Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  Ichiro worked the towel beneath Ned’s fingers and he and Kyuzo each took an elbow, pulling Ned up. They followed Manjiro and Ace out of the bar street, then cut between two buildings and onto the forest path at the bottom of the hill, carrying Ned up a switchback trail.

  At a clearing near the castle they stopped to rest, subduing their heavy breathing, until only Ned could be heard above the whisper of the wind that had come up.

  He was freely crying by then, and kneeling before the others with his eyes open, staring over his own laced fingers and the lumpy mound of towel.

  27.

  Twenty Questions

  TSUNE AND HER NIECES had not gone to bed early that night and were in a first floor room playing word games. Masako was “it” and had chosen a word that began with a certain Chinese character containing seven brushstrokes which, when put together with another seven-stroke character, depicted an embarrassing situation. Tsune and Keiko were irritated by the vagueness of Masako’s hints but were asking questions anyway, for if they failed to guess the word in twenty tries they would have to take their hair down and walk out onto the castle grounds under the chilly April rain that had just come up. That was the punishment Masako had endured when she lost the last game, and she still looked bedraggled.

  A scratching sound had been coming from outside the castle for quite a while and Masako said it was made by the ghost of the first Lord Okubo, who, everyone knew, sometimes haunted the family during rainstorms. The first Lord Okubo had died, legend had it, during the longest drought in Japanese history, and therefore liked to walk around the castle with his head turned up and his mouth open. Masako reminded Keiko that they had seen him once when they were younger, and that he was not likely to remove Keiko from the list of those he would haunt simply because she now considered herself an adult.

  “He wouldn’t bother us in normal weather,” she admitted, “but he’ll find you and scare that haughty attitude of yours out of you if you’re out tonight.”

  Keiko and Tsune were exchanging glances. They had only one remaining guess in the current game and what they were telling each other was that they would accuse Masako of cheating if they guessed wrong. They would say her hints were misleading or that the word didn’t have enough of the sense of embarrassment to it, or simply that it was time for bed. In any event both of them had decided not to go outside in the rain.

  “But what is that scratching?” Tsune asked. “Really, there isn’t a tree, is there, that could reach this high up the castle wall? I think you should go look, Masako. Perhaps the first Lord Okubo’s ghost is standing on stilts at the window with the answer to your question, and if that’s the case it would be fruitless for Keiko or me to go for we wouldn’t know whether his answer was right or wrong.”

  “I’m not stupid, Auntie,” Masako said, but the issue of the scratching had taken hold of her imagination. So while the others pretended to discuss what her word might be, she walked to the edge of the room to listen. The windows on the castle’s upper floors were only wide enough to shoot an arrow out of, but in a recent remodeling some of those on this first floor had been widened to provide a better view and better ventilation. When Masako opened this one, however, she discovered that it was still shuttered from the outside. They had all arrived in such a deep depression over Manjiro that no one had thought to properly air the place out.

  “I’m not stupid, but I am tired of waiting for you two,” she said, “so I think I will go out for just a second. And when I come back I’ll want your last guess with no excuses. Don’t say I’m cheating or I’ll scream and wake up everyone.”

  The castle had wide hallways on the first floor and when Masako stepped out of the room Tsune and Keiko jumped up like cats to follow her. If they could catch her walking far enough away from the main door they might sneak after her and hide, yelling like the first Lord Okubo’s ghost when she came back past them. Keiko knew that normally she had to be careful with tricks at this time of night, but with her aunt in on it, even in their state of grief, she was prepared to be more daring than normal.

  Masako had gone quickly through the hallway because she was afraid of its echo. She unbolted the main door and took an umbrella and stepped into waiting geta. And just as her aunt and sister hoped she might, she left the door open, oblivious to the wind and rain that came inside. As soon as she walked down the stone staircase and around the bend of the castle wall, Tsune and Keiko took the single remaining umbrella and followed her, smiling like devils and leaning into each other.

