Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

HORN: Have you had a leave clearance hearing?

  ME: Yes. I don’t know just how it stands now.

  ROBERTS: For your information, Kai, you haven’t been cleared by the Joint Board in Washington yet.

  ME: Will you give me that pass?

  ROBERTS: Not until you get leave clearance. I can’t give you a pass without leave clearance.

  ME: Why have I been denied that leave clearance?

  ROBERTS: You haven’t been denied that. The Joint Board just hasn’t decided your case yet.

  ME: Under whose authority is the leave clearance board?

  ROBERTS: The WRA.

  ME: In other words, if the legality of the leave clearance …

  ROBERTS: Just for your information you can test the legality from the project just as easily as you can from the jail. I believe you are on the Stop List.

  ME: I am curious why I was put on the Stop List.

  ROBERTS: I don’t know that myself. In almost every case the Stop List is compiled by someone in Washington. The Stop List means that you are not eligible for leave clearance and eventually will be transferred to Tule Lake. They expect to finish this group of leave clearances by June.

  ME: I would like to understand.… Am I guilty in this case as far as you are concerned?

  ROBERTS: I think you are guilty.

  ME: I want you to remember, Mr. Roberts, that I haven’t pleaded guilty. Any action that I have taken, it is not with the intent of disloyalty; it is purely from the standpoint that I consider myself a loyal American citizen.

  After the “interview,” they let me go. It seems I’m not considered radical enough, dangerous enough to be removed to Tule Lake, though someone suggested they’ve left me here to separate me from Ben. The Fair Play Committee is no more.

  Later. After I got off work at the tofu factory, Hideo pulled me aside and said they’d heard that Tule Lake had gotten bad. The MPs have set up a stockade for dissidents and resisters. It’s called the bullpen and the prisoners are housed in wall tents with no heat and only two blankets. The bunks are on the ground. Many have been beaten but given no medical care. I turned away when he was still talking—I didn’t want to hear any more.

  May. The Federal Grand Jury in Cheyenne has indicted sixty-three Heart Mountain draft resisters and charged them with “willful and felonious failure to report for preinduction physicals.” They’ve all pleaded not guilty. Their lawyer from the ACLU says they have a strong moral case, but not a strong legal one. They’ll probably lose.

  June 13. My brother, Kenny, is back in the country. He didn’t write to me; I heard it from Ben. Despite censorship, Ben’s letter reached me because one of the MPs, who has been kind to us, delivered it by hand. Ben said their trip to Cheyenne was marred by the presence of a Caucasian prisoner who had escaped. He was in chains and every time they went into a restaurant, everyone stared at them. The trip wasn’t unpleasant, but took several days. They stayed in county jails along the way.

  The FBI interviewed them, though Ben felt he answered without giving any information. Anyway, there was nothing to hide. All was public information to begin with. Right before the trial was to begin, Ben said a JACL team came to interview them. My brother was one of the interviewers. They tried to get Ben and the others to drop our case. “I feel badly having to tell you this, but you would have found out anyway,” Ben said.

  July. The Heart Mountain 63 lost. The judge said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. One may not refuse to heed a lawful call of his government merely because in another way it may have injured him.”

  Hardly any of the papers covered the trial. But a Basin, Wyoming, paper published this: “If these Japs are good American citizens as some people insist they are, why didn’t they enlist to show their love and respect for our country? The phrase ‘good American citizens’ sure has a hollow ring when applied to most Japs. Ask the mothers and fathers of the thousands of real American boys who bled and died from gunfire of the Japs. Let them be the jurors when the next group of Japs are granted a hearing for draft violations.”

  Thursday. The Heart Mountain 63 were sentenced to three years in the federal penitentiary. They asked for bail pending their appeal but didn’t get it. In another note from Ben he said the worst thing that happened was the introduction of a false witness—an informant among us, an old man who befriended us but was really spying for the administration. Ben said when he saw him in the court, he couldn’t understand why he was there. Then he took the stand and realized we had all been betrayed.

