Requiem

by Frances Itani

  So here I am. One more person in my life has disappeared. And I’m heading back to family, first family, and at their bidding.

  But not quite yet.

  The terrain is changing. Big open spaces have begun. Basil, behind me, is making horse sounds again and I can tell that he’s enjoying this outlet for his energy. I stop the car and let him out at the side of the road. I keep him on a leash because there’s a bit of traffic—not much—and I look around while I receive the generosity of sky from every direction. While I’m pulled over, a freight train moves along the bottom edge of sky into my line of vision, far off, south of the highway. Prairie train, long trail of flatcar, boxcar, train that seems not to move but must be moving out there, along that never-ending space.

  Basil does his business beside the road and leaps into the car again. Once he’s settled, I decide to keep on, get through Winnipeg and out the other side, branch north a bit, aim for Saskatoon and then north and west again. I want to drive and drive. I want to pass ranch and wheat farm and watery slough. I want to be numbed by the early flatness of prairie before I reach rolling hills. I’ll stop when I have to, when I can no longer go on, when I feel myself falling into the dark.

  When Lena and Greg used to tell stories in the car, sometimes they started with a chant:

  In a dark dark wood, there was a dark dark house

  And in the dark dark house, there was a dark dark room

  And in the dark dark room, there was a dark dark space

  And in the dark dark space, there was …

  They took turns filling the dark space. I didn’t need to. I had enough dark spaces of my own to fill. Or so Lena reminded me, when I disappeared into gloom.

  “Where do you learn these things?” I said to Lena.

  “Childhood. I make up the endings. We both do, don’t we, Greg?”

  Stare stare like a bear

  Wearing Grampa’s underwear

  Greg was giggling in the back seat.

  “What about your childhood?” Lena said. “Tell us the stories you learned.”

  “Not Goldilocks. Not Hansel and Gretel. More like The Spider Weaver and Kachi-Kachi Yama.”

  “Tell us,” they both said at once. “Tell us! Please!”

  The train is still there, to the south, and gives the impression of being miles long, travelling a path parallel to mine and at the same pace. It’s a cardboard silhouette, pushed by some force that comprehends enormity, patience, space. At one point, the distance between road and track narrows and I can make out the image of a moon on the side of each boxcar, each moon missing a chunk, as if it’s been bitten out. And then, as my car surges ahead, I hear a long, slow whistle from the train. A greeting in this limitless land. I am here and you are here and I salute you.

  Beyond the western edge of Winnipeg, it begins to snow. A quick, harsh blizzard that takes me by surprise. I drive through it and half an hour later I’m under afternoon sun, wondering if the storm happened at all. But here’s the proof: horizontal chunks of snow, trapped and unmelted at the base of the windshield. The air as cool and fresh as it was in Ontario, but the landscape so vastly different.

  Weather can be visualized in all directions here. Sun ahead, cloud behind, blue above. There it is, the primary colour between green and indigo, background for migrating geese to stroke a wide-stretched vee across an otherwise unbroken sky. One puffball cloud appears to have been catapulted from an earthbound slingshot. The scene keeps changing. A visible rope of rain stretches taut in the northeast, tethering cloud to earth. Spindly baby calves huddle close to their mothers in a muddy field close to the road.

  I switch on the radio and listen to an American talk show from across the border for a while. The topic is aging and how old people are treated in today’s world. “If I’m in the way, put me on a piece of ice and push me out to sea,” says one old man who phones in. “There isn’t any sea around here,” says the host. “Then take me out to the back forty and shoot me,” says the man.

  I switch to CBC and hear the tail end of an interview with a British mystery writer who talks as if she has a rag in her mouth. Finally, I turn the radio off. And think of Greg, young; I can’t remember exactly how old. Maybe eight, nine. He had heard the word cremation somewhere and brought it to me, asking for explanation. I did my best, tried to describe without alarming him. He took in the information, gave a little chuckle and said, in a deep, low voice and with immense bravado, “Well, they can just lay me down on a sailing ship and set fire to the sails and let me drift out over the ocean.” And then he laughed as if this was the funniest image he’d ever conjured. In fact, the two of us roared with laughter, tears running down our cheeks.

  Since Lena died, I’ve sometimes found myself praying when I think of Greg. “Please, God, let him be safe. Let him grow and thrive and have a life. Let him be happy. Please.” Praying when I’ve never prayed before. Praying that things will be all right for my son.

  I look to the sky ahead and suddenly wish for a canvas. A flexible surface, responsive to the pressures of the brush. It’s been weeks, months since I’ve painted. I have only paper with me now. Still, the urge is there, or was, fleetingly. A good sign. Hopeful.

  I fumble with tapes and push in Symphony No. 3, Eroica, and still my thoughts as the music begins. The first movement does that to me: it says, Listen. It’s the second movement that makes me believe Beethoven heard many voices crying in his head. Well, it’s the funeral march, after all. But the entire symphony keeps breaking expectations. There is a grandness to its fragmentation, its emphasis, its yearning. As I turn up the volume and settle back to listen, the one long curve in the road—the only curve on this part of the prairie—makes me understand that I am on the extreme edge of a rim of orb called Earth.

