Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  “I’m sure he’d be glad to, Evelyn,” my grandmother said then.

  I was caught now, of course, and so I could only parrot her sentiment. “Sure,” I said. “Sure I’d be glad to help.”

  WHEN I ASKED MRS. WILSON—I had determined to call her Mrs. Wilson now rather than Aunt Evelyn, as she was not technically my aunt and calling such a woman by her first name seemed impossible to me at that time—where exactly we were headed, she would only tell me that she was going to visit someone or that she was going to meet someone and when she seemed reticent to offer any additional information I let it drop. Much of the remainder of the drive was accomplished in silence, something of a surprise since I had assumed, for no reason other than my previous experiences in conversation with those I perceived of as adults, that I would be subjected to some manner of questioning as to my own life and my own decisions. But Mrs. Wilson said almost nothing, the most significant exchange of what was nearly six hours in the car, round trip, being a moment in which she asked if I was driving as fast as I felt comfortable.

  “I can slow down,” I told her.

  “No, no,” she said in response. “I thought you might go a bit faster is all.”

  And so I did, speeding west along the interstate in the early morning, the freeway descending the hills and then burning in a ruler line across the Central Valley before shifting, just after the golden hills beyond, to run south along the edge of the bay. We caught occasional glimpses of the ocean and the bridge, small pleasure craft with their shining white triangles of sail taut against the endless oceanic breeze, and, beyond them, lumbering barges heading into the Port of San Francisco, its shape that of a ghost city rising from a dark gray ribbon of fog lined, on its top edge, with a stripe of pure white light that reminded me, yet again, of the smoke of my addiction. I knew I could score in that great gray metropolis and the thought of that possibility bade me break into an anticipatory full-body sweat.

  Mrs. Wilson had removed a small map from her purse at some point and now directed the car off the interstate and then down one street and another, the Pontiac’s great pale blue hood jutting out ahead of us like a diving board. I still did not even know if we were looking for a business or a private home, so when she at last told me to pull the car to the curb I was not sure if we had reached our destination or if she was only pausing to gather her bearings, until she told me to shut off the ignition. She turned the mirror toward her own face and spent a moment looking herself over before asking me first for the car keys (which she slipped into her handbag) and then if I would come with her.

  She did not wait for my answer, and yet a moment later I stood beside her on the sidewalk, staring at the house in front of which I had parked the Pontiac. It was utterly unremarkable, yellow, with a small white porch in the front framed by thick, square pillars, a house in a style still known as a California bungalow. I did not know Mrs. Wilson well at that time—I have come to the conclusion in the years since that no one really knew Mrs. Wilson particularly well—but even a complete stranger would have sensed her distress in that moment, the way in which she seemed to gather herself, to untangle herself, waiting there on the street outside that house until I finally asked her if she needed some assistance.

  But then I saw her, the woman who had captured Mrs. ­Wilson’s attention so completely, a woman who stood on the porch of that yellow bungalow, her face and shoulders yet in shadows so that I could not make out her features. Mrs. ­Wilson did not answer me and did not move until my hand came up, tentatively, to her elbow, grasping it gently, feeling the thin bones of her arm beneath my grip. Only then did she step forward at last, moving toward the house, the figure there continuing to watch us approach without movement or comment until she, Mrs. Wilson, finally stopped at the base of the concrete steps that led to the house’s landing.

  “Kim?” she said. “Do you remember me?”

  The woman there looked down at us, her face—I saw now that she was Asian, not Vietnamese but certainly Asian—betraying nothing, no sign of recognition or even of acknowledgment.

  “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” Mrs. Wilson said then.

  “Who’s that?” the woman on the porch said.

  Mrs. Wilson looked at me and by the expression upon her face I knew that she was momentarily surprised to find me there. “Oh,” she said, “this is my cousin’s son. John. He drove me.”

  “Hello,” I said lamely.

