Sophie and the Rising Sun (3 page)

The English would flow softly and easily from his mouth when, in truth (although his English was exceptionally good), it was not the language of his childhood in his father’s house, so he had never felt completely comfortable with it. But in his daydream, English was completely easy and natural for him—because it was Sophie’s language.

“Good morning, my dear Mr. Oto
,
”
Sophie would have answered in a voice softened around the edges in the way of Southerners, and then, to his delight, she would have blushed and fluttered a little—prettily—walking toward him the whole time and with the soft folds of her summer dress flowing around her.

But those images set his heart to thudding ominously and caught and held his breath against the thuds, so that finally, he disciplined himself against feelings that had come far too late in his life and for a lady who would have been completely unattainable anyway. So that never again in those years since he first saw her had he spoken to her or tipped his hat or called her attention to him in any way.

The only thing he allowed was that he weeded Miss Anne’s front walkway every

weekday morning, when Sophie was likely to pass by, but even then, when she was so

near, he tended the plants as if they were the only important things in the world—working his thick fingers into the soil around them and waiting to take the brief glance at Sophie that was all he would ever have. So that particular October morning, as usual, he weeded and waited and wondered what she would be wearing and where she would be going.

Sometimes, she wore a wide-brimmed hat with tiny silk flowers on it and a voile dress—that was usually on Tuesdays, when she went to the book discussion meeting at the library. Other mornings, she wore baggy men’s coveralls—even then, somehow managing to convey an impression of complete elegance—and carried a crab trap. That’s when she was on her way to tend the traps she set in the creek that ran through the marsh at the edge of town. At those times, he envied even the crabs she would reach in to grasp, take out of the trap, and declaw on the spot.

On Wednesdays, she wore the same dark blue dress she had been wearing that infamous morning in the hardware store—but with a variety of tatted or crocheted collars, all pristine and immaculate. That’s when she came calling on Miss Anne, opening the gate and coming right up the walkway, her feet passing—
incredibly!
—within inches of his busy hands, and the delicate wake of her cologne wafting over him where he knelt, weak-kneed, among the marigolds. The first few times she came into the yard like that, he was terrified that she would remember him as the one whose rude behavior had so deeply offended her, but if she remembered, she never gave the least indication of it. In fact, she never looked his way at all.

On this custom of “calling,” Mr. Oto had once asked Matilda, who came to Miss Anne’s house once a week to clean and do the laundry.

“What do you mean?” Matilda demanded of him, suspiciously, when he asked her about it. She was ironing a damask tablecloth and, as usual, thumping the heavy iron down upon the cloth hard enough to make the ironing board shudder on its wooden legs.

He was hesitant to continue, for Matilda’s open contempt frightened him. After all, he had heard her refer to him as that
“ugly, dried-up, yellow foreigner
.
”

“Please...” He pressed forward with it, in spite of Matilda’s scowl. “Why do ladies come here sometimes?” He was trying to keep the question very broad, although he knew and Matilda knew also, that no other ladies from the town ever came to call on Miss Anne.

Matilda slammed down the iron against the board once again, only harder than ever, and turned to face him, threatening and ominous.

“Folks just come calling,” Matilda spat out the words at him, as if they explained everything. “Don’t you know nothing at all about good manners?”

And because he didn’t know how to answer her question, he said nothing more.

Other times—when Sophie wasn’t coming to call—she wore sandals and a voluminous paint-stained blue duster and carried an easel under her arm and a paint-spattered wooden case from which he could hear the rattle of brushes. That’s when he knew that she was going to paint watercolor pictures at the river.

In fact, Mr. Oto sometimes went down to the river himself to paint delicate watercolors of marsh grass and to try to capture the glint of infinitesimal sky in the water and to pretend that Sophie was sitting there beside him. But he always made sure that he would never intrude upon her singular right to that place by the river, because he went to it only on Sunday mornings, when Sophie was usually within the confines of the Salty Creek Baptist Church.

At a few minutes after ten o’clock,
he heard Sophie’s footsteps on the sidewalk, and then came his careful and brief glance. That morning, she was walking in a preoccupied way, wearing a light blue silk dress and with her arms crossed over a slim book held close to her heart, and her lips were moving soundlessly.

And because he had no idea of where she was going at such times, he imagined that she went to a different place near the river, where she sat beneath a moss-laden tree, breathing line after line of poetry into the air. English poetry that he had trouble fully understanding, but that he continued trying to learn—poems that thundered and wept and brought such an exquisite pain to his soul that he could hardly bear it.

So unlike the limited English of his childhood—in a place where English was used only for conducting business and nothing else.

