Butterfly's Shadow

by Lee Langley

  ‘We’ll pray for you.’ Adding hastily, ‘Not that there’s anything to worry about, of course.’

  He touched her soft, papery cheek and ran down the stairs, swallowing to hold back tears. When Nancy was at work it was Mary who had collected him from school. She would hug him, before he grew too old for such things, her face smooth against his, and step out smartly to keep up with his skipping, jumping pace. Now, the outside world was contained in the view from her bedroom window. Only her mind still moved, restlessly.

  ‘Listen, kid,’ Louis said, and then seemed to have no further words available. He cleared his throat, squeezed Joey’s shoulder, hugged him, punched his arm, gestures standing in for language that escaped him.

  Nancy straightened his jacket and slipped a scarf round his neck.

  Joey said, protesting, ‘Hey, I’ll boil!’

  ‘It might get cooler.’

  She held him tightly, her face buried in his jacket, dry-eyed.

  ‘I’ll write every day. You write when you can.’ She shook her head. ‘What am I saying? You’ll be home before the mail gets delivered. Once they realise.’

  Once they realise what? The sentence was never finished. Once they realise he’s not ‘really’ Japanese?

  Walking down the street he felt Nancy watching him from the porch, arms crossed, clutching herself, holding on. At the corner he turned and waved and saw her step back into the house, closing the door quickly behind her.

  He hefted Louis’s travel bag, shifting it from left to right hand. It was a strong bag, serviceable, but heavy even when empty. Joey could have taken something lighter, but to reject the bag would have hurt Louis’s feelings and today was hard enough already. Not for him to twist the knife.

  The first time he had presented his papers, the official at the desk checked the details against a list before him.

  ‘Joseph T. Pinkerton, right?’ A routine glance up, down to the papers, up again. A double take.

  ‘So . . . Okaaay. Let’s check this out . . .’

  How many lines had he waited in, since then? How many blurred-ink imprimaturs had been stamped on how many forms, how much checking of documents, instructions and counter-instructions followed . . . how many moments of perplexity?

  Here lay confusion: all-American Joe Pinkerton, but born in Nagasaki. Son of an Oregon hero, a gold-medal swimmer, but maternal parent Japanese – and what was her name again, the mother? What kind of a name was that?

  Joey grew accustomed to the discomfiture, the mistrust and the hostility engendered by the mismatch of his identity and appearance.

  He was aware that he stood out as disconcertingly as if a wolf had been rounded up with the sheep. They were a herd, docile; they were slight, he was big-boned. They were dark, he was fair. Their murmured exchanges lapped around him in a language he had no knowledge of. They glanced up at him, anxious, puzzled. He looked them over with a dispassionate, assessing glance, this tired, huddled, relatively small mass. He had learned the categories: the Issei, who came over early and were never permitted citizenship; the Nisei, the second generation, born and raised American. Citizens. How fragile the word now seemed. And where did he fit into this categorisation?

  There was an odd smell in these stark rooms, acrid, almost chemical. This too Joey learned to categorise: he came to recognise it as the smell of the sweat that breaks out on the skin of frightened people.

  Registration had been the first shock, his realisation that here the human element did not exist; documentation ruled. There were no discussions, no nuances. A piece of paper, a signature, a stamp. Sheep and goats. Blessed are the pure in blood for they shall inherit the earth. The Japanese mother, the birthplace, these were the facts that categorised him. Duly identified, registered and above all documented, Joseph Theodore Pinkerton was set on a path without deviation. All that remained was to pack his bag and report back: a number, a cypher, tagged with a shipping label and dumped in a room to await transportation. Around him, other numbers, registered and tagged, waited in lines – men, women, children; ignorant of what was in store for them, gradually filling a vast hangar which had once been something else – possibly a postal depot or a storehouse, but was now the Portland Civil Control Station.

  Walking into the control station he experienced his first encounter with the new order; a moment that somehow encapsulated all that was to follow.

  As he made his way into the reception area, a guard lounging by the doorway caught his eye and beckoned him over amiably.

