The Electrical Field (20 page)

“It’s difficult, isn’t it, Asako-san? Even after all these years.” I found myself only able to nod my head.

“I know.” She went on, just when I thought she would move away with her too-kind smile. “I know because I had feelings for him. But he never had time. Not for me, ne?

“I remember the two of you swimming, crossing that river outside the camp, back and forth, all afternoon. You know how the current was. You held on so tight to his neck, I remember …” and she waved her hand in the air, clenched and shook it a little before us. “I thought …” She didn’t continue, but instead looked up, startled that she’d gone on so. She studied me closely again, standing up a little straighter.

“I used to think you two didn’t look alike at all. Your brother was so tall and slim. And you …” Her eyes moved over me. “But now I think I see something—chiisai, something small. But it’s there.” She traced a finger over a patch of skin beneath one eye, then dropped it. “You didn’t know, did you?” Again I shook my head. I held out my hand.

“Thank you for coming, Yamashiro-san. I’m sure my brother would have been very pleased.”

We bowed to one another. She paused before turning away. “You do know who I am, don’t you, Asako? You remember me, don’t you?”

Again I bowed, as graciously as I could. “Thank you for coming, Yamashiro-san,” I repeated, and watched her amble down the aisle and disappear behind the large door into the bleached white sunlight of the afternoon.

The cavernous church felt cooler and darker than ever as I helped Stum ease Papa into the wheelchair. Papa watched as I moved his body about, a helpless child who must assert his will any way he can. He wanted to know who the woman was I’d been talking to.

“Yamashiro-san,” I answered. Papa’s memory had long been ailing by then, and any name or incident could start it bleeding, like an unhealed wound.

“No, no. Iwata-san,” he said. “Ne?” He was insistent, prodding, never content with my silence.

“No, Papa, that’s somebody else,” I finally replied.

When we came out into the sunlight, Mrs. Yamashiro was standing off to one side, alone, clutching a small shabby handbag, clearly waiting to be picked up.

“There she is again,” Stum announced, a little too loudly. I almost pushed him away. He could be so backward.

Dare, who, who, Papa wanted to know. His eyes darted this way and that, his wheelchair rattling from his strong arms batting about.

“What’s the matter, ne-san?” Stum tugged at my arm. “Ne-san, what is it?” The two of them staring up at me. With alarm I noticed that the paper I’d written my remarks on had slipped from my hymn-book. I watched it float to the
ground through watery eyes. I snatched it up, and before I could stop myself I’d crumpled it in my fist.

“Ne-san,” Stum repeated once more, softly. I felt him patting my back, the fleeting warmth of his awkward touch. “It’s all right. You did a good job today. Good job.”

At that time I could not place Yamashiro-san at all. Yet it all upset me; in light of the memorial service, I suppose, and the few words I’d said about Eiji. I was overcome. Tired, as I recall, because I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. My memory was blank, at least at that moment. The woman talking about camp days had done nothing to jog it. There were so many families there, all living in tumbledown shacks, one no shabbier than the next. It was just another adventure to me at my tender age. I was little more than a child when we first got there. Of course, after four years I was still young, barely older than Sachi was now. I could hardly be responsible for remembering a girl much older than myself, for at that age four or five years’ difference could seem a lifetime. And yet she’d been there, watching Eiji and me swim in the river; watching so closely that she’d seen how I’d held him.

After dinner that evening, determined to show his tattered memory intact, Papa wheeled from the cabinet drawer to where I sat on the chesterfield. I flinched as he did so, watching him bump against the furniture, watching the wheels grind their thin tracks into my carpet. For years after he became confined to his bed, I could still follow his winding path through my living-room.

He pointed to a photograph, shaking his finger at it. This woman he remembered as a youthful girl. It was a skill,
I had to admit, reading a face across the decades. “Dare?” Again he was asking who she was, but now he knew the answer. He was testing me and showing off at the same time. But I didn’t have to look closely at the picture to recognize Yamashiro-san. It wasn’t just her face; it was the particular way her legs were bowed below her skirt; the way she stood on the patchy terrain, squinting, legs apart, holding a bucket just as she’d held her shabby handbag earlier in the day. Papa poked me with his bent finger. “Iwata.” Her maiden name. Iwata-san. And there beside her was Eiji.

