by Joy Kogawa
The Yellow Peril is a Somerville Game, Made in Canada. It was given to Stephen at Christmas. On the red-and-blue box cover is a picture of soldiers with bayonets and fists raised high looking out over a sea full of burning ships and a sky full of planes. A game about war. Over a map of Japan are the words:
The game that shows how
a few brave defenders
can withstand a very
great number of enemies.
There are fifty small yellow pawns inside and three big blue checker kings. To be yellow in the Yellow Peril game is to be weak and small. Yellow is to be chicken. I am not yellow. I will not cry however much this nurse yanks my hair.
When the yellow chicks grow up they turn white. Chicken Little is a large Yellow Peril puff. One time Uncle stepped on a baby chick. One time, I remember, a white hen pecked yellow chicks to death, to death in our backyard.
There it is. Death again. Death means stop.
All the chickens in the chicken coop, dim-witted pinbrains though they are, know about it. Every day, the plump white lumps are in the chicken yard, scratching with their stick legs and clucking and barkling together. If anything goes overhead—a cloud, an airplane, the King bird—they all seem to be connected to one another like a string of Christmas-tree lights. Their orange eyes are in unison, and each head is crooked at an angle watching the overshadowing death. They stop for a moment, then carry on as death passes by. A little passover several times a day. Sensei said in church, the Death angel passes over at Passover.
Hospitals are places where Death visits. But Death comes to the world in many unexpected places.
There is that day on the way to school. When was it? Just a week ago?
The long walk from Slocan to school in Bayfarm is by way of a path through a heavily wooded forest, past some houses and the white house where the missionaries live, and onto the highway to Lemon Creek. The road curves up in a long slow slope near Bayfarm.
Stephen and I are walking to school that death day, my schoolbag slung over my shoulder, his strapped to his back. In my bag are two new scribblers, one with a picture of a dog and one with two little girls. I have pencils, wax crayons, scissors, a cube eraser, all new in a new pencil case, and my lunch is in a rectangular metal lunch box with a diagonal slot in the lid for a small pair of ivory chopsticks. My lunch that Obasan made is two moist and sticky rice balls with a salty red plum in the center of each, a boiled egg to the side with a tight square of lightly boiled greens. Stephen has peanut-butter sandwiches, an apple, and a thermos of soup. My schoolbag thumps against my hips as we walk.
We have just come out of the patch of woods near the missionaries' place when I see two big boys, Percy Bower and another boy, running down the road. Stephen sees them too and freezes briefly.
“Don't notice," he whispers, barely moving his mouth.
Percy has a handful of stones and throws them down the road. When he sees us, he calls out, “Hey, Gimpy, where ya goin'?"
"Takin' yer girlfriend to school?" the other boy shouts.
They catch up to us and begin dancing in front of Stephen, jabbing him on the shoulder. "Fight, Jap. Fight!"
Stephen stands still as a stone. One of his hands is on the strap of his backpack ready to take it off.
“C’mon ya gimpy Jap!"
Stephen hands me his lunch box. I step backward, wanting to run away, wanting to stay with Stephen. He is taking his schoolbag off when we hear one of the missionaries shouting at us. She is a thin woman with light brown hair. I see her at Sunday school.
"Here here!" The voice is sharp, like an axe chopping logs into kindling. She is standing at the side of the house, her hands on her hips, her feet apart.
The boys flee, sprinting down the road. Stephen, with his schoolbag dangling from one shoulder, begins walking rapidly in the opposite direction towards Bayfarm. I catch up to him and hand him his lunch box.
We walk together rapidly and in silence, past the Doukhobor store and across the road to the open field. In the middle of the field stands the school and, behind the school, the rows and rows of small wood huts, each with its stack of wood—round logs, logs chopped in quarters, neat stacks of kindling wood. Miyuki's place is hidden from view by the school. All the houses are the same—fourteen feet wide and twenty-eight feet long. Two families live in each house. Laundry hangs from lines strung on poles. Wooden sidewalks extend out short distances from doorways to outhouses, and around gardens.
"Miyuki's sister likes you,” I say to Stephen.
