Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [27]
But sometimes his head rang with words that turned into an endless song, words that added up to minutes, hours, days of a life that was growing fainter as he grew more at home in this huge, flat land planted with crops that people were always comparing to the colour of his hair. Sometimes, to keep the old life alive in his head, he drew pictures of rocks and waterfalls, of mist curling round pine trees like a white scarf; he drew snow cranes with scarlet crowns, and funny-looking chickens, different shapes and sizes.
Nancy kept chickens but they all looked the same, round, plump, as though they had been built in a factory. Not like the chickens he recalled, some with long feathers cascading over their shoulders like the paper streamers in street parades here, others black as tar and scrawny, stretched tall, menacing. And so many colours, the feathers glowing bronze, ivory, gold.
There had been fishing trips by the shore, watching for the fish that hid themselves without concealment, taking on the colour of the water they swam in. He missed the smell of fish, and he missed the rain, sometimes no more than a fine spray that washed the leaves, then turning angry, hammering the hillside with such force it cut off the view like a curtain of steel rods.
Words and phrases filled his head, the past and the present jostling, the old familiar and the newly learned – baseball, ikebana, popcorn, kamishibai, movies, onsen, bubble gum, sento, Coca-Cola, miso, taffy, radio, steak, hot dogs, steak, hamburgers, steak . . . Meat. So much meat. In that fading, shadowy place inside his head he used to eat bean curd, rice, wild nettles, grass-shoots and dark arame harvested from the sea. Chopsticks transferred morsels from bowl to mouth. Here, meat covered the plate. People held a fork in their right hand and stabbed it into their food as though digging up plants from earth.
But beneath all the rest – the animals, the birds, the sound of the temple gong, the kamishibai man with his bicycle, handing out candies and telling stories of dragons and princes and demons who spirited children away from their homes – he endlessly circled the thing unmentioned, always unmentioned. He bunched the memories up close, tight, squeezing them together, and at the centre there was a blank, a hole, a gap, a nothingness where comfort and love and softness had been. He could draw this emptiness, this shape: a kimono, smooth hair, curved neck, but he kept the drawings in a box in the closet. Sometimes he took them out and held one up close to his face, trying to breathe in something, some hint of life, and then another sound took over – the sound of screaming – and he dropped the drawing and pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the noise, but of course it was there inside his head.
He tries, now, to remember how, long ago, in that shadow-time, he had been taken on to a big boat and told he was going on a visit to a place called America, to see his father. He thinks he remembers crying, but more and more he forgets – had he cried?
He recalls being pulled this way and that, to look at new things –
‘Isn’t this great? Isn’t this fun?’
He would have fun in America, Nancy kept telling him, life was great in America. There was everything you could want. But when he got to America – look, Joey, ice cream, look, cookies and roller skates – what was missing was his mother. His dad arrived, and soon they were living in a house with an upstairs and a couch and a yard. But when he asked when he was going home they told him this was home now, his mother was dead. His dad didn’t wear a white uniform any more, and they saw Charlie Chaplin at the movies, but nobody wanted to talk about a place called Nagasaki and the woman who took him walking by the shore.
It was the first time a friend from school had stayed overnight. Nancy brought in a folding cot and made up a bed for Frank, and they pestered Ben until he showed them how to calculate depth and distance on