  ‘Sir? May I help you?’

  Joe held up his bag, tagged and numbered. ‘Well now, you tell me . . .’

  He watched the guard’s face switch expressions with the speed of a kid’s flicker-page booklet – from benevolence to astonishment to something approaching rage.

  ‘Okay, buster. Get back in line with the rest.’

  He got back in line, looming over the heads of those around him, blue-eyed and six feet tall. No wonder the guard had mistaken him for a person.

  The Portland Assembly Center – previously the Livestock Exhibition pavilion – had been hastily converted to its new role, that of way station, a halfway house while the detention centre proper was set up elsewhere.

  Climbing from coaches and buses the ‘evacuees’, as they now were, milled about, uncertain where to go next. An elderly couple came towards Joey; then bowed and instinctively side-stepped, murmuring an apology. He wanted to grab them, shake them, spell it out: they didn’t need to get out of his way or apologise. He, too, was just a number.

  Waiting in yet another line, leafing through a discarded newspaper, Joey paused at the obit page, glancing over a montage of faces: the famous recently deceased. Lives of achievement or notoriety reduced to a block of newsprint. His eyes slid down the names: Bronislaw Malinowski, born Krakow, Poland 1884 . . . influential British anthropologist and the founder of Functionalism.

  He patted his bag, tracing the pack of books inside, among them his copy of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the pages dog-eared and marked with coffee stains. All that travelling – Papua New Guinea, the Trobriand islands, the Solomon Sea – and then the great man shuffled off his mortal coil in Connecticut, on a stint as Visiting Professor at Yale. We’re all connected, Malinowski said. Joey Pinkerton, resident alien, was also American.

  A guard tapped him sharply on the arm with his baton: ‘Keep up with the line, feller.’

  So: not American, not any more, his old identity consumed in the flames of Pearl Harbor, the waves that closed over the sinking ships washing away the last traces. Now, magically transformed, he had been reborn Japanese. The enemy.

  He stood for a moment, swept by a sense of unbelonging, out of reach of earth and sky and air around him, like a fish floundering out of water. Silence rang in his ears.

  Gradually, as though reaching him from a long way off, a susurration of meaningless words filled the air. He became conscious of grit in his shoe, an itching between his shoulder blades, thirst. He became aware of his surroundings.

  In the distance an ugly, apparently derelict building sprawled, bulky against the sunlight. Next to him, a boy’s voice:

  ‘I guess that shit-hole has to be it. Home from home.’

  Bawled instructions and counter-instructions; shouts, whistles . . . a wall of amplified noise falling on the bewildered crowd. A few boys of Joey’s age found themselves taking charge of what was becoming an unmanageable flock. Like a docent on a school outing Joey guided lost children back to their parents, took a pregnant woman’s bag, motioned others on ahead of him. Most were dressed with formality, as though bound for a family outing; the women in hats and gloves, the children unnaturally neat. But the faces were anxious, bemused. Old ladies wept quietly, trying to remain invisible.

  When they reached the vast barn, it engulfed them, a labyrinth of empty spaces, like an unfinished theatre awaiting set-dressers and cast. Brusquely moved on by armed soldiers, the evacuees trailed through the corridors: elderly
men and women, young mothers, grim youths, children, looking about them apprehensively. Part of some predetermined pattern, they waited. A strong smell of animal dung hung in the air.

  Flimsy boarding divided the building into cramped temporary ‘apartments’. As Joey paused at a doorway a thin, dark boy with a scar on his cheek edged in behind him.

  ‘Jesus. They told us not to bring mattresses, but have you checked out these babies?’

  On each iron bedstead an envelope of mattress ticking was filled with prickly hay.

  Wordlessly the pair stepped into the cubicle and threw their bags on two of the beds.

  ‘Joey Pinkerton.’

  ‘Sat Ichir. Since we’re all Japs here.’

  ‘So what do I call you – Sat?”’

