The Wreckage (15 page)

“Hello, my duck,” Patty said.

Lilly smiled at them. Mercedes had been expecting a raver of some description, something that only a barred door would hold. But the stillness of the woman was just as disconcerting. Blonde hair close cropped to her head, a face so pale she looked as if she’d just recovered from an illness. A light to her skin that might have been the aftermath of a fever.

“She don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive,” Patty said, talking to Mercedes as if Lilly was a child too young to understand. “Lilly,” she said, “I brought you a few lassie buns.”

“Who’s this one?” Lilly said, still smiling.

“This is Mercedes.”

“Hello, Miss Berrigan.”

“You’re here after Wish, is it?”

Mercedes glanced quickly at Patty.

Lilly patted the mattress beside her. “Sister Marion told me you were by the church and talked to Father Power.”

Mercedes sat next to her while Patty set the lamp and buns on the nightstand. Lilly put an arm around Mercedes’ waist.

“Now,” she said. “Who do you belong to?”

“I’m a Parsons, miss. From up Little Fogo way.”

Lilly leaned away to have a better view of her. “Parsons,” she said. “That’s a Protestant name.”

Mercedes nodded uncertainly. She said, “Do you know where Wish is to?”

“Sister Marion tells me you’re in love with Aloysious,” Lilly said quietly.

For no reason she could identify Mercedes said, “Is that a good thing, Miss Berrigan?”

“Where is your family, Mercedes?”

“They’re all home in Little Fogo.”

“They must be worried about you.”

She didn’t answer.

“What is it you want from me, Mercedes?”

It seemed a ridiculous question for someone with the gift of second sight to ask. A hint of dismissal in it no different than the priest earlier in the day. No different than her mother. “Wish haven’t told you where he’s gone?”

“I’m sure you know,” she said, “how close Wish keeps things.”

“You don’t know anything at all? Is he even alive?”

Lilly pushed the girl’s hair over her ear. “I’ll pray for you,” she said.

Patty said, “You couldn’t ask for anything more in the world than to have Lilly praying for you, Mercedes.”

A heavy sea was running on their trip home the following day, the coaster rolling to port and starboard in languorous arcs like a metronome keeping a slow, relentless beat. The colour drained from Johnny’s face as soon as they hit open water and he was forced to stretch out on his coat in steerage and lie on the floor. His face had a greenish hue that reminded Mercedes of the palest colours of the northern lights. He blinked up at her and said, “I wish I was dead.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” she said dismissively.

“It’s not my business to say, Mercedes. But I think a girl like you could do better.”

“You mean someone like you, Johnny Boustani?”

“Maybe,” he said. He smiled his stupid smile in spite of his misery.

“Yes, you’re some prize, you are. Is your poor little stomach all right, Johnny? Want something to eat?” She pushed one of Patty Keating’s molasses and pork fat buns under his nose. “Have a bite, my love.”

He heaved himself to his feet, one hand covering his mouth as he staggered outside to the rail.

“That was mean,” Amina said.

Even over the steady murmur of the engine they could hear him retching.

“He sure can play that trumpet, can’t he?”

She was surprised at how angry she was, how Johnny called it up in her so quickly. He had the hapless innocence of people who bore the brunt of others’ anger all their lives, and at the moment Mercedes felt capable of just about any cruelty. She thought of her mother suddenly, sitting at the head of her father’s coffin, calmly telling her the skiff left the harbour an hour before. The flash of recognition made Mercedes’ stomach turn. Love at the root of that ruthlessness. It made her wonder about God, to see it so plain.

When they got off the boat in St. John’s harbour, Johnny was too weak to walk on his own and the girls stood on either side to steady him as they made their way up Prescott Street. They had to stop halfway up the incline to let him catch his breath. Mercedes did her best to avoid feeling sorry for him and simply couldn’t help herself.

Rania was waiting for them when they came through the door of the shop. She took Mercedes to one side, told her Hiram Keeping was there to see her. “He’s been in the kitchen all afternoon,” she said.