  The woman on the porch nodded. She was, I could see now, Mrs. Wilson’s age or close to it and was dressed more casually than my aunt, in a simple blouse and slacks, her black hair spun up about her head like cotton candy, a style almost identical to my aunt’s but for the absence of a head scarf.

  For a moment I thought she might simply dismiss us by returning to the interior of that little house but at last she nodded. “Mrs. Wilson,” she said quietly, as if confirming to herself that this was who stood before her. “You had better come inside.”

  3

  MY AUNT INTRODUCED THE WOMAN AS MRS. TAKAHASHI. I would come to understand only later just how entangled the two women were, a red thread tying together not only their own lives and their husbands’ lives and the lives of their children but pulling a taut line across history itself. And yet only in hindsight does it feel like fate, like providence, the initial connection between them, between their families, not brokered by the women at all but by their husbands and even that a kind of coincidence made meaningful only by our viewing it as a past event with everything else strewn out beyond it—all the pain and heartbreak and yes even death—so that the very coincidence of their meeting feels, in the end, less like coincidence and more like synchronicity. And yet how easily could Homer Wilson have kept his mouth closed in his frustration and, even if he did speak, how easily could Kimiko Takahashi have ignored those English words, instead continuing to walk behind her husband in the dust and slow heat of the afternoon.

  I heard the story many years later, in the days after Mrs. Takahashi’s funeral when I sat with her adult daughters, Doris and Mary, and told them everything I had learned about their family and about my own, and they told me what I did not yet know, the story of that initial meeting under the shade of Homer Wilson’s failing peach trees, and not only that but the story too of the years that had come before, all the way back to Japan. That first story had come at some remove, the narrative of their lives in Newcastle only spoken in the house when they had been children, for the Wilsons were not discussed in the Takahashi home, not after Tule Lake and Jerome and Oakland and San Jose. That was a past, a betrayal, to be erased from their minds.

  In the fable I was told, the year was 1923 and Hiro Takahashi must have felt that his dream of a new life in America had been an illusion, its shape blowing away like the thin road dust that rose in pale eddies around their feet: his own and those of his young wife, infant child in her arms. He had been working for a variety of ranches and orchards and the constant scrambling from one to the next had run him down to a thin hard wire of worry and fatigue. Now that his young wife held a child to her breast that worry had become a kind of fever.

  So consumed was Hiro in his own thoughts that he did not even hear the voice that came from the peach trees that lined the road: “Goddammit all to hell!” It was Kimiko who reached forward and touched her husband’s arm and told him, in quiet Japanese, to wait. “Chotto matte yo,” she whispered.

  Hiro stopped and looked about him as if waking from a dream. Trees. The road. And Kimiko with the baby in her arms. Looking at her there, glowing in the sunlight, it is not hard to imagine that, for all his exhaustion, he might yet have felt all his labor worthwhile. His grown daughters would tell me that he often spoke of Kimiko with a kind of awe, as if, even after all their lives together, he still could not believe that she was his, that she remained by his side through all their years of struggle, his constant failure to establish himself in a country he had assumed, back when he had still lived under the protection of his family in Y
amanashi Prefecture, would provide him with opportunities that his home simply did not, especially after his eldest brother had married, and thereby laid official claim to the orchard that had been in the Takahashi family for generations, an event that starkly defined what he had always known, that the family orchard would never be his.

  His initial response had been to try to make a new start in the city of Kōfu, a few hours’ walk from the grapes and peaches that had been his life’s work, and although he found employment quickly—washing dishes in a rooming house—he knew with immediate certainty that there was nothing for him in the city. On moonlit nights he would sit and stare out at the blanched peak of Mount Fuji, knowing that, despite everything, it was the same mountain he had been staring at since he was a boy working among the trees and vines of his father’s orchard. Even there in Kōfu, sitting in the lantern-lit darkness, it felt as if he could almost reach back into his own past to claim it as his own, but instead there was only the city all around him encased in shadows and the pale eternal shape of the mountain, blue and faintly luminous against the black sky.

