by Joy Kogawa
The ojisan who is binding the cloth on the stick pours some gasoline onto the cloth from another container and, setting a light to it, he holds the flaming torch high up in front of him. I am sitting on the log wondering what Grandma is thinking of all of us here in the cool night.
"Sa," the ojisan says as he comes towards us, holding the torch, “shall we begin?''
He beckons to Stephen, “Your grandmother and grandfather are my old friends," he says. He hands the torch to Stephen and helps him hop to the gasoline-soaked pyre.
Swift as the crack of a whip the flames shoot along the edge of the log, and before Stephen can reach another corner to spread the fire, the entire platform is a dancing bright-dark rage of crackling in the night. The heat is as intense and roaring as the sawdust furnace in the basement in Vancouver when its door is open. Who, I used to wonder, could survive such heat? The angel in the Old Testament story kept three men safe in the middle of a place like that.
"It's in the heat of fire where the angel is found," Obasan once told Stephen. She also told him that the best samurai swords are tempered over and over again in the hottest flames and people too are made strong and excellent when they go through life's difficulties. Stephen always scowls when Obasan says these things.
From where I am sitting I can feel the fire, hot and dry on my face. Obasan has been using a handkerchief to chase the mosquitoes diving around us, but now she puts the handkerchief in front of my face and we move farther back where it is not so hot.
It is strange to think that the coffin will soon be touched by the yellowish red-streaked light. And what of Grandma Nakane? She will turn to ashes, Stephen told me, on this mountain tonight.
nineteen
As soon as the coffin begins to burn, one ojisan says quietly to Obasan, "There is no need to stay longer."
She bows and thanks each of the men in turn and we walk back down the mountain with one ojisan holding a flashlight to show us the way.
In the morning, before I waken, Obasan returns to the silver mine with chopsticks and a tin to gather the bones and ashes. She sends them to Grandpa Nakane, who says he will bury them when we all return home again.
The days of mourning gradually end and the yellow-red leaf days of autumn also pass.
One afternoon, soon after the first snowfall, I come in after a sleigh ride clown the road and hear Obasan chatting to Nomura-obasan.
“When good things happen they come in a cluster, do they not?'' she is saying cheerily.
Nomura-obasan nods and her strings of gray hair flap into her long cheeks.
Nakayama-sensei, the Anglican minister, has just left, Obasan says, with the news that Uncle will be arriving this afternoon. The doctor also said this morning that Stephen's cast will be removed this week.
"Such good news,” Obasan repeats.
The snow outside is falling like tufts of cotton and the fence post wears a white puff hat. The whole mountainside is muffled and soft, with blobs of snow perched on the trees like a popcorn extravaganza. By late afternoon, the shadows have deepened to a purple-gray and the coal-oil lamps are lit.
The furniture in the two rooms has been shuffled all day. Nomura-obasan's cot is now in the kitchen, wedged against a wall beneath the shelves of food. The kitchen table is in the front room and we set it with a place for Uncle. A blue and white tablecloth covers the oilcloth and the blue rectangular plates and small round ones are placed in a triangle with the rice bowls. The miso shiru, smelling of brine and the sea, is on the stove and the black lacquered bowls with the black lids wait on a tray on the warmer above the stove beside the king George/Queen Elizabeth mugs Mother bought to commemorate the royal visit. The dried fiddleheads with their slightly tough asparagus texture have been soaked and are cooking in a soy sauce sugar base with thin slivers of meat and mushroom. Salty, half-dried cucumber and crisp yellow radish pickles are in a glass dish.
Obasan is showing no signs of impatience as she brings in an armload of logs and fills the box beside the stove. Stephen, hopping with the help of one crutch, pokes a log into place in the stove.
"When is he coming?" Stephen asks for the third time.
"The snow is too much perhaps," Obasan says as she looks at the clock on the windowsill.
I have been making paper baskets out of folding paper and filling them with jelly beans, one basket for each of us.
"Ah," Nomura-obasan says as I bring her one. She holds the basket in the palm of her hand and raises it above her head with mock gravity. "Thank you. This is for after supper, is it not?" She puts it on the stool at the head of her bed, beside her basket full of medicine and her knitting.
