Requiem (22 page)

There were fifty-two children in our school now, and three teachers. One of the teachers, who had a university degree, volunteered to work with the boys and girls of high school age. The students who would be graduating at the end of the school year were going to be permitted, for the first time, to write their final exams at the town high school across the river. Until now, they’d had to write exams by correspondence.

I liked my own teacher, Miss Mori. She had taught me the previous year, as well, and she knew that Keiko had helped me learn to read and print before I’d started school. Miss Mori sometimes asked me to draw pictures on the blackboard, and she let me use some of her precious supply of chalk. I wondered if Miss Mori would say something about my name changing from Oda to Okuma on the attendance sheet. I hoped that one of my fathers had let her know before classes were to begin.

I knew that Mother was spending time at Uncle Aki’s house in the afternoons because Auntie Aya was not able to look after the work by herself. Sometimes, she stayed in bed all day. On good days, she sat outside the doorway. Some days, she tried to cook; other days, she did not. She liked the catalogues that arrived in the mail, both Eaton’s and Simpson’s, and she kept them by her side and read them as if they were storybooks. She lingered over the pages that had pictures of babies and baby furniture and clothing, and there was always a sadness about her.

The first day I spent at Okuma-san’s, he prepared our meals and set two places. He asked me to sit opposite him at the table, on a bench that had been hammered together from pieces of pine. I sat, but I had no appetite. I ate no breakfast or lunch, nor did I want food ever again. He did not seem surprised.

In the evening, when it was time for our supper, he said, “Perhaps tomorrow your appetite will come back. Would you like to look at a book while I am having my meal? There is a book on the chair for you, over there. You might not have seen this one before. I know you have learned to read, and I can help you if there are big words that are difficult.”

I shook my head and did not look towards the book or the chair. I had seen few books since we’d arrived at the camp, except for the ones lined up on a shelf at the back of our classroom. I did not feel like looking at a book now. I wanted only to return home. I missed the cooking smells in my real home, and I missed the calming presence of Mother and the way she silently looked out for me. I wondered what my own father was doing at that moment.

“Some other evening, then,” said Okuma-san, still speaking softly. “There are many more books.” He gestured towards the shelves. “They will be waiting for you.”

I did not look at the place he was gesturing, but this did not seem to bother him either.

“I am going outside for a walk,” he said. “I will leave a snack on the table in case you become hungry later.”

When he had finished eating, he went outside, and I watched as he crossed the dirt road and began to walk slowly up and down the rows between garden plots. While he was gone, and with an eye to the door, I lifted the cover from a plate he had left on the table. It held a small trout, a slice of tomato and some cabbage. Beside it was a bowl of rice. I ate quickly and finished before he came back.

He looked at the bones on my plate.

“Neko shirazu,”
he said. “What about the part the cat can’t find? The cat is unaware of the fat morsels in the cheeks. He walks away from the bones of the fish but he leaves the best part behind.”

I picked up my chopsticks and poked at the bones and found little pads of trout in the cheeks, like miniature hidden scallops.

The next morning, I ran to my own house and stood in the doorway. I knew that First Father would be out in the gardens with the other men, harvesting and packing, preparing tomatoes for pickup by trucks that would come from across the river to take the flats back over the bridge—some to the town cannery and some to the railway station, where they would be loaded onto a train. The communal gardens in our camp had become known in only two years, and there was a steady market for our produce. The people of Vancouver wanted good tomatoes that grew fat and red and abundantly.

Everyone in camp who was able to work had to put in extra hours during harvest time, picking tomatoes and filling the big red pails. I could read the print on the sides: BURNS’ SHAMROCK PURE LARD. After each pail was filled, it was carried to the end of a row and the tomatoes were dumped gingerly into the flats. Tomatoes had become the main source of income in our camp, and everyone had to take care that the ones that did not go to the cannery were not bruised during packing. At this time of year, people were extra busy because individual family plots had to be tended as well.

Mother was standing by the stove when I opened the door. She was wearing a loose summer dress patterned with overlapping ovals of a soft grey colour, and a red apron overtop. On her feet were open-heeled slippers that First Father had woven from straw. He had made a pair for each of us the first winter so we wouldn’t get slivers in our feet from the plank floor.

I could smell
shoyu
, the familiar aroma of soy sauce. Mother had been adding drops to something she was stirring in a large pot. The two curls on her forehead looked as if they’d been lacquered, because steam was rising straight up out of the pot. I knew she had heard me enter.

“Bin.” She said my name carefully. “Father said you were to stay with your new father.” I could see that she was forcing herself to speak these words.

She did not move from the stove, but I saw her glance quickly out the window in the direction of the tomato fields.

