His hand lowered to her thighs now and gently slipped inside before sliding down to cup her calves and ankles. For a moment her lids snapped closed in a reaction of sheer shock, then remained that way as she savored the pleasant sensation that followed Even the soles of her feet, small and narrow, did not go unwashed.
“Why must you wash me before I take a bath?” she asked tremulously. "It makes no sense"
He rose now. "You would not wish to bathe your body in dirty water, would you?”
"But you just bathed me."
"No. You Westerners do not know what real cleanliness is.” Then, "Forgive me if I have offended you. I'm afraid I make a very poor host.”
"No . . . no, I . . . like what you are doing,” she unwillingly admitted. “It's just that . . ." Her gaze lowered.
His eyes searched her face. “I know this must be very difficult for a Western woman such as yourself,” he said slowly. “But you must understand by now that I would not bring harm or discomfort to you.”
She could only nod her head.
He smiled. "Good. Now we will complete your bath. Then, after you have rested—for your body still needs much rest—we shall eat.”
What followed was actually very enjoyable, once she closed the door on her thoughts and let herself relax and only feel. First he added the last of the boiling water to the half-filled tub of tepid water; then, to her amazement, he dropped orange slices in the tub—to scent it, he explained. And she could indeed smell the citrusy-fresh scent of the fruit rising with the steam. Lastly, he stood her on her feet, supporting her with one hand about her waist, and with her faced away from him, he removed her robe.
When he scooped her up, she wrapped her arms around his neck. She could smell his own clean scent. With her head tipped back against his forearm, she looked up into the inscrutable face. He seemed totally unaware of her naked body held against him.
He lowered her into the deliciously hot water, and it surged about her breasts, distorting everything below. While she lolled in the tub, soaking, he went to the fireplace to return with two more pails of hot water, which he emptied into the tub. “Give me your foot,” he instructed.
Languorously she offered up her right foot, and he began to rub its heel and sole with the lava rock. She closed her eyes and sank farther into the tub, letting her arms float to the surface in dreamy abandon.
He repeated his actions with the other foot, then took the dried gourd and scrubbed each leg, from ankle to calf. She did not find it particularly enjoyable, but he explained it removed the superfluous hair and dead skin. He began to apply the wet rice bran. "This is like a facial,” he explained. "In my land the geishas use nightingale droppings.”
She laughed, realizing both that it was the first time she could remember laughing in a long time and that Taro was attempting to make the bath easier for her by making her relax, by occasionally talking to divert her. At her laughter, his glance flickered to her face, then dropped as he resumed his task.
At last, to her disappointment, he leaned over her with a large soft towel and lifted her easily from the tub. Beneath her hands that she put around his shoulders, she could feel the ripple of the muscles. His face was just above hers, and she contentedly nuzzled her head in the hollow of his neck, dreamily wishing she could stay in that secure, fetal position forever. But too soon he laid her on the mat and released her.
As he knelt over her, roughly toweling her proffered body, her gaze clung to his face. She perversely wished that there was some way she could break through his self-containment. She sighed, somehow knowing that no one would unless he permitted it.
His dark gaze fell on her. “You enjoyed the bath after all?”
“Very much. Can we . . . you will bathe me again?”
A mask slid over the eyes. “Whenever you wish, Lotus Woman.”
CHAPTER 38
Daily Jessie's strength returned. The color returned to her skin and the shining life to her butter-yellow curls. She knew soon she would be strong enough to leave the cabin. But her soul was not yet ready to return to the dichotomy of her former life. And so she luxuriated in those lazily passing days of spring.
Taking up her perch on the narrow wooden arched footbridge that Taro had constructed over a nearby rivulet, she watched as the scrub oaks and piñon and occasional willow changed into their emerald garb. She learned to sit patiently, knees drawn up beneath her chin, while the shy mule deer or pronghorn antelope made its way down to the thin but deep ribbon of water. It was the mating season; even a flock of cinnamon teal proclaimed it from the cerulean sky with their gargled calls. A desert bald eagle swooped down into its mountain cranny where its mate waited, and the smaller birds trilled their love calls.
And Jessie waited, for what she was not certain.
Her life there in the mountains took on a comfortable routine, beginning with dawn when Taro woke and stirred the banked embers into life against the early-morning chill, for the altitude was nearly five thousand feet above sea level. After breakfast, usually rice and bean curd, which she was learning to prepare, he would leave for the mine, equipped with three candles, for his ten-hour day beneath the ground.
After his departure she would clean the dishes and then read some of the out-of-date newspapers he furnished her. Later she went to sit on the footbridge, enjoying the sun’s life-giving rays as she had never thought she would. At noon she walked down to the mine entrance that was half-pit, half-cave and shared a picnic lunch with the man who had come to own a part of her, as he put it.
It was easy to talk with him, for he seemed interested in what she had to say, especially her earlier life and her education— something that the Japanese female did not receive. However, Taro surprised her when she learned that he had more education than she, for he told her the Japanese male usually had a full eight years of education unless he was of the eta—or the untouchable—class.
