by Margi Preus
That was odd, he thought, and he tried once more. But again, just as he was about to pick it up, the coin scooted away as if it were alive!
Manjiro stared at the coin. There it lay on the ground, unmoving, just as you would expect it to do.
This time, he decided, he would step on it to prevent it from skittering away. He inched his foot toward it, and gradually lifted the toe of his shoe. He was just bringing it down when the coin jumped out from under his foot.
What would make it do such a thing?
Manjiro stood back and scratched his chin. He gave the coin a good, hard look, and for the first time noticed the very fine thread attached to it. Looking up, he noticed a tall boy leaning against a fence, calmly chewing on a stalk of grass. But behind that blade of grass, the boy couldn’t quite conceal a smirk. Manjiro laughed and said, “That is a good joke. Are you making the coin jump?”
The boy shook his head, then jerked his thumb toward the woods. “Job!” he shouted. “You’ve been found out.”
A willowy boy wearing a bemused smile appeared from behind a tree. “I fooled you, huh?” he said, winding the thread around a stick as he walked.
“You must be some kind of dupe,” the boy at the fence said, sneering at Manjiro.
Manjiro recognized this boy. He was one of the boys who had made faces behind his back that very first day in America. Now he was in on some kind of joke that was being played at Manjiro’s expense.
“What is a ‘dupe’?” Manjiro said.
The boy snickered. “It’s what you are: stupid.”
Job said, “Sheesh, Tom, ease up a little.”
Manjiro turned to the boy named Job. “That is a pretty good joke. But you can fool more clever people than me if you use different string. If you want a suggestion, of course.”
“Sure,” Job scratched at his mop of hair. “What kind of string?”
Manjiro picked up the coin, and was about to open his mouth when the tall boy spat out his grass and pushed himself away from the fence.
“Job!” he said, loudly, for the benefit of some other students who had begun to gather. “You’re not really going to listen to this squinty-eyed son of a pig are you?”
Job looked from Manjiro to the tall boy and back again. “Well, Tom, I …,” he said.
Tom walked up to Manjiro and glared down at him. Tom was bigger and taller than Manjiro, and maybe older, too. But Manjiro’s many months on a whale ship had made him tough and strong. He might be able to beat Tom if it came to a fight.
A truly strong person does not resort to violence unless it absolutely cannot be avoided, Manjiro reminded himself. His father had taught him that. Manjiro also remembered what Captain Whitfield had said about staying out of trouble.
Manjiro stepped around Tom.
Or he tried to. Tom put his hand on Manjiro’s chest and said, “Do you really think you are going to this school? This school? You?”
Manjiro didn’t answer. Victory without fighting, Manjiro reminded himself, was honorable.
“See?” Tom said to a cluster of boys behind him—his friends? “He don’t even understand what I’m saying. He’s not smart enough for that.”
Other students who were arriving for school, both boys and girls, hung back.
“I don’t think you’re going to fit in here. I don’t think we let people like you into this school,” Tom said. He crossed his arms and stood in Manjiro’s way. A few students walked around them, up the stairs and into the school, but when Manjiro tried to move one way or the other, Tom would move, too, blocking his way.
“Go home, little slant-eyes,” Tom said. “Go home where you came from.”
If only I could, Manjiro thought, I would. There was a long pause while Manjiro wondered what to do. Then he remembered he still had the coin in his hand.
Tom seemed to remember that at the same time, because he said, “Give me back my two bits, punk.”
“I know a coin trick, too,” Manjiro said. He pulled the thread off the coin and tossed the coin high in the air. He felt all eyes shift to focus on it—even the students on the steps turned back to watch. The coin spun back down, winking in the sun. Manjiro caught it, simultaneously catching the eye of a girl who stood nearby. He felt his face flush.
“That’s no trick!” Tom said.
“He hasn’t done it yet, Tom,” the girl said.
Manjiro tried not to think about the girl as he wove the coin through the fingers of his right hand the way Itch had taught him. He would look very foolish if he didn’t pull this off, he knew, and he focused all his concentration on the trick.
Next, he pinched the coin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, holding it so all could see. Then, with a big flourish, he placed—or seemed to place—the coin in his left hand.
“Abracadabra!” he said, making a sweeping gesture toward that hand. “Vanish!” He curled open the fingers of his left hand to reveal his empty palm.
“Oh!” the girl exclaimed, clapping her hands. “That was a good trick!”
“He’s stolen it, is all,” Tom said. “And he better give it back, ’cuz it’s mine!”
The schoolmaster came to the door and stood with his arms folded, taking in the scene with a stern look.
Manjiro glanced at him, trying to determine if he was in trouble already. He had to make the coin reappear to complete the trick, so he forged on.
“Now I make it appear!” Manjiro started to reach toward the girl’s face, intending to make the coin seem to come out of her ear. That was the way the trick was supposed to work. But he stopped, his arm suspended in midair. What if he accidentally touched her! Something like this could never happen in Japan, he suddenly thought—for a man and woman to be so familiar in public! But he was not in Japan, he reminded himself—he was in America now, where men and women walked arm in arm on the street. Manjiro’s hand brushed against the girl’s hair, his heart leaped into his throat, and he almost dropped the coin. But he finished the trick smoothly. Perhaps nobody even noticed the hesitation. The students broke out into applause, and the girl touched her ear. “Is there anything else in there?” she laughed.
