Uncle Aki began to run frantically from shack to shack, but everyone knew that there was nothing more to be done. Father decided to send one of the teachers with a message across the bridge, to let the doctor in town know that a woman on the east side of the river was dying. After many hours, someone drove up in a small, dusty truck that had a running board. The driver was not the local doctor but a veterinarian. He went into Auntie Aya’s home and spoke with her and gave her an injection, and that gradually stopped the bleeding. She was weak for a long time because she had lost so much blood, but eventually she recovered.
Little Taro, however, was not so fortunate. He died not long after Auntie Aya’s bleeding stopped. He had looked so perfect when he was born, but because of the condition of the afterbirth, he did not have a chance. That is what Ba told everyone. All those months he had survived inside Auntie Aya’s womb, but when he was born he lived only seven days.
When Baby Taro died, he was dressed and wrapped in a blanket and carried to the cremation site that had been established in a small clearing surrounded by woods on the side of the mountain. The sun was sparkling; the trees around the edges of the clearing were dappled with light. I looked up and saw the wild horses grazing on the plateau above us. Auntie Aya was too weak to stand, and a chair was brought for her so that she could sit during the service. Uncle Aki stood behind her, and they wept openly.
After the cremation, after the smouldering ashes had cooled somewhat, after the mourners had returned to their shacks, Hiroshi and Keiko and I were taken back to the site by Father and Uncle Aki. Each of us was given a pair of special chopsticks, and we were told that we had to sift through the ashes to pick up any tiny bones that remained. We had to be especially vigilant for a fragment that might resemble a teardrop shape. As cousins of Baby Taro, that was our duty. Keiko was handed an empty baking powder tin, and with the chopsticks, we were to drop the pieces of bone into the tin.
I was worried that my chopsticks would slip and I would get into trouble, but Father and Uncle Aki crouched down and said that this was important and we must not let a single piece of bone fall back to earth. For our baby cousin’s journey, we must not.
Although I was very much afraid, I helped Hiroshi and Keiko pick out every tiny fragment we could find in the cooling ashes. Father and Uncle Aki stood by to ensure that nothing was dropped. The fragments in the baking powder tin were carried by Uncle Aki back to his home, where Auntie Aya awaited.
Auntie Aya was to keep the fragments of Taro’s bones for many years, until long after the war was over and there could be a proper grave in a real cemetery. But more and more, Auntie Aya was seen sitting outside on a low stool in front of her shack, even in the fall, when the days became cold and we were in school. She spoke less as people came by to see her. Uncle Aki often came to our place to visit, and I overheard him tell my parents how worried he was. At night, when my parents were in bed and thought I was sleeping, I heard Mother say that Ba had told Auntie Aya she must never become pregnant again. She was not strong enough to carry another baby inside her. Father did not comment; I never heard a reply from him when Mother was telling him what went on in Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya’s house. He listened in silence and he did not say what he was feeling.
Some days, Auntie Aya got up off her stool and stood in her doorway and called out to anyone who would listen. She called out that she could hear Baby Taro’s bones knocking against the inside of the baking powder tin. The bones were knocking against the sides, she said, because they wanted to be free.
Shortly after Baby Taro died, an old man came to live in our camp. Not old like Ba and Ji, but older than our parents. He had been hiding in Vancouver and caring for his sick wife ever since December 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. After his wife died, the man wandered out onto the street and was picked up by police. No one knew how he had escaped detection for so long. The adults said that he must never have gone outside, that he must not have left the rooms he was renting in Japtown. They said he must have had help from Caucasians, his hakujin friends, to get food and supplies. They said that after his wife died, he didn’t care anymore about being seen. He went outside and was immediately detained and then sent to our camp above the Fraser. Ba and Ji told Mother and Father that he was known to the Vancouver community, and that he was an educated man who had once played the piano and knew a great deal about music. Everyone had assumed that he had been sent to a road camp somewhere in northern British Columbia and had been put to work building roads.
