Fools' Gold (16 page)

Kaneda was almost out of food. He had not taken precautions and by the time he realized that Fujino was indeed late, his food supply had dwindled too rapidly to get him through the winter. He still had tea and bags of ground meal, but his lack of other food had forced him to begin a fast. It was not a complete fast, of course, for he would eat some of the meal and drink tea each morning, but though he knew it to be spiritually weak, it nourished his anger with Fujino and allowed him to continue his history. He was not happy with the telling of stories when there were no listeners. In general he had allowed only a day or two for each century since Jomon, and he caught himself skipping many of the smaller details. He spent almost no time on personalities, and sometimes he let certain geographical areas go unmentioned for as long as five hundred years. Now he was in the middle of the sixteenth century when things were really beginning to happen in Japan. He had just finished all of the gruesome stories of the feudal wars and was anxious to get on to unification. Unification! For the first time the entire nation was at peace with itself and under one leader. Fujino knew little of this time in history so it would be too bad for him, for under no circumstances would Kaneda repeat it.

“Hideyoshi,” Kaneda said in a low monotone. He paused, remembering statues he had seen of the great hero Hideyoshi in armor or Hideyoshi reading. A portrait of the great man was on one side of the new paper money, and a likeness of him had been etched on several of the country's coins.

“Hideyoshi was our first modern hero and the man who first unified Japan.” There was music in the telling of stories. He could hear it in his voice. “Hideyoshi defeated both the small and the great armies and instigated change. Under his rule Japan had her first land registration, her first census, and the sword hunt that left most of the wandering samurai without the instruments of their trade.”

It was hard to continue in the formal monotone of a storyteller. He knew the time of Hideyoshi so well there was no use telling himself. When he tried to picture the small face of the great general, he had no trouble. It was for someone else that he wanted to do the telling, to make the thing come alive.

Kaneda heard the approach of Finn at sunset and for a few moments confused those noises with the internal sounds of sixteenth-century Japan. They were like the sounds made by a cart being pushed from behind by a man. He imagined Hideyoshi riding, and himself a tradesman trying with all his strength to get his cart and his wares off the road in time.

Outside, Finn saw the water wheel first and remembered Fujino trying to explain to him how it worked. He stood before the closed shelter that the two men had built. He'd rehearsed a hundred times what he would say, yet he hesitated now, afraid to push the hide door back, afraid to find Kaneda wearing Fujino's mouth, his body frozen into those same angles. He unloaded the sled, moving boxes up close to the entrance, hoping that the old man would come out, would greet him. The dog pushed his nose under the flap, smelling the fire, and Finn saw an orange tongue of flame. He was alive then!

Kaneda moved slightly to one side, picking up a knife and thinking “wolf.” Finn pushed the dog out of the way and when he threw back the curtain Kaneda's knife was inches from his face. Finn looked forward out of his thick hood and for a moment saw the flames dancing in front of the face of Fujino, highlighting the pink flesh of the inside of his mouth. Kaneda held his thrust. Finn pushed the hood back away from his face.

“Mr. Kaneda?”

“You are not a wolf.”

“Do you remember me? I'm Finn. From Nome.”

Finn turned and pulled the closest box of supplies into the small room. Already, in the moments he'd been in camp, the sky had turned toward another night. Finn took the knife from Kaneda and slit the side of the box. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey and several small packages of salt salmon. He sat next to the old man and waited.

“Where's Fujino?” the old man asked. “What are you doing here?”

Finn held out the bottle. “Fujino's dead,” he said quietly.

Kaneda unwrapped a little of the salt salmon and looked at it. He had, after all, been fasting only because there was not food. He put a little of the fish to his lips and sucked on it. “Sending you won't get him off the hook,” he said. “He is late, very late.”

Finn reached inside his coat and handed Kaneda the package of money. “This is what he got for your gold. And the raw gold is his share for the work he did on the beach.”

Kaneda counted the money. “Why did he not come himself? Fujino is not so big a coward. Is he so big a coward?”

“Harakiri,”
said Finn.

