Time and again Dorothy and Fred had planned and re-planned what they would take when the time came. But now that it was upon them, with less than two hours to manage it, they could not find a way to get everything in the few travel cases and flour sacks they owned.
Nor could they carry it all.
“Bobby can carry the children’s clothes. Take them out of the rucksack and put them in his bag.” Even as she spoke, Dorothy began to do just that. “Then I’ll put the glass jars in the rucksack.”
With a determined grimace she worked the five jars into her rucksack, padding them with things already inside.
“There!” She felt triumphant. But Fred didn’t share her enthusiasm.
“Pick it up,” he said.
“Well let me just finish this first, then I’ll—”
“Pick it up, Dorothy.” He lifted the rucksack and dropped it heavily into her open arms.
She looked at him, worry lining her mouth. “I can do it.” She hefted the bag so the bag’s strap was over her shoulder. “See?”
“Walk to the well and back.”
“Oh Fred, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Dorothy, do it now.”
Even the children shushed when they heard the quiet command in their father’s voice.
She pulled a face at him, shifted the bag higher on her hip, then turned and walked away from her family, out into the courtyard, across to the dining shed, then on fifty yards to the well.
With each step her knees threatened to buckle. Her back screamed, her neck would hardly hold her head up so she could see where she was going, and her feet refused to do anything but shuffle.
This bag was nothing compared to loads she’d carried time and again in Gauhati. This should be a breeze.
And yet it was not. Her heart was pounding before she was halfway to the well. Her whole body shrieked for her to drop the bag that weighed down her bones.
She realized now that she’d been subconsciously lightening her loads in recent months, splitting the wet laundry into two loads instead of one, and so on. Because her body was beginning to tolerate less and less, and poor nutrition was solely to blame for it.
Standing still, Dorothy was the picture of slender good health. Moving under the weight of the rucksack she’d turned into a decrepit old woman. When had she become such a ninny that she couldn’t carry forty pounds across the yard and back?
Dorothy turned to start her way back and bumped into Fred. He had followed her. With a sad sort of grin he pulled the bag from her shoulder and hiked it over his own, and drew her into a hug.
“Oh Fred,” she cried. “I thought I—I mean, I didn’t know it would—oh Fred!”
“No tears now, darling girl. It’s only things. You know that. If it were Bobby you were carrying, why, you’d be walking right along and whistling Dixie, too. But this? This is just things.”
She knew he was right. Knew it with every screaming joint in her body. But she’d left so much behind. Her India things, gone to the bottom in Singapore Bay. Her Iloilo things, ransacked by the Japanese in Calinog. She’d been stripped of everything but the minimum necessities.
And it was happening again. Again there was no time to organize it well. No time to fret. No time to say goodbye.
What would Rosa do when she found out they’d left? She might slip down from the hills for a visit to bring vegetables and find them gone. Poor dear Rosa! It wasn’t right to just disappear from her life like this!
Dorothy turned toward the bunk that was now stripped of its bedclothes. Slowly she drew four of the five glass jars from her bag and lined them up on the sandbox bed. She would keep one, but the other four had to go. They’d done their job, and now she would leave them for someone to find, maybe someone who needed them worse than she did. Maybe Loreto would find them, and know what to do with them. Her heart pinched at the thought of never having the chance to thank the beautiful little Filipina nurse who had made her life so much more than bearable here in camp. To never again hug Rosa who had taken the Chambers family into her very heart.
But this time the salt stayed on the inside. Anger had a way of drying her tears and today not a single tear escaped.
There was space in her rucksack now and she turned to Bobby to retrieve the clothes she’d shoved into his little pack.
But he scooted away from her.
“I carry it, Mommy!”
“Oh sweetie, it might be too heavy. Let Mommy check it, will you?”
“No!” He backpedaled further away. “I carry it. I a sojur. See?”
He threw the bag over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and marched up and down the path to the dining hall, his head high, his chin up, and the bag with the children’s entire wardrobe and his old worn out teddy bear bouncing along on his back.
His three-year-old legs were spindly, but strong to the task. And his determined face won her heart all over again, unleashing tears to wash away her anger.
At eleven o’clock sharp the little family of four was lined up and ready to go, each with a pack they could carry a good distance if they had to, and none looking back over their shoulder at the pieces of their life they were leaving behind.
. . . .
It was days before they knew where they were being taken. All one hundred of them were driven in trucks to the wharf, then loaded onto an inter-island steamer.
Fred’s memoir
On June 16, 1943, some Japanese officers and civilians came into Camp, very evidently armed with pistols. Some of us wondered if “this was it”. They told us that we should be ready to move within two hours. The Camp was literally cleared of every personal belonging. We were herded into trucks, like cattle, not told our destination, and taken to an inter-island steamer docked in the harbor. The ship had been a tug sunk in Manila harbor and had been raised and put into service. We went aboard, about a hundred of us, and found our places wherever we could. The ship was already loaded with sugar and raw carabao hides. Fortunately, Dorothy, the children and I were together. Some not already interned were put aboard.
