Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  After the funeral, Evelyn Wilson held herself apart from her neighbors. Hiro and Kimiko and Homer and the children still sometimes picnicked in the orchard or on the banks of the irrigation canal or sometimes drove down to the confluence of the American River in Auburn, a moment of relief from the heat and labor of the summer, but Evelyn Wilson did not join them. She was hardly a recluse, of course, for she still went to town on occasion—to Auburn for church and to Newcastle as well—and was cordial and quietly talkative to her casual friends. But were Homer to ask her to come with him and the children and the Takahashis—to the river or for a walk through the trees—she would demur and complain of a headache and Homer would give up and wander away to meet his friends and he and the children and the Takahashis and theirs would spend a Sunday afternoon or evening together. Sometimes their outings would be as simple as driving down the ridge to the low Japantown that stood with its series of ramshackle buildings under the shade of the cottonwoods in the draw at the base of Chantry Hill, pulling the truck to a stop and the children piling out of the back and Homer treating everyone to an ice cream from Yoshida’s store. He would thank the shopkeeper in Japanese, an exchange which always brought a loud peal of laughter, not only from Mr. Yoshida himself but from his wife and children too and even from Hiro and Kimiko.

  And so, at least for the children, there was still a kind of gold to the place, the summer rivers clear and cold with meltwater and the oaks crackling with dry heat over days that seemed long enough to encompass lifetimes. And who is to say it would not have gone on like that forever had not history itself come to intervene, the president’s voice on the radio offering a monotony of Japanese aggression? They attacked Malaya. Attacked Hong Kong. Attacked Guam. Attacked the Philippine Islands. Attacked Wake Island. Attacked Midway Island. The family listened to it huddled around their little radio in the lamplight, the speaker hissing and the woodstove ticking with heat.

  “Why did they do that?” Raymond asked.

  “I don’t know,” his father told him.

  “This is bad,” Kimiko said in Japanese.

  “It’ll be all right,” Hiro said in English.

  Kimiko only said her Japanese sentence again.

  The attack had come on a Sunday and although the ­following week’s church service was the same as it ever was—the chanting the same, the smell of incense, the sound of the priest’s voice—it also felt as if the very air of that room had changed. In the parking lot afterwards, the men clustered with the men, the women with the women, and the talk was of what might come, the voices around Kimiko in a state of quiet panic.

  —My husband says they’ll come to see how Japanese we are.

  —They can’t do that.

  —They can do what they want.

  —What will they do?

  —My husband says they’ll have the police guard our homes.

  —Guard our homes from what?

  —From people.

  —What people?

  And then the last words before the group fell into silence, the statement so resolute that Kimiko felt it like a single needle of ice plunging into her heart:

  —From Americans.

  It was but a few days later, after Doris and Mary had gone to school and Raymond was out with his father in the orchard, that Kimiko burned the little Buddhist ancestor shrine Hiro had built soon after they had moved into the house, breaking its shelf from the wall with a claw hammer and then taking the individual pieces from the small cabinet one by one out into the yard where a steel barrel smoked, its open circle holding within a cradle of flame into which she slid the broken pieces of wood, stirring the fire until it twisted from the mouth of the barrel like a small bright tornado. The incense holders. A small sheet of paper containing the Seikatsu Shinjo, which Hiro had written out in English for the children to practice, beside which rested the black lacquered box containing Shinran Shonin’s hymns, all of which now, piece by piece, Kimiko resigned to the fire. The various lacquered wooden stands for offerings. The red candle. The cloth burned with a ferocity that surprised her. Of the metal—the bells and lanterns and such—for these she had dug a small hole near the edge of the orchard trees where the grass was thick and she thought the pieces would not be found.

  She did not burn the Buddha until after she had smashed the shrine itself and had resigned each piece to the flames. Only then did she lift Amida Nyorai from where she had set it on the kitchen counter, an image of the Buddha seated upon a lotus flower, his eyes closed, thumbs and knuckles touching gently just below the curve of the open neck of his robe. For a long while she watched that impassive face blacken in the barrel, the coal spark creeping across its features, the bright glow, and finally its disappearance into flame.

  “You watch,” she told her husband that night, her voice a harsh whisper which she knew, nonetheless, her children could hear. “They’ll come to see what we have. They’ll see we’re Japanese.”

  “We’re Americans,” he said. “Our children are American.”

  “Their children are American,” Kimiko said, pointing in the direction where, across the hill, the Wilson children slept in their upstairs bedrooms.

  “Doris and Mary and Raymond are as American as they are,” Hiro said.

  “You’re a fool,” she said. “You’re just an old fool.”

  He must have heard her, for soon thereafter the rifle disappeared and the oil and gasoline Hiro kept in the shed also vanished, presumably to the small barn at the Wilsons’, so when the government officials came at last—in February, later than she had anticipated—there was nothing to find in the little house at all. And yet one of the men lifted a photograph of Hiro’s parents from its hook upon the wall, the figures on the paper seeming to tremble beneath their traditional Japanese clothing. “Who’s this?” one of the men asked. The hakujin men were a trio in dark suits and ties and stood in the Takahashis’ tiny home without apology, gruffly opening drawers and cabinets and even peering under the floorboards and shining their electric torches into the grass and weeds. There had been a moment when one of them had stood directly upon the covered hole in which Kimiko had buried the tiny lanterns from their shrine, but he had felt nothing but the earth beneath him and had moved on.

