Requiem (24 page)

She and the other women in camp were busy now, pickling, preserving, knitting socks and mittens and scarves, lining winter clothes, everything done by hand. The men were making improvements to the root cellars near the shacks, and they dug more cellars out of the side of the hill and reinforced those with planks. Everyone, in some way or other, was occupied with finding wood, chopping wood, clearing deadwood, stacking wet wood, storing dry wood. Huge logs were dragged from the surrounding forest and sawed with a crosscut saw. Having enough wood for winter was important to every family, and the woodpiles grew higher and higher.

I helped to keep Okuma-san’s woodbox filled to the top, day and night. Unlike the real stove First Father had crated and brought with us on the train the winter we arrived, Okuma-san’s stove was like the others in camp, a converted oil drum that rested horizontally on low cradle legs made from iron. A large kettle was filled to the top so that warm water was always available.

Every day, when I came in from school, a snack was waiting for me on the table: crackers, sometimes a bowl of canned peaches. Fish was salted and dried, sometimes canned. We ate it with rice and with vegetables from the garden. On rare days, a special treat from Mother was waiting on the kitchen table:
sushi
, or part of a cake she’d baked earlier in the day and delivered while I was at school. There was always enough for both me and Okuma-san. If First Father knew about this, no one said. I did not see First Father often. When I did, it seemed to me that he turned away, as if he didn’t want to speak to me. He did speak, sometimes, if I happened to be with Hiroshi or Keiko, outside.

“Are you behaving well?” he said to me one day. “Are you learning new things?”

I nodded. By now, I knew what was expected of me at Okuma-san’s. What was expected was that I would learn. Learning, reading, drawing and music were honoured in his home. I had a sudden urge to blurt out the name
Bait-o-ven
to First Father, but he had moved on.

In the late fall, our first camp wedding took place. Miss Mori, my teacher of the past two years, married a man whom everyone knew as Tak. Tak was in his twenties, and had been living with his parents in our camp for the past six months. He had been sent to a work camp in 1942, to build roads near the Alberta border, but after a year he was permitted to join his parents because his father had become ill. Few young single men were ever allowed to remain in the inland camps; they were either sent to Ontario prisoner-of-war camps, to work camps to build roads under supervision, or—if they could find jobs—they were permitted to move east to work. Even the young male teachers in the other internment camps in the interior were eventually sent east, after being told by the Security Commission that they could no longer keep their teaching jobs.

Tak remained in our camp until his father was well again, and by then, he and Miss Mori had decided to marry. They planned to move to Ontario after their wedding. They had been promised work in Hamilton, and had received permission to travel by train across the country. Tak’s parents would leave with them, and that would mean the first empty shack in our community.

I was sorry to lose Miss Mori partway through the school year. She had always given me extra challenges. It wasn’t difficult for me to learn work from the third grade because I could hear the lessons around me from the next row of desks. I was doing both grade two and grade three work at the same time. Miss Mori also taught songs to the four grades on our side of the room. There was no instrument to accompany our voices, but that didn’t stop her from teaching us to sing. There was one special song we planned to sing at her wedding, but that was to be a surprise.

Miss Mori was replaced by Mr. Blackwell, a Caucasian missionary from the Anglican Church, a man who had once taught English and Bible studies. He was living in Vancouver when Miss Mori announced her departure. When the school committee found out about him from church contacts, he was invited to teach at our camp. He agreed to take over grades one to four for the rest of the year, and he found a room in a boarding house across the river. He had an old black car. Every day, he drove it across the bridge, right up to the school door.

Everyone stopped work for the wedding, which took place outside on a sunny fall Saturday afternoon. A canopy had been created and decorated, and Miss Mori and Tak stood under it and were married by a minister from across the river. The minister left immediately after the ceremony. With the temperature cooling down, we all moved inside the schoolhouse to celebrate in the community room. Many of the women had baked, and Mother had made a special cake in the oven of her stove. Other families had donated butter and sugar to help with the cake.