The trip to Manila took a week and demonstrated running between “Scylla and Scherybides” . If our ship moved too close to shore there was liability of trouble from guerilla bands. We might be rescued! If our ship moved too far offshore, there was liability from American submarines. Thus it took a week for the trip that in peacetime would require twenty-four hours. It was a wet trip, sleeping on deck, and it rained five nights out of seven.
Dorothy stretched her legs out in front of her, trying not to jostle those around her. She hadn’t sat in a chair in nearly a week. Here, on the deck of this ancient steamer, there was scarcely room to sit and almost never room to lie down.
Her clothing felt strange, stiff, after having been rained on each night and dried in place the following day. She needed a bath. She needed to wash her hair and clean her teeth. She needed to walk!
It was impossible to dispel the sense of disorientation. She couldn’t shake the dazed, disconnected feeling that came over her while sitting on the deck of a steamer that clearly had spent some time at the bottom of the harbor. It creaked and groaned, and gears that had evidently received minimal restoration after the sunken vessel was raised screeched their displeasure day and night.
While it could never be accused of running silently, the inter-island steamer nevertheless threaded the intricate course that kept them just far enough from enemy American submarines, and not quite close enough to guerillas on shore who might mount a rescue attempt.
A handful of overcooked rice and a kind of hardtack biscuit were given to each of them twice a day. And trying to get more than one-half cup of water per day was a challenge that not even Dorothy’s kind, persuasive medical charm could manage. Their guardians weren’t so much mean and threatening as disinterested. Clearly, they’d done this before.
Early morning on the seventh day the engines throttled down and an eerie silence descended. Dorothy rou
sed from sleep and could not get her bearings. Carefully she rose to a kneeling position and fully absorbed the scene before her.
On every side loomed broken masts, blackened hulls and the tangled rigging of scuttled boats. Each stark mast, whether broken or bent, seemed to mark something more than merely the grave of a once-proud boat.
The steamer slipped silently along the narrow portion of the channel that had been cleared of wreckage. All around her people began to rouse. Fred shifted his sleeping children so he could kneel beside his wife. She took his hand, and felt the tension in his sinewy arms, the rigid self-control he was demanding of himself.
For the first time in her life, surrounded by the horrible evidence of a world gone awry, she felt they were alone. Whatever lay ahead was going to take every resource they had, every shred of ingenuity and every ounce of courage they could summon.
The burned out shoreline revealed their destination. This damaged shell of a once-thriving port was Manila harbor. They were being taken to the internment camp at Santo Tomás.
It seemed as though the night had robbed them of their place in the world. Dorothy reached for Rosa’s hat. But it, too, had been lost in the night.
Fred’s memoir
The trip was uneventful, but the harbor at Manila was a sight with masts of sunken ships all over. Corregidor looked as if it had been burned out. We were taken to Santo Tomas to begin another chapter, with new friends and a greater challenge. At that time, Santo Tomas was a small “town” of 4000, with Los Banos housing 2500 and Baguio 500.
chapter forty-six
SANTO TOMáS
June 21, 1943
250 DAYS INTO INTERNMENT
Dorothy and Fred had barely spoken since they’d crossed the gangplank and set foot on solid ground. Occasionally she carried—or rather dragged—Fred’s pack so he could carry Bobby on his shoulders.
“Wha’s at, Dad?”
Bobby would point to some grand landmark that rose above the palm trees in the distance, and it was usually Dorothy who replied. She was the one who’d spent time in Manila, and it helped to focus on those lovely vistas—many still undamaged by the war—and ignore the blackened harbor behind her.
They shuffled and stopped, shuffled and stopped with their group of one hundred and nine until they reached an open area on the wharf and without ceremony were ordered at gunpoint into waiting trucks.
Bobby clutched his frazzled teddy bear close to his chest, clearly remembering their departure from Calinog when a Japanese soldier nearly ripped it apart to check it for contraband. But this time his precious buddy was ignored.
It was Carol’s doll they were interested in. Her little five-year-old face was rigid with anxiety as the gruesome-faced guard turned and twisted, rattled and shook her sweet dolly that had come to her all the way from the USA two Christmases ago. When he held it out to another guard to examine, the child nearly fainted.
“It’s fine, sweetheart,” Dorothy cooed. “The soldier won’t hurt Pippa.” She prayed she hadn’t lied to her daughter.
And she hadn’t. At last they were satisfied it was just what it looked like. A little girl’s dearest friend. Once they’d given the doll back, Carol clutched Pippa fiercely. Dorothy reached for words to give her back her smile but came up wanting.
All along the bone-rattling route, Filipinos stopped to watch the small convoy. They nodded surreptitiously to those on board, careful not to be seen making eye contact with any particular person among the internees. A barefoot Filipino who was not so careful received a wicked slap to the head from a guard he hadn’t been aware was watching.
They were everywhere. Watching.
When the trucks finally lurched to a stop and they were told to get out, Fred collected the family and moved them into the queue that was forming at the gate of Santo Tomás University. This would be the first of a thousand different lines that would dictate their lives in the coming months.
