Samurai Summer (2 page)

“There’s a swimming pool in town,” I said.

“It’s always full there. You should see it.”

“Yeah, right.”

She looked around.

“Of course, this is your last summer here.”

I didn’t answer.

“Then you’ll have to get used to summers in the city.”

“I guess you’ll find some other place to send me off to.”

“That’s not fair, Tommy.”

“Who’s Tommy?” I asked.

“Kenny then.” It sounded like a sigh when she said it.

She knew nothing about fairness, but I didn’t want to say that to her. She wouldn’t understand.

“If Papa were around I wouldn’t have been stuck in this penitentiary,” I said.

She probably thought that wasn’t fair either, but she didn’t say anything. Then I felt strange. Maybe I had said more than I ought to. And much more than a samurai would have said. It wasn’t her fault that Papa wasn’t home. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. He was just gone all of a sudden. That was three years ago. He’d said goodbye, and then he’d gone out and had never come back.

At the funeral, his hair was long and it was bleached white by the sun. I went up and said goodbye to him. Mama bawled like a cow in the church. Her wails echoed against all the walls. I wanted her to be quiet. I don’t know why, but I wanted the church to be completely silent right then. Deathly silent.

After that, they sent my mother off to some rest home. They wouldn’t let me live by myself at home so I had to stay with Grandma, but she could barely walk so that wasn’t much of a rest home for me.

As I was standing there next to my dad lying in his casket, I started to think about death, which wasn’t so strange, of
course. And when I learned more about how it is to be a samurai, I came to understand what death is. It’s nothing. You should expect to die every day. That way you’re prepared for it, and when that day comes you’ll be calm. It’s nothing to fear.

Every morning the samurai looks for a peaceful place to clear his head of all the things that aren’t peaceful thoughts. Then he tries to imagine himself at the exact moment, the very second, that he’s pierced by an arrow or a rifle bullet or a lance or a sword. Thrown into a fire. Struck by lightning. Crushed in an earthquake. Hurled from a cliff. Overcome by disease. Or run over by a train.

Maybe all of them at once.

The samurai say: “Die each day in your mind. Then you will not fear death. Think of death every morning and every night.”

“Kenny?” I heard Mama’s voice. It sounded far away, as if she were sitting in another world.

“What?” I said after a while.

“You went so quiet.”

“Wasn’t I the last one who spoke?”

“You looked like you were thinking about something,” she said.

“It’d be strange if I weren’t thinking about something, wouldn’t it? Aren’t you always thinking about something?”

“What were you thinking about then?” she asked with a smile.

“Nothing,” I answered.

I didn’t tell Mama about what happened to my bag of Twist. I wanted to clear that up myself.

The sun was still up when Mama left, but it was evening. We were alone again, all forty of us. A few of the girls cried, but they did it silently. One of them was sitting by herself on the thick branch that reached out over the cove where we washed ourselves every morning and evening.

I don’t know why I went there. Maybe I had seen something ripple on the surface of the water. A big pike. I don’t think anyone saw me as I walked across the grass.

A couple of the smaller kids were spinning slowly on the merry-go-round without yelling or talking. Everyone seemed to be thinking about their mothers and fathers.

The girl sitting on the branch was Kerstin. I didn’t know her but I knew the name of pretty much everyone here.

Kerstin wiped her eyes. She had long hair that was light and almost yellow in the sun. It hung down into her face a little.

“Hi,” I said.

She nodded and brushed the hair away from her forehead.
I turned around to see if anyone could see us, but the courtyard was almost deserted. The two little kids on the merry-go-round had disappeared.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Okay.” she answered. That was it. It was probably the first time I’d heard her say anything.

Just then, a fish thrashed its tail among the reeds on the other side of the creek. It sounded like the shot from a cannon.

“That was probably Old Pike,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Do you fish?” I asked.

“I don’t have a pole,” she said.

“You can whittle one. I’ve got a good knife.”

I meant my hunting knife, not my short sword, my
wakizashi
.

“You need a line and hook, don’t you?” she asked.

