Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  “Me and wife and baby?”

  “Of course.” He paused and then said, “How old?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “No,” the man said, smiling now. “I mean the baby.”

  “Ah,” Hiro said. He too smiled. “Raymond. Two month.” Then he stopped and said the last word again, the correcting s louder than the word itself: “Months.”

  The young man nodded. “Raymond, huh?”

  Hiro nodded. “Ray.”

  “Good name, Ray. My uncle’s name.”

  “American name.”

  “That it is,” the man said. “Ours is about the same age, actually. James Herbert Wilson. We call him Jimmy.” He paused, as if in thought. Then he said, “You said your name was Hiroshi?”

  “Yes, Hiroshi. Short is Hiro.”

  “Hero?” Homer said, and so Hiro repeated it once more, pronouncing it not in the way the white man had but in the Japanese way, and to his surprise, this man, this Homer Wilson, said it back to him in much the same accent, his tongue striking just at the r so that the sound was nearly inaudible.

  “Very good,” Hiro told him. “You could speak Japanese.”

  “Maybe you can teach me,” Homer said, smiling. “That would be a thing to know, wouldn’t it? Me speaking Japanese.” He laughed then; his eyes returned to the tree and Hiro followed his gaze into the branches. The sun was up there, its light shaped green, shifting as the leaves wound along the tangle of branches. Komorebi.

  THEY MIXED THE LIME SULFUR in a huge iron kettle that had been held in Homer Wilson’s shed for exactly that purpose and set it on an open bonfire they had gathered from the previous year’s pruning, the kerosene flashing up like a brief impossible star and then the dry foliage curling in the heat and, after many hours, the liquid in the great cauldron began, at last, to boil. The two women, Kimiko and Evelyn, watched from a distance for a time until the sulfur’s acrid reek stung the air so strongly that they were forced to retreat to their separate lives. Hiro and Homer watched them as they disappeared into the trees.

  For the rest of that week, the men painted the tree trunks, working side by side and finding that there was a rhythm in the work, an ease that neither had expected. Hiro had labored, already, for a half dozen men on as many farms and had learned that employers were varying in their dispositions, some kindly and distant, some ever on the lookout for an imperceptible transgression, even when it was clear that most of the ­Japanese laborers, some as young as twelve years old, knew more about managing fruit and vegetable production than did the pale, grim owners. But it felt different here. This American, this Homer Wilson, wanted to learn, wanted to know what Hiro knew, and treated him as a kind of equal, even one night inviting the Takahashis into his home, an invitation which cemented the feelings Hiro already held for Homer Wilson, that he had found a friend.

  That his wife and Homer’s wife did not find themselves quite so well matched was nothing either of the men even considered. During those first weeks the two women did not exchange more than a few words, and in fact their interactions were so tenuous and guarded that it would take many years of proximity before the sum total of their conversations would fill a single page. It was not simply reticence; Kimiko was concerned about her lack of aptitude in the English language to such an extent that the vocabulary itself seemed to drain away from her each time she reached for it. Only when her two daughters spoke that language around her in a constant and unceasing flow did she finally come to feel she understood something of its logic and texture. But that was so much later, after Tule Lake and Jerome and Oakland, after the family had settled in San Jose and their lives had changed forever. As for Evelyn Wilson, she simply lacked the trust and patience and grace to help her young neighbor muddle through the basics of a new language. And yet there was, or might have been in those early days, a feeling between them that they might yet seek friendship, their minds independently searching for something to say and neither saying anything at all.

