close contact with him over the many days and nights, she would have sworn that a deeper, richer substance imbued his low-pitched voice.
The cloth slid down the valley between her rose-tipped breasts, around her ribcage, and up under her arms before moving lower to bathe her stomach. She began to tremble inside, like the slightest tremors of the earth that go unnoticed before a quake. What this man did to her was a hundredfold more arousing than all the nude paintings . . . even than Brig's exploratory kisses. She could not take her gaze from Taro's face, yet his countenance remained impassive as he went about his task.
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