To review: a story in words, yes, but in words plus timing and understanding. Take breadboard, for instance. When does breadboard enter my life? At the age of three or four as I thought? If it is a true change point in a true incident, examining breadboard will lead to the other incidents which build upon it. In which case I must ask, what has happened just prior and how had life gone on before? And what place does breadboard play in the larger story of my life? For if Karl’s theories are correct it will be by this method that I unlock the mystery and find success. For both me and Dr. Frank. However much I choose to tell him.
A second word drops beside breadboard as I stand contemplating these matters and the stars. It is footbridge, and it reveals its mysteries at once. I cross the footbridge to the other side of the creek where I see a little girl about six years old with no clothes on. I take my clothes off and lie on top of her. Then I put on my clothes and follow her to her big white house. In her mother’s kitchen we tell what we have done. The mother laughs at us. We go outside again and remove our clothes and then cross back over the bridge. The road winds away from the rented wooden house in Colwood where we lived: pretty farms and fences, tall trees all around. I pick wildflowers for her and we make garlands and put them around our wrists and necks. We know we are married because we have promised to live together forever. When we come to the crossroads we play one-potato, two-potato to decide which way to go. Her hand tops mine and she chooses.
I yawn and go back to bed. As I drop away from my thoughts, holding to an image of my childhood bride, I hear the squeak of rubber-soled shoes passing the door, the jingle of keys, a muffled howl from the East Wing.
SIX
June 7 and following, 1941
The question is, which is the best breed of rabbits? Ron Signet and I are standing outside the rabbitry smoking and discussing this matter. He’s offered me a cigarette, I’ve taken a puff and handed it back. Ron stuffs one hand in his pants pocket and rocks casually on his heels. I try it, but I know I look awkward. I catch the eye of the Jap, Kosho, whom Dr. Frank has put in charge of the rabbitry. His being the overseer is a sore point with everyone, especially since Japan joined in the Axis pact. Pete Cooper says he doesn’t understand why the Americans continue to sell the Japs oil. “It’ll come back to haunt them,” he says.
Working with Kosho doesn’t bother me. He keeps so much to himself that I don’t see the problem. Right now, he’s bringing a hay bale from the storage shed. He’s immensely strong. I say, “Tell us, Kosho, what is your opinion about the best breed of rabbits. Ron here prefers the French Silver. I like the Beveren.”
Kosho smiles and says, “The white rabbit is best.”
We laugh, because we only breed white rabbits. They’re good meat producers and their skins bring the highest prices. I plan to tell Georgina that a French sable coat is actually a sable-dyed white rabbit. I don’t believe this is commonly known. Not that I think that any of her furs would be rabbit!
Ron has told me that Kosho is from New Westminster. He was discharged from the penitentiary (for what crime I did not ask) but sent here immediately afterwards. He is good with the rabbits and with the chickens which he also tends. He is always cheerful, humming and talking to himself in Japanese. The only oddity he exhibits is that he carries a white towel with him everywhere. I asked Ron about this and he said I would have to ask Kosho, which I did. He explained that the towel is so he can hang himself if he has the chance.
“Are you not afraid to die?” I asked him.
“I say my prayers every day. Why should I be afraid?”
The few Japanese have their own hut. A woman, Miss Cochrane, one of Dr. Frank’s associates, is in charge of it. I’ve seen her several times walking through the grounds carrying their laundry. None of the other staff will help with these inmates. They cook and clean for themselves. The Chinese, who are also here, do not have the same problem, although they prefer to do their own cooking, and they clean again after the janitors have finished in their outbuilding. This is a sore point with Pete Cooper, who calls it arrogant. They are responsible for the laundry of the entire institution.
In his spare time, Kosho fishes in the pond or in the small creek that runs to it, behind the farm. When he can take the fish alive, he stocks them in the fountain at the front door of the asylum. I’ve asked him why he does this and he says, “To bring the birds.”
