CHAPTER 13
The 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
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.
The heat of summer, as we had been warned, was as extreme as the cold had been during the winter months. Some people were having difficulty moving about because the temperature soared higher than 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite this, no one could stay inside for long because of the work that had to be done in the gardens. Seeds and budding plants had to be watered in the dry, sandy soil. Most families had a long stick or broom handle with an empty can attached at one end, for the purpose of watering. Until a workable irrigation system was set up, full buckets of water had to be carried to the garden area. The stick-and-can device was dipped into the bucket and used to water the plants, one at a time, row by row. All the while, men and women, girls and boys could be seen climbing the hill from the river below, carrying full pails of water suspended from yokes they wore across their shoulders. Some families devised their own filtration systems, using layers of sand and homemade charcoal above their water barrels. In our home, we were still boiling water for drinking, and we collected rainwater at every opportunity.
One morning, the long-awaited shipment of doors and windows arrived by truck. The men in camp stopped work on the gardens and the schoolhouse, and immediately began to work on the shacks again. Within a short time, every shack had a door with a latch and real hinges, and windowpanes in the two front windows.
But Father had wanted the extra window for our home, and he had made the crooked opening in the bedroom wall at the back. Now he had to cut an extra pane of glass. He went outside to try to fit the glass to the frame, and lost his temper when the frame splintered and a thick chunk of wood fell to the ground. He let go of the glass and it, too, dropped and shattered.
I was outside, at the corner of the shack, sitting on the low stool I had dragged out from the kitchen. I had a piece of cardboard on my lap and I was drawing a picture with the stub end of a pencil. I was trying to draw a horse, but I was having difficulty. I had a picture of a horse on the ground in front of me, torn from an old calendar that Keiko had found. When the window glass hit the ground, I looked up and blinked.
“What are you staring at?” Father shouted. “Why are you sitting there making foolish pictures when you should be helping?”
I looked down unhappily at my picture, which did not in any way resemble the calendar horse. Especially the distorted hind end.
“Arse!” I shouted. And then, out of nowhere, came “Arsehole!”
Father picked up the chunk of wood that had splintered from the frame and threw it in my direction, hitting me squarely on the forehead, directly over my nose and between my eyes. I heard my own cry and became aware of something gushing down my face. I reeled back and put my hand to my forehead. I saw a red splash on the sandy ground and another against the tarpaper on the outer wall. Mother came running outside, and a sudden, abrupt shout hung in the air between my parents. I was helped into the house, and after that I remembered nothing except waking in my bed after dark.
It was Keiko, later in the evening and under the blankets, who whispered and told me what had happened next. Both she and Hiroshi were astonished that I had sworn at our father. I did not mention my bad drawing of the horse. Of course, the story grew and grew and we went over its details many times after that, but always out of earshot of our parents. What happened after I was laid on the bed became Keiko’s story because she had been there when the pane of glass had fallen.
Father went to get another pane of glass from the camp supplies, and returned to the back window to try again. Mother was in the bedroom, looking after my wound. Keiko was sent to get clean water from the barrel
