The Year of Counting Souls

by Wallace, Michael

  For a long moment Sammy watched his father undetected. Father was a small, thin man with a mustache and a pinched face. With his bowler, his dark suit, and his eyeglasses, he looked like an accountant. Father’s family had been from the samurai class before the Meiji Restoration set Japan on the course to modernization, but there was nothing of the warrior in his appearance. Sammy didn’t have it, either. He’d noted that glumly many times looking in the mirror as his face matured in a not very samurai-like direction.

  “Look!” Yoshi said. “It’s Father. What is he doing here?”

  “Looking for us, obviously.” Sammy grinned. “Maybe he wants us to paint the torii gate, too.”

  Yoshi’s face crumpled into a scowl. Sammy now studied his brother, suddenly seeing a resemblance with pictures of Grandfather in his army uniform. Wait, was it possible that Yoshi would turn out to have the samurai face?

  Father at last noticed the two boys, who rose to their feet, obedient and reluctant at the same time. They grabbed their towels and surfboards and made their way across the sand. From Father’s rigid posture and furrowed brow, it seemed as though he was angry. But why? He’d known they were going to surf before doing their work on the shrine.

  Father spoke to them in Japanese. His tone was stiff and flat. “Sachihiro, Yoshiko. You will both get dressed and come with me, please.”

  Sammy and Yoshi exchanged looks. After changing in one of the beach cabanas, they hoisted their heavy wooden surfboards over their shoulders and followed their father down Kalakaua Avenue. It was a long walk to the quiet residential street where they lived, and there was a streetcar that could have dropped them off two blocks from home, but the conductors yelled at them if they tried to enter carrying their nine-foot boards.

  Father said nothing the entire time, only walked with his hands clasped behind his back, studying the sidewalk in front of them. Every once in a while, a hand went to the breast pocket of his jacket, where he tugged at a piece of paper, though he never actually pulled it out. By the time he unlatched the gate and they entered the small courtyard in front of the house, Sammy was more confused than ever about his father’s strange mood.

  The brothers leaned their surfboards against the inside of the fence next to the gate and set their bundled towels and bathing suits on the stairs to the house, then joined their father by the purification font. Sammy thought the trickle of water from the bamboo pipe into the bucket was a mellow, soothing sound. His brother always said it sounded like someone pissing.

  Using the scooper, Father washed his hands, swished water in his mouth to cleanse it, then rinsed the handle of the scooper before waiting for his two sons to do the same. When all had washed, they made their way to the small shrine in the corner of the yard, where they removed their shoes before approaching to pray. All the while, Yoshi kept rolling his eyes when Father wasn’t looking.

  Sammy didn’t have time for it. He was worried. Something was wrong.

  “Boys,” Father said in a low voice. “Your mother doesn’t know anything of what I am about to tell you. She is so delicate now, and her nerves won’t take it. For the time being, this must stay between the three of us.”

  His hand went into his breast pocket again. This time Sammy caught a glimpse of the top of a piece of paper, and the familiar letters of “Western Union” across the top, and he began to guess what had left Father agitated. A telegram had come from Japan with news. Bad news.

  “What is it, Father?” he asked.

  “Your brothers. You know they were serving in Manchuria.”

  Brothers. Not brother, but brothers.

  “Did they—?” Sammy asked. “Are they—?”

  His father answered with a jisei from Bashō, a death poem, written not for himself, but for a poet and friend he was mourning.

  Move the gravemound

  My wailing voice,

  The autumn wind.

  Ten years later Sammy came up from his morphine dream like a pearl diver with burning lungs and black spots floating before his eyes.

  He still smelled plumeria. It came on a breeze from his right. He looked in that direction, where a small square of light was framed by shadow. Gradually he saw that it was a window in a wall of whitewashed cement block. A lizard crept along the wall, stalking what looked like an elongated cockroach with waving antennae.

  Sammy’s mind was still swimming, and a partially formed haiku in English came to him.