“There is a class system ruled over by the nobility,” he clarified. “Below that is the warrior, or samurai, class; the agriculture class, from which I come; the mechanics and artists; and lastly, the merchants. Then there are the untouchables, which are not dignified with a class.”
She admitted that there was a class system in the United States despite its egalitarian claim to democracy, the class being ruled by the Anglo. “Below that are the races of color. That I am partly one of color—-Spanish—was one of the reasons I was considered unsuitable to marry Brig Godwin.”
“The heir to Cristo Rey?” Taro asked carefully.
She nodded, and he said, “It is this then that drove you to the House of the Golden Dreams?”
She looked away from his probing gaze. “Yes, but what I feel for him no longer exists. I have come to see that he was not the man I thought he was. He was a weakling. A puppet!”
“And yet your soul is still not healed, is it?”
“Maybe one day,” she replied evasively. If you allow me to stay here long enough.
Would he? Or would he make a bridal contract for some young woman he had never seen, as he had told her many of his countrymen had done?
The thought stung—not the thought of Taro’s marrying someone else, but the thought of what would take place between him and his bride, something that she would never experience. Why, she was jealous!
And what would Taro think of her outlandish thoughts, coming as he did from a society where a woman supposedly had no thoughts? Yet he had been in the United States for four years, since he was only seventeen. In some ways he did seem to think as a progressive American would.
But what American male, she asked herself, would have done for her, or any woman, what he had?
Embarrassed as always by the direction her thoughts seemed to run, she would change the subject, asking Taro to tell her more of his strange homeland, so that daily she was becoming more familiar with the unusual man and his customs.
She learned to remove the funny shoes, the zori slippers, he had provided, really not so different fro
m her huaraches of childhood, before she entered his house in the tabi stocks. And she always made certain the zori toes pointed away from the door. She acquired the taste for the furry green tea and learned the polite ritual of taking the thumb and forefinger to wipe the lip of the teacup when one is finished.
Such a simple custom, yet as she watched Taro perform the rite on her own cup, it seemed a terribly intimate gesture.
Sitting on the wooden slats that bridged the stream, she pondered the irony of the situation. At the Crystal Palace she had watched men nonchalantly slip their hairy paws down the low-cut fronts of the dance-hall girls’ dresses and had felt only repugnance for what she saw. Yet there in the clean simplicity of Taro’s home, she had only to watch the smooth slender fingers trace the rim of a cup and her stomach fluttered with the beating wings of a hundred Japanese nightingales!
Even now her breath seemed trapped in her lungs as her gaze fell on Taro moving up the boulder-cropped path toward her. Behind him plodded the burro that had brought her to the mountain refuge. She rose and went to meet Taro, feeling shy before the man with the memory of her thoughts about him still fresh on her mind.
What would it be like for his hands to touch her in a way that was not impersonal?
She patted the rough, furry hide between the burro's droopy ears. “How was your day?” she asked Taro, noting that the rawhide chests on either side of the burro were full.
“The silver is wearing thin, but I may have found a streak of copper.”
She fell into step beside him as they moved toward the cabin. “Copper? Is it valuable? The men at the Crystal Palace talked of nothing but gold and silver lodes.”
“It will be,” he prophesied. “But maybe not soon enough.”
They removed their shoes and went inside the cabin. Jessie crossed to the wall of staggered shelves to find the tea canister and prepare Taro a cup while he changed into a robe. She had been careful over the weeks to keep her head averted, her hands busy preparing the tea, but sometimes her eyes glimpsed a forbidden flash of gold-sheened, muscled flanks, and her stomach would lurch, as if she were falling.
The late afternoon was her favorite time of day. After the tea, she and Taro would bathe, first him, then herself. Though he no longer performed the intimate task of bathing her, since she was strong enough to do this herself, she still found the bathing a sensual rite.
Afterward they would eat and spend the hours of the evening talking—he perfecting his English, which she thought was as good as or better than hers, and she learning smidgens of Japanese. Sometimes she would help him pack the dynamite blasting caps with black powder. At other times she would simply sit and watch, entranced by his liquid movements, as he sharpened his pick or worked on his hand drill. Occasionally she sewed, one of her first projects his robe that swallowed her despite her tall frame, while he read Cooper’s The Spy or Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—to learn more of his new country, he explained to her.
Taro seated himself now before the kotaku, and she noted how the ebony of his robe enhanced the deep, utter black of his eyes. She set two cups on the table and took her place across from him. From experience she learned that the first few minutes of drinking the tea were reserved for savoring its taste.
After a few moments, Taro spoke to her, his jet gaze without expression. “Your afternoons in the sun have replaced the color in your skin. Now it has the color of a summer peach—the shade it had when first my eyes saw you.”
Her gaze dropped before the intensity of his. “Why did you come each night to my table?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
He put the cup to his mouth, letting the hot liquid flow over the beautifully delineated lips, and she watched, fascinated— fascinated by everything about the man. “You were like a burning bush,” he said finally. “You were alive with color, except for your eyes. But the color inside you radiated, like an aura. Your body spoke to mine, Lotus Woman. And my body grieved when it noted your color was slowly fading, that your body was dying.”
