Chapter 53 - Kagome gets an Education

Saburo's repentance and subsequent miraculous recovery was noted and discussed at length by the village gossips. Kaou's strange affliction also provided much fodder for discussion. Kaou, herself, remained uncharacteristically tightlipped about the story behind the red hand print on her face, and the residents of the village were surprised that there were no scandalous stories about Kagome coming forth, even though Kagome had obviously confronted Kaou. Opinion was divided on whether recent developments were caused by spiritual powers, youkai spells, divine intervention or merely long overdue karma. About all that anyone could agree on was that it was wise to stay in Kagome's good graces.

Kingo's parents were quick to grasp the implications, and they pressured Kingo to do his penance to InuYasha, Kagome and Tsuchiya, which he eventually grudgingly did. The River Woman permitted his injuries to heal, but left sufficient scarring on his back to remind him of the gods' wrath. Ichiro and Yozo healed slowly and were left with debilitating scars as a result of their intransigence.

Saburo divested himself of his old friends, but found that the rest of the village youngsters still wanted nothing to do with him. He found solace and purpose in throwing himself into an apprenticeship with Hikaru, the village carpenter.

The rest of the village haltingly resumed normal life, although many things were never quite the same. Kaou's actions had left hard feelings between many former friends and relations, and people were having a hard time adjusting to the ugly revelations about themselves and their neighbors.

Kagome entered Aiko's shop one afternoon to restock her supply of mirin and vinegar. Sango was there ahead of her getting her own orders filled. Aiko filled Sango's order with her usual care and they quietly concluded their business, then Sango walked stiffly out of the shop. Both were coolly cordial, but an invisible Miroku loomed large between them.

Aiko sighed and turned to Kagome after Sango was well away. "Life's trials don't tie themselves up in neat little packages, do they? You dealt with Kaou, and we're grateful, but even so, her tales continue to plague us. I like Sango-san and wish I could be easy with her again. We were fighting on the same side and still we end up enemies."

"Give her time," Kagome said. "Sango-chan is a very forgiving person, but she's still hurting from ... everything."

"It's asking too much, and I know it. I still can't forgive myself for causing her all that pain. But I... No. I was wrong and that's all there is to it. I won't make excuses." Aiko swallowed hard and took Kagome's flasks. "Mirin, was it?"

"Mirin and vinegar."

"Right."

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Harvest came and went, and with a long winter with three house-bound kids facing her, Kagome decided it was past time to get her children's schooling in order. With Mama's help, she selected a collection of primers, notepads, pens, pencils and other assorted equipment to set up school.

InuYasha viewed the new acquisitions with skepticism. "You really think this is going to work?" he asked as Kagome put the supplies on a free shelf.

"This is important," she replied firmly. "I have it all figured out. I'll just wait for a rainy day to start, when there's nothing else to do. That should get us off to a good start."

"Yeah, right."

"You could work at being encouraging," she commented tartly. "You're not helping anything by being so negative."

One morning in early November, the first winter storm blustered its way into the valley with howling winds and sheets of rain. Tsuchiya and Toushi stood in the doorway disconsolately, watching the day's fun wash away. Kagome seized her opportunity, cleared the table from breakfast and laid out the primers, some abacuses, and some paper and pencils. Then she said brightly to the children, "I have something special I've been saving up for us to do on stormy days like today. It's such a bore sitting around watching the rain. Let's try this instead."

Tsuchiya and Toushi turned quizzically and inspected the table. Toushi lit up at the idea of books, but Tsuchiya looked considerably more dubious.

Kagome held up and rattled an abacus.

"Ohh!" Toushi cried. "Kanesuki-san uses that to figure out medicines."

"Yes," Kagome said. "Do you want to know how it works?"

Even InuYasha looked interested in this one. Everyone settled around the table and picked up an abacus. When Noriko decided bang the table with hers, Kagome quickly swapped it out for a puzzle she was fond of.

