“Give me a roll of tape and I’ll seal the boxes you’ve filled,” Sedge offered.
“I’m waiting until the end to do that.”
Sedge wanted to ask about his hand, but he suspected Riku would resent it. Knowing he might even consider it a provocation, Sedge stood there mutely, unable to find anything they could communicate about. Finally he said, “Are you looking forward to the festival?”
“Not really.”
Sedge paused again. “You don’t have to do everything now, you know. You can always finish in the morning.”
“I leave in the morning. Thanks to you, my stepmom’s making me go to Echizen.”
Sedge had to swallow more than once to make the pain of the boy’s remark disappear. He didn’t want Riku to blame him for what had happened to his hand, nor did he want him to view his apprenticeship as a punishment Sedge had pushed for. “You don’t think the move will benefit you?”
Riku didn’t answer. He still hadn’t looked at Sedge since he’d entered the kura.
Sedge decided to leave him in peace.
As he turned, Riku said: “The move will benefit you most of all. If my father could see you now, having gotten rid of his son and planning to live alone with his wife, he’d . . .”
The unsaid words hung between them. Sedge made no reply, knowing that whatever he said would be misconstrued, used to fuel Riku’s anger.
“I’ll be inside if you need anything,” he said gently and left. Before he was out of earshot, he heard what sounded like Riku kicking a box into the air and all its contents raining to the floor.
Sedge returned to Mariko’s room and, not knowing what else to do, lay down. Without intending to, he fell into a borderland of sleep. And in this strangely vivid, half-lucid state he dreamed.
He found himself trailing behind a man wearing the long black robe of a Zen monk and a bamboo hat that was old and bleached by the sun. Although simple woven sandals clad his feet, he walked briskly, using a bamboo cane. Sedge had difficulty keeping up with him.
Along the path were kuhi engraved with Bashō’s haikus. For some reason, he was sure the monk ahead of him was an acolyte of Bashō. Afraid he would lose sight of him, Sedge picked up his pace, determined to catch up.
Running along the path, he soon grew out of breath. He stopped to rest where a kuhi lay on its side. Similar to those in Yamanaka Onsen, it was dust-blown from countless gales over the years and draped in moss. He stepped closer to read the poem on it.
In the old kura
Senbazuru burned to ash
The boy’s cold fury
The haiku startled him. Only Riku could have written it. What was it doing on a kuhi? He hurried even faster to catch the man ahead of him, assuming he would know.
Soon he came across another kuhi, this one lying before a tree. With fresh mud clinging to its base, someone had newly uprooted it. The haiku on it read:
Broken birdhouses
Dumped into cardboard boxes
Banished to Echizen
The path extended straight into the distance. Before it turned again he could see the monk progressing quickly. Sedge called out, but the monk didn’t stop. Sedge ran forward again for some time, only to see another kuhi, this time fallen in the middle of the path. Its three visible sides had no writing on them, but when with all his strength he rolled it over he found another haiku.
Through the high window
Resplendent in summer moonlight
Her heron-scarred flesh
Finally he caught up to the monk. Sedge wanted to ask what the purpose of his journey was. But, out of breath, his voice wouldn’t come. The monk was leaning into another kuhi Sedge hadn’t seen, and soon toppled it over. Apparently he had knocked down all the ones Sedge had seen along the path. Looking down at it, Sedge read its haiku.
A foreigner came
Mother loved him more than me
Two missing fingers
Sedge raised his eyes to the monk. “I’ve followed you all this way,” he said, finally able to speak. “Would you allow me to ask a question?”
The monk jumped forward and swung at Sedge with his cane. Sedge parried the blows as best he could before dashing for safety into the nearby woods. When he returned to the path, the monk was gone.
He felt he had no choice but to keep going. However, he was soon stopped again, not by a kuhi in the middle of the path but by the sight of a young man sunk to his waist in the dirt. As if the path were quicksand, he was twisting back and forth, unable to pull himself out. It was Riku.
Where the boy was trapped, the lower half of his body had sunk straight into the earth. Responding to Riku’s calls for help, Sedge approached him carefully, not wanting to suffer the same fate.
He dropped to the ground and with both hands began digging a circle around Riku, deep enough for him eventually to escape. But with every inch he cleared away, Riku sank further. Sedge couldn’t afford to stop digging, because if he did Riku would disappear completely. Already he had sunk into the path to his chest. From all the digging Sedge had done, his fingers were raw and starting to bleed.
He didn’t want to fail Riku, or abandon him. He knew that if the path swallowed him completely, he would never make it out again. And while for some reason Sedge understood that the boy wouldn’t die even if he became packed into the hard earth, he would be stuck there forever, for all the seasons of his life, surrounded by cold and darkness, tortured by his unfair fate.
Sedge dug and dug, until he awoke in a sweat. Riku had opened the back door and was walking across the floor, which shook beneath his steps.