Mercedes found him in the chair beside the stove. He had his handkerchief in his hand, blotting it across his forehead and neck. “Hello, Hiram,” she said.

“Jesus, Sadie. You didn’t tell me he was alive.”

She stepped back toward the doorway, putting a hand on the frame.

“Your brother,” he said. “You didn’t tell me he was still alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, mopping at his forehead. “Wish said he’d killed him. He told me Hardy was dead.”

“You’ve seen him,” Mercedes said. “I
knew
it.”

Hiram’s entire body clenched, as if a cramp passed through him. “He come to the shop and dragged me out of bed when he got to town. Said Hardy was dead and he’d killed him.”

“Where is he, Hiram?”

“I don’t know. He came by yesterday. Said you’d run off after Wish and he was looking to bring you home.”

“Not Hardy,” Mercedes shouted.
“Wish
. Where’s Wish?”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Hiram.”

“In Halifax,” he said without looking at her. “In Canada.”

Lieutenant Kurakake visited Nishino several times after the retreat from Guadalcanal, before the company shipped back to the front. The officer arrived each time with two bottles of sake, one of which he left unopened with the injured soldier. He placed a small table over Nishino’s midriff on the hospital berth and set out two porcelain cups, filling them with the rice wine. There was always a protracted period of silence between them as they drank to Nishino’s recovery, before Kurakake put his first question to the soldier.

His inquiries weren’t antagonistic and followed no set pattern, but there was a sense of interrogation about their time together. The man’s rank and the gifts of alcohol compelled Nishino to make limited confessions of one sort or another.

Kurakake set down his cup and folded his arms. “Tell me, Private Nishino. Why did you keep this to yourself? Your English?”

“I am Japanese.”

“Of course.” Kurakake rocked slightly in his chair, thinking. “It’s a valuable thing to the Imperial Army to have soldiers with this skill.”

Nishino didn’t respond.

“You preferred to serve in other ways. You wished to fight.”

“Asia for the Asians,” Nishino said, sitting up slightly in his bed.

Kurakake smiled down at his feet. The inclination of his head suggesting this sentiment embarrassed him although Nishino had heard the phrase used by every officer he’d encountered.

“Still,” Kurakake said. “It seems unnecessary to have been entirely secretive in this matter.”

“I am Japanese,” he said again.

“We have established as much.”

“I would not allow others to doubt that.”

Kurakake tilted his head to one side. “Tell me, Nishino,” he said. “How old were you when you arrived in Canada?”

“I was five.”

“And you moved with your family.”

“My mother. My father was already there. He went to Hawaii long before he married. He spent a year there, then moved on to British Columbia.”

“The Golden Door.”

Nishino looked at him.

“It was how people referred to British Columbia years ago, when I was a boy. The Golden Door. He worked in the sawmills?”

“And the salmon rivers. Eventually he wrote his parents to ask them to arrange a wedding for him. He came home to Japan for six months and then went back to Canada.”

“Your mother was expecting you when your father left.”

Nishino said, “He wanted to own a piece of land before his family arrived.”

“It took him five years?”

“To buy it and clear it and build a house.”

A medic was working on the jungle sores of a soldier at the other end of the makeshift field hospital, scraping under the skin at the edges of the ulcer with a kitchen spoon, cleaning away pus and rot to try to stop the spread. The soldier grunting through the treatment, a harsh staccato rasp.

“The name again, please,” Kurakake said.

“Kitsilano.”

“Kitt-su-sa-ra-no,” Kurakake said. And he nodded to Nishino in the way he would to a musician waiting for permission to begin playing.

When he left British Columbia, Nishino’s intention had been to wipe the place from his mind. A scorched-earth program, slash and burn. He joined the Imperial Army in a northern country district where his mother’s people originated, claiming he had spent his years away in Taiwan. The soldiers in his unit had coarse accents and rougher manners. They were fervently nationalistic, fatalist, brawling, and he aspired to the same conditions for himself. He tried to bury every conscious verbal and social tic that would mark him as an outsider, but he was often taunted for his city-fied accent, for his barely definable but undeniable separateness. Found a level of acceptance among the other soldiers finally by enduring a drunken company beating without uttering a sound. Kept their trust with a vicious disregard for his own safety in combat. He fully expected to be killed during the war to liberate Asia and wanted nothing more for himself than that.

