Requiem

home and will not be lunatic enough to travel again. One trip every quarter century is enough.

Lill has employed a boy to cut the grass for the last time before winter. I see him from the window, making careful rows. The aunt grinds on behind the curtain. When we enter the dining room, Lill calls out, throwing words ahead of her so as not to startle.

Now I stop. Said grass cutter will mail this as he departs.

P.S. There is art on the walls here. Good art that Bin would want to see.

The final letter of the trip arrived the same day Miss Carrie returned home. We met her at the airport.

Lill invited a friend to tea, a retired officer of some regiment or other, old and ill and sorry for himself. I had already met him, when he was a dozen years younger. He was better company then as retired officer than he is now in the role of dying man. He was once attractive and interesting; now he is bent on dying.

Fortunately, Lill’s young niece had also been invited, and this provided diversion for everyone. She brought her young man, to whom she is engaged. He was on display, but he was awkward and has not yet learned to be charming. He has a mother, like everyone else, but has not been instructed. He wore a three-piece suit, has a beard—urban, not prospector. He did not look like a provider. SHE carried the tray into the dining room, but he plunked down on the first chair he could see. The dying officer looked on, amused at last. I wrote a note to the niece this morning: “A young man is at a definite disadvantage if he is seated when a lady enters a room for her tea.” I sent it off by the afternoon post.

“This is how I want to get old,” said Lena. “With spirit like Miss Carrie’s. Connected. Engaged. With people of every age. Even the ones who are dead.”

We loved receiving Miss Carrie’s letters, and she had more stories to tell on her return.

And Lena and I had something of our own to tell: Lena was pregnant, due the following summer, 1976. Our first and only child, conceived the night of the barbecue. Our beautiful son, our beloved little worrier, Greg. Born old, in a daze of humidity and heat.

CHAPTER 15

1944

Auntie Aya’s baby was born in the early summer. It was a boy, and she and Uncle Aki named him Taro. He was delivered a few weeks before his due date, and he had black hair, a squarish sort of birthmark on his neck and dark eyes like Auntie Aya’s, eyes that stared up into mine when I went over to meet him. He was small, and his toes and fingertips were cold and dusky blue, but Uncle Aki held him up proudly in the doorway so he could be seen by callers who stood outside to congratulate the parents.

Ba was the one who assisted with deliveries because, for many years, she had helped the midwife in the Vancouver area where she’d lived during the time she and Ji had owned their store. She was the only one in camp with that kind of experience, and as there was no doctor among us, she was kept busy the three and a half years she was in that place. She called for my mother to help with Auntie Aya’s delivery, and when Mother came home that night we heard her whispering to Father, behind the dividing sheet in the bedroom. Ba was worried, Mother said, when the afterbirth came, because she knew there would be difficulty ahead.

The birth was cause for celebration because Taro was a first son. Our father opened the small red book and read aloud the fate of a baby born in the year of the monkey. After I saw Taro, I drew a picture of a horse as a gift, and Uncle Aki tacked the picture to the wall in their bedroom and told me he would give it to the baby when he grew older. It was somewhat of a stick figure, but I was pleased with the drawing nonetheless, because the slope of the neck was better than my earlier attempts.

But Ba’s prediction bore out, and Auntie Aya began to bleed heavily within twenty-four hours of the delivery. She had to stay in her bed and did not seem to be getting better. Some said it was because of the extreme cold she had endured during the early months of the past winter. Others said she had breathed the terrible choking fumes from lime that had been dumped into the holes of the outhouses during the first hot spell. That was the problem, they said. It was not a good thing for a woman expecting a child to breathe such fumes. All of this we children overheard, even though the conversations were whispered.

Auntie Aya became more and more ill. The bleeding turned to haemorrhage. Mother came home one afternoon after helping Ba, and she sat on a chair and looked at the floor and we could see that she was crying. She told us that our aunt was weak and had lost a lot of blood. She had been lying on her back in bed and had told Uncle Aki that she was slipping away; she could feel herself leaving.

Uncle Aki began to run frantically from shack to shack, but everyone knew that there was nothing more to be done. Father decided to send one of the teachers with a message across the bridge, to let the doctor in town know that a woman on the east side of the river was dying. After many hours, someone drove up in a small, dusty truck that had a running board. The driver was not the local doctor but a veterinarian. He went into Auntie Aya’s home and spoke with her and gave her an injection, and that gradually stopped the bleeding. She was weak for a long time because she had lost so much blood, but eventually she recovered.

Little Taro, however, was not so fortunate. He died not long after Auntie Aya’s bleeding stopped. He had looked so perfect when he was born, but because of the condition of the afterbirth, he did not have a chance. That is what Ba told everyone. All those months he had survived inside Auntie Aya’s womb, but when he was born he lived only seven days.

When Baby Taro died, he was dressed and wrapped in a blanket and carried to the cremation site that had been established in a small clearing surrounded by woods on the side of the mountain. The sun was sparkling; the trees around the edges of the clearing were dappled with light. I looked up and saw the wild horses grazing on the plateau above us. Auntie Aya was too weak to stand, and a chair was brought for her so that she could sit during the service. Uncle Aki stood behind her, and they wept openly.

After the cremation, after the smouldering ashes had cooled somewhat, after the mourners had returned to their shacks, Hiroshi and Keiko and I were taken back to the site by Father and Uncle Aki. Each of us was given a pair of special chopsticks, and we were told that we had to sift through the ashes to pick up any tiny bones that remained. We had to be especially vigilant for a fragment that might resemble a teardrop shape. As cousins of Baby Taro, that was our duty. Keiko was handed an empty baking powder tin, and with the chopsticks, we were to drop the pieces of bone into the tin.

I was worried that my chopsticks would slip and I would get into trouble, but Father and Uncle Aki crouched down and said that this was important and we must not let a single piece of bone fall back to earth. For our baby cousin’s journey, we must not.

Although I was very much afraid, I helped Hiroshi and Keiko pick out every tiny fragment we could find in the cooling ashes. Father and Uncle Aki stood by to ensure that nothing was dropped. The fragments in the baking powder tin were carried by Uncle Aki back to his home, where Auntie Aya awaited.

Auntie Aya was to keep the fragments of Taro’s bones for many years, until long after the war was over and there could be a proper grave in a real cemetery. But more and more, Auntie Aya was seen sitting outside on a low stool in front of her shack, even in the fall, when the days became cold and we were in school. She spoke less as people came by to see her. Uncle Aki often came to our place to visit, and I overheard him tell my parents how worried he was. At night, when my parents were in bed and thought I was sleeping, I heard Mother say that Ba had told Auntie Aya she must never become pregnant again. She was not strong enough to carry another baby inside her. Father did not comment; I never heard a reply from him when Mother was telling him what went on in Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya’s house. He listened in silence and he did not say what he was feeling.

Some days, Auntie Aya got up off her stool and stood in her doorway and called out to anyone who would listen. She called out that she could hear Baby Taro’s bones knocking against the inside of the baking powder tin. The bones were knocking against the sides, she said, because they wanted to be free.

Shortly after Baby Taro died, an old man came to live in our camp. Not old like Ba and Ji, but older than our