  ‘That’s my family name. You call me Ichir.’ He regarded Joey, head cocked. ‘There’s an old Japanese joke. I’ll cut to the punch-line: “funny, you don’t look Japanese” . . .’

  ‘My mother,’ Joey said. ‘I was born in Nagasaki.’

  ‘Holy shit, you’re worse off than me. At least I was born in Benton County. You were spawned in the devil’s empire.’

  ‘Think they’ll shoot me?’

  ‘Only if you run,’ he said. ‘This is America. Home of the free, remember?’

  The scar on his cheek was fresh, the jagged line dark with dried blood. He touched it with a fingertip.

  ‘In case you’re wondering; neighbourly gesture of farewell. Something to remember them by.’

  ‘What happened to your parents?’

  ‘They went home on a visit, the annual pilgrimage to the old folks. Planned to be back for shgatsu.’ He saw Joey’s expression. ‘New Year’s? They always come back loaded with the full traditional shopping basket and we spend the whole holiday stuffing ourselves with osechi-ryori and all that jazz. Why not? It makes the grandparents happy.’

  He had been going through his pockets absent-mindedly, and now produced a couple of cellophane-wrapped candies. He offered one to Joey, unwrapping the other slowly, following an unspoken trail of thought.

  ‘Well there won’t have been many pretty postcards sent this year, not really a time for nengajo.’

  Joe wanted to ask: what city were they in, Ichir’s parents? How traditional was the family? What was nengajo? For the first time he became aware of the extent of his ignorance: the order of names, the celebration of festivals, the food, the customs – all a blank page. There must have been a time, between learning to talk and being carried off to America, when he would have been familiar with these things, would have recognised the New Year dishes, played the traditional games. Now, he stood, stupid as a tourist, lost in a foreign, exotic world.

  He unzipped his bag and looked around for shelves, but the walls were bare. The Portland Assembly Center was temporary; till the real camp was ready. But what did temporary mean? A week? A month?

  For twenty-four hours they were stunned into shock, paralysis. Then, like a collective mechanism clicking into gear, everything changed. Men drew up duty rosters; everyone got busy: women in the communal laundry, scrubbing, wringing out, hanging up clothes; young men setting up lessons for children, others checking out the kitchens, organising communal latrines. Girls draped stark cubicles with colourful scarves, teams of volunteers washed down walls and floors to try and eradicate the lingering reminder of dung.

  Joey offered his services in the clean-up operation and was met by exquisitely polite refusals. Smiling, bowing, one after another they explained they had enough help already . . . so kind, maybe another day, or when they changed shifts perhaps . . .

  They didn’t trust him.

  ‘Do you blame them?’ Ichir said. ‘The way you look? You could be a government spy.’

  There came a day some ten weeks later when everything shone clean; when disinfected livestock stalls had been painted in harmonious colours, children placed in improvised schoolrooms and a handwritten daily news-sheet produced – even though there was, of course, no news in the usual sense.

  The inmates had, by a communal act of will, created a village within a steel cavern.

  Next morning came the announcement: the relocation camp was now ready; it was deportation time.

  34

  When no more bodies could be fitted into the train, when even the corridors were packed solid, the guards opened up a baggage car for the remaining ‘passengers’. Joey climbed in with the others and moved up to make room for Ichir and his bag.

  He thought about cattle travelling like this. At the end of the ride the cattle faced slaughter; for this motley freight-load and others like them, there was a blank. Nobody had felt the need to explain what lay ahead, other than to repeat the now familiar word: detention.

  Thinking these thoughts was no way to make the best of a bad journey. And to be locked inside a windowless space was no way to travel.

  Back braced against the wall, sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying shoulder to shoulder with his neighbours, Joey breathed in stale air that grew thicker as the hours passed. The others occupied the body of the train, in compartments whose windows had been blacked out, for fear the occupants might signal to hidden enemy agents or draw dangerous information from the passing scenery.

