Obasan

by Joy Kogawa

  It's the bedbugs and my having to sleep on the table to escape the nightly attack, and the welts over our bodies. And all the swamp bugs and the dust. It’s Obasan uselessly packing all the cracks with rags. And the muddy water from the irrigation ditch which we strain and settle and boil, and the tiny carcasses of water creatures at the bottom of the cup. It’s walking in winter to the reservoir and keeping the hole open with the axe and dragging up the water in pails and lugging it back and sometimes the water spills down your boots and your feet are red and itchy for days. And it's everybody taking a bath in the round galvanized tub, then Obasan washing clothes in the water after and standing outside hanging the clothes in the freezing weather where everything instantly stiffens on the line.

  Or it's standing in the beet field under the maddening sun, standing with my black head a sun trap even though it's covered, and lying down in the ditch, faint, and the nausea in waves and the cold sweat, and getting up and tackling the next row. The whole field is an oven and there's not a tree within walking distance. We are tiny as insects crawling along the grill and there is no protection anywhere. The eyes are lidded against the dust and the air cracks the skin, the lips crack, Stephen's flutes crack and there is no energy to sing anymore anyway.

  It's standing in the field and staring out at the heat waves that waver and shimmer like see-through curtains over the brown clods and over the tiny distant bodies of Stephen and Uncle and Obasan miles away across the field day after day and not even wondering how this has come about.

  There she is, Obasan, wearing Uncle's shirt over a pair of dark baggy trousers, her head covered by a straw hat that is held on by a white cloth tied under her chin. She is moving like a tiny earth cloud over the hard clay clods. Her hoe moves rhythmically up down up down, tiny as a toothpick. And over there, Uncle pauses to straighten his back, his hands on his hips. And Stephen farther behind, so tiny I can barely see him.

  It’s hard, Aunt Emily, with my hoe, the blade getting dull and mud-caked as I slash out the Canada thistle, dandelions, crabgrass, and other nameless non-beet plants, then on my knees, pulling out the extra beets from the cluster, leaving just one to mature, then three hand spans to the next plant, whack whack, and down on my knees again, pull, flick flick, and on to the end of the long long row and the next and the next and it will never be done thinning and weeding and weeding and weeding. It's so hard and so hot that my tear glands burn out.

  And then it's cold. The lumps of clay mud stick on my gum boots and weight my legs and the skin under the boots beneath the knees at the level of the calves grows red and hard and itchy from the flap flap of the boots and the fine hairs on my legs grow coarse there and ugly.

  I mind growing ugly.

  I mind the harvest time and the hands and the wrists bound in rags to keep the wrists from breaking open. I lift the heavy mud-clotted beets out of the ground with the hook like an eagle's beak, thick and heavy as a nail attached to the top of the sugar-beet knife. Thwack. Into the beet and yank from the shoulder till it's out of the ground dragging the surrounding mud with it. Then crack two beets together till most of the mud drops off and splat, the knife slices into the beet scalp and the green top is tossed into one pile, the beet heaved onto another, one more one more one more down the icy line. I cannot tell about this time, Aunt Emily. The body will not tell.

  We are surrounded by a horizon of denim-blue sky with clouds clear as spilled milk that turn pink at sunset. Pink I hear is the colour of llama's milk. I wouldn't know. The clouds are the shape of our new prison walls—untouchable, impersonal, random.

  There are no other people in the entire world. We work together all day. At night we eat and sleep. We hardly talk anymore. The boxes we brought from Slocan are not unpacked. The King George/Queen Elizabeth mugs stay muffled in the Vancouver Daily Province. The cameraphone does not sing. Obasan wraps layers of cloth around her feet and her torn sweater hangs unmended over her sagging dress.

  Down the miles we are obedient as machines in this odd ballet without accompaniment of flute or song.

  "Grinning and happy" and all smiles standing around a pile of beets? That is one telling. It’s not how it was.

  I can't remember when Uncle stopped talking about going back. It may have been the first year after the ghost towns, or the next year, or the year after that.

