They took the highway to the ranch turnoff. Abe-san liked the tan screens of corn shaking stiffly in the wind. After the corn, there were miles of grazing land, then the emerald of irrigated pastures.
She stopped once to check the back wheel. Abe-san followed her with his head, then leaned out and said, “Used to wander when I was boy, only walking. So many treasures everywhere—didn’t matter which direction. Never knew if I was at home or on the way.”
Small clouds broke open over the ranch and the moisture that was let down from them evaporated before it hit the earth.
When Mariko and her grandfather drove into the yard, they found McKay and Bobby digging potatoes. The ground was wet and when McKay wiped his face with the back of his hand, he left a smear of mud.
“This is some outfit,” McKay said as he opened Mariko’s door.
“Godawful, isn’t it?” Mariko said.
For a moment, Abe-san let the sun beat down on his head and closed his eyes.
“Konichi wa,” Bobby said.
Abe-san smiled, holding out his hand to Bobby. “My friend … very happy to see you.”
“Samisen … come in for tea. We have red tea and Mormon tea, no tea ceremony tea, I am sorry …,” Bobby said.
Abe-san smiled. “Please, I would like to sit here for a while. We’ve been inside for so long.…”
Bobby looked from the old man to McKay and back to the old man. “Then we have tea out here.”
When he returned with a tray, McKay and Mariko were nowhere to be found. Balancing plates of fruit and cookies on the dusty fender, he served tea.
“Bitter melon,” Abe-san said, holding the handleless porcelain cup up to admire the color.
“May I?” Bobby asked, indicating the seat next to Abe-san.
“Hai, dozo.”
Bobby looked at the old man. “You go home soon?”
“Sooo …,” he said in a faint voice.
He tipped the cup delicately to his mouth. The afternoon sun blazed down on the two old men and on Heart Mountain, and the yellow went up in the cottonwoods like candle flames. Fruit had been difficult to get during the war and when Bobby held the one orange in the palm of his hand, Abe-san accepted the gift, turning it slowly as, if the orange were a globe.
McKay led Mariko through the house and outside to his porch. She touched one of the screens.
“Is this where you sleep?”
McKay laughed. “Yes.”
“Even when it snows?”
He nodded and tried to rub the mud from his face. She held his arm, turning it palm outward, then knelt and kissed him where the mud came down to his wrist; she kissed the front of his jeans. McKay lifted her. She took her sweater off. She wore no bra.
“You look like ivory …,” he said, running his finger along her collarbone.
She unfastened his pants. As he watched, he tried to rehearse in his mind the days after she left. He would get up early and do chores. He would ride the pasture below cow camp and come home … he would not drink … no, he would drink excessively.…
She looked up. “What’s wrong?”
McKay took her hand. “This can’t be.”
“What?” she said softly.
“That you are leaving tomorrow.”
She bit her lower lip. “Come here,” she said, lying on the cot.
The sound of her voice made him shiver. He pulled the rest of his clothes off hurriedly and lay down on her. He knew she could feel the wetness under his arms—his excitement and sorrow and joy and fear. He bit her arm gently and thought how the bullet that had gone through her grandfather’s arm years ago had also entered her, and in that way they had become inextricably linked.
When he touched her a flush came to her face. He was trembling and could not make his arms and legs stay still, yet the bullet that had preceded his own entry into her always made the passage seem shockingly familiar.
“Mariko,” he cried out.
“There’s nothing but this, is there?” she said.
“Shhhh …” He kissed her mouth.
After, she watched him as he slept. She buried her head by his ear and whispered: “I’m not going to forget you.” Then, starting at the top of his head, traced his body with her eyes. But it was his mouth she loved most, the way the upper lip barely touched the lower one—such natural elegance, she thought. The straight nose and the princely mouth and the powerful legs … I’ll remember these.…
“Are you still here?” he asked sleepily.
Then he lifted up and embraced her and as the smell and taste of him filled her again, the idea of leaving dropped away.
She put her hand on his chest and watched it move up and down. “I’ll always love you,” she said.
He looked at her, anguished. “I don’t want to be consoled.”
The wind made a door inside the house slam closed. Then Bobby came running. When they saw the expression on his face, they simply rose naked in his presence, dressed, and followed him—through the living room, down the dark hall, through the kitchen, into the yard. There, on the gray fender of the car, the tea tray teetered and Abe-san sat motionless in the backseat.
“He was peeling orange. So happy, eat orange. We share, then he go back like that,” Bobby said breathlessly as Mariko and McKay climbed over Abe-san. McKay took the old man’s pulse and Mariko opened his kimono and laid her head against his chest. He was thin and the skin was stretched taut over the sternum and the sun was like a light on his domed forehead.
Mariko looked at McKay. He shook his head. She leaned toward her grandfather again, touching his chest with her long hand.
“Look, he’s still holding the orange,” she whispered at last.
Bobby collapsed on his knees in the dust. “So sorry,” he whispered, then McKay helped him to his feet.
The wind came in gusts and McKay felt it push at the back of his head and saw the row of willows by the ditch wave tendrilously, though it was the car that seemed to be moving, not the trees. Mariko lay against her grandfather. Her hair had come loose and it mixed with Abe-san’s white strands. Finally she closed his kimono and stepped out of the car. His head had rolled to one side, facing west, and held the sun.
