The Dancehall Years Read online

  You shouldn’t be here, she says. It’s too dangerous.

  I’ll only stay a minute. How’s the house?

  Fine.

  What’s a house like Scarborough going to do empty, Isabelle? It’ll start rotting in months. We should have seen this coming. Why do you think we had to register everything we owned with the custodian months ago, get cards with identity numbers and all the rest of it?

  I don’t know.

  You didn’t want to know.

  All I want is for us to be left alone.

  It’s not enough though, is it?

  They look at each other, realizing that everything that might have been theirs is out of reach. No matter how many words they reel out, they’ll almost have each other and one of them would slide through the other’s hands.

  The only thing I can think to do is get you to buy the place from us, he says. You can sell it back to us after the war. Borrow the money from Percy Killam. Pay it back to him a bit at a time. You could take over the market garden until we get back. We’re loaning you our jobs, our business.

  You’re loaning me your jobs?

  Yes.

  Maybe you could sell it to me for a dollar. Buy it back later for a dollar.

  I can’t do that.

  You don’t trust me.

  It’s not that. It’s my parents. What are they going to do for money? There’s no one else I can ask.

  Will they need any?

  Of course they will. It’s my responsibility. I’ll find out where they’ve been sent and get it to them somehow.

  It’s too dangerous, you being out there at the lake.

  We’ve had a post office box in Blaine for a long time. My father didn’t trust the local post office. All you have to do is fill in your name on this deed, get someone to do the conveyancing and send the cheque. My parents will send a forwarding address. Four hundred dollars, it’s not much. All I wanted to do was sign up. Be a Canadian soldier. He goes out and leans over the verandah railing.

  She follows and stands behind him. I’ll try, Takumi, but it might not be until the summer. It’ll only be when the others come up that things will be settled enough to talk.

  As she sets out for the lake the next night, mist slides behind the trees on the hill on the other side of Deep Bay. All along the Government Road, she keeps looking behind herself to make sure no one is following. Switches off the flashlight when she turns onto the Killarney trail in case someone spots her departure from the main road. The wet bark smells like resin; she walks carefully as the branches close in on her. Once there’s a thick enough wall of trees behind her, she turns the light back on so she won’t trip on a root, lifts her palm on and off the beam when she stops to listen. Reaching the lake clearing, she shines the light into the bushes to locate the beginning of a trail he might have bushwhacked, checking a few yards past where he likely would have camouflaged his entrance. At last she finds it, parts the wet bush and steps onto the new trail, still stopping to listen every few minutes. When she finds him sitting on the ground in his cold dark camp, he turns away as if his back hurts: a slight tender man, his hair long enough to scoop into her palm and lift to kiss the back of his neck.

  You shouldn’t have come here, Isabelle.

  Wordlessly, she slides her hand along his shoulder blades until all she hears is the rush of two rivers meeting in a valley below a distant mountain. When they lie on the ground and pull the sleeping bag over themselves, the tops of the firs click and creak in the wind. I’ll stay at Scarborough as much as I can, she murmurs. Sleep there. Touch everything you’ve ever touched. Stones ricochet from a faraway ridge as he gropes toward her breast as if it’s his last chance at thirst. His longing springs from a place so deep inside himself the rush of the river is a hum in her thighs. It’s so damp she feels her hair turn as blue as the far side of the mountain. Then he’s inside her trying to listen for danger and keep his edge at the same time. He raises himself on his elbows, listening for sounds that might become the enemy on the other side of any man’s ears. I’ll listen for a while. Can you do that? When he arrives at a private place in the forest where he’ll hunt for an animal he’s never met, they’re close to breaking out into an open meadow full of their own light when there’s a stomping through the bush and two officers push into the clearing where they stand determined and miserable. Takumi’s on his feet in one leap, hair flying, buckling his belt, throwing the blanket over Isabelle.

  We’re sorry, Takumi. We have to take you.

  I’m not going.

  When they grab him and twist his hands behind his back, Isabelle pushes her way between them, fierce and naked.

  If you take him, I’m going too.

