Requiem (11 page)

If Auntie Aya had at first been reluctant to get involved in other people’s misfortunes, our own mother had gone into action from the beginning. There were many older women in the building, and several had become ill and needed help washing their clothes and getting to meals. I tried to stay close to Mother while she moved about, in case something unexpected might happen. Surrounded by strangers every moment, I had begun to worry about being separated from her, or from my brother and sister. I missed Father, whom none of us had seen for almost two months. Only when Mother was told that we were being sent north did we learn that he would be joining us again. But not until the day we were to board the train.

In the meantime, even more women and children had arrived at the livestock building, which meant that those of us who had been there the longest had to move on. Buses and trains were taking families away, heading to ghost towns from the former gold rush days and to camps in places named Greenwood, Kaslo, Slocan, Tashme, New Denver, Lemon Creek—as well as to work the sugar-beet fields in Alberta. Faces that had become familiar disappeared and were never seen again. And then, one morning, shortly after breakfast in the poultry building, we were told by guards that our turn had come, that Father had arranged for us to go north. Auntie Aya was to travel with us, though we did not see Uncle Aki until just before the bus arrived to take us to the train.

Everything had to be packed up quickly. Damp clothes were yanked from lines, divider sheets and blankets tugged from ropes and racks. Other families were led out of the building with us—some faces were familiar, some were not—and we were herded onto a bus and driven to a station platform, where we were to board a train. There we stood, in a huddle beside the tracks, once more clutching bundles that had been newly tied with string.

Husbands and fathers were now joining the group, and families were reunited in the confusion as everyone crowded around heaps of suitcases, baskets, hundred-pound sacks of sugar and rice, paper shopping bags, buckets and boxes, rolls of bedding coiled with rope. We were adrift in a sea of bent-over backs, a blur of shapes and colours. I moved closer to Mother, who was wearing her navy blue coat again but this time with a scarf wrapped around her head and tied under her chin. A huge black train thundered in—the Pacific Great Eastern—raising cinder dust as it puffed and wheezed to a halt in front of us. Hiroshi leapt forward, and Mother hauled him back.

“Stand still,” she told him sharply. “Take your sister’s hand and look after her until you are told to board the train.”

I saw how tense she was when I looked up at her face.

“Hold your bundles tightly,” she said, quietly now. “Don’t look back. Your father will find us. Uncle Aki has seen him. He is helping the old people and he has to look after the sacks of sugar and rice. He has to be certain that the crate that holds our stove gets into the freight car at the back of the train.”

Father had been brought to the station separately, but at the time we boarded, there was still no sign of him. Mother told me to lift my feet high onto the steps of the coach. A tall policeman in uniform, the ever-present RCMP, leaned forward and picked me up suddenly, as if I weighed no more than a piece of cloth fluttering through the air.

“There you are, young fellow,” he said, and he set me down gently in the doorway between coaches.

I was feeling the weightlessness of the moment, the pleasurable rush of my body through air, when I heard Mother’s voice below. Her refusal of help. She climbed up by herself and looked away until the policeman stepped back and offered to lift someone else.

We claimed facing double seats, Hiroshi and Keiko on one side, Mother and I on the other. I was pushing my palms across the rough bristles of upholstery, and I looked up to see a conductor and a different member of the RCMP making their way through the long aisle of the coach. One by one, the two men removed every linen square that had been buttoned to the top of the seatbacks. No dark head of Japanese hair would be touching those starched white linen squares. Again, Mother turned away until the men had passed us by.

The train began to jerk and halt, jerk and halt. Father had not found us. He had not come to the train, after all. And then, just as we were pulling away from the siding, I saw him outside, running to reach the steps at the end of the coach.

“Thank God,” Mother’s voice whispered above me. “Thank God we are together now.”

But Father was agitated and out of breath, and he scarcely took note of the fact that he hadn’t seen us for a long time. He picked me up roughly and plunked me down between Hiroshi and Keiko on the facing seat. They both squirmed and wriggled but did not dare to complain. I was trying to hear what my parents were saying, but Mother lowered her head and whispered, raising her palm in front of her lips so that she would not be heard by others crowded around us. A cold rain had begun outside and was trickling down the thickness of distorted glass in the train windows. I watched Mother as she stared over our heads while she listened to something Father was telling her. She leaned back into the seat. With no expression on her face except one of extreme fatigue, she closed her eyes.