  For Kimiko what began as a kind of grudging ­acquiescence faded until there was only the fact of her, of Mrs. Wilson, the woman who was the wife of her husband’s hakujin friend. Although even this she secretly questioned, the idea that Homer Wilson thought of her husband in the same way her husband thought of Homer Wilson. Such things simply did not seem possible to her. She had come to America as a kind of package meant to satisfy a business arrangement between the nakōdo and the two families—her own and the Takahashis—and once they had bustled her onto the ship that transaction had been completed. And yet so much of that transaction had lacked the necessary propriety. She had been too young, for one. And there had been no meeting between herself and her prospective husband, so even that part of the process, the omiai, was absent. Only later did she puzzle out the dire circumstances of the whole event, that her parents must have needed her gone, that their finances must have fallen awry to such an extent that when they heard of the Takahashis’ unmarried son in America they jumped at the chance to unload the financial responsibility of their only daughter before the window for sending picture brides to America was closed forever by government decree. And perhaps the Takahashis did not actually understand just how young she had been, not twenty-two or twenty-three but seventeen years old, in most ways still very much a child. Looking back at herself years later, a sepia photograph the nakōdo had sent to Hiro in America and which he would keep for all the years of his life, she was struck by just how innocent she appeared: dressed in a formal kimono, her thin, tapered fingers woven together upon her lap. She could not remember what she had felt that day in the photographer’s studio, her expression utterly blank and vacant, the white face powder giving her features the appearance of a mask.

  What she would remember forever were those days on board the ship. Sick for the first week and then slowly coming into some semblance of rightness, she had considered her options with a level of detail that sometimes shocked her: jumping from the deck into the roiling sea (but alas she preferred to live), disappearing into the first city the ship moored at (but she did not know how she would survive there), trying to convince the sailors to take her back to Japan (but she could only live there now in a kind of exile from her own family). In the end, she decided to at least meet this man, this Hiroshi Takahashi.

  He was not as handsome as she might have hoped and was a good deal poorer than she feared. The only reason she remained by his side was that he was, she learned soon enough, kind, not only to her but to others, and something of this pulled at her heart in ways she had not anticipated or even wanted. She did not know, of course, what she would do if she were to leave his side—she knew no one in San Francisco or anywhere else on the continent—and yet for many months the idea stayed with her, not as a real possibility but at least as an option, something that provided her a kind of compass during days of struggle and privation. It was a fiction, the idea that her location was of her own choosing, but one which helped her in those early days.

  When I asked my grandmother about Kimiko Takahashi, it took her a long while to even determine who it was that I was talking about, the departed Japanese-Americans so wholly forgotten that it seemed they had been scrubbed clean out of my grandmother’s mind. But then something at last came to her memory, her words forming slowly as the information trickled back into whatever shallow furrows it had left behind. “Tak’s wife, you mean,” she told me. “Sure, Tak’s wife. I don’t think I knew her name. Nobody did, probably. She was just Tak’s wife. That’s all.”

  And even if they knew she was named Kim—not Kimiko to Mrs. Wilson but Kim—that was scant knowledge compared with how they knew Mrs. Wilson herself or any of the other young women, young mothers, in the countryside and in the town, orchardist’s wives. In those days, days before I was born, their names were known. The names of their children were known. But my grandmother’s knowledge of Mrs. Takahashi was not so different from the white community’s knowledge of any of the Issei women. They would have known some of the men, of cou
rse, because they were actively working in the same industry in which the white farmers were working, property lines bounding property lines, fruit weighed upon the same scales and packed into the same Blue Anchor boxes. So they knew Tak and his family in the same, general way they knew the Dois and the Uyedas and the Nakaes and the Yokotes and many others too, knew them as quiet, almost silent neighbors and did not consider what that meant, exchanging a simple greeting when crossing paths but otherwise ignoring their presence altogether.

  But it would turn out that Mrs. Wilson, in her way, was unknown as well. And yet that had not always been the case, the people of the town and the countryside, people with whom she had grown up, speaking of her as if of two separate women, a serious but not unsmiling teen who would become a young bride and young mother and then, almost as if a switch had been flipped, the severe, unforgiving woman whom I recalled from my own childhood. That there had been another—a woman whom people had liked and not merely feared and respected—seemed impossible to me, and yet the evidence was present in nearly every conversation I had with anyone old enough to remember who she had been in the days of her own youth. They recounted various versions of an event from which she seemed to have never fully recovered, an event that transpired one bleak, raining winter night in early 1933. Jimmy and Ray were both ten and Helen eight and Kimiko and Hiro’s second child, Mary, was just shy of her second birthday, and Evelyn Wilson was nearing the full term of her third pregnancy. The Takahashis would have been awaiting the news of the birth, so when the knocking came upon their door late that winter evening, they—Kimiko and Hiro and Raymond too—would have assumed that that news had finally come, that the baby was here, that it was a boy, or it was a girl, and that all was well. But the loud frantic knocking continued. Then came a shrill child’s voice from the darkness: “Help! Help!” and the door opened to reveal the boy, Jimmy, a boy who was so often at their home that the fact he had been standing outside banging on the boards instead of simply opening and entering as he had done countless times before only served, later, to underscore just how frightened he was, his panting breath steaming the air around his head. “My mama,” he said. “She’s dying.”

