All around us wild birds were singing. The upper branches of the high pines were humming in the wind. Crushed beneath my father’s boot, a fieldmouse leaped from the piled leaves like a spurting gray fountain, frightening me for an instant, and ran in a frenzy into the brilliant underbrush alongside the road.
“Are we going to tell about the black man when we get to town?” I asked my father’s broad back.
“Umm?” my father said. “Yes….”
“Will the constable come out from town?”
“There’s no telling, ” my father grunted. “Until the report gets to the prefectural office there’s no telling what will happen.”
“Couldn’t we just go on rearing him in the village? Is he dangerous? You think he is?”
My father rejected me with silence. I felt my surprise and fear of the night before, when the black soldier was led back to the village, reviving in my body. What was he doing in that cellar? The black soldier leaves the cellar, slaughters the people and the hunting dogs in the village and sets fire to the houses. I was so afraid I was trembling, I didn’t want to think about it. I passed my father and ran, panting, down the long slope.
By the time we were on level road again the sun was high. The red earth exposed by small landslides on both sides of the road was raw as blood and glistening in the sun. We walked along with our foreheads bared to the fierce light. Sweat bubbled from the skin on my head, soaked through my cropped hair and ran from my forehead down my cheeks.
When we entered the town I pressed my shoulder against my father’s high hip and marched straight past the provocations of the children in the street. If my father hadn’t been there the children would have jeered at me and thrown stones. I hated the children of the town as I would have hated a species of beetle with a shape I could never feel comfortable with, and I disdained them. Skinny children in the noonday, light flooding the town, with treacherous eyes. If only adult eyes had not been watching me from the rear of dark shops I was confident I could have knocked any one of them down.
The town office was closed for lunch. We worked the pump in the square in front of the office and drank some water, then sat down on wooden chairs beneath a window with hot sun pouring through it and waited a long time. An old official finally finished his lunch and appeared, and when he and my father had spoken together in low voices and stepped into the mayor’s office I carried the weasel pelts over to the small scales lined up behind a reception window. There the skins were counted and entered in an account book with my father’s name. I watched carefully as a nearsighted lady official with thick glasses wrote down the number of skins.
When this job was finished I had no idea what to do. My father was taking forever. So I went looking, my bare feet squishing down the hall like suction cups, one shoe in each hand, for my only acquaintance in the town, a man who frequently carried notices out to our village. We all called this one-legged man “Clerk,” but he did other things as well, such as assisting the doctor when we had our physicals at the school annex in the village.
“Well if it isn’t Frog!” Rising from the chair behind his desk, Clerk shouted, making me just a little angry, but I went over anyway. Since we called him “Clerk,” we couldn’t very well complain about his calling us, the village children, “Frog.” I was happy to have found him.
“So you caught yourselves a black man!” Clerk said, rattling his false leg under the desk.
“Yes….” I said, resting my hands on his desk where his lunch was wrapped in yellowed newspaper.
“That’s really something!”
I wanted to nod grandly at his bloodless lips, like an adult, and talk about the black soldier, but words to explain the huge negro who had been led through the dusk to the village like captured prey I simply couldn’t find.
“Will they shoot him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Clerk gestured with his chin at the mayor’s office. “They’re probably deciding now.”
“Will they bring him to town?” I said
“You look mighty happy the schoolroom is closed,” Clerk said, evading my important question. “The schoolmistress is too lazy to make the trip out there, all she does is complain. She says the village children are dirty and smelly.”
I felt ashamed of the dirt creasing my neck, but I shook my head defiantly and made myself laugh. Clerk’s artificial leg jutting from beneath his desk was twisted awkwardly. I liked to watch him hopping along the mountain road with his good right leg and the artifical leg and just one crutch, but here the artificial leg was weird and treacherous, like the children of the town.
“But what do you care, as long as school is out you have no complaints, right, Frog!” Clerk laughed, his artificial leg rattling again. “You and your pals are better off playing outside than being treated like dirt in a schoolroom!”
“They’re just as dirty,” I said.
It was true, the women teachers were ugly and dirty, all of them; Clerk laughed. My father had come out of the mayor’s office and was calling me quietly. Clerk patted me on the shoulder and I patted him on the arm and ran out.
“Don’t let the prisoner escape, Frog!” he shouted at my back.
“What did they decide to do with him?” I said to my father as we returned through the sunwashed town.
“You think they’re going to take any responsibility!” My father spat out the words as if he were scolding me and said nothing more. Intimidated by my father’s foul humor I walked along in silence, in and out of the shade of the town’s shriveled, ugly trees. Even the trees in the town, like the children in the streets, were treacherous and unfamiliar.
When we came to the bridge at the edge of the town we sat down on the low railing and my father unwrapped our lunch in silence. Struggling to keep myself from asking questions, I extended a slightly dirty hand toward the package on his lap. Still in silence we ate our rice balls.