  In 1948, three years after our exile from our place of exile, I am twelve years old and Stephen is fifteen. We are still here in Granton, Alberta, still here on the Barker farm, attending school except in thinning season or harvest-time.

  “Bar Japs for Another Year from Going Back to B.C." says a newspaper clipping from the Toronto Star, written by Borden Spears.

  Tues. March 16, 1948

  Nearly 20,000 Canadian citizens will be deprived for another year of one of the fundamental rights of citizenship, the House of Commons decreed last night. They are the Canadians of Japanese origin who were expelled from British Columbia in 1941 and are still debarred from returning to their homes.

  Led by Angus MacInnis of Vancouver, CCF members made a vain but valiant effort to have the last restriction on the freedom of Japanese Canadians removed at once. The attempt was eloquently supported by David Croll (Lib. Toronto Spadina) and three Liberals declared themselves in opposition to the government.

  They were branded, however, as theorists, visionary idealists, purists, talkers of academic nonsense, weepers of crocodile tears. By a standing vote, 73 to 23, the House decided that for another year no Japanese Canadian may enter British Columbia without an RCMP permit, and those now in the interior may not return to the coastal area.

  Defenders of the restrictions denied they were motivated by racial considerations. But in nearly four hours of increasingly bitter debate, there was no direct answer to the blunt question posed by Mr. MacInnis. If the national security is no longer in danger, what is the reason for curtailing the freedom of Canadian citizens? There was even, from Tom Reid (Lib. New Westminster), this statement: As long as I have breath in my body I will keep fighting in this House of Commons to see that the heritage which belongs to Canadians should be returned to the white people."

  Maj. Gen. C. R. Pearkes (PC Nanaimo) suggested there would be "crimes of revenge" if the exiles were permitted to return home now. In war, he said, the innocent suffer with the guilty; there was still hatred among the white people of B.C., and he thought the government was wise in giving the old sores another year to heal.

  Another year? Which year should we choose for our healing? Restrictions against us are removed on April Fools' Day 1949. But the "old sores" remain. In time the wounds will close and the scabs drop off the healing skin. Till then, I can read these newspaper clippings, I can tell myself the facts. I can remember since Aunt Emily insists that I must and release the floodgates one by one. I can cry for the flutes that have cracked in the dryness and cry for the people who no longer sing. I can cry for Obasan, who has turned to stone. But what then? Uncle does not rise up and return to his boats. Dead bones do not take on flesh.

  What is done, Aunt Emily, is done, is it not? And no doubt it will all happen again, over and over with different faces and names, variations on the same theme.

  “Nothing but the lowest motives of greed, selfishness, and hatred have been brought forward to defend these disgraceful Orders," the Globe and Mail noted. Greed, selfishness, and hatred remain as constant as the human condition, do they not? Or are you thinking that through lobbying and legislation, speechmaking and storytelling, we can extricate ourselves from our foolish ways? Is there evidence for optimism?

  thirty

  Those years on the Barker farm, my late childhood growing-up days, are sleepwalk years, a time of half dream. There is no word from Mother. The first letter from father tells us that Grandpa Nakane died of a heart attack the day before we left Slocan. The funeral was held before we reached Granton. Later, there is news of an operation from which Father has not been able to recover. The last letter we receive around Christm
as 1949 tells something about a doctor he doesn't trust.

  The sadness and the absence are like a long winter storm, the snow falling in an unrelieved colourlessness that settles and freezes, burying me beneath a growing monochromatic weight. Something dead is happening, like the weeds that are left to bleach and wither in the sun.

  Sometimes in the summer, Stephen and I go to cool off in the main irrigation ditch, which is wider than the ditches along the side of the road. Thistles grow along the bank and we are careful where we walk. The water is always muddy, so brown that we cannot see the submerged parts of our bodies at all. Under the bridge, we are even cooler and we often sit there in the thick silt, hiding while the occasional farm truck rumbles overhead.

  The only other place that is cool is the root cellar, which is an earth-covered mound over a cave-like excavation the length of a garage, angling underground in a slow slope. There are boxes and sacks and piles of potatoes and other vegetables lining the shelves. I cannot stand the odor of decaying potatoes in this damp tomb, but on certain days I am so dizzy from hoeing in the heat that Uncle carries me here, leaving the door open so that I can breathe.