At a signal from one of the older girls, Miss Mori’s pupils, including me, gathered quickly in one corner of the room. We stood, tall and proud, and sang to the new couple “Don’t Fence Me In,” a song Miss Mori had taught us the year before. Miss Mori wiped at tears while we sang, but at the end of the song, she joined everyone in the room as they clapped and cheered.

I had made a special card for my departing teacher, using a precious sheet of thick paper from one of Okuma-san’s books. I folded it across the middle and drew a mountain and a schoolhouse. I tried to make these look like our mountain and our schoolhouse. Across the bottom, in indigo ink, I drew the river. I wanted Miss Mori to remember me and I wanted her to know that I was going to miss her. Okuma-san stayed at my side much of the afternoon, and he presented the new couple with a book of Japanese legends from the two of us.

School carried on, and as always, we started the morning by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the King.” Mr. Blackwell had brought a large rolled map with him from Vancouver, and this was hung on the dividing wall between classrooms. He used a pointer, and pointed to all of the pink areas and said, “This is the Empire, and we are proud to belong to it.” There was a round globe on a stand on the other side of the classroom, and Keiko sometimes pointed out the names of countries as we spun the globe during our breaks for lunch or recess.

Mr. Blackwell was a kind teacher but he insisted that we work hard. He also decided, that year, to give us new names. He told us it was difficult for “white” people to pronounce Japanese names, so he gave us English names. I was called Benjamin Okuma the rest of the time I was at that school. Sometimes, he called me Ben. The following year, Mr. Blackwell stayed on and taught the upper grades. That is when he changed Hiroshi and Keiko’s names to Henry and Kay. Okuma-san and the other children continued to call me Bin. I did not like being called Benjamin at school, and sometimes I forgot to look up when Mr. Blackwell called out the English name he had given me.

All our lessons were in English now, even though Miss Mori had sometimes spoken the Japanese language when she was teaching. Mr. Blackwell, however, insisted: English in the classroom and English in the schoolyard. Some children did not speak Japanese at all; others began to learn English only when they first started school.

There were evening classes now, too—these provided extra help for high school students—as well as community classes for adults. Classes were offered in drama, dance, sewing, carpentry, singing and calligraphy. Uncle Aki had persuaded Auntie Aya to take one of the classes, and she said she would try calligraphy. She had done this before, when she’d lived in Washington, and she would try again. But only if Uncle Aki accompanied her to the classes.

At Okuma-san’s, once my homework was done in the evenings, I was permitted to do as I wished until bedtime. There were books on his shelves, perhaps even more books than there were in my classroom. The textbooks and readers at school had to be shared because there weren’t enough to go around. These were the same texts that every other child in British Columbia was using, and they had been ordered through the Security Commission’s purchasing office. But in Okuma-san’s shack, the books were different in every way.

I began to take them down, one at a time, to examine them closely. There was one about animals I especially liked, and Okuma-san read the accompanying stories to me. When I was alone, I turned the pages slowly and made up my own stories to go with the pictures. These were not animals such as the ones that lived in the woods and mountains around the camp. These were not wild horses that galloped between the rows of shacks on spring and summer mornings, or chipmunks that darted among tree trunks, or black bears that ambled up on the Bench. These were not loping coyotes silhouetted on the ridges of surrounding hills. This book was populated by monkeys and badgers and hares and crabs and foxes, and sparrows that danced on their tails and held fans tucked to their wings. Some animals wore kimono-like robes and
geta
, wooden clogs, on their feet, and some were full of mischief. They especially liked to trick one another.

Okuma-san told me what he knew about these creatures. He also told stories that were not in his books, but that he had heard as a boy. Sometimes he talked about people he had met long ago while travelling in the big world I had never seen. When he spoke about his travels, I pictured the spinning globe in the schoolhouse and imagined Okuma-san in a small boat, paddling over its round surface, crossing seas with ease, pulling up on the shore of one foreign land after another.

