Frances Itani - Requiem

It quickly became clear that people did not like the look of us sitting there. Okuma-san spoke to me in a low voice. “Look straight ahead,” he said. “People are sometimes afraid. Maybe of themselves, maybe because the war ended only a year ago and they want to blame someone who is nearby. Don’t be ashamed. We have done nothing wrong and we still have a long way to go.”

No one spoke to us, and eventually, the final bus arrived. After we boarded and took our seats near the back, I closed my eyes and wished for nothing but sleep.

I HAD NEVER BEEN to a hakujin school with all Caucasian children. It was early September and Okuma-san and I had been trying to fix up an old chicken coop on the property owned by Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, Okuma-san’s new employers. The Boyd house was at the front of the property and the gardens lay beyond—acre after acre of rich, dark soil where vegetables, tomatoes and strawberries were grown. At the far end, there were more than a dozen apple trees. Off in the distance I could see a range of dry, golden hills.

Although the Boyds had not raised chickens for half a dozen years, they had never torn down the chicken coop on the property, and this was now put to use to house us. It had been swept out and modified before we arrived. A door had been put in, and the wire fencing surrounding the chicken run had been ripped out. The rest was up to us.

This required days of scrubbing, getting rid of feathers and dust and insects. Okuma-san painted the inside with white paint. Two metal cots were provided. The rest, Okuma-san bought secondhand when Mr. Boyd drove him to a junk store on a back street of the town. We had a kitchen table and bookshelves made from apple boxes and a counter that contained a dry sink and a low cupboard. A room at the back of the chicken coop was the bedroom. Okuma-san bought a small table so that I would have a place to do my homework, and this was put along the wall in the main room, which served as kitchen and living area. The place was smaller than the shack we had just left, and not as clean. There was a pump in the backyard, and the pump handle croaked up cold, clear water for drinking. Water for bathing was heated on a wood stove. The toilet was an outhouse near the fenced edge of the property. It had not been used for years, because the Boyds now had indoor plumbing in their own home. Mr. Boyd had hooked up a power line to the chicken coop, and this meant that for the first time since 1942, we had electricity. Okuma-san walked back to the junk shop and purchased a brass desk lamp and set this on my homework table, which wobbled unevenly and had to be levelled from below with a thin wedge of wood.

At the beginning, Okuma-san worked both outside and in. Not only did he help with gardening, but he was also asked to keep track of invoices that were impaled on a sharp spike on a desk in the enclosed back porch of the main house. Mrs. Boyd had been looking after this task until we arrived, entering the figures in a black ledger. She showed Okuma-san what was expected, and he spent long hours over the invoices every week. Old furniture had been stacked up and pushed together at one end of the porch so there would be room at the other end for the office desk and the shelf above it.

Two local men worked in the gardens, and these men lived within walking distance in the town. Their jobs were to weed and harvest and look after the sprinkling system during the evening hours. One man was responsible for pruning the apple trees. He showed me how he had made inroad paths that allowed for both harvesting the apples and the reach of the sun. He showed me, too, the place where asparagus plants pushed up next to the trees, and he told me that in the spring, he tended them and kept them healthy. At night when I went to bed, there were new sounds and I could hear the rhythmic swish-tick of irrigating, the hum of water as it paused in the air before it fell to the parched rows all around.

Okuma-san pitched in outside wherever help was needed, and I helped, as well. All of this meant that there was little time for any other activity. The plank keyboard had followed us by bus to the Boyds’ address, and had arrived at our chicken coop one hot, dry afternoon. So far, it had not been touched. Nor had I opened the sketch pad that was tucked into the shallow drawer of my homework table.

Okuma-san did take an hour off work, however, to accompany me to school on my first day. We walked from the Boyd place at our end of the town, crossed a short field to reach Main Street and continued to the other end, where the school was located. It was a large two-storey building and contained classrooms for primary, middle and high school combined. High school students used the upper floor, all other grades the lower. I was to be in grade four.

Several laughing, playing children were standing around the entrance for the younger grades on that first day. Some of the smallest students were accompanied by their mothers, but most children were on their own. They were talking excitedly in raised voices, darting in and out of small groups and calling to one another. As we approached, everyone became silent and the crowd stood back to let us through. Most of the mothers looked at the ground when we passed, but the children stared at me and I had an uneasy feeling at the pit of my belly. I wondered if I might be getting sick. If so, that would mean I wouldn’t have to attend school after all.

Okuma-san ignored the stares and the averted eyes and walked into the building as if he knew exactly what to do and where to go. He led me down a long hall and around a corner to a second, shorter hall. He stopped outside a classroom that had a brass number four nailed above its doorway. The door was open, and I followed him into the room. We had not spoken since entering the school, and this made me uneasy because I wondered if he had been guessing the location of my classroom.

A young woman was standing behind the teacher’s desk and she looked at us and said her name was Miss Paxton. She seemed to be expecting us, and this surprised me. Her cheeks flushed as Okuma-san bowed slightly and presented her with an envelope that contained my report cards from the camp. The contents were supposed to be proof that I belonged in her class, though from the look on her face, I thought she was on the verge of denying this.

“This is my son, Bin,” said Okuma-san. “He has completed grade three, but he has also done much of the grade four work because he was in a mixed class last year.”

Miss Paxton looked at the envelope that had been deposited in her hand, but she did not open it. Instead, she pointed to a row of desks and told me to take a seat at the back. The other desks were spoken for, she assured Okuma-san, though he had not commented on this. He bowed his head slightly as he departed, and when he reached the doorway, he half-turned in my direction and nodded, making certain that I looked him in the eye before he left.

There was no time to think about my abandonment in this large, strange place because a bell rang out loudly and the building expanded like a bellows in response to the sudden noise. Children came from every direction, through the doorway and into the classroom, but they slowed when they saw Miss Paxton. They became completely silent when they saw that I was already in my seat at the back of the room. After one quick glance around, I knew that there was no one like me in the class—no other child with a Japanese face.

Every child seemed to know exactly where to sit. Perhaps some order had existed before school began. All I knew was that within seconds, every desk was filled. Order prevailed until a girl in my row held up a note and said she had to be near the blackboard because she couldn’t see properly. Miss Paxton nodded while she read the note, and had the girl exchange seats with a boy in the front row.