She was the sister of a friend of Eiji. The brother I barely remembered—an average boy, below average, really; a little runty. When Stum joined us in the living-room, I quickly put away the photograph. Stum had been just a baby then, toddling about in the gloom of the camp, and there was no need to open a can of worms to explain what was well past. Yet Stum did have his suspicions and his questions, as if the past were some puzzle, some game to him. One I did not indulge him in.

Perhaps he’d spied me tucking away the photograph when he came in from the backyard, for he immediately grew cranky and glum. “Who was that woman at church, ne-san?” he kept asking. “You know but you won’t tell me. Why not?” I let his childish questions hang in the air, unanswered. Papa’s head was dropping to his shoulder and I motioned to Stum to take him upstairs. “Go on,” I finally ordered, when he slouched back in the chesterfield.

I hated watching that long, slow struggle up: the way Papa clutched Stum, when they never touched otherwise. It was unbearable to me. I went outside. At that time Stum had
not yet put up the fence that would separate our yard from the tangle of wild growth around it. Alongside the house I spotted four of my good jars that I normally used for pickling radish. All empty except for one with holes punched in its lid; a firefly blinked inside it. Stum must have caught it, stupidly thinking it would survive in there. By the time I unscrewed the lid, its little light had gone out. The tiny creatures flying through the darkness with their bodies momentarily aflame fascinated me too, but I’d never think to keep them in a bottle.

Stum called them kamikaze, those fireflies. As he called Yano and Eiji. In his jealousy, Stum had always made it sound as if Eiji were to blame for his own fate, as if he’d in some way brought it on with his recklessness. What did he know, being little more than two years old then?

When Stum came out he saw the empty jar in my hands.

“Did you put the extra blanket on Papa?” I hadn’t been thinking of Papa, but my mind, efficient as it was, had moved on to the tasks at hand. I found it necessary to tell Stum every single thing. Otherwise it would never get done. Back in those days, he could be hopeless.

“Where is it?” He nodded at the jar, ignoring my question. I held out my hands to show him that it was gone. He looked perturbed; the surfaces of his eyes shone, trapping what light came from the kitchen. “It took me all night to catch it.” There he was, the little boy again, his little eyes drooping in disappointment.

“It’s cold tonight, he’ll need that wool blanket,” I said. Stum could be distracted by the smallest things, and I felt bound to keep him on track. Instead of answering me, he
wandered deeper into the yard and slowly moved beyond the perimeter of my then modest garden. With his dark clothing he was soon invisible, but I heard his rustlings through the weeds and bushes; the crush of twigs under his broad feet. As I think back, it was as if he were walking out to sea.

“Stum!” I called. “Stum!” But he didn’t answer. I thought of following him, but stopped myself. I knew when to leave well enough alone. I hastily set down the jar and went inside. There was the rattle of glass that echoed on the stone patio behind me.

Upstairs, Papa was shivering under a single sheet and the thin bedspread. What was Stum thinking? The window was pushed up as far as it would go, up to the sky, flat and dark as slate. It was an ugly night sky. When I was a child it never entered my head that a sky could be anything but pretty, but there it was: desolate and empty of stars. The sight of it robbed me of my irritation with Stum, as I thought of him alone out there. How would he ever get along without me? Poor, sweet, foolish Stum.

By the time he returned that night it was past one o’clock, and I was sitting up waiting for him. Papa had long been asleep and I’d been mending a pair of socks to keep myself occupied. Somehow Stum’s expression appeared tangled and weedy with too many thoughts, like those woods beyond our yard.

“Why do you keep things from me, ne-san?”

“What things? I don’t keep anything from you.”

“About our brother. About what happened. You never talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to say, ototo-san.”

“That woman at church had something to do with it, didn’t she?”

“It’s not important.” I sighed, exhausted. “Erai. It’s late. Time to go nen nen.”

“Stop that baby talk! I’m not a child any more!” I tried to shush him, fearful that he’d wake up Papa, but he stomped over to the cabinet drawer and began rifling through it. “Where is that photograph?” he demanded.

“It’s just an old picture,” I told him, as calmly as I could. I rose and went to his side and tried gently to pull him away from the drawer.

“If it’s just an old picture, why can’t I see?”

