by Joy Kogawa
Kenji has been bragging for days that he sat in Rough Lock Bill's cabin. I don't believe Kenji. Stephen told me Rough Lock Bill yells at kids if they come too close. His cabin is right near the beach where Stephen and I play and I have never seen him close up.
Although we keep staring into the trees, the shape does not re-emerge. On the way back down the mountain, Kenji tells us that Rough Lock Bill saw the King bird one day near an old gold mine.
"If you tell lies," Kenji says, "the King bird cuts your tongue in half and you can't talk. That's what it did to the birds. All they can say now is 'twit twit.’ Betcha that was the King bird, eh, Nomi? Gonna come after you if you tell lies."
"Sh," I whisper to Kenji. I am listening to the sound of a bird in the trees that is fluttering and darting ahead of us down the road. The small chirp is like part of a trill that was cut off too soon. Somehow it reminds me of musicians tuning up at the outdoor theater in the dusk at Stanley Park. Perhaps, I am thinking, the King bird was a conductor that called all the birds together to some auditorium in the woods where people couldn't go. Perhaps they sang together, a great bird choir, each bird adding its part to the melody, till some catastrophe happened and the songs disappeared into chirps and tweets.
By the time we get home, it's late afternoon. The long shadow is like a giant wing, a mountainous King bird hovering over us, listening to our whispers and stories, alert for lies. Is it at midnight the King bird will descend to cut off our tongues? Which lies, I wonder as I fall asleep, has the King bird overheard today? In the night, I dream of a red red bird, tiny as an insect, trapped in a whirling well.
twenty-one
The following week Kenji is with me again. We have come through the woods to the lake. The pathway here is well worn, like Rough Lock Bill's porch floor where the rocking chair has worn a smooth groove—well-worn like his socks, through which his big toe protrudes dark as a walnut.
This, of course, cannot be seen from where we are playing in a corner of the beach. Beside us is the rocky cliff and the tortuous single-lane road which snakes its way to the New Denver hospital. Stephen told me Father and Grandpa Nakane are there. But the way is too far, far too far, for our walking.
It's a calm summer day. The lap lap of the waves against the shore is Obasan's slippers slapping against the soles of her feet. Sluff whoosh. Sluff whoosh.
Kenji is paddling around on a log raft he found grounded half in and half out of the water. I would like to go with him but Uncle says I must not go on rafts. When he jumps off, his wobbly glasses bounce diagonally so that one eye is suddenly naked and surprisingly small. He straightens the elastic band on the back of his head that keeps his glasses snug, and the band breaks, making his glasses fall across his cheeks.
I am wearing my green-and-white cotton-knit bathing suit with a string net bib. At my feet is a moist sand village, the slanting roofed houses packed firm and peaked by two flat pieces of wood. Feathery tops of brome grass gone to seed are drooping trees lining the white pebble sidewalks. There are twig chimneys, twig bridges, twig people, one plump twig dog with three legs and no head.
The sun is a warmth against the coolness of the water's tickle along the quiet sand. We are absorbed in our play and do not see the man standing behind us watching.
I am startled when Kenji suddenly leaps up and calls, “Hi, Rough Lock."
The first things I see are his feet in a pair of sand slippers. One big toe sticks out through a hole in his sock. He is a thin man, skinny as a tree, his face grooved like tree bark. His arm is a knobbly branch darker than mine. His hair is scraggly and covers his head like the seaweed on Vancouver beaches draped on the rocks. I have never seen him close up before.
"Whatcher name?" he asks me.
I stare up at him, then down at the village.
"Can't talk, eh? King bird got your tongue?" He lifts his eyebrows and nods knowingly. His Adam's apple is a lump in his dark wrinkled neck. I feel an urge to reach out and touch it—pluck it from his throat.
"Well, Ken, what's your friend's name?"
"Naomi," Kenji says.
"Can't hear you. Speak up." The man's tone of voice is neither angry nor kind.
"Naomi," Kenji blurts.
"Here," the man says, handing me a stick. "Print me your name. Can you print?"
I brush the wet sand off my hands and take the stick. NAOMI, I print in large letters in the sand.
