From a distance, I began to take notice of the gradual work of death within the house. Cook succumbed to the dreaded plague that had once passed over us, her health unraveling rapidly. Ansei’s herbs might have aided her, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Her suffering seemed a natural conclusion to her life’s hatred. How could I bother myself for her when I had not even the emotional strength to mourn for Ansei?
Roused from sleep during a rare warm night, I went to the edge of the spring. The moon’s reflection glimmered over the surface of the water. I waded in and let the cold water force a gasp from lungs as it chilled my warm flesh. The water swallowed me slowly up to my neck
Floating on my back as I had done so many weeks earlier, I scanned the shallows for the spider web, but of course, weather had long destroyed it and the spider had moved elsewhere to rebuild. This was the way with spiders. How were they always willing to begin building again knowing full well their work would not last—no matter how laboriously, how painstakingly they had produced it?
This was resilience.
I stared at the ruined web and looked inside of myself, wondering if I could even wish for strength of that kind. In the next instant, a heavy cloud burst with rain and thunder and poured down over my head, carrying dead emotions to the surface of my mind. Tears poured from my eyes and mingled with the fresh rain and whatever remained of Ansei’s presence in the pool.
Having once opened this channel of emotion, a great wall of sensation: thought, memory flooded, almost overpowering me. I paced the garden paths, nervous, tearful. I retreated to sleep for an escape, but vivid dreams haunted my nights. Ansei always. Kind. Cautious. Chillingly restrained.
The momentum of this flood of memories forced me back to activity—and to the loom.
* * *
When I entered the house through the southern genkan, I found the space nearly abandoned. Madame had retreated to her mountain cottage with Satomi, and left Kame to care for Cook.
Physically, I was as well as I had ever been, and perhaps much better, due to the fermented stores I had lived upon in Ansei’s garden shed.
I observed something like dismay, even suspicion, in Kame’s weary eyes when she first took notice of me, glowing with health.
“How is it you seem so well, Furi, while all around you are withering?” she murmured.
Kame needed rest. Perhaps she was suffering already from the early stages of the disease. “I can see you are not well,” I answered her. “Let me look after Cook tonight.”
She slitted her eyes. “Cook wouldn’t allow it.”
“Is she well enough to even notice who is tending her?”
“She is poorly, but I think she would know you, and believe herself in hell already.”
“Take an hour’s rest,” I said. “If you still insist on nursing Cook, then I will let you. What can I do to her more than the disease has already done?”
Kame took no further persuading.
True. I had little wish to relieve Cook’s suffering. I could have watched her die quite coolly, a week or two before that time. But I didn’t volunteer to nurse Cook because I was indifferent to the injuries she had dealt me. I nursed her because I could feel. After weeks of numbness, sensation had returned. And I yearned for the wholeness Ansei had shown me.
In the end, Cook and I both recoiled from each other.
At last, I wouldn’t force her to receive my help. When I sat by her bedside and offered her Ansei’s tincture for blood borne illness, she shrank from my touch, her heavy-lidded gaze flitting around the room with fever and mistrust.
“Cook, this medicine will not harm you. Possibly it will heal you. Will you try it?”
“No,” the air rasped across her dry vocal chords. “I won’t take anything you give to me.”
I raised a cool cloth to her brow.
“Cook. If I were trying to poison you, don’t you think I could manage it less directly?”
“Don’t touch me! Leave me alone to die in peace!”
I left her. If Cook preferred to die rather than let me nurse her, I was full willing to let her.
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Tatsuo, in contrast, clung to me. “Quickly,” he rasped. “Give it to me.”
I poured several drops of the liquid into a cup of tea, and lifted his head from his pillow.
“Swallow slowly,” I cautioned, but he took the cup in both hands and swallowed it one gulp. I took a serving too, when I began to feel fatigue creeping up on me while I nursed Kame and Tatsuo.
Cook died within two days, unaided by the peace she had plead for. She filled the house with the harried cries of a wounded animal.
When she passed, I washed and prepared her for burial. I knew of no kin to notify. A hireling dug a grave in a mountain cemetery. That done, I started a fire in the garden and burned her bedding. But further preparations seemed unnecessary, and I had to return to nursing Tatsuo and Kame.
Kame refused the tincture as had Cook, but after many days, in a feverish stupor, she begged me for anything that would relieve her. I gave her the remedy then, but by morning, when she awakened, she was still in pain.
“You poisoned me! You beastly creature! You’ve killed me!”
By evening, she was dead.
Her death confused me, at first, because Tatsuo was improving rapidly. He was still quite weak, but his mental clarity had returned, and was well enough to become concerned about the final rites of the dead.