Kaneda closed his fist around the whiskey bottle. The word came to him late for he had expected English, expected not to understand.

“Harakiri?”
This time the voice was his own. Four distinct syllables. He let the word slice the air.
“Fujino? Harakiri?”
The old man stood and stupidly saw himself as the sixteenth-century peasant again. He looked at the knife stuck in the side of the box that Finn brought and pictured the soft hairless abdomen of Fujino and the knife moving through it. He saw a wound open cleanly, robust intestines bursting forth like Christmas gifts.

“Fujino? Harakiri?”

Finn put his arm on the old man's shoulder. “It's my fault,” he said. “I talked him into staying.”

There were noises inside the old man's head. He heard drums and horns. The mute dog entered and sat quietly next to Finn.

“Seppuku,”
the old man said.
“Harakiri.”
The dog cocked his head, listening.

“I'm sorry,” said Finn.

The old man reached down and pulled the knife from the side of the box. He felt the pressure starting way down in his bowels, moving up. He thought he was going to be sick. He swayed, nearly falling. In his hand the knife moved, swinging easily, and the dog, recognizing a game, took it in his mouth and sat with it between his paws. It was a sharp knife, one that Kaneda honed each day, and on the blade now were drops of blood. The dog, surprised, cleaned the blood off the knife and began sniffing around the room for more. He could taste it in his mouth but didn't recognize it as his own. He thrust his muzzle deep into the open side of the box and began to pull on the sharp tail of another of the frozen salted salmon.

Though Finn and the old man could speak to each other, they couldn't understand. Finn knew Kaneda had no English, but he'd assumed that it wouldn't be a big problem. Sign language, certain words, drawings; these were the tools they would use. And Finn, at the old man's insistence, abandoned early his decision to give up whiskey. He'd been there only a few hours and already a bottle was gone and another was opened and on the ground between them. The small room was hot. Kaneda was in no danger of freezing, and though he was very low on food he had managed well with his meal and his tea.

Finn leaned forward, pressing his face close to the old man's. The fire reflected yellow off his beard and eyes.

“It was my fault,” he said. “Do you understand the meaning of the word ‘fault'?”

“Harakiri
is an old and honorable method. The samurai, the
ronin
, used it quite often. But Fujino…”

“He did it with mercury,” Finn said slowly. He took a piece of the paper he had been drawing on and drew a picture of a bottle and wrote mercury on its label.

“Whiskey,” Kaneda said, pushing the bottle toward him.

“No, mercury. Like the planet.” Finn drew the sun and placed circles around it at various distances.

“This one,” he said. “The circle closest to the sun. The smallest…”

Kaneda looked at the paper then shook his head. He didn't understand.

“It was not at all uncommon during the phase of history that we are now studying for a
ronin
to commit
harakiri,”
he said. “Things were pretty bleak then. In fact it used to be the custom of
ronin
to stand at the gates of the homes of rich merchants and threaten to disembowel themselves if the merchants did not offer money and food. Very disgraceful to see the decline of such an honorable group.”

Finn listened hard to the sounds that were coming from Kaneda's mouth. Nothing. He understood nothing.

“Fujino. Fujino. Fujino.” The old man repeated the name evenly, in the same monotone he used when telling stories. “He died knowing nothing of our heritage. Knowing nothing!”

“Suicide,” said Finn, taken away by the grief that he heard in the old man's voice. “All my fault.”

The two men talked, each unsatisfied with the sounds he heard coming from the other.

“Penance,” said Finn. “Do you know what that is? I am here to take his place.”

Finn held the bottle high, trying to show the old man the strength of his pledge. “I will work for you while the gold lasts. I will consider my duty finished when you return to Japan. Until then I will act as Fujino did. I am here to take the place of Fujino.” He sat heavy with the weight of such a promise.

“Fujino,” the old man said, shaking his head. “I wish you were able to tell me the circumstances surrounding his death. I never thought Fujino would do that.”

“Mercury,” said Finn. “Mer-cu-ry.” He pointed at the drawings of the bottle and the solar system.