He kneels beside me, reading. "Aha, Na-o-mi. That right? Can you read?" He prints BILL with his forefinger, "Rough Lock," he says, "my name's Rough Lock Bill. And what's this?" He smooths the sand with one brown hand and prints a large SLOCAN.
I can read but I don't answer.
"How old are you?"
"She's seven," Kenji says.
"Can't read. Can't talk. What's the good of you, eh? Look. SLOCAN." He sits down on the sand in his dungarees and stares out over the water, tapping his stick in the sand. "You from Vancouver?"
I nod.
"Big city." He shakes his head. "All that cement [“see-ment”, he says] addles the brain."
He jabs his finger in the sand. "This here's the best place there is.”
He scoops a handful of sand and lets it trickle into a pointed mound. Then another and another. Three sand hills. Three small pyramids. "What have I got here, eh, Ken?" In front of the three hills he has dug a well, the walls of damp sand patted firmly into a bowl shape. "Them's mountains," he says, indicating his mounds. "Lake here, and three mountains."
He picks up several twig people from our sand village and puts them in a cluster at the base of one mountain. "These," he says, "are people. And this"—he points to the hole again —"lake. Wanna hear a story?"
"Sure," Kenji says, flopping on his stomach and resting his chin in his hands, his elbows on the sand.
Rough Lock cleans off a brome grass tree and shoves it in between two teeth at the side of his mouth. As he talks, the grass moves back and forth like a flag. ''Never met a kid didn't like stories. Red skin, yellow skin, white skin, any skin." He puts his brown leathery, arm beside Kenji's pale one. "Don't make sense, do it, all this fuss about skin?"
"Nope," he says when we don't answer, "It sure don't, Rough Lock."
He picks up one of the sticks and begins, "Well, this here is an Indian brave." He marches it slowly around the base of the sand mountain and in between where the mounds meet, as he talks. "Long time ago these people were dying. All these people here, don't know what it was. Smallpox maybe. Tribe wars. Starvation. Maybe it was a hex, who knows? But there's always a few left when something like that happens. And this Brave, he set out to find a place. A good place with lots of good food—deer, fish, berries. Know where that was?"
"Where?" Kenji asks.
"Well, I tell ya, it took him a long time to get here. But he knew it when he saw it. This right here. Right here." He waves his arm, indicating the lake and the beach. "So he goes all the way back to where his people are, back past these mountains, and he says to them, ‘If you go slow, you can go.’ So off we go, these few here, some so weak they have to be carried. Took all of them together—how long? Months? A year? 'If you go slow,' he says, 'you can go. Slow can go. Slow can go.' Like a train chugging across the mountains."
Kenji is helping him march the stick people around and around the mountains till they come to the edge of the sand-hole lake. ''We call it Slocan now. Real name is Slow-can-go. When my Granddad came, there was a whole tribe here." He points a stick at his cabin. "Right there was the chief's tepee. But last I saw—one old guy up past the mine—be dead now probably."
He spits out the brome grass and grins at me.
"Don't talk much, do ya?" he says as he flattens his mountains, "Like that old fella up past the mine. Never said a word, almost like a mute, he was. But I heard him chirping one time just like a bird. Don't you never talk?"
I scuff the sand with the heels of my feet. "I can talk."
Rough Lock grunts. "I tell ya, the old man there could talk t
o the birds as if he was one of them. One time he had the whole forest singing so loud you'd think there was a hootenanny up there."
"We saw the King bird," Kenji says.
"Say, you don't say," Rough Lock says, scratching his head. He shades his eyes with his hands and looks up at the mountains. "See how quiet it is? A whole mountain full of birds and not a peep out of 'em. Used to be a time there'd be music in the morning—enough to drive you deaf ["deef”, he says] just sitting here."
Rough Lock Bill shakes his head slowly, pushing his lips down at the corners. "Birds could all talk once. Bird language. Now all they can say is their own names. That's all. Can't say any more than their names. Just like some people. Specially in the city, eh? Me, me, me." He jabs his chest with his thumb and grunts. "But smart people don't talk too much. Redskins know that. The King bird warned them a long time ago."
