The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  “What?”

  “We’ll get you on the train to Port aux Basques. Next one leaves at six this evening. You can get a berth on the Caribou from there across to Canada.” He pulled the suspenders up over his shoulders and reached under the desk for a bottle of dark rum. “I’ll loan you enough for the fares,” he said.

  “What will I do with myself over there, Hiram?” The older man sat back in his chair. “You were planning on joining up, weren’t you?”

  “The army?”

  “Overseas,” Hiram said.

  Hiram told me everything about you and Hardy, Wish. Hardy was only knocked senseless and is up and around same as if nothing ever happened to him. I wish you’d only come and talked to me before you run off and—there was half a line scribbled out here that Wish had spent hours trying to decipher, holding the page to the light to guess at letters and words, with no luck— everything would be all right now. I have left the Cove for St. Johns and will wait here till you get home again, no matter how long.

  He could feel the speed in the writing, letters running into one another in her rush to finish and mail it to him, as if there was still a chance to turn things around, to bring him back. He was in the middle of basic training by the time it arrived. He’d sent Hiram the money he owed him with a note saying how he’d found his way to England. And Mercedes had written back.

  Please write to me care of Hiram when you get this. Hardy come to bring me home to the Cove but I told him we are engaged and are going to marry when you come home, whenever that might be, I will be waiting if you will have me. And there was a long Bible verse written out as a kind of P.S. at the bottom of the letter. Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

  Hardy was alive and fine. The relief of that flooded him like the light of revelation. The Salvationist on the St. John’s street corner had shouted out over the crowd: “Ye must be born again.” Amen to that.

  Wish was stationed in England for the better part of a year, waiting to be sent into action. He and Mercedes wrote back and forth, the regular letters from St. John’s a relief from the endless parade drills and rifle exercises and early-morning calisthenics. He had been wrong about Mercedes, about how ruthless love could make her. There was no smell to the paper other than the smell of his own hands anymore but he lifted it to his face each time he read it.

  In October of 1941 they sailed out of England with no word of their destination. Ten days later he sighted the rocks of Cape Race, the ship skirting the southern coast of Newfoundland on its way to Halifax. A heavy sea and he could just make out the white line of surf where it rode up the foot of the cliffs.

  They had a week on leave in Halifax, and on November 8 they were ordered aboard the Wakefield, a former passenger liner refitted as a U.S. Navy troop ship. They departed on the tenth, part of a large convoy of American vessels transporting British soldiers, sailing south. Wish wrote to Mercedes, I thought joining the infantry would at least keep me off the water. Rumours had them heading for Australia or Singapore or Malaysia. The Pacific, either way, which meant the Japanese and jungle fighting.

  The convoy ran dark with hatches secured from half an hour before sunset, which made the overcrowded quarters stifling. They were under U.S. Navy regulations and the ship was dry. Wish managed to jerry up a still with potato skins and sugar and water in a garbage bag that he kept hidden in a latrine, the alcohol passed around in metal cups after lights out. Major McCarthy turning a blind eye as long as none of the liquor got into the hands of American sailors.

  The entire battalion was made up of green soldiers. None of them knew a thing about how the war was going in the region and they made do with rumours and crackpot theories that were passed around quarters in the dark. The Japs couldn’t see at night because of their slant-eyes, they were genetically predisposed to seasickness. They were an army of lady-boys with tiny cocks, they held hands as they marched. They cut off the heads of civilians and raised them on stakes, they used women and children for bayonet practice. Except for the lurid relief of war gossip, there was nothing in the way of distraction.

  We have half an hour of exercise before breakfast, rain or shine, Wish wrote. A sing-song on weather decks after supper. A couple of fellows in blackface doing show tunes. The rest is just waiting.

