Requiem

by Frances Itani

  For a week of sunny days, I sat outside on my stool with my head tipped back, egg white running down my forehead. In time, the wound healed and everyone, including me, continued to believe the story that I had called my father an arsehole. The scar, of course, remained.

  Two weeks before the new school opened for classes, a Chinese grocer drove his truck across the bridge from town and arrived, unannounced, on our side of the river. The slanted boards on the side of the truck shook and rattled as he turned off the dirt road and entered the lumpy, muddy grounds. Because it had been raining early in the day, he had thrown a canvas overtop of the boards to make a temporary roof to keep his supplies dry. People came out of their shacks and crowded around. The man told us his name was Ying. That was his last name, but everyone called him Ying, he said. He lowered the back of his pickup and showed what he had for sale. He told us he had a new store at the end of town near the bridge, and he promised to drive to the camp every Monday so that people could put in their orders. On Wednesdays, he would return with the deliveries.

  In the back of the truck and on display were ginger root and Chinese cabbage, yeast and green tea. He even had shoyu, our kind of soy sauce, along with rice and flour, sugar, buckets of lard, oatmeal, baking powder, sesame seeds, crackers and eggs. He had a few oranges, and he had nails, cast-iron skillets, brooms, pails and chicken wire. People began to buy, and the items in his truck were soon gone. When Ying drove away, the noise left behind sounded as if the muffler on his truck had fallen apart.

  The following Monday, he returned, as promised. The women came outside and placed their orders. Ying put on small, round glasses and recorded every order in his notebook. There was an air of gaiety about the occasion.

  “One pound chimpo sausage,” a woman piped up from the crowd around the truck. “Don’t forget to add chimpo sausage to my order when you come back. A big one, too.”

  The other women began to laugh.

  “Chimpo sausage, Ying,” they called out. “Chimpo sausage! Don’t forget!”

  Ying laughed, too, and Hiroshi and I looked at each other and grinned. We could tell from Ying’s expression that he didn’t know chimpo was a slang word for penis. I smiled to myself and backed away. After Ying left, Hiroshi said, “Chimpo. He doesn’t even know what it means.”

  Every Monday, when Ying drove his truck to collect the orders, the women continued to make a joke of chimpo sausage. When Ying found out what it meant, he carried on with the joke. I guess he was enjoying it, too.

  One afternoon, Ji came to our shack and began to build a wooden sink for our kitchen. He also built a shelf beside it to hold the small bucket of water that we kept just inside the door. Mother often helped Ba and Ji. She sent baked treats to their place; she helped Ba to hang her wash outside; sometimes she helped them in their garden plot. She knew that Ji was trying to help her in some way, too. He built the sink from cedar and made it with smooth and beautiful joints. Mother rubbed her hands over the surface and bowed slightly to Ji to thank him. She couldn’t wait to try out the sink, and they each poured a glass of water through the drain, but not before setting a pail underneath to catch the same water again. They laughed as if they had shared a great joke, and then poured the captured water back into the bucket.

  After the sink was in place, Ji became more ambitious, and suggested that he and Father build a bathhouse to be shared by our two families. The bathhouse, raised in an enclosed wooden shelter, became a separate structure between Ji’s shack and ours, with short paths leading to it from both homes. The wood that lined the bath was as smooth and beautiful as the wood in the sink. The bath had a galvanized metal floor and a wooden platform across the bottom to keep us from being burned. Ji had designed it so that a wood fire could be kept going in a chamber beneath the tub.

  Now that we had our own private bathhouse, we were able to have a real bath every night, an improvement over standing or sitting scrunched up in the galvanized tub. After Hiroshi and Keiko and I scrubbed with soap and rinsed and climbed in for a hot soak, it was our parents’ turn. Even during the winter months, we soaked every night in our newly built tub.

  Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya wanted a bathhouse, too, and Ji showed Uncle Aki how to build one. There were many such projects going on in the camp, along with logging and chopping and sawing wood for the coming winter. Like hauling water, wood gathering was a never-ending job, because no one could survive winter without a large supply.

