Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

“A mistake.”

  “You know it’s not a mistake.”

  For the rest of her life, she would remember how he looked in that moment, the mingling of despair and betrayal and fear passing across his features like the wind over a field of grass. How she wished she could pull him to her like she had seen in American moving pictures: two people crashing together with such power that it was as if they had become magnets drawn to each other alone. But she and Hiro did not have that kind of relationship. She did not know if anyone actually did.

  “What will we do?” her husband said then.

  “Find somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “We’ll find something,” she said.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what happened. What could have happened?”

  “Money maybe.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “But he did. He is.”

  “Why? Why is this happening?”

  “Because this is not our home.”

  “This isn’t forever,” he said. “This is just for now.”

  “I don’t mean this place,” Kimiko said then, gesturing at the walls, the floors, the sandblasted windows, the cooking stove.

  It matters little if there were more words between them; those words would have been more of the same and they would have quieted after a time and Hiro would have folded the letter once more into his pocket and wandered outside with his pipe. She insisted that he needed his solitary walk, when in fact it was she herself who needed to be alone. The fact of that letter, of Walter E. Shettley’s missive, washed over her like a wave, not its ultimate meaning—nearly three decades would pass before she truly understood what it all meant and even then her knowledge would be partial—but what it meant for her and Hiro and the children and what it might mean for Ray. She found herself seated not in the chair now but on the edge of Doris’s bed, sitting on its lumpy edge and staring forward until the gaps in the wall boards faded into a wavering texture of soft horizontal stripes beyond which was the barbed-wired fence that held all the world: a flat bare space containing only humiliation and loneliness.

  “Don’t tell Raymond,” she had told her husband before he left the room, pipe in hand. “Don’t tell any of them but especially not Raymond.”

  “Of course I won’t tell him.”

  “It would destroy him.”

  “He’s tough.”

  “Just don’t tell any of them.”

  “I won’t,” he said simply. And then he was outside and the door clacked closed behind him.

  What she thought then was a kind of terrible relief. Everything was clear at last. The tenor of the words themselves—their style, their sparsity, the directness of their expression—had obliterated what she knew had been one of her husband’s central beliefs: that they were, he and Homer Wilson, somehow equals, this despite the fact that Homer Wilson was white and an American citizen and a landowner and therefore part of the very fabric of the nation in a way that her husband and herself and their children could never be. Their internment was only the latest in a long series of differences that stacked one against the other from the moment she had been sold across the sea in the joint conspiracy between the matchmaker and her parents. Hiro had told the children that it was for their own good, that they might well have been physically attacked had they remained in Placer County with the fervor of anti-Japanese sentiment roiling the air. What a naïve fool.

  But she knew who she was. She was Japanese. That was how she thought of herself and knew she would continue to think of herself no matter how many years she lived in this country. She had understood this long before the buses had arrived and it had become plain to everyone who could call themselves Americans and who could not.

  AND YET SHE HAD never been free of those hills with their rows of peach and plum and pear trees and the golden grasses and olive-colored oaks and the blaze of summer heat coming up from the earth. For twenty-seven years she would be away from that landscape but her memories of her son would be forever entangled in that same topography so that she could not think of him without thinking of the oaks and the orchards and their little house on its hill and the big white Victorian of the Wilsons’ on the hill opposite and the little town with its fruit sheds and the tumbledown buildings of the little Japantown that nestled in the draw at the foot of Chantry Hill. Her boy. Her beautiful boy. There he had been and then the war came and then Tule Lake and Raymond had gone to war as a soldier then had simply vanished, gone so completely that it sometimes felt as if his entire existence had been a kind of hallucination or vision. For a long while she had felt in her heart that he yet lived and had decided, for reasons she could not fathom, to remain apart from his family—from his mother and father and sisters—but the years passed and then it was 1950 and 1955 and she knew that her son was dead, knew it and had even come to accept it in the warm beating center of her heart.