  “My parents,” Hiro said simply.

  “Where do they live?” one of the men asked, his voice gruff and sharp. “Japan?”

  “They live in Heaven,” Hiro said.

  The man stood looking at him for a few moments, then glanced briefly at the photograph before returning it to its nail. It was the only item she had saved from the shrine, the only object that had not become smoke, and yet, when the man had brought it down from its nail, she wondered why she had saved anything at all.

  “What’s this about, gentlemen?” This from Homer Wilson, stepping through the door behind them now with his gangly limbs and buckteeth and jug-ears, his voice steady and calm and even jovial.

  “Just about done here, Mr. Wilson,” one of the men said.

  “Well, maybe you men come over for a cup of coffee after,” Homer said. “Tak, you come too.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Hiro said quietly.

  “Sure it is, Tak, we’ll just sit and have a coffee and then we’ll let these fine folks go about their business. Whatcha think, gents? Cuppa joe to get you through the night?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” one of the men said. And another: “Me neither.” And the third: “All right, but just one. We’ve got a lot of houses to cover.”

  “Good then.” He turned to Kimiko now. “Can you tell ­Evelyn to put on the pot?”

  She almost told him no, that she would do no such thing, but his eyes spoke to her of fear, an expression that surprised her, for what could he possibly fear in this situation? The Wilsons, after all, had nothing to lose. Not a thing. At last she nodded and pushed through the door into the cool of the early evening.

  She was glad to escape that close, crowded room. Behind her came the sounds of the se
arch and Homer’s absurdly affable voice murmuring through the closed door. Above her, the sky still appeared the color of daylight, but the trees all around her had already captured the coming night in their branches, their shapes darkly blue and shining with stars. She did not want to walk the path to the Wilsons’ but she knew that there was purpose in it, that Homer Wilson had a plan of some kind, if only to show these men that her husband was not some radical ­Japanese, but then she caught sight of a shape just beyond the white sedan the men had driven to their dooryard, a figure who, as Kimiko watched, stepped out into the silver dusk.

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Kimiko said.

  The figure said nothing, only standing there, her face shrouded in shadow. She must have followed her husband from the house but why she had not come inside with him Kimiko did not know, although of course Mrs. Wilson had never stepped foot inside the Takahashi home. Not once.

  “Mr. Wilson says put on the coffee,” Kimiko said quietly in careful English. “Mr. Wilson says the men will come.”

  And now, at last, Mrs. Wilson spoke. “The men will come?” she said.

  “Yes,” Kimiko told her.

  “So they didn’t find anything, I gather.”

  Kimiko said nothing, shaking her head, although she was not sure she was any more visible to Mrs. Wilson than Mrs. Wilson was visible to her. The grass around her glowed faintly in the last light, pale and shimmering.

  “You managed to get everything burned up then?”

  She looked up now, quickly, her eyes hard.

  “Of course I saw you, Kim,” she said. “You were at it for hours. It doesn’t change anything, you know. They still know you’re Japanese. I mean, anyone can see that.” She paused, breathing, and Kimiko thought she could see the arc of a smile there in the darkness. “Well, your secret’s safe with me anyway.”

  Kimiko watched her there, that dark shape on the edge of the trees. Later she would wish she had spat some subtle insult in the direction of that threatening shadow but in reality she said the only English word she could yet bring to mind: ­“Coffee.” And then she turned back toward the little house, around through the side yard and to the back, and there she lowered herself to the step and lay her head in her hands and wept.

  WHEN I RETURNED FROM DRIVING to and from San Jose that first time, I asked my grandmother about Mrs. Wilson’s relationship to Kimiko Takahashi, and the memory she came to was the same memory that was held by the old postman and the woman who had worked at the fruit shed and by the elder members of the Tokutomi family I spoke to later. They all shared the same image of the same May day in 1942, the afternoon in which the buses came to take nearly half the county’s occupants away, first to Tule Lake and later to other camps scattered around the country. The gravel square was busy with anticipation that day, men and women and children gathered in knots along the edge of the square, the Takahashis and the Dois and the Hatas and the Nodas and the Nishikawas and many others besides, some white landowners and townspeople among them, many more, watching at a distance as the Issei and Nisei and Sansei waited amidst the stacked bundles that constituted their lives: some combination of suitcases and rough boxes covered in cloth or paper, bundles and simple sacks that might once have contained feed corn or grain and which now, in the heat of the summer sun, contained instead the sum total of their lives, organized into low stacks in the gravel as they—all of them, white and Japanese—waited for the arrival of the buses. Across the gravel, the slab doors of the fruit sheds were open so that the dim, dusty interiors could be seen, the belts silent, the box-machines still.