And still Kitsilano surfaced in his sleep, in moments of near delirium brought on by exhaustion and lack of food. Summer days on the farm where they grew strawberries and tomatoes to sell to the canneries in New Westminster and to stalls in the market along the river. The long seasons of public school with its mix of whites and Japanese, Chinese and Sikhs, Jews, Portuguese, Scots. The afternoon Japanese-language school where Mr. Yawata taught them about the samurai and the old wars against China and Russia. On special occasions the students saluted the Japanese flag and Mr. Yawata led them in singing the
kimiga yo
. Most of the other students were Nissei, born in Canada, and they knew only rudimentary Japanese. They ridiculed Mr. Yawata, who was in his fifties, absent-minded and partly deaf and spoke no English at all. He lifted his eyeglasses to his forehead to write on the chalkboard and minutes later was rifling through his pockets and desk drawers, muttering to himself, trying to find them. He had to cup a hand behind his good ear to hear his students and they tormented him by speaking in whispers or simply mouthing words. The one obligation trumping all others in their lives, Mr. Yawata insisted, was their obligation to the emperor.

In Vancouver and Steveston and Kitsilano there were restaurants that would not serve Japanese. Most movie theatres required they sit in the balcony. On Alexander Street in Vancouver white men handed out leaflets that said “Get Rid of the Japs” and “The Rising Sun Must Set,” accusing the teachers in the language schools of being navy reservists sent to teach naval tactics or to spy.

Mr. Yawata read aloud to them from the
League of the Divine Wind
, a book about an uprising during the Meiji era when two hundred patriots attacked a garrison of two thousand soldiers. The kamikaze rebels wore short
hakama
over their everyday dress with two swords held in their sashes. They wore headbands of white cloth and bound up their sleeves with strips of white cotton, and every man wore a white shoulder strap bearing the word “Victory.” Mr. Yawata walked as he read, stumbling into his desk, the trash can. The rebels were adherents of the Ukei shrine, of the gods of Japan before the invasion of Buddhism and the Christian missionaries from the West. “How did the men of the League prepare for combat?” Mr. Yawata read. “Most of all, night and day alike, by imploring the blessing of Heaven.” They fought to return Japan to the rule of His Glorious Majesty with only swords and spears and halberds. After their defeat, the survivors of the league committed the ritual disembowelment of seppuku in fidelity to the emperor. Mr. Yawata leaned over to grab awkwardly at the fallen trash can without taking his eyes from the book in his hand.

A handful of boys in Nishino’s class could pass gas at will and they formed their own League of the Divine Wind, belching and farting through the halls of the school, shouting “Kamikaze!” as they went. They sat outside the classroom and performed mock seppuku with their pencils. It was all a bizarre joke to them. Two of the boys slipped into the classroom early one afternoon and removed the screws from Mr. Yawata’s chair and it collapsed underneath his weight the moment he sat down. He lay there, sputtering among the wreckage, his glasses fallen across his face. And Nishino felt as if the fate of all things Japanese in the new world lay there with him.

Lieutenant Kurakake sat with his arms folded. They had finished most of the bottle of sake as Nishino spoke through the worst heat of the afternoon. He had never talked of these experiences to anyone before. As soldiers they were required to ignore the protocol of hints and innuendo and formal politeness that otherwise governed interactions between people of such different station. But more than this, Kurakake clearly felt he owed Nishino something. Something unspoken between them, something related to Chozo Ogawa allowed Nishino to talk as freely as he did.

He was fighting the drowse of the late afternoon and for a few moments he thought the officer might have drifted off. But Kurakake looked up suddenly, as if someone had shaken him by the shoulder. “Your father,” he said.

Nishino looked away. He said, “Words are the root of all evil.”

Kurakake smiled, acknowledging the proverb, and they were silent a long time afterwards as if to honour it. Finally the officer said, “You left your family in Canada, Nishino? No one returned with you?”