  The wheels turned and from the south-western seaboard a hundred thousand people rattled across an unseen landscape in ramshackle rolling stock brought out of retirement, heading for hastily constructed camps in desolate corners of the land. The sound of this particular train’s metallic rhythm pounded in Joey’s head. Next to him, Ichir picked up the beat and improvised his own version of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’:

  ‘Pardon me, boy, is this the train for Chattanooga

  now?

  No, no siree, not this train, no how!

  This train’s for Utah, Wyoming, or somewhere not

  so near:

  Idaho, Nevada. Or could be California out there,

  Arizona. Colorado, Arkansas, some hot dam’ camp

  somewhere!’

  Through a crack in the wall tantalising glimpses of landscape flitted past, flashes of blinding white intermittently cut through the darkness. Hours passed. The train clattered on.

  This was how his father had travelled when he made the journey to Washington, DC with the vets ten years before. But mood can transform an experience: Joey remembered Ben’s letters to Nancy, the picture they gave of the men; their buoyant spirits, their hopes on that outward journey, rocked by the train, retelling old army jokes, occasionally enjoying a shared slug of whiskey – an illegal activity under Prohibition – singing old songs. There had been army ditties, but also a song that Joey remembered hearing hobos singing as they tramped past his grandparents’ house years before, a song that at the time he thought was funny, with its chorus of sandwiches that grew on trees and streams of lemonade, but which he now saw differently, heartbreakingly, as a bum’s picture of a place of plenty. ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’ was just another way of describing a land of dreams, Cockaigne.

  The men Ben rode with then were noisy, shaggy, shabbily dressed and confident; en route to confront the government, demand their rights.

  Around Joey, barely visible in the boxcar gloom, his fellow passengers swayed with the train. At the assembly Center they had been euphemistic evacuees. Now, bound for the camp, they would be prisoners. They crouched, sat or squatted neatly, elbows tucked close, trying not to embarrass their neighbours with bodily contact. Nobody lolled or sprawled; the older men attempted to protect their clothing from the filthy boxcar floor by placing scraps of paper precisely beneath buttocks, like doilies under cakes. They made no noise, and certainly no one would have thought of consuming alcohol. The mood was quiet, crushed. Not far from Joey an old man wept quietly; shamed, mortified: he had wet his pants. They had committed no crime but they were on their way to prison and they knew that none of them had any rights.

  In Joey’s pocket, the cream-coloured envelope plastered with stamps had grown grubby. He drew it out now, and sq
uinted inside, at the photograph. Cho-Cho looked grim, admonitory Half closing his eyes, he attempted to superimpose a younger, softer image on this angular woman. In the dimness he tried to imagine his mother’s mouth curving in a smile.

  The sun from an early morning slant had moved high overhead, later sinking low in the sky. From time to time the train stopped, its engine dying into silence. Peering out, Joey would find they were stranded on a stretch of track in the middle of nowhere, shrivelled bushes casting no shade. Then, with a jerk and a laboured clanking, the train moved on, rocking, wheezing, sighing steam.

  This time, when the train came to a halt, instead of silence they heard a clamour of voices, the barking of dogs. They had arrived at Tule Lake.

  When they first heard the name, learned to pronounce it correctly: Tulee Lake, there had been conjecture. A lake. Would there be trees, the sound of birds, fish beneath the surface? Or would it be an urban lake, an unknown Chicago, set about with modern blocks, noisy with streetcars?

  Stiff from the journey, they climbed awkwardly from the baggage car, urged on by soldiers with rifles and bayonets. The rest emerged from the train, blinking in the sunlight. The corridors were awash with fluid and there was a stench of urine; toilets had overflowed, soaking shoes and baggage stacked in the corridors. Mothers held babies clasped in their arms. A group of unaccompanied children, dressed alike, faces blank, small hands linked, moved as one, bunched tightly together. All around, dry flatness encircled them; there was no lake to be seen. Far off, dull green patches indicated some sort of cultivation, but the green was thick with dust. They were in a place of dust; dust baked into a substance as hard as rock beneath their feet, the only landmark a low hill rising in the distance.