Requiem (15 page)

That was when Greg was a child. And what about now? If he has learned anything from my behaviour, he has learned to keep the insults buried. Maybe I’ve let him down in that department, but there aren’t any rules.

I see a gas station and restaurant ahead and decide to try phoning Kay again. If I get through to her, she’ll know enough not to press. But she’ll be wondering about my whereabouts. She and Hugh will be having conversations, trying to figure out exactly where I am. They’ll have a map laid out on the dining-room table; they’ll be making guesses. They’ll be discussing Lena, too. And First Father. I don’t even want to imagine what they’re saying. I don’t want their concern or their pity.
Go and see him
, Kay will say.
Why won’t you ever forgive? He has to see you. How much time can he have left? He’s eighty-four. It’s easy to find the place. It’s on the way into Kamloops, on the outskirts of the city. A small house on a dusty road off the main highway. Mother always took good care of it. He used his redress money for the down payment after the Apology. It’s a shame Mother didn’t live to own the house she’d rented for years, but they never had the money. Of course, when he made the move to purchase, we helped him out
.

Of course.

I don’t want their interference. Not that they’re interfering right now. How much more alone could I be than in a car travelling a straight line across the country? If there’s something to work out, it’s called grief. It’s close and it’s sorrowful and it’s something I haven’t put a name to. Anger, maybe. At everything. At Lena. She shouldn’t have died of a stroke. She had warnings and didn’t pay attention. She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t tell me and she didn’t tell Greg. And now we’ve both lost her. Was she frightened? Did she have a foreboding? Did she not understand the danger, or did she understand it all too well?

The worst part to think about is that if she
had
paid more attention—or if I had—she’d be with me now. There was medication in her purse, untaken. I didn’t know she’d seen the doctor, didn’t know she’d been advised to control her blood pressure. I didn’t know her blood pressure was high enough to need controlling. Everything was kept private. When her hand let go of the coffee mug at the cabin door in October, I thought it was because the mug was slippery. We swept up the glass and mopped the coffee and I filled another mug.

Lena was about to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Child bride, she used to call herself, jokingly, being in her twenties when we married—while I was in my thirties.

Three and a half weeks after the scalding coffee splashed at her feet, three and a half weeks after Thanksgiving weekend, she had the final stroke that killed her. A cerebral vascular accident, the doctor called it. CVA. That happened in hospital, after I called the ambulance, after her speech began to slur and both of us stopped believing that this was about overwork and fatigue.

So here I am. One more person in my life has disappeared. And I’m heading back to family, first family, and at their bidding.

But not quite yet.

The terrain is changing. Big open spaces have begun. Basil, behind me, is making horse sounds again and I can tell that he’s enjoying this outlet for his energy. I stop the car and let him out at the side of the road. I keep him on a leash because there’s a bit of traffic—not much—and I look around while I receive the generosity of sky from every direction. While I’m pulled over, a freight train moves along the bottom edge of sky into my line of vision, far off, south of the highway. Prairie train, long trail of flatcar, boxcar, train that seems not to move but
must
be moving out there, along that never-ending space.

Basil does his business beside the road and leaps into the car again. Once he’s settled, I decide to keep on, get through Winnipeg and out the other side, branch north a bit, aim for Saskatoon and then north and west again. I want to drive and drive. I want to pass ranch and wheat farm and watery slough. I want to be numbed by the early flatness of prairie before I reach rolling hills. I’ll stop when I have to, when I can no longer go on, when I feel myself falling into the dark.

When Lena and Greg used to tell stories in the car, sometimes they started with a chant:

They took turns filling the dark space. I didn’t need to. I had enough dark spaces of my own to fill. Or so Lena reminded me, when I disappeared into gloom.

“Where do you learn these things?” I said to Lena.

“Childhood. I make up the endings. We both do, don’t we, Greg?”

Stare stare like a bear

Wearing Grampa’s underwear

Greg was giggling in the back seat.