“Hah!” Stephen snorts.
Sometimes, instead of staying at school to eat lunch, I go to Miyuki's house. We sit on a bench by a table that takes up almost all the room. On the other side of a partition is a family with three children. We can all hear each other talking. Miyuki's mother gives me some pickles and a plate of lightly fried vegetable okazu to eat with my rice balls. After the meal she usually hands me a wet cloth to wipe the sticky film of rice off my fingertips.
I am telling Stephen about Miyuki's sister when I turn and see that Stephen is no longer walking beside me. We are about halfway into the open field. I turn around and Stephen is standing still and staring past me.
Not far from school, and directly in the line of our walk, is a cluster of boys. It is something about the way they stand there—not moving. Not making a sound.
"C’mon, Steef," I say, feeling curious.
Stephen is shifting back and forth uncomfortably, then turns abruptly and walks away from me.
There are six boys altogether, I glance down as I approach them. The circle is tight and their heads are bent, the bodies tense. I peer through a space between two of the boys. At first all that I can see are the hands and the white feathers fluttering on the ground. One boy suddenly breaks and runs from the circle.
"Hey, Jiro," the boy closest to me shouts after him. None of the others move. I am unable either to move or to avert my eyes.
I recognize two of the boys standing. Tak and Seigo are big boys in grade five. Danny, a small boy in Stephen's class, is kneeling on the ground. Danny is tough. His clothes are always shabbier than everyone else's. His socks hang over his boots or sometimes he has no socks at all.
The boy who is doing the killing is Sho, a shiny-faced boy in grade five, with slippery smooth skin and sharp round eyes.
A hole about the size of both my fists is scooped out of the ground. The hen's neck is held over the hole. Danny grips the white body. Sho holds the head, pulling it taut. Blood drips like a slow nosebleed into the hole. The chicken's body quivers and jerks, its feet clutching and trembling.
"Got to make it suffer," Sho says. He is sitting on his haunches and his hand squeezes the chicken's tiny head. Its beak is open, but there is no sound. The pocketknife is on the ground beside him, the blade smeared red. Sho's eyes are like the pocketknife, straight, bright, sharp.
“Is it dead yet?" I ask. My question is a prayer. I am paralyzed.
The boys ignore me. I wait, attending the chicken's quivering, the plump body pulsing and beating like a disembodied heart. As long as the moving continues, I wait. Sho picks up the knife and cuts into the neck wound. The chicken jerks and Danny loses his grip. It lurches away and flaps drunkenly over the field. Sho jumps up and runs after the chicken as it leaps and flutters high in the air, then comes crashing down to the ground, one wing slapping and dragging on the earth. He grabs the chicken by the wing, clutching its body against his shirt, its feet stick straight out. The wings flap wildly as Sho grabs the feet. His arm jerks high up over his head and the air stirs even where I stand. The chicken's neck gyrates and it splatters the ground and Sho's face and shirt with its dripping blood. There is no sound from the chicken except a strange squeaking noise from the wings as if they are metal hinges.
“Kill it, Sho."
Although the air is raining with feathers and sudden red splatterings, there is a terrible stillness and soundlessness as if the whole earth cannot contain the chicken's dying. Over and over
, like a kite caught in a sudden gust, it plunges.
"Kill it, Sho.”
Danny kneels on the ground, his fist clutching the knife. From across the field, I can hear the sound of the school bell and the shouts of the children as they run to their places. Sho begins to run, swinging the bleeding struggling chicken as he goes. I run too, following the boys across the field to the schoolyard, where a loudspeaker is summoning us. We are late. The singing is already beginning.
0 Canada, our home and native land
True patriot love in all thy sons command
With glowing hearts we see thee rise
The true north, strong and free…
We scuttle into place like insects under the floorboards. I am the last child in the single file of children in my class, standing to the left of the main wooden sidewalk in front of the wide stairs. The stairs lead to the center of the long covered platform like a hall connecting the two buildings of Pine Crescent School.