  “We shouldn’t frighten her too severely,” warned Keiko. “It won’t be worth it if we wake Grandfather up.”

  When Masako got to the first set of shutters, which were more than thirty feet above her, she was no longer sure that they were the right ones. And in any case there was nothing next to the shutters that could make such a scratching noise, so she soon walked on.

  “Oh, first Lord Okubo, are you haunting us now?” she called, on the off chance that she had been followed.

  Tsune and Keiko stifled their giggles, and pressed themselves against the wall.

  But the next set of shutters was such a long way off that before Masako got halfway to them, she turned back. She stopped and listened, to see if she could still hear the scratching, and what she heard instead was an actual human voice.

  “Do not be frightened, Masako,” it said.

  “Ayai!” she gasped, leaping and dropping her umbrella.

  It was a man’s voice, so not a trick played on her by her aunt or sister. At least that’s what she thought until her aunt and sister suddenly appeared behind her, themselves surprised to see her stopped, halfway between the two sets of windows, her umbrella pitching toward them like a pinwheel. Tsune expertly caught it up.

  “You devils!” Masako cried, but the man’s voice said, “Please, all of you, listen. Do not shout again and do not run away. This is an emergency!”

  “Who’s there?” asked Keiko. “Who have you got with you, Masako?” But Tsune passed both umbrellas over to her elder niece, stepped out into the rain and said most seriously, “Is that you, Manjiro?”

  He was in the very clearing that Einosuke had chosen for his garden, standing within its thin rope cordon. Tsune pulled the bottom of her kimono up, and stepped over the string. She touched Manjiro’s arm and held his gaze until the moonlight came into his eyes, telling her he was unharmed.

  “Where are they?” she whispered. “Has something gone wrong?”

  “There has been an accident,” said Manjiro. “One of them is bleeding in the marsh.”

  To him it seemed a terrible thing to have to say, an admission of defeat that reflected back to all the other mistakes he had made. But he spoke without emotion, trying to remember how much better off he was than Ned.

  “We need bandages and medicine and blankets. We need a doctor and we need fire, something with which to cauterize a most horrific wound. We need food and changes of clothing for five…”

  The girls had come forward but stayed on the other side of the cordon.

  “I want to talk to Einosuke if he’ll allow it,” Manjiro said. He turned as he spoke, as if expecting Ueno’s soldiers to come riding up the main road from town. But nothing was visible anywhere save the rain and the darkness through which it fell.

  “It would be better if you brought them here, easier than for us to try to carry everything down to the marsh,” said Tsune. “And leave Einosuke alone for the moment. Why don’t you speak directly to your father?”

  Tsune knew as well as Manjiro did that in the end Einosuke would help him, but she also knew that he would do so only after using precious time, to brood and think things over. And she had seen a change in Lord Okubo since her arrival from Edo, some fundamental alteration in his perception.

  “My father is a repeater of edicts,” Manjiro said, surprised by his own returning bitterness. He looked beyond Tsune at his nieces but did not apologize.

  “Yes, well, I have often thought so of
all such lords,” said Tsune. “But why don’t you try him anyway? I have an intuition.”

  Manjiro well remembered their visit to the Barbarian Book Room and to the Pavilion of Timelessness, how she had jeopardized their chance for a happy marriage with her intuition before. Still, though only a moment earlier he would not have considered waking his father for anything, because the words suggesting it had come from Tsune’s precious mouth, it now seemed entirely right.

  “He is no doubt sleeping,” he said.

  “He is but I will wake him,” said Tsune. “You, in the meantime, bring your companions to the stable and the girls will set about finding what you need.”

  She turned and said, “Won’t you girls?” and her nieces nodded.

  So it was that, though they had gone outside in search of frivolous games, all three women reentered the castle with a new and serious purpose. Masako said she knew where they kept the medical supplies, and Keiko that in a room on the casde’s third floor there were endless stacks of old kimono. Both girls hurried off, lest the frightful task of waking their grandfather somehow fall to them instead of Tsune.