  4

  WHAT HIRO AND KIMIKO FOUND AT THE WILSONS’ STATELY country Victorian was a scene of such heat and blood and terror that for many years to come the very memory of it would send Kimiko’s skin into gooseflesh. Homer—or perhaps it had been Jimmy or even the little girl, Helen—had banked such a blaze in the fireplace that the whole house steamed with heat, the interior awash with flickering orange light as if the furniture—sofas and cabinets and the like—were all aflame, even as the slow patter of drizzling rain drummed against the window glass. The little girl hunkered away from them as they came through the door. Homer too stared at them uncomprehendingly at first, wide-eyed and raking his hands through his sweat-slicked hair. When the light of recognition came it was as if he were awakening from a dream. “Ah God, Tak,” he said at last, his hands on his friend’s shoulders and his voice quavering in panic. “You’ve got to do something. Please. You’ve got to do something.”

  Hiro asked him what was wrong but Homer could only point toward the stairs, from which, even in that moment, a guttural wail descended like a cataract. It did not sound anything like Evelyn Wilson’s voice, although of course it had to be. Kimiko’s heart shuddered in fear and yet when she looked back to the men they were both staring at her, at Kimiko, as if she somehow would know what needed to be done, as if her gender had given her some secret knowledge. When she spoke it was in Japanese, telling her husband that she knew nothing, that she could do nothing, that someone needed to get the doctor up here or to load Mrs. Wilson into the wagon and drive her to his home across town, Homer’s eyes bouncing between them—Kimiko, then Hiro, then Kimiko again—until he could remain silent no longer. “Just help her,” he said in English. “Please.” When Hiro asked him if the doctor was on his way Homer could only mumble that he was going to send Jimmy, was going to but had not—he did not say why—but already Hiro had turned to the boy, telling him to fetch Ray and then to run as fast as they could, not to town, not for the doctor, but for Mrs. Matsuda, the midwife, closer by a half mile or more, almost expecting the boy to protest but instead watching as he leapt all at once for the door as if he had been waiting for just such a command, his thin small body bursting outside like a young deer and disappearing into the rain-soaked night.

  With the muffled impact of the door came another gruff guttural call from upstairs, a sound that was almost a growl but which was followed by a voice that was recognizably Evelyn’s, although high and agonized, this time intoning actual words: “Homer?” she called. “I need you!” Then came her husband’s name again, the pain in her voice a wavering of agony and despair and exhaustion, but Homer Wilson moved not in the direction of the stairs but to Kimiko’s side, his hand on her elbow. “Tasukete! Tasukete!” he said, and for a moment she merely thought that she had somehow translated his simple statement—please help or even save me, he might have said in English—into Japanese, but then he said it again and she realized that he, Homer Wilson, his eyes red-ringed and wet with the threat of tears, was speaking in her own language, leaning toward her, exhausted, terrified, entreating. She might have run in that moment, might have turned and retreated down the thin path that ran from the Victorian to their small, squat country home on the slightly lower rise of the opposite hill, but she did not, instead telling him, telling him and Homer too, in ­Japanese, that she would go, then mounting the dark stairs to the open doorway, where she found Mrs. Wilson staring at her from the twisted sheets of the bed. “Please get it out of me,” she said then. “Oh God please get it out of me.”