For a long time, Mariko, McKay, and Bobby watched the dead man as if to see the moment when the soul went from him.
When the coroner came he was wearing a double-breasted suit and dark glasses.
There was to be no embalming, only cremation, McKay explained. The undertaker had come to the house after McKay’s parents were extricated from the canal. Now he waited with McKay in the kitchen while Mariko dressed her grandfather in a white ceremonial kimono, and after the body had been taken away, Mariko drove back to the Camp alone to tell Kai.
The Camp was nearly deserted now. The guards waved her through the gate without checking her pass. She parked the car in front of the barrack. No one cared now. The life she had had with her grandfather was over … and the life she’d had before evacuation … what would be left of that? Will was in prison; her parents were somewhere in Japan, perhaps dead, perhaps alive … and Kai was nowhere to be found.
The moon, having reached the other side of the sky, lit the room.
She lay down on the floor. It was nearly empty now—just the stove and the beds. Four years in here, she thought. Now he’s gone. Slivers of cold came up from between the cracks in the floor.… He was going to Paris with me and we were going to paint together and carve masks and write plays.… She could not look at his empty bed. Instead, she turned on her side and pulled her long hair back with one hand. For the last five months Abe-san had looked like a ghost, his white hair spectral, and she wondered if he would return now like one of the old men in the Noh plays who had been dead for years.…
She pulled herself up until she was on her hands and knees and slowly raised her head: no one. Exhausted, she slumped down. She closed her eyes. How long did she sleep or did she? Wind rattled the door and shakahachi music came from another barrack. She woke t
o it and to the sound of the screen door slamming back, then opening.
“Grandpère?” Mariko shouted.
“Mariko?” a voice said.
She opened her eyes. At first she didn’t know where she was. A hand pressed down on her and she turned.
“Mariko?”
“Kai?” She looked into his eyes. “Kai … where have you been? I’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?” he said.
She took his hand. “Come here.… Oh Kai, I have to …”
Kai lay down on the floor beside her but she buried her face. He wondered what she wanted of him.… “Mariko, don’t hide.…”
She rolled so her back was against him. He ran his hand across her arm and breast and clasped her hand.
“No … no …,” pushing him away, and began sobbing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered and withdrew his hand. It’s not going to happen, is it? he said to himself and pounded the floor with his fist in anger.
When Mariko woke she was alone and cold. She sat straight up and listened. The wind had stopped. She heard Kai say something to his mother in the next room and the lid of a trunk slam closed. She got to her knees and slid to the edge of Abe-san’s bed.
“Grandfather … are you a ghost yet? Why have you not come to me?”
Kai carried two of the family suitcases to the mess hall, where they would be picked up and delivered to the waiting train. An old man approached, a crony of Abe-san’s who was also an aficionado of Noh theater. He motioned Kai aside.
“You hear?” the man asked.
Kai shook his head. Then the old man held up a white but soiled handkerchief, as if that gesture would tell the story.
“What is it?” Kai asked.
“Sensei …”
“Who? What teacher?” he said.
“Abe-san … dead.”
Kai backed away. Very slowly, he took the wire-frame glasses from the bridge of his nose because they had clouded up. He knew then what had been wrong with Mariko—she had tried to tell him and couldn’t.
“My God, I’m so stupid,” he yelled out.
The old man looked at him quizzically. “Not your fault. Abe-san old man. Know he die.”
Kai collected himself. “When did it happen?” he asked.
“Yesterday. He go in big car. Die then.”
Kai put his glasses back on.
“He tell me you best student,” the old man continued. “You mask-carver too?”
Kai gave a faint smile. “No.”
“So sorry,” the man said and bowed.
Kai ran all the way back to the barrack and threw open Abe-san’s door, calling for Mariko even though he could see the room was empty.
Abe-san’s ashes were returned in a coffee can. Mariko and McKay drove toward the falls with the can between them on the seat of her car. It was dark by the time they reached the base of the mountain. The limestone tusk towered above them but they could not see it. McKay lit a lantern and they climbed up through gooseberry bushes and willows, past Willard’s cave, onto a promontory of rock. From there they could see the lights of the Camp—no longer a furious glare, but only a bright cluster; and to their left, against the mountain, the three lights of McKay’s ranch, because Bobby had gone to town and settled the five-year feud with the REA, and had the electricity turned on.
McKay and Mariko huddled under a blanket on the flat rock and she held the can with Abe-san’s ashes in the crook of her arm against her chest.
“I don’t know if I can do this now,” she yelled over the roar of the water.
“You don’t have to …,” McKay said.
The moon rose over the Big Horn Mountains. It was a hunter’s moon, a huge orb that looked deformed. Mariko stood and stepped cautiously to the edge. Sprays of water flew back on her. She opened the jar and poured its contents—small and large grains and bits of bone—onto her hand and let the wind and spray take Abe-san’s ash away.
There was no conversation between them in the car. When they reached the ranch, the light in the kitchen was on. Bobby had left food: his sacrament, his continual offering. They ate the sandwiches and cake and drank cognac out of one teacup.
