The Hummingbird (17 page)

“Can I just say first that you were right, and Michael has made real progress, thanks to your suggestion that I learn the warrior’s weapons?”

“Ask me.”

I felt bullied. But what options did I have? I stared at the gong, hanging on its stand by the wall, but it provided no alternatives. Finally I gave in. “Is there anyone you want to say ‘I forgive you’ to? Is there anyone you want to say ‘I’m sorry’ to?” I sighed. “Is there anyone you want to say ‘I love you’ to?”

At that last one, the Professor’s jaw drew back. His face went soft.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. That is all of them?”

“Just the four. Gratitude, forgiveness, apology, and love.”

“Yes, well.” He ran a thumb around the upper arc of one of his chair tires. “Nurse Birch, there is a possibility that I may have overreacted. These questions are simplistic. And reductive. But I understand the intention of them now and conclude that it is benign.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“Moreover, a direct answer would be that there is no one.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You are often evasive, Nurse Birch, to the point of my frustration. But you are not a devotee of denial. For example, when I said that I was going to die just now, you did not offer diversionary platitudes or false hope. It may be the one thing I respect about you. Nevertheless . . .”

I waited, leaving him plenty of room. He studied his thumb on the wheel, pondering. “Nevertheless, you cannot suppress your optimism. It is a character flaw. Therefore, as with the advance directive conversation not days ago, today you again ignore the degree of my solitude.”

“Professor, I’m only making sure we don’t miss something important, just because I was afraid to ask.”

“Perhaps you imagine I have a secret daughter, lurking out in the world somewhere, waiting to appear at the perfect heroic moment—but there is no such daughter.”

“What in the world are you—”

“My life’s ‘emotional work,’ as you put it so tidily, was completed long ago. Between my intellectual domain, and my kingdom of one in this house, it has been years since there was anyone to whom I needed to say anything.”

“There’s not one person you have unfinished business with?”

He snorted. “Unless you count yourself, and this gambit is all a pathetic bid for me to excuse you for breaking your promise about
The Sword
.”

“That has nothing to do with—”

“The one lesson I have learned so far from dying is that it is the most alone thing a person can do.” The Professor raised his voice again, rousing himself as though he needed to persuade a crowded lecture hall. “No one else feels the pain. No one shares the dwindling energy. No one else spends a day vomiting, enduring both the physical discomfort and the humiliation of doing so in front of another person. Therefore no—” he pounded the chair arm with his fist. “Blast it. I say there is not one person of any kind with whom I need to do one more emotional thing of any kind.”

He turned his chair away from me. “Have I satisfied your prurient interests now, Nurse Birch? There is no one.”

“Well.” I picked up the clipboard and held it against my chest. “I think that is incredibly sad.”

THE 22ND ANNUAL AZALEA FESTIVAL
of Brookings, Oregon, was not the event the boosters had planned. In fact, some declared the 1961 festival a bust.

Yet its success mattered economically to the people in that region. The craggy Oregon coast remained undiscovered as a tourist destination. Therefore, each May the chamber of commerce hosted the Azalea Festival: a parade, complete with high school marching band and crowning of the year’s Azalea Queen, followed by a cookout at Azalea Park—where footpaths snaked among plantings and sculptures, and flowering trees numbered nearly one thousand.

In June, just weeks after the disappointing festival, three Jaycees met over beers to discuss ideas for generating greater tourist interest the following year. The Jaycees are a junior chamber of commerce, which admits no person over the age of forty. Thus few Jaycees of that era had served in World War II.

However, one of the men, Doyle Rausch, remembered a fall morning when he was a child and heard an aircraft later identified as a Japanese bomber. Over the course of the evening’s suds, he suggested to the other Jaycees—Bill McChesney and Doug Peterson—that they find the pilot and invite him to the 1962 festival.

Though McChesney and Peterson had lived in the area for years, neither knew about the bombing. The greater catastrophes of World War II, and the nation’s efforts to regain prosperity, had relegated this assault into obscurity.

