Sophie and the Rising Sun

by Augusta Trobaugh

  And besides, even though no one knew exactly how old he was, he seemed to display all the mannerisms of an older man: His movements were almost always leisurely and slow, his speech—when he spoke at all—measured and soft, as if the sound of his own voice might startle him. So certainly, he was not a man anyone would expect to notice a lady. But notice her, he always did. And that brief glimpse was all he ever expected to have, for after all, she was a real lady—almost old enough then to be called one of the town’s matrons. And he was only a gardener. And poor. And finally, not even of her race.

  The one and only time he had called himself to her attention in any way was the first time he ever saw her, only a few days after he moved into the cottage behind the back wall of Miss Anne’s garden. One of the first jobs she gave him was replacing the broken faucet in the backyard, and so she sent him to the hardware store down the street to buy a new spigot.

  As it happened, Sophie was in the hardware store that same day, looking over a display of seed packets near the front door. When Mr. Oto saw her for the first time, she was holding a packet of yellow zinnia seeds in one hand and a packet of sunrise-pink petunia seeds in the other and tilting her head a little as she tried to decide between them. Mr. Oto had never seen such a lovely lady before, and he came very close to staring at her—could not seem to tear his eyes away from the impeccable white lace collar on the dark blue dress and the rich, chestnut-brown hair that was only lightly touched with gray on the deep waves that framed her face. And the deep, mature eyes that were an incredible shade of green—as dark as the leaves of oleander trees. Finally, he cast his eyes down, where they belonged, and as if in a dream, he passed by her and went to find the clerk.

  By the time the new spigot was in his hand, Mr. Oto had regained his composure— or so he believed. Because when he turned to leave, he had no intention whatsoever of saying one word to the beautiful lady who was still studying the seed packets. But as he passed so near her on his way out, he watched in horror as his hand came forward with a mind of its own, and his thick, soil-stained finger lightly tapped the packet of pink petunia seeds in her hand.

  “Beautiful,” he murmured, not knowing if he was speaking of the flowers at all.

  Of course, he startled her, even as he startled himself with such an unintentional gesture, so that the first time her eyes turned fully on him, they were filled with offended surprise, and her cheeks instantly flamed into a more vibrant pink than the petunias on the packet. Mr. Oto’s own face began to burn at the realization of what he had done, so that just as abruptly as he had intruded upon her privacy, he bowed deeply before her.

  “Please excuse me,” he whispered, and scurried from the store without glancing her way again.

  On his way back to Miss Anne’s house, he chastised himself mercilessly. How dare he presume to speak to her? After all, he was no impetuous boy—even though he was still young enough for his blood to flow hot in his veins on rare occasions. But he was, after all, mature and with over fifty years of discipline in him. So there was no excuse for it.

  But for days afterward, he found it impossible not to think about her and to wonder why she had no husband—as he knew by the absence of a ring on her hand. How could the men of the town, those who were worthy of her—the bankers and the managers and the quiet gentlemen—fail to see the beauty of a face that reflected mature wisdom and gentleness? Why had they never seen it! For she was definitely a spinster, not a widow. He knew that because of the faint aura of expectancy that still clung to her.

  In those first few days, he thought about her so often that he even found himself

  fantasizing about what could be possible if he were not so poor and so old and if only she had come into his life when he had been young and filled with potential. And if only he were wealthy.

  “Good morning, my dear Miss Sophie,” he would have said, standing tall and strong in front of the gates of his vast estate, wearing a beautiful, embroidery-encrusted coat and bowing low before her. “I hope this day sees you in excellent health.”

  The English would flow softly and easily from his mouth when, in truth (although his English was exceptionally good), it was not the language of his childhood in his father’s house, so he had never felt completely comfortable with it. But in his daydream, English was completely easy and natural for him—because it was Sophie’s language.

  “Good morning, my dear Mr. Oto,” Sophie would have answered in a voice softened around the edges in the way of Southerners, and then, to his delight, she would have blushed and fluttered a little—prettily—walking toward him the whole time and with the soft folds of her summer dress flowing around her.

  But those images set his heart to thudding ominously and caught and held his breath against the thuds, so that finally, he disciplined himself against feelings that had come far too late in his life and for a lady who would have been completely unattainable anyway. So that never again in those years since he first saw her had he spoken to her or tipped his hat or called her attention to him in any way.

  The only thing he allowed was that he weeded Miss Anne’s front walkway every

  weekday morning, when Sophie was likely to pass by, but even then, when she was so

  near, he tended the plants as if they were the only important things in the world—working his thick fingers into the soil around them and waiting to take the brief glance at Sophie that was all he would ever have. So that particular October morning, as usual, he weeded and waited and wondered what she would be wearing and where she would be going.

  Sometimes, she wore a wide-brimmed hat with tiny silk flowers on it and a voile dress—that was usually on Tuesdays, when she went to the book discussion meeting at the library. Other mornings, she wore baggy men’s coveralls—even then, somehow managing to convey an impression of complete elegance—and carried a crab trap. That’s when she was on her way to tend the traps she set in the creek that ran through the marsh at the edge of town. At those times, he envied even the crabs she would reach in to grasp, take out of the trap, and declaw on the spot.