  34

  Without Will, without Ben, I’ve sought out Abe-san’s company again.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  I didn’t feel like talking so I watched him work. He held a half-carved block of wood.

  “In old days,” he began, “we used better wood—palowanea … sometimes camphor tree.…”

  He set the mask down on a block of pine and, hitting the chisel with a wooden mallet, made a long, deep cut between the cheek and the nose, then held the mask up close, for inspection. With a smaller chisel, he made several tiny gouges under the eye.

  “The ideal is to copy an old mask exactly. But always, personality of the carver shows through.…”

  He put the mask away. “If I cut away too much, all I have is this,” he said, laughing, and took a handful of wood shavings. We walked back to the barrack. On the hillside above Camp we saw three deer. Abe-san stopped.

  “See those. I need them. Nikawa. Mix paint with glue made from bone of deer.…”

  We walked on.

  “Carving take two weeks; painting take one week or more.”

  The moon rose in the east, over the shadowed canyons of the Big Horn Mountains. “It looks like that,” Abe-san said, pointing to the moon. “White like that. Paint five or six times, then sand it, then paint over again. That’s how I make it look like flesh—I paint and sand and paint. Later, use very fine brush to paint hair, eyes, lips, teeth. Last thing … make holes for ribbons that hold mask to head.”

  He stopped at the door to his room but didn’t invite me in. “You’ll see,” he said.

  Another day, I walked in the direction of the waterhole. Some of the kids had made a small raft lashed together with bailing wire and a paddle out of scrapwood. When I topped the hill I saw Abe-san out on the water. He was singing Shigun—Japanese ballads—and the sun, having just risen, made the sky go red. Steam rose from the water and Tanabata poems rang in my head:

  … frantically I

  wandered the shallow shoals of

  the great river of

  heaven still lost amidst the

  white waves when dawn lit the sky.…

  A raven swooped, cawing, then looped around, cawing again. I thought of the fabled raven who extended his wings across the Milky Way as a path on which lovers could meet. But it won’t be me who meets her, I thought, and shivered—Mariko.… I turned and walked back to the barracks before Abe-san saw me watching him.

  I had already gone to bed when I heard his singing again. I got dressed and went outside. Weeks before, Abe-san had set up a small portable stage floor in back of the barrack. A bright moon shone on Heart Mountain. For a long time he sat on his knees with his legs under him, facing the mountain. Once, he leaned down and brought a bottle up from the grass. He took several swallows, then, pressing his thumb over the opening, held the bottle up as an eyepiece through which to view the moon. He sat back again. He picked up a silk sack from the floor, letting it rest in the palms of both hands, and held it skyward, then drew the mask from under the cloth. “When I put mask on, I am not me,” he had told me once. “And when there isn’t any self, there isn’t any time. In Noh, I step out of time.”

  He tied the mask behind his head and sat motionless. I waited for him to get up and move, but he lifted his hands suddenly and took the mask off. He stood. A low, howling note of music came from him. “Noh plays, very short on paper, very long to perform. One sliding step—a hundred years,” he had told me.


  He drank again. I felt thirsty too and wanted to show my face so I could share the bottle with him, but decided not to. This time, when he put on the mask, it stayed on, and he rose slowly to his feet and walked to the back of the stage. He had told me many times about the swishing sound the brocade kimono made when a Noh actor made his entrance down the bridge—hashi-gakari—but this soft cotton kimono made no sound at all as he took his first sliding step. “Outer form in Noh—mask, movement, robes—all indicate inner soul, inner mind. When you see mask on outside, you understand mind on inside,” Abe-san had explained.

  He wore white tabi socks and slid to the center of the stage, then turned slowly. The mask he was wearing was “a madwoman” mask. The eyes were slits and the eyebrows painted at the top of the forehead, and the mouth opened in anguish. “This Degian mask is face of woman devoted to lover. But also, could be enlightened woman or bodhisattva. That’s why whites of eyes are mud mixed with gold powder,” he had said.

