34.
We Can’t Have This

TOO MUCH TIME had passed, and as the tide came in Einosuke’s body began to move in such a way that the laborers, even in their terror, feared it might get loose from the fragile grasp of the sand, slide under the water’s rough blanket, and be gone. Their leader should have been back by then with castle guards, but since he was not, one man, and then a second, found sticks from the edge of the forest and pressed them against Einosuke’s clothing, their eyes nearly closed against the sight of the headless man. They weren’t pleased with themselves but they held on and hollered, using their muscles against the tide.

And that was what the castle guards saw when they came running behind the chief laborer, some ten minutes after Ueno and his samurai had gone.

“What have you found?” one of them barked, and the chief laborer let out a relieved sigh, thinking the fight had ended well and the laborers, in the meantime, had discovered some dead creature, perhaps a sea lion, for dead sea lions had washed up along this beach before.

But when the laborers saw the guards and fell on their faces, moaning and crying, the guards, in turn, noticed the Okubo family crest on the sea lion’s shoulder, and then the viscera that had launched themselves from the creature’s stomach, unfurling out of its neck like enemy flags, and they fell too, next to their subordinates in the sand. It took a full five minutes for them to stand again, to pull out their swords and thrash about screaming for vengeance, and another ten before they found the necessary courage to pull poor Einosuke out of the apathetic and steadily advancing tide. One of the guards walked down the beach and brought back Einosuke’s horse which, inexplicably, had not run away, another covered his neck with a laborer’s shirt and lifted him up across the horse’s saddle, and in an hour they had walked him through the forest, around the southern-loop road to the castle gate.

Inside the castle, still quite stunned from her moment alone with Ace, Fumiko was directing the cleaners on the second floor when she heard the arrival commotion. Her first thought, oddly enough, was that maybe Ueno had come, in hopes of cutting his losses, and she should send a runner for Einosuke. Her second thought was to find Masako, so the girl wouldn’t climb upon the gate, look down at the horrible man, and get in everyone’s way.

Fumiko came downstairs in a hurry, but there were no guards at the door, and no Masako in any of the first floor rooms where she most often liked to play. From the top of the outside stone stairway she could normally see the gate well, but so many people had run over there now that she could tell only that the gate was open and that a party of riders had come inside. She didn’t like that. She did not want strangers given access to the castle when none of the men was at home, so though she was dressed for work and not for greetings, she went across the intervening ground to investigate. Surely it wasn’t Ueno; only some interloper, some quasi-aristocrat, smoothly talking his way inside.

Masako had twice been to her marsh that day, both before and after her mother and Ace, but when the ruckus began she was close to the gate, standing outside one of the castle’s side doors with Junichiro, trying to make him do his walking trick over and over. She waited a moment, sure, at first, that what she was doing was more interesting than whatever else might be going on, but when others ran past her she finally picked her brother up and hurried after them, coming into the rear of the crowd just at the time her mother got there.

“Good,” said Fumiko, “stay beside me. I’m not putting up with nonsense from anyone.”

She looked toward the side of the castle for Ace, but the stool he had formerly sat upon was empty. Had he gone to his room to think things over, then, or followed that drifting bit of sunlight, around to the casdtle’s back? She wondered what he was thinking, and wanted to see his face.

There was so much noise, were so many shrieks and unwieldy voices, that Fumiko thought a fight had broken out, that maybe, after all, the guards were trying to do their jobs. Many of those in the crowd were turning now to look at her, but Fumiko misread their expressions, thinking they were asking her to settle the argument.

“Let me through, then,” she said. “We can’t have this. When the masters are gone we want this gate closed, is that so hard to understand?” She could hear the curtness in her voice but didn’t care.

“We can’t have this,” Masako told Junichiro.

The crowd held for a moment, then parted despite itself. Fumiko could see the top of the gate now, the place where the guards usually stood, but there were no guards there to yell at. The first sense she had that she was wrong about what was happening did not come until Masako pulled her back a little and told her so.

“Someone’s injured, Mama,” she said. “I can see his feet, he’s slumped across a horse.”

From her lower position Masako could indeed see two feet wrapped together, but little more than that. She wasn’t as interested in seeing someone who was already hurt as she would have been in watching an actual fight, but Fumiko’s reaction was just the opposite. What injured person could force the gates of Odawara Castle so easily open? She imagined again that it might be Ueno, humbled first by Lord Abe’s demise and again by some crippling road accident. “Let me through,” she said. “Stand aside.”

But the crowd didn’t want to part and did so only stubbornly. She saw the horse’s muzzle first, and then those tied-together feet, and then a hand flung back against the nearest leg as if it were trying to scratch something. That hand, she suddenly knew, did not belong to Ueno.

“Go back, my dear,” she told her daughter. “Take your brother and get out of here right now. Go back inside the castle and close the door.”