He sits back on his haunches, shaking his head. "Rough Lock, ya talks too much." He mutters something I don't understand, then stands up slowly and walks back towards his cabin.
Kenji and I watch him till he disappears briefly, then reappears on his porch. We can see him rocking in his rocking chair, his head bobbing steadily as driftwood on the waves.
"I told ya," Kenji says. He jumps up and runs back into the water, pushing his log raft out till the water reaches the level of his short tight pant legs.
"Come on, Nomi," he calls, prodding a pole into the sandy lake bottom to steady the raft.
My toes curl against the foamy fringe of spittle and the cool shock of the water's lip.
"Come on. I won't go far."
I have never gone in past my buttocks.
"Like this," Kenji says, standing astride in the middle and pushing the raft close to shore. It sinks and touches bottom, wobbling unsteadily, as I climb on. I kneel behind him.
"Okay," he says as he leans into the pole and the raft lurches out over the surface. The water is clear and the sand at the bottom is ribbed in smooth rills. Briefly there is the cool gray darting of a fish beneath us and countless tiny fish glide past like one shadow. I stretch out, resting my chin in my hands, watching the water shadows and the patterns of cloud and sky reflected in the lake. I dangle my hand in the water, making a wake within the wake of the raft. As we push deeper, there is a sudden change in the temperature of the water. When I look up, the shoreline is farther away than I have ever seen. I cannot locate the sand village at all.
"It's too far here, Kenji. Let's go back."
"Okay, just one more shove," Kenji says. His pole is about five feet long and easily reaches the sandy bottom. His hands are about two-thirds up the pole and he leans back like a man with a harpoon, then forward, plunging the pole deep. One lunge, and—splash!—the pole torpedoes out of his hands as Kenji tumbles sideways, one leg raised high. He falls with a splat into the water. A cold spray spatters my back and the raft jerks and tilts, angling up like a seesaw. I clutch the edges of the bobbing raft, my whole body suddenly tense as a cat ready to spring. Several feet away, the pole springs to the surface. In the splutter of waves, Kenji's head reemerges, his bent glasses dangling from one ear.
I rise slowly on my hands and knees. Kenji grabs his glasses and clamps them between his teeth like a dog. The water around us is sharply dark and the bottom is no longer visible. A drop-off. He jerks the water off his head and paddles with kicks and splashes to the beach. Closer to shore, he stands up in the water, turning to face me.
"Jump!" he shouts.
"I can't! I can't swim!"
He holds his hands up to the sides of his head as if he cannot see. Then slowly he steps backward till he is out of the water.
I stare down into the black hole and back to where Kenji is standing, his glasses in his fist. His hands are clenched and his arms are out to the side stiff as poles.
I am engulfed by knowing. He will not help. He does not know how to help. He turns suddenly and flees down the beach, disappearing into the woods. I know he will not return. He will tell no one.
The raft drifts, barely moving in the stillness. I must decide quickly quickly what I am to do. Last month a boy drowned in the lake. Farther out the lake goes on forever. I will be utterly lost. Perhaps I can swim. I have watched the others. I must leap now, without hesitating, before I drift farther.
There is a cold sickening impulse and then I jump.
The water is a shock spurting into the cavities of my head. I fight the panic and urge my legs to churn against the enclosing weight. My toes scrape a sharp edge. With all my gathered strength, I push and claw and with a gasp my head is above water. I choke with air and water and a heavy salt blood mucus taste. I am overcome with dizziness. I cannot tell which direction the beach is, where the raft is, where the nearest point of safety is. Sky and lake swirl as I gasp and swallow. From somewhere in my body, a sound comes out intended as a cry—but deep and guttural like the growl of an animal. Again and again I am plunged and twirled in the frantic dizziness.
Then, as through a wavering tunnel, there is something pulling me along, through the water, slow as a courtly dance. I am hanging in a whiteness, limp as laundry on a line. Eventually there is the sound of a steady slap somewhere in the distance beyond the numbness that surrounds me.