Clicking the counter beads was fun. So was sliding the beads to show Kagome different numbers. Everyone was still practicing making numbers with the beads when Wataru-san interrupted the lesson with the news that a large tree had fallen at the other end of the village, crashing into three houses. There were people trapped inside and they needed InuYasha's help right away to clear the tree. InuYasha jumped up and followed Wataru out into the storm, Kourogi at his heels.

Kagome got everyone's attention back on the lesson, then it all started falling apart as she moved to the next step, addition and subtraction. The concept of carrying beads across to the next digit in addition was mildly confusing, but borrowing for subtraction brought Tsuchiya to a screeching halt. While Toushi carefully and thoughtfully worked her way through "13 - 8", Tsuchiya found other uses for his abacus. First, he rattled the beads by Noriko's ear as she worked on her puzzle. She batted it away with a squeal of annoyance.

Kagome moved him to the other side of the table and set him to work on "11 - 2". He carefully set the beads up to show "11", stared at it for a while, then decided it was more fun to try to roll the abacus across the table making noises like the streetcars that drove past the Higurashi Shrine in modern times. After a few passes back and forth in front of him, he sent his 'streetcar' careening across the table to crash into Toushi's 'car', completely spoiling her working of "25 - 7". Her temper flared and she whacked him over the head with her abacus. Rin and Shippo decided that maybe 'adult' lessons could be held at another time and quickly found useful chores to do.

Kagome confiscated the abacuses and called a short recess, then moved on to writing practice. First, she recited the basic hiragana syllables for them to draw, which both of them managed well enough for legibility. Next, she asked them to draw a small cluster of basic kanji. Toushi, who looked at the children's library often, easily produced them, but Tsuchiya could only remember a couple. Kagome patiently guided him through drawing each of them while Toushi watched, obviously annoyed at being stuck waiting for her slowpoke brother to catch up. Kagome changed the game, giving a new set of kanji characters to Toushi, while she repeated the ones Tsuchiya had just worked. Toushi drew her kanji and Tsuchiya drew doodles of lizards.

Noriko was now bored with her puzzle and she started banging the pieces loudly on the table. Kagome gathered up the pieces and was putting the puzzle away when Tsuchiya's gray kitten, Thistle, bolted in the door, sopping wet, and jumped onto the table to drip all over the papers and books.

Kagome declared another recess so she could dry off Thistle and clean up the mess. Thistle protested the towel treatment by clamping down on Kagome's hand and arm with his claws and nipping her fingers. She peeled him off and threw him out on the porch for bad manners, reflecting that Rin really had found the perfect name for him. He might look soft and harmless with all that gray fluff, but more often than not, she got a handful of prickles when she handled him.

School reconvened after lunch. Kagome put Noriko down for her nap and pulled out a beginning geography book. Tsuchiya and Toushi sat on each side of her as she opened the book. It started with a map of Japan. Kagome pointed out the different islands and named them.

"Where are we?" Toushi asked.

"We're on Honshu," Kagome replied pointing out the big island in the center of the map.

"Which part?" Tsuchiya asked.

Kagome pointed to Tokyo.

"What's all that pink part?" Toushi asked.

"That's ... um ... Tokyo. The pink parts on the map are cities." Kagome winced inwardly. Maybe she should have looked at the books closer before beginning.

"We're not in Tokyo. That's where Grandma is!" Tsuchiya protested.

"Well... actually, we are, just, we're here before the city was built. I'll ... I'll have to find a map of Sengoku era Japan to show you."

"What's Sengoku?" Toushi asked.

"Sengoku is the name I learned for the time we live in here when I was learning history at Grandma's. You see, we don't change places when we go through the well, we really change times."

"Oh. What do us people call Grandma's time?"

"Umm, it hasn't happened yet, so it doesn't have a name here."

Toushi looked confused. "It has too happened. I been there."

