Frances Itani - Requiem

For days, we talked about the taste of those cookies and how happy we had been to see our uncle’s friendly face when he grinned under the shadowy brim of his hat and was recognized. Auntie Aya, however, was having a difficult time adjusting to conditions in the livestock building, and she sometimes spent hours sitting on her bunk, staring at nothing. She told Mother she couldn’t sleep because of the sound of sobbing at night. It was only when a doctor was called and a baby was born in the same aisle as Auntie Aya that she roused herself and made a move to help others. The birth of the baby, a boy, had happened quickly, and the people in charge had no time to get the woman to hospital. She had two other young children and needed help. Auntie Aya was often seen after that, walking up and down the rows between stalls, the new baby bundled and held to her shoulder. She told us that she wanted a baby of her own and was getting practice. When she wasn’t helping with the baby, she sometimes supervised lessons, as she had agreed to help with the loosely organized attempts to keep school-age children learning.

If Auntie Aya had at first been reluctant to get involved in other people’s misfortunes, our own mother had gone into action from the beginning. There were many older women in the building, and several had become ill and needed help washing their clothes and getting to meals. I tried to stay close to Mother while she moved about, in case something unexpected might happen. Surrounded by strangers every moment, I had begun to worry about being separated from her, or from my brother and sister. I missed Father, whom none of us had seen for almost two months. Only when Mother was told that we were being sent north did we learn that he would be joining us again. But not until the day we were to board the train.

In the meantime, even more women and children had arrived at the livestock building, which meant that those of us who had been there the longest had to move on. Buses and trains were taking families away, heading to ghost towns from the former gold rush days and to camps in places named Greenwood, Kaslo, Slocan, Tashme, New Denver, Lemon Creek—as well as to work the sugar-beet fields in Alberta. Faces that had become familiar disappeared and were never seen again. And then, one morning, shortly after breakfast in the poultry building, we were told by guards that our turn had come, that Father had arranged for us to go north. Auntie Aya was to travel with us, though we did not see Uncle Aki until just before the bus arrived to take us to the train.

Everything had to be packed up quickly. Damp clothes were yanked from lines, divider sheets and blankets tugged from ropes and racks. Other families were led out of the building with us—some faces were familiar, some were not—and we were herded onto a bus and driven to a station platform, where we were to board a train. There we stood, in a huddle beside the tracks, once more clutching bundles that had been newly tied with string.

Husbands and fathers were now joining the group, and families were reunited in the confusion as everyone crowded around heaps of suitcases, baskets, hundred-pound sacks of sugar and rice, paper shopping bags, buckets and boxes, rolls of bedding coiled with rope. We were adrift in a sea of bent-over backs, a blur of shapes and colours. I moved closer to Mother, who was wearing her navy blue coat again but this time with a scarf wrapped around her head and tied under her chin. A huge black train thundered in—the Pacific Great Eastern—raising cinder dust as it puffed and wheezed to a halt in front of us. Hiroshi leapt forward, and Mother hauled him back.

“Stand still,” she told him sharply. “Take your sister’s hand and look after her until you are told to board the train.”

I saw how tense she was when I looked up at her face.

“Hold your bundles tightly,” she said, quietly now. “Don’t look back. Your father will find us. Uncle Aki has seen him. He is helping the old people and he has to look after the sacks of sugar and rice. He has to be certain that the crate that holds our stove gets into the freight car at the back of the train.”

Father had been brought to the station separately, but at the time we boarded, there was still no sign of him. Mother told me to lift my feet high onto the steps of the coach. A tall policeman in uniform, the ever-present RCMP, leaned forward and picked me up suddenly, as if I weighed no more than a piece of cloth fluttering through the air.

“There you are, young fellow,” he said, and he set me down gently in the doorway between coaches.

I was feeling the weightlessness of the moment, the pleasurable rush of my body through air, when I heard Mother’s voice below. Her refusal of help. She climbed up by herself and looked away until the policeman stepped back and offered to lift someone else.

We claimed facing double seats, Hiroshi and Keiko on one side, Mother and I on the other. I was pushing my palms across the rough bristles of upholstery, and I looked up to see a conductor and a different member of the RCMP making their way through the long aisle of the coach. One by one, the two men removed every linen square that had been buttoned to the top of the seatbacks. No dark head of Japanese hair would be touching those starched white linen squares. Again, Mother turned away until the men had passed us by.

The train began to jerk and halt, jerk and halt. Father had not found us. He had not come to the train, after all. And then, just as we were pulling away from the siding, I saw him outside, running to reach the steps at the end of the coach.

“Thank God,” Mother’s voice whispered above me. “Thank God we are together now.”

But Father was agitated and out of breath, and he scarcely took note of the fact that he hadn’t seen us for a long time. He picked me up roughly and plunked me down between Hiroshi and Keiko on the facing seat. They both squirmed and wriggled but did not dare to complain. I was trying to hear what my parents were saying, but Mother lowered her head and whispered, raising her palm in front of her lips so that she would not be heard by others crowded around us. A cold rain had begun outside and was trickling down the thickness of distorted glass in the train windows. I watched Mother as she stared over our heads while she listened to something Father was telling her. She leaned back into the seat. With no expression on her face except one of extreme fatigue, she closed her eyes.

We arrived at our destination in the evening, and pulled our bundles down from the overhead racks, only to learn that we were not allowed to get off the train. We were at a railway station beside the Fraser River, on the edge of a town we were not permitted to enter. One more rule that had to be obeyed. Father pushed our bundles back up on the racks, and snapped at us and told us to sit down again. The train backed up and stopped, dead still, on a siding away from the main tracks. Angry people from the town were parading along the length of the train, holding signs up to the windows in the fading light. They did not want us there. Not even to sleep on the train.

Wanted or not, this was where we had been sent. But no one knew what to do with us now that we had arrived. Not the protesting people from the town, not the government representatives, not the RCMP, who continued to guard the train. No one seemed capable of making a decision.

“Stay where you are,” one policeman told the men. “Tell your families to be calm. Don’t try to get off the train.” As if we had any choice if we did get off.

It was easy to see that it was cold outside because of the way the protesters were dressed. We were told not to open the windows, but the air in the coach was worsening. It had reeked horribly throughout the journey, but now it was unbearable. Despite this, we were made to sit on the train for three more days and nights. Some children became ill and retched and cried. Odours of urine and feces and vomit mixed with the sticky-sweet smell of varnish from wood panelling inside the coach. Several of the old people had fever and diarrhea. Food was brought to the train by the RCMP, and the smell of it made the air even worse. There were spittoons outside the washrooms at the end of the coach where four or five old men stayed most of the time, bickering and talking and playing cards. It was difficult to fall asleep, even though we did our best to stretch out on seats that had been pushed back as far as they would go.