“What about your childhood?” Lena said. “Tell us the stories you learned.”

“Not
Goldilocks
. Not
Hansel and Gretel
. More like
The Spider Weaver
and
Kachi-Kachi Yama
.”

“Tell us,” they both said at once. “Tell us! Please!”

The train is still there, to the south, and gives the impression of being miles long, travelling a path parallel to mine and at the same pace. It’s a cardboard silhouette, pushed by some force that comprehends enormity, patience, space. At one point, the distance between road and track narrows and I can make out the image of a moon on the side of each boxcar, each moon missing a chunk, as if it’s been bitten out. And then, as my car surges ahead, I hear a long, slow whistle from the train. A greeting in this limitless land.
I am here and you are here and I salute you
.

Beyond the western edge of Winnipeg, it begins to snow. A quick, harsh blizzard that takes me by surprise. I drive through it and half an hour later I’m under afternoon sun, wondering if the storm happened at all. But here’s the proof: horizontal chunks of snow, trapped and unmelted at the base of the windshield. The air as cool and fresh as it was in Ontario, but the landscape so vastly different.

Weather can be visualized in all directions here. Sun ahead, cloud behind, blue above. There it is, the primary colour between green and indigo, background for migrating geese to stroke a wide-stretched vee across an otherwise unbroken sky. One puffball cloud appears to have been catapulted from an earthbound slingshot. The scene keeps changing. A visible rope of rain stretches taut in the northeast, tethering cloud to earth. Spindly baby calves huddle close to their mothers in a muddy field close to the road.

I switch on the radio and listen to an American talk show from across the border for a while. The topic is aging and how old people are treated in today’s world. “If I’m in the way, put me on a piece of ice and push me out to sea,” says one old man who phones in. “There isn’t any sea around here,” says the host. “Then take me out to the back forty and shoot me,” says the man.

I switch to CBC and hear the tail end of an interview with a British mystery writer who talks as if she has a rag in her mouth. Finally, I turn the radio off. And think of Greg, young; I can’t remember exactly how old. Maybe eight, nine. He had heard the word
cremation
somewhere and brought it to me, asking for explanation. I did my best, tried to describe without alarming him. He took in the information, gave a little chuckle and said, in a deep, low voice and with immense bravado, “Well, they can just lay me down on a sailing ship and set fire to the sails and let me drift out over the ocean.” And then he laughed as if this was the funniest image he’d ever conjured. In fact, the two of us roared with laughter, tears running down our cheeks.

Since Lena died, I’ve sometimes found myself praying when I think of Greg. “Please, God, let him be safe. Let him grow and thrive and have a life. Let him be happy. Please.” Praying when I’ve never prayed before. Praying that things will be all right for my son.

I look to the sky ahead and suddenly wish for a canvas. A flexible surface, responsive to the pressures of the brush. It’s been weeks, months since I’ve painted. I have only paper with me now. Still, the urge is there, or was, fleetingly. A good sign. Hopeful.

I fumble with tapes and push in Symphony No. 3,
Eroica
, and still my thoughts as the music begins. The first movement does that to me: it says,
Listen
. It’s the second movement that makes me believe Beethoven heard many voices crying in his head. Well, it’s the funeral march, after all. But the entire symphony keeps breaking expectations. There is a grandness to its fragmentation, its emphasis, its yearning. As I turn up the volume and settle back to listen, the one long curve in the road—the only curve on this part of the prairie—makes me understand that I am on the extreme edge of a rim of orb called Earth.

Water spilt from a tray never returns to the tray
.

T
he sixty shacks were completed during our first summer in the camp. In ours, the opening Father had made for the window in the bedroom wall was now covered by a blanket that Mother had nailed to the frame. The blanket helped to keep out the cold air at night, but Hiroshi and Keiko and I still sought one another’s warmth, our legs and feet intertwined in sleep beneath the blankets that were heaped on our bed. Doors and panes of glass were taking a long time to arrive in the camp, and complaints to the Citizens’ Committee had not yielded results.