  Don’t put those on me. I’ll come on my own.

  The officer picks up the blanket, tries to put it around her, but she pushes it off. I’m coming with you.

  You’re not, Isabelle. You know you’re not.

  Takumi’s baffled angry look throws her as much as the shock. He tries to bolt between the trees, but the officers grab his arms and drag him through the woods away from the only house they’ll ever have.

  Narrows Inlet

  4.

  It’s so good to hear the children playing, Lottie Fenn’d said to her neighbour Frederick Gallagher that summer of ’41 when he’d come down from his place at the end of the point to build new window boxes for her. He’d offered to build her a fence as well: no, no, no, it certainly was not an imposition, more like a God-given opportunity for him to practise the technique he’d learned from the Japanese up at the hotel. This right way? he’d ask Mr. Yoshito as he reached up to help him arch an alder under a fence railing as if he’d never learned his definite articles. Painstakingly humble when he wanted something, but when Shinsuke Yoshito came to sell vegetables at the Woodwards Food Floor, the master gardener would be received at the back door and Frederick Gallagher wouldn’t even pretend to be on familiar terms.

  If only there were a way to get Frederick to finagle an arrangement with the Union to put a light at the end of the island that forms off her rocky beach as the tide comes in. The situation is dangerous as all get-out, especially in the summer when picnickers keep their putt-putt rentals out till all hours. It’s when, not if, a boat is going to run aground on the rocks. The other night, she’d had to go over to the Gallagher place in her dressing gown—a tailored plaid—knock on the bedroom window and ask Frederick to come over and row out to rescue a group of stranded drunks. As he looked down from his window, his smile seemed a long way down from his nose on his large oval face.

  The two of them were good enough neighbours that he’d be comfortably deadheading her azaleas (or her his) while they chatted. He had so much alder lying around his yard, making window boxes for her was doing him a favour, he’d say. When he arrived at her back door with his tools on that sunny, shady morning, she’d been glad she’d put on her new crepe blouse. Fastened a sequined comb in her platinum hair. While she talked to him, she twisted cups of brown paper on what looked like a wooden darning heel, turned up the vessels and filled them with seeds. Was aiming, she said, extending her hand, for a sweep of nasturtium right the way down the window boxes.

  Once the Gallaghers were up (especially Frederick, let’s face it), she found herself thinking twice about hanging her underwear on the line and didn’t even consider wearing a sleeveless blouse without a cardigan. Batwing sleeves on a sweater are one thing—seed pearls stitched along a sweetheart neckline say—but the fleshy version pouching under your arms when you’re hanging the wash, not on your life. A veiled hat to keep away the bugs, her prettiest gardening gloves—roses hand-painted on the knuckles—Frederick coming along the path, panama hat dappled with the pattern of the overhead alder leaves. Who could ask for a better morning?

  He’d ended his work by asking if, when his family went back to the city after Labour Day, she’d mind keeping her eye on their place over the winter. Of course she wouldn’t mind. All the longtime renters seemed to th
ink of the cottages as their own, never mind that they belonged to the Union Steamship Company, and it was only by the company’s good graces that the reservations were kept from summer to summer.

  Hitching the conversation back to their earlier remarks, as if trying to find the membrane that would slip the shell from a boiled egg, she’d been reduced to picking the bits off one after the other, not wanting to say, but she’d disliked the way he’d said the Japanese like that, flattening people she spent complicated winters with into one dismissive silhouette. Saying nothing is best with the summer people who seemed to think that, after they went back to the city, the residents put their lives on hold and the cottages sat perched like inert pieces on a board game waiting for the seasonal occupants to return.

  Well, they don’t. The hotel was closed, certainly: the blankets folded and put away, the concession stands boarded up. Shutters pulled over the windows of the dancehall. Her brother, George, went round and turned off the water in the cottages. The Yoshitos put the hotel gardens to bed and concentrated on their Scarborough farm harvest. And she herself got ready to teach school.