We arrived at our destination in the evening, and pulled our bundles down from the overhead racks, only to learn that we were not allowed to get off the train. We were at a railway station beside the Fraser River, on the edge of a town we were not permitted to enter. One more rule that had to be obeyed. Father pushed our bundles back up on the racks, and snapped at us and told us to sit down again. The train backed up and stopped, dead still, on a siding away from the main tracks. Angry people from the town were parading along the length of the train, holding signs up to the windows in the fading light. They did not want us there. Not even to sleep on the train.

Wanted or not, this was where we had been sent. But no one knew what to do with us now that we had arrived. Not the protesting people from the town, not the government representatives, not the RCMP, who continued to guard the train. No one seemed capable of making a decision.

“Stay where you are,” one policeman told the men. “Tell your families to be calm. Don’t try to get off the train.” As if we had any choice if we did get off.

It was easy to see that it was cold outside because of the way the protesters were dressed. We were told not to open the windows, but the air in the coach was worsening. It had reeked horribly throughout the journey, but now it was unbearable. Despite this, we were made to sit on the train for three more days and nights. Some children became ill and retched and cried. Odours of urine and feces and vomit mixed with the sticky-sweet smell of varnish from wood panelling inside the coach. Several of the old people had fever and diarrhea. Food was brought to the train by the RCMP, and the smell of it made the air even worse. There were spittoons outside the washrooms at the end of the coach where four or five old men stayed most of the time, bickering and talking and playing cards. It was difficult to fall asleep, even though we did our best to stretch out on seats that had been pushed back as far as they would go.

Abruptly, on the third day, we were ordered to leave the train. Once more, we gathered our bundles and left behind a place that had become familiar. A place where I had memorized every anxious face, every seat in the coach, every paint chip, every streak in the glass. Hiroshi and Keiko and I had walked up and down the aisle so that we could exercise our legs. We had fidgeted as much as our parents had allowed. Our legs were cramped, our mother’s feet swollen, our father’s temper barely held beneath the surface. Now we stepped down from the coach and stood in a huddle in unbearable cold, staring up at empty windows as the train pulled away and abandoned us.

I turned a full circle, feeling cinders grate under the soles of my rubber boots. Everyone was looking up because all around, in every direction, were the looming shapes of mountains. The town had sprung up in the centre of what appeared to be a four-square fold of peaks and valleys. White mountaintops glistened as if they’d been iced.

We boarded buses and were driven across the town bridge, over the swift and muddy Fraser River, arriving at a more or less flat, narrow field at the base of a mountain on the other side. Oversized tents had arrived from Vancouver on another train, and Father’s name and Uncle Aki’s were called out because, at their request, one large tent had been assigned to our two families.

The entire trainload of people began the business of setting up a tent village in the bitter cold of the mountains. And though we were wrapped and bundled and blanketed, I had never been as cold as I was in that place, high above a valley we had never seen, across from an angry town that did not want us on either side of the river. Mother told us to keep moving, and we clapped our hands and bent our knees and walked in circles and stomped our feet.

I could hear Father grunting, his anger visible as he pried at the boards of the crate. He had removed his jacket, his tendons taut beneath the surface of his skin. As he lifted out parts of the stove, muscles rippled up his fisherman’s arms, partly hidden by the sleeves of his shirt. With a steady flow of Japanese curses and with the help of Uncle Aki and another man, he put the stove together piece by piece and levelled it on rock and damp ground in an open space not far from the tent where we would be living. Hiroshi and Keiko and I were sent to look for downed branches and dry brush on the lower slope of the mountain, at the edge of the field. While I was dragging a branch through patches of snow, I heard Hiroshi mutter, “Arse-arse-arse.” Keiko began to giggle but no one else paid any attention. Hiroshi and Keiko dragged back larger pieces from blowdowns, and a fire was started in what had become, by necessity, an outdoor stove. Mother found and unpacked two pots—one being the rice pot from my bundle—and she began to melt snow so that she could boil water and prepare our meal. While we waited for the rice to cook, we leaned forward, sharing the space with Auntie Aya and some of our new neighbours. Hands and arms reached towards the burners in an attempt to capture thin waves of heat before they escaped into the mountain air.