"If there is hunger," Obasan says, handing me the chop-sticks, "let us eat."
I am matching the chopstick pairs—the red ones, black ones, two ivory sets—when Stephen, peering through the window, calls out. Obasan wipes her hands on her apron and looks up as Stephen heaves himself to the door and opens it wide, letting in a flurry of snow. Uncle's voice is hearty as he stamps his feet outside.
"Ha-ro Stee-bu!” Uncle places a wooden box, a flashlight, and a sack on the floor before he steps in halfway, shaking the snow off his black coat and pant legs, a bear-shaped man stomping in the doorway. "Ha-ro ha-ro, Naomi-chan!" His arms are wide open and he lifts Stephen up in his arms. "What this what this?" he asks, poking Stephen's cast.
Stephen is grinning widely, the dimples on his cheeks wide parentheses. "I don't need it anymore," Stephen says.
Obasan stands at the doorway to the kitchen and removes her apron.
"Okairi nasai," she says briskly. Her voice is almost crisp and military and sounds like a salute. Her hands are in front of her, folded, holding her apron.
“Okairi nasai," Nomura-obasan calls from the other room. It is the most familiar greeting I know. “Welcome home." Every day, Mother would say this to Stephen as he came home from school. Or to Father whenever he came in. Stephen and Father would reply immediately, "Tada-ima—I have just now returned.”
"Ah," Uncle says, seeing the table. He puts Stephen down to remove his shoes and puts on the slippers waiting for him. Obasan fills the black lacquered bowls with the miso soup.
"Just the right time," Obasan says, handing me the bowls.
Some snow from Uncle's head falls on the black stove surface with a spit and a hiss as he comes into the kitchen to greet Nomura-obasan. She sits up and bows formally, greeting Uncle, who bows in return.
"A difficult time, is it not?" Uncle says.
"The kindness of everyone," Nomura-obasan replies formally. "My presence is a nuisance...."
"Not so,” Obasan replies, handing me the miso soup to give Nomura-obasan.
"And your brother Tadashi-san," Nomura-obasan asks Uncle. "How is his health?"
I hold the soup and wait to hear what Uncle will say about my father. Stephen, his mouth open as if ready with another question, is also waiting to hear.
''Eh"—Uncle nods briefly—“ thank you for your concern."
"There is only prayer," Obasan says. "Nothing else will help."
"Will it be a long time, one wonders, before he can come to us?" Nomura-obasan asks.
"Sa,” Uncle says thoughtfully, "there is no telling.”
Is Uncle saying he does not know where Father is?
"Why is it not known?" I ask. "Where is Father? When will he come?"
Uncle smiles at me as I hand the soup to Nomura-obasan. “And this o-jo-chan, this little girl—who can she be?"
He is joking, of course, but I wonder if I have changed since he last saw me. He is still the same, his open face round like Grandma Nakane's, his black hair a cap straight back from his forehead.
This is the way it is whenever I ask questions. The answers are not answers at all.
"Don't you know where Dad is?" Stephen says scornfully to me.
One time Stephen was reading a letter Father sent but I did not know where Father was. The handwriting in the letter was as even as waves along the beach,
row on row of neat curls and dots, perfect pebbles and shells on an ordered shore. I could only stare at the waves as Stephen deciphered their code. Father was telling us to be like Ninomiya Kinjiro, to help Obasan, and to study hard.
Uncle goes to his sack and brings out two wooden instruments each about a foot long.
With a whoop, Stephen throws his crutch to the floor and lunges for them. "The flutes!" The room fills with music as Stephen plays and Uncle nods his head encouragingly.
Nomura-obasan claps her hands. "Oh, when the cast is removed there will be dancing," she says.
Stephen is playing a song he learned at school.
The mountain and the squirrel had a quarrel
And the former called the latter "little prig”.…
"Music all the time, just like your father," Uncle says, shaking his head.
Obasan, who has been smiling and putting the food on the table, calls us to sit down.
"Sa," Obasan says, filling the last of the rice bowls. "Let us eat." She folds her hands, signaling the saying of grace, and waits until we are quiet. The light from the coal-oil lamp is lowered slightly and her voice is almost a whisper as she gives thanks for Uncle's return. "Father in heaven—that until now there has been protection, arigato, thank you. Tonight, for the safe return, thank you. For the food, thank you.”