"We go many many years into the future. Where you've been will really happen a long time from now."

"I want to go to tomorrow!" Tsuchiya declared. "I want to see if it's the same when I wake up tomorrow as it is today."

"We can't do that. The well only takes us to Grandma's time. It doesn't do any other times."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Umm ... I don't know."

"Why?"

"I, uh, I don't know how it works in the first place."

"Well, I wanna try it." Tsuchiya declared. "Let's go!" He jumped up from his seat to go get his coat.

Thunder boomed directly overhead and the house shook under another blast of wind, then the roof rattled loudly as hailstones bounced on the ground outside.

"Oh, look. Hail!" Kagome said, peering outside. "Let's try this another day, shall we?" At the back of her head, she could feel the beginning signs of a roaring headache coming on.

Tsuchiya looked very disappointed and was quite grumpy when Kagome settled them back down beside her to try the next book. Maybe science would be safer.

This book began with categorizing the different types of animals in the world: fish, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals and so forth. A few defining properties for each were described with colorful pictures of representative species. Toushi cooed over the pictures, but Tsuchiya, who was still feeling grumpy, looked at them critically, then asked, "Where are the youkai?"

Kagome's headache exploded through her skull and settled into her brow, throbbing rhythmically.

"Um, the magic animals aren't here."

"Why not?" Toushi asked.

"The people who wrote the book don't think they exist..." Kagome's voice trailed off as she looked at her dog-eared children beside her.

"That's so stupid!" Tsuchiya cried indignantly.

"Yeah!" Toushi agreed.

"You know, there really aren't very many youkai in Grandma's time." Kagome explained.

"What happened to them?" Toushi asked.

"I don't know. I wasn't around when they went away."

"I think they're just hiding," Tsuchiya declared stoutly.

"Do you think we could find some if we looked?" Toushi asked. "Grampa must know where they are."

The children happily started planning a youkai hunt with Grampa for their next visit while Kagome put away the science book and started rooting through her medical supplies for the aspirin. Two, this was going to take at least two. She brewed some tea to help her head stop spinning. Maybe reading would not be so controversial...

"Let's take turns reading a story, shall we? Grandma gave me a book of fairy stories."

They sat down again and worked their way through one story, taking turns reading paragraphs and discussing words they hadn't seen before. Kagome marked new kanji for future practice.

"Mama, did that story really happen?" Toushi asked after they were done.

Kagome started to say "No," then paused. How could she just say "no" when she lived surrounded by fairy-tale creatures, when her daughter who asked the question was a fairy-tale creature? Once again, she was forced to admit, "I don't know."

InuYasha and Kourogi returned about an hour later to find the children happily building block towers and knocking them down.

"Hey, I thought you were going to do school lessons," he said, looking around the room. There was no sign of Kagome or the lesson books about.

"We did for a while," Kagome said from the dark corner where she reclined with a pot of tea at her side and a steaming compress over her eyes and brow. "You know, until to day I really didn't know just how much I don't know."

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Kagome did not give up on the idea of education, but she was forced to revise her lesson techniques over and over. Since "I don't know" refused to leave the lesson scene, she changed it to "I don't know. Let's see what we can find out." All troublesome questions were carefully noted and research excursions were organized to explore the troublesome topics. It added up to a lot of family-together time and as the winter dragged on, the siblings chafed on each other.

Fidgety Tsuchiya came to loathe lesson time. There was no escaping the fact that some topics required sitting quietly and practicing things, which was tremendously difficult for him. He squirmed and whined through his work periods and did just exactly as little as he could get away with and still escape. Kagome tried to enforce minimum practice times by setting her old alarm clock to regulate when he could leave the table. He discovered if he pestered Toushi enough, she would explode and both of them would get thrown outside to cool off.

