The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  “I will be,” she said. “When he gets home from overseas.”

  “Overseas?”

  “He’s gone to the war,” she said. “Unlike some.”

  Hardy watched her awhile. The kettle shook on the hot plate and Mercedes got up to make the tea.

  “You ever coming back home, Sadie?”

  “Home?” she said angrily. She kept her back to him. “Home?” she said again.

  When her grandmother fell ill, Helen or Mercedes read the evening’s five Bible verses aloud for her whether she was lucid enough to take them in or not. The Book of Ruth they were reading from at the last. The Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full and the Lord hath brought me home again empty.

  “Agnes misses you,” Hardy said.

  He was near tears and she couldn’t bear to look at his face. “Don’t,” she said. She stirred a spoonful of milk into the cup.

  “You’re some hard bit of gear,” he whispered. “You got no feeling for us at all, do you?”

  “There’s your tea,” she told him and she rushed across the hall to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. After a few minutes he called her name, but she stayed where she was until she heard him go down the stairs and out the door to the street.

  Johnny Boustani was assigned to the Intelligence office of the United States Army after Fort Pepperell was established, although he always said the word Intelligence as if it was some kind of joke. In the months after Wish went missing he made a number of informal inquiries and offered Mercedes an educated guess on the whereabouts of Wish’s company—Kyushu in the southwest, somewhere in the vicinity of Nagasaki—although whether Wish was still alive and with them there was no way to know. And he did his best not to answer Mercedes’ questions about conditions in the camps during those early days. When she pressed him for details he said, “I’m just the guy who moves the flags around on the table maps.”

  “Someone must know something.”

  “We haven’t heard much about it, Mercedes. Honestly.”

  “It’s that bad, is it?”

  “There’s some things,” he said, “you might be better off not knowing.”

  She continued writing to Wish all through the war, sending a letter out into the long silence every month, addressing them care of his unit’s base in England. Even to Mercedes it felt like a useless exercise. But the alternative was giving him up for dead.

  Mercedes said, “Hiram, what do you know about his aunt Lilly?” This was early on, when she was teasing out every scrap of information he had about Wish. “Why have they got her locked up at the convent?”

  “She speaks Latin,” Hiram said.

  Mercedes stared at him.

  “She learned on her own, they say. When she was a girl.” He made a face. “She started speaking to the priest in Latin before she was ten, is the story on the shore. And no one could explain where she’d picked up the language. She says she was given messages from God in books that appeared out of nowhere and disappeared after she read them.”

  Mercedes thought of the woman’s arm around her waist, the heat of it.

  “She was living on her own for years out there until the day Wish found her,” he said.

  “Found her where?”

  “Haven’t Wish told you any of this?”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you ever afraid of hearing too much?” Hiram grunted, as if he’d decided against going any further. But then he said, “Wish found her lying on the floor of that little shack she lived in. She had her arms stretched out like they were nailed to the cross. And she was bleeding from the palms of her hands.”

  “What do you mean, bleeding?”

  “That’s when they took her into the convent,” Hiram said. “Wish was more or less living with the Keatings by then anyway. Him and Billy-Peter and Tom fished together and salvaged. And they were into the shine, running it along the shore. You can hardly blame him not wanting to live under the same roof.”

  “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

  It surprised her to see that knowing someone wasn’t just a matter of accumulation, of simply adding details together to arrive at some coherent whole. It was obvious why Wish had told her next to nothing about Lilly. God spoke to her directly and she slept in the room next to his. He found her lying on the floor, blood seeping from her palms. She belonged to another world than this one, Patty Keating said.

  Every detail Mercedes heard about Lilly made her seem more unreal. And pushed Wish a little further off at the same time. It seemed unfair that there were things you could learn about a person that meant you understood them less.

  She learned to revise Hiram’s films after his trips along the coast, rewinding the movies slowly, her fingers registering each nub of broken celluloid. She stopped the machine and snipped one or two frames clear, fastened the clean ends together with a glue she brushed on. Let it set a minute and began running the film through her fingers again. People would barely notice the hiccup in an actor’s voice where these small repairs were made, the slight stutter in the picture’s motion. But if she was forced to cut out long strings of damaged film whole words or phrases disappeared. When Mr. Gruffydd stopped short of kissing Angharad in How Green Was My Valley, saying he had no right, when she chased him to the door and said, “If the right is mine to give,” no one in the audience but Mercedes would know she once added, “You have it.” It was like having the gift of second sight, being privy to some secret part of the world invisible to other mortals.

  But something in the process disturbed her. How easily skeins of conversation and gesture disappeared from the life of a picture. She lay awake nights thinking what would happen if she forgot those words, the brief significant glances. How the shape of those stories would be altered for good.

  Her last visit from Hardy came early in the fall of 1943. Mercedes was playing a game of checkers on the counter with Johnny Boustani when he came into the shop and took his cap from his head. “I was in town,” he said.

  She introduced the two men and after a few moments of small talk Johnny gathered up his coat and hat and left them. Hardy watched after him and then gave Mercedes a questioning look.

