Henry pulled her into a bolstering hug, turned a smile toward Carol, and ambled off to tend to his other patients. The dear, dear man! A hoard of patients awaited him, but he’d come at her hurried request to the children’s ward to see Carol rather than force the child to walk the greater distance to his office in the camp’s main hospital.
Dorothy returned the stethoscope to her kit. She would put Carol on bed rest. No activity that would cause her emaciated body to gobble up more calories than necessary would be allowed. Hopefully the special kitchen prescription would halt the deterioration.
Dorothy knew the progression. Though they had not yet lost a single child, she’d seen the progression on too many faces in this camp, faces that gradually acknowledged the slow death that was starting to number their days.
And then the faces would be gone.
At first the camp had shown a kind of collective reaction to the deaths from starvation by exhibiting a modicum of concern for others who might also be in peril. They’d shown concern by offering a morsel here, a tidbit there to those who looked desperate.
But no longer. Because the morsels weren’t to be had. Almost nothing came over the walls anymore. The Filipinos in Manila were as challenged as the internees, and the risk of discovery was simply too great now, bringing the clandestine deliveries to a trickle.
Some had tried, of course. They’d sneaked away to find food for themselves or their families, only to be shot or jailed trying to return. The realization that nothing would be coming in had left many in the camp very nearly defeated.
As she wheeled Carol and Bobby from the Main building exam room back to the children’s ward, Dorothy conceived a plan to make a game out of her daughter’s recovery.
“Carol, darling, I’ve decided you’re going to have a mattress holiday.”
Carol looked up, mildly interested in something she’d never heard of before.
“A what?”
“A mattress holiday,” Dorothy repeated. “It means you get a holiday from all your chores. It means you don’t even have to dress yourself. You will be the princess and we will be your slaves. Your wish is our command, your highness.” Dorothy swept the best kind of curtsy her beri-beri-bound joints would allow. Once settled in one of the empty cots, she removed Carol’s blouse and shorts and pulled on a loose-fitting pajama smock. “You are Queen of the Bedpost now!”
She forced a smile as she arranged the bedding and lifted Carol’s thirty-seven featherweight pounds onto the cot. She had weighed the exact same thirty-seven pounds two years earlier when they entered Santo Tomás, but was now two inches taller.
“Now, my lady, what is your first command?”
Carol screwed up her face in concentration. Dorothy waited, wondering how she’d tell her she couldn’t even sit up in bed except for one half hour in the morning and one half hour in the afternoon.
“I shall think upon it,” she quipped, showing that she wanted to participate in the game. But she was clearly too tired to think of something. Too tired to want anything to occupy her time. Too tired to do anything but just lie there and rest.
“Mommy?”
Bobby had been very interested in this new development, and now he hopped up onto the cot and crossed his legs. “Sissy didn’t get her snack. Maybe it would make her feel better.” He turned to Carol. “And if you don’t want it all, it’s okay if you share it with me.”
Her son’s request tortured her. She couldn’t even provide her children with a small snack other than a couple of grains of salt. The contents of the relief box were gone. She’d made things last a good seven months, but had she been too stringent? Could the stress to Carol’s little heart have been avoided if she’d supplemented the children’s meals more liberally?
Common sense told her no. And her medical mind agreed. The ‘crash and burn’ after a short period of normal eating would have had just as debilitating an effect.
Bobby rustled impatiently on the cot, just enough to remind her that he was waiting for an answer.
What to do?
She was about to go back to her desk to get the few grains of salt she’d set out for Carol when she remembered the small empty butter tin in her pocket. The relief box butter that she had doled out so skimpily had been the most remarkable luxury. To a starved palate, it had made the crudest foods taste like a priceless delicacy. Now all that was left of the butter was the waxed paper liner in the empty tin the butter had been packaged in. She’d scraped the last of the precious butter into the children’s mush several weeks past, then rolled the paper up. She’d dropped the tin into her pocket just this morning to bring it to the clinic, intending to clean it out and use it to store small clips. But perhaps—
Without hesitation she opened the tin, unrolled the waxed paper and tore off two strips that were still slightly greasy to the touch. She twisted them gently, trying mightily to leave all the butter residue on the paper and not on her fingers.
“This, my darlings, is a wonderful snack I’ve been saving for you. One for you, and one for you.”
“You funny mommy,” Bobby quipped. “This is paper!”
Dorothy caught his little hand as he nearly threw the paper twist away.
“It’s butter paper, Bobby, and it’s wax. You can chew it but don’t swallow. Try it!”
Bobby watched Carol put her small twist in her mouth and begin to chew. As the salty, buttery residue began to seep from the paper onto her tongue her face lit up like Christmas. That was all it took for Bobby to pop his own strip into his mouth.
The euphoric sounds clearly communicated their pleasure with this new snack. Dorothy smiled as she moved down the row of beds, surprising each of the eight little patients with their own twist of butter paper. The moans of delight were sweet music to her ears.
But bits of butter-coated paper would not supply the nutrition her daughter desperately needed.
Dorothy bit her lip.
