Sophie and the Rising Sun (5 page)
Read Sophie and the Rising Sun Online
Authors: Augusta Trobaugh
Tags: #Romance, #Literary, #General, #Historical, #Fiction
Miss Anne said:
Only once in the two years Mr. Oto lived in the gardener’s cottage did he ever ask for anything other then what I provided for him. But one Sunday evening at dusk—about a year after he came—he called to me from the back steps and stood with his hat in his hands and asked me if he could build a small hut behind the cottage.
“A hut?” I wondered if I had heard him right. “Why on earth would you want a hut, for goodness sake? You have a nice cottage to live in.”
That’s what I asked him.
As usual, Mr. Oto was gazing down at his shoes. It was always hard to get him to look me right in the eyes.
“Not a hut for living in, please,” he said. “A hut for thinking.”
That sure didn’t make any sense to me at all, so I tried a different tack: “What
kind
of hut?” I asked, and to be truthful, I was feeling a little bit alarmed, because I was thinking that maybe he would nail together a bunch of old boards or something like that. An eyesore to the neighborhood, even though the land behind the gardener’s cottage wasn’t easily visible from the street. Still, I had a responsibility to the town, you see.
“A hut of wooden poles and a roof of palm fronds that have already fallen from the trees. A very simple hut, please,” Mr. Oto persisted.
“A hut?” I asked once again, because it was really confusing to me, you see.
Mr. Oto just nodded, very patiently, it seemed.
“Well, if you must,” I finally conceded. “But what do you want it for?”
“For thinking,” he repeated.
“You’re not going to worship some kind of idol in there, are you?” I asked right out, because I didn’t know much about people from China, you see. But one thing I did know was that Mr. Oto didn’t go to church on Sundays and didn’t seem to be interested in ever going. Because he never once asked me about the time of services or anything like that. Still, I couldn’t say a thing about it, because I didn’t go to church either. Never have, not since I was a young woman. Seems to me that I can look out my own window and see the flowers and the trees and feel real happy that I’m on this earth, and God and I both seem to like that kind of churchgoing just fine. And it’s honest. I’ll say that much for it.
So I’d never thought much about Mr. Oto’s beliefs except once before—right after he came to live in my cottage. Ruth stopped by one day and said she needed to talk to me about him.
Because Ruth kind of made every single thing that went on in town to be her business. Maybe like a town spokeswoman or something like that. Self-appointed. So it really didn’t surprise me that she showed up at my door soon after Mr. Oto moved into the cottage.
Said she wanted to suggest, right off the bat—that’s the way she put it—that I get Matilda to take my foreign man over to the African-Methodist-Episcopal church with her. Because that’s where he belonged. It was a little church out on the edge of town. A colored church.
Ruth wanted to suggest that right away, she said, before I could tell him it was all right for him to go to the white church. I guess Ruth was just assuming that, eventually, he would want to go to church somewhere, just like everybody else in this town. Except me. And Eulalie, too, come to think of it.
“And what’s wrong with him going to your church?” I asked her that day. Of course, I knew what she thought was wrong with that, and truthfully, I came right out and asked her because I wanted to see her squirm. And sure enough, she started squirming right away, and I’m sorry to say that I enjoyed every minute of it.
“Why, Anne!” she fairly sputtered. “He certainly can’t come to
our
church!”
“But why not?” I asked in an innocent voice, and I particularly enjoyed driving
that
nail home.
“You know perfectly well why not!” She lowered her voice, as if she were revealing a deep, dark secret. “He’s not
white
!”
“And he’s not
black
, either,” I whispered back, as if that, too, were a secret. Then I paused for a moment before I added, “And I strongly suspect he’s not even a Christian, at all, so you can stop worrying about him wanting to come to
your
church.”
Well, that certainly set her back, I should say, and I could see a terrible struggle going on inside her—between her “Christian duty” to bring this errant lamb to the fold of Christ’s flock and her blatant determination that he not enter that fold on a path that led through the white church.
But I couldn’t bear watching her dilemma any longer, because somehow, all the pleasure had gone out of it. “Just leave him alone, Ruth. I don’t think he wants to go to any church at all.”
About that time, Mr. Oto knocked on the back door, and Ruth followed me as far as the kitchen and waited there while I went to the door. And the whole time Mr. Oto and I were discussing what to do about a diseased oleander, she watched him as if—given the right opportunity—he would drink blood and howl at the full moon.
Why, if he had said
Boo!
she would have run right into the doorjamb! I guess by that time, though, she’d made up her mind to forget about trying to save his soul, because she never brought up the subject of Mr. Oto’s going to any church again. In fact, I don’t think she ever looked at him after that day. Maybe she decided to pretend that he didn’t exist.
That
certainly relieved her of her “Christian duty!”
But anyway, that’s why I had to make sure that if I gave him my permission to build this hut of his, he wouldn’t be worshiping an idol in it or anything like that. For it might have attracted Ruth’s attention and maybe even brought her descending upon me once again. I certainly didn’t want that to happen.
