The Dancehall Years Page 6

  When she realized she was pregnant, Noriko took quantities of penny royal and black cohosh, praying the herbs would work; if they didn’t, the child was likely to be damaged by the infusions. One night when she and her son were harvesting cabbage, a pain sliced through her, and the foetus slid onto the ground. Takumi rushed it up to the house on the palm of his hand. If he could get her there fast enough, she’d start mewing. His mother managed to get upstairs to bed, where his father pressed folded rags between her legs as she cried as if she were grieving. When the tiny one refused to start breathing, Takumi sat at the dining room table with the foetus in a jar, its large misshapen head gathered at the front of the skull above the buds of its beginning arms. We have to burn that right away, Shinsuke said when he came downstairs. Takumi dropped his cheek to the table, resting it on the pattern of the eye of the bird that Isabelle would stroke the first day she came to Scarborough. At the death ceremony, he and his parents passed the tiny bones to each other with chopsticks. They’d keep her ashes with them always, they promised, in two urns in case one got lost.

  Later, when Takumi sat mixing blue watercolour tones of foetal skin, his father jabbed his arm. This paper is to record the flora and fauna on the farm, he said.

  One evening at parents’ night, after the other mothers left the classroom, Noriko sat as if stranded in her son’s desk—Lottie had asked her to stay—while her son’s teacher opened a drawer in her desk and took out Takumi’s drawings. When she’d told him to work as large as he wanted, he’d swept and smudged the charcoal with his thumb, pushing a series of shaded mollusks from long thin lines. Only one touch of colour, a dabbing of soft blue shadowed a blobbed foetus floating in a mucous sac. She handed Noriko each page as if it were an illuminated manuscript. Why would my son be allowed to draw something like this at school? Noriko stood furiously at her son’s desk, her grimace exposing a blue line along the top of her gums like an implanted string.

  He’s very talented. To do work like this so young. It’s extraordinary.

  He’s to learn reading and arithmetic and that’s all, Noriko said firmly, leaving the room with the drawings under her arm.

  Never trust anybody around here, Noriko said to her son later when they were pushing the heavy roller over the lawn bowling green. People can turn against you when you’re least expecting it.

  Even Isabelle? Takumi asked because she’d just eaten lunch with them.

  Even Isabelle, his mother replied sadly. A forlorn note faded away like a loon’s call.

  5.

  George Fenn pulls his truck up way too close to his sister’s back porch, and it squeals to a stop. Tornadoes his way through the house, shouting at her in the garden. The bloody government’s finally got it right. The Japs are gone. The Yoshitos were taken away without the kid. They got him in the end, but he slipped off the wharf for christsake. Couldn’t find his body when they dragged the cove. He’s either drowned, or he’s halfway to Horseshoe Bay by now.

  Can he hear himself, Lottie thinks, pulling herself into her cottage on the rope of his sentences. She’d been out planting nasturtiums in the boxes Frederick Gallagher made her last summer, thinking how the kinked stems reminded her of his daughter, Evvie’s, hair. If things had been different, she thought sometimes.

  I’ll start clearing out the place, see what I can find, George says.

  You’ll do nothing of the kind, Lottie says. You’ll have some respect and leave things as they are. ‘What’s happened is bad enough without you behaving like a vulture.

  Sometimes his blustering seems to her to be compensation for having such pale skin and hair he could almost be an albino. Billy too; he’d picked up only his father’s looks, at fifteen, the oldest child in her classroom and a constant bully. His mother died having him, and no wonder, keeping her out in the September Morn shack until it was too late to get her across the Sound.

  That’s not it, Lottie. That old Jap told me they’d never intended to accept the Scarborough place as a gift. We’ll repay your family someday he told me. Had a bit of a search going on when I seen that Isabelle Gallagher lurking at the top of their driveway. Should have figured the way she was always hanging around with those Japs, eh? Wants her head shaved I guess. Never did know what was good for her, that one. Leave her be for now I says to Billy. Let her cry over spilt milk, one of these days she’s not going to know what hit her. Maybe they’ve left money behind that the Yoshito Senior buried somewhere; I heard him say he was going to. It’s an ill wind… eh, Lot?

