Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  “We have always given transit rights to everyone,” he said, “so be on your way. Go and lick your wounds somewhere else.”

  “You are the heir to the fiefdom, are you not?” asked Ueno. “You spoke with the haughtiness of one, at least, in the Great Council garden on the day that your brother’s treachery came clear to us all. Do you remember when we met below Lord Abe’s window?”

  Einosuke’s memories of Toshiro were still so strong that he wanted to say that he wasn’t the heir, but instead he said, “I remember that you were rude, sir. While I, at least, have the status of family, you are a usurper, a servant who mistakes his lord’s position for his own. And though Lord Abe has fallen, you still haven’t found a civil tongue.”

  It was not until Ueno came closer, ignoring the insult, that Einosuke finally saw that he carried something in a teacup. It was difficult to determine what it was because he wrapped it top and bottom with his hands.

  “What do you have there?” Einosuke asked. “Are you selling some family treasure? How much do you want for it?”

  It had been fairly common in past years for desperate men to approach the sons of lords with something semiprecious, and he knew that to pretend that Ueno was doing it now would be a grievous insult. But he couldn’t help himself. He saw Ueno’s face harden, yet he lifted the lid to the teacup and held its contents out. Ned Clark’s nose bobbed in a pool of stinking yellow liquid, so pungent that Einosuke’s eyes watered and his own nostrils flared.

  “We have cared for it well and would like to make amends by returning it,” Ueno said. “Maybe it’s still possible to put it back where it belongs.”

  The nose was as wrinkled as a prune, and as injurious to the eye as a gangrenous toe. Oh where was Einosuke’s sought-after magnanimity? All he had to do was be half as civil as Ueno was trying to be and he could mend something that might otherwise stay torn for decades into the future. And he would be able to tell his father and brother about it when they returned from the prosthetist’s village.

  “Why come to me?” he asked, mitigating his tone. “You’ve obviously been watching the castle. Why didn’t you simply follow my father? He would have welcomed its return more than I.”

  Those were good questions but Ueno didn’t answer them. Instead he pushed the nose closer, like one child showing another a dead mouse. It was a move that angered Einosuke not only because of its impertinence, but because of the truly horrible smell. He drew his head back and, quite without planning to, slapped the bottom of Ueno’s outstretched hand, sending the teacup high into the air. The putrid liquid spilled into the rain and the nose flew out of the cup to dive, like a seabird, into the ocean.

  “Hey!” Ueno yelled. He started to reach for his sword, then called one of his hirelings, who dashed into the freezing water and began frantically splashing around.

  “Not there,” said Einosuke, “a little to your left and farther out.”

  The nose was still visible, and when the samurai looked where Einosuke pointed he had no trouble retrieving it. “Salt won’t hurt it,” said Einosuke. “I’ll bet it’s a more effective preservative than that offensive brine.”

  Einosuke was a better swordsman than he appeared to be, better than either his father or Manjiro, and he knew the chief laborer would run for help if a fight really started. So he pulled his sword out slowly, watching as the rain hit its blade. Number III was soaked and embarrassed but stomped across the rocks to the flung-away teacup. He put the nose inside it again and sat it down on the top of the very boulder Einosuke had intended taking home. Ueno, meanwhile, brought his sword from its scabbard with greater deliberation than that used by Einosuke.

  “I came here today to mend things,” he said. “It had seemed to me before I met you that the time for petty insults had passed.”

  Einosuke let his eyes move back to the laborers who were huddled, more like ducks than dogs now, their leader missing from the front. Good, he thought, he’s gone for help. He backed up, edging toward the water. He would teach this man a lesson and tell his father about it when the party returned to the castle that night.

  “A lord’s advantage isn’t only with words,” he said, “but in having excellent fighting instructors.”

  Even as he spoke he knew he should stop, that one neutral word, just a syllable of civility, would disarm the situation. Where Ueno was concerned, however, he had no civility, and he cocked his sword above his head. What he’d said about his fighting instructors was a blunder, though, for it made Ueno come at him with more care than he might

  otherwise have shown. He stepped up and stopped, stepped up and stopped, balanced and searching for the right moment.