“Not worship an idol,” he assured me, and he only thought he was hiding that smile of his from me.
Well,
I was thinking,
if he isn’t going to worship an idol and the hut can’t be seen from the street anyway, what harm can it do?
“All right,” I said at last, and I sighed loudly enough to discourage him from asking me for anything else and went back into the house, leaving him bent in a deep bow and still smiling at the ground. Always did drive me crazy, that did. All that smiling he did all the time. And the bowing.
And like I said, people around here never did get used to him—or even try to get to know him at all. I guess either they thought he was a heathen, like Ruth did, or else they couldn’t get past the color of his skin—a very deep honey-brown. Not quite dark enough to be thought of as black. But certainly not light enough to be called white, either. And the dark, slanted eyes that—really—were quite kind, if you took the time to look at them and to get close enough to him to do that.
I took quite a bit of criticism, sure enough, letting him stay in the gardener’s cottage behind my back wall. But for the most part, folks around here were used to my doing things they thought were controversial. Because I never thought anyone—especially me—should live a whole lifetime doing things the way other folks thought they should. I tried to teach that to Sophie, too, whenever I had the chance. But I don’t know that she ever really learned it. Like I say, her mama kept her real close. And she raised Sophie to be a lady, too—so in that case, it certainly did matter what other people thought.
About the same time that Mr. Oto first saw the great crane in Miss Anne’s garden, Sophie passed the last bungalow at the end of the street and walked beyond, following a curving, unpaved road that meandered off through the palmettos and Australian pines. Still walking somewhat dreamily—as Mr. Oto would have described it—she finally came to a grove of live oak trees near the salt marsh, where she kept a canvas sling chair for just such mornings as that—a morning made for reading and thinking and listening to the scurrying of nameless creatures in the undergrowth. And for gazing across the sawgrass to the great, open dome of sky that she always believed was directly above where the river emptied into the ocean.
Here, she could always find a certain quietness of soul, something to restore her so that she could tend the crab traps and plant the new azaleas and figure out how she could stand to read
A Farewell to Arms
. Especially that part in the story where the lovers are parted by such a tragic death.
Sophie avoided tragic love stories of any kind, and in particular, one such as this—that was also about war. And after all, wasn’t war the very subject everyone was trying to avoid? What with everything going on in Europe? She had tried to object—politely, of course—when Miss Ruth suggested that novel as the next work to read and be discussed by the book discussion group, but Miss Ruth had insisted they read it. It wasn’t lost on Sophie how her eyes glittered when she argued for the book. Titillation, of course—that’s what the old lady was after. Titillation over death. And war. And tragic love.
Sophie had never liked Miss Ruth, but of course, she had always been polite to her. Sophie’s mama had insisted on that.
“You be polite to her, Sophie. She’s your elder and, I might add, a very well-respected lady in this town. I won’t have her saying that I haven’t raised you right.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sophie always answered, but privately, she thought that maybe Miss Ruth wasn’t as well respected as her mama thought—that maybe everyone really felt about her as Sophie did, that she was an insufferable busybody who snooped around all the time, trying to cause trouble.
Even when Sophie was a child, she felt that way about Miss Ruth—and with good reason. How well she could remember one particular day when she was only six or seven years old, and Miss Ruth came to see her mama, and they spoke in low whispers in the parlor before her mama called her into the room.
“Sophie, have you been playing with those colored children down by the bridge again? And after I told you not to go down there?”
Sophie had felt her face beginning to burn, and she glanced at Miss Ruth, who was sitting very straight and rigid—just like a skinny, old-lady judge or something—and with her eyes glittering in delight to see Sophie pinned and squirming under her scrutiny and that of her mother.
“Yes’m,” Sophie muttered, somehow seeing the dark, smiling faces of the children she loved playing with, children of a woman who ran a small crab-house restaurant all alone in her little house near the bridge over Alligator Creek. The long, lovely afternoons of swinging in an old tire that hung from the limb of an oleander tree, and the laughing and the running, the tantalizing aromas of deep-fried fish and hush puppies that came from the kitchen of the little house.
And especially, Sally—her best friend. Sally with the serious face and wearing the red rag wrapped around and around her head that her mama made her wear. Her friend Sally. Queen of the backyard, wearing a bright red, cotton crown.
Queen Sally
, Sophie used to call her. Queen Sally with her bright red crown.
“Sophie, are you listening to me?”
“Yes’m.”
“Don’t go there again. It isn’t proper.”
“Yes’m.”
“I don’t want to hear of you playing with those dirty children again.”
“Yes’m.”
They’re not dirty, Mama. They’re my friends.
Miss Ruth—the ruthless witness—nodded her head once, emphatically, and then Sophie’s humiliation ended when her mama nodded, too.
“Go on, then. But you mind me now.”
“Yes’m.”
Released to the relative freedom of her own backyard, Sophie sat in her painted-plank swing for a long time, but not swinging. No one to take turns with her. No dark, laughing children. No Sally with her young mouth always in a straight and serious line.