“I see we have a magician in our midst,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Now, would you all kindly enter so we can begin classes?”
The students filed in, still chattering about the trick. “How did you do that?” a boy asked.
“Do it again!” said another boy.
“Pah!” Tom spat. “That’s nothing. I know lots of tricks like that.”
“No, you don’t, Tom,” Job said. “I’ve never seen you do any tricks at all.”
Manjiro followed the other students into the school. He could just see the back of the girl’s head, and he kept his eyes on her glossy brown hair swishing back and forth.
He was not so naïve as to think the coin trick would put an end to Tom’s taunts. The best way to win this fight would be to succeed in school—at least he had to make it through this one day.
Manjiro made it through that day and another and another. Most of the students accepted him just fine. After discussing the trick, Manjiro gave Job a length of fishing line that would be even harder to see than sewing thread. Soon Job was spending time with Terry and Manjiro, and sometimes he helped out at the Whitfield farm.
But the more friends Manjiro made and the better he did in school, the more Tom and his friends seemed to dislike him.
“I don’t see why one of those people should be allowed in our school,” Tom said out loud when the teacher had stepped out of the classroom for a moment. “His people would just as soon kill you as look at you.”
“My dad says they go about with giant swords and will chop open your head like a watermelon,” said one of Tom’s friends.
“How do we know he’s not a spy?” Tom said. “That’s what I think. He’s been sent here to spy on us and report back to his government.”
“Oh, yeah, Tom,” Job said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m sure his government is ex
tremely interested in our particular geometry class.”
“You shut your trap, Job,” Tom snapped. “People are going to think you’re anti-American if you keep being friends with him. There’s no way he’ll ever really be American. He shouldn’t be allowed in this school. We shouldn’t have to go to school with people who want to kill us.”
“Stow it, Tom,” someone in the back called out.
“You stow it or I’ll come back there and make you,” Tom yelled back.
“Yeah?”
“You know I will.”
A fight was narrowly avoided when the teacher reentered. The boys abruptly sat down, and the teacher gave them all a withering glance before continuing.
20
THE CHALLENGE
inter was quiet. The wind and cold kept people bundled up in thick overcoats and woolen scarves, hurrying from one warm stove to the next. At school there were lessons and reading and tests, and Tom and the others were too busy to tease and bully. But spring brought green leaves, fishing, and fresh taunts.
“I thought Tom was finished griping at you,” Terry said as the three friends sat on the bank of the stream, fishing. “But I guess not.” The stream chuckled along, untouched by any such unpleasantness.
“Aw, he’s always got to pick on somebody,” Job said. “I used to be friends with him just so he wouldn’t pick on me.” “I don’t know what I can do about it,” Manjiro said. He cast; his line went into the water with a plink, and then all was silent as the boys contemplated what he might do.
“Maybe you should take the offensive.” Terry made a face as he gingerly pulled a worm out of a small tin of bait, as if he were startled to find a worm there. Manjiro laughed at the look on his friend’s face—somehow Terry was able to look disgusted and surprised at the same time.
“Yeah!” Job said. “Challenge him to a fight or something.”
“A fistfight!” Terry said. He gave up trying to bait his hook, threw the worm into the woods, lay back, and pushed his hat over his eyes.
“Are you crazy?” Job said. “Do you ever look at Tom? He’s always got a black eye or a cut on his face. They say he’s so tough, he picks fights with whaling men.”
Terry emitted a low whistle. “Really? Well, then, you’ll never beat him at a fistfight.”
“I don’t want to have a fistfight with him!” Manjiro said. “Why would I? I can’t get into trouble. I might get throwed out of school.”
“Thrown,” Terry corrected. Then he jumped up. “Gee whiz, Johnny Mung, I know what you should do! You should fight him with swords. You’d surely win then. Nobody around here knows such fancy moves. So what do you say? Should I set it up with you and him and swords?” He swung his fishing pole around his head to demonstrate.
“Hey, watch it! There’s a hook on that!” Job said. Terry stopped swinging.
“Swords?” Manjiro said. “A sword fight would definitely get me throwed—thrown—out of school. Another thing—when people fight with those kinds of swords, somebody’s head is sure to come off.”
“Really?” Job said. “Somebody’s whole head gets cut off?”
As the boys walked back to the farm, Manjiro explained how the samurai swords were so ferocious that their strength was tested by slicing up corpses. He said stories were told of men who had been severed from shoulder to hip so quickly that they walked on for several paces before splitting in two. A sword like that took a head off in one swoop. “But they say that even after a man’s head has been cut off, he can still perform some function,” Manjiro said.
“Like what kind of function, do you think?” Job said.
“Sometimes chickens run around after their heads are chopped off,” Terry said.
“That may be, but chickens don’t know any better,” Job said. “If a person’s head were cut off, he would know it; he’d know he was supposed to fall down dead. His brain would say, ‘Look there; your head is gone! You’re dead! Fall down!’”