  Einosuke heard a cough and when he glanced toward the laborers again he saw his older brother, Toshiro, sitting atop the boulder he had chosen, right beside that teacup. He attacked Ueno when Toshiro nodded, running at him and bringing his sword down fast, glancing it off Ueno’s blade and narrowly missing his shoulder. Ueno stumbled sideways and, in order to keep from falling, stuck his sword in the sand. Einosuke laughed and took the position Ueno had held before. He could see the laborers easily now but Toshiro was gone from the boulder.

  Ueno closed the distance between them carefully, cocking his sword as Einosuke had earlier. He led with his right leg, but at the last instant backed off a half-step and sliced his sword quickly under Einosuke’s, in and back out again, dragging it across Einosuke’s left thigh. Einosuke’s sword hit the sand and he took his hand off its grip in order to touch the wound he’d been given. It was a long and shallow slice, a wan and enigmatic smile, with blood overflowing its lower lip. He grasped his sword with both hands, put his weight on his uninjured leg and charged, but Ueno deflected his thrusts and turned to watch Einosuke stumble past him, down toward the water again.

  “While a samurai is practicing kendo, young lords are drinking saké,” he said, “while a samurai perfects his riding, young lords…”

  But his mind was slower than his sword and before he could find the proper analogy Einosuke attacked again, cutting Ueno’s belt and nicking his abdomen. The belt fell partly to the ground, where it caught on his leggings. In order to free it Ueno had to pull his short sword out, and at just that moment Einosuke hit his buttocks with a swift sword slap.

  The stretch of ground on which they stood had narrowed as the tide came closer. Einosuke knew that had Ueno not shown up they would have had the boulder freed by then and he would be on his way home to his family. He considered yelling instructions to his laborers, telling them to start work even while the fight went on. Both men, however, would have been better served by fighting single-mindedly, and not by trying to think up insults or give instructions; that was a lesson Ueno seemed to learn more quickly than Einosuke. He moved to take the upper part of the beach again, backing Einosuke toward the water. Einosuke could feel the sand give way beneath his feet, and he looked down at its change of color. If he moved to his right Ueno moved with him, and he could not so easily go left, without widening the bloody smile in his thigh.

  Ueno’s next assault was so slow at its beginning that Einosuke wanted to run at him. But his left leg complained, and when he put his weight on his right leg, his heel sunk into the sand. And then Ueno’s speed increased, his sword held parallel to the tide. He knocked Einosuke’s blade away twice, down and then down again, and came in above it with the short sword he had rescued from his belt, cutting both of Einosuke’s biceps in a single powerful stroke. Einosuke’s arms began to fall in front of him, quite as if they belonged to someone else, and as Ueno prepared to make a proper final thrust, there was Toshiro again, standing in the surf to Einosuke’s right.

  “Where have you been?” asked Einosuke. “Can’t you do something to help me?”

  Ueno’s last maneuver was textbook, as if he had a practice dummy before him, and not a living, breathing man. He brought his sword from its highest position, poised with its tip pricking the sky, then let it speed through the air horizontally, passin
g through Einosuke’s neck without slowing down, or as if there had been only the slightest turbulence against it, like an unexpected gust of wind from the bay. Einosuke saw the blade pass through Toshiro on its way to him, cutting his brother in half, and he felt it, too, the way it hit him so abruptly, like that irritating slap he had previously given Ueno on his buttocks.

  Ueno completed his move by dropping both swords and catching Einosuke’s head in midair, grabbing it by its topknot. His face was wild as he swung around toward the laborers, shouting, “Behold your defeated lord!” But the laborers could behold very little from their prone and terrified positions on the ground.

  Ueno retrieved his swords and walked across the sand, Einosuke’s head bouncing down low against his thigh, and when he looked toward the horses and those other horrified riders, he shouted, “Come to me! Do not make me walk!”

  But, in fact, he did walk, to swagger among the laborers, dripping blood from Einosuke’s head upon each one.