Toushi, on the other hand, was in her element. She deeply resented Tsuchiya's disruptions of her interesting study sessions and was particularly annoyed that he seemed to be so satisfied with the results of his teasing. He just smirked when she yelled at him and since he was bigger and stronger than she was, physical retribution was self-defeating. She chose to get even by working ever harder at her studies to make his failures all the more glaring. Tsuchiya, in turn, resented that information seemed to flow so easily into her mind and remain there forever, neatly filed and cross-referenced for all occasions.

Noriko remained on the fringes of the lesson scene. Kagome kept her involved by handing her animal pictures to color, map puzzles to work, and shape blocks to build. While she and Tsuchiya often drove Toushi crazy by throwing blocks at each other or racing abacuses across the table, it wasn't always so friendly between them. Tsuchiya felt that since he was older and a boy, it was his right and duty to lord it over his younger sisters. Neither of them was much impressed with this logic, and they bonded over ganging up on him to smack him back into place.

Tsuchiya's campaign to enforce his seniority privileges was not faring well, and he could hardly wait for his new brother to arrive to even the odds. It seemed to be taking forever; Mama got rounder and rounder and despite her assurances that his brother would be here soon, he felt about ready to explode.

Finally, in early spring, the day came that Papa collected him and his sisters and took them to visit Grandma while Mama gave birth. A few short hours later, Papa returned briefly to report the birth had gone well and Mama and the new baby were resting.

The next morning, Papa took them home again to meet their new sibling. Tsuchiya found his new brother a crushing disappointment. He had forgotten how little and useless a new baby was. The tiny mite sleeping in Mama's arms wasn't going to be able to do anything in the war against his sisters for ages.

Toushi inspected her new brother with her hawk-bright eyes for a long moment, then decided he'd do. Noriko viewed him with suspicion, unsure what his presence was going to do to her standing and what she should do about it.

They named him 'Taibou', the Eagerly Awaited one. In this child, there had been no angst about the future, no question about his parentage, just happy anticipation. InuYasha and Kagome were finally relaxing into their role as parents.

Toushi tended to pronounce it "Taiba". Tsuchiya called her to task on it shortly afterward as they practiced kanji at the table. Rolling his eyes with his most irritatingly superior big-brother tone, he said, "It's Taibo-oh, not Taiba-ah. You know, kind of like "No-ohriko."

While Toushi drew her ears back and glared at him with sullen resentment at the reminder of her pronunciation problems, Nariko said in a prim voice, "I like Nariko."

Toushi's glare became smugly triumphant.

Tsuchiya's ears flattened as he became surly in turn; they were ganging up on him again.

Noriko wasn't one to let it go at that. She announced at dinner that she was to be called 'Nariko' from now on.

"Oh, really," InuYasha said with raised eyebrows.

"Yes." The prim look was back, feminizing, but not softening, the steely golden eyes backing up that assertion.

Names were a fluid commodity in medieval Japan. People often acquired new names after notable events or accomplishments. A boy generally took a new name when he became a man at fifteen. Still, Noriko's declaration was unusual for someone her age.

InuYasha stared at her for a while. Asking why of someone this age was not likely to yield a coherent answer. He was aware of the ongoing friction between Toushi and Tsuchiya over Toushi's pronunciation, and figured that Noriko was just stirring the pot for some reason. He let it drop, believing it would blow over soon.

However, Noriko, now Nariko, proceeded to firmly correct everyone who slipped into the old pronunciation until she had them all retrained. She particularly enjoyed correcting Tsuchiya. He decided he was not about to give her the satisfaction of a war over Taibou's name; 'Taibou' quietly became 'Taiba'.

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Authors Note:

The new baby, Taiba, has arrived and so has our next CONTEST.

I suppose you have all noticed that each of these children has his or her own unique talent for driving parents crazy.

The person or persons who can come closest to guessing Taiba's talent will be awarded the answer to one question or a bit of spoiler text highlighting Taiba's talent for their entertainment.

Submissions can be sent in until June 5, 2010.

Have fun!