Tears in the Darkness (45 page)

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” August 24
] Our dysenteries and beriberis still die. We have improved the general mass of the sick but even at best, with our supplementary [food bought from merchants at the gate] we are not able to produce a planned ration. None of us will ever be really well.
⁷

Beriberi is a disease of the nervous system and heart caused by a thiamine (vitamin B
₁
) deficiency. There are two forms of the disease. Dry beriberi affects the nerves and the extremities, particularly feet and legs, and some of the men in Bilibid were in so much pain they could not walk or even stand. Wet beriberi weakens the heart, affecting circulation and blood pressure. Without thiamine, the body's cells begin to break down and the walls of the arteries and veins grow so weak and porous they allow pints of fluid to leach into the surrounding tissue and body cavity, turning a man into a bloated hulk. The fluid in turn puts pressure on the body's organs, and when they start to fail, death is sure to follow.

Ben Steele looked awful. The fluid in his body had pooled everywhere. The swelling that had started in his feet and spread to his ankles, legs, scrotum, and abdomen finally reached his chest and head. His body was so bloated (the term is “anasarca”), that his skin looked like the surface of an overinflated balloon—smooth, shiny, stretched hideously tight. Sometimes the liquid in his head would pool on one side of his face and he'd wake looking deformed, his eye sockets so swollen he'd have to hold an eye open with one hand so he could see to eat with the other hand.

Looking himself over, he thought he weighed three hundred pounds. He was so misshapen it was impossible for him to do anything but lie flat or sit propped up against the stone wall. There were many
nights when he could hear the fluid sloshing around in his chest and he was afraid his heart would drown. Many days he was so sick he couldn't eat, couldn't do anything for himself, really, and since the corpsmen and orderlies were always too busy to tend an invalid properly, his doctor on Ward 11, Lieutenant Gordon K. Lambert, assigned an ambulatory patient in the ward—a man with his own troubles—to help him.

 

STEVE KRAMERICH
was as crazy as ever. He came into Bilibid from Tayabas Road with severe cerebral malaria. The daily doses of quinine he was taking had done little so far to stop the amnesic spells and the bizarre behavior that had started on the rocks by the river. His doctors recognized his pathology right away. His comrades, meanwhile, thought him just plain loony.
⁸

One day on Ward 11, for example, he spiked a fever of 105°, and the corpsmen dragged him into a cold shower to lower his temperature. He was addled and woozy, and as he stood in the shower stall watching the water circle the drain at his feet, he got the idea he was being sucked down into city's sewer system. And he started to scream.

In the weeks that followed, he suffered one malarial delusion after another. One day he might be Jesus Christ standing in an open window, arms outstretched, shouting to heaven, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The next day he might see himself as a fallen angel exploring the precincts of hell. He was sure Bilibid was hades, he told his bunkmates, because the clock on the central guard tower, long since broken, of course, never changed time. “Forever and ever,” Steve Kramerich kept mumbling as he stared at the clock. “Forever and ever.”

For a while Dr. Lambert thought that intravenous quinine might stop Steve Kramerich's delusions, but the man was still “nuttier than a fruitcake,” as his comrades liked to say, so Dr. Lambert took Steve into the compound for a stroll and a talking cure. Steve talked and Lambert took notes.

He was still seeing visions, he said, still hearing voices—the wards as circles of hell, the rain on the roof as a chorus of the damned. Then he accused the doctor of being Satan in disguise, said he was keeping him alive just to torture him.

The doctor had heard enough. “Soldier, you need a job,” he told Steve Kramerich, something to occupy the mind, and he ordered him to work as a corpsman's assistant on Ward 11, work with one particular patient,
empty the invalid's bedpan, fetch the man's food, chat with the poor fellow, a patient named Ben Steele.

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” August 25
] To gather round a lugao bucket and dip out your ration with a wooden stick, to drink from a hollowed-out coconut shell a watery slop made from a river weed and some tough gourds, to squat about a fire with some dozen practically naked comrades and beat mongo beans or boil a tenth run of coffee in a blackened tin can—you can't do these things day in and day out, with nothing to look forward to tomorrow except this mud and heat and flies and stink, half-starved and yet not wanting the stuff that comes to fill the emptiness of your guts, you can't do this and then snap back into a world that couldn't ever believe that this could happen to us.
⁹

Lunch was at noon, dinner at six, rice and rice, just like breakfast. The Japanese insisted they were supplying the prison with enough raw grain to yield two cups of cooked rice for each man every day, but the daily ration was usually less, closer to ten or twelve ounces. Other than carbohydrates, rice has few nutrients. Filler food, for the most part.