"Amen," Uncle says in a loud voice.
Nomura-obasan from the other room also adds, "Aaahmen," drawing the "A" sound out from deep within her like a groan.
Within days, everything changes. Bright wallpaper covers the newspapered walls. Above my bunk, a shelf is made for my clothes. The kitchen table returns to the kitchen and a folding screen gives Nomura-obasan privacy.
On the Friday following Uncle's return, Stephen must go to the hospital to have his cast removed. In the morning he is out in the back shed, pounding the ice off the runners of his homemade sled with a split log. Humpty Dumpty, I am thinking, will fall out of his shell, and what will he be then?
"Without doubt, the young heal easily," Nomura-obasan says.
"That is so," Obasan agrees. "It is an easy matter for the young.”
We watch them going through the deep fresh snow, Uncle floundering as he pulls Stephen behind him. The track they leave shows not just the thin metal runners but the whole underside of the sled as well. What strange giant winter slug must this be that leaves such a mark as it slithers down the snowy slope? I have often seen small animal tracks in the path and under the trees, though I have not seen any creatures around the house. The road is mostly downhill all the way to the hospital.
By early afternoon they return. Stephen sits on a bench in front of the open oven door, Obasan bathes his feet in a basin of water. Hesitant as a spring robin, Stephen stands and hops, hops to the kitchen table, where Uncle is sipping a mug of tea and watching him solemnly. Stephen's whole body tilts slightly as he rests briefly on his bad leg.
“It will improve," Uncle says softly.
More boldly, Stephen limps around the room. Even when he moves slowly he looks as if he is in a hurry. Back and forth he goes, like Long John Silver with a peg leg, like a sailor on a rolling ship. Step hop, step hop.
"Together, with strength, with energy, let us walk," Nomura-obasan says.
twenty
Until May 1943, when we first attend school, Stephen and I have no formal studies except for Sunday school and handicraft classes held in the missionaries' big house. At home, Obasan keeps me busy making a scrapbook of the Royal Family.
Some of the children attend Japanese-language classes but I hear Obasan and Uncle whispering that it is unwise to have us go. The RCMP, they are saying, are always looking for signs of disloyalty to Canada. Stephen and I are unconcerned with such worries and life for us is a quiet and pleasant holiday.
Stephen's limp has almost disappeared by late spring. When he runs he sometimes looks like a galloping horse. Once the earth is firm underfoot, the whole mountain is for galloping in, for climbing and for exploring.
Slocan greening in spring is vulnerable as birth, the bright yellow-green turning steadily deeper into shades of blue. Uncle makes a rock garden in the front yard with a tiny stream and waterfall winding around the base to a small pool. At the top of the garden, Stephen digs a hole and plants a flagpole with an oversized Union Jack. He and Uncle work together and the fallen fence is mended. A vegetable garden, flowers, a lawn, and a chicken coop with several chickens appear. Sweet peas climb the wire-covered walls of the chicken coop. More and more, the yard is a miniature of Uncle and Obasan's place on the island.
Beyond the natural stone steps at the back of our yard is the path Uncle makes by which we enter the moist forest and the glade that is speared alive with fiddlehead stems. "Warabi," Uncle calls them. He shows us which ones we are to pick. We carry metal syrup tins, Uncle, Obasan, Stephen, and I, as we forage through the woods in the green mountain light. Beyond a certain point of unfurling the ferns are stringy and inedible, but the crooked asparagus-like stems, not yet ornate with curls, are just right. The green flesh snaps apart with the slightest bend.
Through the seasons, we trace and retrace the woodland mazes, harvesting the wilderness. Dog-eared mushrooms are here and there like hidden treasures, scattered over the spongy earth. Under the canopy, Uncle says, if the mushrooms are white, they are not good. The ones that grow on trees, floppy and dark, are fine. At home they are tested by boiling them with a dime in the pot. The weeds that look like carrots are poisonous and Uncle brings the news from town that several families are ill from eating them. But there are the safe berries—wild strawberries the size of shirt buttons, piercingly sweet, and gooseberries large as marbles.