She came to me in the doorway then, and put her arms around my shoulders and my back. She pulled me close, and when I looked up, I saw that she was crying without noise. She pushed me away gently and said, “Go now. Don’t get into trouble. We will see each other every day. Go and find Hiroshi and Keiko. They are picking tomatoes, but they are probably watching for you. They are still your brother and sister, don’t ever forget. And I am still your mother, though we will no longer live in the same house.”

I edged back slowly, casting a glance around the room at all that was familiar: the homemade table and bench, the few chairs, the low three-legged stool, the curtain in the doorway that led to the bedroom, the beautiful smooth sink and shelf that Ji had made for Mother, a hastily constructed cupboard that held our blue-and-white rice bowls and plates and chopsticks and kitchen utensils.

“Hurry!” Mother said. “Go and look for the others. And be sure to show your new father respect. He is an educated man. A good man. I am certain of it.”

She returned to the stove and stood without moving. She did not look in my direction. I had no choice but to let myself out the door.

As I walked away from my mother’s house, Ba called to me from her doorway.

“I’ve been watching for you,” she said. “I thought you would come back this morning. Try not to be sad. This is the way things happen sometimes, when one family has no sons and another has more than one.”

But I could see that she looked sad herself.

“Sit at the table,” she said. And she set out a green bowl and cut an orange into slices for me. “Ji is in the garden,” she added, when she saw me looking around for him. “He will be glad you were here to have a visit with me.” She sprinkled some raspberries around the orange slices in the bowl. “Finish them all,” she said, “and I will read my letter from Manzanar while you are eating.”

She patted the deep pocket of her dress, where she carried every letter that had arrived from her daughter, Sachi, in California. The letters were creased and flattened and had been read many times. When a new one arrived, she always took it over to read it aloud to Mother and to anyone else who was there. I had not heard the latest one, which had arrived the previous day. It had been written in the early summer, and had taken months to come from Manzanar because it had to go to the censor’s office before arriving at our camp. Ba sat on the chair across from me at the table.

“This letter slipped past the censor,” she said. “It must have been put in the wrong pile. There isn’t a single mark on it.” She laughed, and then she began to read.

Ba was lost in thought over Sachi, and I waited until she folded the letter along all of its creases, and replaced it in her pocket alongside the other letters. I thanked her for the orange and the berries and went across the road to the garden.

Hiroshi and Keiko were waiting.

“What’s he like?” Keiko said. “To live with.”

When I didn’t answer, Hiroshi said, “Your new father.” And then he blurted out, “Is he kind?”

“Yes,” I said in a soft, low voice, not unlike Okuma-san’s. “He is kind.”

I was aware of people in the rows around me, staring. Everyone seemed to know.

Keiko reached into her pocket and pulled out two Ritz crackers she had brought from home. She pushed them into my pocket and said, “For later. If you want a snack.”

I picked up an empty lard pail and began to drop the ripe tomatoes on top of one another, not caring if they became squashed or bruised.

I
n the evenings, Okuma-san read books by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes, he lit candles. Every evening, he left the same book for me on the chair after the supper meal was finished. Sometimes I stole a glance at the book, but it wasn’t until several weeks after school began that I opened the cover.

Okuma-san pretended not to notice.

There was a strange picture at the beginning of the book. A baby boy with a pleased expression on his face was inside a round fruit that looked like a peach. He was stepping out of its centre, where the pit should be, and the peach had split open. The boy held his fat little arms above his head as he strode out of the peach. He looked ready for adventure, and I began to wonder what the story was about.

Okuma-san peered over my shoulder and said, “Ah, yes. This is a story I was told when I was a boy about the same age you are now. It begins with an old man and his wife who are lonely because they have no children.”

I did not want that kind of story.

I ignored Okuma-san and turned the page. I saw a river. It was curving its way out of hills that had been drawn to look far away on the page. There were wavy lines on the surface of the river, and a large peach floating on its current. An old woman kneeled at the edge of the river. Beside her was a washtub filled with clothes. I turned the page to see that the peach had drifted to shore and was lodged next to the washtub. The old woman and her husband were smiling as they looked down at a baby curled up inside the peach, which had split open. I could see that pictures were helping to tell the story, but I did not know what the story was.

I looked at every page. A monkey and a dog were dressed up as humans and fighting with swords; a boat was sailing on a sea and heading for an island. I decided to read the story by myself. But there were a few big words I did not know.

When Okuma-san went outside for his evening walk through the gardens, I examined the pictures in the book again. Two were in colour. Others were shaded in black and white, as if they had been drawn with a pencil, or maybe with pen and ink. Okuma-san had three pencils in his shack, and these were kept sharpened in a small jam jar on the shelf. He had ink and a long pen with a nib that he sometimes dipped into a small bottle. The ink was dark, almost black. He had told me the name of the colour—indigo. In winter, the ink in our school froze on the coldest days. The teachers lined up the stubby bottles on a small table close to the stove, but it took hours for the ink to thaw. On those days, we wore our winter jackets all day, at our desks.