  And then she understood something she had not even asked of herself, knew that Evelyn Wilson too was a survivor, that she too was a mother of the dead.

  “Help me, Evelyn,” she said now. “Please, help me.”

  I had drawn myself up to the edge of my seat and a quick glance to my grandmother confirmed that she had as well, the two of us suspended there in anticipation of Evelyn Wilson’s response. Evelyn Wilson herself betrayed nothing of her own thoughts, her face emotionless, seeming to suspend our expectation not out of malice but out of utter indifference.

  When at last she spoke her voice seemed to come from that same indifference, her words uttered as if they were the only answer possible. Only later did I come to understand that she did it not out of the goodness of her heart but out of a sincere desire for control, assuming as she did—and rightly—that Mrs. Takahashi would not simply return to San Jose unappeased.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “Of course I’ll help you, Kim. Of course I will.”

  10

  IT WOULD TAKE NEARLY A MONTH BEFORE THE IMPLICATIONS of Mrs. Wilson’s agreement to help Mrs. Takahashi were fully understood, namely that her own culpability was more central to the narrative than at first appeared. She herself was unaware—and would be unaware for all her life—just how much she was to blame, but at that time we were grateful for any sense of guidance. Mrs. Wilson had been there in the county in 1945 and had seen Ray—had seen him, we still thought, only at a distance in Auburn—and so was the first point of contact we had with any kind of tangible information. Mrs. Wilson had agreed to help Mrs. Takahashi, after all, and even told her she would meet her there at my grandmother’s whenever Mrs. Takahashi wanted to make the drive up from San Jose, which she did six times over the next five weeks. Each time, Mrs. Wilson would appear at my grandmother’s soon after Mrs. Takahashi’s arrival and my grandmother would offer them tea, then they would both take their seats in Mrs. Wilson’s Pontiac: Mrs. Takahashi in the back, Mrs. Wilson in the passenger seat, and I the driver. (I made some excuse to the filling station’s owner on these afternoons, telling him that I had to help drive an elderly relative about for some appointments and did not entirely know when such an errand would end. Mr. ­Borton, for his part, was irritated only to the extent that my absence meant he would need to be at the filling station office in my stead. By the end of the intrigues with Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi, I determined that my life was better spent elsewhere and convinced Mr. Borton to reduce my employment to part-time so I might take advantage of the G.I. Bill at the local community college. It took me eight years to complete my college and university education, but I graduated at last with a master’s degree in 1977, having published the first of several novels.)

  I will not belabor you with the various witnesses we spoke to over those weeks, witnesses who described days wholly unremarkable and which we cobbled together from the vague reminiscences of people who often could hardly remember Ray Takahashi at all. “Oh yeah, right, right, I think I do remember him,” one might say. “I think I saw him once at the picture show over in Auburn
” or “Yeah, yeah, saw him once at the drugstore there in Loomis, eating a sundae at the counter I think. No I don’t think anyone was with him,” or something similar. Most such reminiscences were mundane and pointless, but one or two carried with them a fresh stab. An old Japanese farmer in Loomis recalled Mr. Takahashi contacting him in search of news, and then further remembered seeing Raymond in the flesh a few weeks later, head down, walking up Ridge Road from the irrigation canal. The farmer had pulled over and asked Ray if he needed a ride and Ray had told him that he did not and then the farmer had told the young soldier that his father had been in touch looking for him and that he should call or write home right away. Ray nodded and said he would use the public phone in town and that anyway he had just been home and that his parents knew of his whereabouts and all was well. “That was all,” the old farmer said with a shrug. “I think I only saw him that one time, walking up the road like that.”