  On Wednesdays, she wore the same dark blue dress she had been wearing that infamous morning in the hardware store—but with a variety of tatted or crocheted collars, all pristine and immaculate. That’s when she came calling on Miss Anne, opening the gate and coming right up the walkway, her feet passing—incredibly!—within inches of his busy hands, and the delicate wake of her cologne wafting over him where he knelt, weak-kneed, among the marigolds. The first few times she came into the yard like that, he was terrified that she would remember him as the one whose rude behavior had so deeply offended her, but if she remembered, she never gave the least indication of it. In fact, she never looked his way at all.

  On this custom of “calling,” Mr. Oto had once asked Matilda, who came to Miss Anne’s house once a week to clean and do the laundry.

  “What do you mean?” Matilda demanded of him, suspiciously, when he asked her about it. She was ironing a damask tablecloth and, as usual, thumping the heavy iron down upon the cloth hard enough to make the ironing board shudder on its wooden legs.

  He was hesitant to continue, for Matilda’s open contempt frightened him. After all, he had heard her refer to him as that “ugly, dried-up, yellow foreigner.”

  “Please...” He pressed forward with it, in spite of Matilda’s scowl. “Why do ladies come here sometimes?” He was trying to keep the question very broad, although he knew and Matilda knew also, that no other ladies from the town ever came to call on Miss Anne.

  Matilda slammed down the iron against the board once again, only harder than ever, and turned to face him, threatening and ominous.

  “Folks just come calling,” Matilda spat out the words at him, as if they explained everything. “Don’t you know nothing at all about good manners?”

  And because he didn’t know how to answer her question, he said nothing more.

  Other times—when Sophie wasn’t coming to call—she wore sandals and a volumin
ous paint-stained blue duster and carried an easel under her arm and a paint-spattered wooden case from which he could hear the rattle of brushes. That’s when he knew that she was going to paint watercolor pictures at the river.

  In fact, Mr. Oto sometimes went down to the river himself to paint delicate watercolors of marsh grass and to try to capture the glint of infinitesimal sky in the water and to pretend that Sophie was sitting there beside him. But he always made sure that he would never intrude upon her singular right to that place by the river, because he went to it only on Sunday mornings, when Sophie was usually within the confines of the Salty Creek Baptist Church.

  At a few minutes after ten o’clock, he heard Sophie’s footsteps on the sidewalk, and then came his careful and brief glance. That morning, she was walking in a preoccupied way, wearing a light blue silk dress and with her arms crossed over a slim book held close to her heart, and her lips were moving soundlessly.

  And because he had no idea of where she was going at such times, he imagined that she went to a different place near the river, where she sat beneath a moss-laden tree, breathing line after line of poetry into the air. English poetry that he had trouble fully understanding, but that he continued trying to learn—poems that thundered and wept and brought such an exquisite pain to his soul that he could hardly bear it.

  So unlike the limited English of his childhood—in a place where English was used only for conducting business and nothing else.

  He had asked Miss Anne to bring books of poetry to him from the library,

  believing deep in his heart that if he could only learn to read poetry such as Sophie read,

  he would, somehow, be with her. Miss Anne never once suspected that inside the

  small, intense man was a heart hungry to learn to language of love, and she delighted in bringing him the books he asked for. She sat with him for long hours, watching as his brown finger passed across the page and listening to him sounding out the words. And when he would come to the end of a poem, he would nod his head in deep satisfaction and glance at Miss Anne with shining eyes.

  That particular morning, he suddenly remembered some of those beautiful words. And so he whispered, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky!”

  The words of Wordsworth’s poem echoed most pleasantly through Mr. Oto’s mind as Sophie walked away down the sidewalk, and more—the words seemed to course through his brown arms in warm rivulets and to run out from the tips of his fingers so that he could feel their beauty draining into the earth around the marigolds.

  “These flowers will be especially beautiful,” he whispered. “I will be able to look at them and see which ones were watered with such words.”

  Mr. Oto did not know then that the crisp, October day would present yet another miracle to him—besides his glimpse of Sophie and his belief that marigolds could absorb through his own fingers the very beauty of the words.

  For her own part, Sophie seldom noticed Miss Anne’s gardener in the front yard when she passed by the house or when she came to call. But she certainly remembered him. Particularly she remembered his audacity in trying to tell her which seeds to buy. For goodness’ sake!

  But she also remembered that horrified look in his black eyes when he realized his infraction, and his deep and completely apologetic bow. After he had left the hardware store that day, Sophie decided upon the petunia seeds after all—and not because some strange, foreign little man had said that she should choose them. And she wondered only briefly how someone like him had come to live in their little town, anyway.

