Requiem (29 page)

Okuma-san and I remained in our shack until the end of the summer of 1946, after most of the tomatoes had been harvested and sold. Ying had been bringing newspapers from across the river all the while, and Okuma-san read these and told me that we must be patient because it looked as if some of us would be able to remain in the province after all. A few Caucasians had begun to stick up for us and there had been public objections to politicians who were trying to force us to relocate. Employers had come forward to say that they needed help on farms and in their orchards and sawmills and canning factories. They needed to keep up with demand and production, and there was a shortage of workers.

People from the town across the river began to come over to our camp, offering a few dollars to take the deserted shacks apart so they could salvage the lumber. It was around this time that my first family announced that they would be leaving. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya would leave with them. Auntie Aya did not want to be far from Mother, who had helped her so much throughout the years in the camp.

The evening before they left, Mother came to our shack and knocked on the door. She brought with her an armful of clothing that Hiroshi had outgrown. She also brought a basket of food that could not be taken the next day. After Okuma-san and I had put these things away, she asked me to come for a walk.

My mother and I crossed the dirt road and went past the gardens, all the way to the far edge of the cliff that looked down over the great river. There was a narrow path along the edge, and we walked back and forth on this path. She took my hand in hers and I remembered, afterwards, how warm and small her own hand had been. We stopped several times to look at the wildflowers, and when we came close to the gardens again, she exclaimed over the huge size of the pale green cabbages still left in the rows.

It was a warm evening, and Mother had on a yellow cotton dress with a raised pattern around its bottom edge that reminded me of delicate rows of puffed corn. She wore a pair of sandals that First Father had made for her from leather, and as we walked, she stopped every few minutes and held my shoulder for balance while she shook out the sandy grit that was trapped under her toes.

“Bin,” she said. “You know that you will always be my son. Okuma-san has adopted you because your first father thought it was best. But I will always love you and we will see each other again.”

“When?” I asked. “When will we see each other?” I knew that there was little money, and that people like us did not go travelling.

“When we can,” she said, and she looked down over the river as if it were far away and not flowing swiftly below us, at the bottom of the cliff. “We will see each other when we can.”

In the morning, Mother, First Father, Keiko, Hiroshi, Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya were picked up by Ying in his truck. Keiko was trying not to cry, but tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked so much older now, with her short haircut. Hiroshi and I said goodbye, and he threw out a hand in
Jan-Ken-Po
and I did the same, and we both did
Scissors
so neither of us won. Hiroshi looked away, towards the town on the other side of the river. First Father put a hand on my shoulder and a low sound came from his throat that sounded like “Huuuh.”

The goodbyes were not prolonged. I watched them push their bundles up into the back of Ying’s truck and I watched as they climbed up beside them. First Father thumped the cab to let Ying know he could pull away. Okuma-san stood beside me. Mother had her navy blue coat over her arm, the same coat she had worn when we’d arrived almost five years earlier.

First Father did not look back. I saw him only in profile as he departed. He looked resolute and unrelenting about this decision and any he would make in the future. The last image I held of the others was of them looking back at me as if they were trying to fix me in memory. Their faces became smaller and smaller and finally disappeared as Ying’s truck bounced and rattled along the dirt road. Ying drove them to the bus station across the bridge, and they were gone.

Two weeks later, we received a letter from Mother telling us they had found a place to live in a valley about forty miles south of the camp. First Father and Uncle Aki were working in a sawmill and they would stay there until they were able to save enough money to move again. Uncle Kenji and his family had arrived there, too. There was a school a mile down the road, she wrote, and Hiroshi and Keiko—now called Henry and Kay—would be attending with our cousins, in the fall. That was all she said, apart from giving an address care of the local post office.

This postwar move undertaken by my first family was the beginning of many. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya stayed in the mill town until 1950. They waited a year after they were allowed to vote in federal elections—which also meant that they were free to go to the coast—and then moved to Vancouver. It had become clear that Auntie Aya needed help from the kind of doctors that were available in a large city.

First Father and his brother, Uncle Kenji, both accomplished fishermen, drifted for years in the interior of the province, from village to town, from town to village, always far from the coast, seeking work in mills and orchards, staying overnight in flea-infested bunk-houses, trying to find places to live, making repeated and thwarted attempts to search for what would never be recovered. My first family moved so many times, I had to check the envelopes that arrived from Mother and Keiko to learn their latest location. It was only after Hiroshi and Keiko and our cousins had grown up and left home that First Father and Mother moved one last time, even farther inland, to the outskirts of Kamloops, near the North and South Thompson Rivers, where the two of them remained. Uncle Kenji followed right behind them, and had a house nearby.

S
ummer was almost over when Okuma-san made plans for the two of us to travel to a town in southern British Columbia. We were among the last few families to leave the camp. A friend he had in Vancouver, a Caucasian, had written to say that he had heard from a cousin, a Mr. Boyd, who lived south of the Okanagan Valley and needed someone to do odd jobs related to his business. He was willing to hire Okuma-san. The job had nothing to do with music, but it might be a way of biding time until more freedom of movement was allowed and until communities were more welcoming.

The cousin, as it turned out, owned a market garden that had grown too large for him to handle. His property was located on ten acres at the edge of a small town and there was a building where we could live on the property itself. Okuma-san was warned that the building would need some attention. In the letter, his friend also said that a school would be within walking distance for the child.

We travelled by bus, which really meant three buses, as we had to change twice along the way. Because there was a two-hour wait between the first and second buses, we sat on a bench outside a garage in the first town and kept to ourselves. At the entrance to the town we had both seen the sign welcoming visitors, posted by the roadside. Directly below the welcome sign, a second sign had been nailed to the post: JAPS NOT WELCOME. I had no difficulty reading this and did so, silently, to myself.

Okuma-san bought two more tickets when it was time to change buses again. There was another wait and again we stayed outside, sitting on a low wall at the back of the station parking lot. Okuma-san dipped into the food basket he’d packed for our journey, and gave me a rice ball that had almost dried out, some strips of omelette and an apple. He had made lemonade before we left the camp and we drank from a jar with a tight-fitting lid.

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.