Part 4 (1/2)

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 gla.s.s, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.

”Kapow!” Harris said. ”Kaboom!”

We come from the cemetery, We went to get our mother, h.e.l.lo mother the Virgin, We are your children, We come to ask your help, You should give us your courage.

-Voudon song

CONTENTION.

Some of us are dreamers.

-Kermit At 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 h.e.l.l 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, dispa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sociations for him. He begins to remember a bout of chicken pox he had as a child-how his mother would bring him gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.s; 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 fas.h.i.+onable. 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 cuc.u.mber in 250 slices, besting Hugh Andrews of Blackpool by four cuts. The rounds of cuc.u.mber 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 a.s.s,” 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.

s.h.i.+MABARA.

The 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 j.a.panese 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 sh.o.r.e 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 j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sed the time by counting miracles. The first was that she had a son. On the day of s.h.i.+ro's birth, the sunset flamed across the entire horizon, turning the whole landscape red, then black. Later, when s.h.i.+ro was twelve, a large, fiery cross rose out of the ocean off the s.h.i.+mabara 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 Kiris.h.i.+tan rebels followed s.h.i.+ro out of Amakusa to the s.h.i.+mabara Peninsula and the ruin of Hara Castle. Kiris.h.i.+tan is a word that has been translated into j.a.panese and come back out again, as in the children's game of telephone. It goes in as Christian, comes out Kiris.h.i.+tan.

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 s.h.i.+gemasa 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 Kiris.h.i.+tan 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 s.h.i.+ro a letter, there were one hundred thousand Bakufu samurai between her and her son.