It was clear there would be no reasoning with him, so when I realized that he was searching the wrong drawer I coolly stepped back. “You hid it,” he said, glaring at me. He closed the drawer.

Instead of indulging him, I concentrated on mending his sock. Suddenly he put his hand over mine to still my busy needle. He came close, his breath coming at me in gusts. “Is it me, ne-san? You think I won’t understand, I’m baka?” His face had collapsed a little, and I had to look away. Stum had moments like this. When he took things too seriously; as if everything in the world were only about himself. I gave a mirthless laugh, muttered something, then yanked the sock away from his hand in order to carry on stitching. He grimaced, his cheeks bunched with pain. He raised his hand and sucked at his palm, then shook it. He gave me another look, of anger, bitter anger; sadness, I suppose. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but thought better of it and scrambled up the stairs. As I resumed my mending, I noticed
a drop of blood on Stum’s sock. The tip of the needle was tinged with red as well. He must have stabbed himself with his own impulsive gesture. I found myself irritable now that it was hours past my bedtime. He could never leave well enough alone. As always, he had to prod and poke at things.

I could smile now, remembering all this as I tucked away that leaflet. The thought of my poor baby brother fretting about nothing, about a past that had little to do with him.

Before shutting the drawer, I glanced briefly at the words on the leaflet once again. It did still pain me to see Eiji’s name, and those meaningless dates that told nothing, nothing about him. Just as my words that day had meant nothing. I had half a mind to throw the flimsy leaflet in the trash. Yet I kept it; for whose sake I didn’t know. I rummaged a little for the old photograph of Eiji and that woman, Yamashiro-san, or Iwata-san, as she had been called back then; I didn’t recall her given name. But I dreaded the sight of it.

For she was just another one of those girls in the camp I tried to ignore, those girls who wanted Eiji. Who watched him greedily every minute of the day. It disgusted me the way they fawned, harmless as they were, their shrill voices teeming around him. He was beautiful, after all, with his smooth, glowing skin. I searched—half-heartedly, I admit—but the photo was not to be found. I must have misplaced it somehow, somewhere, over the years. I suppose I was grateful to be rid of it, if the truth be told.

Back in bed, I slept fitfully for a time, and in the middle of the night I found myself wide awake, staring into the darkness. My body felt heavy and swollen; something was
happening to me, something frightening and gradual that no one, no doctor, could help me with, that much I knew. I held my arms out above the covers. They were heavy, so heavy; my hands were bloated, the skin a queer parched white. As enlarged as they’d appeared to me that day when I was a girl, coming back from the Port Dover beach, but more unsightly now that the skin was aged, no longer fresh. Then I saw her in my mind, Iwata-san—Sumi, that was the name I’d known her by—standing that day in the camp as she was in the photograph, holding her bucket as she called after Eiji and her brother, Tak, waving with one hand. They both called back to her. She’d seen me, but she was gone now, dead. Who else had seen? She’d seen my hands on Eiji’s neck, holding too tight, those afternoons at the river outside the camp. I’d held too tight even after the time in Port Dover when Eiji sputtered at me to let go, then forgiven me because I’d held on as a drowning person does, drowning another.

T
HE SKY, WHEN I
looked out, was thick and swollen with ashen clouds as if from a fire. It was Sunday; the field remained deserted. I could not detect even the shadow of a shadow at the window of the Nakamura house. I was worried but assured myself that, if Sachi hadn’t turned up at home yesterday, Keiko would have been at my door, day or night. I busied myself, yet kept coming upon things I’d left behind: half-chopped vegetables on the cutting board, dishes standing in water, my dustrag abandoned on the ledge. I was about to retrieve the rag when there was a knock at my door. A crisp and clear
rat-ta-tat-tat
, unfamiliar to my ears.

“Is it here? With the girl?” It was the woman I’d seen last week, the Yanos’ next-door neighbour. No sooner had I opened the door than she poked her head in, peeking around my hallway and behind me into my living-room. She would have stepped right inside, uninvited, if I hadn’t wedged
myself in the doorway. She coughed the scraping cough of a smoker, and now, in the light of day, I noticed the cluster of vertical lines on her upper lip, raying out from her lipsticked mouth. As her hands batted about beneath the longish cuffs of a man-sized windbreaker, I saw that, all over, her skin had the parched look some hakujin skin could have. I smelled the smoke.