  Nothing to do but let him go on until he runs out of steam, dwindles out and sits there deflated. She makes tea for him without serving him anything along the lines of the date squares she’d offered Frederick. Her brother doesn’t know the first thing about the Yoshitos. Never did. Thankfully has no idea the moon had been behind a cloud the night Takumi escaped; that, when the officer turned his head, the prisoner shot feet first into the sea. Swam underwater between the piles so fast you’d think he was wearing fins. Traversed below the surface up the north side of the cove where the tide was so high there was no beach on which the police could track him. Voices shouted, then stopped as if they’d been turned off by a switch. Give it up. That kid’s probably drowned, she’d heard them yell.

  Wouldn’t have a clue she’d followed him down the slope where he was hiding on her beach beside Gwen and Leo’s tarp-covered rowboat she kept there off-season to protect it from the winter tides. She’d helped him pull off his soaking clothes and change into old rain pants; given him sweaters, a blanket and flashlight, an oiled duffle bag filled with beef jerky, apples, rubber boots, matches and a knife.

  The moon sailed out from behind a cloud, too bright for him to take a chance on setting out until it slid behind another. How many days and nights to Jervis Inlet? he asked. Egmont first; he’d have to hide the rowboat every night, a lot of days to be on the exposed shoreline. I want you to take this key to our post office box in Blaine, Miss Fenn, he’d said desperately. We’ve had it for a long time. If you could get down there in a month or so, please hold on to anything you find in the box.

  As he pulled away, Lottie heard everything in exaggerated detail: the clunk of the oarlock, the seagull squawking from the rocks. Facing the bow, using an oar as a paddle, she saw him prop the flashlight between his legs as he felt his way into the bay. White caps slapped against Millers Point; outside the cove, a southwesterly ploughs up the mile-wide stretch of Queen Charlotte Channel, at least blowing in the direction he was heading.

  6.

  Night closed in as Takumi rounded the Millers headland, pulling hard on the oars that deposited paisley scoops behind him. The rowboat lifted into the next trough, the wind pushing him away from the concave curve of Passage Island lowering over the horizon. As the sky and channel opened wider and the Point Atkinson beam and the far lights of Vancouver dimmed, a stretch of sky lightened under a line of dark low clouds above the mountains. He passed Hood Point and started into the open stretch of Howe Sound.

  He keeps rowing as if he’d always be rowing, so numb with shock he hardly feels the cold night; the current and wind push the swelling sea with him as he’s pulled away from Isabelle’s body again and again. Never trust anybody around here. How could she have let herself be seen? How could she? Already he’s living his life in reverse, shunning rather than welcoming the approaching day: rounding Hood Point, the chop from a northerly Squamish in the middle of a tide change and he’s rowing as hard as he can but not getting anywhere. When the off-flow gathers more strength, signals of hope like the clouds that shielded the moon collapse as light returns to find him rowing uselessly in place.

  A small bay cuts so narrowly between two cliffs nobody would think to look there even if they did suspect he hadn’t drowned. The water turns cornflower blue to starboard, gunmetal green to port. Dawn will expose him to any patrolling boat so he hitches the boat to a branch, twists boughs over the hull to camouflage it and balances his gear up the beach.

  Trying t
o lean driftwood poles together above the high tide line, he has to stop and warm one hand after the other. Climbs along another fallen giant of a tree to a stretch of trunk that’s crumbled into red powder where he stabs enough bits of resined wood to start a fire. Dry twigs from the underside of a spruce, a few pieces of driftwood, a plank stuck sideways to direct the wind into the flame. If the fire is small and peaty, the smoke will get lost curling through the overhanging mist and canopy of branches. All those times on the beach when he wanted to skip rocks in the water and his father would call him over to the fire, to show him where to stick the plank. You might need to know these things someday, he’d say. He digs a few clams, smashes them open with a stone. A few swordfern fiddleheads for greens. Turns up crab shells to collect rainwater, piles hot stones around his blanket, lies down on the beach and falls asleep exhausted.