  One time, Uncle squats beside me as I lie on a potato sack, my body drenched in cold perspiration.

  "Itsuka—mata itsuka," he says, rubbing my back. "Someday, someday we will go back."

  On schoolday mornings, Stephen and I wait at the end of the driveway for the yellow school bus to drive us the seven miles to the Granton School. Penny Barker, the farmer's daughter, also waits with us. Penny has a thin face and brown braids and her teeth have metal bands across them. She has pretty dresses that are bought from stores, unlike mine that are made from Obasan's old dresses. Penny never talks with me in school—only when we wait for the bus.

  Sometimes I stand too close to the edge of the ditch and the thistles, even in winter, jab me in the calf. The thistles, it seems to me, are typical of life in the Granton school. From nowhere the sharp stabs come, attacking me for no reason at all. They come at unexpected times, in passing remarks, in glances, in jokes.

  "How come you got such a flat face, Naomi? Steamroller run over ya?"

  Sometimes I feel a prickly sensation at the back of my head and a tiny chill like a needle on my neck. Or the area around my eyes gets stinging hot and I wonder if it shows I'm about to cry, not that I ever do.

  Once Penny, who is in Stephen's class, sidles up to Stephen on the school bus and says, "Come here, blackhead, and let me squeeze you." Stephen doesn't know whether to scowl or laugh.

  "Hyuk hyuk," he says sourly.

  None of the children in the Granton school are from Slocan. There is a boy from Kaslo in Stephen's class who is the home-run king on the ball team. And a few others from other ghost towns—the Takasakis, Sagas, Sonodas. One family, the Utsunomiyas, have been in the area from before the war. There are also several Okinawan families—the Kanashiros and the Tamashiros, who shortened their name to Tamagi. They have been here from the time of the coal mines and the construction of the railroad and the establishment of the North West Mounted Police in Fort McLeod.

  Almost all of us have shortened names—Tak for Takao, Sue for Sumiko, Mary for Mariko. We all hide our long names as well as we can. My books are signed M. Naomi N., or Naomi M.N. If Megumi were the only name I had, I'd be called Meg. Meg Na Kane. Pity the Utsunomiya kids for their long, unspellable, unpronounceable surname. Oots gnome ya. Or the Iwabuchis. The Eye Bushys.

  There is a black-haired Native Indian girl in my class called Annie Black Bear. Once the teacher called her Annie Black by mistake. Annie looked so pleased—throwing a furtive happy swift glance at me.

  One of the first things I notice at the Granton school is that arithmetic is easier and spelling is harder than in Slocan. There are certainly more books in Granton: Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Girl of the Limberlost, The Prince and the Pauper.

  Stephen receives permission to play the piano in the auditorium and every noon hour and recess, and before school begins, he is there alone or with a few girls who stand in the hall outside giggling and listening. Skinny Miss Giesbrecht, who teaches music, lends him her music books and coaches him from time to time. Uncle takes her some vegetables or a loaf of his stone bread every time he comes to town. For two years in a row, 1948 and 1949, Stephen comes in second in the talent show on CJOC Lethbridge radio. All of Granton is proud of Stephen. Especially his teachers. In Miss Langston's grades seven and eight class, I have a hard time living up to his reputation. He was her favorite student. Sometimes I wonder if she is so disappointed in me that she marks me extra hard. Her red X's on my papers are like scratches and wounds.

  “Not like your brother, are you?" she said once, returning a poor paper.

  Thistles, as I say, are typical of my life in Granton and grow everywhere.

  Occasionally, at Thanksgiving, Easter, or Christmas, we drive the seventy-odd miles in the old pickup truck Uncle has bought, across the coulee to the village of Coaldale on Highway 3, between Taber and Lethbridge. Nakayama-sensei was moved there. A number of other people from Slocan are scattered throughout southern Alberta, working on sugar-beet farms like us.