The prisoners got the worst grade of rice, the dregs of each shipment. The grains were often spoiled or moldy, each sack laced with worms, weevils, small rocks, dirt, rat droppings. Everything, of course, went in the pot. There were men who couldn't stomach the worms. They'd sit hunched over their ration, meticulously culling them out, white worms about as long as a finger joint, with two tiny black spots near the head. Paul Reuter ate it all, the whole squiggling mush, but he always took a moment to flick off the worms on the surface. Just couldn't look 'em in those two black eyes before they went down.

The rice tasted “moldy and musty,” “dirty and soggy,” “like raw dough,” “like wallpaper paste,” “like dishwater.” Some men found it so vile they had to “choke it down.” To others it tasted like nothing, a meal that left the American palate sour and unsatisfied. Still, they ate every ounce. Especially the men from O'Donnell and work details. They licked their cups clean, then checked in the dirt at their feet for any grains that might have dropped there.

Twice a day the cooks served soup, which is to say hot water with a bit of meat (“a sliver,” “a ribbon,” “a thread”) or a tiny piece of fish (always rotten) and a “vegetable,” usually worthless thistle, muddy water
lilies from the nearby Pasig River, or other weeds of unknown origin. Almost every day the men found scraps of garbage in the soup, the tops of carrots or camotes or radishes, refuse from a restaurant or Japanese army mess.

Pappy Sartin and his doctors tried to supplement this subsistence ration with extra food from local merchants. (The doctors pooled the little money they'd smuggled into prison with the $10 to $12 a month the enemy paid them for “working” in the hospital.) Some of this fund went to set up a special diet kitchen for the heavy sick that procured foods high in protein or other nutrients—peanuts, duck eggs, most of all, mongo beans. Mongo beans, about the size of small lentils, were cheap, ubiquitous, high in thiamine. Some men ate them raw or stewed or let them soak in a wet towel to sprout, then boiled them and served them over rice. Every ward had a mongo bean garden, tins and jars and buckets growing the beans.

[
Hayes, “Notebook”
] This mongo bean is a life saver to us and as long as we can get them we can stomach the rice and eat a sustaining quantity as well as acquire a vitamin intake of which we are so much in need. We buy these beans at 45 centavos a cup (canteen), about one centavo's worth [in prewar prices]. But they go a long ways and so long as I live I will always attribute my survival to this lowly bean.
¹⁰

Everyone was hungry all the time. Men picked through the garbage outside the galley for scraps—scraps of scraps, really. They chased after the dogs, cats, snakes, and rats that wandered into the compound. The Catholic chaplains had contacts outside the walls who from time to time would smuggle in peanuts and chunks of crude horse sugar, and for a while an unusual number of Bilibid's patients expressed an interest in converting to the Church of Rome. “Son,” Father John E. Duffy told a would-be catechumen, “you don't want to be a Catholic. You're just hungry.”
¹¹

They dreamed about food, dwelt on it night and day. Men formed “food clubs” to trade recipes—Brandy Pottage, Virginia Brunswick Stew, French Apple Pie—or talked about their favorite restaurants.
¹²

“Prison life goes on,” Tom Hayes often wrote. “Mongo [beans] night & morning, lugao, dry rice, & watery soup . . . days of scratching for existence, groups gathered about open fires with improvised utensils fashioned
from tin cans, gasoline tins, pieces of wire, parts of galvanized roofing, cooking up odd concoctions of all possible edible combinations of anything edible and available . . . At night one lies courting sleep and looks at the reflection on the stony floors of the cold black bars that stand between us and the moon.”
¹³

 

BY NOVEMBER
1942, Ben Steele was doing better. He was still sick with malaria, beriberi, dysentery, and jaundice, but after three months in Bilibid he seemed on the mend. The spike of protein in a duck egg Dr. Lambert had given him had activated his kidneys, and the terrible swelling that had distorted his body had slowed. He was still an invalid, but against all odds and his doctors' expectations, he had survived. As they say in Montana, he'd been near enough to hell to smell the smoke and was happier than a kid pulling on a dog's ears, just to be breathing.

