Black Glass (8 page)

Harris was back in Panama, dancing and raising a loa. The Harris in Panama could not see into the future, but even if he could, it was already too late. Raising a loa had not been his real mistake. By the time the loa came, everything here had already occurred. Harris had made his real mistake when he took the toad. Up until that moment, Harris had always played by the rules. Harris had been seduced by a toad, and in yielding to that seduction he created a whole new world for himself, a world without rules, just exactly the sort of world in which Harris himself was unlikely to be comfortable.

“Come on,” his wife said. “What do you really think?” She was so excited. He had never seen her so animated.

She was going to be old someday. Harris could see it lurking in her. Harris would still love her, but what kind of a love would that be? How male? How sufficient? These things Harris was unsure of. For these things he had to look into himself, and the cartoon looking glass didn't go that way.

He held the cartoon panels between himself and his wife and looked into her instead. He had never understood why Carry Nation appealed to her so. His wife was not religious. His wife enjoyed a bit of wine in the evening and thought what people did in the privacy of their own homes was pretty much their own business. Now he saw that what she really admired about Carry Nation was her audacity. Men despised Carry Nation, and Harris's wife admired her for that. She admired the way Carry didn't care. She admired the way Carry carried on. “I always look a fool,” Carry wrote. “God had need of me and the price He exacts is that I look a fool. Of course, I mind. Anyone would mind. But He suffered on the cross for me. It is little enough to ask in return. I do it gladly.”

“I know it's not literature,” Harris's wife said, a bit embarrassed. “We're trying to have an impact on the American psyche. Literature may not be the best way to do that anymore.”

Harris's wife wanted to encourage other women not to care whether men approved of them or not, and she wanted and expected Harris to say he approved of this project.

He tried to focus again on the surface of the glass, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.

“Kapow!” Harris said. “Kaboom!”

We come from the cemetery,

We went to get our mother,

Hello mother the Virgin,

We are your children,

We come to ask your help,

You should give us your courage.

—Voudon song

Some of us are dreamers.

—Kermit

A
t dinner Claire's son asks her if she knows the name of the man who is on record as having grown the world's largest vegetable, not counting the watermelon, which may be a fruit, Claire's son is not sure. Claire says that she doesn't. Her son is eight years old. It is an annoying age. He wants her to guess.

“I really don't know, honey,” Claire says.

So he gives her a hint. “It was a turnip.”

Claire eliminates the entire population of Lapland. “Elliot,” she guesses.

“Nope.” His voice holds an edge of triumph, but no more than is polite. “Wrong. Guess again.”

“Just tell me,” Claire suggests.

“Guess first.”

“Edmund,” Claire says, and her son regards her with narrowing eyes.

“Guess the last name.”

Claire remembers that China is the world's most populous country. “Edmund Li,” she guesses, but the correct answer is Edmund Firthgrove and the world's most common surname is Chang. So she is not even close.

“Guess who has the world's longest fingernails,” her son suggests. “It's a man.”

Well, Claire is quite certain it's not going to be Edmund Firthgrove. Life is a bifurcated highway. She points this out to her son, turns to make sure her daughter is listening as well. “We live in an age of specialization,” she tells them. “You can make gardening history or you can make fingernail history, but there's no way in hell you can make both. Remember this. This is your mother speaking. If you want to be great, you've got to make choices.” And then immediately Claire wonders if what she has just said is true.

“We're having hamburgers again.” Claire's husband makes this observation in a slow, dispassionate voice. Just the facts, ma'am. “We had hamburgers on Sunday and then again on Thursday. This makes three times this week.”

Claire tells him she is going for a personal record. In fact it is a headline she read while waiting with the ground meat for the supermarket checker that is making her rethink this issue of choices now. “Meet the laziest man in the world,” it said. “In bed since 1969 . . . his wife even shaves and bathes him.”

Claire imagines that a case like this one begins when a man loses his job. He may spend weeks seeking new employment and never even make it to the interview. He's just not a self-starter. Thoroughly demoralized, on a Monday in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, he refuses to get out of bed. “What's the point?” he asks his wife. She is tolerant at first. He needs a rest. Fine. She leaves him alone for a couple of days, even brings in trays of food, changes the channel of the TV for him.

This is no bid for greatness, this is a modified suicide. “Man collapses watching game show.” But staying in bed turns out to have pleasant associations for him. He begins to remember a bout of chicken pox he had as a child—how his mother would bring him glasses of orange juice. He feels warm and cared for; his despair begins to dissipate. “I've got such a craving for orange juice,” he tells his wife.

Months pass; he has been in bed an entire year before he realizes what he has become. He's not just some schlub who can't find work. Suddenly he's a
contender.
With stamina, perseverance, and support he can turn tragedy into triumph. He tells his wife that the only thing they have to fear now is a failure of nerve.