Peterson embraced the idea as a potential boon to tourism; he promptly wrote to the Japanese Consulate in Portland seeking information about the pilot. In August, Vice Consul T. Nishimaki mailed a response that contained two critical pieces of information: the name Ichiro Soga and an address.

The Jaycees wrote to Soga, tendering an invitation. They also sent a missive to the U.S. State Department, inquiring whether the visit was permissible. The federal government answered favorably, adding however that the travel cost must be borne locally. Soga also replied, saying that he would be glad to visit, but his wife, son, and daughter must accompany him. Airfare would cost $3,000 in 1961 dollars.

Letters and news reports from the time offer a contradictory chronology, but the gist of all accounts was this: Over the winter, Soga and the Jaycees developed a plan for the visit. The Oregon group sent a letter to President Kennedy, asking for his endorsement. The idea of inviting this special guest to the 1962 Azalea Festival appeared in the
Brookings-Harbor Pilot.

Public objection was immediate. It first saw expression in letters to the editor. Mrs. Otis Gadberry’s epistle typifies the tone: “We think the Japs should stay over there, and we here.”

Mrs. Chester Davis likewise penned, “If they want to make a celebrity of someone, a lot of boys around here have been in the war and should be far more recognized than some Jap who tried to burn Mount Emily.”

“I don’t think much of it,” wrote S. E. Albin. “The pilot could have killed us.”

Bar fights began, occurring with sufficient frequency that the local chief of police approached the Jaycees in concern. The group responded by de-emphasizing the tourism potential of Soga’s visit, in favor of the higher principles of peace and mutual understanding between people and nations.

News of the conflicts reached Soga. He sent a letter questioning whether his visit would improve relations after all. The Jaycees dispatched a telegram reassuring him that the opposition was a loud group, but small.

In March, the Jaycees began fund-raising: $300 from their treasury, $500 from the Chamber of Commerce, then smaller gifts from around the region and California.

Days later, a full-page advertisement appeared in the
Brookings-Harbor Pilot.
The text was a broadside against rekindling old animosities and causing veterans undue pain. It contained language offensive to contemporary ears, but reflecting some portion of postwar public opinion.

It seems that this fellow, who missed killing a lot of innocent people, should now be honored by us for his mistake. This whole procedure makes as much sense as giving a man a gold medal for not robbing a bank when he walks past the door.

Soga’s sole claim to fame is that he was the sole Nip pilot who bombed the mainland of the United States by air plane. . . . Why stop with him? Why not assemble the ashes of Judas Iscariot, the corpse of Attila the Hun, a shovel full of dirt from the spot where Hitler died? . . .

We the undersigned residents of the Brookings-Harbor area are absolutely opposed to such kind of publicity.

Below the text stood 141 names in black and white: four bold rows of thirty-five, plus one more atop the left-most column, befitting the leader of this unapologetic declaration of xenophobia: Donny Baker III.

DOUG PETERSON, THE JAYCEE
who had first suggested inviting Soga, owned and operated a drugstore. In the spring of 1962 the local school board came to his pharmacy, asking if he sincerely intended to bring Soga to Brookings. When Peterson answered yes, the board members told him they would no longer patronize his store. A few days later, a picket line formed outside. W
E DON’T WANT
S
OGA
, the protestors’ signs read. W
E WANT
E
ICHMANN
.

Bill McChesney likewise reported losing customers at his dental practice. He had greater concerns, however. A late-night caller announced that he was aiming a high-powered rifle at McChesney.

Not all the apprehensions existed on one side of the Pacific. Soga worried that the visit could be a trap, and that he could be prosecuted for war crimes. It was not an unwise imagining. No former member of the Japanese military would have been unaware of the work of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. This judicial body, its twelve members personally selected in 1946 by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, weighed charges of severe war crimes committed by twenty-eight senior military and political leaders (instigating war, crimes against humanity), as well as lesser offenses alleged against another 5,700 Japanese people (primarily prisoner abuse).

