Floating City Read online

  Aki carefully wrapped the smoked fish, the seaweed and the eggs, and when the picture was ready, added that into a neat package tied with string. Taiji donned his kimono, set out his ink block, brush and cup of water, and sat himself down cross-legged on the floor. He held his sleeve as he dipped his brush, then drew columns of minute pictograms down the page, from right to left. Some resembled trees, some boxes inside boxes, some were simple strokes. He stamped the bottom left corner in red ink, an even smaller pictogram. “Hanesaka,” he muttered. The family seal. Then he blew on the sheet and set it down to dry. Dear Mother and Father, Aki read haltingly. She was the only one learning to read and write Japanese.

  It will soon be autumn in Port Alberni. The summer flowers are fading. My family and I are well. Please accept these gifts as humble tokens. I hope you are also both well and that we meet again in the future.

  Your faithful son, Taiji

  Augusta insisted on carrying the package to the sailors, who promised to deliver it to Taiji’s family home. In return for their trouble, Taiji included a smaller package of fish and eggs for the sailors to share on their voyage home. Before they left, one danced a jig with Augusta and sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in sorry English.

  * * *

  —

  Two officials from the City, the same ones who’d claimed the land on which Taiji had built their house many years ago, came knocking: now greyer; one fatter, one thinner. They asked for Frankie.

  “Fu-ranki.” His mother buttressed herself right up beside her son.

  They demanded to see his land deed. The thin one gestured to the shore where the Floating Garden gently bobbed.

  “I made that land myself,” said Frankie in his deepening voice. “I don’t need a deed to it.” He sounded bold with his mother by his side. He allowed himself a smirk. “It’s floating on water.”

  The man smirked back. “Then where’s your dock licence?”

  His mother’s weight against him slackened.

  “Nobody owns the water,” Frankie retorted and shut the door. His heart was pounding like the lone hammer of Bachelor #13.

  Augusta pressed her ear to the door and repeated what she heard: a sigh, a damn Jap, a bump-bump as they climbed into their boat, then splish-splash of oars as they rowed away.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie was in his garden when Mr. Koga burst out of the hotel. “The Japs, the Japs!”

  Inside, he found Mr. Fung staring at the radio on the counter, beside his dwindling coins. The announcer kept repeating: The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.

  Frankie ran and jumped into the boat. He heard his breath and the news wheezing out of his chest as he rowed, as if in slow motion. His mother was sitting in her chair by the window when he arrived. “The Japs,” he panted. “The Japs.”

  She turned away with a sigh, unsurprised. “Now they’ll send us back.”

  * * *

  —

  First, they were told to stay inside and not come out. But they had to: to work, shop for food, go to school. Then they could go out, but not at night, when they couldn’t be clearly seen; they’d blend in too much with the bushes and shadows. They might sneak into the water and across the bay to where Jap submarines surely lurked. Maybe, Frankie privately mused, one was under their house right now to be spotted by Aki’s one eye pressed between the floorboards.

  Yas could not stay put. He could not stay inside. Even with the windows wide open, he needed open air and open water. He’d take off on the logs and disappear beyond the harbour, sometimes riding a log between his legs and paddling. He’d drift back late at night, long past curfew, and sneak in through a window just for fun.

  Mr. Fung sat nervously listening to the radio with not much to do. Many of the bachelors had fled while a few lay low in their rooms. He set to work. How to Tell a Japanese from a Chinese, he printed in large letters across the top of a blank page. He drew a Chinese face that resembled his own: Honest and humble. Beneath that face, he drew a Japanese face that resembled Mr. Koga’s: Sneaky Jap. Then he drew a Chinese eye and a Japanese eye: one slanted down; one slanted up. One opened wider than the other. One with a fold and one without.

  “To show I’m not one of you,” Mr. Fung said when Frankie slammed a stack of flyers on the hotel desk. Frankie had torn them down from all over town. It was a wonder Mr. Koga hadn’t yet been arrested.

  By the following week, new signs appeared telling all the Japs in town to pack their bags, no more than what they could carry in two hands, and to be ready to move. When, the signs didn’t say.