The old man’s shack, at the end of our row, was built with the help of Father and some of the other men. They worked quickly because they had to return to work in the gardens. The communal gardens had become large and productive, and everyone helped so that money would keep coming in from the sale of tomatoes, which were shipped to Vancouver by train.
The old man’s home was slightly smaller than everyone else’s because most of the ready building materials had already been used. With his arrival, the camp now had sixty-one shacks and a population of two hundred and seven.
Every day and evening, Hiroshi and Keiko and I saw the man outside his shack, chopping wood for kindling. When he was not chopping wood, he was tending a garden plot that he had started late. In the evenings, he went for long walks alone up to the Bench and around the hills behind the camp. Sometimes I saw Father speaking to him at the end of our row, and they had long conversations.
It was rumoured that of the many boxes that had accompanied the man when he arrived, several held books. These were unpacked and lined up on rough shelves in his shack. Some of the books contained pages of musical notes. Why, the neighbours wondered aloud, would anyone use an allotment of space for books? He could have brought bedding, or tools, or an extra bag of rice.
The old man’s name was Okuma-san, and not long after he arrived, he killed a bear. No one knew how he had done this, because no man in camp was allowed to have a gun. Father told us that Okuma-san’s name meant Great Bear, and that it was fitting he had killed such an animal.
Hiroshi and Keiko and I spoke about this among ourselves.
“He probably set a snare,” Hiroshi said, insisting that the old man must have read about snares in one of his books.
We all wondered if this was so, and if it was possible to learn how to catch a bear by reading a book. When Hiroshi asked Father about this, he said, “It is surprising, it is true, but Okuma-san is a wise person and he must have studied the habits of the bear. He knows that bear follows the same trails, over and over. He knows what bear likes to eat and where he takes his rest.”
The bear was hung with a rope around its neck in a rough and open woodshed that Okuma-san had erected behind his shack. Everyone came to see, knowing that after the carcass had hung for a few days, the meat would be shared out among the neighbours. With high summer temperatures and no refrigeration, fresh meat had to be eaten quickly before it decayed.
The day after the news of the bear went through the camp, I walked by myself to the end of the row and stared up into the cavity of the bear. Its belly was slit all the way to its groin, its organs removed, and I could see the thick lining of beige and milky-coloured fat that showed how the animal had begun to prepare for its long winter sleep. The bear’s eyes were open and its pink tongue lolled out the side of its jaw. The old man came out of his shack and asked my name, and I replied, giving my last name first. “Oda,” I said. “My first name is Bin. It’s short for Binosuke.”
Okuma-san nodded and repeated my name, and I was surprised to hear the softness in his voice. He told me that he had met my father, and that they’d had long talks. That was all he said, that and my name, and then the two of us stood in silence before the open woodshed, and despite the foul odour coming from the bear, we admired its beauty. I wanted to look through the window of Okuma-san’s shack so I could see the books that were rumoured to have pages of notes, but I was shy and I turned and went home without asking.
The next day, before nightfall, I retu
rned to look at the bear. This time, I hid in shadow of the trees so I wouldn’t be seen. To my surprise, the bear’s hide had been removed and its body flipped end to end. Now it was hanging by its hind legs, which had a stick between them to keep them apart. In the dim light and from where I stood, the carcass had taken the shape of a human without a head. Only a bit of fur remained around its paws. I was so shocked by the sight, I couldn’t keep myself from shouting out. I stumbled and fell in the dirt, and picked myself up and raced for home.
For the rest of the summer, I dreamed of the headless bear that had once ambled alive and free over the Bench up on the side of the mountain. The dark mountain that cast its shadow, and that stretched up and up above the camp and the turbulent river.
CHAPTER 16
1997
“Does the river have voices, Dad?”
Greg.