  “My God, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said after we had driven away, back downhill, back toward the old highway. “It’s almost too much to bear. It’s almost too much,” her own incredulity seemingly as profound and troubled as that of Mrs. Takahashi herself. (Toward the end of that period, when summer had broken to a cold wet autumn, Mrs. Wilson’s reaction was revealed to be merely relief at another dead end in which she was not implicated. But there was to be a final piece of the story yet to come in the figure of Jim Tuttle, young son of the Oklahoma family who were the only other tenants of the little whitewashed box that was still thought of as the Takahashi home. After nearly everyone in the story was dead, my grandmother first, then Mrs. Takahashi, and finally Mrs. Wilson herself, leaving only me and the teller, he would appear out of nowhere on a hot still summer afternoon in 1983 and at last offer the nearest thing to closure this story can ever have.)

  Towards the end of that period, Mrs. Takahashi asked me to drive us to nearby Penryn to visit the Buddhist church, Mrs. Wilson having, during their earliest conversations, suggested that Ray might have slept there.

  I expected something with a spire and stained glass, if only because that was what the word “church” meant to me, but the church to which I was directed was a plain, plaster-covered residential house, converted to its current use many decades before. Twenty-seven years had passed since Mrs. Takahashi had last set foot inside its cool, dark interior, but that central room had remained unchanged: smelling of incense and polished wood and carrying, in its shadows, a peaceful quietude. The pews looked not unlike those of the various Catholic churches of my childhood, although in place of some bleeding Jesus at the head of the room was a kind of altar or shrine carved from dark teak upon which sat the image of the Buddha surrounded by various incense containers, small books, gongs, and the like.

  When the priest appeared, he and Mrs. Takahashi exchanged greetings in Japanese. He was a diminutive man, bald and very old, and he smiled warmly in my direction when Mrs. ­Takahashi introduced me. The conversation continued in Japanese, so that I knew nothing of what was said and eventually excused myself, returning to the blazing heat of the parking lot.

  “Did she find someone to talk to?” Evelyn Wilson asked me. She had remained in the passenger seat, window rolled down, and if she perspired at all there was no indication of it.

  “She’s talking to the priest,” I said. “Is he a priest? I’m not sure that’s the right word.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Thank you for driving us around. I’m sure there are things you’d rather be doing.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “What are your friends doing?”

  “I don’t know anyone around here, really,” I said. “Just my gran.”

  “Is that what you call her? Your gran?”

  “That’s what I’ve always called her. You’re a . . . I mean, you’ve got grandchildren, right?”

  She did not answer for a time, her eyes, behind those great orb-like sunglasses, staring out past me into the bright summer sunlight. Then she said, “Yes, I’ve got grandchildren.”

  “What do they call you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They don’t call me anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t have a relationship with them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I mean . . . boy, I just stepped in it, didn’t I?”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “My daughter Helen, her husband’s from Chicago and they both moved out there. Helen and I, well, we just don’t have a relationship.” She shook her head. “It’s one of the reasons I finally got up the courage to go talk to Kim. I thought if I could find her son then maybe I could find my grandson.”

  “Because he’s the only grandchild you have left.”

  “He’s the only one I have left at all,” she said then. “My husband’s gone. Heart failure, of all things, which is ironic since the man had the biggest heart of anyone I ever knew. You know, for a while I blamed Ray for that too.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I thought he sullied my daughter’s honor. That Ray did, I mean. It sounds so old-fashioned now. And when I went up to Seattle to take care of the problem—to have the problem taken care of, I mean—well, I don’t think my husband ever really forgave me for that.”

  “He had to understand it though. Didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. Tak really was my husband’s best friend in all the world. I didn’t really think it was possible even back then. I mean I didn’t think it was possible that he could overlook the fact that Tak was Japanese. It just seemed like too much.”

  “But don’t you have a son too?”

  “Oh,” she said sadly, “that’d be Jimmy.”

  I waited for her to say more but the church’s door had opened and Mrs. Takahashi appeared, the priest just behind her, the two of them turning toward each other and bowing slightly, saying something that I could not hear. Mrs. Takahashi stepped down to the gravel of the parking lot and then to the car.

  “What’d he say, Kim?” Mrs. Wilson asked her as I moved to the driver’s seat once more.