Underfoot, the mountain floor is a soft covering of pine needles, plant leaves, green growths. We breathe and are stabbed alive by the air, the sap from the trees, the slight metallic smell of cedar and pine. The rain, the warmth bring to bloom the wildflowers that hide beneath the foliage. Everywhere is the mountain's presence. Our bones are made porous.
It's a warm blue day in June 1943, a month after we first attend school in Slocan. Unlike Stephen's school in Vancouver, all the teachers and children in our school are Japanese. The white children in Slocan go to a different school. Two of the children from my class have come to visit. There's Kenji, a boy with thick glasses stuck together with a knob of adhesive tape, and Miyuki, the shy girl who always wears a pretty dress and has shiny black shoes. Her hair is in ringlets that bob up and down like springs. Kenji, in a sweater that comes almost up to his elbows and in pants so tight they hug his legs, looks like a scarecrow leading the way. We start climbing the road toward the old mine and come to the bridge of logs over a stream. A short distance along the stream is a stone ledge beside a tuft of orange water lilies.
Miyuki squeals as she dangles one toe into the creek and jumps away from the shock of cold, her dancing ringlets quivering.
Kenji stabs the moss with a stick and prods at a frayed husk of a pinecone emptied of seeds. A long multi-legged bright red insect moves across the rubble he has made, like a derailed train in search of its tracks. It crawls onto the end of Kenji's stick and mounts steadily in a straight line toward his hands.
"Get off," Kenji shouts. He turns the stick around and the insect crawls back to the other end, leaning out into the air and waving its feelers, as it looks for a toehold.
"Get off!" He flicks the stick like a whip, then whacks it against the stone ledge.
"Don't kill it," Miyuki says in her high tiny voice.
Kenji weighs the matter, then tosses the stick, with the insect still clinging tenaciously, into the stream. It bobs once, then rushes headlong downstream, and we run down following it till we come back to the log bridge.
The insect is still on the stick, twirling in an eddy at the end of the bridge. We abandon it there, a tiny red dot, bobbing and dancing in its whirlpool.
"C’mon," Kenji says, and we follow the road again till we come to the oval stone that marks the begin
ning of a path. We enter a thick army of trees, then a glen and a lookout point called Pluto's Bluff. From here we can see directly down on top of our house. Kenji stands on the edge and tosses a stone high up and over the trees. "See, it'll hit the chicken coop," he says. It's a few seconds before we hear the faint crack of rock hitting rock.
Miyuki, halfway up the path to Minnie's Bluff, is calling us to hurry up. This lookout is so full of trees and bushes we can hardly see the town at all. Then we are on our way again to the last stretch of the two-mile trek and the highest lookout point, Mickey's Bluff.
The entrance to this bluff is a sheer edge of rock with toeholds and an overhanging tree branch, which we grab one at a time, pushing and hauling one another till the three of us stand on the rounded mound of rock as large as a rooftop.
Up and over the mossy rock surface we run to the mountain edge and here we are, suddenly looking down on Lilliput from the top of the world. A dizzying kingdom. Far below us and for miles around are the tiny houses with thin streams of real smoke rising out of toothpick chimneys. The river is a silvery black snake that winds in and out of the woods to the lake. In the distance beyond the lake are the mountain peaks, purple and blue and jagged with snow. The world is as immense as sky and tiny as the pin-dot flowers in the moss.
On this day we stay, playing, arranging stones, watching chipmunks, gathering pinecones and wildflowers. We are lying on our backs, watching the sky in silence, when suddenly Miyuki gasps. "Look!" Her startled voice is like the sudden sharp sound of a twig snapping.
She is pointing excitedly at a sleek gray shadow plummeting to earth like a falling kite, straight down in front of us and below to the trees. We inch as close as we dare to the edge of the bluff and stare down the rocky hillside.
"Must be the King bird," Kenji says in awe. He lies flat on his stomach and leans out over the edge. "It was big, eh?" With his head hanging over the lip of stone and his arms and legs spread apart, he looks like some sky creature that has fallen to earth and landed here in a splat. “That's the one Rough Lock Bill saw, I bet," he says.