A fisherman in hip waders was standing in the middle of the river, casting for trout. The kind of sports fishing First Father had never done—probably never had a chance to do. I watched as the flyline snapped forward, back, forward, back again, curving in on itself and out again, lighting, finally, on the surface of a small dark pool downstream. Amazing grace. Motion efficient, appearing effortless. Line at a standstill mid-air, yet moving again, again. Grace. Amazing.
“Voices?”
“You know. Like it might be trying to tell you something.”
I was trying to still the motion, the snaking of the tip through space, and yet create the illusion that the line, the movement, was about to thrust itself off the edge of the paper into—what? Imagination? Extension of imagined space?
It was the early eighties, I recall, and we were in Prince Edward Island beside the Dunk, a river so narrow we could toss a stone from one bank to the other. There was a muffled dampness to the surrounds, the result of strong rains the night before. Branches along the banks drooped over one another like crossed swords. We had walked the trail for a mile or so, no problem for seven-year-old Greg, who loved being outside in his rubber boots, loved to examine life along the trail—underbrush, wildflowers, plants and weeds. He was listening, that day, to the river.
“I do hear the river,” I said. “I listen because it has a story to tell. Sometimes many stories. What does it tell you?”
“Well,” he said, seriously, “I hear it say my name when it’s rushing by. It sounds like gregogregogrego.” He looked down sheepishly, then smiled, more to himself than to me. “I can hear the sea, too. I sure heard it in that big storm last night.” He added this bravely, and raised his chin to look up so he could check my reaction.
The storm last night. It was the end of August and we’d rented a cottage—our first family visit to that province. But something about the sea and the excitement of being there stayed with Greg from that time and never left. No surprise that he’s a science student now, and that his graduate work will be in marine studies.
The cottage we’d rented on the north shore of the island was actually a mobile home—a large trailer, though we called it a cottage. It was about thirty feet back from the edge of a cliff, set at the bottom of a long, narrow field owned by a bachelor farmer named Albert. We were in the wide part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the part that is expansive and so almost sea, it is sea. The storm the night before had been fierce, and we had been witness to the gathering of forces the entire day. Breezes changed to winds, winds to almost gale, low-lapping waves to fierce whitecaps rolling over the surface of the water. I ran outside to the car to get a map, and the car door snapped back against my legs after I’d pushed it open. The sea was flowing rapidly into dips between dunes below the cliff, as if there were empty vessels to fill all along the beach. By nightfall, the trailer was shaking so badly I wondered if we were experiencing the tail end of a hurricane that had swept up the Atlantic coast from Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas, and was now blowing out to sea. There was no radio in the place, no phone, no warning system. We were a mile from Albert’s farmhouse and the nearest human.
While being tucked in at bedtime, Greg looked up, white-faced but with small, perfectly round patches of red on his cheeks, the telltale sign of excitement—and worry.
“Are mobile homes stable enough to withstand hurricanes?” he asked. His voice was thin and earnest, but trusting, always trusting.
Lena and I came out of his room together. She whispered, “He will think up every adverse condition. He has no idea he’s unearthing my deepest fears. This damned wind sounds as if it will lift us right off the cliff and into the waves. I don’t like it one bit.”
Greg called us back to his room. “I don’t like the way the cottage shakes when you both walk down the hall at the same time,” he said. “It frightens me.”
We bundled him up and brought him out to sit with us in the narrow living room, and looked outside—though all we could see was blackness—and told stories while the arms of the wind battered at the long sides of the trailer, which felt so fragile from within, the place might as well have been made of tin. Lena brought out a lamp from our bedroom and tried to find a place to plug it in, but the power went out and we had to light candles. We told stories about bravado and trickery and good humour. By the time the worst part of the storm had passed, Greg was asleep. Shadows flickered behind me as I carried him down the hall to his room and tucked him in for the second time. And heaped blankets overtop so he wouldn’t be cold in the night.