OKUMA-SAN HAD BEEN
an only child, born in Victoria just before the turn of the century. His parents were importers of silk and tea, and they had owned a store that did very good business. The school he attended in Victoria had divided classrooms: Japanese and Chinese children on one side, Caucasian children—
hakujin
—on the other. The same divisions existed in the play area outside. A fence split the schoolyard down the middle: Japanese and Chinese children at one end,
hakujin
children at the other. That was the way things were then, Okuma-san explained. He had always hoped that the
hakujin
children would accept him as he grew older, but Japanese children played together and
hakujin
children did the same.

After supper, in the evenings, Okuma-san’s father liked to sit on a chair by the front door outside the small bungalow where they lived in Victoria, smoking a cigarette and watching the goings-on of the street. The cigarettes he smoked were hand-rolled and inserted into the end of a yellow-stained ivory holder. The father smoked one cigarette per night, always after supper. He puffed slowly and did not allow anyone to disturb him while he smoked. If it was raining, he stood in the doorway to stay dry.

When Okuma-san was nine years old, his father decided to travel to Japan to visit the companies he dealt with in his business, and he took Okuma-san along to learn something about the country of his ancestors. They sailed on a freighter, and Okuma-san described that stormy voyage with huge waves crashing over the ship’s bow. He was told to stay below in his bunk, and was not permitted to climb the steps to the outer deck because the wind was so strong he might be lifted off his feet and blown over the side. When he became seasick, one of the crew members gave his father a chunk of ginger root and told him to have Okuma-san drink warm tea made from the grated root. After he drank this, the seasickness went away.

When he and his father arrived in Japan after the difficult journey, they visited the village where his late grandparents had been born. He was told stories of his grandfather, who had gone out in a boat every day to catch fish. The grandfather had been a fisherman all his life, but he couldn’t bear to touch the scales and skin of the fish he caught. He could not bear even the smell of the fish.

Here, I interrupted. I knew about fishermen and how they came in and out of the bay in the fishing village where I had been born. I knew about the stink of fish on First Father’s clothes when he used to return to our house after fishing up and down the coast for weeks.

“Well, then, if he couldn’t touch the fish, how did your grandfather get them off his boat?” I asked. “He would have to sell them, wouldn’t he?” I had never heard of such a fisherman.

“I was told that he wore special gloves made from rubber when he handled the fish,” Okuma-san replied. “And when he became ill from the stench, he leaned over the side of his boat and emptied his stomach. But he remained a fisherman because it brought him a good living.”

It wasn’t the sea that claimed the lives of Okuma-san’s grandparents. They had died of a contagious disease, the name of which he did not know. He thought it might have been cholera. They had died within days of each other.

During that trip to Japan, Okuma-san was taken to Osaka by his father, who made the decision to leave him there so that he could attend school for a year. Okuma-san boarded with an older British missionary couple. Okuma-san’s father wanted him to learn about Japan in school, but he also wanted him to continue to speak English.

His father said he would be back in one year to bring him home. He promised that Okuma-san’s mother would accompany him when he returned the following year.

Okuma-san was amazed to live in a place where everyone was Japanese, and he enjoyed walking through the streets without being noticed. It was the first time he had not been surrounded by Caucasian faces, even though he was living with a
hakujin
couple.

But at the Japanese school he attended, things did not turn out quite so well. His teacher, his
Sensei
, was ill-mannered and short-tempered. He had dark eyebrows like bushes grown thick to keep outsiders from peering in to see the world of his thoughts. Okuma-san did not like the teacher or the school. He was taunted by other Japanese boys because he was different, and because he had come from a land across the ocean where none of the other boys had been. The Japanese he spoke was unlike that of the others, and this, too, gave him trouble. He had a hard time making friends. The man and woman with whom he boarded, a childless couple by the name of Dowson, were kind to him and treated him like a son. Still, he looked forward to the day his parents would return so that he could leave the school he disliked so much. His father and mother sent him two letters during the year: the first told him how much he was missed; the second gave their approximate arrival date and the name of the freighter on which they would be sailing. His father was going to meet with new business partners, because he had decided to import Japanese dishes, as well as silk and tea.