  And yet she knew nothing of childbirth except to push and push and push, and where was Mrs. Matsuda or the hakujin’s doctor, Thompson, who would come from town, where was anyone who knew anything and why was she the one who had been chosen to stand here at the base of the bed between her landlord’s wife’s nether parts in the blood and waters of the womb, in the terror of her screaming, the pale soft feet first and then, for a long terrible time, nothing but the pain and the pushing, the whole of that baby stuck there like a stone in a pipe, those naked parts of Evelyn Wilson not even seeming as if they were part of Mrs. Wilson’s flesh at all now but instead were something freakish and alien, stretched tight and swelling forward with each great exhausted push even though, still, it was only those two tiny feet, the rest like a red tunnel fleeing into wet empty darkness. But it had to come. It had to. And so she said, “Push harder,” and then said it again and again and then she was not even speaking in English anymore, that language flooding away from her so that her words were only in Japanese and at last, after how much time she did not know—a half hour, an hour, a day, a lifetime—a great tearing and the sound of liquid upon the boards and the baby, blue and twisted and silent, was there in Kimiko’s hands, a limp terrible thing.

  “Is it out? It is out of me?” Evelyn said from her sweat-soaked sheets.

  “Eh,” Kimiko said. “Kawaisōni.” The child’s misshapen head lolled hideously in her grasp, its lifeless body stretching toward the wet boards. She did not know how to hold it, this dead thing. Not like a child. Not like a living child at all.

  “It’s a boy?”

  “Hai,” she said.

  “I knew it. Why is he so quiet?”

  She answered her in Japanese again and Evelyn was silent for a long moment and then, abruptly, she began to scream, at first her husband’s name and then a wordless keening that rose up into the fetid, iron-scented air like a siren, her head swinging back and forth across the twisted, sweat- and blood-soaked sheets, her mouth open in a great oval of bleak despair. And, standing between her open, bare legs: Kimiko ­Takahashi, her own clothes equally soaked in blood and fluid, holding the blue corpse of that baby out before her as if to pass it directly to the Amida Buddha himself and thence into the pure land beyond.

  MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE PE
OPLE I spoke to in town would tell me that something changed in Evelyn Wilson after that black night in which Kimiko Takahashi delivered Mrs. Wilson’s dead son into the world. The Japanese midwife, Mrs. Matsuda, arrived a moment afterwards and thumped up the stairs to bark at the hakujin woman in Japanese as the afterbirth came, pushing her back to the sweated-through pillow and bringing her some kind of tea that smelled like hell itself, bidding to her drink, but she could not or would not and finally retched what she had managed to swallow to the floor before at last passing into an exhausted sleep, so that her last view of that night was of the two Japanese women standing near the doorway like specters from the land of the dead, staring back at her as if she were soon to be among them.

  The funeral was held in the little plot of land in the Catholic section of the town cemetery, both families there, the Wilsons and the Takahashis, and around them the members of the local Catholic parish and an assortment of citizens from the orchards and the town, all of them standing around that small hole in the earth, the damp air of late February drifting in mist about them. It was an image that would return to Kimiko’s memory at various times in her life, none more intensely than in the days slightly less than eight years later in the wake of Pearl Harbor when it became clear that the brightness of their lives would be extinguished with such ferocity that it would come to feel as if the brief respite between one kind of suffering and the next was but a fever dream. In those winter days, the earth once again slaked with rain, what came to mind was the image of Evelyn Wilson’s face, the gray hard intensity of her gaze as she stared down into the hole, a rigidity that was, Kimiko thought, as thin and frangible as a paper mask. She had said nothing that day, nor for many days thereafter, her lips drawn and tight even as her husband’s period of mourning lessened and finally was gone, he and Hiro back to their old camaraderie out in the trees and sunlight, planting a new line of plums on the edge of the south-facing hillside. But Evelyn Wilson was much slower to recover. Perhaps she never did or had. Perhaps she never forgave any of them for what had happened to her, although of course she was cordial and friendly when their paths crossed—this was what you did, regardless if the person was friend or enemy—and this was how it would be until 1942 when the buses came and the whole Takahashi family disappeared from their lives, only Raymond returning, returning as if to wreak one final act of destruction upon her heart.