The Citizens’ Committee, comprising a dozen interned residents, was the main committee in camp, and its representatives did their best to solve problems and complaints that arose in the community. An RCMP office was across the river, and the Mounties in this office acted as a liaison between our camp and the town. Although we were supposed to be self-sufficient, we were all registered with the Mounties, and we had to rely on the town for supplies. It would be a couple of years before we would be permitted to cross the bridge and enter the place ourselves, so families had to shop by catalogue or by mail. For groceries, lists were made and sent over to the grocers in town every two weeks. Most of the time, people made do with what they had at hand.

Despite the hardships, much had been accomplished. The field that had held nothing but sagebrush when we’d first arrived now contained the lives and the comings and goings of more than two hundred people. With daylight hours being longer, the air was warmer, especially in the middle of the day, and more and more people were seen outside. The fire in our stove was allowed to go out after breakfast. Keiko and I were sent out to pick dandelions, and Mother prepared these with sugar, sesame seeds and
shoyu
, the soy sauce we had brought with us. But the supply of
shoyu
was running low and had to be watered down until more could be ordered.

Once the shacks were finished, a meeting was held to finalize plans for the schoolhouse, which would be located at one end of the field. It was to have a long, divided room for classes, as well as a community room. Every family in camp pledged to contribute to the building in some way, because everyone wanted the children’s education to start again. The school year had not resumed after being interrupted the past winter, after our removal from the coast. For now, older girls in the camp who had recently completed high school and any young women who had studied at university were approached by a school committee to see if they would be interested in being teachers. Information about correspondence courses began to arrive from the Department of Education in Victoria, and some training was promised for would-be teachers the following summer, in New Denver. The carpenters had begun to make desks and benches for the school, and so far, the supplies consisted of a blackboard, a few pieces of chalk, scribblers with multiplication tables on the back and pencils without erasers.

Keiko longed to be back in the classroom again. She played school, and she acted at being “teacher” when she had any time left over from helping Mother or after doing her share of weeding in the garden plot. She hauled me in as her “pupil,” and it became her mission to teach me to read and do elementary math. She also encouraged my drawings. Sometimes we made puppets and miniature puppet theatres together. For materials, we used whatever we could find in the woods and any remnants of cloth or paper or cardboard that had been discarded around camp. For glue we used grains of cooked rice, moistened with water, and we pressed these flat with our thumbs. Other children joined in, but Hiroshi refused to participate in Keiko’s classes, held in the shade of softly scented pines up the slope behind the camp. There was a plateau there, partway up the mountain, a flat area that everyone had begun to refer to as the Bench. From that height, we could look directly down on the entrances to the outdoor toilets below, and watch people go in and out. It was said that ghosts hung around the wooded area behind the outhouses, and a girl in her teens who joined us one day told us she’d seen the ghost of one of the old people who had died of dysentery when we’d first arrived, a woman in her seventies. The ghost of the woman had no feet but it had been prowling in and around the trees, even with no feet.

“Bin can chase away ghosts,” Keiko told the others. “It’s part of his fate. Father said.”

Sometimes I was persuaded by the older children to run down the hill, arms outstretched. They all laughed as I ran, but I did not laugh. I had not seen any ghosts. Still, I ran down the hill, shouting at the top of my lungs, pretending to chase the ghosts away.

The main problem in the camp was always the supply of clean water. Several of the men chipped in together, and after obtaining permission from the RCMP office across the river, they purchased an old truck. The mechanics in the camp kept the truck running, and it was used for everything from early cartage of water barrels to much later delivery of tomatoes that would eventually become the main source of income for the camp. Special permission was needed before leaving the camp area, but there was no place to go. Our movements were restricted, and the road blocks were still in place. We weren’t allowed in the town. We could walk along the road to the end of the bridge on our side of the river, but we were not allowed to cross it. That was as far as we could go. There was nothing but canyon and river and mountain everywhere else.