  When they were gone Tsune walked up the flights of castle stairs slowly, not out of fear but out of wondering how it would be to see Kyuzo and Manjiro together again.

  At the top of each flight she stopped and looked through the narrow window slits at the rain and the far off ocean with its broad expanse of darkness. On its surface she thought she could see ships, perhaps the Americans passing on their way to Shimoda, and directly below her, at the entrance to the stables, she saw more clearly the figures of five men.

  After that she went faster up the stairs, choosing correctly, without having seen it before, Lord Okubo’s room.

  28.

  Allergic to Pain

  THOUGH LORD OKUBO hadn’t heard any of the outside goings-on, he was not asleep, for the cuts he had made on his abdomen were inflamed, itching like the nervous rash that had plagued him as a child. He was, in fact, sitting by a candle in a loincloth, examining those cuts, when Tsune came in and told him her news.

  He dressed and followed her out into the hall, several times glancing over to make sure the door to that golden inner room was closed. On the ground floor he woke a guard, sending him for the castle physician, and when he passed down the long stone stairway he thought of the late night rain as a pleasant accompaniment to the unexpected cheerfulness that rose from his bosom the moment Tsune mentioned Manjiro’s name. It was extraordinary, for wasn’t it only yesterday that he had been so ashamed of that name that he’d nearly taken his life? Yet now he hurried across the castle grounds to do what he could to help. Tsune’s intuition, it seemed, had been right.

  Lord Okubo pushed open the stable doors with the kind of authority he had not felt in years, as if the spirit of Kambei had somehow alighted, not so much upon Manjiro, as on himself.

  “What misfortune befalls you this time?” he asked, but Manjiro was in the background and what he saw before him was difficult. Three strangers, two poorly dressed warriors and one of the foreign musicians, stood beside a sight both strange and humbling, touching and repulsive at the same time. The second foreigner reclined on a bed of hay, his legs bent under him like those of a newly born foal. He had uncovered his wound only seconds earlier, relinquishing, as a kind of first experiment, the pressure of the towel. When he heard Lord Okubo’s voice he said, “It still don’t hurt at all. I seem to be allergic to pain.”

  Indeed, the serious bleeding had stopped, leaving only a slow bubble coming from the middle of his face, like one might find on the surface of a stew pot on a low boil. Lord Okubo came closer, and when he put his hand out the foreigner took it, pulling him down next to him in the straw. Tsune knelt too, peering at Ned with sympathetic eyes, and when the castle physician came hurrying in, only a minute behind them, Manjiro stepped out of the darkness. The physician was as old as Lord Okubo and had feared his liege had had a heart attack or a stroke. He didn’t hesitate, though, when he saw Ned’s face.

  “Someone light a fire,” he said, “and someone else bring the detached appendage. The wound looks clean, so maybe if we hold it in place long enough it will remember its allegiance and grow back.”

  Lord Okubo glanced at Manjiro but now his eyes were hesitant. His son was harder to look at than the foreigner’s ravaged face.

  “Alas, the nose is gone,” said Kyuzo, “taken, as a prize, I’m sorry to say, by the villain who cut it off.”

  “Well, then, has someone seen to the clearing of his air passages, to extracting the blood and mucus so he won’t drown?”

  No one had seen to anything and when Kyuzo said so, the physician reached out to turn Ned’s face in the dim light.

  In the corner of the stable farthest from the horses Ichiro had found a small pit and started a fire. And when he came back the physician gave him several tools to sterilize: a steel prong, old and dark from repeated bluings, two long knives, and something that looked like a pair of garden scissors. When Ned said, “What’s the use of them devices?” Lord Okubo listened with all his heart, as if he, and not his son, could interpret the foreign tongue.

  “First I need to know what blockage there is,” the physician explained. “After that I’ll clear the nostrils, if we can call them that now, and then I’ll cut away the bits of excess flesh. Finally, I want to sear the entire wound, and douse it with my healing powder.”