The square tower of the main building stood grandly in the near distance, a five-minute walk from where they now stood. The children could see little through the fence that was woven with strips of weathered bamboo to purposefully obstruct the view from both directions. But Dorothy could see enough. Enough to know that life had just changed immeasurably for them. The barbed wire that looped ominously along the tops of the walls and massive iron gates told her that. And somehow she was going to have to summon the courage to immerse herself in this strange new world.
The urge to disappear into the city behind her was strong, but the line moved her ever forward. She felt a tug on her arm and looked down to see which of the children it was. But it was not one of her children. It was not one of the two precious souls she’d brought through so much and now thrust ahead of her into this new strangeness.
It was a Japanese guard. And he was tugging on her medical bag.
So far she’d managed to safeguard the medical supplies she’d collected over their months of internment. And now her bag was full, thanks to Loreto’s final donation just the week before. She had quinine, sulfanilamide, aspirin powder and more.
Would they let her keep it all? Or would her meager collection be confiscated? Would she be allowed to practice medicine? Or would that be forbidden? These questions joined the others that had been circling in her brain in recent days. Would the family be housed together? Would they have to pay for every meal? Would they find funds like the lifesaving Chinaman in Iloilo provided? Her heart raced and she felt her smile quiver as she released her hold on the bag.
So many unknowns.
After asking several questions regarding the contents of her medical bag, the guard closed it, sealed it with a tag on a knotted string, and nodded to her. Dorothy peered at the square red stamp on the tag but as usual, the Japanese “chop” told her nothing at all. She reached for the bag but the guard stayed her with a warning hand.
“Izza yatuh,” he said.
“But—”
“No now. Yatuh,” he insisted.
Later. Not now. Later.
Dorothy withdrew her hand and tried without success to calm her racing heart. She’d never yet been forced to give up her bag. So far in their internment she had been allowed that small courtesy. Now the prospect of losing it seemed catastrophic. She had hidden half their money in the lining of the worn leather bag.
She knew her eyes would betray her if she looked at the guard, but she had to. She had to read his intentions. Was he confiscating it? Would he report her for having something in there she shouldn’t have?
Dorothy raised her head and forced herself to look the fellow in the eye. “For me later?” she asked.
He nodded and cocked his head toward the bag he was just setting on a cart behind him. “Yatuh.”
The dry mouth of panic made swallowing hard, but Dorothy forced herself to put it in God’s hands. She would leave it to Him as to whether or not she would ever see her medical bag again, the bag whose leather grip fitted her hand so perfectly. The strong, sturdy bag her father had gifted her when she graduated from medical school.
Her fingers kept reaching for it, searching for its familiar grip. It was like a phantom limb, gone but still felt in the familiar way it rocked against her palm.
“Dorothy? Dorothy Kinney! Over here!”
They had barely reached the halfway point of the “intake” area when she heard someone calling her name. She and Fred turned toward the voice. It came to them like a lifeline, like a branch to hold on to until they could find purchase for their feet.
“Over here!”
A familiar face smiled at them from beyond a rope barrier.
“Louise? Louise Spencer?”
Dorothy started to moved to the barrier, pulled like a magnet to the woman from home, from Colorado. But a bayonet lowered in front of her, stopping her headlong rush to the safe harbor of a friend, and she crept back into the slow-moving line.
Over her shoulder she could see Louise moving parallel
to her, pointing to a spot beyond the end of the building. That was where they would meet.
The beastly intake process took two more hours. Questions, statements, signatures—all demanded with suspicious tone. Dorothy was sure that Louise would tire of waiting, and for some reason that seemed devastating to her.
But once outside the long “intake shed” Dorothy ushered her family around the corner, and into the arms of the first face from home she’d seen in more than two years.
. . . .
Dorothy sought a quiet place to distance herself from the shock of the day. In this jungle of people, though, a place of solitude was not to be found. She blessed their good fortune that Louise and Dick Spencer had been there to guide them through the bewildering rules of life in Santo Tomás. But it was almost too much. Too much to try and be sociable when all she wanted to do was strip down and wash and sleep for about a month.
Of course, there was no bed yet. No mattress. No place to rest her head until Fred could build something.
Somehow she managed to not embarrass herself, and to show Louise the courtesy and gratitude she truly felt even though she was too tired to properly express it. It seemed that tears were more ready than words. But Louise understood.
“Dorothy, go easy on yourself,” Louise whispered. “I know what you’ve been through. They took you and your children away from camp, not telling you where you were going. I can’t imagine you didn’t wonder if they were going to shoot you all.” She patted Dorothy on the arm, her understanding shocking yet complete. “The soul doesn’t recover from that overnight, you know. Give yourself some time.”
The soul doesn’t recover from that overnight.
The words spun in dizzying relief in her head, making the world recede as if she and Louise were the only ones left in it. She sensed an almost physical adjustment of her heartbeat, a resumption to something that nearly approached normal. But then, normal was a “relative” state of being these days.
A few minutes alone was all she needed, just a few minutes to collect herself, then she could face things.
But how she expected to find a place to be alone almost made her laugh.
Courage in a White Coat Page 28