  They don’t even ask, though, that’s the odd thing. When George informed the summer tenants that the water would be turned off after Labour Day, he was perceived as that burly fellow who lived year round with his son, Billy, in a cabin at September Morn Beach, named after a calendar on his wall that pictured a naked lady dipping her toe in the water. You’d think people like the Gallaghers would be interested in what makes the place tick when they’re not there, and be curious as to why this man George Fenn with the booming voice who looked as if he should be in trade, as they say in the old country, had such a proprietorial air about him, as if he were indulging their unwelcome presence for a few sunny weeks each summer out of a sense of noblesse oblige.

  There are those who live on the island who are of the opinion that the situation should be reversed: that the Yoshitos were the ones who belonged in a cabin and the Fenns ought to be ensconced in the Scarborough house, maintaining a nice standard of living.

  Still. Sit Shinsuke Yoshito down next time you’re by the hotel greenhouse and ask him to tell you how his family came to live on Bowen Island. Miss Fenn, not wanting to harp endlessly on about parsing sentences, preferred her students to grow up with a sense of the island’s past and invited Shinsuke to come to her classroom to tell the story.

  The day Keizo Yoshito, Shinsuke’s father, saw the island for the first time, it was dampened and blanketed by fog, a shroud that deluded Keizo and his crew into thinking they were alone on the high seas. When the overcast lifted, he realized it’d been blue and sunny inches away the whole time. The coho run was so good they were winding the nets back out as quickly as they could pull them in. An unexpected trawler loomed beside them, and called out that they were pulling alongside. Keizo thought they must be in trouble; otherwise, why would they haul over and throw a rope? He cut the motor and welcomed the men aboard. The visitors leapt over the gunnels, tied the crew’s hands behind their backs, lashed the two boats together and hoisted their captives into the second ship. They’d had it with the Japs selling fish to the canneries for nothing. We’ve told you and told you, but do you listen? No.

  Keizo’s seeing his boat cut adrift and sent idling off to goodness knows where was like having his heart cut out of his body. Everything he owned was tied up in that boat. He and his two crew members were rowed ashore and forced up a gravel beach at gunpoint into a camp near Scarborough Beach where a group of tents stood in a circle. They were to be guarded there until the fishing season was over—while his wife remained worried sick back in Steveston with their new son, Shinsuke.

  One day, one of the guards needed a diversion and escorted Keizo out to pick blackberries. Through the leaves, past patches of dazzling sea, the forest was thrown into silhouette by the brightness of the sun, and Keizo saw the bay windows and wide verandah of the Scarborough house for the first time. Orchards at the back, a horse and cart hauling a load of kelp up from the beach. Maybe because he saw the clearing on such a beautiful day, or maybe because he was being held against his will, or maybe because he had no idea how he would make a living with his boat cut adrift, to his longing eye, the place seemed so desirable that at the end of the fishing season when he was set free, he returned to the island to approach the owner of the house, Mr. Masen Fenn. Yes, their teacher’s father.

  Mr. Fenn was sitting with his son, George, on a stoop at the side of the house he’d arranged to have built while he worked on the other side of the island managing a logging camp, which was divesting the south shore of its virgin timber in order to feed the mill across the strait. He’d hoped to stay on indefinitely with his wife and family, but new house or no new house, that very morning, his wife, Elizabeth, had begged him to let the family move to the city for the winter. The rain would not spare them, the winter darkness was closing in; they could stand it no longer.

  When Keizo asked if there might be work, Masen Fenn took him on a tour of the property and promised they’d talk further. In the end, Shinsuke’s father moved his family to the island as caretakers of Scarborough, and the Fenns retreated to the city.

  At the time, cleared areas on the island were weighted down with stumps, Shinsuke told the students. But a few years later, his father started work in the new explosives factory on the west side of the island, where swaths of forest had been harvested into ties for the Vancouver Island railway. Keizo’s job was dangerous. Until the highly poisonous liquid nitroglycerin was combined with some form of dope, the substance was inclined to destabilization—they were not to shake it or impact it in any way; the simplest movement could cause it to explode. Luckily there were sufficient quantities of sawdust left from the massive tree cutting to use as absorber, and once the oil was neutralized and the sticks wrapped in paper and paraffin, they were safer to handle. Because the “mixer” was the worker with the most dangerous position and received a few more cents each day, Keizo volunteered for the job, hoping to put the bonus aside. The day he met Mr. Fenn, he asked that he be considered first if the place was ever for sale. He planned to bury any money he saved; that way none of them would be tempted to spend it.