  Green lizard creeping

  Hunter of the unwary

  Tiger of scales and—

  No, that wasn’t quite right. There weren’t tigers in Hawaii, and so the metaphor fumbled. Or was this Hawaii? No, he was in the Philippines, and the poem should be in Japanese because he was a soldier now. His loyalty—

  Pain interrupted that thought. It came first as a sharp, stabbing sensation in his abdomen, followed by the dull throb of his broken leg. Someone was touching it.

  He looked down to see one of the American nurses wrapping his leg in linen while another mixed plaster with water in a ceramic bowl. The one mixing was the one who’d saved his life. Others had wanted to leave him or worse, but she’d fought until they relented. The young woman was tall and would have been considered homely in Japan, all bony limbs and angles like a crane fishing for frogs. Put her in a bathing suit in Hawaii, on the other hand, and the boys would stare.

  A soldier sat on a stool in one corner, a rifle and a crutch propped behind him on the wall. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and Sammy was still disoriented enough that at first he thought the man was Japanese. Only gradually did he realize the man was Spanish looking, not Japanese.

  A dog with half a tail sat on the man’s lap, sniffing at pockets as if looking for a treat. The soldier stared toward the window, one hand idly scratching the dog’s ears. Nobody seemed to have noticed that Sammy was awake.

  The larger and older of the two nurses jerked his leg to get some of the linens around it, and Sammy gasped at the pain. The two women looked at him, looked at each other. The soldier dumped the dog and climbed stiffly to his feet. He reached for his rifle.

  “He’s all right,” the younger woman said. “You can sit down, Corporal. This one won’t cause us any trouble.”

  It was all coming back to him now. He’d been riding toward Manila with other men of his unit, trying to block out the conversations around him. For soldiers supposedly on their way to combat, they’d been surprisingly jovial, passing crude jokes and anecdotes. Two yokels had been relating their experiences in a Korean brothel. Another man described what a white woman looked like naked—not from experience, mind you, but from something his brother had told him. Other conversations were more mundane: about the relative merits of udon or soba noodles, about the sights of the Philippine countryside, and whether or not one’s backside or leg muscles were more sore after a day on a bicycle.

  Then the American trucks appeared. One barreled toward him like an enraged, three-ton metal carabao. Other men threw themselves away, but Sammy looked up, staring, not moving his bicycle off the road until it was too late. He thought he’d be crushed, tossed under the wheels and mangled. Instead he found himself plastered to the windshield as the truck rumbled on.

  You could have moved in time. Why didn’t you?

  For the same reason he’d written that letter to Yoshi in the Kempeitai. That’s why.

  The woman who’d saved him was now studying him with her blue eyes. “It’s Sammy, isn’t it? How are you feeling?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” the other woman said sternly.

  “He’s just an injured boy,” the younger one said.

  “He’s a dirty Jap soldier, and the less you tell him, the better. Corporal Fárez, go tell the lieutenant that the Jap is awake. No, wait. Stay here.” She licked her lips nervously. “I’ll go myself. Someone needs to guard him at all times.”

  The remaining nurse sighed and kept working on the plaster as the older woman left the room. “Don’t mind Miss Frankie. She’s not a
s hard as she seems.”

  Sammy thought she was exactly as hard as she seemed, maybe harder. There was a difference in the way she’d been jerking him around, as if he were a bag of rice, and the way this other nurse was gentle with her touch.

  “You can forgive Frankie for being a bit testy,” she continued. “It’s been a long few days. A long month, to be honest.”

  Her expression hardened as she said this last part, as if she was only now remembering who he was.

  “My belly really hurts,” he said. “Whatever you gave me before is gone.”

  “It doesn’t hurt enough,” she said, then seemed to catch herself. “What I mean is that until you’re crying out, you’re not getting any morphine. We’ve got to ration what we have, and you’re . . . well, Japanese.”

  “Doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

  “Maybe you people should have thought of that before you sent your army ashore.”