“I have never thanked you for what you did—taking me from that horrible place and . . . making me well.”
“The light and color you bring to my house are enough.”
He rose in a fluid motion and, taking the wild strawberries she had gathered earlier, crossed to the open window where hung the bird feeder. He began to talk as he mashed the berries’ pulp into the feeder. “Within the week I need to return to Tombstone to renew my supplies—and, of course, have the assayer test my ore. Perhaps you would like to go with me?”
Her heart missed a beat, then double-timed to catch up. His back was to her. She could not bring herself to ask the gentle man the one question she wanted to ask. “If you wish me to.”
He turned toward her. His back was to the sun, and she could not see that inscrutable face. “I wish to give you your freedom, Lotus Woman. There are no birdcages in my house, for the bird would never be mine if it were caged.”
And am I yours? Was she reading too much into what he said? Would he think her too forward were she to reveal she dreamed erotic fantasies about him now? “Shall I prepare the bathwater?” she asked instead.
He nodded, and she took the kettle of boiling water that was kept continuously hot from the bed of coals and poured the water into the large tub while Taro brought in more water. This time, however, when the bath was ready, instead of retreating to another part of the room to occupy herself, she said, “You once told me that it was the woman who bathed the man in your country, yet you have not asked this of me. Will you not let me bathe you this time, Taro?”
Silently he studied her. “It has been a long time since a woman performed such a task for me. I would greatly appreciate it.”
She retrieved another kettle of water while he shed the robe and seated himself on the stool. Carefully she poured the steaming water in the tub, then collected the cloth and dampened it. Remembering how he had gone about bathing her, she first washed the broad shoulders, noting the ridges of muscles that were crisscrossed by welts. “The scars—how did you get them?”
“The railroad supervisor was not pleased because I did not bow before him as did the Chinese coolies. Not too long afterward I left the railroad—the Chinese call it the Smoke Dragon,” he added, smiling. “Then I began to work in the mines.”
Her fingernail traced the corduroy line of scars, and she had the satisfaction of feeling his muscles flex beneath her fingertip. She left his back to wash his body precisely as he had washed hers. There was something tantalizing about the clean, smooth skin that covered the rock-hard muscles, the well-formed calves, and the strong line of the feet.
She thought about how reversed was the situation compared to that of the Anglo society. Here she performed the most personal of tasks for a man, and yet a sexual act was never culminated; but from what she had learned in the Crystal Palace, couples engaged in the sexual act and yet never once experienced true intimacy, she was certain.
She began to wash the arms now, not bunched with muscles but ridged in long, sinewy strength. Taro’s lids were closed, and she enjoyed the chance to look upon the purely masculine face of tawny marble, wondering if she would ever have the chance to know the man, his thoughts. His eyes opened to meet hers. He said nothing, and she knew then he did know her thoughts.
Her throat worked, wanting to break the overpowering silence with words. Taro’s fingers came up to rest on her lips. He moved his head in an almost imperceptible negative gesture, and she sensed he was telling her that it was no time for words. Puppet-like, her hands resumed the task of bathing the man. Carefully she kept her gaze averted from his genitals.
With his bath finished, she retired to a corner to discard her blouse and skirt while he donned his robe and prepared her bath. Sitting on the stool with only the robe thrown discreetly about her shoulders, she cleansed away the day’s accumulation of dust and dirt before stepping into the tub to soak, her head resting against the cypress’s edge. Taro did not watch her.
Instead he worked on the primers and drillers that he would use in the mine blasting, but she knew that he was as aware of her as she was of him.
Later, they stretched out on their respective mats, his across the room from hers now that she was well. The candle was extinguished, and only the banked embers cast a faint golden glow over the room.
"Taro,” she whispered.
"Hai?" he answered, reverting to Japanese, as he did more often now.
"The headache—it's bothering me again. Would you massage it away, please?”
"Hai," he said quietly and, moving as silently as the mountain cat, came to kneel at her side.
And his fingers took away the pain and brought the safety of sleep.
CHAPTER 39
Three days Taro had said he would be gone! And this was only the second day! Jessie sighed and resumed mending the robe’s hem where a plank's splinter had torn it. She knew that the isolation was causing her imagination to play tricks on her; yet she could not help but worry.
Would Taro seek out one of the Chinese concubines who she had come to learn existed in Hop Town? Or perhaps worse, would he partake of the pleasures offered by some willing Anglo woman? It was an absurd thought, for in the short time she had worked at the Crystal Palace she had learned that the Anglo prostitutes did not solicit the business of the Orientals . . . at least not openly.
The thought of Taro and another woman led her to ponder that at some time he would naturally take a wife, no doubt a contract bride from the old land. She knew she should leave soon; there was no pretext left for her to stay. The memory of the night before Taro left for Tombstone—the magical touch of his fingers— flooded through her, and she put aside the robe to pace the room in restless agitation.
Outside the summer sun floated lazily just above the orange-tinted mountain humps. In another half hour it would begin its rapid descent. Another lonely night, she thought, standing at the open door to catch any hint of a breeze. And how many more lonely evenings after she left the mountain refuge?
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