Father put on his jacket again, and he scowled and planted his feet wide and stood behind the stove. He was taller than the other men and he wore a wool cap with earflaps, the chin strap dangling. His eyebrows scrunched as he gestured to the surrounds of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir that shadowed the slopes at his back. In places where there was no snow, the soil was a mixture of rough gravel and sand. In the woods, there was only darkness. High above, on the side of the mountain, a rockslide had left its mark, a slate-coloured vee now gathering dusk.

I shifted my weight, planted my feet in the way my father had, crossed my arms and tucked my hands into my armpits.
Arse
, I said to myself, knowing it was meant to be a bad word.
Arse-arse
.

I tried my best to remember our warm kitchen, the one we had left behind on the island so many weeks ago. I thought of Missisu’s piano and I turned my head sharply as if I might be ambushed by a fog of wavy, familiar notes. I looked to Mother’s face for a sign as she leaned forward to pull dishes from the willow basket.

But it was clear that Mother was not thinking about music or about our old, comfortable kitchen. I could see that she was thinking about getting food out of the pot and into the rice bowls, out of the rice bowls and into our bellies. I could see that she was thinking about warm water, which she had already begun to heat, so that she could wash the soot and train dirt off the three of us before putting us to bed on cots set up inside the heavy canvas tent.

And there we stood. Our family. The five of us captured in memory for all time, looking as if we had signed up for some bizarre adventure trek, having brought a stove with us to defeat the treachery of winter.

Uncle Aki, Auntie Aya and a few neighbours crowd into the edges of this memory. They are seeking our shared heat because no other man in camp has thought to pack a stove in a wooden crate. On the fringes of the same picture, more deadwood has been gathered. Campfires have been started all along the rows of tents. A baby wails. Food preparation has begun. The sound of high-pitched, rhythmic sobbing starts up from the far edge of the field. The same sobbing that kept us awake at Hastings Park has followed us here, to the camp. Auntie Aya shudders, and Uncle Aki puts his arm around her shoulder. Father surveys the scene and nods. Because, for the moment, our own small family is the only one that has a stove, and a poker to rattle its embers, a lifter to lift the burners and an open chimney pipe through which smoke curls up and up, into the circle of tightening darkness.

S
ix hundred and ninety-seven kilometres between the Soo and Thunder Bay, and I am somewhere between. I try to envisage five million square kilometres of Shield and all I can conjure is the idea of immensity. An eye looking down over lake and rock, peering into crevice to see hibernating bear, or moose knee-deep in muskeg, or wolf skulking in shadow. Water is high in ponds and craters because it has no easy place to drain. Trees lean as if a mythical wind has bent an entire forest all at the same moment and in the same direction. I feel that I’m on some vast and bumpy map, uncharted landscape from which there is no exit except the one I draw for myself. But for thousands of years, Native tribes have travelled this route. And for hundreds of years,
voyageurs, Métis
, missionaries and explorers pushed their way deep inside the continent.

I’ve been stopping here and there, mostly for Basil, but sometimes to do quick sketches on paper. Creeks and streams and rivers all head towards the big lake; dark waters bubble over jutting stones; circles puddle atop thin ice. And old conversations with Lena surface as I drive. A lidded eye pushes up from below, from the morass of memory that I have been holding down. I can’t prevent what bursts through. I keep thinking: Lena as … Lena doing … Lena trying … I remember her excitement when we travelled here together. Her insistence that we stop so that she could examine the upheaval of massive slabs of rock. She wrote down the names of road signs: Widow Pond, Dead Horse Cove, Lost Boy Creek, Old Mine Road, Bear Paw Landing, Horse Thief Bay. “Every name contains its own story,” she told Greg. “In the way that rivers hold stories, so do roads and pathways. Sometimes, if we dig around and listen hard, we can find out what the stories are.”