Modeled after the trial of Germans at Nuremburg, the Tribunal received criticism for exonerating the emperor and his family of responsibility for the war. Critics also argued that the panel was biased by design; one of the judges was a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

Nonetheless, the case proceeded. Prosecutors took more than six months to make their case, calling 419 witnesses and admitting 4,336 pieces of evidence. The defense required nearly eight months to present its rebuttals. With many judges issuing dissents, the final opinion ran 1,781 pages. Of the twenty-eight senior officials, one was found mentally unfit, two died during the proceedings, two were sentenced to long prison terms, and sixteen received life without parole (although the thirteen of them still alive a decade later were indeed paroled).

The remaining seven—war ministers, prime ministers, chiefs of intelligence or branches of the armed forces—were sentenced to death by hanging. The executions took place at Japan’s Sugamo Prison in a single day, December 23, 1948.

China conducted its own trials, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions. Therefore the sole pilot ever to bomb the mainland in U.S. history could hardly be faulted for his concern. In a letter to his daughter, Soga revealed a suspicion that, were he not arrested outright, he might be publicly humiliated. In particular, he remarked that he was afraid of being “pelted with eggs.”

Coming from a land in which honor is more valuable than wealth or power, and a nation still staggered by the blow of unconditional surrender, Soga could not rescind his acceptance of the Americans’ invitation without a loss of standing. Therefore he developed a strategy. He would bring his family’s ancient samurai sword. If circumstances turned disrespectful, if his wartime duties were mocked or marred, he would restore the Soga name by committing seppuku.

This form of ritual suicide by a blade was traditionally reserved for samurai. However, upon their surrender, many generals and senior ministers had performed self-disembowelment to avoid the dishonors of capture, torture, or imprisonment.

The pilot prepared a similar plan. If the Americans sought to shame Ichiro Soga, the sword would have the last word.

CHAPTER 11

THE BASEMENT SMELLED OF SWEAT,
and I could not have been happier. I stood at the head of the stairs, listening, enjoying, imagining what the sounds told me. There were clanks with pauses between them—that would be when Michael was arranging the weights for the next set of lifting. A series of faster clinks would follow—the lifts, Michael’s breath measured at the start but increasingly strained as he reached number eight or nine. And when the bar clattered back into its frame, my husband would pant like a bellows.

When we first lived together, I used to watch him work out. I’d pretend to read the paper, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. “Don’t mind me,” I told Michael while he grunted and strained. “I’m just objectifying you.”

He locked eyes with me. “Feeling’s mutual.” And he returned to lifting.

I learned to leave him alone, though, because it was all too animalistic for me, and my excitement was distracting to him. Still, it was all I could do to wait upstairs till he finished, and not pounce when he came into the kitchen for a glass of water.

There would be none of that now. Becoming comfortable enough to lust openly for each other again, when we were not even kissing or holding hands, felt as distant as alpha centauri. Still, if he was working out in that dusty cellar, it did my heart good too. When there were no sounds, I assumed he was taking a break and trotted down.

Michael had pulled his equipment out from under the tarps that had covered it for the past two years: rusty iron weights, gleaming chrome bars, gray plastic dumbbells. And of course the bench, on which Michael lay red-faced, his chest heaving.

“Hi, sweetheart.” I leaned down to kiss his forehead. “How was your day at the shop?”

He jerked back. “What do you mean?”

I kissed him anyway. “I don’t mean anything. How was your day?”

“That’s not the way you put it. You said, ‘How was your day at the shop’?”

“OK. And?”

“So you’re checking up on me now? What, did you go by and ask Gary where I was or something?”

“Honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just had a rough day with my patient so I was just asking—”

“This has nothing to do with any stupid patient.”

I took two steps backward. “Please don’t disparage the people I care for.”

“Why are you keeping track of me?”

“Michael.” I leaned back against the stairway, body language as neutral as I could make it. The chest of his shirt was dark with sweat. “All I was doing was greeting you, making conversation. Why are you annoyed?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“Honestly I don’t. I thought it was an innocent question.”

“All right, look.” He stood abruptly, almost popping upright. “I don’t know what you’re up to. But I do not need anyone’s permission to take a day off from work and go to Joel’s range with Gene.”

He strode to the far side of the bar and began removing rings of weight. There was a speed to the way he did it, a fury. I let everything boil for a minute, while he came to the near side and slid rings from there too.