How does she feel about this? In the picture which accompanied the story she was shown plumping up his pillow and smiling, a beefy sort of woman, a type that is never going to be fashionable. She may feel, like him, that this is her only shot. His greatness is her greatness. His glory is her glory.

Or her motives may be less pure. Out in the world more, she is bound to be more worldly than he is. He has a vision. He is extending the boundaries of human achievement. She is speculating on the possibility of a movie made for TV. She may suggest that, as long as he is just lying there, he could be growing his fingernails, too.

She is an ignorant woman. You don't just grow your fingernails because you happen to have time on your hands. It requires commitment, a special gelatinous diet, internal and external fortification. A person's nails are, in fact, most at risk during those precise hours a person spends in bed. She has her own motives, of course. She is tired of clipping his nails. “Why don't you grow your beard out?” she suggests, rouging her cheeks and donning a feathery hat before slipping out to a three-martini lunch with the network executives. She will order lobster, then sell the exclusive rights to the tabloids instead. “Why don't you make a ball out of twine?” The largest recorded string ball is more than twelve feet in diameter.
That
will keep him in bed for a while.

At the restaurant she meets Solero don Guillermo, the world's fastest flamenco dancer. She forgets to come home. Her husband grows hungrier and hungrier. He makes his way to the kitchen five days later, a smashed man. He contemplates slitting his wrists. Instead, while preparing his own breakfast, he manages, in twelve seconds, to chop a cucumber in 250 slices, besting Hugh Andrews of Blackpool by four cuts. The rounds of cucumber are so fine you could watch TV through them.

Forty-two years later—a good twenty-four years off the record—he gets his wife's note, placed in a bottle and tossed off the
Queen Mary.
“Kiss my ass,” it says.

“You
know
”—Claire's son's voice is accusing—“how much I hate raw hamburgers. This is all pink in the middle. It's gross. I can't eat this.”

“I'm tired of hamburgers,” Claire's daughter says.

“Is there anything else to eat?” Claire's husband asks.

Claire smiles at them all. She sends them a message, tapping it out with her fork on the side of her plate. It may take years, but she imagines it will get there eventually.

T
h
e sea, the same as now. It had rained, and we can imagine that, too, just as we have ourselves seen it—the black sky, the ocean carved with small, sharp waves. At the base of each cliff would be a cloud of white water.

At the top of the cliffs was a castle and, inside the castle, a fifteen-year-old boy. Here is where it gets tricky. What is different and what is the same? The story takes place on the other side of the world. The boy has been dead more than three hundred and fifty years. There was a castle, but now there is a museum and a mall. A Japanese mall is still a mall; we know what a mall looks like. The sea is the same. What about a fifteen-year-old boy?

The boy's mother, Martha, was in a boat on the sea beneath the cliffs. Once a day she was taken to shore to the camp of Lord Matsudaira for interrogation. Then she could see the castle where her son was. The rest of the time she lay inside the boat with her two daughters, each of them bound by the wrists and the ankles, so that when she was allowed to stand, her legs, through disuse, could hardly hold her up. Add to that the motion of the boat. When she walked on land, on her way to interrogation, she shook and pitched. The samurai thought it was terror, and of course there was that, too.

Perhaps Martha was more concerned about her son in the castle than her daughters on the boat. Perhaps a Japanese mother three hundred and fifty years ago would feel this way. In any case, all their lives depended on her son now. As she lay on the boat, Martha passed the time by counting miracles. The first was that she had a son. On the day of Shiro's birth, the sunset flamed across the entire horizon, turning the whole landscape red, then black. Later, when Shiro was twelve, a large, fiery cross rose out of the ocean off the Shimabara Peninsula and he was seen walking over the water toward it. He could call birds to his hands; they would lay eggs in his palms. This year, the year he turned fifteen, the sunset of his birth was repeated many times. The cherry blossoms were early. These things had been foretold. Martha remembered; she summoned her son's face; she imagined the sun setting a fire each night behind Hara Castle. The worst that could happen was that her son prove now to be ordinary. The wind that had brought the rain rocked the boat.

Thirty-seven thousand Kirishitan rebels followed Shiro out of Amakusa to the Shimabara Peninsula and the ruin of Hara Castle.
Kirishitan
is a word that has been translated into Japanese and come back out again, as in the children's game of telephone. It goes in as Christian, comes out Kirishitan.

The rebels made the crossing in hundreds of small boats, each with a crucifix in the bow. A government spy stood in the cold shadow of a tree and watched the boats leave. He couldn't count the rebels. Maybe there were fifty thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Of those, maybe twelve thousand were men of fighting age. The spy grew weak from hunger and fatigue. Just to stand long enough to watch them all depart required the discipline and dedication of a samurai.

