“I’m all right, babydoll,” I told her, but she climbed into my lap nonetheless and held my head in her tiny hands and rocked me and told me everything would be all right, as I had said to her dozens of times before.
I went there for the funeral, my first time in Newcastle since 1971, and stood around as people I did not know talked about her, and when a woman nearing sixty approached me after the service and asked if I was John Frazier, it took me a moment to place the name that she gave me in response. It was Helen, the daughter who had become so estranged from her mother that in 1969 they had not been in communication at all. She looked not unlike her mother had those years before, perhaps heavier but otherwise it would not have been difficult to identify her and I marveled at my own inability to do so. In the years that had followed I had not thought much of Helen Wilson, the daughter, the mother who had also lost her child, and I longed to ask her if she had reconciled with her own mother in the end and if she had learned what had become of her son, Franklin Yamada, but after handing me a business card she turned and walked away, the look on her face an inscrutable mask. I had seen just that expression from her mother and knew it would be foolish to press her.
“She seems pleasant,” my wife said next to me.
“She just buried her mother,” I told her.
“Oh jeez,” my wife said. “I didn’t know that was the daughter. You might have introduced us.”
“I didn’t know her,” I said. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“What’s the card?”
I handed it to her and she read it aloud, the name of a law office in Auburn, and although I did not know or understand what it might have meant, my wife, smarter than I am in almost every way, said, “She left you something.”
“What do you mean?”
“In her will. She left you something.”
“No way,” I said.
“I’ll bet you a million dollars,” my wife said.
MY WIFE, OF COURSE, WAS RIGHT. Stepping up to the lawyer’s office I thought I would receive some kind of document of confession, that somehow Evelyn Wilson might have known the whole story of Ray Takahashi’s disappearance and would only now, finally, reveal it to me, the last survivor of those days in which we searched for his whereabouts to no avail. But I was not handed any cryptic sealed envelope but instead was instructed to sit in the lawyer’s unkempt office and was read the pertinent part of the last will and testament of Evelyn Florence Wilson. When the lawyer was done he looked up at me.
“I don’t understand,” I told him.
“What’s not to understand?”
“What about her daughter? Her grandchildren?”
“It’s yours, Mr. Frazier,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t think the daughter wants anything to do with it at all.”
I shook my head. It did not seem possible but the lawyer assured me that it was true. I signed the documents and was instructed to visit the title company to complete the transfer. I did so with my wife and daughter present, after which the house and property atop the ridge, the old white Victorian in which the Wilson family had made their home and the twenty remaining acres that surrounded it, was officially transferred into my name.
AND SO IT IS HERE, in the late spring of 1983, that this story reaches its end. I have come to see what needs be done to the house and property, for my wife and I have decided to keep it, at least for now, and to use it as a summer getaway, a place in the country we can retire to when I am not teaching, to offer our daughter some version of those same childhood memories that I still hold dear. That my wife is pregnant again is another reason to hold the place in trust, for we are growing weary of the city. It could be that we move here permanently one day. This I do not yet know.
I have come to clean and repair and generally ready the house for the arrival of my wife and daughter and the baby yet to come, which really means that I have come here to write in this space while the contractor I have hired does what work needs doing: new siding to replace that which has rotted away, new roofing, new porch boards and a new rail, new steps off the back door. The original furniture remains in place, every stick of it, and I have taken some time here to go through the Wilsons’ papers—old receipts and the like, ephemera of the days in which this house held a business and a family all at once. At some point I will take the important papers to the county office in Auburn to see if some archivist there can make use of them. I do not think I will throw them out if the county can find no purpose in the documents, for there are photographs and maps and business papers going back before the turn of the century and they provide a history of this place, one that I cannot bear to see destroyed. In that stack of papers is a photograph of a young Japanese man next to a white farmer. It is unlabeled but I can only assume that I am looking at Homer Wilson and Hiro Takahashi, their faces bright in the sun of some summer long past.
I have hired some landscapers to clear out the brush and trim the fruit trees that yet remain, remnants of that old orchard still somehow clinging to life. I have been told that the other house, the little house in which the Takahashis once lived, is no longer salvageable and that it should be torn down but have asked the laborers instead to block off the doors and windows so that my daughter will have no way of entering, for I cannot fathom removing that structure from the world. It feels, indeed, that I have no right to do so. I can see its sagging roofline from the upstairs bedroom, the one that I think must have been Helen’s those many years ago, as I have found a series of girlish hearts inked upon the bottom of the windowsill where the bed was once pushed against the wall. From here the trees appear a second surface of the earth, one which could be walked across, soft and yielding but firm enough to hold my steps: oaks and loose fruit trees of what variety I do not yet know, their shapes like green clouds brought low from the sky to huddle close to the heat of the earth.
THE END OF THIS STORY arrived in mid-May, both unbidden and unexpected, its coming announced by the sound of a car crunching the gravel outside. My assumption was that another worker or laborer or contractor had arrived or departed, since that had been the steady traffic of the preceding three weeks, and so I was fully prepared to ignore that sound when a knock came on the screen.