  The effect was chilling. Abe-san, portraying a woman, moved with a lightness and delicacy. He was not impersonating a woman, but had captured the feminine spirit. Masked, buoyant, moon-drenched, he moved swiftly to the edge of the stage. Then, almost imperceptibly, he raised his fan, unfolding it, as if unfolding the sun. His arm rose until the fan covered his face—anguish overtaken by anguish. His feet slid and he began a slow dance. The fan came away and his mask tipped moonward. A sound came from deep in his chest, a deep roar, a wolfs falsetto: yooooooooo. Then he stamped his foot and spoke:

  My heart finds no solace

  at Heart Mountain—

  not even wind obstructs my love,

  not even snow.

  I wish I had sown

  seeds of forgetfulness

  when we first met if

  I had only known how hard

  it would be to see you.…

  Mariko’s words.

  Abe-san glided to the center of the stage, lowering his head slowly. The moon cast shadows across the mask. The delicate hair painted down the sides looked like lines of aging.

  Watching him I thought about the news I had heard the day before, something new and terrible, called kamikaze. Pop said the word means “divine wind” and refers to the typhoon which broke apart Kublai Khan’s invading ships in the thirteenth century. It no longer refers to an act of nature, but a human act: using the body as a weapon. I looked at Abe-san gliding with such stillness over the tiny stage, frail and delicate.… They said that at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Japanese pilots—kamikazes—crashed their small planes onto the decks of American battleships, right into the holds where the torpedoes were kept, starting devastating fires. A human bomb falling … Watching Abe-san move effortlessly: he could have carried a tea tray on his head because there was no up-and-down movement—only sliding—yet it always looked as if he were being lifted or, like yeast, rising.…

  He turned, his fan unfolded and held stiffly, then stopped suddenly when he saw me.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Watching you,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Abe-san turned away and methodically went through the ritual of untying the mask. When it had been removed, his face was another mask. For a moment, I couldn’t think which was flesh, which, carved wood. Sweat streamed down the sides of his cheeks. Reverently he held the mask in the palms of his hands and the soft ribbons hung and swayed. Then the mask that was really his face broke. He looked at me.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  He handed it to me carefully. Away from the actor’s body it looked no more, no less than a mask. Quite lifeless. Light from the setting moon lodged itself against the gold and mud eyes. I handed it back. “It’s so light,” I said.

  I could smell the liquor on his breath. He let the sweat drip. His white hair, in a severe bun, pulled the skin on his face back. Even though he was in his eighties, he had no wrinkles and he stood straight.

  He contemplated the mask. “I try to carve each one exactly like the very old ones, the ones Zeami’s carvers made. But always, the personality of the carver shows,” he said. He held the mask up once again. “My face can’t express what mask expresses. All my face does is show confusion—self, whirling.…” I had never seen him as calm and melancholy. The sky darkened. “Look,” he said, then I saw the moon go into eclipse, or was it only a cloud?

  35

  Pinkey’s free-fall had started when he backed away from the graveside service for Vincent and it had not stopped. He did not wait for a storm to start drinking. The night the eclipse occurred, he knew it was Vincent’s shadow he had entered, knew by the smooth, silent, agile way it pulled over him. He had ridden from town to cow camp to Snuff’s to town again and thought the passage from one point to the next must be like the lines drawn between stars to make a constellation.

  When Vincent was young, Pinkey pointed out the stars because of the times cowboys have to ride home in the dark—the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, Sirius, the North Star, the Pleiades—Vincent had wanted to know why he needed stars when his horse knew the way home, and Pinkey told him about the time his horse drank from a creek in the winter and the cold water gave him a heart attack and he fell down dead, and he had to cut the cinch and carry his saddle over his shoulder. “A man wants to know where he is every once in a while …,” he had said, laughing, “at least once a week or so.…”

  When he looked up, a corner of the full moon was already black. He crossed Sand Coulee and Little Sand, then loped down into a draw where one tree grew by a spring. He looked at the darkening sky and thought the shadow must be permanent. He stepped off his horse. He did not need to look at the moon anymore; he had seen enough. A fragile scent of mountain mahogany drifted through the air. He had to keep reminding himself that it was spring, or was it winter? He couldn’t remember.