  In the morning, he pulls the flap of the tarp over his head; the absence of the people he loves, a song he once knew and can’t remember the words to. Didn’t she look behind on the trail? Didn’t she hear anything? The sound of his mother’s knife on the cutting board, the soy smell, the radish between his teeth, a bowl of soup between his palms. Instead, only the black perforation of the high tide line ready to peel along the rocks. If a northeasterly comes up, he could be stalled until tomorrow night. Nothing to do but dig a long cedar root the way his dad showed him, circle it into a hoop, slash grommet holes in the tarp, and thread the fabric with a long piece of kelp stipe to make a drogue, a curved sail sunk under water in front of the bow to use the pull of the tide to help row. His legs cramp when a southeasterly blows up, his fingers blister, but he manages to make Keats Island before dawn, where he passes a cold stiff second day’s sleep in the woods back of a deserted beach.

  The next night, as he’s rowing toward the Sechelt peninsula, the dawn is so misty he has no idea how close he might be to the beach. Row in too close, he’ll scrape the rocks; stay out too far, he’ll miss a landing spot. When the wind changes with the tide, he can’t hold the boat to port any longer. He lifts his hands off the oars to lick his blisters, checking over his shoulder to see if he’s still pointed at the next headland, and a massive wave crunches the boat against the barnacled rocks. Water pours through a hole smashed in the side; the drogue splodges like a collapsed parachute. He struggles out, hurling his precious possessions on the rocks, so wet and cold and alone he almost gives up and swims out to drown with the rowboat but the storm stops as suddenly as it started. As the sun starts to rise, he realizes he’s directly across the isthmus from the inlet, the bush so thick and dark maybe no one would see him bushwhack through the narrow neck of land. He takes two trips—the tarp on the second so it can dry in the sun. When he finally pushes up and over a slope of massed ferns, he sees a few boats tied to a dock in the inlet. Switching a canoe around so the bow seat is in the stern and he can kneel on the floor in the middle, he points what’s now the bow into the wind and turns his stroke to a J. If he were allowed a day—he can almost remember day—the sun would burnish the arbutus trees on the bluff between thrusts of land sloping into the sea. When the inlet widens, he lucks into a quiet calm, staying close to shore then drawing sideways into a beach where a moss-covered ledge towers above him. At least the canoe’s easier than a rowboat to portage into the tree cover.

  At moonrise the next night, he passes between the slopes of Tzoonie Narrows, a natural barrier a third of the way up the inlet. When he lifts his paddle to mark his arrival, the cliffs seem to close behind him like a gate. In a nearby bay, he knocks a lot of mussels off the rocks and fills the canoe with enough oysters to keep him going for a few days; with the peninsula between him and the outer coast, he’ll be able to gather seafood on the beach when the tide’s going out. Any boats entering the Skookumchuck would come in on the flood; he could be back in the hills by then. Gliding into an area where an unlikely slope gradually rolls into gentle hills, he’s drawn almost without stroking into a creek where his boat is lifted as if into a series of canal locks that usher him under a grove of huge moss-trunked maples whose leaves let themselves down in such a convincing front he’s shocked when he goes in behind and sees that the timber on the hillside has been logged off. Beaching the canoe, he hacks his way through the alder scrub, stopping short at the edge of a bluff where the logged trees would have catapulted into the sea. The remaining fir stumps are so large his encircling arms only half embrace them. In an area back from the edge, several rock faces have broken off, and there’s a lot of chit chit chit from birds he doesn’t know. A small bluff gives way to large pieces of more broken rock as if from a slide, the pieces so settled the thick fir roots provide edges for natural dirt stairs. He’ll be able to climb high enough to keep an eye on the narrows; if anyone does see his fire, they’ll think it’s someone up hunting goats. Back down at the stream edge, he makes camp for the night—raw clams, young nettles and miner’s lettuce for supper. When the rain wakes him, he realizes that, in his relief and exhaustion at finding a safe camp, he’d grown careless and left the canoe floating in the creek. It’s filling up with rainwater. At least it’s a boatful of good drinking water, he thinks half asleep. Wait a minute, it’ll sink if he doesn’t get up. He staggers over to bail it, props it over his lair of moss and goes back to sleep.