  “You want a cup of tea?”

  “I was just wanting to set eyes on you. See you were all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  He stood with his cap in his hands and he bent his head slightly, taking a long look at her. “You look a little nish, to me,” he said. “Are you getting enough to eat?”

  She’d had no word from Wish since before the fall of Singapore, fourteen months previous. “I’m eating fine,” she lied. “Is someone dead, Hardy?”

  “Everyone’s the best kind. Ruth had a youngster after Christmas. A girl. I wanted you to know.” He motioned his head toward the door. “This one, Johnny,” he said.

  “He’s just a friend.”

  It made her so lonely to see him she felt sick and she wanted him out of her sight. He seemed to feel the impatience in her and it rattled his thoughts. He was carrying a winter’s worth of news but he simply looked at her, not knowing what to say. He went to the door finally, stopped there before stepping outside.

  “You can always come back to the Cove,” he said, “if things go badly down here.”

  “You know the difference of that, Hardy.”

  He threw his cap to the ground. “Goddamn it, Mercedes.” He bent over and swiped it. “You and Mother,” he said. “I don’t know which one of you is more mulish.” He fixed his cap and went out the door.

  Early in 1944 Mercedes finally received a note from Wish. The card typed and signed at the bottom in his hand. It had been written eighteen months earlier, just after his arrival in the Japanese POW camp. She went straight to the Bashas’ store and jumped around while she shook the card in the air. Sammy watched her with a wide grin on his face, completely mystified. Amina grabbed Mercedes by the wrist in order to take the card and she read it aloud. Mercedes bit the skin on the
back of her hand. Hearing Wish’s words in another’s mouth almost like hearing him speak himself.

  The Bashas held a special meal that evening to celebrate. Johnny Boustani sat quietly in a corner and joined the toasts and sang along when the music began but he never looked in Mercedes’ direction through the evening. Amina sat beside him, in a kind of silent commiseration that went on under the noise of the entertainment. Every time she caught Mercedes’ eye her expression seemed to ask, “What about him?”

  Mercedes had thought that moving out of the Bashas’ house would mean seeing less of Johnny Boustani, but the opposite was true. It loosened the constraints that Rania’s surrogate motherhood had imposed. Twice a week Mercedes and Johnny went to the movies at the base theatre. The Basha Orchestra played dances at the USO and Club Commodore and the Old Colony Club, and when Johnny wasn’t sitting in with the band he and Mercedes danced or chatted with the Basha women or loitered outside for a cigarette.

  “You treats him like a dog,” Amina said, “letting him follow you around like that.”

  “I can’t help how he acts.”

  “You’re inviting it.”

  “Johnny Boustani falls in love with everyone,” Mercedes insisted. “Didn’t you tell me that?”

  Judging by her father’s advice, Mercedes thought Johnny had one thing on his mind when they first met and had tried his best to sweet talk his way into it. He gave up on talk eventually, accepting the borders she’d set for him and walking the limits of them repeatedly, like a prisoner taking exercise in the yard. She thought it was enough to have told him where things stood in her heart and let him make up his own mind about his chances.

  They could see the single headlight of the locomotive rounding the curve at the trestle and chugging slowly into the brightly lit station. The roar of the crowd rolling out over the harbour as the soldiers of the 5th Regiment stepped onto the platform. The brassy strains of the CLB Armoury Band striking up.

  Mercedes said, “How long do they think it’ll last in the Pacific?”

  “Eighteen months, some say. But it could go faster now we can throw everything at them.” And a moment later Johnny said, “I guess they’ll be shipping us out of here soon enough.”

  She could hear the regret in his voice. “Why do you waste so much of your time on me, Johnny Boustani?”

  “I’ll be the judge of how much time I’m wasting.”

  “You know my mind.”

  “Everyone knows Mercedes Parsons’s mind,” he said. “Mercedes not the least.”

  “You been good to me. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that.”

  He lurched away drunkenly before righting himself, heading back toward Cabot Tower. “Go to hell, Mercedes,” he said.

  She tried to call him back but he ignored her. She looked out at the lights of the welcoming ceremony below and stood with her arms folded, sure he’d come for her when remorse got the better of him. Half an hour later she was walking among the groups of soldiers around Cabot Tower, asking after him. Several people had seen someone wander off onto the headlands and she debated heading home on her own. But he was drunk and staggering around in the dark and in the end she couldn’t leave him. She spent what felt like hours picking her careful way among the walking paths out there, calling his name until she heard him shouting “Johnny’s not here.” She kept calling and followed the sound of his denial, found him lying in the furze, staring up at the stars.

  “Never had a bed so comfortable,” he said when she knelt beside him in the moss.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “What if I am?”

  “I don’t trust drunk men.”

  “You?” he said. “Living with Hiram Keeping?”

  “Hiram’s different.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  She shifted sideways to sit on the ground. The night was colder on the hill than in the city and she folded her arms around herself. “I’m froze to death, Johnny Boustani. Let’s go home.”

  Johnny never took his eyes from the stars. He said, “I love you, Mercedes.”

