She gave an unbelieving huff. “Amazing that your head was so clear as to think of it, being in such pain.”
“Oh, by that time you’d set my leg nicely. I wasn’t in much pain.”
Leda took a breath. “I fear you must live with sadly credulous people, Mr. Gerard.”
“They’re the finest friends on earth.” He looked at her with a straight, cool challenge, as if inviting her to contradict him.
She dropped her eyes. “You’re very fortunate, then. I really must go now.”
“As your new employer, Miss Etoile, I really must ask you to stay.”
Her back stiffened. “Mr. Gerard, this is a highly inappropriate time and place to conduct business. I must ask you to excuse me.”
“I can see why you were dismissed from your position, Miss Etoile, if arguing with your first instruction is any indication of the way you mean to go on.”
“I was not dismissed. I resigned.”
“Why?”
“That’s none of your affair.”
“I’ve just hired you. It seems to me to be emphatically my affair.”
“Very well. Madame Elise wished me to assume duties which were—impossible for me to perform.”
“What duties were those?”
Leda simply stared at him in silence.
He held her stubborn gaze, but after a moment a certain consciousness came into his face; he looked down and ran his palm over the sheet again. Leda felt herself turning scarlet.
“May I now be dismissed, Mr. Gerard?”
He rubbed a fold of sheet between his thumb and forefinger. “Are you afraid of me?” he asked in a low voice.
Leda hardly knew what she was. Her fingers seemed to have no capacity in them but to hold onto the doorknob. “Do I have reason to be?” she asked shakily.
“You’re extremely eager to leave.” There was a note of dryness in his words, but still he didn’t look up.
“This is a highly improper situation. I don’t know what manners may be in your part of the world, but here—for a lady to be in a gentleman’s…bedroom…” She moistened her lips. “It is not decent. The servants will talk”
He gave a moody chuckle. “Surely the servants won’t think I’m capable of violating your virtue in my present case.”
“Then they clearly don’t know you very well, do they?” she said stiffly. “I am better informed.”
Her hand tightened on the knob in expectation of a mocking reply, but instead she was startled to see a dark flush of blood rise in his face as he stared down at his fist. “I beg your pardon for that,” he said. “And for detaining you in a compromising situation, if that’s what this is. You can go.”
He looked up at her directly, and for an instant it hung between them, the image of him watching her in her own room while she dressed. Leda felt all her skin grow hot with mortification. His mouth seemed tense with some unspoken emotion, and she suddenly felt that she was precariously too close to him.
“Good night,” she said, pulling open the door.
“Good night. I’ll see you in the library at nine o’clock tomorrow, Miss Etoile, if that meets with your standards for proper conduct.”
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Leda pointed out.
His mouth twisted. “Of course. And I suppose you demand the week free for the festivities?”
“Certainly not,” she said. “Nine o’clock Monday will be perfectly appropriate. Good night, sir.” Without waiting for an answer, she closed the door firmly.
Twelve
Chikai
Hawaii, 1874
Samuel dreamed about women. He dreamed about them almost every night, something that seemed so shameful to him that he never said anything about it to anyone.
He tried to stop doing it, but he couldn’t. In the day time he could bend his mind to study, or train in Dojun’s demanding games: drive himself to the limits of his strength and balance until he was good enough to tumble head first off the upper ledges at the top of Diamond Head and land on his feet amid dry brush and talus fifteen feet below. But at night he could fall asleep reciting Bible verses to himself, or practicing Dojun’s ways of breathing, or reading Around the World in Eighty Days, and still he dreamed of things that made his face burn when he thought of them; made him hot and miserable and horrified at what was inside of him.
He didn’t have any friends at school. He didn’t want any friends; he much preferred going home to watch over Kai, amusing her until supper was over, when Dojun came to him in their private place and they began the rough exercises, the stretches, the bruising falls and rolls and leaps that gradually grew better; grew quicker and softer and easier; grew into something as natural as answering a question when one knew the solution well.