  But we had survived so far. We would never have running water; we would never have electricity or refrigeration. But produce from our garden fed us, and Mother pickled and preserved beans and cucumbers and tomatoes for the cold months. Our root cellar, dug out of the earth, was stuffed with carrots and cabbage and squash. Many families had begun to raise chickens, and the men caught fish in the Fraser and shared it out. Every two days, Mother and Keiko and Auntie Aya made bread together. Auntie Aya, who had stayed inside so much when we’d first arrived in the camp, was expecting a baby the following summer. Uncle Aki ordered wool from the Eaton’s catalogue, and Auntie Aya began to knit and sew. She wanted a baby boy. She wanted their first child to be a son.

  All the while, Father was reading about the war whenever he managed to get a newspaper in his hands. He was never in a good mood after reading about bombings and invasions and the sinking of ships. The more he read, the more he scowled and said that we would be in the camp for a long time. At the dinner table, he railed on about the war and snapped at us if we weren’t paying attention. Mother did not comment. She did not argue with Father; nor did she stick up for us when he was in a bad mood.

  Father and the other men talked when they were outside, and passed on news that came to camp. Everyone was interested in knowing what Japan was doing in the war, because whatever Japan was doing could also affect us; it was as if we were somehow to blame.

  After another cold winter in the camp, everyone was anxious to have warm weather again, especially Hiroshi, who had one of the biggest jobs of all—carrying water up the hill. The large communal tanks were in place and that made the job a little easier, but the tanks were across the road and partway down the hill, towards the river. Every family needed its water barrels replenished daily, for household use. In our family, from the beginning, that had been Hiroshi’s job.

  The worst time for carrying water was during the winter, because the path down the side of the hill was slick with ice. Father had made attachments from rope to provide traction for Hiroshi’s gumboots, and those fit at grip sites around his ankles and beneath the soles of his boots. Every day, he had to slip and slide down the hill and back up again. When the school year was in progress, he lugged water before and after classes. Father made him fetch water for Ba and Ji, too, because they were too old to do so themselves, especially during winter on the icy path. But when Father was out of earshot, Hiroshi swore. He swore with words I had never heard before. Nor did I know where he had learned them. All winter, he called the path to the water tanks “that goddamned icicle hill.”

  I knew I would be taking over the chore of the goddamned icicle hill when I was older, and I did not look forward to that day. Father kept telling me I had to work at strengthening my arms and back, and this worried me. I did not give much thought to the job Hiroshi would move on to when it would be my turn to take over icicle hill. Whatever the job would be, I knew Hiroshi would complain and swear even more.

  When Father was not around, when I was alone or with my brother, I went to the lean-to where the wood was stored and practised placing the Jack-pine pole across my shoulders to test the amount of weight I could bear. There was a nail at each end of the pole and I tried to balance a bucket on each side, the way Hiroshi did.

  “You can’t do it!” he shouted at me. “You’re too scrawny. Anyway, why bother trying? You have to grow bigger before you can do what I do.”

  I did not say what I thought. That he sounded full of anger, just like our father.

  One morning in spring, I got up
at the earliest light, while the camp was still quiet. I slipped out of bed and dressed and began to walk up the sloped path behind the shacks. Hiroshi and I sometimes came up here together, and sat on tree stumps and played Rock-Paper-Scissors—Jan-Ken-Po. Because I was alone now, I skirted the trees behind the outhouse buildings, where the ghosts gathered. A few people were outside their shacks, and some men were already up and working in the garden across the road. I continued up towards the Bench, and heard a sudden noise above me. Before I could react, I was startled by horses that burst past me at a gallop. I jumped to one side of the path and watched in excitement as the wild animals raced to the camp below. Maybe I had disturbed them; I didn’t know. They galloped in and around the shacks, circled back, raced through again and disappeared up a trail that curved around the mountain at the far end of camp. There were shouts as people ran outside to watch. I counted the horses as they raced by. One, two, three … eleven in all, tangled manes flying.