  His father had been to America once, had worked there when he was a young man, and this was where the idea must have come from. There was nothing for him in Yamanashi Prefecture, not in the countryside and not in the city, and so one afternoon he returned home to the family orchard in the shadow of Fujisan, paid his respects to his father and mother and to his oldest brother and his brother’s pregnant wife and mother-in-law too, and then disappeared across the wide endless Pacific. He had told them he would return once he had earned some money, a kind of nest egg, but in truth he knew he would never see his family again. Sometimes, when the moon shone full upon the orchards of Placer County, he could be found wandering the high hills, staring out toward the west, out across the valley and perhaps, too, across the sea to where Mount Fuji still stands watch over the orchard of his childhood. Maybe such things really happened or maybe they are only part of the narrative I have built for him, for myself. He would never see Fujisan again either.

  His brother’s marriage had pushed him away and yet it was his brother who also provided his salvation. Hiro was employed in Vacaville by then, picking fruit for a stern Japanese farmer ten years his senior, and when his brother’s letter arrived Hiro was excited to hear news of home. But there was something else in the small envelope as well: wrapped in the letter’s paper was a photograph of a young woman, a girl really, in a traditional kimono, her hair swept up in a style that so reminded him of his home that he nearly shouted with longing. He supposed she was attractive, although he also knew that such a thing hardly mattered. Powdered face and black eyes. The letter offered sparse details: Hiro’s parents and brother had arranged the match with help from a nakōdo. The woman came, the letter continued, from a family of good standing in Tokyo. It did not occur to him to question the specifics: the unlikeliness that a city girl from a good family would needs be shipped off to marry a farmworker in California. What he wondered instead was if she would be able to adapt to the life he had in ­America, although he knew too that it had been the matchmaker’s job to determine the answer to this question and many others as well. He knew very little, the fairer sex yet a mystery to him, and he could hardly fathom the notion that this woman, ­Kimiko, whose photograph he carried in his shirt pocket, was to be his own.

  When she arrived in Vacaville early in the fall of 1920, he had moved to Loomis and then Penryn, and she followed. By the time I returned to Placer County in 1969, these towns were little more than brief off-ramps from the roaring freeway that passed from San Francisco to Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and beyond, but then they were bustling hamlets, each with its own identity and purpose, and Newcastle yet among them. Hiro had come northeast on the word of a man he had met at the ­Vacaville Buddhist Church, following that man’s word only because he felt, in his heart, that he was not meant to be a laborer all his life but that there had to be something more to the years that would follow than working some other man’s plot of land.

  She joined him in Loomis. They lived, those first years, in a building that was not much more than a shack in a row of similar shacks occupied by similar people—young couples and some bachelors, some even with elders or with children. When he was moved to the internment camps at Tule Lake and later Jerome in distant Arkansas, it would often come to him that his shelter in the camps was still better than it had been during the first few years of his marriage, Kimiko bearing his first child in a room six feet wide and ten long. They named the child ­Raymond, a name Hiro had seen in an American magazine. The year was 1923 then. Hiro was twenty-two years old; Kimiko had just turned twenty.

  It was soon after the birth of their first child that the voice had come from the orchard rows and Kimiko had stopped her husband with her hand, with her gentle words. Hiro was just preparing to ask her what was wrong when the voice came again—“Shit, shit, shit!”—and this time Hiro heard it himself, looking for a moment to his wife and the baby she held in her arms, and then stepping from the swirling eddies of dust and into the grass between the trees: “Hello?” he called in English. “Do you require help?”

  There was at first no answer from the trees and so Hiro called again and now a voice returned—“Who’s there?”—and Hiro continued forward, calling his own name in American order, his given name first and then the family name: “Hiroshi Takahashi.” It was spring and the trees should have been bursting with new buds and many were, but here and there in the branches were leaves curled and blistered in bright orange and red as if pustules filled with blood. Hiro repeated his call, “Do you require help?”