As we were finishing, a young girl with a neck as refreshing as a bird’s came walking across the bridge. I swiftly considered my own clothes and features and decided I was finer and tougher than any child in the town. I stuck both feet out in front of me, my shoes on, and waited for the girl to pass. Hot blood was singing in my ears. For a brief instant the girl peered at me scowlingly, then she ran off. Suddenly my appetite was gone. I climbed down the narrow stairs at the approach to the bridge and walked to the river for a drink of water. Tall wormwood bushes clustered thickly along the bank. I kicked and tore my way through them to the river’s edge, but the water was a stagnant, dirty brown. It struck me I was a miserable and meager creature.
By the time we had left the road along the ridge, cleared the fir forest, and emerged at the entrance to the village, calves stiffened and faces caked with dust and oil and sweat, evening had covered the valley entirely; in our bodies the heat of the sun lingered and the heavy fog was a relief. I left my father on his way to the village headman’s house to make his report and climbed to the second floor of the storehouse. My brother was sitting on the sleeping platform, fast asleep. I reached out and shook him, feeling the fragile bones in his naked shoulder against my palm. My brother’s skin contracted slightly beneath my hot hand, and from his eyes that suddenly opened fatigue and fear faded.
“How was he?” I said.
“He just slept in the cellar.”
“Were you scared all by yourself?” I said gently.
My brother shook his head, his eyes serious. I opened the wooden shutters just a little and climbed onto the window sill to piss. The fog engulfed me like a living thing and swiftly stole into my nostrils. My urine jumped a great distance, spattering against the cobblestones, and when it struck the bay window that jutted from the first floor it rebounded and warmly wet the tops of my feet and my goosepimpled thighs. My brother, his head pressed against my side like a baby animal, observed intently.
We remained in that position for a while. Small yawns rose from our narrow throats, and with each yawn we cried just a few transparent, mean
ingless tears.
“Did Harelip get to see him?” I said to my brother as he helped me close the wooden shutters, the slender muscles in his shoulders knotting.
“Kids get yelled at if they go to the square,” he said with chagrin. “Are they coming from town to take him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Downstairs, my father and the lady from the general store came in talking in loud voices. The lady from the general store was insisting that she couldn’t carry the food for the black soldier down to the cellar. That’s no job for a woman, your son should be a help! I finished removing my shoes and straightened up. My brother’s soft palm was pressed against my hip. Biting my lip, I waited for my father’s voice.
“Come down here!” When I heard my father shout I threw my shoes under the sleeping platform and ran down the stairs.
With the butt of his hunting gun my father pointed to the basket of food the woman had left on the dirt floor. I nodded, and lifted the basket carefully. In silence we left the storehouse and walked through the chill fog. The cobblestones underfoot retained the warmth of day. At the side of the storehouse no adult was standing guard. I saw the pale light leaking through the narrow cellar window and felt fatigue break out all over my body. Yet my teeth were chattering with excitement at this first opportunity to see the black man close up.
The imposing padlock on the cellar door was dripping wet; my father unlocked it and peered inside, then carefully, his gun ready, went down alone. I squatted at the entrance, waiting, and air wet with fog fastened to the back of my neck. In front of the countless eyes hovering behind and peering at me I was ashamed of the trembling in my brown, sturdy legs.
“C’mon,” said my father’s muffled voice.
Holding the foodbasket against my chest, I went down the short steps. The catch was crouching in the dim light of a naked bulb. The thick chain of a boar-trap connecting his black leg and a pillar drew and locked my gaze.
Arms clasped around his knees and his chin resting even further down on his long legs, the catch looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, sticky eyes that wrapped themselves around me. All the blood in my body rushed toward my ears, heating my face. I turned away and looked up at my father, who was leaning against the wall with his gun pointed at the black soldier. My father motioned at me with his chin. With my eyes almost closed I stepped forward and placed the basket of food in front of the black soldier. As I stepped back, my insides shuddered with sudden fear and I had to fight my nausea down. At the basket of food the black soldier stared, my father stared, I stared. A dog barked in the distance. Beyond the narrow skylight window the dark square was hushed.
Suddenly the food basket began to interest me, I was seeing the food through the black soldier’s starved eyes. Several large rice balls, dried fish with the fat broiled away, stewed vegetables, goat’s milk in a cut-glass bottle. Without unfolding from his crouch, still hugging his knees, the black soldier continued to stare at the food basket for a long time until finally I began to feel hunger pangs myself. It occurred to me the black soldier might disdain the meager supper we provided, and disdain us, and refuse to touch the food. Shame assaulted me. If the black soldier showed no intention of eating, my shame would infect my father, adult’s shame would drive my father to desperation and violence, the whole village would be torn apart by adults pale with shame. What a terrible idea it had been to feed the black soldier!
But all of a sudden he extended an unbelievably long arm, lifted the wide-mouthed bottle in thick fingers covered with bristly hair, drew it to himself, and smelled it. Then the bottle was tipped, the black soldier’s thick, rubbery lips opened, large white teeth neatly aligned like parts inside a machine were exposed, and I saw milk flowing back into a vast, pink, glistening mouth. The black soldier’s throat made a noise like water and air entering a drain, from the corners of his swollen lips like overripe fruit that had been bound with string the thick milk spilled, ran down his bare neck, soaked his open shirt and chest, and coagulated like fat on his tough, darkly gleaming skin, trembling there. I discovered, my own lips drying with excitement, that goat’s milk was a beautiful liquid.