That may be so, but I’ve also seen him, when I’m out for my walks with Ron, dusting breadcrumbs into the water. The fish come to his hand. They nibble at his fingers and he talks to them. Pete Cooper says that Japs eat fish raw, they don’t even clean them. I cannot bring myself to ask Kosho about this. If it were true, how would I know what to think of it?
Once, when we were on our own in the rabbitry, I had a real talk with Kosho. It was just after my bout with the truth serum, when so uncovered in my soul did I feel that I found heat, cold, light, even normal conversation almost painful. I told him about my leap into the sea from the Brentwood and how I discovered the sea serpent. “Of all the memories I have, Kosho, this is the most beautiful,” I said. He looked thoughtful, and replied that his religion speaks of a kingdom of serpent people under the sea.
I said, “Are they good people? My religion asserts that serpents are evil. My father says they appear in the end times.”
“Some are good, some bad,” he said. “People who fall into the sea and live are very lucky. Such people are said to have met Ryu-wo, the guardian of the Shinto faith.”
Since I did not see how that could apply to me—am I not Christian, despite my differences with my parents?—I said, “What about the bad serpent people? Tell me about them. Could I have met one of these?”
“Their king is terrible. He destroys human villages. He eats innocent children.” I felt from the look in Kosho’s eye that he was on the verge of a confidence.
“Can anything stop him?” I asked before he could say more.
Kosho’s face closed over. “Yes, he is stopped,” he said. Kosho made a chopping motion with his hand.
“What stops him?”
Kosho busied himself at the sink, washing the sink and counter surfaces with a weak solution of carbolic. “He meets the goddess of love and she asks him to stop, and he does. It is a famous story.”
“Not to me,” I said.
I have thought about this conversation in case my first reaction to it was mistaken, but I still can’t make my experience fit. The sea serpent I encountered was a mother, and I was clear in my duty to her and her babies. How was she the guardian of any faith? Georgina, in her rescue of me, was my good angel. Without her I would have died. The human encounter, not the animal one—no matter how unusual it was—is what sustains me.
If nothing else, the conversation served to remind me that it is not wise to make hasty judgments. Each mind is furnished on its own terms in its own culture, for its own reasons. Uncover its secret reasons, and you will reveal the pattern behind the taste in furniture. Ha!
Kosho, like Karl, is a good man. This question of who is good and who is not, though, and how to tell which is which, is a troubling one. I asked Dr. Frank about it and he said, “Good question, Sandy, that’s just the thing.” He was pleased with me, but I’m still waiting for an answer.
Ron Signet finishes his cigarette. Back inside the rabbitry, Kosho cuts hay into short lengths for the cages. He does this on a wooden table with a hay knife. Ron keeps a keen eye on the knife, and takes it away once Kosho is done. Kosho’s access to certain tools is another sore point with Pete Cooper. I am not allowed to touch them yet. I go to the stores and begin mixing feed—oats, wheat and buckwheat—into buckets. Then I add linseed oil cakes, and dampen the mixture before setting it out into the feed troughs. Kosho puts hay in the mangers and I follow along behind him, replacing small blocks of salt in the hutches where necessary. Since it is Saturday, I gather all the water dishes and take them to the sink for a thorough cleaning.
I’m standing there, hosing the
dishes. In front of me, on a shelf, are the tins of carbolic acid and cresol we use as disinfectants. I’m just lifting down the carbolic when Pete Cooper enters from the yard and says, “Okay, girls and boys, hop to it.” Through the open door I see a pickup truck loaded with rabbits in cages. These are the young that have been weaned and quarantined to ensure against the spread of disease. The quarantine period is over. I finish with the dishes, fill them with fresh water and place them in the cages.
Attendant Cooper is walking up and down. “For Christ’s sake, let’s get a move on! Hot time in the old town tonight!” He’s due to go off shift. Winchell has told me that Cooper’s wife has left him for a sailor. If it’s true, it might explain his moods. It’s the kind of thing Winchell might hear, since he always has his ear to the door of the staff room when he’s meant to be washing or polishing floors. Winchell keeps files on us in his head for use, he says, after the war when the proletariat will rise up and kill the capitalist pigs. “Am I on your list?” I once asked him. “One of them,” he said. He flashed the smile he knows upsets me: black stumps of teeth, inflamed gums. “You’re with the milk-fed virgins.”