  When the younger of his hirelings, Number III, got closer to him, Ueno gave him Einosuke’s head, lest his own horse grow frightened and run, but once he was mounted he took it back again, and twirled it by its topknot, so the others could get a look at his prize. He watched them closely, searching for fear, and then handed the head to Number 75.

  “Keep this for me,” he said, then he rode into the forest by himself.

  For his part the older man gave the head a gentle touch, clasping Einosuke’s cheeks like one might clasp the cheeks of a child. He brought the head up so he could look directly into its eyes, and whispered, “I have lived for more than sixty years but I didn’t know what my fate would be until today.”

  He trotted to a spot where he could reach into his satchel and take out his grooming implements and begin recombing Einosuke’s hair. It was a proper gesture, a respectful one, his hope being that someone might do as much for him, that someone might take a few moments to make him look presentable too, in the unhappy days to come.

  34.

  We Can’t Have This

  TOO MUCH TIME had passed, and as the tide came in Einosuke’s body began to move in such a way that the laborers, even in their terror, feared it might get loose from the fragile grasp of the sand, slide under the water’s rough blanket, and be gone. Their leader should have been back by then with castle guards, but since he was not, one man, and then a second, found sticks from the edge of the forest and pressed them against Einosuke’s clothing, their eyes nearly closed against the sight of the headless man. They weren’t pleased with themselves but they held on and hollered, using their muscles against the tide.

  And that was what the castle guards saw when they came running behind the chief laborer, some ten minutes after Ueno and his samurai had gone.

  “What have you found?” one of them barked, and the chief laborer let out a relieved sigh, thinking the fight had ended well and the laborers, in the meantime, had discovered some dead creature, perhaps a sea lion, for dead sea lions had washed up along this beach before.

  But when the laborers saw the guards and fell on their faces, moaning and crying, the guards, in turn, noticed the Okubo family crest on the sea lion’s shoulder, and then the viscera that had launched themselves from the creature’s stomach, unfurling out of its neck like enemy flags, and they fell too, next to their subordinates in the sand. It took a full five minutes for them to stand again, to pull out their swords and thrash about screaming for vengeance, and another ten before they found the necessary courage to pull poor Einosuke out of the apathetic and steadily advancing tide. One of the guards walked down the beach and brought back Einosuke’s horse which, inexplicably, had not run away, another covered his neck with a laborer’s shirt and lifted him up across the horse’s saddle, and in an hour they had walked him through the forest, around the southern-loop road to the castle gate.

  Inside the castle, still quite stunned from her moment alone with Ace, Fumiko was directing the cleaners on the second floor when she heard the arrival commotion. Her first thought, oddly enough, was that maybe Ueno had come, in hopes of cutting his losses, and she should send a runner for Einosuke. Her second thought was to find Masako, so the girl wouldn’t climb upon the gate, look down at the horrible man, and get in everyone’s way.

  Fumiko came downstairs in a hurry, but there were no guards at the door, and no Masako in any of the first floor rooms where she most often liked to play. From the top of the outside stone stairway she could normally see the gate well, but so many people had run over there now that she could tell only that the gate was open and that a party of riders had come inside. She didn’t like that. She did not want strangers given access to the castle when none of the men was at home, so though she was dressed for work and not for greetings, she went across the intervening ground to investigate. Surely it wasn’t Ueno; only some interloper, some quasi-aristocrat, smoothly talking his way inside.

  Masako had twice been to her marsh that day, both before and after her mother and Ace, but when the ruckus began she was close to the gate, standing outside one of the castle’s side doors with Junichiro, trying to make him do his walking trick over and over. She waited a moment, sure, at first, that what she was doing was more interesting than whatever else might be going on, but when others ran past her she finally picked her brother up and hurried after them, coming into the rear of the crowd just at the time her mother got there.

  “Good,” said Fumiko, “stay beside me. I’m not putting up with nonsense from anyone.”

  She looked toward the side of the castle for Ace, but the stool he had formerly sat upon was empty. Had he gone to his room to think things over, then, or followed that drifting bit of sunlight, around to the casdtle’s back? She wondered what he was thinking, and wanted to see his face.