  And then there he was: a young white man, about his own age, straw hat partially obscuring his face so that Hiro could not see him fully until he tilted his head back to return Hiro’s gaze. A freckled nose. Ears larger than one might expect and canted in Hiro’s direction as if he were a horse and had swiveled his ears forward to better hear the man who stood before him. “Ah hell,” he said, clearly embarrassed, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “I hear from road,” Hiro said.

  “Yeah, I’m just throwing a tantrum all by myself.” His hair was light brown, not quite the yellow of some of the hakujin but close. They both wore denim bib overalls, faded to a nearly identical hue.

  “Tantrum?” he said now, a faint smile on his lips.

  “Angry at myself for not spraying when I should’ve,” the young man said.

  “Peach leaf curl,” Hiro said simply.

  “Peach leaf curl,” the young man repeated. Then he looked up. “Bordeaux I guess,” he said.

  “No,” Hiro said. “Lime sulfur.”

  “That so?”

  “Hai,” Hiro said. Then he repeated the word in English. “Yes. Lime sulfur better.”

  “What’s your recipe?”

  “Two-thirds to one-third,” Hiro said.

  “Two-thirds being the sulfur.”

  He nodded. “Ground like salt,” he said. “Very fine. For winter and maybe February.” This latter English word, February, was difficult to say and he felt his mouth slipping over the word as he struggled with it.

  “Yeah,” the man said now, “for some reason I never got around to it. Jesus there’s just so much to keep ahold of. Maybe I can prune this back?”

  “No pruning now,” Hiro said. “Too late.”

  “Yeah I guess I know that too.” He paused and then said, “You’re . . . what? Chinese?” The man had been looking from Hiro to the fruit and back again but now he stopped and really looked at the man before him, a face deeply tan, eyes dark but sparkling, cheeks slightly drawn, not from privation but from, the young man thought, a kind of strength. He was taut as a bow. That much was clear just from looking at him.

  “Japanese,” Hiro said. “Late for lime sulfur but maybe try. Paint on here and here and here.” He pointed to the trunks, their shapes unpainted, unmarked by the whitewash of the sulfur. “Start process.”

  “Start what now?”
/>
  Hiro paused, thought hard about the English r sound, and then said carefully, “Process.”

  “Ah yeah. Process,” the young man said. “Sorry.” Then he said his name: “Homer Wilson.”

  “Hiroshi Takahashi.”

  They shook hands, and for a moment Hiro stood there in the shade next to this man, this Homer Wilson. If he felt something of the magnetic pull that would draw the two families together he did not show it, and yet it had to be there, a pull of such force that it would draw them together even long after history had blown them apart.

  At last Hiro nodded. “Have a nice day,” he said. Then he turned back to where he had left his wife and baby in the road.

  “Ah wait wait,” the man said. “You working around here?”

  Hiro told him for whom he had worked and that he was looking for something more permanent, somewhere he might stay, adding, after some discussion, that he had a new baby and that it was hard on his wife to be on the move all the time.

  “Seems like you know about trees,” Homer said then.

  “Yes,” Hiro answered. “Family orchard in Japan. Peaches and Kyoho.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah, grapes. Like . . . ah . . . Concord.”

  The man nodded in a kind of low arc, as if he were scooping up a pail of water with his mind, the ears waving in the air like the empty husks of melons. “I could use some help,” he said now. “Maybe you can help me with your recipe. The lime sulfur, I mean.”

  Hiro looked at him. “A job?”

  “I can’t promise much,” the man, Homer, said, “but if you can help me get these trees in some kind of order we can work something out. For the pay I mean. Maybe we can figure out a way to hold back the curl at least.”

  “No place to live.”

  “Oh I can take care of that,” Homer said. “There’s a little cabin. It’ll take some work. Maybe a roof. And a good cleaning.”