0 Canada, glorious and free
0 Canada, we stand on guard for thee
Kenji is in the row ahead of me, behind a girl called Hatsumi, and Miyuki is in front of her. When the principal, Mr. Tsuji, starts to talk, we stand with our hands straight down our sides.
"Good morning, boys and girls," he says.
"Good morning, Mr. Tsuji,” we reply in unison. I am barely listening to what Mr. Tsuji is saying. From behind the school, I can see Sho running, then slowing to a walk as we start our school song.
Slocan, get on your toes
We are as everyone knows
The school with spirit high!
We all do our best
And never never rest
Till we with triumph cry….
I am wondering where he left the chicken and if it is dead at last. The teacher in front is waving her arms vigorously and urging us to sing. All her gestures are as intense and jerky as a hen's and she flutters and broods and clucks over us.
Work with all your might
Come on, rise up, and fight
And never give up hope
The banner we will hold with pride
As to victory we stride.
Sho is at the end of his line and his smooth face is streaked. His shirt sleeve has a red blotch on it and a small pocketknife dangles from a string tied to a belt loop. He is not singing. I don't sing either.
“Once more," Mr. Tsuji says, “Slocan, get on your toes.…"
I hate school. I hate running the gauntlet of white kids in the woods close to home. I hate, now, walking through the field where the chicken was killed. And I hate walking past the outhouse where the kitten died. At least it should be dead now.
That other death place by the skating rink is close to where the girl with white hair lives. Her hair is so white and fine that it flies around her like a cloud. Her eyebrows are white too. Whenever she sees me, her eyes grow narrow, one shoulder rises slightly, her nostrils widen, and she turns her head away, as if she has suddenly smelled something bad.
One Thursday after school, I am walking down the path close to the skating rink and can hear a kitten mewing. The girl with white hair is standing by the outhouse at the edge of the rink.
"You threw my kitten down there," she says.
I stand still listening. The voice is weak—a faint steady mewing.
“Go in there and get her for me," she orders,
"I didn't do it," I say.
“You did too.''
"I didn't."
“Did.”
"Didn't."
Her eyes grow small and beady. Two bullets. She thrusts her chin out and lunges with her foot as if she is about to rush at me. I run home.
The next morning on the way to school, there is no sound from the outhouse, but on the way home, the kitten is mewing again. No one is nearby. I stand and wait. I wait till long after the sun goes behind the mountain. No one comes to help. Even the white-haired girl does not come by.
It all becomes part of my hospital dream. The kitten cries day after day, not quite dead, unable to climb out and trapped in the outhouse. The maggots are crawling in its eyes and mouth. Its fur is covered in slime and feces. Chickens with their heads half off flap and swing upside down in midair. The baby in the dream has fried-egg eyes and his excrement is soft and yellow as corn mush. His head is covered with an oatmeal scab, under which his scalp is a wet wound. The doctor in the dream is angry and British. His three uncomely children all take aspirins to fight their headaches. The nurse combs and combs my hair, the sharp teeth scraping the top of my head.
twenty-three
When I come home from the hospital, Nomura-obasan is no longer here. The quilt of blue and white squares on her cot is strangely straight and orderly, as if a hill had suddenly been flattened into a farmer's field. She's moved, Obasan tells me, back to her daughter's family in town. For a few days, I sleep in Nomura-obasan's bed, resting and reading and rereading two books so often I almost memorize them. One is about a little girl called Heidi who lives in the mountains with her grandfather and another is a book called Little Men. I keep them at the head of the bed on the stool where Nomura-obasan used to have her knitting and her pills.
The rest of that summer in Slocan, the fall and winter of 1943, and all the following year are a crowded collage of memories—Sunday-school outings, Christmas concerts, sports days, hikes, report cards, letters from Aunt Emily and Father, the arrival of a piano in the crowded room where Uncle and Obasan sleep.