With a harsh clanking the black soldier returned the glass bottle to the basket. Now his original hesitation was gone. The rice balls looked like small cakes as he rolled them in his giant hands; the dried fish, head bones and all, was crushed between his gleaming teeth. Standing alongside my father with my back against the wall, buffeted by admiration, I observed the black soldier’s powerful chewing. Since he was engrossed in his meal and paid no attention to us, I had the opportunity, even as I fought the pangs in my own empty stomach, to observe the adults’ catch in suffocating detail. And what a wonderful catch he was!
The black soldier’s short, curly hair tightened into small cowlicks here and there on his well-shaped skull, and just above his ears, which were pointed like a wolf’s, turned a smoldering gray. The skin from his throat to his chest was lit from inside with a somber, purple light; every time he turned his head and supple creases appeared in his thick, oily neck, I felt my heart leap. And there was the odor of his body, pervading with the persistence of nausea rising into the throat, permeating all things like a corrosive poison, an odor that flushed my cheeks and flashed before my eyes like madness.… As I watched the black soldier feeding ravenously, my eyes hot and watery as though infected, the crude food in the basket was transformed into a fragrant, rich, exotic feast. If even a morsel had remained when I lifted the basket I would have seized it with fingers that trembled with secret pleasure and wolfed it down. But the black soldier finished every bit of food and then wiped the dish of vegetables clean with his fingers.
My father poked me in the side and, trembling with shame and outrage, as if I had been aroused from a lewd daydream, I walked over to the black soldier and lifted the basket. Protected by the muzzle of my father’s gun I turned my back to the black soldier and was starting up the steps when I heard his low, rich cough. I stumbled, and felt fear goosepimple the skin all over my body.
At the top of the stairs to the second floor of the storehouse a dark, distorting mirror swayed in the hollow of a pillar; as I climbed the stairs a totally insignificant Japanese boy with twitching cheeks and pale, bloodless lips on which he chewed rose gradually out of the dimness. My arms hung limply and I felt almost ready to cry. I fought a beaten, tearful feeling as I opened the rain shutters that someone had closed at some point in the day.
My brother, eyes flashing, was sitting on the sleeping platform. His eyes were hot, and a little dry with fear.
“You closed the rain shutters, didn’t you!” I said, sneering to hide the trembling of my own lips.
“Yes—” Ashamed of his timidness my brother lowered his eyes. “How was he?”
“He smells terrible,” I said, sinking in fatigue. Truly I was exhausted, and I felt wretched. The trip to the town, the black soldier’s supper—after the long day’s work my body was as heavy as a sponge soaked with fatigue. Taking off my shirt, which was covered with dried leaves and burrs, I bent over to wipe my dirty feet with a rag, a demonstration for my brother’s sake that I had no desire to accept further questions. My brother observed me worriedly, his lips pursed. I crawled in next to him and burrowed under our blanket with its smell of sweat and small animals. My brother sat there watching me, his knees together and pressing against my shoulder, not asking any more questions. It was just as he sat when I was sick with fever, and I too, just as when I was sick with fever, longed only to sleep.
When I woke up late the next morning I heard the noise of a crowd coming from the square alongside the storehouse. My brother and father were gone. I looked up at the wall and saw that the hunting gun was not there. As I listened to the clamor and stared at the empty gun rack my heart began to pound. I sprang out of bed, grabbed my shirt, and ran down the stairs.
Adults were crowded into the square, and the dirty faces of the children looking up at them were tight with uneasiness. Apart fr
om everyone, Harelip and my brother were squatting next to the cellar window. They’ve been watching! I thought to myself angrily, and was running toward them when I saw Clerk emerge, head lowered, lightly supporting himself on his crutch, from the cellar entrance. Violent, dark exhaustion and landsliding disappointment buried me. But what followed Clerk was not the dead body of the black soldier but my father, his gun on his shoulder and the barrel still in its bag, talking quietly with the village headman. I breathed a sigh, and sweat hot as boiling water steamed down my sides and the insides of my thighs.
“Take a look!” Harelip shouted at me as I stood there. “Go on!”
I got down on all fours on the hot cobblestones and peered in through the narrow skylight window that was just at ground level. At the bottom of the lake of darkness the black soldier lay slumped on the floor like a domestic animal that had been pummeled senseless.
“Did they beat him?” I said to Harelip, my body trembling with anger as I straightened. “Did they beat him when he had his feet tied and couldn’t move?” I shouted.
“What?” In order to repel my anger Harelip had readied himself for a fight, his face taut, his lip thrust out.
“Who?”
“The adults!” I shouted. “Did they beat him?”
“They didn’t have to beat him,” Harelip said regretfully. “All they did was go in and look. Just looking at him did that!”
Anger faded. I shook my head vaguely. My brother was peering at me.
“It’s all right,” I said to my brother.
One of the village children stepped around us and tried to look through the skylight window but Harelip kicked him in the side and he screamed. Harelip had already reserved the right to decide who should look at the black soldier through the skylight. And he was keeping a nervous watch on those who would usurp his right.