The Beauty of Death Vol.1

The Carp-Faced Boy-1

THE CARP-FACED BOY

by Thersa MatsuuraHorse and Bones—

Grandpa Tetsu squatted behind the rustling curtain of a willow tree, his near-crippled hands weaving horseshoes from lengths of stiff straw. With the completion and knotting off of each row he squinted over at the one-storied, thatched-roof house—paper windows and doors thrown open to catch the breeze—to check if his family was sneaking up on him again. He needed to keep his distance, especially now that his daughter had returned; and she wasn’t alone.

For weeks he’d been battling a thorny ache inside his chest. It felt like the deep end of hunger, or possibly a warning. And then two nights ago, through the sheeting rain, he’d heard the neighing of a pained horse and with it a baleful cautioning only his keen ears could detect. He’d let his wife welcome his daughter and her son—the most unwelcome of guests—while he fell back asleep certain that something very, very bad was going to happen soon.

There was the sound of feet slapping wooden floors, but still no one came outside. The horse beside him shifted uncomfortably on its spongy hooves and Grandpa Tetsu reached up and patted its ribbed belly. What kind of monster rode a limping horse all the way from the city in the pouring rain, until its shoes tattered and fell off?

The old man stood, balancing himself with one hand on the animal’s sunken back. He stretched and slapped at the kinks in his crickety legs. Used to be he could stand most hours of the day, walk to Takakusa Mountain and back, and never tire. But that was a long time ago. He retrieved his wife’s tortoiseshell comb from his sleeve and carefully began working the knots out of the creature’s matted mane.

“Good boy.” Grandpa Tetsu inhaled the dusty, sweaty-warm odor of the animal and the knot in his chest eased. “At least she brought you.”

The shrill scream of a child came from the direction of the house. Movement and laughter. The old man ducked. He watched as his wife and daughter burst from the open door and marched over. They planted their baskets of laundry not more than a stone’s throw away from where he stood crouching behind the horse’s nervous legs. Not noticing him, the two began pulling water from the well. The child, strapped to his mother’s back with long pieces of soft cloth, squirmed and kicked his chubby legs. It looked as if he might be in pain. Or possessed. The thought lingered a little too long, and almost as if he’d heard it, the boy stopped, turned, and looked directly at his grandfather. Something poisonous passed between them. Grandpa Tetsu shuddered and fell back against the tree.

He’d been seen by the carp-faced boy.

It was unnerving: eyes goggling, startled wide; long, wet lashes. Grandpa Tetsu had never seen the child blink. Not ever. That must mean something. Then there was the mouth, thick lipped and down turned, every now and then popping open in that desperate famished way of the candy-colored carp in the pond. When he first saw the child last spring, the old man had expected him to speak, to form a sentence or two, to say something frightful or wise. But no, instead, from the empty cavity spilled only a long line of drool or when disgruntled the occasional howl. An ear-splitting, unnatural cry that continued until those heavy sagging cheeks splotched red and a more awful-colored substance oozed from his nose. Something about the child was all wrong.

In an effort to stay calm, the old man pulled loose the pouch tied around his waist and placed it on the ground between his legs. He wriggled his entire fist inside, retrieved a handful of fish bones, and stuffed them into his mouth. Slowly he chewed. The briny-salt taste tightened his cheeks and jaw. His appetite flared. Fat, fish-faced child, he thought, leaning forward, daring another look. The boy continued to stare, turning his head every time his mother moved so as not to lose sight of the old man. What was he thinking? After a moment, the toddler’s thick arm flailed and steadied, pointing in his direction. An icy claw gripped the back of Grandpa Tetsu’s neck and he pushed himself flat against the tree once more.

And why was he so fat anyway? When the entire town was fighting to put something in their belly, what was that ugly boy feasting on? Grandpa Tetsu filled his mouth with more bones. Worked them angrily between his jaws.

“When all I have to eat are these.” But with the mumbled words his mood lightened slightly.

It was his best-kept secret. Grandpa Tetsu was the town’s elder. Old and healthy, he was revered for his exceptional luck. During his entire life he’d not so much as suffered a broken bone, even that time he fell off the roof last winter and landed on his head. The most remarkable thing, though, was the fact that he had never lost a tooth. Everyone else his age spent meals mashing watery sweet potatoes between tender gums. Not Grandpa Tetsu. Almost daily townspeople stopped by to discuss the weather and ask his advice on health and long life. And almost daily Grandpa Tetsu told them lies.

He thought that telling the truth lessened its power. So the paper seller with the persistent cough was told to stir cicada husks into his morning soup, and the geta maker’s wife with the full-body rash was instructed to make a tincture of the lizard’s tail plant and early morning dew and apply it to the infected areas. Strangely, most of the remedies worked.

His real secret, though, was fish bones. Collected from the garbage after meals and roasted a second time over warm coals until they cracked and blackened. He sprinkled them with sea salt and kept them in a cloth bag around his waist. He ate them whenever the hunger pangs came. Which very often occurred in the middle of the night. The thought of nighttime led his thoughts to what had happened the previous one—when his daughter and only grandchild had slept under the same roof.