  I had not tried to draw a horse since the year before, when Father had thrown the chunk of wood at my forehead, but I decided I would try again, this time using a real horse as my model. Hiroshi and I began to stay outside as much as possible so we could keep a lookout for the horses, each of us for a different reason. Our vigilance was rewarded when the horses came back several days later, again without warning. I counted eleven, and this time they arrived in the early evening, nervous and alert. They slowed and pawed at the earth and snorted and nickered and began to graze on green shoots that were coming up along the edge of camp. When they had eaten enough, or for some other reason we could not discern from our safe distance, they took off abruptly and all together, and galloped away.

  Hiroshi began to boast. He had seen several Native children around, higher up in the hills, and one of the older Native boys had been riding bareback on a wild horse, using only a homemade bit and reins made from rope. If someone else could do this, so could he, Hiroshi said. He wasn’t certain how the boy had tamed the horse. Nor was he certain that he would be able to ride without a saddle, but he was going to give it a try.

  I, too, wanted to ride, maybe one of the smaller horses—a colt, perhaps—but most of all I wanted to draw one of these beautiful animals. I had a pencil with an eraser, and I tried many times to capture the likeness, always starting with a suggestion of mane and the long, sloping lines of the neck and head. Every time I tried, I ended up erasing more lines than those that remained, and my drawing became a mass of smudges. I wanted to create an animal mid-gallop, nostrils flared, head stretched forward, eyes looking directly out of the picture—the way the horses sometimes looked at me as their bodies hurtled past.

  I tried to draw on cardboard, and I drew on small fragments and chips from the ends of lumber that were strewn around the edges of the camp. Sometimes, I drew with a stick, scratching lines in the dirt. When I did have a piece of paper, it was usually brown and bloodstained, old wrappings that had come from Ying’s store with coiled-up chimpo sausage inside. I was careful not to press too firmly, in case I had to erase and start over again. I tried not to make holes in the paper. I drew over the top of old newsprint that had been used for packing, and I filled the narrow borders of catalogue pages. I edged closer to the horses and composed a foreleg bent and off the ground, almost meeting mid-air with the hind leg when the horse was running. I tried to draw a horse that was at a standstill, peering around its long, flat forehead to look sideways at me with a large dark eye. I drew a horse straight on, with its front legs looking like knobbly stilts. I drew a mane that parted over the ears and swung over the highest part of the horse’s face, above its eyes. I tried to capture the dip in the horse’s back and its scraggly tail. I drew legs that were half dark and half white.

  I spent much of the spring and summer trying to draw those wild horses. And I found that I had to study the animals again and again to observe the angle of their legs and if they moved in the same way all together, or if the front joints were different from those at the back when the horses were in motion.

  Hiroshi had found a long, rusted railway spike in the dirt on the garden side of the road, and he scrounged for a length of old rope and then tied the rope to one end of the spike. He told me that if he could figure out how to get the rope attached to the other end, the sharp end, and if he could make the two stay together without the rope slipping off, he would get his homemade bit into a horse’s mouth. He kept an extra length of rope handy for a rein. He had already chosen the animal he wanted to ride: the tallest, one that had a reddish coat and mane. He did not want Father to know about this, so he hid the spike and rope under his pillow and slept on top of them every night. Sometimes he forgot them in our bed in the morning, so I brought them outside and told him I would tuck them behind the woodpile. When the horses came, Hiroshi ran to the woodpile to get the spike and rope. But when he tried to edge close to the herd, the horses skittered off, left and right. Eventually, after several weeks, he grew tired of this and gave up. But I did not stop trying to draw them.

  One night, I was awakened by a noise that sounded like an explosion, a huge snorting sound. It was a warm night, and because of the heat, Mother had left the door open with only a thin blanket hanging from the frame, hoping that a bit of breeze would come in around the edges. I was lying on the mattress beside my brother and sister, and I heard the snorting sound again, but I could not understand why the others weren’t awake. How could they sleep through such noise? Because I was at the edge, I slid silently out the end of the bed and went to the kitchen. There, in the open doorway, was a horse’s head, a huge dark head tangled in the blanket, tossing back and forth. The front of the horse’s body was almost inside our kitchen. I stood where I was, unable to move.

