Sophie and the Rising Sun Read Online Free PDF

his face in nearsighted concern. “Are you ill? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”
    “No, miss,” he finally managed to say, but still, he did not look at her, but leaned a little to see the camellia bushes and to wonder if there was something hiding in them.
    Or am I becoming a dream-laden man who can’t tell what’s real? Like my old father before me?
    Miss Anne looked at the bank of camellia bushes against the wall. Nothing was there.
    “Well, then, if you’re sure you’re all right, let’s get these dogwoods planted before the roots dry out any more,” she said, striding off toward the other side of the yard and then looking back at him expectantly. Like an obedient child, he followed her. But to himself he said, What can it mean that a great crane has come to me here? And what message does he bring— of my father and of my father’s ancestors?

Chapter Five
     
    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