After a year, when Samuel could fall twenty times from the monkey pod tree in the garden and come up ready to climb it again, Dojun left his place as butler for Lady Tess and Lord Gryphon. He went to live in a small house far up on a knee of Mount Tantalus, where the ferns were like trees and the moths were as big as Samuel’s hand. From Dojun’s lanai, Samuel could see all the way from diamond Head to Pearl Harbor. The gray-green sweep of the kukui-nut forest hid the city below; Tantalus was like an earth-scented heaven where the mists drifted in and out and triple rainbows formed above the shoreline and the constant horizon of the sea.
Dojun became a carpenter. He built furniture of koa, running his hands over the smooth wood, the light and dark, the infinite grading from golden blond to chocolate brown, from straight grain to figured—the best was the deep reddish-brown fiddleback grain: the prized “curly” koa—and after school each day Samuel carried endless board feet of it up the mountain on his shoulder for Dojun to work.
Dojun taught him how to use his hands, delicately, shaping the splayed curve of a table’s legs in the same way Samuel was learning shúji, to draw the bewildering system of Japanese and Chinese characters, using his spirit and his body—making a simple, beautiful line that fit together into a koa-wood stand that looked to Samuel like calligraphy itself. Dojun snorted and said that with writing, Samuel had no art—that was shodō, a mastery far beyond Samuel’s clumsy efforts, something that a man might devote his whole life to. But when Dojun looked at the woodwork, he criticized and made curt suggestions for improvement, so Samuel thought he was doing very well, and loved the smell of sawed wood and oiled metal.
Samuel made his wood scraps into blocks, carving them in to fanciful shapes of birds and flowers, and took them home for Kai. At five—almost six, as she insisted—she found them moderately amusing for a quarter hour, and then wanted him to ride her on her pony and watch her dive in the fish pond.
When he finished the koa stand, he wrapped it carefully in burlap, carried it down the mountain, and gave it to Lady Tess. She put it in her bedroom, right beside her bed, with the rock on it he’d brought from Diamond Head, which looked very silly and homely to him now that he was older.
At school, he was on the blue team. Both the teams wanted him, because he was one of the bigger boys in his class, stronger and more nimble than most, and had more wind than any of them. In one skirmish a boy from blue tripped and fell across Samuel’s legs. He sent himself into an easy roll and came up in a crowd of reds, who fell onto him from all sides. He lay face-down at the bottom of the pile, catching his breath as they got off of him one by one.
The bell rang, and everyone ran except the last boy, who didn’t get up off Samuel’s back, but lay there heavily, breathing in his ear.
Samuel froze.
He felt for a moment as if the real world had vanished; it all went to black; all he heard was an awful sound and then he was sitting on his knees in the long grass, shaking, staring at the other boy and panting viciously.
“Damn—what’s the matter with you?” the red boy yelled, picking himself up clumsily. “You knocked me galley-west, you loonie! I ought a make you eat spit.”
Samuel just stared at him. He was afraid he was going to be sick, so he only swall
owed and didn’t say anything.
“Apologize!” the other boy demanded, standing over him.
Samuel’s hand trembled beneath him as he shoved himself to his feet. He was taller than the red boy, heavier, but there was something close to a sob stuck in the back of his throat. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“What?” The boy stood with his hands on his hips.
“I’m sorry!” Samuel shouted.
The boy grinned. “All right” He reached out to shake hands. Samuel didn’t move, and the boy took him around the shoulders, heading toward the school building. Samuel endured the sweaty embrace for half a step, and then pushed him away, sitting down and putting his face in his crossed arms.
One of the teachers was shouting at them. Samuel heard the other boy hesitate, and then run toward the building. When he came back, the teacher came too, and asked if Samuel was feeling well.
He took a deep breath, stood up, and said, “Yes, sir.”
The teacher put his hand on Samuel’s forehead. “You’re a little clammy. Sit outside in the shade for a few minutes—Wilson, go bring us a dipper of water.”