  She looked up at the sky herself then, picked out the Big Dipper, Orion. Concentrated hard on them.

  “I’m in love with you, Mercedes,” he said again.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  He sat up suddenly to look across at her. “I know it’s not what you want to hear. But it’s a fact. I love you,” he said. “I loves you.”

  “Don’t make fun.”

  He lay back again, spreading his arms high at his sides. “Johnny Boustani,” he said, “second lieutenant, U.S. Army Intelligence Office. Casualty of war.” He started giggling. “Crucified by the love of a girl from the bay.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “He’ll never come out of it alive, Mercedes.”

  “Johnny.”

  “It’s going to go bad for those fellows when we invade.”

  Mercedes got to her feet and began walking away.

  Johnny raised himself to his knees and shouted after her. “They’re going to fight to the last woman and child. That’s what the Japs are saying, Mercedes. And they’re not going to waste a morsel of food or a drop of water or a single man to keep any prisoners alive.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “They’re dead men, Mercedes. Every one of them.”

  “You bastard.” She had never spoken a word like it aloud.

  “I’ll take care of you, Mercedes. I want you to know that.”

  “Shut up, Johnny.”

  “You could learn to love me, if you let yourself. If you let me take care of you.”

  She was only a few yards away but the dark made the distance seem immense and she screamed across at him. “You’re a bastard, Johnny Boustani. Why are you telling me this?”

  He leaned forward on his hands as if he was about to throw up. “I’m drunk,” he said.

  She came back to him and took him by the ear, lifting his head to talk directly into his face. “Say it isn’t true,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Mercedes.”

  She twisted his ear. “Say it.”

  He looked at her a moment, his eyes slurring slowly back and forth. “It isn’t true,” he whispered.

  “You don’t love me,” she said.

  “Never did. Never will.”

  She let go of his ear and his head sagged below his shoulders. He laid himself back on the ground, one joint at a time.

  “I’m going home,” she told him.

  He didn’t answer her and she walked off over the uneven ground. The wind had come up and she pulled her jacket tight at the throat with one hand. She looked back over her shoulder but there was no sign of movement in the dark. She stopped and tried out a number of other things she’d never spoken aloud before. “Goddamn it,” she said. She looked up at the sky again. “For the love of Christ Jesus.” She walked back to Johnny a second time and took him by the lapels of his jacket, dragging him to his feet. He put his arm over her shoulder and she half carried him across the headlands and down the road toward the lights of the city.

  There was a new indoor pool in English Bay.

  He happened on three boys he knew from the Japanese Language School, all members of the League of Divine Wind. They wore shorts and sandals, towels hung around their shoulders. They weren’t friends of his but they invited him along because they were pessimistic about their chances and wanted the comfort of numbers.

  The manager was apologetic, shrugging helplessly as he explained the facility’s policy. The caustic smell of chlorine drifting out to them from the pool. He was an older man with a moon face under a straw hat, grey pants held high by suspenders. “Sorry, boys,” he said, and it seemed to make him lonesome to turn them away. It was almost possible to feel sorry for him. They walked all the way to a swimming hole near Steveston instead. Putting the place out of their minds.

  But the refusal ate at him and the following Saturday he went back to the pool on his own. The o
ld man shook his head again. “No Japs,” he said.

  Nishino leaned against the doorframe while swimmers came and went and they chatted aimlessly awhile. He watched for a chink, a trap door, an open window in each word exchanged, in every casual detail. He told the manager he was living on a farm beyond Kitsilano and the old man smiled.

  He said, “I lived in Kits for years before I moved into the city.”

  The next week, Nishino brought a container of fresh strawberries from the farm. They ate the fruit together while the manager spoke about this and that, happy for the audience. He had an uncle who’d worked as a shift boss in a sawmill in the valley years before, and Nishino told him it was the very same sawmill where his grandfather first found work when he moved to British Columbia. It was a bald-faced lie but a safe one—the English had trouble telling one Japanese worker from another—and the manager seemed delighted by the information.

  “You’re a clever little nip, ain’t you,” he said. And he apologized again, as he did regularly, for the pool’s policy. “People just won’t stand to share the place with your kind,” he said.

  And then Nishino made his proposal. The pool opened at ten each day. The manager agreed to let him and his friends come down for a swim at seven-thirty in the morning, as long as they promised to be gone before it opened to the general public. “I won’t have enough paying customers to buy myself a quiff, they finds out I’m letting Japs in the water,” he warned.

  The air in the poolroom was humid, as dense with moisture as the rainforest. They cannonballed and belly-flopped off the diving board in the deep end until their skin stung. Just after nine, the manager poked his head through the change-room door and shouted at them to finish up. They swam into the shallow end toward the stairs leading up to the deck. The other boys were halfway out of the pool when they glanced back to see him standing splay-legged with his hands on his hips, only his head above the surface. A look of stilled concentration on his face.

  It came to them all then without discussion or plan. They walked back down the stairs and stood at arm’s length from one another. And after a few moments of willing it, all four boys pissed into the clear water of the pool.