“Certainly. Help yourself,” said the old man. And then, “You know, Fujino was going to be my son-in-law. He was going to marry my daughter.” He looked at his watch. “It is midnight. That means in Tokyo it is late and my daughter is standing at our gate waiting for the postman. Do you know, was Fujino able to post a letter when he arrived in Nome? Did he write to my daughter?”

“It's bloody cold,” said Finn, “and dark. What kind of land is this for men to be living in?”

The old man began to cry. “Of course not. He would not have dared to write her without my permission. And he would not have dared ask me.”

“Here, here. Wait on that,” said Finn, trying to reach across the fire. “That'll do no good. Those tears'll freeze on your face.” He picked up the whiskey bottle and stuck the neck of it underneath the old man's nose. “Wouldn't a spot of this help? I'm sure it would.” He nudged the old man with the bottle, trying to get him to look up.

“I should have given him permission. I should have volunteered it. He was a good boy whom I did not appreciate.”

The old man took the whiskey bottle and poured a little of the liquor into the tin cup that he held in his lap. He drank, then poured more and offered it to Finn.

“You are from Ireland,” he said. “You probably know nothing about the history of Japan.”

Finn heard, miraculously, the word “Ireland” as it cleared the cave of the old man's gibberish.

“Ireland?” he said. “I'm Irish.”

“I should have told Fujino these stories. I, in my selfishness, started without him as a punishment for him being late. But I was slowing down. I wanted him to hear especially about Hideyoshi. About his invasion of Korea and all the strange things he did that are not easy to find in any of the history books.” The old man wiped his eyes and looked up. “Would you be interested in hearing?”

“Ireland,” said Finn. “What was that you were saying about Ireland?”

The old man adjusted himself under his blankets and furs. He put another log on the fire and poured whiskey into two cups. Finn watched carefully, sensing that something might happen. When the old man felt quite comfortable he closed his eyes and waited for a long time. Finn thought he was asleep, and at the sight of him, tiredness from the week of long travel swept over him. The mute dog was asleep behind Finn and provided a comfortable backrest. He closed his eyes and had the sense that he was pushing the sled, looking for the proper trail markings, trying to find the old man. His feet slipped through the crust of snow once and he jerked awake, and then fell immediately into a deep sleep. The old man tracing the story of Hideyoshi in his mind came to what he thought would be an interesting starting place. He said, “Hideyoshi,” three times, testing the evenness of his monotone. He kept his eyes closed, waited a moment longer, then began:

“Hideyoshi was the ruler of all Japan but felt that if he wanted to stay in power for long he would have to do something about unemployment. For years his army had been busy defeating the armies of all the local barons, and now, in the late 1580s, he had tens of thousands of soldiers sitting around the castle towns with nothing to do. His advisors thought the situation to be critical….”

The old man stopped for a moment. He felt he had gotten off to a good beginning. He didn't want to make any mistakes or say anything that would be confusing. One could not be too careful. When talking to a foreigner rhythm was everything.

Large branches cracked and fell upon the Snake, ice heavy. The army, on the far side, used the river as an extension of its camp, laying it with straw and wood chips, then bedding down their dogs. The raft that was used in summer for transportation protruded from the ice now, at angles. It was tied to the nearest tree by a rope that had crystallized and that was supported by icicles growing from it and rooting themselves in the ground.

The army had been nearly invisible in Nome, was nearly so now. The tents and buildings blinked dim light out at the winter or an occasional command shot pistol-clear off toward the frozen sea, but the soldiers and the officers stayed inside. They were surveyors and would sleep or play cards until their equipment could once again be pushed into the spring-soft soil. They had no fence and expected no visitors. A single man, on guard duty, stood inside a closed house on the river, leaning over a charcoal fire.

Phil, in the village these few weeks, was rested and had come to the river early this day so that he would be standing on the ice when Ellen and Henriette arrived. It would be hard for them coming even this far, so he'd brought a dog sled ready with blankets and furs. He let his dogs stand close to the army dogs, each group looking at the other, none barking, the leaders quietly rolling their lips back away from their teeth.