  She may not have had the immediate antagonism toward him as the other nurse, but Sammy recognized risk when he saw it. A man lived and died in the army by what he noticed or didn’t. He remembered how the woman had asked his name, and knew why. The same thing could work in his favor.

  “I thought I was a dead man, and I’m awfully grateful to you for saving me, Miss—?”

  “You don’t need to know her name,” the injured soldier said. He put down his gun and settled back into his seat with a wince but kept the weapon within reach. “You can call her nurse. That’s good enough for you.”

  “It’s all right, Corporal Fárez,” she said. “My name is Miss Louise. I don’t bear you any ill will, but you are the enemy, and I have no illusions about what would happen to me had I fallen into your hands instead of you mine.”

  “You mean we’re monsters who would torture you for fun?” Sammy shook his head. “Your typical Japanese soldier isn’t so different from an American kid. Not too bright, a little crude. Basically good-hearted.”

  “Oh, really? I’ve never heard of American boys bayoneting Chinamen for sport, have you?” She turned her back to him and scrubbed the plaster from her hands in a basin of water.

  He’d been readying a joke, something about drunk tattoos and brothels, that would have proven the point about the commonality of your average soldier, but her comment was like a punch to the face.

  “No?” she said, her back still turned. “Weren’t you in China? Haven’t you heard the rumors?”

  “I was in China,” he said, his voice quiet.

  He’d been there, his brother had been there, his commanding officer, too, and most of the soldiers of his company were veterans. The best, most battle-hardened troops of the operations now seizing all of Southeast Asia, from Singapore to the Philippines, had sharpened their swords in China. Sometimes literally, after having used those swords to kill so many people that frequent sharpening became necessary.

  Some men—those with a sense of shame—didn’t speak of what they’d seen or done. Others did. It might come out with braggadocio, but mostly with an air of the inevitable. Like a man who is forced to kill to defend his home.

  Sammy didn’t mean to speak the words aloud, but they came out before he could stop them. “A man doesn’t want to kill Chinese, he is forced to by circumstances.”

  “You tell yourself that if it makes you feel better,” Louise said.

  She’d missed the irony, hadn’t heard the lead weight hanging to his sentence, the ugly, deformed, and burned history behind it.

  Sammy studied the ceiling while she finished washing up. The lizard had apparently caught his roach and retreated to the shadows to digest its meal. At the very least, it showed no interest in the other bugs crawling across the ceiling. He composed a better haiku and spoke it aloud to cleanse his mouth and his mind.

  Green lizard napping

  Ignores a feast of vermin—

  Belly full, you sleep.

  Louise turned around, blinking. “What?”

  Sammy pointed at the ceiling. “The lizard has eaten his fill and now seems indifferent to the fact we’re being overrun by bugs. Doesn’t it know it has a job to do?”

  The edge of her mouth turned up in a smile, as if she couldn’t decide whether to be amused or irritated. Sammy understood. She hadn’t forgotten what he’d said moments earlier. He was an enemy, and though she’d treated him well so far, she was only doing her duty.

  The door opened, and in came a tall young soldier with a hard face. Sammy recognized this one, too. He seemed to have been charged with evacuating the hospital staff to wherever they were now. What was his name? Kozlowski, that’s right.

  The older nurse, the one Louise had called Miss Frankie, followed him in. She fixed Sammy with a look that reminded him of a weasel studying a chicken coop. He licked his lips.

  “Corporal, you will stay,” Kozlowski said to the man with the dog. “Miss Louise, you will leave. You only slept a few hours this morning—you’re no good to us if you don’t get some rest.”

  “But, I—”

  “That’s an order. Go.” As soon as Louise was gone, the lieutenant turned his wolflike gaze to Sammy, whose mouth felt suddenly dry. “And now, soldier, you and I have some things to discuss.”

  Chapter Eight

  Louise didn’t think she’d be able to sleep in the small, sweltering room that had been set up for the nurses. There were bugs, for one: giant cockroaches that didn’t bother to flee in the light, ants marching about as relentlessly as columns of Japanese soldiers, and mosquitoes that had somehow found their way through the netting hung up at the windows. She swatted as many of them as she could but always found new bite marks when she searched.