“But what if there was something he wanted to do before dying? Perhaps a body could stand up long enough to do that one thing,” Manjiro said.
“But the brain isn’t connected anymore—how can it tell the body what to do?” Terry asked.
“Maybe it told the body what to do already, so the body knew it ahead,” Manjiro said.
“Like what? What could it do?”
“Kill the person who cut off his head,” Job said, slashing the air with his stick.
“Or wave good-bye!” Terry giggled.
As they walked into the farmyard, Mrs. Whitfield poked her head around a sheet hanging on the clothesline. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“Sorry, Mrs. Whitfield,” Terry said. “We’re just trying to figure out a challenge for John and Tom.”
“A challenge?” she said.
“A sword fight won’t work,” Job grumbled.
“That’s good to know,” Mrs. Whitfield said. “What is this challenge about?”
“Nothing!” Manjiro said hastily. He hadn’t noticed her hanging clothes or he would have ended the conversation. “We’re just … we’re just talking.”
“Tom is always picking on John,” Terry said. “We thought if he could beat him up somehow, he’d stop.”
Mrs. Whitfield stood up from the clothes basket and raked a wisp of hair out of her face. “Is someone bullying you, John?” she said. The furrows in her brow deepened as she looked at him.
“No!” Manjiro said. “No bully.”
“Well,” she said. “I think you should have a talk with Mr. Whitfield.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just joke.”
Mrs. Whitfield cocked her head and regarded him with one raised eyebrow. “Well, if there’s trouble, you should talk to Mr. Whitfield.”
“No trouble!” Manjiro said.
It was getting late, so Terry and Job said their good-byes. Manjiro went into the cool barn to consider what to do. He didn’t think about Japan very often, but once in a while something would happen that would remind him of home. That day when he swung open the door of the barn, the sweet, grassy smell of hay jolted in him the memory of kneeling on the tatami floor of the temple. He had a sudden longing to be there—to be at that temple—and to be home.
He went straight to Duffy, who was standing in her stall, swishing her tail contemplatively. She was one of his best friends in the world, and the only one he could speak to in Japanese. She would listen patiently, blinking her huge, dark eyes as if she understood his every word.
He pressed his face against her warm neck and spoke to her of all his thoughts. He told her that he didn’t want to get into trouble, but he didn’t want to endure Tom’s taunts anymore, either.
“Duffy,” he said, “what should I do?”
21
FALL DOWN SEVEN TIMES
horse race?” Terry cried. “You agreed to a horse race?”
“A horse race? When?” Job said, panting a little as he ran up to join Terry and Manjiro on their way to school.
“In two weeks,” Manjiro answered. “Me against Tom.”
“Couldn’t you have come up with some other idea?” Job grumbled, kicking at a stone.
“I thought it would be fun,” Manjiro said.
“Tom’s been riding since he could crawl,” Job said. “You’re not going to get as good as he is in two weeks!”
“And anyway, his dad has the fastest horse in the county!” Terry added.
“Duffy is a farm horse—she’s not fast!” Job said. “She’s really just a pony.”
“How are you ever going to stay on your horse for a whole race, much less win it?” Terry moaned. “You’ve got a lot to learn, John Mung. And the first thing is how to stay on the horse. Your riding lessons start after school today.”
During school, Manjiro tried not to think about the race and to concentrate on his work. But as the days went on, that became harder and harder, partly because of a girl, a girl with glossy chestnut hair and stormy, sea-colored eyes. He had
met Catherine on that first day of school, and though boys and girls went to separate classes, Manjiro would see her in the halls and sometimes their eyes would meet. When that happened, Manjiro’s heart filled, like a sail fills with wind. Then he would have to glance away or down at his shoes to catch his breath.
He had hoped the horse race would just be a challenge between Tom and him, with a few friends as witnesses. But word got out and it seemed the whole school was planning to attend the event—maybe even Catherine. The possibility of humiliation began to rub at Manjiro like a burr under his shirt.
He started to hope something would stop the race from happening. Maybe some kind of disaster.
“Are there ever earthquakes here?” he asked Captain Whitfield as they lugged bags of feed to the barn.
“No,” the captain said. “Not here.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”
“I just wonder,” Manjiro said.
Maybe someone would break a leg or something. Even if it had to be him, that would be all right—just as long as he didn’t have to race Tom Higgins.
Meanwhile, the training went on, every day after school. But no matter how much coaching, advice, and cajoling Manjiro got, he could not seem to stay on the horse for very long.
“Run!” Terry shouted and swatted Duffy’s hindquarters with a willow switch. Duffy jumped forward, skittered sideways a little, and then took off at a dead run. Manjiro hunkered down with his head close to her neck, his hand wrapped around her mane, and his knees squeezing her sides.
Terry went by as a sort of smear of color. Then Job, a blur, then everything went by in a blur, until he recognized the approaching splotch of red as the barn, looming closer and closer. And closer. Now the features of the barn stood out, even the knotholes in the siding. He pulled back on the reins, but Duffy was running so fast, so fast! She didn’t slow down! She didn’t change her gait. What she did was stop. Abruptly.