I had not cared much for any of that. I had taken the trouble to alert the machi bugyo of Cook’s death, so she might be taken away and buried. But Tatsuo was devoted to the old traditions—the lore of obake spirits. He wished to prepare Kame’s body to help her pass safely to the spirit realm.
I wouldn’t interfere, but watched from a respectful distance while he poured water over her mouth and then proceeded to bathe her corpse in spring water, attentive to her comfort, even in death. We had no priest to pray, so Tatsuo performed the rite himself, even bothering to offer a small talisman to the gods. Actually, the talisman had belonged to Cook, but I was glad Tatsuo was putting it to practical use.
Within days, Tatsuo grew strong enough to help finish the task of cleaning and disinfecting the household. We built another fire, and took several days washing the floors and walls with rice vinegar and warm water.
After another week, Tatsuo felt it was safe to send for Madame, but we never heard a reply. A second and third week passed and Tatsuo wrote to Madame again. After one month, a message returned to us, but it was not from Madame. It came for Tatsuo, and was from his kindred.
His cousin had become ill in a small village south of the town. He and his family begged for any help Tatsuo might offer.
The old man packed his few belongings that very afternoon.
“Can you not spare any quantity of the antidote you gave to me?”
I gave him every drop of what remained of the bottle and considered myself well rid of it. News of suffering and death within the village had spread to our corner. The tincture and its healing power weighed heavily upon me.
No doctor would trust it, coming from me. And although I believed it a cure, only Tatsuo had been willing to take it—and this because he knew Ansei, not me. Better that Tatsuo should take the tincture and save what life he could with it.
Rumors of uprising followed the rash of illness, and with the rumors, the thunderous march of shogunate foot soldiers traveled through our city, muffling the desperate cries of mourning and loss and calling citizens to remembrance of what other reigning powers might take life away, and how much less kindly.
* * *
Even as the property’s lone occupant, I preferred to sleep in the garden shed. I slept there, barely aware of the weather’s change and the rise of the chilly, penetrating wind against its walls.
I retreated into sleep like I never had in all my life, including my youth. Something happened to me. The shed became a thick cocoon. Day and night blended into one continuous expanse of dreams—filmy dreams of the beautiful woman from Ansei’s sketchbook. When I lifted my gaze to her, she spoke to me, and demanded I weave for her. I couldn’t refuse.
When I awakened, I returned to my loom and began to weave a manner of fabric I had never seen, thin and gauze-like. The silken threads interlaced like a vapor, and as soon as I finished one piece, the woman came to receive it.
In these creative trances, my body seemed to never tire. In my new fervor of creative energy, I lost all sense, all inhibition, heedlessly draping myself all around in the gauzy fibers.
I had never dared to wear my own work before, and risked my life to wear it then, but nothing seemed to matter to me—nothing but the urgency of creation and the demands of the woman, who I felt sure to be an immortal, perhaps somehow related to Ansei. And that relation goaded me more to urgency of service. What if he had sent her to me? How could I fail to obey her?
I had the vaguest notion of time’s passage and I didn’t know where it would have ended, and what I would have produced, had my creative rites not been cut short.
Late one night, two soldiers entered the mill, perhaps on orders to spoil the property for supplies. Silk is difficult to penetrate and when it can be gotten, is useful under a military uniform. Ranking samurai prized it highly.
On hot nights, I slept in the garden, and morning might have come and went without my ever knowing of their entry, but one of the soldiers nearly stumbled over my temporary bed under the plum tree.
I awakened to a grim shadow looming above me. The moon was new and the night dark, but having found me, he couldn’t have failed to see the silk I wore. He called out to his companion, “Come see what I found in the garden.”
His arms were filled with the last of the silks I had woven in Madame Ozawa’s closet, and he cast the m heavily upon the grass, then lunged at me.
He would have fallen upon me, but I sprung out of his reach with a reflexive leap that surprised even me. I ran. Branches lashed my sides as I raced through the garden, past the cultivated conifers to the boundary of the garden’s long untended edges. There, I stopped, my lungs rising and falling as I considered the green mass of a decade’s untended growth. Then I plunged inside the brush, throwing myself through thickets that dug and cut and tore my skin and silken robe.
I could only evade. The soldiers stood between me and any route of escape. I dodged one way and ducked another. To my mind, in its state of clouded awareness, my path was hung all around with vines and shrouds yielding, protecting, and hiding my movement.
I heard a curse and a single cry of pain, then all seemed to darken, like the memory of a dream. My urgency faded, my breathing slowed, but the trance continued into oblivion.