“I came alone.”

“You have no contact with them?”

“I have no one now but Japan.”

The officer poured the last of the sake into their cups and lifted his. “Then we will drink to what you have,” he said.

He slept a drunken sleep after Kurakake left him and woke in the early evening with a fierce headache. He got out of bed and made his slow way to the latrines behind the ward. He was unable to piss when he got there, breathing hard against the tide of pain that ran the length of his back, waiting for it to subside.

He didn’t know what he would have said to Kurakake if there had been more questions about his parents. He would have lied or simply refused to answer, he was certain of that. Once he made it back to his cot he sipped at the sake to deaden the throb in his back and to fog the memory of his mother that Kurakake’s interrogation provoked. But she stayed with him all evening.

He had never witnessed a single instance of physical affection between his parents. There was no meanness or cruelty, just a constant remoteness that he took to be the natural state of affairs between a man and a woman. They spoke to each other only of practical matters. Nishino never heard his mother talk about the future beyond what the next morning held. She bore five other children after arriving in Canada, a girl who died at three weeks old, then two sons and another daughter. She travelled to the Japanese consul in Vancouver to register the name of each child after they were born.

She was a remarkably tiny woman, and her stature made her steadfastness seem more heroic to Nishino. She rose each morning at five and bathed outside in all weather, soaking her naked torso with dippers of cold water to “harden” herself. Her attention was absorbed by each successive task she undertook, and there was something in her diligence and single-minded concentration that made her seem smaller still. As if she was disappearing in whatever work she was doing at the time. She smiled only in those moments after she had completed a job, putting the kitchen to rights before going to bed, setting the last basket of strawberries onto the truck. The only affectation of luxury she allowed herself was to serve even ordinary meals in bowls of Ninsei porcelain that she’d received as a wedding gift.

She had no interest in the world outside the family home and nothing of the new country touched or stained the woman she was when she arrived. She was all he had of the real Japan they’d left behind. And while she was alive, that was almost enough for him.

The last time Kurakake came to see him, Nishino was sitting in a wooden chair beside the bed. The officer opened the first of the two bottles of sake. “We have much to celebrate,” he said. “The company will be moving back to the front very soon.”

“I will be ready.”

Kurakake said, “You will never be a field soldier again, Private.”

And nothing more was spoken between them for a while.

“I have been thinking about Chozo Ogawa,” the officer said finally. “He was not meant to be a soldier, that boy. Do you agree?”

Nishino looked away down the aisle. He didn’t understand what the officer was looking for and didn’t know how to answer.

“He was refused by the army when he first tried to enlist,” Kurakake went on. “Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t,” he said defensively. “I did not know that.”

“Unfit for duty, is what they said. You noticed of course, not right in the head somehow. His father was a friend of mine, an officer from the service who died a number of years ago. His oldest son contacted me and asked if I could help find a place for Chozo. And, naturally, I did what I could. I saw it immediately after he came into the ranks. He wasn’t fit. And yet I couldn’t be seen to be favouring him.” Kurakake raised and lowered his hands in a helpless gesture. He took a sheet of paper from an inside pocket of his uniform coat and turned it over without unfolding it. “What I am trying to say,” he said. “I think his father would have been thankful for the way you watched out for him. He would have wanted to show his appreciation.”

“We helped one another,” Nishino said.

“Yes,” Kurakake said. “I have your orders, Private Nishino.” He raised the sheet of paper. “You will be transferred back to Japan, to Kumamoto. There is a camp being constructed there.”

“A guard for prisoners?”

Kurakake smiled at the look of disgust on the young man’s face. “Not a guard exactly. You will act as an interpreter for the camp commandant, Lieutenant Sakamoto. We served two years together in Manchuria. I have already written to let him know you will be joining his staff.”

Kurakake stood and handed the folded sheet of paper to Nishino.

Nishino looked away from the officer to hide the tears in his eyes, recognizing that the war was over for him and he had no choice now but to submit. He stood and bowed.

“Good luck to you, Private Nishino.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”