  THE FATHERS

  Water spilt from a tray never returns to the tray.

  CHAPTER 13

  1942–43

  The sixty shacks were completed during our first summer in the camp. In ours, the opening Father had made for the window in the bedroom wall was now covered by a blanket that Mother had nailed to the frame. The blanket helped to keep out the cold air at night, but Hiroshi and Keiko and I still sought one another’s warmth, our legs and feet intertwined in sleep beneath the blankets that were heaped on our bed. Doors and panes of glass were taking a long time to arrive in the camp, and complaints to the Citizens’ Committee had not yielded results.

  The Citizens’ Committee, comprising a dozen interned residents, was the main committee in camp, and its representatives did their best to solve problems and complaints that arose in the community. An RCMP office was across the river, and the Mounties in this office acted as a liaison between our camp and the town. Although we were supposed to be self-sufficient, we were all registered with the Mounties, and we had to rely on the town for supplies. It would be a couple of years before we would be permitted to cross the bridge and enter the place ourselves, so families had to shop by catalogue or by mail. For groceries, lists were made and sent over to the grocers in town every two weeks. Most of the time, people made do with what they had at hand.

  Despite the hardships, much had been accomplished. The field that had held nothing but sagebrush when we’d first arrived now contained the lives and the comings and goings of more than two hundred people. With daylight hours being longer, the air was warmer, especially in the middle of the day, and more and more people were seen outside. The fire in our stove was allowed to go out after breakfast. Keiko and I were sent out to pick dandelions, and Mother prepared these with sugar, sesame seeds and shoyu, the soy sauce we had brought with us. But the supply of shoyu was running low and had to be watered down until more could be ordered.

  Once the shacks were finished, a meeting was held to finalize plans for the schoolhouse, which would be located at one end of the field. It was to have a long, divided room for classes, as well as a community room. Every family in camp pledged to contribute to the building in some way, because everyone wanted the
children’s education to start again. The school year had not resumed after being interrupted the past winter, after our removal from the coast. For now, older girls in the camp who had recently completed high school and any young women who had studied at university were approached by a school committee to see if they would be interested in being teachers. Information about correspondence courses began to arrive from the Department of Education in Victoria, and some training was promised for would-be teachers the following summer, in New Denver. The carpenters had begun to make desks and benches for the school, and so far, the supplies consisted of a blackboard, a few pieces of chalk, scribblers with multiplication tables on the back and pencils without erasers.

  Keiko longed to be back in the classroom again. She played school, and she acted at being “teacher” when she had any time left over from helping Mother or after doing her share of weeding in the garden plot. She hauled me in as her “pupil,” and it became her mission to teach me to read and do elementary math. She also encouraged my drawings. Sometimes we made puppets and miniature puppet theatres together. For materials, we used whatever we could find in the woods and any remnants of cloth or paper or cardboard that had been discarded around camp. For glue we used grains of cooked rice, moistened with water, and we pressed these flat with our thumbs. Other children joined in, but Hiroshi refused to participate in Keiko’s classes, held in the shade of softly scented pines up the slope behind the camp. There was a plateau there, partway up the mountain, a flat area that everyone had begun to refer to as the Bench. From that height, we could look directly down on the entrances to the outdoor toilets below, and watch people go in and out. It was said that ghosts hung around the wooded area behind the outhouses, and a girl in her teens who joined us one day told us she’d seen the ghost of one of the old people who had died of dysentery when we’d first arrived, a woman in her seventies. The ghost of the woman had no feet but it had been prowling in and around the trees, even with no feet.

  “Bin can chase away ghosts,” Keiko told the others. “It’s part of his fate. Father said.”

  Sometimes I was persuaded by the older children to run down the hill, arms outstretched. They all laughed as I ran, but I did not laugh. I had not seen any ghosts. Still, I ran down the hill, shouting at the top of my lungs, pretending to chase the ghosts away.

  The main problem in the camp was always the supply of clean water. Several of the men chipped in together, and after obtaining permission from the RCMP office across the river, they purchased an old truck. The mechanics in the camp kept the truck running, and it was used for everything from early cartage of water barrels to much later delivery of tomatoes that would eventually become the main source of income for the camp. Special permission was needed before leaving the camp area, but there was no place to go. Our movements were restricted, and the road blocks were still in place. We weren’t allowed in the town. We could walk along the road to the end of the bridge on our side of the river, but we were not allowed to cross it. That was as far as we could go. There was nothing but canyon and river and mountain everywhere else.

  The heat of summer, as we had been warned, was as extreme as the cold had been during the winter months. Some people were having difficulty moving about because the temperature soared higher than 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite this, no one could stay inside for long because of the work that had to be done in the gardens. Seeds and budding plants had to be watered in the dry, sandy soil. Most families had a long stick or broom handle with an empty can attached at one end, for the purpose of watering. Until a workable irrigation system was set up, full buckets of water had to be carried to the garden area. The stick-and-can device was dipped into the bucket and used to water the plants, one at a time, row by row. All the while, men and women, girls and boys could be seen climbing the hill from the river below, carrying full pails of water suspended from yokes they wore across their shoulders. Some families devised their own filtration systems, using layers of sand and homemade charcoal above their water barrels. In our home, we were still boiling water for drinking, and we collected rainwater at every opportunity.