  The convoy refuelled in Trinidad and from there went on to South Africa. Wish and Harris and Anstey mailed letters at each stop, as if they were marking a path they could follow home after the war. Wish’s last note to reach Mercedes found its way from the Maldive Islands where the Wakefield put in for fresh water. He knew by then that Singapore was their destination, though he couldn’t say as much. HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk off the coast of Malaya in December. The Japanese had travelled south through the supposedly impenetrable jungle of that country as far as the island of Singapore in less than two months. General Percival, the commanding officer of Fortress Singapore, had sent an urgent request for all available reinforcements. Or so the stories went.

  They reached Singapore on January 30. The naval base across the strait from Malaya was abandoned by then and the Wakefield put in at Keppell’s Harbour on the southern shore. The soldiers and their equipment were offloaded between Japanese bombing raids, and the Wakefield departed with thirteen hundred civilians aboard, bound for Batavia, where more refugees were waiting.

  Their unit was ordered to establish a perimeter defence along the Lornie, Adam and Farrar roads. He dug in with Harris and Anstey, and the three men sat on the packed earth to wait. Wish wrote a short note to Mercedes each of the next fifteen days in Singapore. He knew the letters would never be mailed but found some comfort in the sense he was talking to her directly. Am certain of seeing action any moment and feel it’s about time, he told her, sick of drills. And knowing there was something false in that sentiment, he added, They sounds like the real sonsabitches when the game is on.

  Conjecture and reports and scuttlebutt passed back and forth along the line. They heard that the Japanese had crossed the strait by the thousands in collapsible boats at night.

  “I thought the fuckers were blind in the dark,” Harris said.

  “They get seasick in the bath too,” Anstey said. “Don’t forget that.”

  The causeway to the mainland, which had been dynamited at the beginning of January, was already repaired and Japanese tanks were crossing into Singapore. The defending force had retreated as far as Bukit Timah at the centre of the island. They were told that General Percival had refused to deploy barbed wire or mines along the Singapore coast before the Japanese attack because the preparation of such defences was bad for morale.

  Wish wrote to Mercedes, I feel I am living in a made-up world.

  The city was bombed daily, with no Allied planes in the air to offer resistance. The Japanese took Bukit Timah, which left open road to Singapore City. On February 14 the city’s water reservoirs were lost. Wish could see the fighting now, rifle and machine-gun and mortar fire pressing toward their trenches, inexorable as weather. It was like being trapped aboard a punt in heavy seas, the ground shifting as the shockwave of each explosion broke over them, their little gravel boat about to capsize and spit them into the storm. Anstey said, “I’ll bet every one of those bastards is hung like a horse.” Wish kept having to piss, turning his back to relieve himself against the wall of the trench.

  On February 15 General Percival walked out to the Japanese command post in the Ford motor factory on the Bukit Timah road carrying a Union Jack and a white flag. Wish was taken prisoner along with the seventy thousand other Allied soldiers on the island. He hadn’t fired a single shot.

  Thousands of the Allied soldiers were herded into Changi prison on the northeast shore of the island, where they were stripped of their clothes and boots and left with only a loincloth for cover. They were sent out in work groups, clearing away the dead in t
he streets of Saigon City, cleaning up after the halfhearted scorched-earth program undertaken at the naval base before the surrender. Dock cranes tilting on their bases, the huge oil tanks burnt out and blackened. The capsized hulls of vessels visible on the ocean floor.

  The prisoners were issued a booklet of English-to-Japanese translations that they were supposed to memorize, numbers and days of the week and months of the year. Basic orders such as Start eating, Go to toilet, Begin work, Stop work. There were also odd lists of specific objects. Mine timber and coal tub, intake and out-take shaft, rock drill. Cement bag, rail track, tie, explosives.

  “Not hard to guess,” Wish said, “what they’ve got in mind for us.”

  Beatings were a daily occurrence, most often with a four-foot-long stick dubbed “the bamboo interpreter” that the guards depended on to get their message across when all else failed. Most of the prisoners were sick with dysentery and fevers. Wish returned from the dock one evening running a temperature and by morning he was half out of his mind. Harris and Anstey carried him to the hospital before heading off to join their work group at the docks. He lay in that delirious state for the better part of two days. And it was a week longer before he was well enough to leave the hospital.

