Little Yokozuna by Wayne Shorey Page B

and metaphysics of nature, and was a minor poet in his own village. Not believing in their desperate need to find a garden gateway, he could only interpret their headlong rush through Kyoto as the greatest possible insensitivity to beauty, to delicacy, to sun and bloom and wind and tree.
    But Annie and Knuckleball could only think of lost Little Harriet, and they galloped from one place to another, towing their Japanese friends behind them. They looked everywhere for likely places, sniffing their way through the heavy scent of spring flowers for a familiar cool, piney breeze, stepping into bright shrubbery and behind stone pagodas and under twisted little evergreens, hoping against hope to feel the earth dissolve beneath their feet and to find themselves swept away on the trail of Little Harriet again. But the ground was always solid, and every hint of an evergreen smell turned out to be the smell of an actual pine or larch or cedar, almost lost in the overwhelming Kyoto riot of April flowers.
    They saw the Kinkakuji, or Golden Pavilion, and the Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion, both magnificent in their settings of ponds and trees. At the insistence of Kiyoshi-chan's father they took a moment to dip water and drink with a long-handled tin cup from the famous spring of the Clear Water Temple, Kiyomizudera. They saw the many-roofed pagoda of Daigoji, and the kilometers of red torn at the Shinto shrine of Fushimiinari.
    They saw the famous dry rock garden of Ryoanji, and at the Tendai temple of Sanzenin they saw but hardly noticed the lovely moss-mounded garden, with its shrubs sculpted into fat little heaps, like clusters of very docile green farm animals.
    After all this, Annie finally paused in one place. She never knew the name of it, but it was a deep bamboo grove, with the stalks of bamboo growing almost too
    tightly to walk between. The pointed leaves overhead were entangled together into a green roof, through which the Monday afternoon sun could barely filter. She looked into the grove and was caught, as if by a mystic power.
    "Come on, Knuckler," she whispered.
    "Yes!" breathed Knuckleball, seeing into the grove himself. "This is just the kind of place."
    They stepped into the grove, while Kiyoshi-chan and his father looked after them, puzzled. It was like stepping into an underwater world, the kind that comes to life in so many Japanese fairy tales of the realm of the Dragon King. Liquid green light flowed around them, the ground was soft underfoot, and the bamboo spoke in a hushed whisper, like the sound of gentle rain. They took each other's hands wordlessly. There was a breeze through the grove, not the piney mountain breeze they were looking for, but maybe related to it, somehow.
    Annie turned back toward their friends, whom they could barely see through the gently swaying stalks. "We have really not done well," she said. "We have to go talk to them."
    "OK," said Knuckleball, understanding.
    They emerged into the bright sunlight, where the man and the boy waited for them, wearing expressions of long but weary patience. The two American children bowed very low to them both, one at a time.
    "We have been very rude," Annie said. "We have been a little out of our minds. Please forgive us. We have hurt you, and we are sorry."
    Kiyoshi-chan grinned, and his father bowed to Annie, insisting that no such apology was necessary. When he straightened, his face was eased of its frown.
    "Show us what you would like us to see," said Annie, "in the time we have left."
    So they went to just one more place, another nameless temple with a garden. There they sat as the shadows lengthened, watching three turtles on a rock, listening to the
thock
...
thock
...
thock
of a bamboo water pipe, which filled from a falling trickle and tipped, pouring its water into a stone basin. No garden gateway showed itself, but a great peace flowed around them, and Annie and Knuckleball both felt some of their distress fall away.
    "Everything will be OK,"