  Mrs. Takahashi did not answer until I had pulled the car out onto the road again. When at last she spoke, her voice was hardly audible at all. “He was here,” she said. “Raymond was here.”

  “He remembered that?” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “He remembered my family. And he remembered my husband coming to look for Raymond.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said that Raymond arrived soon after my husband did. Days or weeks. And Raymond told the priest that he’d already been home. The priest was satisfied. So that was the end of his concern.”

  It had been the same everywhere then, Raymond’s invisible presence in Placer County being predicated on simple trust. He said he had been home—home, that is, to Oakland—and this was taken as fact and no further thought was given to contacting his family.

  “I’m sorry, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “He slept here.”

  “Every night?” I asked.

  “Almost every night,” she said. “That’s what he told me.”

  It was silent in the car for a time. I kept waiting for either of them to comment on what was, at least to me, the obvious question, but when neither of them spoke again, I finally asked it: “Where was he those other nights?”

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Wilson said from beside me.

  “The priest said he slept there almost every night. So where did he sleep when he wasn’t at the church?”

  “Outside,” Mrs. Takahashi said from the backseat.

  “Outside?”

  “He said outside. I think I know where.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said, and when the road split she murmured to take the fork to the left and I did so, the car’s great wide hood rocking over the brief hot undulation in the asphalt roadbed.

  THE PLACE TO WHICH Mrs. Takahashi directed us might not have been so very far from the old
house in which she had lived on the Wilson property, but it felt, along the winding roads of the outskirts of the county, as if it were some secret place. The road ran alongside a ridge so tangled with vegetation that at times it arched over the path so that the Pontiac pointed on through a verdant tunnel lined with summer sunlight that seemed to spark in the afternoon’s heat. When at last we climbed into the open again it was to find ourselves at the top of a high, flat ridge upon which grew the rough and twisted shapes of oaks amidst pale boulders and waving runnels of golden grass.

  “He would camp out here sometimes,” Mrs. Takahashi said. The only sounds, once I had shut the car off, were of wind through leaves and stones and dry yellow stalks.

  “Jimmy would too,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  I stepped out and walked a few dozen yards into the grass. That he had camped here after his return from the war felt real to me in a way that the other locations we had visited did not, real in the sense that I could, for the first time, feel his presence, feel that he had existed in flesh and bone and blood. He had walked here and had ideas and thoughts and desires. Why I felt him in that place, upon that ridge, I cannot explain any more than I can explain why I felt or still feel that it is my responsibility to tell any of this story at all, but upon that ridge I could understand why someone might come here with a friend, with a lover, or even with the sounds and sensations of war still rattling in his chest, seeking grace and perhaps even absolution as if still a soldier, his body wrapped in his greatcoat, the grasses flattened into a circle around him so that the still-vertical perimeter of their untangled stalks seemed a wall to shelter him from enemy soldiers or gunfire or mortar shells. For we had learned this much, he and I, that to sleep at all was a luxury, and to sleep without death’s constant stalking presence was an almost inconceivable extravagance.

  The idea that Ray might yet be alive had seemed impossible to me, at least until I stood upon that ridge in the afternoon, the two women remaining in the car beside the road as I stood in the shade of an oak, staring out at the grass that rolled in shaking waves when the faint hot breeze ruffled the fringes of my hair. How he must have dreamed of her here, maddening close, the house in which she lay hidden just atop the next ridge. But for all that proximity she might as well have been in Italy or France or Japan. Everything was the same and yet everything had gone crazy. What a thing, to be confronted by the foreman on the same property upon which he had spent all his life. What a strange, foreign world he had returned to, as if in fighting for America he had only brought to the fore those aspects of his country that had previously been held in embarrassed secrecy. Or maybe that was not true either; maybe he had simply been too young to notice, to understand his own difference, his body the betrayer because he was and ever would be Japanese no matter how many wars he fought for the country of his birth.