  Out on the flats again, he tipped his mare into a lope. The pressure of the stirrup made his badly mended leg hurt. It had been weeks since he had thought about the war. Vincent used to read parts of the newspaper to him when they met at the bar. Everything he read was spoken in the same monotone voice and Pinkey liked that. It made the bad news sound solemn without the rash headliner emotionalism and the frivolous news sound more substantial, less at odds with what was going on in the rest of the world. Pinkey’s mother had read to him on their Alabama farm. Like his father, he hadn’t bothered with school, content to raise mules and dogs and chickens. After that, it was Janine who became his “eyes,” then Vincent. Now he had no reader, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about the news anymore. “I’d rather read the clouds,” he liked to say. The rocking gait of his horse lulled him. He could tell the difference between a coyote and a dog track, a grizzly and a black bear track, a weasel and a mink track, a skunk and a bobcat, and he knew the stars and could read the weather in the clouds and the cloud shapes as omens, and he could read the look on a man’s face. But to read the papers only made things worse, blew things up bigger than they were, and they were big enough. “I’m just getting to where I know as much as this ol’ mare,” he thought. “And that’s enough for me.”

  When he looked up again, the black shade had drawn itself over a third of the moon’s surface, over the rough craters and shadows the craters made—shadows over shadows. The eclipse drew over the moon’s slate seas and Pinkey wondered whether there was anyone like him up there on the moon, anyone as lost as he was.…

  He crossed Pole Cat Creek, and when he rode up through the breaks, the pines that grew in the sand didn’t shine, and the skyscraper-size rock tablets were blanks. He pushed his mare harder. He had to get to the cabin before the moon had been taken from the sky, light a lamp, uncork the bottle, and lift it to his lips, the way he might have lifted some part of a woman to his hunger long ago. He thought of kissing someone—how else can a man know what a woman is thinking—and puckered his lips in the dark. He thought of Janine … no, Loretta.… But nothing came back, no lips, no warmth, and his kiss skirr
ed into the same void from which Vincent’s shadow had come.

  The cabin loomed ahead. The moon was all black now, like a face destroyed, but the stars shone. To drink, not to read, not even to kiss, was all he wanted—to drink his way out from under a shadow that blackened what he knew, moved the coming of the year 1945 from him.

  PART FOUR

  1945

  36

  “Is it January yet?” McKay looked at his watch. He and Bobby had not bothered to ring in the New Year. It was four in the morning, the first day of January. “Nineteen forty-five,” he said out loud and wondered whether this was the middle of the war or only the beginning or almost the end. He was hungry and he dressed and went to the kitchen. It would not be light for three hours. He did not want to sit by himself and think about the year that was just over and the year that was to come. “Life is all denials,” he thought. His brother had been wounded and his best friend was rotting away in a prison camp; he had conceived a child with Madeleine and she had lost it, and he loved Mariko in a way that made him blind to everything else and yet he could not have her. The more despair he felt the greater his thirst for life.

  He went outside and stood in the snow wearing his bedroom slippers. A warm wind had come up in the night and it rolled soft and warm against his body and even before first light, he heard the delicate drumming sound of water dripping from eaves.

  Snuff opened the windows on the south side of the bar. The flannel curtains lifted, and he straightened his bow tie in the mirror. “It’s a chinook,” he called out.

  Carol Lyman appeared at the end of the long hall. She had never spent the whole night at Snuff’s and felt awkward now. She had to wear what she had worn the night before—her New Year’s dress and high heels. She was glad no one was there besides Snuff to see her. Taking a deep breath, she walked to the window.

  “You’re right. It does feel warmer,” she said. “Maybe we’re in for a January thaw.”