“Sweetheart,” I said eventually. “You don’t need my permission to do anything.”

He put one hand on his hip. “Then why did you ask about the shop? Unless you knew I wasn’t there, which means you were checking up on me.”

“Sorry not to validate your paranoia, Michael, but I was fully occupied with my patient. All day today, believe it or not, my life was not about you. I don’t know why I mentioned the shop. You could decide never to go back there again, and I would support that as I support everything you do.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, then turned to slide a new weight on the near side of the bar.

I continued leaning on the stairway, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. “How was Joel’s?”

Michael wiped his face on an upper arm. “At least he put the dogs in the shed this time.”

“How about Gene? How’s he doing?”

“It’s brutal, to tell you the truth.” He continued changing the weights. “A piece of his prosthetic leg isn’t right, gives him a terrible limp. It’s hard to watch. Still, when we got down to shooting, he kicked my ass.”

Michael shuffled around the bench to add a weight on the bar’s far side. “It was good times, for a while. Then he and Joel mixed in it about Nagasaki, and whether we were right to drop a second bomb after Hiroshima, and there was no shutting either of them up.”

“I can’t imagine any argument today would make a difference to the people who died back then.”

“Times three.” He shrugged. “Or didn’t die, if you take Joel’s side. But some of these guys, they smell a little burned gunpowder, it amps them up and there’s no coming down.”

That was when I made my mistake. I thought that because Michael was talking, because the conversation had shifted to his friends, his temper had cooled. Maybe if I hadn’t had a hard day with Barclay Reed, I might have been more patient, and waited to bring up the drawings.

But no, I’m not allowed to blame personal woes on work. I chose my profession. No one forced it on me. I spoke too soon because I was eager. I wanted my husband healed. So I ignored the impatience I had seen in him just seconds before, and forged ahead. “I saw that you had two fewer faces.”

“What’s that?” Michael was settling on the bench again.

“Your papers this morning. There were twenty-nine.”

He shook his head. “Will you ever leave me alone?”

I should have listened and let it go. But I couldn’t help myself. “Who were they, Michael? How did you get rid of them?”

“Look, I go to the shrink every goddam Wednesday. Isn’t that enough?”

“Do you talk to her about the faces?”

Michael closed his hands into fists, then stretched his fingers wide. “Not individual ones, no.”

“But the group of them? The thirty-one?”

“Look, what is this? First I can’t leave work. Now do I have to report to you what happens with my goddamn shrink?”

With that I realized that Michael was not the only one suppressing some rage. “You don’t, do you?” I raised my voice. “Dr. Doremus doesn’t even know about them. You’re up all hours drawing, night after night, and she doesn’t even know.”

“You think it’s so important, you go to the appointment this week.” He threw up his hands. “You take over, Deb. I could give a shit.”

“This isn’t about her, Michael.” I advanced on him. “It’s about you. It’s about getting rid of all the things that are haunting you.”

“Those two stopped haunting me because I realized yesterday that I was glad I’d killed them, all right?” He twisted his neck side to side. “They would have wasted as many of my buddies as they could, not to mention their neighbors and families and anyone else. So I blew them away, they never even saw me coming. Now I have to live with the fact that I liked killing them, that I’m proud of it, that part of me digs being a murderer.”

I held the railing for balance. “Michael, all I want is to help you get out of all this pain.”

He lay back, speaking to the ceiling. “You know nothing about my pain.”

“Maybe not. But I know a lot about pain in general. You have twenty-nine horrors inside you. Tell me about one of them.”

Michael spoke through clenched teeth. “Not a chance.”

“Just one. You pick. Which would be the easiest to talk about? The squiggle guy? The one with mouse ears?”

“You think any of them are easy?”

“Some must be easier than others. After all, you just made two go away.”

He fell back on the bench, grabbing the bar with both hands. “Right this second I would like to make
you
go away.”

Ouch. I fell back against the stairs. Michael gripped the bar, popped it off the safety frame, and began banging it up and down. His motions were so abrupt, so jerky, I worried that he might injure himself. So, as they say in my line of work, I removed the impediment to calm. I went upstairs, closing the door behind me.

