Frances Itani - Requiem

Keiko longed to be back in the classroom again. She played school, and she acted at being “teacher” when she had any time left over from helping Mother or after doing her share of weeding in the garden plot. She hauled me in as her “pupil,” and it became her mission to teach me to read and do elementary math. She also encouraged my drawings. Sometimes we made puppets and miniature puppet theatres together. For materials, we used whatever we could find in the woods and any remnants of cloth or paper or cardboard that had been discarded around camp. For glue we used grains of cooked rice, moistened with water, and we pressed these flat with our thumbs. Other children joined in, but Hiroshi refused to participate in Keiko’s classes, held in the shade of softly scented pines up the slope behind the camp. There was a plateau there, partway up the mountain, a flat area that everyone had begun to refer to as the Bench. From that height, we could look directly down on the entrances to the outdoor toilets below, and watch people go in and out. It was said that ghosts hung around the wooded area behind the outhouses, and a girl in her teens who joined us one day told us she’d seen the ghost of one of the old people who had died of dysentery when we’d first arrived, a woman in her seventies. The ghost of the woman had no feet but it had been prowling in and around the trees, even with no feet.

“Bin can chase away ghosts,” Keiko told the others. “It’s part of his fate. Father said.”

Sometimes I was persuaded by the older children to run down the hill, arms outstretched. They all laughed as I ran, but I did not laugh. I had not seen any ghosts. Still, I ran down the hill, shouting at the top of my lungs, pretending to chase the ghosts away.

The main problem in the camp was always the supply of clean water. Several of the men chipped in together, and after obtaining permission from the RCMP office across the river, they purchased an old truck. The mechanics in the camp kept the truck running, and it was used for everything from early cartage of water barrels to much later delivery of tomatoes that would eventually become the main source of income for the camp. Special permission was needed before leaving the camp area, but there was no place to go. Our movements were restricted, and the road blocks were still in place. We weren’t allowed in the town. We could walk along the road to the end of the bridge on our side of the river, but we were not allowed to cross it. That was as far as we could go. There was nothing but canyon and river and mountain everywhere else.

The heat of summer, as we had been warned, was as extreme as the cold had been during the winter months. Some people were having difficulty moving about because the temperature soared higher than 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite this, no one could stay inside for long because of the work that had to be done in the gardens. Seeds and budding plants had to be watered in the dry, sandy soil. Most families had a long stick or broom handle with an empty can attached at one end, for the purpose of watering. Until a workable irrigation system was set up, full buckets of water had to be carried to the garden area. The stick-and-can device was dipped into the bucket and used to water the plants, one at a time, row by row. All the while, men and women, girls and boys could be seen climbing the hill from the river below, carrying full pails of water suspended from yokes they wore across their shoulders. Some families devised their own filtration systems, using layers of sand and homemade charcoal above their water barrels. In our home, we were still boiling water for drinking, and we collected rainwater at every opportunity.

One morning, the long-awaited shipment of doors and windows arrived by truck. The men in camp stopped work on the gardens and the schoolhouse, and immediately began to work on the shacks again. Within a short time, every shack had a door with a latch and real hinges, and windowpanes in the two front windows.

But Father had wanted the extra window for our home, and he had made the crooked opening in the bedroom wall at the back. Now he had to cut an extra pane of glass. He went outside to try to fit the glass to the frame, and lost his temper when the frame splintered and a thick chunk of wood fell to the ground. He let go of the glass and it, too, dropped and shattered.

I was outside, at the corner of the shack, sitting on the low stool I had dragged out from the kitchen. I had a piece of cardboard on my lap and I was drawing a picture with the stub end of a pencil. I was trying to draw a horse, but I was having difficulty. I had a picture of a horse on the ground in front of me, torn from an old calendar that Keiko had found. When the window glass hit the ground, I looked up and blinked.

“What are you staring at?” Father shouted. “Why are you sitting there making foolish pictures when you should be helping?”

I looked down unhappily at my picture, which did not in any way resemble the calendar horse. Especially the distorted hind end.

“Arse!” I shouted. And then, out of nowhere, came “Arsehole!”

Father picked up the chunk of wood that had splintered from the frame and threw it in my direction, hitting me squarely on the forehead, directly over my nose and between my eyes. I heard my own cry and became aware of something gushing down my face. I reeled back and put my hand to my forehead. I saw a red splash on the sandy ground and another against the tarpaper on the outer wall. Mother came running outside, and a sudden, abrupt shout hung in the air between my parents. I was helped into the house, and after that I remembered nothing except waking in my bed after dark.

It was Keiko, later in the evening and under the blankets, who whispered and told me what had happened next. Both she and Hiroshi were astonished that I had sworn at our father. I did not mention my bad drawing of the horse. Of course, the story grew and grew and we went over its details many times after that, but always out of earshot of our parents. What happened after I was laid on the bed became Keiko’s story because she had been there when the pane of glass had fallen.

Father went to get another pane of glass from the camp supplies, and returned to the back window to try again. Mother was in the bedroom, looking after my wound. Keiko was sent to get clean water from the barrel outside the door. Hiroshi had missed the whole event because he was working in the garden, watering plants.

Ji, who had heard the commotion, came over from next door to help repair the broken frame and fit the glass. Through the hole in the wall, the two men could see directly into the bedroom while I was being cared for. Father was scowling while they moulded and packed putty in and around every crack, until the glass was finally fitted. Still, it was awkwardly set because of the way the opening had been made in the first place, and nothing was going to change that. But Father didn’t care, and Ji did not comment on the crookedness. Nonetheless, Ji stood back and smiled at the patchwork and the finished product. He liked perfection. He’d had carpentry experience in his youth, and long ago, he had built shelves and a deep counter in the general store he and Ba had owned in Vancouver. He pulled out a rag, which most of the time hung from his back pocket, and he wiped remnants of linseed oil from his fingers. His tough old hands were creased with rivulets of cracked skin. He patted Father’s shoulder as if Father needed encouragement. And then he soundly told him off because of the cruelty he had shown his younger son.

When Ji went back to his own shack, he sent Ba over to look at my injury. The bleeding had stopped, but she examined the wound, went home again and returned, carrying a small bowl of egg white, runny and raw. This was applied to the split in my forehead while I lay in bed, and then she covered the wound with a strip of clean cloth.