  He’d hung his tarp, but in the morning, he wakes up soaking wet, rain from the edges of the overhang had dripped straight onto his blanket. He split long kelp stalks to dry in the sun to use as cupped gutters for the eaves of his burrow roof. Later, back in the scrub, he finds the remains of an old logging cook shed, its shake roof doused in moss. The floor planks are rotted away, the sink matted with slime. The door comes off in his hand. A cast iron stove and frying pan have been left behind, and a sharpening stone. Miraculously, an axe.

  An iron range is hooked up to a barrel of oil, a bit still sloshing in the bottom. Chewed through sacks of rotten flour, rice peppered with mouse droppings and the sweet smell of death from the packrats skittering in the crawl space. An old bottle out back magnifies the last of the sun’s rays into a fire, the first since the day his matches got soaked. He finds a large round stone with a flat bottom; thinking of his mother, he makes a stupa to connect himself to the place that has received him. He puts rounded thick sticks of driftwood to dry on the stove that look to his hungry eyes like loaves of bread. The chain he hangs to drip rain funnels a multitude of excited drops into his bucket.

  After he meets a deer in what he already thinks of as his field, he goes back for a length of cable he’d seen at the camp. Traveling the trail the next day, he realizes she’d have her head lower than the day before when she spotted him, so he hangs his snare close to the ground. Careful and exacting as he’s been, he’s still astonished the next morning when he rounds the bend and sees his kill heaved on the ground in front of him. Using his whole body to shift the carcass, he lifts her hooves onto his shoulders, the way he and his father did with their deer every fall. Lets her down on her back, pressing her chest until she’s splayed wide enough for him to slice through her skin from windpipe to anus. Cross strokes across her breast from armpit to armpit; the skin tightly furled with one hand, he takes small strokes at the connecting membranes with the other. Draws the knife under the skin, pulling it under her to protect the meat from getting soiled on the ground. Her small muscled body heaps over itself until it rests on its own skin blanket. As he slices through the pelvis, blood and intestines spill in a rush onto the mossy rock. Freeing the diaphragm from the ribcage, he runs the blade under her muscle sheet and up her neck, lifts the windpipe into his other hand and feels around his own shoulder to find the line between the blade and ribcage he’d look for had the kill been himself. When he pushes back the deer’s thigh, it gives like a dog opening her body to be petted. He packs the torso on his back, one leg over his shoulder, another under his arm until a multi-limbed creature covered with blood and slime can struggle back to camp.

  The next day, he paddles a half-mile further up the in
let and carries back large stones to pile across the entrance to a stream. When the tide comes in, salt water would rise into the creek. If it recedes fast enough, the cod and shiners will be trapped. He’d twist a reel of inner bark from a cedar, lash his knife to a stick and nip them onto the bank. That summer, he’ll learn to fish like a bear, lying by the side of the creek, reaching out to grab the sluggish chum floating in the water.

  BOOK II

  Take Leo

  7.

  March, 1942

  The days without Takumi go on and on. I think about you all the time in case you don’t know. When the first crocuses come up, the telephone operator from the Union office sends a message to the post office that Isabelle’s to call her sister.

  Mother’s very bad, Issie, says Ada. You’d better come to town.

  In town it’s pouring so hard peoples’ breath steams the insides of the windows of the streetcar. Isabelle gets off, trudges up Willow St. to the General Hospital. Here’s Isabelle, Harriet, her father says, trying to insert a sponge on a stick between his wife’s lips. Yesterday your mother was asking for sips of water, now she won’t even open her mouth. Harriet pulls off the sheet, presents mottled purple patches coalescing around her knee caps. Her feet are twisted as if they’ve been wrenched by her pulled-apart toes.

  What’s happened to your feet? Isabelle cries. A starched white arm reaches in the door, perches a lunch tray on the sink. Why are we feeding her if she doesn’t want to eat, Dad?