  Wish had heard stories about malaria as they headed into the tropics, how people went mad with hallucinations. At the time he’d imagined visual monsters of some sort, spiders the size of tanks, rock falls, nightmarish creatures. His own delusions turned out to be subtler though no less terrifying. He was convinced he had to eat the hospital and spent hours feverishly trying to deal with the logistics of the task. The thatched straw roof was the obvious place to start, but the walls were concrete. What would he do once his teeth cracked and fell out? How would he manage to shit it all from his system without causing serious damage? Even the memory of that ludicrous belief and the absolute certainty with which he held it made his stomach turn.

  He passed his recovery time in the hospital writing notes to Mercedes and studying the Japanese wordbook, practising his pronunciation on the guards and hospital orderlies. Much the way he’d learned Latin from his aunt Lilly. He found two empty pages at the back of the book and began pointing to objects around him—bed, window, cup, book—writing out phonetic versions of the Japanese words. Rifle, uniform, doctor. Sleep, sick, tired, hungry.

  He got himself yelled at and slapped occasionally for his interest. Even the Japanese who were most cooperative barked the words at him, as if they were about to start gnawing on his leg. Not a one of them smiled easily, if at all. He wrote, I thought you Protestants were a sour crowd Mercedes but I never seen the like of these.

  His company was transported to Japan six weeks later. When they arrived at Nagasaki #14 they were given permission to send a forty-word card home. In the three years he’d been incarcerated, he’d received four letters from Mercedes, all of them a year or more out of date. Each offering the same message as the first. I will be waiting if you will have me.

  Osano spoke to him. The guard was sitting with his back against the cab of the truck, his arm draped over the urn box, which was carrying a slightly different cargo now, Wish knew. He smiled and flashed the picture of Mercedes in his hand. Wish pointed at Osano, touched the pocket he’d taken the letter from, then pointed again. Osano fished a small leather billfold from his pocket and took out a photograph of his own that he held toward the prisoner. They traded the photos carefully, like an exchange of hostages. The woman in Osano’s photo stared straight ahead, dark eyes and hair cut sharply at the jaw line. The picture was badly taken or overdeveloped, her features barely visible in the washout.

  “Some beautiful,” Wish said, as he did every time. “Kirie.” The guard spoke briefly then, shaking the picture of Mercedes to show what he was talking about, before returning it to Wish.

  McCarthy said, “You sure he doesn’t speak any English?”

  “I’d be dead for long ago if he did, sir.”

  “What have you got on him?”

  “Sir?”

  “You wouldn’t trust that picture in the hands of someone who didn’t owe you something, is my guess.”

  Wish shrugged. Some debt or obligation was obvious in the man’s behaviour, something related to the first time they’d exchanged these pictures, though more than that Wish couldn’t say.

  The truck struggled up the steep incline past the shipyard, gave an audible mechanical sigh as they crested the hill and coasted toward the camp gates. As they drove closer the driver reached out his window to slap the cab roof three times. Osano got to his feet quickly, to make a show of watching over the prisoners.

  Three large trucks with covered beds were parked near the guardhouse and a group of prisoners stood at attention in the square, at least a hundred of them, all strangers. They were mostly barefoot and so thin it was clear they’d been living in camps for an extended time.

  “Looks like we have newcomers,” McCarthy said.

  McCarthy was summoned to the commandant’s office as soon as he stepped from the truck. Inside the urn box in the truck bed was a bag of empty liquor bottles, stowed there by Osano while the men were inside the church. There was too much activity in the camp to try shifting them to the still or the barracks. Wish tried to guess from Osano’s face what they should do but the guard refused to look in his direction, shouting to dismiss him and the Dutch officer. They walked off to join a handful of other prisoners who were watching the newcomers from the shade.

  Harris said, “They’ve been shipped in from Mushiroda Camp.”

  Anstey nudged him with his elbow. “They look like they could use a drink, Wish.”