Samuel moved back, not wanting to be touched. “I’m all right,” he said. “I want to go in.” He forgot to say “sir.” He walked past them both and inside the building, sitting down at his desk. Everyone was looking at him curiously, all their white shirts like pale moths in the dark fern-forest shadiness of the classroom.
When he went up Tantalus that afternoon, he was still shaking. He couldn’t hold his hands steady with the wood.
“Sick, you?” Dojun demanded in pidgin.
Samuel retrieved the nomi chisel that he’d dropped. He wanted to tell Dojun, but he was so ashamed. He never wanted Dojun to know what his old life had been, and there were no words to explain what had happened to him on the school field.
“No, Dojun-san,” he said. “I feel fine.”
Dojun took the nomi from his hand. “You lie me, Samua-chan,” he said. “All sick not body.”
The way he said it; the word he used with Samuel’s name—it was like so many Japanese words, a thousand meanings in one sound—I love you; I’m stronger, wiser, older; I’ll take care of you, Samua-chan.
“I’m afraid,” Samuel said, staring down at the workbench. “I don’t want to go back to school.”
Dojun turned the nomi and sat down, starting to work on the joining of a chair leg. “For why ’fraid?”
Samuel clenched his empty hands and took a deep breath. “I don’t like the other boys.” he said, more strongly.
“Fight you?”
He wished they had fought him. He’d like to kill them all, especially the red boy who’d lain on top of him and didn’t get up, blowing hot breath against his ear. He thought, for the first time in a long, long time, of the shark and the song, of dark water full of blood. Dojun had never mentioned the songs again, and Samuel had given up waiting to hear, and then forgotten them, but now when he thought of it he knew that Dojun had been teaching him any way, showing him how to sing songs without words; with his body and his hands and his head.
“No, Dojun-san,” he muttered. “I didn’t fight.”
“Come here.”
Samuel lifted his head and went to stand by the stool where Dojun worked. Dojun laid the nomi aside, carefully swept some tiny curls of wood into the shavings box. He stood up—and smashed his open palm across Samuel’s face.
Samuel reeled back under the force of it. He hit the workbench, grabbed it with his hands and then twisted away as Dojun moved again. Samuel shied behind the bench, staring at Dojun, his body pushing back against the corner between a half-finished tansu chest and the wall.
Through the blaze of tears he couldn’t even see Dojun as more than a glimmering shadow among shadows. His face stung. It didn’t hurt so badly; there were a hundred of Dojun’s exercises that had hurt more, but still his body trembled and he flinched uncontrollably when the smeared shape in his vision moved.
Dojun. Dojun had hit him. The betrayal of it seemed so huge that Samuel couldn’t think; could only hold him self up against the wall like a fractured doll, clinging to a wooden prop.
Dojun took a step toward him, and Samuel winced again. It felt as if something crucial had collapsed inside him, crumpled in on itself and liquefied and went sliding away, taking what he had of himself with it, leaving a hollow shell that stood there backed in a corner, trembling.
He saw it all as if he were standing outside, looking in, watching it happen. He saw the tears begin to slide down his own face, splash down from his chin to his shirt and make dark spots of moisture.
Dojun stood still. He didn’t come any closer. The Samuel who watched had a feeling that Dojun was surprised, though nothing on his face showed it. The empty shell Samuel just stood there, weeping.
“Samua-san,” Dojun said, and Samuel flinched.
Dojun watched him another moment, then went back and sat down on his stool. He adjusted a board in the vise, picked up the azebiki-noko, and began to saw a crosscut.
“I’ll tell you a story,” he said in Japanese. “This is a story all Japanese boys know, but maybe foreign boys don’t know it. You should hear it now. It’s about the pupil who wants to learn to fight with the sword, so he goes looking for the greatest master who is alive. He follows rumors, and travels into the wild mountains, until he finds a shrine, and beyond that, the hut of a ramshackle hermit. This hermit is the master, a fighter of unequaled skill.”
