Requiem (33 page)

“What about Kamloops?” she says suddenly. “You have to pass through there to get to the camp, or very close by. I’ve already warned Father that you’ll be driving to B.C. after you leave Edmonton. He’ll be sitting in his chair, staring at the door as always, but this time he thinks it’s you who will be walking in.”

A man who won’t leave the province. Another who won’t enter. Until now. I imagine a painting, panels, a diptych maybe, some sort of split canvas. If I were in it, I’d paint myself out.

“I don’t know why you did that, Kay. I haven’t decided about that.”

A long sigh.

“You never knew,” she says. “Well, how could you? No one ever told you. After we left the camp, while we were on the move from one town to the next, some nights after Henry and I were in bed, Father mourned because he had given you away. It was terrible. He keened, a high-pitched wail. My God, it was terrible.”

Did I hear correctly? Did she say keened? First Father, keening.

“There was no keeping him quiet,” she said. “It was disturbing to all of us, but to Mother especially. Her grief was quiet and contained. But just as terrible all the same. There were other people around, too. In the mill towns. Other Japanese families, just a few. We lived in such close quarters; everyone knew everyone else’s business. No one was happy about the noise.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Kay?”

“How do you think Henry and I felt? You were his favourite. You always were. He had hopes for you. The biggest hopes. He loved you so much. Can’t you see that? He always loved you best.” She sounds like a child as it spills out of her. “Why do you think he gave you to Okuma-san? My God, Bin, figure it out. You’re not a stupid man. He wanted more for you. What he couldn’t give. A future. Any future at all. But he missed you. He even said, several times, that he was going to go after you and bring you back. Long after you and Okuma-san left British Columbia.”

I swallow hard at this. I’m the target of the ambush: words coming at me from all sides.

“But he didn’t come after me, did he. If he’d wanted me, he wouldn’t have given me away in the first place. Anyway, by then he’d have lost face—if he’d tried to take me back. Okuma-san
did
legally adopt me, you know. He
was
my father.”

I haven’t intended anger, but there it is.

“I know all that,” she says sadly, and I suddenly understand that what she’s telling me is probably true. Every bit of it.

Why didn’t he let Mother visit me when I was a child? I don’t ask. Okuma-san and I were living far away from them, in the south of the province. Even before we moved to Ontario, there wouldn’t have been enough money. A trip would have been unthinkable.

All the emotions withheld. First Father, having made his decision, would have had to banish any thought of changing his mind and trying to get me back.

All the feelings concealed.

All the stories never told. Fifty-one years of stories. Fifty-one years since Ying’s truck drove my first family across the bridge and dropped them at the bus station on the other side of the river. I have no idea, I realize, how they lived their lives. I know only how Okuma-san and I lived ours. I received Mother’s letters, and Kay’s, but did the letters reveal anything? They never wrote about the details: how much my sister and brother had grown in a year; if they had to wear tight shoes; what they endured at their schools; if their hand-me-downs were ridiculed; if Henry was often in fights, as I was; if they had enough to eat; if they ever knelt inside a church to pray. Did they have trouble finding their first jobs? How did Kay get herself to university? She must have worked so hard. And what was Mother’s life like during those years, before Kay and Henry left home? Hard-working, of course. I found out later that she had worked as a domestic in the home of one of the mill owners. Trying to contribute earnings to feed and dress her children. But no one was in a position to give Mother what she did not have. A different kind of life. A family undivided.

“Look,” I tell Kay, “I’ll go. I’ll visit him. I’ll drive right up to his goddamned doorstep. Give me the directions.”

“You don’t have to swear,” she says. And there’s a sudden softness to her voice that makes me remember her as she once was, up on the slope behind the camp, trying to teach me to read, helping me to collect pine cones to decorate, admonishing when she heard anyone say a swear word, urging me to run down the hill to chase away the ghosts—something I’ve never quite managed to do.

But you can
, Lena’s voice says, suddenly, in my head. It’s as if she’s beside me again.
Put the fates to use. Chase away your ghosts. This is your chance
.