  There was so much noise, were so many shrieks and unwieldy voices, that Fumiko thought a fight had broken out, that maybe, after all, the guards were trying to do their jobs. Many of those in the crowd were turning now to look at her, but Fumiko misread their expressions, thinking they were asking her to settle the argument.

  “Let me through, then,” she said. “We can’t have this. When the masters are gone we want this gate closed, is that so hard to understand?” She could hear the curtness in her voice but didn’t care.

  “We can’t have this,” Masako told Junichiro.

  The crowd held for a moment, then parted despite itself. Fumiko could see the top of the gate now, the place where the guards usually stood, but there were no guards there to yell at. The first sense she had that she was wrong about what was happening did not come until Masako pulled her back a little and told her so.

  “Someone’s injured, Mama,” she said. “I can see his feet, he’s slumped across a horse.”

  From her lower position Masako could indeed see two feet wrapped together, but little more than that. She wasn’t as interested in seeing someone who was already hurt as she would have been in watching an actual fight, but Fumiko’s reaction was just the opposite. What injured person could force the gates of Odawara Castle so easily open? She imagined again that it might be Ueno, humbled first by Lord Abe’s demise and again by some crippling road accident. “Let me through,” she said. “Stand aside.”

  But the crowd didn’t want to part and did so only stubbornly. She saw the horse’s muzzle first, and then those tied-together feet, and then a hand flung back against the nearest leg as if it were trying to scratch something. That hand, she suddenly knew, did not belong to Ueno.

  “Go back, my dear,” she told her daughter. “Take your brother and get out of here right now. Go back inside the castle and close the door.”

  “Why?” asked Masako, but her mother said, “Don’t ask questions. Go to our private quarters. Do so quickly and do not turn around.”

  Fumiko could hear herself as if from a distance. She knew she had found the proper tone of voice to make Masako obey, but she did not know how long she could maintain it. Masako might go only partway back and then tur
n to ask another question, and if that happened Fumiko didn’t think she could find the power, again, to make her daughter keep going. For the moment, however, she only stood there, her back toward the horse.

  “Come on, baby brother,” Masako said, “if we’re not wanted here let’s go practice our walking somewhere else.”

  Fumiko could feel the crowd’s silence, a breathless kind of thing that would go on forever if she didn’t turn around. But she commanded herself to wait until Masako was at the base of the stairs, until she had carried her brother up those stairs and stepped inside the castle and softly closed the door. And when she finally did turn around it was only through divining a strength that she had always known she had, but had never used before.

  “Get back,” she said calmly. “Stand back away from there now.”

  The crowd moved like her daughter had, heads down and grudgingly. Only the guard who led the horse stayed close to her. She looked at that hand again and then stepped up to touch it, actually reaching under it to draw her fingernails across its palm. That the hand was cold did not surprise her, but she had to close her eyes in order to release it, and find the courage to walk around to the other side of the horse. She didn’t let herself imagine anything, not what had happened, not whether he had slipped and fallen on the boulder or whether the boulder had plunged from its net and crushed his skull. She did not let herself imagine the look in Einosuke’s eyes.

  The crowd had stepped out to form a crescent, its back to the castle, so when Fumiko went around to face the end of the world as she knew it, she was alone. At first, however, she could not make out what she saw, could not understand the sight before her. She even felt relief, for a second, as if there had been some hideous mistake. It was odd because even as she fell, even as she clutched the horse’s riggings, to keep herself from going all the way down, the thought stayed with her that if this was not Einosuke, then the bile in her mouth, her locked-up jaw, and the streaming flow of her saliva were all unnecessary, all wrong. She screamed but stopped the sound immediately and whipped her head sideways so that an arc of her saliva wet the horse and laced her husband’s clothing, like Junichiro’s had the chocolate not so very long ago. She reached out and pulled Einosuke’s short sword from his belt and pressed it against the soft flesh under her chin and felt the tip go in and would have driven it all the way home had not the horse jumped, in its own renewed terror, turning her and letting her see Masako’s headlong rush back down the castle stairs, screaming bloody murder with Junichiro in her arms.