24.
Whoa, Nellie

MYUZO WAS NOT ONLY limping, as he walked, along the road toward Manjiro, but simultaneously using the tip of his short sword to try to dig a deep sliver from his palm. It wasn’t working very well. “I can’t get at it because my hand keeps shaking,” he said. “Here, you give it a try.”

When he extended his sword toward Manjiro however, the hand in question didn’t seem to shake in the slightest. The Americans were with them again, both had their hats off, and were staring at the sliver like they were trying to read Kyuzo’s palm.

“I should have brought my sewing kit,” Kyuzo said, “or at the very least a needle. An old man gets lazy, that’s a lesson I’ve learned these last few days on the road.”

The sliver had been driven into his palm at a forty-five-degree angle, falling away from its surface like the body of a carp does from the surface of a pond. “I hurt my toe, too,” Kyuzo explained. “I was walking on an overgrown path, looking at the mountain view, and caught it on a protruding root.”

He lifted his left foot up so that all three men could see his red and swollen big toe. His toenail was wrenched loose, gaping at them like the sprung lid of a soybean jar. Manjiro had taken the blade and was bringing it to the sliver cautiously when Ace, seeing the clumsiness of the approach, sighed.

“Oh, please, give me that thing,” he said, “I’ll go cut a proper needle.” And without waiting he grabbed the sword and plunged across the stream into the forest.

Kyuzo and Manjiro looked at each other, both thinking that maybe the sword, plus one of the Americans, was gone for good, when Ace came splashing back again with a length of dried bamboo in one hand and an entire young bamboo sapling in the other. He used Kyuzo’s knife to slice the dried wood into finely beveled spikes.

“Close your hand a bit now and maybe look down yonder,” he said. “The trick to this technique lies in not using any one needle for too long.”

Ace had Ned hold the extra needles he had cut, then carefully dug a trough around the sliver, flicking bits of stringy flesh away. He used two more needles to hook the sliver’s end, pulling steadily until the head came out, then he pressed down around it with his thumbs, bent to grasp it with his teeth, and pulled the sliver out. It was a full inch long and still as sharp as the unused needles he had cut.

“That was well done!” said Kyuzo. “It was artful! Did your father teach you that or do all Americans know how to do such things?”

He showed his hand to Manjiro, pointing at the hole in it as if it were a medal, but by then Ace was busy with the bamboo sapling. He used Kyuzo’s knife to strip it of its outer skin, making lengths of fibrous bandage, laying them across Ned’s arm, while he knelt to examine Kyuzo’s toe. It was in far worse condition than his hand, with a distance as long as the sliver’s length between the end of the nail and the toe it was supposed to cover.

“You really ought to rest after this,” he told Kyuzo. “No more walking until it heals up.”

While Manjiro translated, Ace took the longest of the strips he had made and tied a hangman’s noose in the end of it, lowering it over the wounded toe, slowly working it down as if over a condemned man’s head. He then yanked on it with one hand and pushed on his noose with the other, lest there be more resistance than he expected. He held on tight when Kyuzo first tried to get away, then held on tighter still when he attempted to reach for his sword. Kyuzo would have killed Ace quickly had he got it, but instead both his hands flew to his temples and he howled a howl not heard in those parts since the extinction of the howler monkey. He jumped into the air two or three times, landed hard on his good right foot and sat down.

“Whoa, Nellie,” said Ned, but Kyuzo was up again in an instant, bellowing his outrage into the forest. Ace, however, only took a second bandage from Ned’s outstretched arm and knelt in the dirt, catching Kyuzo’s instep, and guiding his foot until it rested along his own left thigh. There was a bit of new blood around the replaced nail, but otherwise it was once again properly aligned in the bed of his toe. When he loosened the first bandage Kyuzo felt an echo of the earlier pain, but in a minute his toe was so completely wrapped in strips of bamboo that it looked like something to eat, like a delicacy one might find in a cake shop. He bent and grabbed his ankle and pulled his wounded foot up, until it hovered under his nose. His kimono split, exposing his other leg, which was thin and straight, like a cranes at the edge of a pond. He worked his fingers in beside the bandage, and between each of his other toes, his grounded leg like a fence post.

It was in this way, through the utterance of a wayward wife’s pet name from one, and the issuance of this good medical treatment from the other, that the two Japanese finally began to think of the Americans as individual men, and not as merely cargo on its way to Shimoda.

And a short time after that, when they came down out of the foothills that led into Odawara proper, Kyuzo was in the lead again and hardly limping at all.