Frances Itani - Requiem

When Lena and Greg used to tell stories in the car, sometimes they started with a chant:

They took turns filling the dark space. I didn’t need to. I had enough dark spaces of my own to fill. Or so Lena reminded me, when I disappeared into gloom.

“Where do you learn these things?” I said to Lena.

“Childhood. I make up the endings. We both do, don’t we, Greg?”

Greg was giggling in the back seat.

“What about your childhood?” Lena said. “Tell us the stories you learned.”

“Not Goldilocks . Not Hansel and Gretel . More like The Spider Weaver and Kachi-Kachi Yama .”

“Tell us,” they both said at once. “Tell us! Please!”

The train is still there, to the south, and gives the impression of being miles long, travelling a path parallel to mine and at the same pace. It’s a cardboard silhouette, pushed by some force that comprehends enormity, patience, space. At one point, the distance between road and track narrows and I can make out the image of a moon on the side of each boxcar, each moon missing a chunk, as if it’s been bitten out. And then, as my car surges ahead, I hear a long, slow whistle from the train. A greeting in this limitless land. I am here and you are here and I salute you .

Beyond the western edge of Winnipeg, it begins to snow. A quick, harsh blizzard that takes me by surprise. I drive through it and half an hour later I’m under afternoon sun, wondering if the storm happened at all. But here’s the proof: horizontal chunks of snow, trapped and unmelted at the base of the windshield. The air as cool and fresh as it was in Ontario, but the landscape so vastly different.

Weather can be visualized in all directions here. Sun ahead, cloud behind, blue above. There it is, the primary colour between green and indigo, background for migrating geese to stroke a wide-stretched vee across an otherwise unbroken sky. One puffball cloud appears to have been catapulted from an earthbound slingshot. The scene keeps changing. A visible rope of rain stretches taut in the northeast, tethering cloud to earth. Spindly baby calves huddle close to their mothers in a muddy field close to the road.

I switch on the radio and listen to an American talk show from across the border for a while. The topic is aging and how old people are treated in today’s world. “If I’m in the way, put me on a piece of ice and push me out to sea,” says one old man who phones in. “There isn’t any sea around here,” says the host. “Then take me out to the back forty and shoot me,” says the man.

I switch to CBC and hear the tail end of an interview with a British mystery writer who talks as if she has a rag in her mouth. Finally, I turn the radio off. And think of Greg, young; I can’t remember exactly how old. Maybe eight, nine. He had heard the word cremation somewhere and brought it to me, asking for explanation. I did my best, tried to describe without alarming him. He took in the information, gave a little chuckle and said, in a deep, low voice and with immense bravado, “Well, they can just lay me down on a sailing ship and set fire to the sails and let me drift out over the ocean.” And then he laughed as if this was the funniest image he’d ever conjured. In fact, the two of us roared with laughter, tears running down our cheeks.

Since Lena died, I’ve sometimes found myself praying when I think of Greg. “Please, God, let him be safe. Let him grow and thrive and have a life. Let him be happy. Please.” Praying when I’ve never prayed before. Praying that things will be all right for my son.

I look to the sky ahead and suddenly wish for a canvas. A flexible surface, responsive to the pressures of the brush. It’s been weeks, months since I’ve painted. I have only paper with me now. Still, the urge is there, or was, fleetingly. A good sign. Hopeful.

I fumble with tapes and push in Symphony No. 3, Eroica , and still my thoughts as the music begins. The first movement does that to me: it says, Listen . It’s the second movement that makes me believe Beethoven heard many voices crying in his head. Well, it’s the funeral march, after all. But the entire symphony keeps breaking expectations. There is a grandness to its fragmentation, its emphasis, its yearning. As I turn up the volume and settle back to listen, the one long curve in the road—the only curve on this part of the prairie—makes me understand that I am on the extreme edge of a rim of orb called Earth.

Water spilt from a tray never returns to the tray .

The sixty shacks were completed during our first summer in the camp. In ours, the opening Father had made for the window in the bedroom wall was now covered by a blanket that Mother had nailed to the frame. The blanket helped to keep out the cold air at night, but Hiroshi and Keiko and I still sought one another’s warmth, our legs and feet intertwined in sleep beneath the blankets that were heaped on our bed. Doors and panes of glass were taking a long time to arrive in the camp, and complaints to the Citizens’ Committee had not yielded results.

The Citizens’ Committee, comprising a dozen interned residents, was the main committee in camp, and its representatives did their best to solve problems and complaints that arose in the community. An RCMP office was across the river, and the Mounties in this office acted as a liaison between our camp and the town. Although we were supposed to be self-sufficient, we were all registered with the Mounties, and we had to rely on the town for supplies. It would be a couple of years before we would be permitted to cross the bridge and enter the place ourselves, so families had to shop by catalogue or by mail. For groceries, lists were made and sent over to the grocers in town every two weeks. Most of the time, people made do with what they had at hand.

Despite the hardships, much had been accomplished. The field that had held nothing but sagebrush when we’d first arrived now contained the lives and the comings and goings of more than two hundred people. With daylight hours being longer, the air was warmer, especially in the middle of the day, and more and more people were seen outside. The fire in our stove was allowed to go out after breakfast. Keiko and I were sent out to pick dandelions, and Mother prepared these with sugar, sesame seeds and shoyu , the soy sauce we had brought with us. But the supply of shoyu was running low and had to be watered down until more could be ordered.

Once the shacks were finished, a meeting was held to finalize plans for the schoolhouse, which would be located at one end of the field. It was to have a long, divided room for classes, as well as a community room. Every family in camp pledged to contribute to the building in some way, because everyone wanted the children’s education to start again. The school year had not resumed after being interrupted the past winter, after our removal from the coast. For now, older girls in the camp who had recently completed high school and any young women who had studied at university were approached by a school committee to see if they would be interested in being teachers. Information about correspondence courses began to arrive from the Department of Education in Victoria, and some training was promised for would-be teachers the following summer, in New Denver. The carpenters had begun to make desks and benches for the school, and so far, the supplies consisted of a blackboard, a few pieces of chalk, scribblers with multiplication tables on the back and pencils without erasers.