What I found upon what I still thought of as Mrs. Wilson’s porch was a somewhat portly man in a white shirt, perhaps fifty or so, his thinning hair slicked back from his head like some Southern revival preacher out of a Flannery O’Connor story. He told me his name was Jim Tuttle and asked if I was related to Mrs. Evelyn Wilson or the Wilson family. When I told him I was, he asked me in what way.
“Who are you?” I said. He said his name again and I shook my head. “What’s this about?”
“Uh . . . well . . . ,” he began, his balding pate already beaded with sweat. “It’s about . . . well . . . I need to tell someone something.”
“Tell what?”
“Are you Mrs. Wilson’s son or . . . ?”
“She was my aunt,” I said then, increasingly exasperated by this interruption and by the apparent reticence of this man Tuttle to explain his presence on my porch.
“Oh, your aunt,” he said.
“What’s this about?” I asked him again. “I’m right in the middle of something.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I would’ve called, but I didn’t have the number.”
“Called for what?”
“To arrange a time of more . . . uh . . . convenience.”
“But to do what? Convenience for what?”
“Oh . . . of course . . . ,” he said now, his face clouding with obvious concern and difficulty and distress. “You have no idea why I’m here.”
“At this point, I’m not even sure you have any idea why you’re here.”
“Funny,” he said without mirth. He was wearing a linen sport coat but it might as well have been wool for all the sweat his body was producing. “I came here to tell someone what happened,” he said.
“To whom?”
�
�To my father.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Ed Tuttle Junior,” he said.
“I don’t think I can help you,” I said. “I don’t know anyone by that name. I think you’ve just gotten the wrong house.”
“No, no,” he said quickly, for I had half turned toward the interior again, toward my typewriter and its stack of pages. “It has to do with Mrs. Wilson. I just have to come clean is all. It’s something that’s been a secret in my family and I just can’t have that anymore.”
“Why’d you come here?”
“Because she didn’t know what happened.”
“Who didn’t?”
“Your aunt.”
“Listen, Mr. Tuttle—”
“Please, call me Jim,” he said.
I exhaled. “So look, what is this about exactly?”
“It’s about something my father was involved in a long time ago.” Tuttle looked out in the direction of the dilapidated house in which the Takahashi family had once lived. “There was another house on the property,” he said then. “A little one.”
“It’s still there,” I said. “Not livable but still standing.”
“We lived there in 1945,” he said then.
“You what now?”
“In the little house,” he said. “At least I think it was there. I was only nine years old so I could be wrong.”
“The family from Oklahoma,” I said simply.
“Yes, that’s right. So you know. Maybe you also know that there was a Japanese family, lived in the house before us.”
“The Takahashis,” I told him.
“That’s right. What I need to tell you, or someone, is about the one of them who was a soldier.”
“Ray?” I said, practically shouting the name, leaning forward so that poor Jim Tuttle staggered back in alarm. “You mean Ray? Ray Takahashi?”
“Y-y-yes,” Tuttle stammered. “That’s who I mean. You knew him?”
“I knew his mother well.”
And now what passed across his features was unmistakable fear. “Is she still alive?” he said.
“No,” I told him, “she passed a couple years ago.”
“And Evelyn Wilson is gone as well?”
“That’s right.”
“And so that leaves you.”
“And here I am,” I told him.
“Can we go inside? It’s awfully hot out here. I wouldn’t mind sitting down.”
For a moment I was not sure how I should answer, so strange was Jim Tuttle’s demeanor, his stammering, sweating lack of surety, as if he had come all this way to tell me some piece of news and yet, now that he had arrived, wanted only to flee. But in the end I held the door open as he staggered into the shaded interior of the house, no cooler inside than out, although at least it was out of the sun and I was able to offer him a cold Coca-Cola, the bottle of which he held to his sweating brow like an ice pack.
We sat at the kitchen table and when he asked me if I was a writer, gesturing to the typewriter with its stack of notes and pages, I evaded the question, telling him I was working on some genealogy, which was not so far from the truth. “I think you’d better tell me what you’re doing here,” I said to him after it seemed he had settled some, sipping at his Coca-Coca and pulling at his shirt collar.
“I’m not proud of it,” he said. “I just want you to know that.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re not proud of it.”
And then I waited as he breathed and drank and set his bottle down and lifted it and drank again and once more returned it to the table. “This is a nice house,” he said. “I remember it from when I was a kid. We weren’t allowed to come up here but, you know, sometimes my sister and I would sneak around the orchard a little.”
“Mr. Tuttle,” I said, and then, because he was already gearing up to correct me, “Jim, look, I’ve got to get back to what I was doing . . .”
“Oh yes, yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just can’t seem to get myself in order.” He breathed out slowly and then said, “God give me strength,” and then, over the course of the next hour, he told me what I thought I would never know, what I thought no one could ever know: what had, in the end, actually happened to Ray Takahashi in 1945 on the night of a rainstorm which would mark the end of that summer and the beginning of the cold gray winter to come.