I wonder for a moment if Kay is crying.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t mean to swear. It’s just that I hadn’t made up my own mind about seeing First Father—not yet. Give me the directions.”

I take them down and write them on the back of Otto’s new business card, which I’ve pulled from my wallet while standing in the phone booth. I flip the card over and see an engraved chrysanthemum in one corner, symbol of the Imperial family. Otto’s publishing address and phone number are prominent. With Japanese characters I don’t know how to read down one side. A prelude to his retreat with the Buddhists in Japan. And now, directions to First Father’s house on the back.

I continue west through miles of rolling hills. I had phoned Greg immediately after talking to Kay.

“I might be able to get back to Ottawa for my twenty-first birthday in the summer,” he told me. “Unless you can make it to Cape Cod. If you can swing it, it might be easier that way. Everything will depend on the dates around my program. And there’s someone I want you to meet—you and Miss Carrie, too. Her name is Caitlin; she’ll be at Woods Hole with me. We managed to be accepted into the same program. I’ve been seeing her for a while now. She’s in two of my classes here,” he said. “She’s great, she’s just great. You’re going to like her, Dad. And she doesn’t like to be called Kate. Full name only.”

I felt his happiness. I felt happiness for my son. And Lena’s voice prods me again.

Greg will be fine. And you won’t have to look for a bride. He’ll do it on his own, when he’s ready. All in good time
.

I keep on until suddenly, starkly, I have a thrilling view of what appear to be walls of black slate. Pushed up by the earth’s internal forces. Dark silhouettes on my left, snow peaks on my right. A bit farther, and I see that some of the mountains are heavily treed. When I’m close to Jasper, several plump bighorn sheep bound past the car as if in welcome.

Something is settling into place. Neatly, the way Greg’s case of rock samples used to go
snap, click
in his palm. A familiarity roused from deep sleep as I drive farther into the mountains. As real and subtle and deep-down present, as if I had never left.

Uncle Kenji, I now recall, helped to build this road I’m on, the one that eventually became the corridor, the Yellowhead Highway. Uncle Kenji’s first camp was a road camp.

I drive and drive. Basil, content to look up from time to time, sniffs the air, looks out at shapes that block the sky, settles back.

“This is what it comes to, Basil,” I tell him. “I haul out a map of this outrageously vast country and get into my car and pack my friend the dog, and carve a route from east to west, and come upon an amazement of eruptions that have been thrust up out of our recent geologic past. And we drive through them as if there’s nothing that cannot be accomplished, as if there’s no mountain that cannot be moved.”

I hear a snuffle from the back. Look around again. I am in British Columbia and the sky has not fallen; the mountains have not crumbled. This is the province of my birth; the province of the birth of my parents, all three.

After a day’s drive, when I drop south, I realize that anything could be waiting on the other side. Mule deer, for a start. I see them standing under shelter of the trees. Yellow wildflowers, brash and sturdy, everywhere I look as I descend into Kamloops, my ears popping, out of the higher hills and into the lower hills. This dry and sunny climate. Sunny, well into the evening hours. The wide valley looking as if the mountains on all sides slid back voluntarily and allowed the North and South Thompson rivers to meet.

I pull over to a roadside restaurant, feed Basil at the edge of the parking lot and go inside to find food for myself. I order a steak, mashed potatoes, a cheese salad. But when the food is brought to my table I see that it was a mistake to stop here. The steak is too bloody; the mashed potatoes are instant; the cheese salad has no cheese. I question the waitress and she tells me the cook ran out of cheese.

I know when to give up. I order a coffee and pull out the road map, pull out Otto’s business card, match Kay’s directions on the back of the card to the map and see that I’m not far from First Father’s house. Probably not more than five or ten minutes away.

The car is steamed up from Basil’s barking, and I wipe a rag down the windows. I start the engine and brace myself. The road is dusty once I leave the highway, but hard-packed and wide enough for two cars. There aren’t many houses, and they’re small; they look as if they’ve been gathering dust for a long time. I pull over to check directions again, see the mailbox painted black, a low-slanting roof, outside shutters closed over south-facing windows. Exactly as Kay described. There’s a good-sized garden at the side, which she did not mention.