Suddenly my ears clear and I am aware that I am dangling in half and the sound of pounding is a steady whack on my back. With the pounding is a dull unbeatable weight and a roaring sound.
"Okay, okay, I gotcha," a man's voice is saying.
Between gasps, I am breathing, I am breathing and I know I am safe. Phlegm and water gush from my mouth and nose.
Eventually I am placed on my stomach on the sand, my head turned sideways on a cloth surface.
"Okay now, hey?"
I lie, exhausted and cold with spasms of shivering, the blood a taste in my nostrils. When I open my eyes at last, it is to a red-and-blue-checkered flannel shirt. Rough Lock Bill is kneeling beside me. There is a smooth groove beside his rocking chair. I attempt to move but my arms are weak. My chest heaves and I hear whimpering and a hacking sob that seems to be coming from within. I curl my knees up to my chest. In the effort, more water and phlegm gush from my nostrils and mouth, covering the shirt.
"‘At's it," Rough Lock says. He is peering at me, his face close to mine. My cheek is pressed into some granular chunks of sand in the shirt. I wipe my nose on the sleeve and close my eyes again.
twenty-two
I am in a hospital. Father is in a hospital. A chicken is in a hospital. Father is a chicken is a dream that I am in a hospital where my neck and chin are covered with a thick red stubble of hair and I am reading the careful table of contents of a book that has no contents.
When I waken fully at last, I am in the Slocan hospital and a nurse is standing beside me smiling. I have been asleep, it seems, forever. Vaguely I remember Rough Lock carrying me here. I also remember Obasan's hand rubbing my back. The nurse starts to comb my tangled hair, pulling so that the roots clinging to the scalp strain the surface of the skin.
"Does it hurt?" she asks me.
"No," I reply. The weeds in the garden do not moan when they are plucked from the skin of the earth. Nor do the trees cry out at their fierce combing as they lie uprooted by the roadside. Rapunzel's long ladder of hair could bear the weight of prince or witch. I can endure this nurse's hands yanking at the knots in the thick black tangles.
The beds are as close together as the desks in the schoolroom where we are jammed two to a seat. If I lean out, I can almost touch the bed of the woman beside me, who sits up washing her face in a basin, cupping the water in her hands and rubbing her face up and down, her eyes squeezed shut. The heads of the beds are against a windowed wall and the feet point to the door and the hospital corridor.
Obasan has brought me my blue Highroads to Reading, Book Two, with the bright orange lettering and the happiness inside.
Minnie and Winnie slept in a shell;
Sleep, little ladies! And they slept well.
The
fairies, white-gowned with white-veined wings, sleep wispy as smoke in a blue shell, and the woman in the next bed sleeps, her mouth open, and all the others in the room also sleep and sleep, and Father, I was told, is in a hospital too with Grandpa Nakane in New Denver and are they also sleeping in a room full of people like this?
I am in a grade-two reader full of fairies, sitting in the forest very still and waiting for one fairy tiny as an insect to come flying through the tall grasses and lead me down to the moss-covered door on the forest floor that opens to the tunnel leading to the place where my mother and father are hiding.
What does it mean? What can it mean? Why do they not come?
"Daddy is sick, Nomi," Stephen said.
“When will he come home?"
“I don't know. Maybe never.''
“Never? Is he going to die?"
The kids in school said that when old Honma-san died in Bayfarm, there was a ball of fire that came out of the house and then moved off up the mountain. The kids know about the place by the mine road where Grandma Nakane was cremated.
The nurse is never going to be finished with my hair. I am quite capable of combing it myself. Why is this spectacle being made of me? If I cry now while I sit on this bed, all the people will turn and look.
“It's old people who die, isn't it, Stephen?"
"Yes.”
"Daddy won't die.''
“Of course not."
“And Mommy?"
Obasan has also brought me a thin book with a picture of animals in it called Little Tales for little Folk. There is an oversized baby chick called "Chicken Little" standing on the front cover.
What is this thing about chickens? When they are babies, they are yellow. Yellow like daffodils. Like Goldilocks' yellow hair. Like the yellow Easter chicks I lost somewhere. Yellow like the yellow pawns in the Yellow Peril game.