I'll go with you

Untitled Part 2

Clouds were rising in the ocean now. The unexpected warmth of the past few days had at night drawn heavy fog from the cold waves. Sadao watched mists hide outlines of a little island near the shore and then come creeping up the beach below the house wreathing the pines. Soon, the fog was wrapped about the house too. He was about to go back to his room when he saw something black come out of the mists. It was a man. 

He was flung out of the ocean- flung, it seemed, to his feet by a breaker. He staggered a few steps, his body outlined against the mist, his arms around his head. Then the curled mists hid him again. 

The man was on his hands and knees crawling. Then he saw him fall on his face and lie there.

''A fisherman perhaps,'' Sadao thought, ''washed from his boat.'' He ran quickly down the steps to take a closer look. A mile or two away on either side there were fishing villages, but here was only the bare and lonely coast, dangerous with rocks. The surf beyond the beach was spiked with rocks. Somehow the man had managed to come through them — he must be badly torn. 

He saw when he came toward him that indeed it was so. The sand on one side of him had already a stain of red soaking through.

"He is wounded," Sadao exclaimed to nobody in particular. He made haste to the man who lay motionless, his face in the sand. An old cap stuck to his head soaked in sea water. He was in wet rags of garments. He turned the man over to look at the most American face Sadao had ever seen. 

His face was very white, paler than most Americans'- but that was possibly from the terror of whatever had left him in this state at the doorstep of Dr Sadao Hoki who most unfortunately did not have it in him to throw a wounded man back into the sea or hand him over to the very people that had wounded him so. As Sadao bent to look at his face, the wet cap fell away to reveal long, luscious blond locks that must not have been washed at all, except by the fierce unforgiving sea that had cut him so badly. 

The man looked younger than Sadao, though not by much, and the light silver streaks in his rough, uncut yellow beard along with the single crease across his forehead led him to believe that suffering had aged this man much before his time just as it had done Sadao. A wave of immense loathing washed over him, but no amount of loathing would have allowed him to go back on his Hippocratic oath and leave this stupid white man with his almost golden hair and gaunt white face that might have been handsome if not so tortured alone to the mercy of the sea, or the general who was so cruel even to his wife and most certainly would not spare an American; or even to the unpredictable forces of nature that had not been kind to him so far, and had no reason to be kind to him now. 

Now Sadao remembered the wound, and with his expert fingers he began to search for it. Blood flowed freshly at his touch. On the right side of his lower back Sadao saw that a gun wound had been reopened. The flesh was blackened with powder. Sometime, not many days ago, the man had been shot and had not been tended. It was bad chance that the rock had struck the wound.

''What shall I do with this man?'' Sadao muttered. But his trained hands seemed of their own will to be doing what they could to stanch the fearful bleeding. He packed the wound with the sea moss that strewed the beach. The man moaned with pain in his stupor but he did not awaken. 

He lifted the man's battered cap. There, almost gone, was faint lettering. It was now apparent that he was a sailor from an American warship. Sadao spelled out the font on the cap- "U.S. Navy." The man was a prisoner of war! 

Now, Sadao was unsure of what to do. His father would never forgive him if he did not hand over a war prisoner to the police as any patriot should, and neither would the law. If he was caught sheltering a white man in his house, he would be arrested and if he turned him over as a prisoner, he would certainly die. 

"The best thing to do would be to put him back into the sea," Sadao thought, but he did not move. It was a full moon, the tide was high. No, the sea would almost certainly kill him. He wished for Hana's presence beside him, for she had almost always been his voice of reason during extreme situations. 

"Would Hana have saved him?" he wondered out loud. 

He pictured her angelic face that he had not seen in five years. The flash of dark brown eyes. The unrelenting and indisputable kindness that they reflected. The anger that coursed through them when she heard of even the smallest injustice. Sweet Hana, who was his lantern on the darkest nights, who would never harm so much as a fly. He heard her voice ringing in his head, fierce and full of conviction- 

"Is he anything but a man? And a wounded helpless man!" 

Yes, there was no question of it. Hana would most definitely have saved the man. 

Hana had not lived long enough to bear children, and his servants had long since fled from there- for they could no longer bear his irritable temper after the death of his wife, even though they had tried their best to put up with it for two years. Sadao had been left completely and utterly alone. He had nobody to talk to, nobody to help him with the housework, nobody to come home to after a long day of work, and nobody who would report the sheltering of a white man in his house that had not been home for five years- since everything that gave life to the lovely place that had now seemed to him little better than a dreary hut had died with Hana. 

Yes, Sadao would take the man into his house to treat him and let him stay there until he was well enough to leave. He was revered by the general as a patriot, and his father had a high reputation in the country; it would be easy enough to do it without raising suspicion. Had the man been well, Sadao would have handed him over immediately. All Americans were his enemies, and he had no reason to make an exception for this one. It was only the fact that he was wounded that invoked Sadao's sympathy and made him reconsider handing him over like he knew he ought to do. 

Sadao shook his head. He snapped out of his sequence of thoughts and carried the man by his shoulders into the house. Perhaps he would be able to make a sound decision about the man when he was whole again.