The house is smaller than I imagined. Can’t be more than four rooms at most. But no truck in sight. And then I remember Henry telling me that First Father and Uncle Kenji purchased a truck together years ago and share the use of it. They get their groceries together, their supplies, whatever they need, whatever they drink—I have no idea. The truck must be at Uncle Kenji’s.

I go to the door and face an uneasy silence. I trip over the step, worn smooth and sliverless. He’d have heard me drive in—or maybe not; he might not hear well.
He’s eighty-four
, Kay reminded me on the phone.
He’ll be in his chair, facing the door. The door is never locked. The way he sits, he looks as if he never gets up, though he must, to cook and eat and sleep
.

I rap at the door and there’s no response. I push it open and step inside. There’s the mat, set out to receive shoes that will never touch the surface of the inside floors. It all comes back, like a sudden gust of winter. And a heap of shoes farther inside, but not all belonging to one person, surely. When I look more closely I see that they are slippers. Some meant for visitors. Slip out of one pair and into another.

No lights on. I flick a wall switch and a spartan kitchen jumps to life. Rice pot on the counter, an electric rice pot, its cord haphazardly wound. A blue-and-white rice bowl I recognize, chopsticks beside it on a bamboo pad. A bottle of
shoyu
on a shelf. A bad print of Mount Fuji on the wall.

Mother’s willow basket is on the floor, in a corner by a chair. The same basket that was stuffed with as much she could carry the morning we boarded the
Princess Maquinna
, the mail boat that took us away from the coast. The same willow basket that hid the one pair of dolls that escaped the burning pyre. Now it is filled with papers and magazines. There’s no other reminder of Mother, that I can see. And there’s First Father’s chair, with cushioned seat and wooden arms. The place smells like childhood, and part of me is reeling.

“Hello,” I call out. “Hello. It’s Bin.”

No response.

I push open the bedroom door. This room is as spartan as the kitchen. A double bed, roughly made. Dresser, closet, bedside table with a book on top, a badly frayed palm-sized book with a red cover.

He never discussed his own fate, I now realize. That wasn’t part of the ritual.

I go out to the car and bring in my bag. I leave the shoulder pack in the car. The manila folder is still in there, but I haven’t looked at it since I left home. It’s almost dark now. The mountains have stretched into their heights to shut out the light; I’d forgotten how quickly it happens. I’ll stay overnight, sleep on the couch—if he has one. I peer into the living room and see that there’s a pullout against the wall, with several blankets folded on top. Probably where Kay and Hugh sleep when they visit. A second chair faces a TV. There’s a small bathroom, off to the side. First Father must be at Uncle Kenji’s. Maybe he’s having his supper there.

Basil takes up position beside an unlit wood stove in the living room. A wood stove means a woodpile, somewhere. It must be outside the back door. And the night chill has begun to drift in.

I return to the kitchen and see the note on the table. I don’t know how I could have missed it the first time through. A message, hastily scrawled, written in ballpoint.

The note is unsigned, and there’s no date. So matter-of-fact I want to tear it to shreds. But I don’t. I fold it over and over, stare at it in my palm.

I’m in the living room, drinking my third Scotch, thinking of the lousy meal I was served at the restaurant. And then I think of the Japanese food Kay used to prepare whenever Lena and Greg and I visited. Everything tasted a bit fishier, a bit saltier than the food we ate at home. Kay’s food tasted like childhood and looked like childhood. Even the stacks of prawns with their heads and beady eyes, though we never had prawns in the camp. And
sushi
, so many kinds, and green tea—homegrown—and
tsukemono
, the thin but crunchy pickles Mother and Kay used to prepare together. The smell of brine,
shoyu
, cucumber, some sort of mash made of rice bran, stone weights pressing it all down. There’s no aroma like it. Which sets me to wondering if the large crock that once stored them has been stowed somewhere in this Kamloops house. There might be a basement.