  The two women had not been seen together for a long while and then, suddenly it seemed, there they were, side by side in the gravel. In my imagination I place them directly in front of the little house in which, in 1969, my grandmother resided, since that is where, I have been told, the buses were loaded. But of course they might have waited elsewhere along the edges of the town square. When I think of Mrs. Wilson now I think of a stern, aging beauty, a sixty-nine-year-old widow who had become, with the passing of years, increasingly severe and unforgiving, but then she was but forty-two, perhaps no longer young but certainly not the elderly woman I knew. Her manner, when described to me by those who had known her, was not one of tragic loss but instead manifested itself as a kind of physical bearing, as if she felt she was owed respect for some activity or action unknown or misunderstood. And this would be how she was to be remembered that summer, the summer of the removal: as somehow separate, apart, maybe even aloof, as if she had known this day had been coming and now she was simply there to watch it unfold.

  She stood a full head taller than Kimiko and when she spoke, her voice, Evelyn’s, Mrs. Wilson’s—even those I spoke to who were her contemporaries would only ever call her Mrs. ­Wilson, just as they would never have called Kimiko ­Takahashi anything at all—was a clear bright sharp sound amidst the steady murmur of more distant voices and the occasional crunch of gravel underfoot.

  “It’ll be fine,” Mrs. Wilson was saying, as if they were merely picking up a thread of conversation that had broken off a few hours or a few days before, perhaps on the path between their two homes. “You’ll see. They just need to be careful about it is all. And you’ll come right back to us. I’m sure it won’t be long at all.”

  The Japanese woman in her shadow said nothing, only nodding quietly and staring without focus toward the gravel of the square. Behind them, away from the square, stood a little row of three small Victorians at the center of which was the house I would, twenty-seven years later, occupy with my grandmother, all of them empty now as their occupants had come out onto the sidewalk to watch and quietly discuss the events of the day, the plans of the president, the war with Japan, the reports that submarines had been sighted from California beaches, and the necessity—such were the terms used—of removing the Japs from the whole of the Pacific coast. That Homer Wilson did not share such views was a surprise to the people of the town, even though they knew of his friendship with his foreman. And yet it was still a surprise to them when Homer Wilson would stand at the meetings of the Fruit Growers Association and use words like “neighbors” and “friends” and “community members” in reference to those we had sent to the camps, as if he were under some spell.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Wilson continued, “Homer’ll do something about it. You’ll see.”

  Kimiko’s expression was so impassive that it seemed almost as if she did not hear Mrs. Wilson speaking at all. And yet after a moment she whispered a faint reply: “Thank you, Evelyn.”

  Mrs. Wilson paused now, for the woman had never, in all the years they had known each other, said her first name. She had assumed that it was some kind of Japanese tradition or even a stricture and it did not please her now that such a stricture had been broken. There had been a formality between them. Why break that formality now? Why break it ever?

  “I know we’ve had our differences,” she said then, trying to choose her words with care, “but we’ve got to put all that behind us now.” She paused a moment, searching for the right phrase. And then there it was and she said it: “I want you to know that I forgive you.”

  “You forgive me?” Kimiko said quietly, still gazing at the gravel, her dark, warm hair pinned up in a globe upon her head.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said. “It’s important to move on. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” Kimiko said in response, her tone flat, colorless. “We’ll move on.”

  This was a kind of relief. If only Kimiko Takahashi had apologized she might well have forgiven her years before, and yet she had not and so things had settled into—what?—a kind of awkward routine of avoidance. But that was over now, she supposed. “And I’ll take care of things while you’re gone,” she said now. “You can trust me on that.”

  “Of course,” Kimiko said.

  “Well, we’re neighbors, aren’t we?”

  “We are.”

  Again Kimiko’s unsmiling nod. Gaman, her own mother would have cal
led it, that quiet suffering which was, Kimiko had been taught and now knew as intimately as she knew anything about herself, simply the way of life, so woven into its fabric that it was part of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, especially, she thought now, for a woman bound inextricably to the lives of men.

  The families had broken into small clusters, each only a few meters from the other. Of the groups that ranged about in the gravel, some were comprised strictly of those of Japanese ancestry, others included a white man or woman or couple standing as part of the circle, the Issei and Nisei and Sansei dressed in coats and ties if men and in clean, sensible traveling clothes if women, the whites more often in overalls or work shirts or simple dresses, so it seemed some odd meeting between Asian businessmen and white farmers, a bitter and perhaps even ironic play on the reality of the scene.

  She was not looking at them, though, not at the clusters of men and women, young and old, white and Japanese, but instead at the image of her own son, stark and bright in his button shirt and jeans, the Wilson children—not really children anymore, in all actuality—standing near him, the trio huddling in the same close cabal that they had built and maintained all their lives. In May of 1942 he was not yet twenty years old. There would be a darkness to his nature when he returned from the war, a darkness that I would come to imagine as a black flower blooming over him during those nights in the Vosges forest when the blood of his friends and companions ran in streams down the steep mud of the brush-tangled mountainsides. (Or maybe that was how I had come to imagine myself, the black flower my own, the sucking mud, the biting ants, the bomb craters along the Rach Gia filling with water and with blood.)