“I’ve got those. And floats too.”

“Guess you’ve got everything then,” she said as she jumped down from the branch.

“I’m saving up for a casting rod,” I said. “I don’t have one of those. And no reel either. I’m planning on buying an Ambassador Gold.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“It’s the best.”

Kerstin nodded. I think she understood. She was standing
next to me now just a few feet away. She was about the same age as me but a little taller. She looked strong. Maybe she would make a good girl samurai. Maybe she’d have a high rank.

The wife of a samurai was put in command of the regular soldiers when the samurai were away. Some samurai wives were good at fighting and self-defense. Once in the1500s, a samurai’s wife climbed up onto the roof of her castle to spy on the enemy soldiers below. When she was done spying, she drew a map of their encampment with her lipstick.

Kerstin didn’t wear any lipstick like Mama did, for example. I could always smell lipstick whenever Mama tried to hug me. It smelled awful.

“Want me to make you a fishing pole?” I don’t know why I asked. I really hadn’t planned on saying that.

“When?”

“Well… tomorrow?”

“Out in the forest?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She looked as though she thought the forest was dangerous. She probably didn’t know that the forest was a place where you could always be at peace. That’s how I felt anyway.

But I was wrong.

“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to,” I said.

“Do you have some special place in the forest?” she asked.

She pointed toward the woods beyond the creek as if I didn’t know what a forest looked like.

There was no fence or barbed wire or anything around the camp. They were smarter than that. They knew we had nowhere to go—at least not for long. It was even scarier this way.

“We’ve got a castle,” I said.

And with that, I had given it away. It was a secret we weren’t allowed to tell anybody. Especially not a girl. The words just came out; I didn’t have a chance to think about it.

“What sort of castle?”

I didn’t answer.

“Are there others who have this castle?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything more.

“What sort of a castle is it?”

“I… can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a secret.”

“Then you shouldn’t have told me, should you?”

She looked at me and smiled. This girl was smart. I had to watch myself.

“Sometimes I talk too much,” I said.

“Can I see it?” she asked. “The castle?”

I didn’t answer. I thought first. Yeah, this time I thought first. I had already told her she could come with me into the forest. And the forest
was
the castle in a way.

“Okay,” I said.

I would live to regret that.

I
t was evening again. We had just been down to the lake to wash ourselves. You came back dirtier than before you went down. When you dipped your hand into the water, it came out covered in a brown film that was almost like a second skin. It worked as protection against the sun. This summer the sun was intense. They said it was hotter than it had ever been.

When we were eating our supper there was a girl who threw up. Nice one! I think her name was Lena. The food was so disgusting that all forty of us should have thrown up every time we sat at the table, but nobody had dared do it before. Lena sat at the same long table as me, and suddenly she leaned forward and threw up. Stuff like that impressed me. Kerstin was sitting a few chairs away from Lena. I looked at Kerstin but she didn’t look back. Instead she stood up and
went over to Lena just as the counselors came running over. Otherwise it was deathly silent in the mess hall.

Then it started to smell. One of the counselors led Lena away so that the rest of us wouldn’t throw up too. I looked down at my plate: two slimy prunes drowning in oatmeal. If I had thrown up into my plate it wouldn’t have looked or tasted any different.

When we got up to the dormitory, Sausage made puking noises, but it wasn’t funny anymore.

“Cut it out, Sausage.”

“What?”

He looked like I’d just hit him. Like he was about to start blubbering just because I had said that.

“It was only funny down there,” I said.

“Jeez,” said Sausage and went over to his bed, sat down on it, and sulked. Then he looked up. “You didn’t have to say that,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Then he perked up and asked, “Are we going to work on the camp tomorrow?” His head was round, and when he looked happy his face became even rounder. He was round all over and his mother only sent him clothes that were too tight for him. Maybe she hoped he would get thin enough
that the clothes would fit. Her own clothes were always too big. When she came on visiting day it looked like a four-man tent had wandered in through the front gate.

“The castle,” I said. “It’s not a camp.”