“Why?” asked Masako, but her mother said, “Don’t ask questions. Go to our private quarters. Do so quickly and do not turn around.”

Fumiko could hear herself as if from a distance. She knew she had found the proper tone of voice to make Masako obey, but she did not know how long she could maintain it. Masako might go only partway back and then turn to ask another question, and if that happened Fumiko didn’t think she could find the power, again, to make her daughter keep going. For the moment, however, she only stood there, her back toward the horse.

“Come on, baby brother,” Masako said, “if we’re not wanted here let’s go practice our walking somewhere else.”

Fumiko could feel the crowd’s silence, a breathless kind of thing that would go on forever if she didn’t turn around. But she commanded herself to wait until Masako was at the base of the stairs, until she had carried her brother up those stairs and stepped inside the castle and softly closed the door. And when she finally did turn around it was only through divining a strength that she had always known she had, but had never used before.

“Get back,” she said calmly. “Stand back away from there now.”

The crowd moved like her daughter had, heads down and grudgingly. Only the guard who led the horse stayed close to her. She looked at that hand again and then stepped up to touch it, actually reaching under it to draw her fingernails across its palm. That the hand was cold did not surprise her, but she had to close her eyes in order to release it, and find the courage to walk around to the other side of the horse. She didn’t let herself imagine anything, not what had happened, not whether he had slipped and fallen on the boulder or whether the boulder had plunged from its net and crushed his skull. She did not let herself imagine the look in Einosuke’s eyes.

The crowd had stepped out to form a crescent, its back to the castle, so when Fumiko went around to face the end of the world as she knew it, she was alone. At first, however, she could not make out what she saw, could not understand the sight before her. She even felt relief, for a second, as if there had been some hideous mistake. It was odd because even as she fell, even as she clutched the horse’s riggings, to keep herself from going all the way down, the thought stayed with her that if this was not Einosuke, then the bile in her mouth, her locked-up jaw, and the streaming flow of her saliva were all unnecessary, all wrong. She screamed but stopped the sound immediately and whipped her head sideways so that an arc of her saliva wet the horse and laced her husband’s clothing, like Junichiro’s had the chocolate not so very long ago. She reached out and pulled Einosuke’s short sword from his belt and pressed it against the soft flesh under her chin and felt the tip go in and would have driven it all the way home had not the horse jumped, in its own renewed terror, turning her and letting her see Masako’s headlong rush back down the castle stairs, screaming bloody murder with Junichiro in her arms.

“MOTHER!”

Fumiko dropped the blade and ran toward her running daughter, both of them screaming now. Her arms tore her obi off and pulled at the sides of her kimono, flinging them out, as if trying to make wings of them, as if trying to turn her kimono into a cape with which she could block her daughter’s view of this absolute horror. She felt the wind of her running and saw the ground surge upward and the castle swirl above her and crash down upon them both.

“AIAIAI!”

Mother and daughter came together with such force that Junichiro popped out of Masako’s grasp and tottered off by himself, going toward his father and the horse and the crowd. The laborers fell on their faces again, beating the ground around them with fists like hail, and the guards marched around. “Revenge!” they screamed. “War against the enemies of Odawara!”

Those words moved everyone else, but it was the vision of Junichiro staring at the covered neck of his dead and headless father that made Fumiko jump up again, finding herself. She ran back and scooped him up like an eagle might a kitten and clutched him to her and spun around, drops of blood from her own wounded chin surprising and quieting him by spilling into his mouth. And when she got to Masako again she picked her up too, tucked her under her other arm and staggered off with both her children, raging madly back toward the castle.

It was the end of the world as she knew it, it was true, but as soon as the door closed behind them Fumiko knelt and looked at Masako. “Go and wash,” she said. “And change your clothes and find someone to take your brother. Where is O-bata? If you see her send her to me. And tell the guards to keep the American away. We cannot see him now.”

She hardly knew what she was saying and knew less what might await her in the weeks and months to come, but her intention, as soon as she was alone, was to write a note to Lord Okubo, calling him home. When O-bata came she would send her for a runner, and then she would have Einosuke brought inside the castle and kneel beside him, in a vigil that would last until her own life left her body, and all thoughts save those of him were once and forever washed away.

She stood and started walking and was surprised when her movement was encumbered by Masako, who had not done anything she’d been told to do but clung to her mother, her mouth wide and silent, tears flowing like rivers from her eyes.

So Fumiko knelt again then, and held her daughter, until so much darkness descended that they couldn’t see each other. No one interrupted them, no one came from the upper floors of the castle or from outside.

And though they surely wanted to, no one asked what should be done with the waiting corpse of their husband and father, of Lord Okubo’s eldest son and heir, of Einosuke, Manjiro’s difficult and beloved older brother.