In the morning, we woke to a strong breeze, this time from the northwest. Puffs of clouds, plump and grey, hung from a line above the horizon. A far-off haze made the sky look as if a triangular chunk had been removed. The rain stopped, and from the window, we could see surf crashing in sideways. Humps of sand-covered seaweed shaped the outline of the beach for miles. I suggested that we give the sea a chance to calm down, that we drive inland, away from the wind and in shelter of the woods, a trail walk along the river. Lena said she would stay at the cottage because she wanted to read for a while. Later, she would prepare a picnic supper to take to the beach in the evening, if the wind had died down by then. Easy foods that we could carry over the dunes. Island corn, sandwiches, marshmallows to roast. We made a plan to collect driftwood high up on the sand later in the afternoon so that we could make a night bonfire at the base of the cliffs. If the wood was too wet, we’d use the supply of dry wood that Albert had left under a shelter. The weather turned quickly on the island, and we hoped for a calm sea by nightfall.
I had been working with watercolours, trying something new, wanting to capture sea, sky, shore; tough marram grasses that bound the sand; the shadow of a hawk that hunted in the afternoons along the edge of the field; a mix of quick and dramatic changes. The light around me altered every time I looked up. I had already begun to move away from my early work, and now every stroke I made was stretching towards some new form. Here, it was stretching against the threatening bulge of dark sea. “Sombre,” Lena said when she came up behind me one morning. “Moody, moody.” I wondered what she saw, but I didn’t ask. She was right, though. A sombre tone was creeping in from underneath. The only other comment she made was after we had returned home. “There’s been a change,” she said. “Almost as if the sea left its mark on you. The shapes seem to disappear into the painting itself, and yet some part of them is still there—if you know what I mean.”
I did. I understood what she was telling me, and it was because of the sea.
Greg and I returned to the cottage that day, after our inland river walk, and we stood on the cliff looking out over a long stretch of surf that was now somewhat diminished because the winds had lowered. The waves were still white-tipped but safe for leaping, and exciting for a small boy. There were four people in the water below, two of them children. We watched as they waited for the exact moment a wave peaked to dive headfirst into the foam. From where we stood, we could hear their voices drifting up as if from an old recording, bumpy and muffled, only the odd-pitched cry getting through.
Greg raced to get his bathing
suit, and we changed and hurried down to the beach and into the cold water. Tiny smooth stones were being tossed pell-mell at the edge of shore. We swam, and jumped waves to get ourselves out deeper, and rode larger waves back to shore, and fought against them to wade out, and rode them in again. I couldn’t keep from laughing aloud while Greg shrieked his delight. When I finally persuaded him to come in, his slim body was hard and blue with cold. I rolled a big towel around him and sat him down so that I could massage his legs.
That evening after our picnic supper, we sat below the dunes around the fire and we were rewarded with a moving-picture show of the aurora borealis against a dark wall of sky: vivid, miraculous, an infinity away. Great vertical sheets of light. The breeze had dropped completely; the sea was calm, its bulge ominous as ever. Foam slid in over sand that had been pounded flat. The red blink-blink of a buoy flashed and bobbed far out. We listened to the slow wash of waves and watched in awe as the sky’s colours rushed past on their way to somewhere else. Shades of deep green to lighter shades and back again swept over the huge stage of the night. There were greens I have never seen before and have never seen since.
Greg told Lena, “All that moving colour in the sky makes me feel like shouting, Mom. It makes me feel like running underneath.” And then he shrank into himself. “It makes me feel like a tiny speck.” He started to drop off to sleep and, barefoot, I carried him over hard-packed sand and up steps that had been dug out of the dunes but managed to change shape in every weather. I tried to be careful of my footing, but it wasn’t a smooth climb and Greg woke before I could brush the sand off his legs and feet and get him into bed.
“You know, Dad, when I grow up,” he said, looking straight up at me, “I’m going to be all Japanese like you, instead of just half.” He snuggled deep into the covers, and then he added, “This has been the happiest day of my life.” In an instant, he was asleep.
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