  He made a face, thinking of the bottles in the truck. The moonshine operation and the location of Wish’s still were an open secret in the camp. He’d begun making liquor within a week of arriving at #14 and occasionally, discreetly, offered it to guards as a bribe or payment for some small favour. Both parties acting as if no transaction was taking place between them. Even when Osano first approached Wish through the civilian interpreter, the conversation was oblique, barely decipherable. “There are many shortages in the city due to the war,” Mr. Haruyama translated, while Osano bowed to Wish. “Many people are suffering the lack of luxuries they once took for granted.” He carried on this vein for a long while before he said: “Mr. Osano worked as a liquor distributor in Nagasaki for many years before the war. It was a job at which he excelled.” Wish feigned ignorance at the time, though he was careful not to be discouraging. Over a period of months the two men made their arrangements through trial and error, with offhand comments about equipment and payment passed through Haruyama, with grimaces and nods. It was like a lengthy, clandestine courtship.

  As long as the enterprise operated beneath the strictly ordered surface in the camp, as long as it did nothing to disturb the appearance of complete submission to rules and regimen, the guards acted as if it didn’t exist. Many of them purchased liquor from Osano themselves. But that didn’t mean there was no risk involved. Wish didn’t doubt he’d be beaten, maybe even shot, if he was seen trying to sneak those bottles from the truck.

  The commandant came through the door of his office ten minutes later, accompanied by McCarthy. The two officers were trailed by a Japanese soldier Wish didn’t recognize. A tall fellow for a Jap, almost the height of Harris. There was a barely perceptible hiccup in his gait. He stood beside the commandant as Koyagi addressed the newly arrived men, translating for him.

  “You will be treated with respect if you earn respect,” he said. “You will be under the command of the senior British officer in camp, Major McCarthy,” he said and he gestured toward the Irishman. “Exercise commences at 0500 hours. Breakfast at 0530, followed by a fifteen-minute smoking period. Work crews depart at 0600 hours. Tardiness will not be tolerated. Laziness will not be tolerated. Insubordination will not be tolerated.” He smiled as he translated. Not a trace of an accent in his words.

  “Where’s Haruyama?” Wish asked.

/>   The prisoners looked at one another. No one knew where the civilian interpreter was hiding himself. But it was obvious he’d been supplanted by the newcomer.

  “Something’s wrong with his leg,” Anstey said. “He’s got a limp.”

  “His leg or his back,” Wish said.

  The camp guards were a mix of Koreans, who weren’t permitted to join the Imperial Army, and civilians and Japanese soldiers assigned to the camps because of injuries that made them unfit for front-line duty. It was a game for POWs to guess at the less obvious afflictions, to pinpoint their weaknesses.

  Wish said, “Where did he learn to talk like that, I wonder?”

  “The Great Japanese Empire,” the interpreter was saying, “will not try to punish you all with death. Our goal is to bring the blessing of freedom to the people of Southeast Asia. Those obeying all rules and regulations and cooperating with Japan in constructing the New Order of the Greater Asia which leads to world peace will be well treated.”

  Koyagi was watching the interpreter with a startled, slightly offended look. Wish looked back and forth between the two. A moment later the commandant interrupted the little sermon being tacked on to his comments to dismiss the new prisoners. The younger soldier bowed curtly to his superior and walked off to the guardhouse.

  “We got a true believer there,” Wish said.

  “Jesus Henry Christ,” Harris whispered.

  They didn’t know what to make of the new arrivals. It might have been a simple administrative shuffle. It might even be a consolidation made necessary by American advances. But the POWs had so little say in the world of the camp that any change put them on edge, a reminder of how fragile and erratic their fortunes were.

  “You’ll have to get the bottles after lights out,” Anstey said as they walked to the kitchen for their evening meal.

  “The guards’ll be more watchful than we’re used to with the new ones in camp,” Wish said. “I’m not tore up about getting myself shot for a dozen liquor bottles.”