  “Will it hurt?” Lord Okubo asked. “Should we hold him down like we would a wounded pig or a foaling mare?”

  “Well, at least he’s got to keep his head still,” the physician said.

  Ned’s head was anything but still, as he turned it between the physician and Lord Okubo, but when the physician approached him again he did seem to try to cooperate. He closed his mouth, which had been gulping at the stable’s stale air, and even found the courage to blow a little of the carnage from the front of his face, like a whale.

  “Good job,” said the physician. “Now don’t move young man, let me see what’s left inside to take away.”

  There was an oil lamp by the door, which Kyuzo picked up and held as close to Ned as he dared. In the meantime Ichiro had brought the sterilized tools back from the fire, setting them quietly on a blue ceramic plate, the last of the items pulled from the physician’s bundle. When the physician touched him Ned clenched his jaw, but the man’s touch was light. He removed whatever blockage there was with easy, graceful movements, then picked up the scissors from the plate.

  All this time Tsune had stayed behind Lord Okubo, steadily watching everything, but when Masako called her, from just outside the stable door, she nearly fell forward onto the old lord’s back. She didn’t want to leave again, for the presence of her lover and her prospective husband really did seem to keep her in balance, and she hoped the guards would have enough sense to keep the girls away. But despite her hope the stable door opened and the heads of both her nieces appeared in it, one above the other, their eyes as bright as candles. They had gained a clear view of Ned, who said, “This ain’t no carnival show.”

  The girls were quiet for such a long time that Tsune thought their reactions might be like the American’s pain, and simply not come. But when she stood to get the clothing they had brought, both girls finally did open their mouths, leaking out a sound that rose in two falsetto screeches, reaching a horrible crescendo, like barn owls fighting over the remains of a field mouse. Ned flinched when he heard them, and tried to jump up. Ace and Kyuzo were strong enough to keep him from standing, but they couldn’t make his head stay still, so Ichiro fell upon him, too, locking his arms around his forehead and throat. Tears sprung from Ned’s eyes and the hole in his face began to bleed again and he looked wildly about. The two girls ran back out of the stables, but their screams had so unhinged the physician that he was now afraid to use that smoldering prong. First he feared it was too hot, then he couldn’t find the steadiness of hand to burn the wounded part of the Ned’s face without burning the rest o
f it. On his first approach he touched Ned’s cheek. On his second he burned one of Ichiro’s arms.

  “Give me that thing!” said Lord Okubo. “What kind of way is that to act in a crisis? Put your hands in your lap and tell me what to do, we mustn’t be defeated by the fears of a couple of girls!”

  The strength of the old lord’s command not only worked to good effect on the physician, but on everyone else as well. The physician sat down, Ace and Kyuzo held Ned more calmly, and when Ichiro loosened his grip on his forehead Ned stopped thrashing, once more understanding that the best thing he could do for himself was hold still.

  “Now tell me how to proceed,” said Lord Okubo. “And you, Manjiro, make yourself useful by speaking English. Soothe this wretched fellow.”

  It was the first time he had spoken to his son since Keiko’s dance recital.

  “Without blocking his nostrils, burn everything lightly,” said the physician. “Let the prong rest on each bloody place for a second and then move on.”

  Lord Okubo held up the instrument, showing it very deliberately to Ned. “It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he said.

  “That’s my father speaking now,” said Manjiro. “He will touch your wound only once, in order to make the bleeding slow down.”

  Maybe Ned had forgotten about Manjiro’s English, for as soon as he heard it he jumped again, and looked away, toward the stable’s far wall. But when he turned his face back again it came against the side of Lord Okubo’s prong. There was a hissing sound, slight, as promised, like meat when it first hits a pan. And as quickly as that the prong was gone.

  “Good,” said the physician, “that’s a third of it already.”

  “That didn’t hurt either,” said Ned, and Lord Okubo burned him twice more.

  “Now the cleanser,” said the physician. “In that bottle next to you. Dab the wound with it and try not to push anything back into those blow holes.”