  The kindergarten building in Bayfarm, near Pine Crescent School, was dismantled and shipped by rail to Coaldale in 1946. Uncle and another boatbuilder, Mr. Mototsune from Taber, who is also on a sugar-beet farm, erected the building. It's the only public building from Slocan that remains standing today. Everything else was destroyed.

  Some days, we see Nakayama-sensei in his black suit, riding his bicycle, his short legs pumping along—a plump black dot on the empty road. If we are out in the field, he leans his bike against the side of the house, finds an extra hoe or beet knife, and comes to work beside us. Sometimes Uncle and Nakayama-sensei joke and talk, taking time out at the end of a row with a thermos of tea. At other times, the only sounds are the whacking of the hoes and the trill of a meadowlark.

  thirty-one

  On spring evenings I often go alone to the swamp. It's about a mile from the house, kitty-corner through the fields. To get there the shortest way, I hop across the rows of beets. The cows are always standing around in the weedy mud, their hoof-prints filling with ooze. On the far side of the swamp, there's a clump of spindly bushes and bulrushes like chopsticks or candles with their furry brown tip flames. The only tree here is dead. Its skeleton is a roost for a black-and-white magpie that I often see angling across the sky.

  I squat on the tree's dead roots in the whine of mosquitoes, watching the dragonflies skimming over the water. The longer I sit, the more I see. It's like the puzzle in the comic section of the newspaper where you find faces among the leaves and tree trunks and fences.

  All over the ground the cow-dung saucers bake in the sun like gray pancakes among the thistles and weeds. The dry earth is as cracked and scored as broken pottery.

  The creatures reveal themselves in unexpected places. Water spiders and poppy-seed-size swimming creatures churn at the edges. Yellow-green jelly eggs cling to the tall grasses. Tadpoles wriggle clumsily through the water, their tails churning and undulating like the mosquito larvae that gyrate energetically up to the water's surface. One toad sitting in a cow's hoof-print suddenly claws its tongue to rid itself of a stinging insect it has mistakenly trapped. If I do not move at all the toads and frogs croak and breep rhythmically.

  All along the western horizon the sky is a display of fuchsia flames, and I can see Stephen this evening, a silhouette riding on his bike down the road towards me. He looks like one of the Israelite children moving unharmed through the fiery furnace. I am sitting motionless as the dead tree. Near my foot is a tiny green frog the size of half my thumb. One of its back legs dangles to the side.

  "Sh,” I whisper to Stephen as he lays his bike down at the side of the road and hops the ditch. There is a swift plip plip of water as frogs and toads disappear to safety. At my foot, the green frog's chin neck palpitates rapidly and it crawl-hops under my leg. I cup my hands over i
t, lifting my thumb for Stephen to peer in.

  "Leg's broken," I say to him.

  "It'll give you warts.''

  "It will not."

  The swamp is as still now as an orchestra poised waiting for a signal from the conductor. It listens to us.

  Stephen squats beside me and seems about to say something several times but stops. He looks at me, then off in the distance, frowning.

  "Don't move," I whisper as the swamp sounds begin again.

  He grinds some ants to death under his heel and kicks at the tree root where the ant mound is.

  "C'mon home,'" he says at last.

  "What for?"

  He swats at a mosquito. "Nakayama's here."

  “So?”

  "So c’mon home."

  The frog slithers and pushes its way out of my hands and I catch it, almost crushing it.

  "C’mon," Stephen repeats. He shakes his head at the mosquitoes diving around his ears.

  Reluctantly, I get up and we walk, Stephen propelling his bike by one hand on the seat. The last of the sun's rays are focused on an overhang of frayed clouds.

  "Do you think the frog'll live?" I ask.

  All the way home Stephen has nothing to say.

  "Tad" is what I think I’ll call my frog—short for Tadpole or Tadashi, my father's name. There was a fairy tale I read in Slocan about a frog who became a prince. Hah! Well, what, after all, might not be possible? Tad is a frog prince. Prince Tadashi. He wears a dark green suit, not the rough green army garb, but a smooth suit, silky and cool as leaves. He is from the mountains. Certainly not from Granton. He was hidden under the tree roots waiting for me, a messenger from my father.