The hospital chow would certainly be a small step up in nutritional value, but for Carol to grow stronger would take far more protein than even hospital food would provide. She thought through the short list of meager provisions she had. She could mix Carol’s powdered milk stronger for the next few weeks, even though it meant the supply would dwindle that much faster. But what she really needed was protein. She’d find peanut butter or eggs or potted meat or chicken gristle or a bit of fresh heart. Somehow. Someone had to have a stash they would trade for the two or three scoops of coffee she had left.
Dorothy’s heart twisted and tumbled, overwrought with the need to safeguard her children. Between the two of them, surely she and Fred could manage it.
Dearest Mother,
You of all people know how I longed for family, those long years in India, when I was fulfilled in every way but one. And God answered my need with Fred and Carol and Bobby. My dearest treasures, my heart, my all.
Did He know that these two little darlings were destined for these troubled days? For this desperate hour? Is that why He gave them to me?
Am I enough?
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
STARVING LITTLE HENS
Dorothy slogged through the pouring rain, her wooden bakyas betraying her at every step. Their wet hemp straps stretched just enough across her toes that they slipped one way as she slid another. She may as well have gone barefoot. That certainly might have spared her ankles these wrenching twists. But if one had any hope of keeping the mud off one’s feet, the thick wooden sandals were the only option. Shoes didn’t have the ghost of a chance against the rivers of mud.
Dearest Mother,
It’s October, and I never thought I’d welcome the rain, but now that it means the bombs stop falling on Manila for a while, I can’t help but be glad of it. We don’t see the American planes close overhead, but they are ours, bombing the harbor, taking out Japanese installations. Our “keepers” have moved their anti-aircraft guns close now. Shells fall on the grounds. They shoot flak a
t our planes, and it comes back to land about the campus as red hot bits of steel and shrapnel. In the distance we’ve seen parachutes fall from burning planes, burning chutes failing to open, open chutes falling slowly, swaying gently, delivering our boys—some of whom are shot as they float like cloth dolls birthed in the clouds—to this plot somewhere between heaven and hell.
She’d managed so well for over a month now, trading their relief allotment of cigarettes for small morsels of bolstering food for the children. But now she had only three ounces of coffee grounds to trade for protein of some kind. Any kind. Surely it would be enough to trade up to a small portion of spam.
But nobody had a thing to spare. They’d gazed longingly at the coffee before shaking their heads. She’d not embarrassed herself by appearing anxious, even though it was humiliating to beg.
She looked back along the row of shanties she’d just visited. One fellow had offered her a can of corned beef. His price? $100 American. Another would consider selling only a bundle of goods. It was all or nothing. In the bundle were two tins of meat, some bouillon powder, some firewood and a few other small items. His price? $500 American. None of that Mickey Mouse Money, he’d insisted. They all despised the worthless currency printed by Japan for their use, and no one would call it anything but just that—Mickey Mouse Money.
Buying anything was hopeless. She could only pray for a trade.
Her medical skill was the most valuable thing she had to trade. But that was never an option. It was unthinkable. It would violate everything she believed in, everything she’d built her life’s work around. Any demonstrated medical need would automatically find help at her hands. With no thought of compensation. Tonight the only thing she would barter with was coffee.
Dorothy settled into a slow shuffle along the miserable excuse for a board walk that was more mud slide than walkway. The rain was coming in on a pretty good slant now, buffeted by winds that could not quite manage a typhoon, but stayed strong enough to make the going perilous.
She made one last visit to the two bachelors in the shanty at the end of Camote Road and then headed back to the Annex. It was exhausting, battling the weather, battling her sense of dignity, trying not to let slow panic overtake her. Her children needed protein. Somewhere in this camp there was protein to be had. She just had to keep asking. And she would. Tomorrow.
Dorothy stood in the rain, holding her wooden bakyas in her hands and rinsing them in the rain as best she could before entering the Annex. She paused at the door, her mind whirling through every possible source of food and coming up wanting. She stepped into the long hall that led to her room and shook as much rain from her dress as she could. Inside the room she moved as cautiously as possibly, careful not to drip on the beds she passed.
So fervently did she concentrate on her passage through the small room that she practically bumped into a woman who stood at the entrance to her own family’s little cubbyhole.
“Oh! Mrs. Nash! I didn’t see you. Oh dear, I’ve gotten you all soaked. So sorry!”
Grace Nash stood at the ‘threshold’ of Dorothy’s minuscule abode with a small bundle in her hands. It was mesmerizing to see those hands close up, the long slender fingers that had coaxed such magical music from her violin all those months ago. She was one of those beautiful women who always seemed to maintain a dancer’s pose, and while—like Dorothy—her body was beginning to betray itself, it had not robbed the woman of her innate poise.
“Pay it no mind, Dr. Chambers, no mind at all. I’ve just brought you a little something. It’s not much. Not at all what I would like to bring. But my little Gale is doing so well, and I know it was your doing, getting him posted out to the hospital. And I never thanked you. So here.”
Instead of handing the bundle to Dorothy, Mrs. Nash carefully lifted one edge of the pretty handkerchief that concealed her gift. Beneath the embroidered corner, cradled in a nest of similar handkerchiefs, were two small, brownish, eggs. With practically translucent shells.