General Itakura Shigemasa pursued the rebels through Amakusa, burning the villages they'd left behind. Many of the remaining inhabitants died in the fires. Those who survived, Itakura put to death anyway. He had the children tied to stakes and then burned alive. It was a message to the fifteen-year-old Kirishitan leader.

Although Hara Castle had been abandoned for many years, it was built to be defended. The east side of the castle looked over the sea; on the west was a level marsh, fed by tides, which afforded no footing to horses, no cover to attackers. North and south were cliffs one hundred feet high. Only two paths led in, one to the front, one to the rear, and neither was wide enough for more than a single man. On January 27, 1637, after ten days of repairs, the rebels occupied Hara Castle.

They hoisted a flag. It showed a goblet, a cross, a motto, and two angels. The angels were fat, unsmiling, and European; the motto was in Portuguese.
LOVVAD SEIA O SACTISSIM SACRAMENTO
: Praised be the most holy sacrament. In March, when Martha knelt in Lord Matsudaira's camp to write Shiro a letter, there were one hundred thousand Bakufu samurai between her and her son.

•   •   •

JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH,
and early April passed in a steady storm of negotiations. The air above Shimabara was full of words wound around the shafts of arrows. One landed in the camp outside the castle. “Heaven and earth have one root, the myriad things one substance. Among all sentient beings there is no such distinction as noble and base,” the arrow said. An arrow flew back. “Surrender,” it asked, but obliquely, politely, confining itself, in fact, to references to the weather.

January and February were muddy. General Itakura commanded the Bakufu forces. Government agents tried to dig a tunnel into the castle, but the digging was overheard. The rebels filled the tunnel with smoke and regular deposits of urine and feces until the diggers refused to dig farther.

Itakura planned to pummel the castle walls with cannonballs so large it took twenty-five sweating men to move each one to the front lines. The last days of January were spent pulling and pushing the cannonballs into place, but it proved a Sisyphean labor in the end since no cannon, no catapult, was large enough to launch them.

More letters flew across on arrow shafts. “The samurai in Amakusa cannot fight,” the letters from inside the castle said. “They are cowards and only good at torturing unarmed farmers. The sixty-six provinces of Japan will all be Kirishitan, of that there is no doubt. Anyone who does doubt, the Lord Deus with His own feet will kick him down into Inferno; make sure this point is understood.” “Surrender,” said the arrows going in, but the penmanship was beautiful; the letters could almost have been framed. Meanwhile, Lord Matsudaira Nobutsuna and a fleet of sixty ships were moving up the coast from Kyushu, bringing Martha to her son.

General Itakura received a letter from his cousin in Osaka. “All is well. When Lord Matsudaira arrives, the castle, held as it is by mere peasants, will not last another day.” Itakura translated this letter immediately as mockery. He decided to attack before the reinforcements arrived.

His first try was on February 3, a mousy, hilarious effort; his second on New Year's Day, February 14. Itakura himself led the bold frontal attack across the marsh and was killed by a rebel sharpshooter. After his death, he was much condemned for inappropriate bravura. He had laid the government open to more ridicule, dying as he had at the hands of farmers.

The night before his death Itakura wrote a poem.

When only the name remains of the flower that

bloomed on New Year's Day,

remember it as the leader of our force.

He attached it to an arrow and shot it out over the ocean in the direction of Lord Matsudaira's fleet and the moon.

On February 24, the Commissioner of Nagasaki transmitted Lord Matsudaira's request that the Dutch ship
de Ryp
begin a bombardment of the castle from the sea. The shelling lasted two weeks until, on March 12, the shogunate canceled the request. Two Dutch sailors had been killed; one, shot in the topmast, fell to the deck and landed on the other. A storm of arrows left the castle. “The government agents,” these arrows said, “are better at squeezing taxes out of starving farmers, better at keeping account books, than at risking their lives on the field of battle. This is why they have to depend on foreigners to do their fighting. We in Hara Castle are armed with faith. We cannot be killed and we will slay all village magistrates and heathen bonzes without sparing even one; for judgment day is at hand for all Japan.”

The Dutch commissioner, Nicolaus Coukebacker, sent a defensive letter by boat back to Holland. “We were, of course, reluctant to fire upon fellow Christians, even though the rebels in question are Roman Catholics and the damage the rebellion has done to trade conditions in Nagasaki has been severe. Our bombardment was, in any case, ineffectual.” He was too modest. The outer defenses had been weakened.

On March 5, in the middle of the lull provided by the Dutch bombardment, a letter flew into the government camp from one Yamada Emonsaku of Hara Castle. Expressing his reverence for the rule of hereditary lords in particular and governments in general, Yamada assured them he had never been a sincere Kirishitan. He then outlined a lengthy plan in which he offered to deliver Shiro to the Bakufu alive. “Please give me your approval immediately, and I will overthrow the evil Kirishitans, give tranquillity to the empire, and, I trust, escape with my own life.” An answer asking for further information was sent back, but Yamada did not respond.

