Butterfly's Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

chorus from the women: not in the fields, far too hot.
    Frank carried Benji out the door and down the steps. Kate came running after him with a straw hat for Benji and a jug of water. The hat fell over the boy’s eyes; Frank snatched it off. “That’s no good.”
    â€œDon’t take him—he’s too young. He can help me in the garden.”
    â€œI was in the fields at five.”
    Benji gazed back and forth at them impassively.
    â€œWhat must he be thinking?” Kate said. She laid a hand on his forehead as if to gauge his temperature.
    â€œHe’ll be fine.
Daijobu, ne
?” Frank said, jiggling Benji.
    No reaction, just those eyes boring into him.
    They walked along the edge of the pasture where the Guernseys—milked at daybreak—had already found their way to the hill on the other side of Plum Creek. When Frank was a boy with ideas of running away to sea, he had liked to think of that hill as a cresting green wave and the Guernseys as clots of foam. The grass was patchy now, browning in the drought; the cows’ cream wouldn’t have much butterfat, no better grazing than this.
    The Swede was waiting outside the barn with the stone boat—a shallow wooden receptacle with high sides and a seat for the driver—hitched to the Percherons.
    â€œWe’re getting the rocks out of the field,” Frank said to Benji, miming the action. “They push out of the ground in winter; any one of them could break the plow. You’ll see how to do it. Easy. Fun.” He called up the Japanese word for fun. “
Tanoshii
.”
    He hoisted Benji to his shoulders and, with the Swede driving the boat, they went down Plum River Road and headed into a cornfield—flattened stubble now. Frank intended to plant winter wheat here later in the season, after the drought had passed; it might bring a good price next spring.
    He set Benji on the ground, and they followed the stone boat as it bucked and clattered over the furrows. Frank picked up a rock and threw it into the boat—it landed with a
thwock
—then put a small stone in Benji’s hand and helped him pitch it in. “See?” He gave him another stone. Benji hurled it at the boat with such force that it bounced up and out. Benji turned and grinned at him. Frank felt a catch in his throat; his smile was like hers, the same glint of mischief.
    â€œThat’s
it
. Good boy.
Daijobu
.” He ruffled Benji’s thick blond hair, already warm from the sun. “Not so hard, though. Easy now.” He demonstrated a slow underhand pitch.
    They went on down the row, then another, developing a rhythm. Occasionally there was a large rock that had thrust its way up through the soil; Frank let Benji help him wrestle it out, and they carried it—Frank pretending to stagger—to the boat and set it down.
    Benji was a stout little worker. Maybe he’d make a farmer. Stranger things had happened. Frank had never intended to farm, yet here he was. If his brother John—groomed to take over the farm—hadn’t died of tetanus not long after their father’s passing, Frank would still be struggling to make a go of the import/export business in Galena, and living with Kate at her mother’s house. His own mother was a peach in comparison to that woman.
    Benji held out a flat rock in his palm.
    â€œSmart fellow,” Frank said, looking at it closely. “An arrowhead.” He repeated the word; he should have brought his Japanese–English dictionary, though it was cumbersome to manage in the field. He took the arrowhead from Benji’s hand. “An Indian used this,” Frank said. “A hunter.” As they went on, he began to talk about the Indians who used this land before the white man—maybe Benji would begin to absorb some English this way, as Kate kept insisting. He became so caught up in his story about the fierce Blackhawk war that had raged here not so many