  In an instant, Mother was beside me, pulling me out of the way. She crossed the narrow kitchen and waved her arms, and this startled the horse so that it backed out of the doorway and galloped off, its hooves slamming the earth as it ran.

  I knew, even in the dark, that Mother was shaking. She did not light the lantern. She composed herself, and rearranged the blanket in place over the doorway while the others, even Father, slept on.

  “Shhh!” she said. “We won’t wake anyone. Go back to bed now and don’t make a noise.” But before I returned to the bedroom, she pulled me close to her and held me tightly, as if she might lose me if she let go.

  In the morning, I wondered if I had dreamed the horse in the doorway. But I saw from Mother’s face that what had happened in the night was not a dream. The horse was real, its sudden, frightening presence a secret between us.

  CHAPTER 14

  1997

  I reduce speed as I enter a small Saskatchewan village, more of a crossroads than a village, really. A few buildings, including a squared brick tower with four walls bulging, as if the tower has been fattened up from inside. And then, as the speed limit changes again, a church with a signboard displaying a message in large white letters against a black background: WE’VE BEEN IN THE FORGIVENESS BUSINESS FOR ALMOST 2000 YEARS.

  I drive past a farm where two mares stand behind a fence, one with head drooped at a telltale slant, a rich, dark mane sliding forward. It has been a long time since I thought of the wild horses in the camp; a long time since I’ve drawn them. They were so much a part of life there. In the background, circling, galloping through camp, all that energy and beauty. A long time, too, since I thought of my father chucking a piece of wood at me. Instinctively, I raise my hand to my forehead and feel the indent. There isn’t much to see, but I can still detect a slight depression.

  In the seventies, in the early years of our marriage, Lena ran her index finger lightly down my forehead, tracing the scar. “How did you manage that?” she said. “I’ve asked before, and you’ve never really explained. It’s so vertical. The perfect scar. Vestigial. Like a genetic marking.”

  “I was learning the rudiments of hand-eye coordination,” I said. “Trying to draw the back end of a horse. It’s a long story. Somehow connected
to a place called Manzanar.”

  We were side by side, sinking into the middle of a couch that had a deep sag. Closer than we would have been had we chosen the hard chairs that Lena was now eyeing, and that had been taken by others. It was an uncomfortable position, but I liked our bodies touching through our clothes: side, arms, thighs. It was our private circle of closeness, the one that was comforting and familiar. It was a warm fall night and we were in the basement of a house belonging to a couple we did not know well, but who lived at the end of the street. We had accepted the invitation to a barbecue because we were trying to be neighbourly. Lena and I were still new to the city, having spent the first five years of our marriage in Montreal. Lena was beginning to meet her colleagues at work, and I was alone in my studio much of the time, painting. Except for exchanging quick greetings with some of the neighbours, we had so far met only Miss Carrie on our street. And now we were at a barbecue, and the party had been rained on, a sudden storm.

  Our hosts, Pete and his wife, Petra, ushered everyone inside and down the chewed-up basement steps to the rec room below. Pete stayed outside on the patio and dragged the barbecue under an overhang so that he could tend the charcoal. He was turning kebabs on long metal skewers, and every five minutes or so he appeared at the top of the basement stairs and shouted words of encouragement to the rest of us.

  The other men in the room were big and heavy-set. A room of giants, taller than I. Six two and more, to my five nine. I’d have looked undernourished in a lineup beside them. Pete was an accountant; the other three men worked for him, in the same small company. They all bantered back and forth as if they knew one another well, as did their wives.

  Despite the familiarity among them, Petra seemed unsure of how to keep the conversation going. The place smelled like basement, damp and mildewed; there was no pretending. There was a bar across one end of the room and a pea-green shag rug on top of the cement floor. We were all hungry and the men were showing signs of being tired of waiting for their food. Pete was taking a long time to cook the beef over charcoal.