Her voice, which had been hushed from the start, now dropped to a furtive whisper, lest the little treasure find its way into other hands in the dark of night.
“Let’s keep them in their little nest, if you’ll just tell me where you want me to put them,” she whispered. “They are so fragile the shells are almost transparent. Poor starved little chickens can’t seem to make a proper egg.”
Dorothy quickly emptied her one and only small wooden bowl and held it out. The sight of Mrs. Nash’s perfectly improper little eggs had robbed her of words. There was such a moving reverence in the way Mrs. Nash laid the cradled eggs in her little bowl that Dorothy found herself holding her breath, lest the eggs vanish on a careless sigh.
God had heard her prayer, and sent Grace.
Surviving a Japanese Internment Camp:
Life and Liberation at Santo Tomás, Manila, in World War II
by Rupert Wilkinson. Pg 123
Private money and credit helped if you had it. There was always food for sale at colossal prices, some of it brought in officially by the Japanese and some sold by profiteers from smuggling and hoarding. In early November 1944, [an internee] bought five cans of Campbell’s soup at $10 each (about $150 today). A month later he felt guilty about buying a pound of mongo beans, for which he paid sixty prewar pesos (some $450 today).
“It is a crime that if anything can be bought it can’t be obtained by the camp for the good of all,” he wrote in his diary.
For people with valuables rather than cash, there were Taiwanese guards who coveted rings, watches, and jewelry to take home to wives and girlfriends. In January, a fine diamond engagement ring could fetch 4 to 5 kilos [8 to 10 lbs] of rice plus extras such as tobacco. Internee dealers who got to know “the right” guards negotiated the sale, taking a third or more of the proceeds in food or cash for the risk; some guards took the jewelry without delivering.
None of this stopped malnutrition.
Things were changing almost daily now. It had started with the “pig victory”, an inglorious escapade in which a pig had escaped from the Japanese army’s livestock pen. It was quite miraculous how it vanished into thin air with a whole patrol of soldiers chasing after it. But vanish it had. And it’s reappearance in various and sundry shapes and forms was equally miraculous. Even so, the aroma of roasting pork was never once detected on the breeze about camp.
In recent weeks rumors had run rampant that the Americans had the Japanese in retreat. Camp guards taking over the first floor of the Ed Building seemed to give the rumors some credence. And now the camp loudspeaker had just issued a coded message that nearly stopped every beating heart.
“Better Leyte than never!”
Strange though it seemed, every adult knew what it meant. Don Bell had been reminding internees to replant their gardens, then ended his announcement by saying it wasn’t too late to plant. In fact, he said, it was “better Leyte than never”. He’d used the moment to slip in an announcement to the internees. One they’d been praying for these many months.
Dorothy and Fred had met for dinner, the first time in nearly ten days. The meager chatter died instantly around them as internees registered what had just been said. The people around their plank table looked at one another, stricken dumb by the coded announcement. They’d been waiting for it, longing for it, for some news that the Americans were coming to get them.
But when the announcement came, in its cryptic code, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe it. Here they were, in October of 1944, no real food to speak of, just the unrecognizable dregs of what passed for food—husks of rice, but no actual rice usually present, a few weevils floating on the top of cups of soup. Even the weevils weren’t interested in mere husks, it seemed.
Yet unexpectedly, and completely out of character, the Japanese had brought in a small supply of rice.
Why? What could have prompted this overdue act of charity?
The answer lay in the announcer’s quip.
Of late, camp announcer Don Bell had confined himself to mere reminders, cautioning the internees not to use other types of paper in place of toilet tissue and so on.
But tonight, after announcing that a bit of rice had been delivered into camp, and prompting people to be sure and replant what they were using from their meager gardens, he added the quip, “Better Leyte than never!” It was audacious! It was scandalous that he would make such an obvious announcement within the hearing of their armed guards.
But cautious glances confirmed that none of their captors had picked up anything suspicious from the announcement.
Better Leyte (lay-tee) than never!
“Fred! Did you hear that? Fred?” Dorothy poked him, dragging his attention from the man at the end of the table who he’d been staring at for the last five minutes.
“Did you?” she repeated.
Fred turned to her, raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “No. What?”
Dorothy lowered her voice to a whisper. “The Americans have taken Leyte! They’re coming! No wonder our keepers brought rice into the camp. They’ve got to fatten us up in case they get caught holding us here!”
Even as she spoke the words, the truth of the matter suddenly occurred to her. The supply of rice was actually meant to demoralize the camp. Normally, extra rations were only provided when the Japanese felt victory was near. So extra rations were meant as a ruse to make the internees think the Imperial army had beaten back their boys in blue.
But Bell’s announcement had just revealed the lie.
Anyone who had listened to the men’s endless conjecturing on the progress of the war knew that Leyte was the key. If MacArthur could take Leyte, he could establish a firm foothold for retaking the islands, and an air base from which to mount inland raids. This was the best news they could have heard.
MacArthur was on his way.
Courage in a White Coat Page 37