  One morning, the long-awaited shipment of doors and windows arrived by truck. The men in camp stopped work on the gardens and the schoolhouse, and immediately began to work on the shacks again. Within a short time, every shack had a door with a latch and real hinges, and windowpanes in the two front windows.

  But Father had wanted the extra window for our home, and he had made the crooked opening in the bedroom wall at the back. Now he had to cut an extra pane of glass. He went outside to try to fit the glass to the frame, and lost his temper when the frame splintered and a thick chunk of wood fell to the ground. He let go of the glass and it, too, dropped and shattered.

  I was outside, at the corner of the shack, sitting on the low stool I had dragged out from the kitchen. I had a piece of cardboard on my lap and I was drawing a picture with the stub end of a pencil. I was trying to draw a horse, but I was having difficulty. I had a picture of a horse on the ground in front of me, torn from an old calendar that Keiko had found. When the window glass hit the ground, I looked up and blinked.

  “What are you staring at?” Father shouted. “Why are you sitting there making foolish pictures when you should be helping?”

  I looked down unhappily at my picture, which did not in any way resemble the calendar horse. Especially the distorted hind end.

  “Arse!” I shouted. And then, out of nowhere, came “Arsehole!”

  Father picked up the chunk of wood that had splintered from the frame and threw it in my direction, hitting me squarely on the forehead, directly over my nose and between my eyes. I heard my own cry and became aware of something gushing down my face. I reeled back and put my hand to my forehead. I saw a red splash on the sandy ground and another against the tarpaper on the outer wall. Mother came running outside, and a sudden, abrupt shout hung in the air between my parents. I was helped into the house, and after that I remembered nothing except waking in my bed after dark.

  It was Keiko, later in the evening and under the blankets, who whispered and told me what had happened next. Both she and Hiroshi were astonished that I had sworn at our father. I did not mention my bad drawing of the horse. Of course, the story grew and grew and we went over its details many times after that, but always out of earshot of our parents. What happened after I was laid on the bed became Keiko’s story because she had been there when the pane of glass had fallen.

  Father went to get another pane of glass from the camp supplies, and returned to the back window to try again. Mother was in the bedroom, looking after my wound. Keiko was sent to get clean water from the barrel outside the door. Hiroshi had missed the whole event because he was working in the garden, watering plants.

  Ji, who had heard the commotion, came over from next door to help repair the broken frame and fit the glass. Through the hole in the wall, the two men could see directly into the bedroom while I was being cared for. Father was scowling while they moulded and packed putty in and around every crack, until the glass was finally fitted. Still, it was awkwardly set because of the way the opening had been made in the first place, and nothing was going to change that. But Father didn’t care, and Ji did not comment on the crookedness. Nonetheless, Ji stood back and smiled at the patchwork and the finished product. He liked perfection. He’d had carpentry experience in his youth, and long ago, he had built shelves and a deep counter in the general store he and Ba had owned in Vancouver. He pulled out a rag, which most of the time hung from his back pocket, and he wiped remnants of linseed oil from his fingers. His tough old hands were creased with rivulets of cracked skin. He patted Father’s shoulder as if Father needed encouragement. And then he soundly told him off because of the cruelty he had shown his younger son.

  When Ji went back to his own shack, he sent Ba over to look at my injury. The bleeding had stopped, but she examined the wound, went home again and returned, carrying a small bowl of egg white, runny and raw. This was
applied to the split in my forehead while I lay in bed, and then she covered the wound with a strip of clean cloth.

  When Ba was finished, she patted the pocket of her dress and pulled out a letter and showed it to Mother and Keiko. It was from an internment camp in California. The name of the place sounded peculiar and magical on her tongue: Manzanar, Manzanar. Ba’s daughter, Sachi, and her husband, Tom, had been moved to this camp, which Sachi wrote about. She said it was a large and lonely place, with barbed wire around the edges and guards with guns in towers to keep watch over the inmates inside. Thousands of Japanese Americans had been taken there from the coastal regions, and thousands more were to come. Sachi and Tom were sharing a small apartment in a barracks building with another young couple. The two couples were not entitled to more space because, as yet, they had no children. They ate their meals in a mess hall. The camp was surrounded by desert, and there were mountains in the distance.

  Mother and Ba sat together in our kitchen and drank green tea and went over and over the letter, discussing every detail of the place that Sachi described as Manzanar. There were a few censored lines in the letter, but Ba now had an address to write to, and she was going to answer the letter this very day.

  Ba returned to our place every day for a week to apply egg white to my forehead and to change my dressing. Each time she came, she made sure Father was there so that she could give him a tongue-lashing because he had injured his child. Father did not argue with an elder; he looked away and waited for her to finish. The rest of us had never heard Father spoken to in such a way, and I was secretly glad to hear Ba scold him. I was happy to have the attention of Mother and Ba while they patted the dressing to my wound. But what I remembered most from that time was Father being punished for his bad temper.