  And then there was her worry about her patients. Seaman Therrien had taken a turn for the worse, two men had come down with dysentery, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the vengeful look on Frankie’s face when she’d come in with Kozlowski to interrogate the Japanese soldier. Kozlowski was a serious man, willing to take serious measures, but she didn’t think he’d hurt Sammy Mori to extract information. But she wasn’t sure.

  And what about Frankie? Would she harm their patient? Surely not.

  All these thoughts and fears were churning through Louise’s mind, but when she lay down on her cot, they faded into a feeling of pure exhaustion.

  Hours later Louise woke in the gray of early dawn, still sleepy, but with a full bladder insisting that she get up. A rooster crowed, a man called out in the lilting tones of Tagalog outside the window, and there was what sounded like a clanking bell—all in the distance. The chattering birds were closer at hand, and frogs and insects carried on their usual racket.

  Louise dressed and made her way down the darkened hall of the hospital. Coughs and snores sounded nearby, but there were no men crying out for pain relief. Whoever had worked the night shift had done her job.

  She was fully awake by the time she finished her business at the latrine, and enjoyed the quiet that had settled into the mountains. So much to do today, starting with sharpening needles and sterilizing bandages, but she didn’t have to begin yet. May as well have a look around, as there might not be another chance today. Once she started, the work would continue relentlessly until she collapsed again onto her cot.

  Louise walked past the army trucks camped on the edge of the road with camouflage netting and grassy “roofs” on top. A familiar face poked out from behind one of the tires, tongue hanging from a grinning mouth.

  “You again?” she told the dog. “Did they throw you outside, or did you climb through the window?” She raised an eyebrow as Stumpy fell in beside her. “I hope you’re not making a nuisance of yourself in the village. These local fellows will get jealous if they catch you sowing your wild oats with their ladies.”

  Stumpy barked twice, and someone moved behind the open shutters of the house to her right. It was the largest of the nipa huts in the middle of the village, standing on long stilts in a way that made Louise think of a daddy longlegs balancing on the hillside. Someon
e said that Kozlowski had paid the villagers to use two of the houses, and she guessed from the mosquito netting at the window that this was one of them.

  Louise wanted to be left alone, so she stayed quiet as she kept walking. So did Stumpy, bless his mangy little heart. He trotted a few steps ahead of her, swaggering, as if he couldn’t wait to show her his new domain. Woman and dog followed the road in the opposite direction from which they’d arrived the night before last.

  A dull rumble vibrated like distant thunder. Louise had heard that sound before. Artillery shells, bombs. The sound could carry for many miles, depending on the weather and how it bounced off hills and mountains. It might be ten miles away, it might be fifty, but there was fighting raging somewhere. Men were dying.

  The road hugged the hillside as it wrapped around to more terraced rice paddies. Above there were only two more houses, and then unbroken jungle to the peak of the mountain, draped with gauzy mist. Louise stopped, blinking in surprise as she took in the road ahead.

  There wasn’t one.

  Or rather, what had been a narrow ribbon just wide enough for a truck turned into a footpath when it reached the far end of the village. The path curved up the hill in a series of switchbacks, rising higher into the mountains behind. There must be other villages up there, more isolated even than Sanduga.

  But those villages wouldn’t be reached by vehicles. And they weren’t on a road leading to the Bataan Peninsula and MacArthur’s army. The trail was going into more rugged terrain still, and she had no doubt that it ended altogether somewhere far above them.

  A scuff of dirt made her turn around. Dr. Claypool and Lieutenant Kozlowski stood on the road behind her. Kozlowski wore an undershirt, khaki pants, and unlaced boots. The doctor held a cigarette at his lips and scratched at his gray stubble.

  Louise studied their expressions. The doctor was thoughtful, eyes serious beneath those thick eyebrows. The lieutenant’s gaze was sharp and questioning.