RAY HAD TAKEN TO SLEEPING out on Boulder Ridge with regularity by that time, the heat of August and September drifting into the relative cool of October at last. He lay, most nights, bundled in his greatcoat in the grass, sometimes erecting a small pup tent he carried with him, cooking a can of beans over a fire for his meals and generally living his days increasingly untethered from the world of men. The altercation at the diner had changed things for him, had changed his heart in ways he had not expected or wanted, and yet he did not feel he could leave the place he still, despite everything, felt was his home. When he woke each morning in the boulder-strewn field among the oaks and the squawking blue jays and the small darting shapes of black phoebes and goldfinches and sparrows, he could not help but feel grateful that his eyes had opened here and not upon that other ridge in the French mountains or upon those olive groves in Italy or indeed upon any sky but this one, any trees but these, any grasses but the dry golden grasses of home, a place which he still felt and would ever feel was his birthright.
And yet there would be a reckoning and he knew that too. He had seen them watching him and understood that they watched with purpose and intent. A few days after the incident with Helen in the diner, Ray had come upon a familiar figure on the sidewalk in town. He had already heard, of course, that Chet Kenner had lost his leg in the Pacific but the sight of him there—one pant leg pinned up under his left buttock—was still a shock. Ray was just turning to avoid him when, to his surprise, Chet hailed him as an old friend.
“Listen, Ray,” Chet told him after they had finished a round of small talk about the war, their homecoming, the people they knew, “I’ve been hearing some weird stuff.”
“What’s that?”
“My brother told me the pickers were talking about you.”
“Bish told you that?”
“Yeah, he works out there for the Wilsons, you know.”
“I saw him there,” Ray said sadly. “What are they saying about me?”
“He wasn’t sure,” Chet said, “but the fact that they’re talking about you at all makes me nervous.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Ray said. “Just pickers blabbing on.”
“I hope so.” He was silent for a moment and then he said, “Hey maybe you should come stay with us for a few days.”
“Stay with you?”
“Well don’t make it sound like a thing,” Chet said, smiling. “It’s not a date.”
“Your folks would be okay with that?”
“Shoot, who cares? They’ll adjust. One thing about this leg being gone is my folks will do just about anything I say—at least for now.”
Ray stood for a moment in utter silence, staring down the street, the cars moving by with their rattling engines. “That’s real nice of you, Chet,” he said quietly. “I don’t think so, though.”
“Where’re you sleeping? Outside?”
“Boulder Ridge, mostly,” he said.
“Well, shoot, Ray,” Chet said then, “the offer stands if you change your mind. Or even if you just want a good meal at a table. Bish would be glad to see you too.”
And he could almost see himself there, in some hakujin kitchen in his uniform, with Chet and his younger brother. He had not known Chet well in high school but it was clear now that both he and his younger brother felt that Ray was somehow beyond reproach for the service he had offered to the country, that if no one else cared or acknowledged what Ray had done he at least had these two who looked at him as if he had done something worthwhile. Ray had continued to wear his uniform, as if in living and breathing in that uniform he might yet use it to replace his own flesh so that he would be
simply American and nothing else. For was that not why he had first buttoned the shirt over his naked chest, pulled his legs into the trousers, laced his boots? Was that not why he had shot Nazis in France? Was that not why he had watched his companions blown to pieces night after night, day after day, all through southern Europe? Did that not make him, in the end and at long last, American?
“I appreciate that, Chet,” he said finally. “But I’m okay out on the ridge.”
There had been violence in Placer County, some of it before Ray had returned, and there had been grace as well, hakujin farmers who had kept intact the orchards and farms of their Japanese-American neighbors, returning them, as the Wilsons had promised to do, upon their release from the camps. But there had also been an incident earlier that year where a Japanese-American home had been dynamited and there had been fires that consumed the homes and sheds and equipment of Japanese-Americans all through those golden hills. There would be taunting far into the years to come, Japs and Nips and all the rest. But why these hardscrabble fruit pickers were talking about him—if indeed they were talking about him at all—he could not imagine. Perhaps it was simply more of the same: that Mrs. Wilson had asked them to keep him away from the house. If that was the case, he thought there would be no trouble, since he did not have any reason to go near the house anymore.
He had mentioned to Chet that Jimmy Wilson was dead and Chet told him that it had been in the newspaper and his mother had kept the notice; he would show it to Ray if Ray wanted to see it, although apart from stating that Jimmy had been killed in the Pacific, Chet said that there was nothing in the newsprint that Ray did not already know. The whole world had gone mad for a few years and the boys of that county had thrown themselves into the meat grinder without a thought. Even Ray, for he really had believed that there might be some dispensation for his mother and father and sisters in the camps, that the government might look to his service as a way to release them back to their lives. Nothing he had wanted had come to fruition in the end, the whole of the tree blistering into curl.
Phantoms Page 18