Once I’ve washed and dried my hands, I go to assist Kosho with the unloading of the cages. Instead of putting the rabbits at once into their hutches, we leave them as they are on the floor and wash our hands again. “What are you nancies doing now?” Pete Cooper asks. “I’ve got to take the cages back.” He points to Kosho. “Chop suey, eh? Chop chop!”
“Well, Pete,” Ron Signet says, strolling across to take a look at the young rabbits that clump together, feathery furred and blinking, “they have to sex them first.”
“What’s that?”
“They can’t put the bucks with the does, Pete, else in a short time we’d be overrun!”
Ron gives a “heh heh.” A pink blush stains his cheeks.
“Who’s gonna do it?” Cooper says, his eyes sparking with interest. “Kosho? Or Sandy?”
“Well,” Ron says.
I’ve been shown how to do this before, and I don’t mind. You get to hold the rabbit in your arms and cradle it; with the smaller ones you can cup them in one hand. I’ve never been watched before—except by Kosho. Kosho stuffs the white towel in his pocket, crouches and opens the first cage. “Girl,” he says and hands me the doe. I put her in a hutch. He does this several times, separating the animals with ease, until Pete says, “No, no, Kosho. You already have turn. You give turn to Sandy.” Pete Cooper’s sweaty face. His hair, skin, eyes, everything about him washed in red. I don’t think he’s been drinking, but there’s a smell about him. “You’re a lover, Sandy. You love everything, don’t you. Krauts, Japs, anything that moves. Let’s see you ‘love’ these bunnies.” He grins, pushes Kosho out of the way, reaches in and lifts out a rabbit.
I close my eyes for a second, then I support the small being in my hand. Its fur is soft and smooth, its heart beats rapidly. When you tip them upside down, they go still, so I tilt the animal and murmur quietly to it. I do not wear a glove. To this point, I have never been scratched.
I push down with two fingers just in front of the anus and the vent protrudes. It isn’t always easy, when they’re this young, to tell which is which, but there is no small tube and I can see from the veins along the central line the pink bands that indicate a female. Pete Cooper is right about me, I am a lover. I love this creature, its trust, its innocence.
“Oh, Sandy,” Pete Cooper says, “how does it feel? Is it good for you?”
I stroke it between the eyes before I hand it over to Kosho.
“Cute little fryer,” Pete Cooper says. I can tell he’s angry, but Ron is there and Pete just pushes by and drives away in the truck.
We finish the job in no time. Tomorrow we’ll go through the breeding stock and cull the old bucks and the does that have served their period of usefulness. This part isn’t pleasant. Before we do it, Kosho prays. Every now and then we let one go. We don’t keep records—we don’t have to—since it’s all in Kosho’s head.
By the time we’re ready to leave it’s getting late and we’ve had to turn on the lights. At the last minute, and to my surprise, Pete Cooper turns up again. There is no truck, so he must have walked from the barn.
“I thought you were off home?” Ron Signet says. Ron’s been reading a book. He’s recently taken up Esperanto. He says that after the war there’ll be a big call for it and he wants to be ready. He marks the page with a turned-down corner and tucks it in his tunic pocket.
“I was,” Pete says, “but Barker’s fallen ill so I’m staying on.”
“Well, it’s overtime.”
“Yeah, but…” says Pete.
“Big plans tonight?” says Ron.
Cooper winks. “Heap big!”
I’m not good at hiding what I feel: This has worked against me all my life, first, of course with my parents, and now here. Karl says I have (haf) to get over it; Georgina says that I must learn to dissemble; that if I were in the military, I would or wash out. Her son dissembles all the time in his letters. He doesn’t tell her what’s really going on, and for that she’s grateful. He won’t tell the truth to anyone, except, perhaps, to the new girlfriend he’s found in England. This is the way he’ll survive the war. I turn my back so that Attendant Cooper won’t see my face, and follow Kosho out with the attendants behind us, still chatting.
