Frances Itani - Requiem

“They both fly in vee formations,” Albert had told him, pointing out past the shore. “From here, they look pretty much the same size, do you see? But the wild geese never coast. Their wings never stop flapping. A cormorant will pause now and then, and coast. That’s how you tell them apart.”

There was still a bit of light during our walk, and Lena said she was turning back because she wanted to start in on the packing. The sky was changing again, and clouds had begun to spin out from the setting sun. Greg and I continued for a while, sandpipers scurrying ahead comically, miniature busybodies with white rings around their necks. We were intent on reaching a promontory where the red cliffs jutted sharply into the sea. Mostly, we were silent, listening to the ebbing waves and paying attention to what had washed up on the sand since our last walk. Just before we reached the point, we came across a tidal pool that was shrinking rapidly but, at the same time, creating numerous shallow puddles some twenty or thirty feet back from shore. In the puddles, hundreds upon hundreds of small herring were trapped. The tide was going out quickly. The once wide rivulet through which the herring had swum in from the sea had left its outlines, but it was now clogged with sand and the exit was blocked. It was obvious that the herring were doomed, because the pools that contained them were too far back from shore. There was no hope of reopening the rivulet; it had closed long before we’d arrived. And now that the water was being absorbed, hundreds, maybe thousands, of small fish were abandoned on the surface of the sand.

Greg began to scoop them up, his bare hands turning to liquid silver as he ran to the edge of the sea to dump them in. Back and forth he raced, saving as many as his small hands could hold. When he saw how little progress he was making, he tried to scoop the flopping bodies into his sunhat, running to the sea and returning to the shrinking puddles. I helped him for a while, sickened by the hopelessness of the drama we’d become a part of. We could not keep up. There were too many tiny fish. Too big a school, too many stranded.

In exhaustion, and finally acknowledging what I already knew, Greg plunked himself down on the sand. His knees were bent up, his head down. His skin was almost nut brown from the sun and he looked like a sea creature himself.

I heard a curse. “Goddamn,” he said. That tiny, lean boy. He was struck down in defeat. It was a defeat for me, too, because I could not see any way to help him. He’d have been insulted if I had said, “It’s an accident of nature and we have stumbled upon it and we are witness to it and there is nothing more we can do.”

I thought of Okuma-san, who had always been there in the background when I was a young boy. Somewhere near. Instructing, caring. Hovering, the way Uncle Aki hovered over Auntie Aya. What would Okuma-san have done in this situation? He would have allowed Greg the dignity of silence.

It was dark when we turned and made our way back, the living-room light in the trailer acting as a beacon on the cliff to guide us forward. Greg’s narrow heels dug into hard, damp sand, leaving a trail of dogged footprints.

At bedtime, my son, who had been born old, looked up from his pillow and said, “I’m not so sure I want to live in an unjust world.”

To which I had no reply.

The death of the herring did not deter Greg. His love affair with the sea having begun, he became all the more determined to learn about the creatures that live within. Lena and I supplied books and recordings. He began to take tapes to school, sharing songs of the humpback whales. At home he sat in the reading chair, wearing oversized earphones while leafing through his new books and singing heartily along with the whales. In an exercise book he brought home from school, he printed: I have a reckrd with sownds of a humpback whale. I’m going to be a marine bologist. I love sea mammals. They are frendly that’s why .

When the teacher asked the class to make two lists, one of things they could do and one of things they couldn’t, Greg printed in his book:

THINGS I CAN DO: think, sing, giggle, subtract, swim, love the sea

THINGS I CAN’T DO: fly, juggle, drive, hate the sea

At dinner one evening, he crossed his hands over his chest and declared that in place of his heart were whales and dolphins. That was where he was holding his love.

By the beginning of 1945, the windows at Okuma-san’s had frosted over and we would not see through them again until spring. Thick needles of frost had built up inside the walls; Okuma-san held a chair and steadied it while I stood on the seat and broke off the larger brittle needles near the ceiling. Like every other tarpaper shack in camp, ours was not airtight, though Okuma-san had done what he could to seal the cracks. At night, the boards snapped and groaned and the place breathed with a hoary rasp. I’d become used to the winter noises here, in the way I had been familiar with distinctive sounds in my earlier homes: the tide seeping up under the house of my birth on Vancouver Island; the winds gusting through the boards and knotholes in the home of my first family.

There had been recent changes in our camp. Four families had packed up their meagre belongings and departed the first week of December. They left their homemade furniture behind and travelled together, all of them heading for Ontario. Their shacks were now being used for storage of wood and for food that could be kept frozen.

The United Church had helped these families to find work—two of the older girls would be domestics; their parents were to be caretakers and short-order cooks. One man was to have a job working for a laundry, another for an optical company.

Ba and Ji had received a new letter from California. Sachi wrote that half the population, almost five thousand prisoners, had now left Manzanar. Unlike Canada, the United States had decided to permit Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast. Despite this, many were moving east because their homes in the coastal regions were no longer available to them, and their jobs were gone. Sachi’s husband, Tom, had applied for a job in Nebraska, using his engineering background, and that was where they were heading. Although Sachi was expecting the baby in April, she was going to try to get temporary work as a steno, to help with the income after they settled.

Since Christmas, two babies had been born in our camp. Ba had helped with the deliveries, and both babies were girls. The parents had to keep the wood in the oil-drum stoves piled high and burning constantly to make certain that the new babies would be warm enough.

Also, a man had died of pneumonia—one of the elders. I hated to use the outdoor toilets at any time, but when someone died I became worried about the footless ghosts that were said to gather in the woods behind the building, even though I still hadn’t seen one.

As for the war, it wasn’t any easier than before to get news about what was happening either in Europe or in the Pacific. There was still no radio in camp. We did learn, from letters, that many Japanese Canadian men had been recruited to work with the British and Australian armies. And that the Canadian army needed men to teach the Japanese language to soldiers who would be working in Pacific operations.

For a few days, our worries were set aside because New Year’s Day was the biggest celebration of all. It was the custom for families to visit back and forth for two or three days over this period. On New Year’s Eve, I ran back to the house of my first family because I was allowed to bathe in the bathhouse with Hiroshi and Keiko on this special night. We scrubbed extra hard, remembering the warning of the adults: anyone who forgot to bathe before midnight would turn into an owl.