“Yeah, yeah, the castle.”

“What else would we do?” It was Micke who said that. His bed was next to Sausage’s. Micke was as skinny as a twig and as wiry as a juniper branch. When he and Sausage stood next to each other they looked like creatures from two different planets. Micke could never look plump. He was always unhappy, and I had never heard him laugh. It was like he didn’t know how. He was directly below me in rank. When I was out on a mission, he was left in command. He was a good commander. He returned the command to me when I got back without saying much.

But once, earlier last summer, it seemed like he wasn’t satisfied with going back to being number two again. It wasn’t something I asked him about. It wasn’t anything he said. It was just something I felt.

“What else would we do,” Micke said again, “except work on the castle?”

Just then, I thought of Kerstin and what I had said to her. I still couldn’t believe that I’d told her about the castle.

“Yeah, what else would we do?” said Sausage with a laugh.

“We have to widen the moat,” said Micke.

“We have to dig the ditch from the creek first,” said Lennart, who was sitting on his bed farther down.

“You can’t widen the moat when it’s full of water, can you?” asked Micke.

Lennart looked at him. Lennart was the same age as me and about as tall. We had the same color hair and sometimes the counselors got us mixed up. But I had ten times as many freckles as Lennart. And he never got sunburned, not even this summer.

He had been at the camp last summer, too, and we had become friends. He had no mother back home. Apparently she’d just left one day without leaving behind a letter or anything. That was tough on Lennart. He was the first one I had approached to be second in command, but he had said that he didn’t want to be in charge of anyone but himself. He hadn’t looked very happy when he said it. I thought a lot about that last summer. In charge of yourself? When did you ever get to decide anything for yourself? When you were a kid you didn’t get to decide anything. At least not about yourself. It was the grown-ups who made all the decisions, even though they could barely look after themselves.

But at least we had the castle. And I had my troop. I was in charge of that—sometimes anyway. We had our own country.

“We’re not going to dig all that way,” said Lennart to Micke.

“But we have to dig a canal from the creek.”

“But that’ll take years,” said Sausage. “It’s miles and miles from the creek to the castle.”

“We’ve got plenty of time,” said Lennart.

“You sound like you want to stay here,” said Micke.

“You got a better suggestion? Maybe you want me to come stay at your house in the fall?”

“I’m sure they’d be thrilled,” said Micke. “Another mouth to feed.”

“We can carry water from the creek and pour it into the moat,” said Sausage.

We laughed at him.

We had a lot of work ahead of us. So far, we had mostly been working on the main tower. There was going to be a big hall where we could receive visitors. And guard towers and weapons stores. And the samurai leader’s quarters—mine, that is. And then a hall for the warriors. But there was a lot left to build: the gatehouse, side towers, guard towers, inner courtyard, inner wall, outer courtyard, outer wall, and then the moat.

The troop consisted of Sausage, Micke, and Lennart, and then there were Janne, Sven-Åke and Mats too. Janne and Mats lived in our dormitory; Sven-Åke lived in the dorm opposite. He was also an old friend from last summer. All of them were good warriors except maybe for Sausage, but
he was good in other ways. I didn’t want anyone else in the troop. It might have been a good idea if there were more of us to help build the castle, but then we’d have to take care of the extra helpers afterward too. It wasn’t a good idea to be too many. That could lead to mutiny. You can’t be in command of too many warriors. Also, everybody has to have the chance to make their own decisions, and the bigger the troop, the more difficult that becomes.

I heard a bird screech out over the lake. It didn’t sound like it usually did. It sounded like it was calling for help. I went over to the window. It was still light outside. I could hear laughter in the courtyard below. I hooked the window open and leaned out. A couple of the counselors were standing there. All the counselors were women. These two were all dressed up wearing skirts and stuff. They were laughing. The door to the building in the courtyard opened and I heard music coming from inside. Even though I hadn’t seen it yet, I knew that one of the counselors had a record player. I had thought about taking it and keeping it at the castle, but there was no electricity out there so there was no point.