A sound? A weight on his chest? He had bolted upright, blinking in the dusky glow of the andon lamp, puzzling at what had woken him so suddenly. He listened hard expecting another warning, but heard only the whir of insects and the erratic dry snore of his wife in the next futon. There was a draft, so he turned, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. There he saw the bedroom door pushed open, and sitting in the hall, skin dyed orange and jumpy by the oil lamp, leaking piteously from an open mouth: the carp-faced boy. At the memory Grandpa Tetsu’s mood returned to its recent sour state.

“Horsey!”

Grandpa Tetsu jumped, scratching his back against the rough bark of the tree, his feet kicking the half-made horseshoes and his bag of fish bones. There under the horse’s chest the child wobbled on his grotesque legs, his curious eyes, his mouth turned into a fishhook smile.

Grandpa Tetsu’s wife laughed and trotted over. “Ojiichan, what were you doing? Did you scare yourself again?”

“Horsey!” the child insisted, raising his plump arms toward the animal, squeezing his sticky hands into fists and releasing them over and over. No doubt recognizing the danger, the horse whinnied, stepped back, and tossed its head. The child’s mother scooped the boy up.

“Don’t put him on the horse,” the old man demanded, standing slowly on painful legs. “He’s too fat.”

“Oh, he’s just a baby,” the old man’s wife said. She reached over and pinched one of the loathsome baggy cheeks. “And the horse carried them both only yesterday.”

Grandpa Tetsu moved around so that the horse was between him and the toddler. “Just don’t.”

The child kicked and arched his back and his mother plopped him down in the dirt, letting him fiddle with the straw horseshoes.

“And he shouldn’t play with those either,” Grandpa Tetsu said. And then realizing he had his daughter’s attention, he continued with the lecture he’d been building up to. “Look what you did.”

He lifted one of the horse’s rear legs showing her the sad state of the hoof. “We’re lucky this animal didn’t go lame. It’s a good thing the sun came out and dried everything up. Hopefully they won’t rot.” He kicked at the dusty ground.

The old man’s wife and daughter exchanged a glance. His wife spoke.

“We should be thankful that they are fine and were given a horse to ride. There have been terrible stories recently of men on the roads—”

“What are you doing there? You!” Grandpa Tetsu interrupted. The toddler had given up the straw horseshoes and was placing small rocks one on top of another. “Only people trying to flee purgatory stack stones. Why is he stacking stones?”

The old man stormed over, grabbed the horseshoes and his fish bag, and returned to his place on the safe side of the horse.

“Oh, why don’t you play with him, Dad? He’s very, very smart,” his daughter said.

“He is,” his wife agreed. “And he adores you.”

Grandpa Tetsu refused to answer. Instead he turned up the bag and shook the remaining fish bones into his mouth. He chomped down hard and screamed. Pain cracked down his jaw and neck.

The surprised horse kicked up its rear legs, just missing him, and danced sideways blowing air from its nose. The boy sitting under the dancing, blowing creature giggled and clapped his hands. His mother took him into her arms again and petted him as if he were the injured one.

Grandpa Tetsu collapsed to his knees, spitting on the ground. The splintering pain clung inside his skull. With his mouth still open, a line of spit connecting him to the earth, he used one trembling hand to dig through the pile of unchewed bones. When he found what he was looking for, he pushed himself up and held his palm out for his wife and daughter to see.

“Look!” he demanded. “Look what that child put in the bag!” There between his thumb and forefinger, a stone; next to it, three teeth cracked in half and a pool of watery blood.

Pain and Bargain—

After that Grandpa Tetsu shut himself inside the tearoom and wouldn’t come out. For two days he refused visitors and left his meals untouched. His only sustenance was small sips of warm tea he slowly maneuvered down his throat by comic head movements and the sweet tobacco he constantly smoked in his long kiseru pipe.

The room reeked of blue smoke and unwashed old man. But despite his wife’s nagging, he opened the thick-papered windows only when he needed to relieve himself or when he wanted to observe the horse, listen for any more whinnied advice. It was the horse that had warned him. The only one he trusted now. Mostly Grandpa Tetsu spent the days moaning and mumbling to himself.

The pain fluctuated from the cut of a newly sharpened knife to a dull thrum that caused even his toes to curl and tingle. But it wasn’t the pain the old man was worried about. What was more terrifying were the ragged tears in the sliding doors that led to the hallway, and how sometimes through these holes there appeared eyes, eyes with long, wet lashes, eyes that didn’t blink.

“Keep him away!” he’d shout, knowing how vulnerable he was. “Just let me die in peace.”

Once Grandpa Tetsu flung a vase at the eyes, but it only clattered across the wooden floor of the hall, leaving a larger gash in the paper. That evening a frowning mouth appeared, opening and closing, and gulping for air. It looked hungry and Grandpa Tetsu prayed his dying would come quicker.

On the morning of the third day his wife brought him more tea, tobacco, and news.

“Today I heard some interesting gossip,” she began.

The old man groaned. Earlier he’d opened the window and now lay on his side staring at the willow tree watching the horse nibble the leaves off the thin cascading branches. The beast was suspiciously quiet today.

“I heard there is a visiting craftsman from Yukifuru Mountain, Gingumo Temple. His name is Nakanishi and he used to carve Buddhist statues. He excelled in the One-Thousand Armed Kannon. They say he is practically a legend.”

She waited for a response. Grandpa Tetsu scratched at a spider-webbing itch on his thigh instead.

“This past spring he gave up carving Buddhist statues and began a more practical, slightly unconventional, and some say much more lucrative profession—he carves false teeth now.”