He had asked Miss Anne to bring books of poetry to him from the library,

believing deep in his heart that if he could only learn to read poetry such as Sophie read,

he would, somehow, be with her. Miss Anne never once suspected that inside the

small, intense man was a heart hungry to learn to language of love, and she delighted in bringing him the books he asked for. She sat with him for long hours, watching as his brown finger passed across the page and listening to him sounding out the words. And when he would come to the end of a poem, he would nod his head in deep satisfaction and glance at Miss Anne with shining eyes.

That particular morning, he suddenly remembered some of those beautiful words. And so he whispered, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky!”

The words of Wordsworth’s poem echoed most pleasantly through Mr. Oto’s mind as Sophie walked away down the sidewalk, and more—the words seemed to course through his brown arms in warm rivulets and to run out from the tips of his fingers so that he could feel their beauty draining into the earth around the marigolds.

“These flowers will be especially beautiful,” he whispered. “I will be able to look at them and see which ones were watered with such words.”

Mr. Oto did not know then that the crisp, October day would present yet another miracle to him—besides his glimpse of Sophie and his belief that marigolds could absorb through his own fingers the very beauty of the words.

For her own part,
Sophie seldom noticed Miss Anne’s gardener in the front yard when she passed by the house or when she came to call. But she certainly remembered him. Particularly she remembered his audacity in trying to tell her which seeds to buy.
For goodness’ sake!

But she also remembered that horrified look in his black eyes when he realized his infraction, and his deep and completely apologetic bow. After he had left the hardware store that day, Sophie decided upon the petunia seeds after all—and
not
because some strange, foreign little man had said that she should choose them. And she wondered only briefly how someone like him had come to live in their little town, anyway.

Later, a bit of that story about Mr. Oto came to her, unbidden, at a Garden Club meeting she went to in the company of her Aunt Minnie, who was already too frail and confused, even back then, to be going anywhere. But her aunt had threatened to cry if she couldn’t go, so Sophie took her—but thankfully, only that once. Sophie found it to be almost unbearable, sitting still for so long inside the Community Center on such a beautiful day, listening while the speaker droned on and on about composting and drainage, and all the while, through the window, she could see the green fronds of palms against the blue sky and a few moisture-laden clouds gathering in the south.

At the end of the meeting, Miss Anne told Sophie’s Aunt Minnie—quite grandly and with her voice loud enough to carry to everyone else—that she had been fortunate enough to find a “real Chinese” gardener.

Across the room, someone whispered, “I’ve seen him, you know, and I declare, he’s the strangest-looking bandy-legged little man!”

“I’ve seen him too, and I think he’s a colored man. At least he’s certainly very dark!”

“And where did he come from? Does anyone know? Anne’s awfully foolish to have the likes of
him
living right behind her own garden!”

But Miss Anne ignored what they said, if indeed she heard them at all.

And before long, the full story of how the strange foreigner came to live in the little town of Salty Creek was common knowledge, thanks primarily to Eulalie, the doctor’s wife, who, though a good and kind lady, was prone to talking loudly to anyone about anything, especially when she was sitting under the roaring hair dryer in the beauty shop.

The sheriff came right away, wearing a raincoat over his pajamas, and all he could learn from the others was that the man boarded the bus in New York City and hadn’t seemed to be sick then. Just real tired, the other passengers said.

But when the sheriff went onto the bus and picked him up, he noticed right away that he was real frail—no bigger or heavier than a child, the sheriff said. So it was easy to carry him off the bus and put him in the backseat of the patrol car.

He also said that something or other about how the whole thing felt kind of strange to him, so he waited long enough to watch the bus pull out of the Gulf station and roar away into the darkness—and all those faces staring from behind the windows were glowing just like lanterns. I told the sheriff that sometimes strange things like that happen, especially when something unexpected comes out of the dark.

He took Mr. Oto—although he didn’t know his name then, of course—straight to the doctor’s house, and after looking him over, the doctor said he couldn’t find a thing wrong with him except that he probably hadn’t had anything to eat in goodness-knows-how-long. That, and a bruise on his head, maybe from having fallen down sometime.

“He just needs something to eat and some rest,” the doctor said. “And we need to keep an eye on that bruise, too.”

About that time, Eulalie came to the door of the office, to see what kind of patient was coming before it was even daylight. She always was curious about things, you see. And when she heard what the doctor said, she went right into the kitchen and heated up some leftover gumbo, adding a little water to it so Mr. Oto’s empty stomach wouldn’t rebel at it, especially if he hadn’t had anything to eat in a long time.

She told me later that when she brought the gumbo to Mr. Oto, it almost broke her heart, seeing that strange, dark face against the white pillowcase and him shivering under the sheet, just like it was the dead of winter. Said that when she started feeding him that good gumbo, he opened his mouth for her —— just like a baby bird, she said—and she could actually see the broth warming him up, and those black eyes losing the frantic look they’d had before, so that they even seemed to be growing larger, and warm, and soft. But that may have been Eulalie’s imagination getting the best of her.