  Later, a bit of that story about Mr. Oto came to her, unbidden, at a Garden Club meeting she went to in the company of her Aunt Minnie, who was already too frail and confused, even back then, to be going anywhere. But her aunt had threatened to cry if she couldn’t go, so Sophie took her—but thankfully, only that once. Sophie found it to be almost unbearable, sitting still for so long inside the Community Center on such a beautiful day, listening while the speaker droned on and on about composting and drainage, and all the while, through the window, she could see the green fronds of palms against the blue sky and a few moisture-laden clouds gathering in the south.

  At the end of the meeting, Miss Anne told Sophie’s Aunt Minnie—quite grandly and with her voice loud enough to carry to everyone else—that she had been fortunate enough to find a “real Chinese” gardener.

  Across the room, someone whispered, “I’ve seen him, you know, and I declare, he’s the strangest-looking bandy-legged little man!”

  “I’ve seen him too, and I think he’s a colored man. At least he’s certainly very dark!”

  “And where did he come from? Does anyone know? Anne’s awfully foolish to have the likes of him living right behind her own garden!”

  But Miss Anne ignored what they said, if indeed she heard them at all.

  And before long, the full story of how the strange foreigner came to live in the little town of Salty Creek was common knowledge, thanks primarily to Eulalie, the doctor’s wife, who, though a good and kind lady, was prone to talking loudly to anyone about anything, especially when she was sitting under the roaring hair dryer in the beauty shop.

  Chapter Three

  Miss Anne said:

  Lord knows what kind of stories Eulalie was telling. She always did have a flair for the dramatic, and whenever she started in to telling something—well, if she thought it wasn’t quite good enough, she’d fix it up a little bit. You know how it is. But she certainly didn’t mean anything by it, and goodness knows, she was the first one to befriend Mr. Oto. Didn’t care one little bit about him being a foreigner. Or about him not being white. Which is a lot more than I could say about some of the others around here.

  Because this is a small town. A simple town. With whites and blacks who know how to get along together. Back then, it was a different way of getting along, because everybody knew what all the rules were, and they were rules, you know, even though they weren’t written down anywhere. Not that I ever knew of. Most folks never questioned them, either. Because it was just the way things had always been done. So white men ran the town and black men worked in the fish-packing plant; white women stayed at home in their houses—particularly in hot weather—and black women came to those houses every day, to cook and clean.

  Then along came Mr. Oto, and he sure upset the applecart! Because he wasn’t what any of us knew, and he didn’t seem to fit in with any of those rules at all. Brown as a biscuit, he was, and small. Probably not more than five feet tall. Stocky, though, and with those slanted-looking eyes. And all that bowing he did all the time!

  Why, no one in this little town had ever seen anything like him. And it was probably very much to his advantage that he was always a very quiet and private person. Unobtrusive, you might say.

  But the way he came to be here in Salty Creek in the first place was that he was on a Greyhound bus that always passed through Salty Creek—back then, anyway—on the way to Jacksonville. Started in New York City. That far away. But that time, when the bus was only a few miles outside Salty Creek, one of the passengers came up front and told the driver there was a foreign man on the bus who was sick. So when the bus made its usual just-before-dawn stop at the Gulf station here, the driver called the sheriff, which was all he knew to do. Told him that some of the passengers were scared the man had plague or something like that. For after all, he certainly was a foreigner.

  The sheriff came right away, wearing a raincoat over his pajamas, and all he could learn from the others was that the man boarded the bus in New York City and hadn’t seemed to be sick then. Just real tired, the other passengers said.

  But when the sheriff went onto the bus and picked him up, he noticed right away that he was real frail—no bigger or heavier than a child, the sheriff said. So it was easy to carry him off the bus and put him in the backseat of the patrol car.

  He also said that something or other about how the whole thing felt kind of strange to him, so he waited long en
ough to watch the bus pull out of the Gulf station and roar away into the darkness—and all those faces staring from behind the windows were glowing just like lanterns. I told the sheriff that sometimes strange things like that happen, especially when something unexpected comes out of the dark.

  He took Mr. Oto—although he didn’t know his name then, of course—straight to the doctor’s house, and after looking him over, the doctor said he couldn’t find a thing wrong with him except that he probably hadn’t had anything to eat in goodness-knows-how-long. That, and a bruise on his head, maybe from having fallen down sometime.

  “He just needs something to eat and some rest,” the doctor said. “And we need to keep an eye on that bruise, too.”

  About that time, Eulalie came to the door of the office, to see what kind of patient was coming before it was even daylight. She always was curious about things, you see. And when she heard what the doctor said, she went right into the kitchen and heated up some leftover gumbo, adding a little water to it so Mr. Oto’s empty stomach wouldn’t rebel at it, especially if he hadn’t had anything to eat in a long time.

  She told me later that when she brought the gumbo to Mr. Oto, it almost broke her heart, seeing that strange, dark face against the white pillowcase and him shivering under the sheet, just like it was the dead of winter. Said that when she started feeding him that good gumbo, he opened his mouth for her —— just like a baby bird, she said—and she could actually see the broth warming him up, and those black eyes losing the frantic look they’d had before, so that they even seemed to be growing larger, and warm, and soft. But that may have been Eulalie’s imagination getting the best of her.