WHY HAD I HANDLED THAT SO BADLY?
Why did I press on about who those two absent faces were, when what really mattered was that they were gone? Most of all, how had I become one of Michael’s problems?

I picked up my cell phone and hit the speed dial for my sister Robin. But when the call went straight to voice mail, I hung up.

The last time Michael barked at me, it was that afternoon in the park after Dr. Doremus. He’d been furious with my impatience for him to make progress. And here I’d done it again. Too eager to crow about the two gone ones, too excited that we could somehow magically tick down the rest of the faces and they would vanish one by one.

It would not be that easy. I had to quit being so hopeful. Some of those faces were never going away. All of them were going to put up a fight.

The weights clanked from below, every sound reminding me of past strengths and past intimacy. If we could have made love once, just one damn time, it would have healed so much between us. I knew that with certainty, but I was powerless to make it happen.

I went outside and sat on the stoop by the kitchen door, staying there for hours.

There was plenty to distract me. Late commuters hurrying home, a pickup with a loud muffler, swallows darting after mosquitos. Some teens cranked pop music as they passed in a minivan, every window open.

As the light dwindled, I saw two kids on bikes with noisy training wheels pedaling up the road, their parents ambling behind. The Franklins: both pediatricians, their home five houses up the street, probably moving out of our neighborhood the moment their med-school loans were paid off. Michael had let them borrow his truck a few times, a load of garden mulch, that sort of thing. We waved at one another but did not strike up a conversation, which at the moment was a relief.

The air was humid despite the afternoon’s shower. Maybe it had rained only at Lake Oswego. Lights came on in houses here and there. Heat lightning flickered over the city. Hard day with patient, hard day with husband.

Before the war, the remedy for a tough work day was to unburden myself to Michael. He would not know Barclay Reed’s name, but he’d hear plenty about his personality, and prognosis, and any moments of grace along the way. Not anymore. Since the third deployment, Michael had not asked one question about a patient. It was almost like I didn’t have a job.

Sometimes life was difficult, that’s all. A down day. Nothing sleep and a fresh start couldn’t fix. But I wanted to cry.

Instead, I remembered my first patient at the agency. I’d lost people during training, but this was my introduction to the death of someone who was totally my responsibility. And it was a rough one: a plucky fourteen-year-old named Sally who had leukemia. When she lost all her hair, Sally looked like an adorable baby chick.

Sally died on a Thursday morning, a beloved stuffed hippo tucked under her arm. Back at Central Office that afternoon to finish the case’s paperwork, I sat at my desk and lost it. Just lowered my face into my hands and bawled.

In a place like that, you can’t cry long without feeling a reassuring hand on your shoulder. I raised my head. It was Timmy Clamber.

He leaned against my desk and folded his arms. “OK, darling. Spill.”

I told him about Sally, choking up again as I did so.

Timmy wagged a finger at me. “No more sobbing, Deb. Not ever.”

“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” I sniffed.

“In your personal life, no. But for this job? First of all, you’ll run out of tears. It’s a sorrow a day around here.” He bobbed his head, which jiggled his dangling crucifix earring. “Yes, it’s hard to see patients hurt, but remember, darling: You’re not the one doing the suffering. They are.”

He moved behind my chair and began massaging my neck and shoulders. Timmy had powerful hands and I leaned into them.

“You have to be strong for them,” he continued. “You have to be steady. That way they can fall apart and you will still be there, solid like a tree. My goodness. The reason you’re holding back tears is not because you don’t have a heart, but because you do.”

There on the little concrete step outside my screen door, I knew that Barclay Reed was about a month from dying of cancer. And Michael had just passed the six-month mark at home. In different ways, they were both suffering. Meanwhile I was healthy, and I wasn’t carrying memories of shooting anyone. I had to be solid like a tree for both of them.

Eventually the mosquitos drove me in. The basement door was closed. Either Michael was still down there, sweating out his rage, or he’d gone out the front door to walk it off. I wandered through the dark house, undressed by letting the clothes puddle on the floor, and crawled into my solitary bed.