We all—except for Kosho who has returned to his quarters—enter the cafeteria by the kitchen door. I hang up my work apron and take off my gumboots in the utility room, stepping over heaps of unsorted laundry, then I wash my hands and sit down for a late supper.
There’s only me eating. Stew and boiled potatoes and boiled greens. Tapioca pudding for afters. Cold coffee. Instead of the usual long tables in rows, there are card tables in cozy arrangements—ashtrays set out, dishes of peanuts on each—oriented towards the stage at the far end. Soon the others from the West Wing will file in for movie night.
As I push aside the grey tapioca globules (must ask Kosho about fish eggs—does he eat them?) Ron Signet goes through the door to the left of the stage and mounts the platform. There he takes a long hook and pulls down the movie screen. Most of the films are educational, from the Forestry Branch or about safety. We don’t mind what they are as it is our main chance to see normal people. Women with makeup, men driving cars.
“What’s on tonight, Ron?” I call out.
Ron leaps from the stage and wanders to the back where the film projector hunches, alien-like with its two reels for head and shoulders. He picks up a film can and reads the label. “ ‘Fire in Your Hospital.’ Sorry, Sandy.” He begins to thread the film.
When I have time, when I’m not busy with my work or trying to understand my position and how I might better it, I like to think about the people with whom I’m confined. Even before Karl comes in, tall, stooped, his spectacles greasy, looking lost, a paper in his hand, and speaks to Pete Cooper, I’m thinking about this difficult attendant. What is it that makes him so angry? The things he says, does he believe them? Or are they just what he says to make his mark? Like dogs do. Pissing into the corners of our minds because he can. Or like the people who came to live in my house when I was small, those who took over from my real parents, who tried to make me believe they were my real parents—did they see it as part of a job, some form of service or improvement? Could they be so deluded they’re guiltless? Judge not that ye be not judged, Sandy.
I cannot say more about the false people, not yet, not before preparing the way first with Dr. Frank, but I would ask you to consider: Would a mother who loved her children tell them each evening as they settled to sleep that they’d go to hell to burn in everlasting fire if they died in the night? Would she, when she was angry at some misdeed—a broken dish, for instance, or a handful of carrots pulled from the garden—would she shout at them in tongues, engendering terrible fear? I know that glossolalia is meant to be God’s voice using the instrument of human speech—so how did it come to be used
as a lash with which to hurt small children? These are questions which I still consider worth posing.
Karl keeps his head down as he hands a message to Attendant Cooper.
“What’s this?” Cooper says. “What hole did you crawl out of? Who sent you?”
“Dr. Frank asked me to bring this to you. He is in his office waiting (vaiting).”
“Vaiting?” Cooper says. “What the fuck is that?”
At that moment the doors open and the others shuffle in. These are men in chains, even though there is nothing binding their feet. They scuff their slippers as if they are hobbled; the starved cheeks, the loss of muscle. Don’t forget your exercises, Sandy.
The sound of the running film is like distant gunfire, the fire raging through the hospital corridors (men carrying water buckets, women soaking blankets and laying them over windows) is repeated a hundred times a night in the bombed cities of London, Belfast, Liverpool and on the Clyde. A haze of smoke from the men’s cigarettes is caught in the cone of the projector light. I’m there, absorbing directions (always know your exits) when there’s a soft sigh, the scent of Chanel, and a cool hand on my arm.
“Georgina!”
“Shhh!” she says. “I had to pull rank to get in here, but I had to come.”
“Why, what’s happened?” I look quickly round, but most of the men are still concentrating on the screen.
“I was just too bloody lonely, Sandy. There’s nothing going on out there! A girl needs some time off for good behaviour.”
“But how did you get in here?”
“I told your friend Dr. Frank my father was thinking of making a donation. I wanted to be sure you were well treated on Saturday nights.”
“He went for that?”
What It Takes to Be Human Page 6