Meanwhile, he'd made a new friend, a landsman, or as close to one as Ben Steele would find in Bilibid, a man named Merrill Lee. Raised on a ranch in Lincoln County, Nevada, Lee too had been a working cowboy. A double hernia had landed him in Bilibid's hospital, and since the Air Corps had trained him as a cook, the doctors put him to work in Bilibid's galley. It was a good job—the cooks always looked suspiciously healthier than the rest of the prison's company—and Merrill Lee was hoping to finish the war in Bilibid, whenever the war was going to finish.

The two men met by chance. Lee had gone to Ward 11 in search of a doctor, and glancing around the room, his eye happened to fall on one of the patients. The man was swollen with wet beriberi, and he was lying next to a filthy old mattress, scratching lines on the floor with a chunk of charcoal.

Lee, curious, wandered over to take a look, and there, taking shape on the floor, was the drawing of a cowboy—the broad-brimmed hat, the boots, the bowed legs, a corral, a snubbing post, two horses.

“Damn!” Lee said to himself. “That's my life.”

“Hey there, I'm Merrill Lee.”

The man on the floor looked up. “Oh yeah, I'm Ben Steele.”

“Where you from, Ben Steele?”

“Montana, out the Bull Mountains way, north of Billings.”

“Well, I'm from Panaca, Nevada, Lincoln County. And what you're drawing there, that was my life. That's what I'm living for, to get back to that kind of life.”

It was like two men meeting on the open range, two solitary horsemen coming upon each other in the middle of nowhere after days or weeks riding the benches and badlands and waves of buffalo grass alone.

“What kind of outfit you got?” Merrill Lee asked.

“Well,” Ben Steele said, “the Old Man used to run about three hundred head on six sections.”

“Funny thing,” Lee said. “I was up in Montana working in Yellowstone Park just before the war.”

“By God, that's just down the road,” Ben Steele said.

Nearly every day thereafter, Merrill Lee visited Ward 11. And every day he brought Ben Steele a canteen cup brimming with stewed mongo beans and a nice crust of burned rice as a side dish.

Lee would sit down on the mattress while Ben finished the snack, then he'd watch Ben draw, watch him for hours and hours, day after day. Sometimes, in the torpor of a tropical afternoon, Merrill Lee would get drowsy, and he would lie back on Ben Steele's mattress and shut his eyes and lose himself among the sorrels and bays, corrals and snubbing posts.

 

BEN STEELE'S LIFE
as an artist began in the dark interstices of his disease, the periods of waking rest when he was left to lie on an old and moldy mattress on the concrete floor of Ward 11. He'd never felt so helpless, useless, and low. Propped up slightly against a gray adobe wall, he spent most of the day staring at his bloated limbs and balloon of a body.

The more he took stock of himself, the mound of flesh he'd become, the more he thought about his life, the life he'd lived at Hawk Creek and in Billings. He kept drifting back to that day in the studio when the great Will James invited him in and started drawing. He knew that James was largely self-taught, and as he lay on the thin mattress on the floor day after day, Ben Steele wondered whether he too had the talent to make magic. After a while, he could imagine himself drawing, and he started drawing horses in his head. Then, sometime in early November, when he began to lose some of his aqueous bulk, he dragged himself across the floor to the ward's stove and grabbed a burned stick from the woodpile and started to scratch on the concrete floor.

His scratches didn't look like much at first, just rough black lines on the gray concrete. This drawing business was difficult, more to it than he'd thought. “I have to make something that looks like something,” he
told himself. Finally, after weeks of scratching, a memory started to take shape—a horse straining against a halter in a corral.

Every day after that, after
bangō
and breakfast, he would settle down to draw. His new friend Merrill Lee started bringing him paper, old government record sheets the cooks were using as kindling for their fires. Some of his bunkmates brought him pencil stubs and twigs of charcoal. He drew in the morning, he drew in the afternoon, he drew under the yellow lights. Horses, cows, sheep, ranch buildings, his beloved hills at Hawk Creek. He sketched the contours of the land, the prairie architecture, the animals and objects of his youth, but since he knew nothing of the geometry of composition, his renderings were all surface, pictures on one plane with animals and men that looked more like cutouts, paper dolls, than the animated figures he'd watched Will James create.