On Saturdays, Stephen and I often stand in the long long line of children at the Green Light Café near the Orange Hall for an ice-cream cone each. Or we walk down the main street, peering in at the women trying the new cold permanent wave at Ikeda's Beauty Salon, beside the bathhouse the carpenters made. In the evenings we read at the kitchen table by the light of the gas lamp, poring over every word in the mimeographed school paper, the Pine Crescent Breeze. There's also the regular appearance of the Vancouver Daily Province with war stories that Stephen reads. When Germany surrenders he tacks the headline page over his bed. I am more interested in the lives of Little Orphan Annie, Mandrake the Magician, Moon Mullins, the Gumps, the Katzenjammer Kids, Myrtle with her black pigtails sticking out the sides of her wide-brimmed hat. My days and weeks are peopled with creatures of flesh and storybook and comic strip.
In Bayfarm, in Slocan, the community flourishes with stores, crafts, gardens, and homegrown enterprise: Sakamoto Tailors, Gardiner General Merchant, Nose Shoe Hospital, Slocan Barber T. Kuwahara Prop., Tahara's Barber Shop, Slocan Dress Shop, T. Shorthouse Meat Market, Tokyo Sobaya for Chinese noodles, Tak Toyota's photo studio, Shigeta watch repair, Kasubuchi dressmaker, Ed Clough groceries. The ghost town is alive and kicking like Ezekiel's resurrected valley of bones, the foot bones connected to the ankle bones, the ankle bones connected to the leg bones, and all them bones, them bones, jitterbugging in the Odd Fellows Hall, skating in the rinks, hiking and running up and down the mountainsides and the streets and paths of Slocan. There are craftsmen carving ornaments and utensils from tree stumps, roots, and driftwood, making basins, bins, spoons, flower stands, bowls; building wooden flumes, bathhouses, meeting halls. There are times for resourceful hands to be busy with survival tasks— pickling, preserving, gardening, drying and smoking food. There are times to relax and talk, to visit, to worship, to commune.
One place that we meet regularly is the public bathhouse. Every few evenings or late afternoons we walk the half mile to town with our basins and bars of soap and washcloths. Sometimes we go just before supper, when the place is not too crowded, but more often we go in the early evening. Those who arrive late are likely to find the bath less hot and less clean.
The bath is a place of deep bone warmth and rest. It is always filled with a slow steamy chatter from women and girls and babies. It smells of wet cloth and wet wood and wet skin. We are one flesh, one family, washing each other or submerged in the hot water, half awake, half asleep. The bath times are like a hazy happy dream except for the
one occasion that remains in my memory like an unsightly billboard on an otherwise pleasant scene.
One evening in the late spring of 1945, Obasan and I are much later than usual for the bath. After supper, she and I are removing the tiny round black dots, hard as BB shot, that are found in the sack of white rice we have recently bought. She dips a cup into the sack and pours the rice onto our trays, the sound like a sudden spattering of hail against the window. She is much faster than I am, spreading the pile to a thin layer, then placing her index finger on a black dot or an occasional stone and pushing it swiftly off the tray. When our trays only contain the white grains, we pour them into a square tin between us. We are still at work when Uncle and Stephen return from their bath.
"Mada?" Uncle asks in surprise. “Are you still at work? Late, is it not?"
Obasan murmurs agreement, but she continues doing a few more trays.
When we are finished, we finally set off for the bathhouse. It is the latest that we have ever gone. We arrive and push open the swinging door as some older girls are leaving, their skin still glowing and hair damp. It is so late there are hardly any people left in the bath. The shelves above the long bench, along the back wall, usually piled high with neat bundles of clothes, are surprisingly bare. In front of the bench area is the slatted floor with its square wooden basins piled up in the corner. The bath is about as large as two double beds.
I go to the bench and begin to remove my clothes beside a thin old woman whose back is to me. I am slipping out of my shoes and socks when the woman turns around. Her breasts are loose flaps of skin that hang flat and long like deflated balloons.
"Kon-ban-wa, good evening," says Nomura-obasan's familiar voice. She holds her washcloth over her abdomen with one hand and her other hand covers her mouth. Her false teeth are in her basin beside her. She bows to Obasan, who has put our basins onto the washing area.
"Tonight, such lateness," Nomura-obasan says. “The bath will be lukewarm." When she talks without her teeth, she sounds as if she is chewing her words.