  You’re my witness, he said to the listening boy, George Fenn.

  Except that the Yoshito family needed every penny they could lay their hands on to survive. Miserable insect invasions took most of the fruit blossoms. Many years they had no fruit at all. You try working soil that’s as rocky as the ground around here, Keizo would say. Without the heaps of fish and kelp he and his son, Shinsuke, hauled up from the beach, they wouldn’t have been able to grow a turnip. There he’d be; Shinsuke couldn’t remember whose idea it was first, but it must have been someone who didn’t mind the stench who’d necklaced a line festooned with fishhooks on Rocky Beach so they could catch dogfish. They lit fires under pots so the oil from the livers would rise to the surface, then sold it as lubricant for the planks on the skid roads so the felled trees could slide down to the sea. Shinsuke would pass that bit of money to his mother, and she’d tuck it into her pocket as if she’d scratched it out of the earth herself.

  After Keizo died in a work explosion, you wouldn’t think his wife and son would have been able to survive on the place, but they did. Young as he was, Shinsuke had to go to work in the logging camp. Then he was hired by the Union to help build the bridges, trails and summer cottages around the lagoon. When he was eighteen, he arranged to have a bride brought from Japan. Maybe his resourceful young wife, Noriko, was inspired by watching Shinsuke and the others fell a huge tree by opening the crevice with a long saw, stuffing coals into the opening, lighting them and burning the trunk, because she immediately found a solution for her lack of preserving bottles: trailing a piece of cord through a saucer of coal oil, she tied the dampened string around the top of an old liquor bottle, let it burn right round and then banged it on the table so the top would break with a clean edge. Then she submerged a piece of paper in the white of an egg and
laid it across the mouth of what was now a jar.

  For years, the Masen Fenns came back in the summer, and the Yoshitos had to move to the bunkhouse. Masen’s attraction to Noriko began as he watched her slice coho at the cutting table in the summer kitchen on the beach, his desire for her coalescing in the bend of her shoulders and the exposed back of her neck as her little boy, Takumi, carefully handed her the clean jars. She stayed winter month after winter month in his house, polishing the newel post until it glowed as if for him alone. In the summer, she grew fragrant sweet peas up the south wall. But she wouldn’t turn around the day he reached for her with one hand, holding the other over her mouth to stop her crying out. Please, he said, trying to turn her to say it was because she’d become everything he missed in the place, he hadn’t meant to hurt her. When the will to force her was spent, she walked away from him dripping semen and didn’t look back.

  Noriko made sure never to be in the same room alone with him after that. She no longer met anyone’s eyes. Masen eyed her shame-facedly and was mortified on her behalf when his wife, preparing to entertain guests who were coming from town, protested—she could see the advantage of having a Japanese family working for them if they knew how to keep their places—there was no reason on God’s green Earth why the Yoshito man’s wife couldn’t put on this nice maid’s uniform and make herself presentable. Masen noticed that Noriko’s straight tunic was pulled taut where her abdomen had grown and hardened; the uniform laid out on the ironing board had a narrow waist and apron sashes meant to be pulled tight. Leave it, he said. It’s bad enough we’re in Noriko’s kitchen.

  Noriko’s kitchen? Noriko’s kitchen is down on the beach.

  That winter, Masen Fenn suffered a heart attack and died in his Hastings Street butcher shop where rows of torsos hung in layers from the ceiling. In his will, Elizabeth Fenn found that her husband had given away Lottie and George’s inheritance; he’d bequeathed the Scarborough house and property to Shinsuke Yoshito. His attached letter explained that, considering the years of work the Yoshitos had put into the place, he hoped his family would understand his desire to protect them.