The invisible men, the
ninjutsuzukai,
went into Hara Castle and returned with information. The rebel leader had a mild case of scabies. While he'd been playing a game of
go,
an incoming cannonball had ripped the sleeve of his coat. His divinity had never seemed more questionable. The letter to Yamada had been easily intercepted. He was bound in a castle room under a sentence of death.

Around their ankles, the invisible men wore leads which unwrapped as they walked. If they were killed, their bodies could be dragged back out. You might think such cords would have given them away, but you are more inclined to believe in the fabulous skills of the ninjutsuzukai than that a boy has walked on water. Not a single ninjutsuzukai was lost.

Lord Matsudaira judged that the rebel position was weakening. After the silly death of Itakura, he had settled on the inglorious strategy of blockade. The strategy appeared justified. The ninjutsuzukai said that the rebels were living in holes they had excavated under the castle. There was not enough to eat.

•   •   •

MATSUDAIRA WROTE A LETTER.
The letter spoke of the filial piety owed to parents. It assured Shiro of Matsudaira's reluctance to hurt Shiro's family and said further that Matsudaira knew a fifteen-year-old boy couldn't possibly be leading such a large force. “I am pleased, therefore, to offer a full pardon to the boy, asking only that he surrender, recant, and identify the real leader of the rebellion. I look forward to a joyful family reunion.”

Martha knelt in the mud beside Matsudaira and wrote as he directed. “We know that you have forced conversions on some of your followers. If you let those hostages go, Lord Matsudaira will allow your family to join you in Hara Castle. All who surrender may depend on the traditional magnanimity of the Bakufu; no one who freely recants will be punished. Indeed, rice lands will be given to those who surrender!” Matsudaira gestured with one hand that Martha was to finish the letter herself. “For myself, I ask only to see you again. Perhaps we could speak. Lord Matsudaira is willing. Don't forget your family on the outside who wish only to be with you.”

These letters were carried into the castle by Shiro's young nephew and little sister. They had been dressed by the Bakufu in kimonos with purple bursts of chrysanthemums. They wore embroidered slippers brought up the coast by boat for the occasion.

Small as they were, the narrow path to the castle held them both, but the path was muddy from the rain, and the children wanted to save their shoes, so they stepped slowly and sometimes, when puddles narrowed the path even more, one did go before the other. Inside the shining kaleidoscope of armor and sunlight, Martha saw the small bobbing chrysanthemums and, high above them, the flag over Hara Castle. “Now we will know what kind of a son you have,” Lord Matsudaira told her. “If you have the wrong kind, only you are to blame for what happens next.”

Soon the tiny figures disappeared from view. Martha counted slowly, trying to guess at the exact moment they would enter the castle. The path was very long and their steps so small. The ocean sobbed behind her. The sun through the trees moved down her face to her hands. If she could send Shiro one more message, she would ask him to keep the children. She imagined the wish like a small, shining stone in Shiro's hand. He rubbed it with his fingers, feeling it, understanding it. He threw it into the air, as he would any other stone, but it became the bird whose shadow passed over Martha's face, the shadow Shiro's answer to her.

Martha struggled to keep her mind on the miracles. Left to itself, her memory immediately chose the most ordinary of moments. A little boy throwing stones. A pair of arms around her neck. A game of hiding. His face when he slept.

Matsudaira had tea prepared. He drank and attended to his mail. He discussed Hara Castle with several of his officers. They were all agreed that the rebellion could not have held out at any other spot. It was a wonderful castle, and after they had taken it they must be sure to destroy it completely. Fire, first, but then the stonework must be carefully dismantled. The unit from Osaka was charged with this.

Matsudaira decided to change the passwords. He sent out the new codes. Now the sentries were to inquire, “A mountain?” “A river” would be the correct reply. In an optimistic mood, he selected a password to signal the start of an attack. It, too, would be in the form of a question. “A province?” “A province!” was also the answer. He had a meal of rice balls and mullet. While he was eating, Martha heard a shout. The children were returning.

Shiro had written a letter, which his nephew gave to Matsudaira. “Frequent prohibitions have been published by the Shogun, which have greatly distressed us. Some among us there are who consider the hope of future life as of the highest importance. For these there is no escape. Should . . . the above laws not be repealed, we must incur all sorts of punishments and torture; we must, our bodies being weak and sensitive, sin against the infinite Lord of Heaven; and from solicitude for our brief lives incur the loss of what we highly esteem. These things fill us with grief beyond our capacity. There are no forced converts among us, only outside, among you. We are protected by Santa Maria-sama [Mary], Sanchiyago-sama [Jesus], and Sanfuranshisuko-sama [St. Francis].”