Dojun finished the cut and took the board from the vise, laying it out and measuring it. His. hand moved up and down the wood once, caressing it, as a man would touch the neck of a favorite horse.
He spoke again. “‘I’m here to study the sword!’” He imitated the grand way the pupil announced his plans to the hermit with a sweep of his arms. “‘How long will it take me to master it?’ The hermit went on with sweeping the floor of his hut. ‘Ten years,’ the hermit said. The pupil was dismayed. “But what if I study hard and work twice as much?’ ‘Twenty years,’ the master said.”
Dojun spread a cloth across his lap. With the nomi, he began working to shape another chair joint. He didn’t lookup from his hands as he spoke.
“The pupil decided not to argue, but asked to be taken on as a student. When the master put his new pupil to work, it was only to chop wood and clean and cook, so many chores that lasted all day and half the night. There was no time for any training with the sword. The pupil never touched a sword, and after a year he grew impatient. ‘Master,’ he demanded, ‘when do we start training? Am I nothing but a slave for you?’
“But the master just ignored him, and the pupil went on with his chores, though he grew more frustrated everyday. He was washing clothes one afternoon, thinking about leaving this crazy old man, when a blow from a huge stick sent him staggering. He lay on the ground in a daze, looking up at the master above him. ‘Sir,’ he cried. ‘I was only washing your clothes! I do a good job. Why’d you hit me?’ But the master only walked away. The pupil couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, but he determined to do better.
“The next day he was chopping wood diligently, when the master struck again, sending him flat on the ground with the blow. ‘What’s wrong?’ the student yelled. ‘Why are you punishing me?’ The master only looked at him in silence, with no sign of anger. The student thought again about leaving. This old man was nuts. The student began to watch out for him, and the next time, when the blow came, the student managed to scramble out of the way. He fell down into a ravine doing it, but he managed to escape.
“After that the attacks began to be more frequent, and the student got better at avoiding them, and finally he began to understand what was going on. But it didn’t get any easier. The better the pupil got at avoiding his master’s bokken, the more often and unexpectedly the master attacked. He came after the student when he was sleeping, and when he was bathing, and when he used the toilet. The pupil thought he would go mad, but slowly his senses grew so sharp tha
t it was almost impossible for the master to catch him. Still the blows came, ten thousand blows, from any place, at any time. Until one day, after the pupil had been at the hut for four years, he was crouched over the fire, preparing vegetables to put into the cooking pot, when the master attacked him from behind. The pupil merely seized a pot lid, warded off the blow, and went back to peeling vegetables without even moving from his position.”
The little curls of hard koa fell from Dojun’s tool on to the white cloth across his legs. The familiar sound of the nomi chiseling into wood made a small, rhythmic scrape in the room.
“From that time,” Dojun said, “the pupil became a master, without ever having touched a sword.”
Samuel understood what Dojun was telling him. He wanted to be that tenacious, dedicated, humble student who became a master without ever touching a sword, he wanted it like breathing, like his heart beating, like life. And he huddled there in the corner, knowing that if Dojun hit him again he would not learn to dodge, but would have to go and take up the sharp blade of the Japanese saw and kill himself.
Dojun looked up from the chair leg and into Samuel’s eyes. Samuel felt his face go beyond his control. The tears kept squeezing out, as if the liquid despair inside him wouldn’t stay trapped, but just leaked and slid out of cracks.
“Please.” The word barely came out a whisper. “Dojun-san…”
Dojun would send him away. Dojun’s training was inflexible, that Samuel knew; nothing given away for a special weakness, a personal limitation, a particular fear of any part of the routine. Dojun offered what he taught as it was; take it or leave it.
Dojun was watching him, his hands motionless in his lap, his eyes intent and unreadable.
He broke the silence abruptly. “I make promise you,” he said. “Never hit. Maybe other fella make hit. Me, never.”
For a moment Samuel wasn’t certain that he understood. He swallowed at the thickness in his throat. “What?” he said hoarsely.