“Do you feel like talking?” McKay asked finally.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
He touched her cheek.
“I don’t want to cry,” she said and wiped her eyes.
“Have some more,” McKay said, holding out the teacup to her.
“Thanks.” She took a sip, then cleared her throat. “That’s better.”
McKay led her up the creaky staircase to bed. She sat in a chair. They were in Ted’s room, not Champ’s, and it looked out on the mountains. McKay thought about Ted’s lying wounded in a hospital. So many sorrows at once—he found he was unable to give himself to all of them.
“Here,” he said. Undressing, he turned down the blankets.
Mariko sat rigidly. “I’m going to be sick,” she said and ran to the bathroom.
McKay went in and held her, though she tried to push him away.
“Don’t. I’m all right.…”
“I don’t mind,” he said. After, he wiped her face with a damp cloth. She was shaking and he helped her back to the bedroom and undressed her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
They fell asleep holding hands. No mention of the fact that they had never spent a whole night together in a real bed was made. Her grief about the loss of her grandfather had not shown through completely yet, but it would come, and he was ready for it. He lay awake for a long time. It wasn’t the reasons that she was leaving that would hurt, but her absence. You only have love when you have it, he thought, and the rest of the time you have nothing. Much later, he woke and felt the bed shake with her sobs.
Mariko left in the morning while McKay slept. Bobby saw her go but did not try to bring her back. A mist hung on Heart Mountain when McKay woke. He felt sluggish, as if he had been drugged, and when he discovered she had driven only as far as the highway he realized she must have walked without a coat or hat in the rain.
46
“Madeleine? It’s Velma Vermeer. You have another letter.”
Madeleine was just going out the door when the call came. She had brought five calves sick with pneumonia down from the mountain, and had bedded them with fresh straw in a sun shed, and they needed to be watered and fed.
Now that the war was over she felt more apprehensive, not less, because soon she would know Henry’s fate. Was he dead or alive? Was he coming home? At weaning, she and McKay would divide their cattle into separate herds again after four years of running together. But she had felt her intimacy with McKay coming to an end for a long time. The war had brought to him sorrows of a different nature and he was preoccupied with them now. To have suffered an absence or to have experienced a great love—finally they came to the same thing, Madeleine thought.
Hurriedly, she finished her chores. She wondered how recent or old this letter from Henry was, because sometimes they arrived out of order. A letter written in 1942 had come in 1944, though others had been written only a month before. The drizzling rain that had begun after sunup had turned the road to mud. She put on her slicker and overboots and hoisted the heavy chains over the back wheels of her truck, lay on her back and hooked them, then tightened them across the hubcaps and drove to town.
This time it was a thick envelope with something soft inside. She opened it under the inquisitive gaze of the postmaster. There was a long scroll of toilet paper folded neatly and the lettering was very small.
She pushed the wad back into the rice paper envelope and drove north. Halfway there, she pulled off the road and read what Henry had written. It was not a letter, but part of a journal he had been keeping during the years since the Bataan Death March. A note was attached:
Madeleine,
I don’t know what will become of us when and if liberation comes so I’m sending this now, care of a Nisei soldier who has a brother at that camp
near us. He said he’d send it by air to you. Looks like the end is here.
Love as always,
Henry
1
1942. Bataan, the Philippines. The War Plan Orange III called for us to hold up in Bataan and wait for the great American fleet to sail in from England. It never did. MacArthur had been recalled to active duty and was responsible to the Filipino president. There was a certain urgency in the air when we arrived, but we were pitiful. Like Boy Scouts. We’d never seen combat and we had very little ammunition around—three-inch guns, that’s all. From time to time we had drills. The rest was like a weekend house party. We wore white uniforms and had formal dinners in the mansion that served as the major’s quarters. If we could find a car, we drove to Manila. There was an Army-Navy Club there and the Polo Club. The guys tried to get dates with army nurses when they could.
The training center for Filipino soldiers was something—they wore coconut pith helmets, bluejean fatigues. Some were barefoot and the guns they carried had been outdated during WWI. The communications system consisted of a phone with miles of wire which had to be connected to battalion headquarters. None of us was prepared in any way for war.
It was Sunday and I was reading the paper when a big V formation of fifty planes flew right over us. Of course, I thought they were ours; then someone started yelling, “It’s the Japs,” and just then the bombs came down. I rushed out and had a man set up a Browning machine gun. He was digging when a row of bullets went right between us. I picked up his BAR and shot. Got a Zero in the wing. The strafing went on for an hour and when it stopped the commander came around and told me to go eat lunch while I could. I went back to the officer’s quarters. Brado, the Filipino houseboy, was hiding under the bed. After I got him out, we had a lunch of cold fried eggs and papaya together. After, I got orders to move to a canefield with our artillery. We found the crashed Zero there. I put some guards on it and carried out my orders to strip it of armament and bury the dead pilot. When it came to getting the pilot out, I was elected. I stuck my arm in and he came apart in my hands, he had been burned so badly. I threw up all over the plane. That was the beginning of the war for me.
Heart Mountain Page 39