  They huddled each night after dark. Taiji with his Canadian Club, Momoye with a bottle of sake, all waiting for Yas to come home. Each had their all-you-can-carry by their feet. They didn’t have much, but it was difficult to choose what to take when they didn’t know where they were going or when they’d be back.

  Frankie spent every last minute on the Floating Garden, wrapping the climbers in burlap and covering the mounds with hay. Mr. Fung promised to look after it, but Frankie had his doubts. At Hotel on the Sea, Mr. Koga and Mr. Fung were arguing nearly every day. Mr. Koga wanted a share of Mr. Fung’s wall of coins for all the hammering he’d done to build the hotel. Mr. Fung was not, he charged, being honest and humble at all.

  But one morning, Mr. Koga didn’t show up. At the end of the day, Frankie went to his house and found it padlocked. He looked inside. Everyone was gone: Mr. Koga, his wife, his two daughters. Pots, pans and dishes were on the table, blankets on the beds. Frankie went back to the hotel.

  “The Mounties took him,” said Mr. Fung, slouched behind his wall.

  “But why? Where?” Frankie asked.

  “He is national, not citizen.” Mr. Fung shrugged.

  But what did it matter? They were all Japs. All enemy aliens.

  At last, in March, new signs went up. The Mounties instructed them to assemble at the train station in two weeks. They would ride the train overland, then board the ferry to Vancouver.

  Then what?

  Five nights before they were to leave, Yas didn’t come home. The next morning, Aki walked the streets and avenues, up and down and up and down, peering into houses, shops, empty buildings. She came home to rest at night and then resume early the next morning. She didn’t arrive home until just before curfew. She cried herself dry pining for Yas, while Taiji went on drinking. Yas, please come home! Julia and Augusta scribbled on a scrap of paper. They rolled it and poked it inside an empty whisky bottle and sent it sailing out a window.

  What was to become of their house? Others on land, including the bunkhouses, had been claimed by the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property.

  On the last night, fire broke out at Hotel on the Sea. Mr. Fung, drowsing at the front desk, was roused when his wall of coins, down to a few paltry piles, grew hot under his fingertips; he escaped easily. The balconies collapsed after the remaining bachelors dove off to save themselves. Only Bachelor #13 was unaccounted for, but he’d been hiding from the Mounties and hadn’t been seen for some time.

  When Frankie awoke the next morning, Aki was gone. He rowed the rest of the family to shore. Following signs, they began walking toward the station. At each block, others joined the growing stream along Main Street, arms straining with what they could carry. Frankie turned back to see his mother and Taiji slowly make their way along. Julia and Augusta skipping around them.

  “Aki!” Frankie shouted and pushed against the crowd of people, past his mother, past Taiji, who looked up in alarm. He’d spotted his sister’s thin figure heading away from everyone, on Gertrude Street leading out of town. He left his bags and started to run after her, skirting the crowd. He called and called but she didn’t stop or look back.

  Finally he was in reach of her and snatched at the tail of her coat.

  “No!” she wailed, and tore free. “We can’t leave Yas!” With a surge, he grabbed her coat firmly this time. They both tumbled to the ground. Aki’s one eye was pouring out tears.
The other had swelled up, bubbling inside its seal. “Please, Frankie!”

  Frankie hung his head to his heaving chest. “We have to go.”

  Momoye and Taiji were waiting at the end of the street where Frankie had dropped their belongings. They were wearing the fine clothes he’d bought for them.

  The six of them continued to the station. They passed his Floating Garden, its stems bundled for the winter to come. Then farther along, what remained of Hotel on the Sea, charred bones barely afloat.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Place Next to Hope

  Hotel on the Sea sank and drifted with the current, its chimney bobbing above the surface like a periscope. It reached Estevan Point, where it was mistaken by a lighthouse keeper for a Japanese submarine. That news made the rounds among the livestock barns of Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition grounds, where everyone had been brought to stay. Some were blaming Mr. Koga and Mr. Fung for making things worse than they already were, but no one said a word about Frankie.

  No one knew what was to become of them all.

  Mothers and daughters and young children were made to stay in one building, men and boys in another. “It’s so Mama can’t have another baby,” Augusta told them, holding her nose against the antiseptic used to rid the stalls of the stench left by the animals.

  They lined up for food, holding out tin bowls as if the slop of porridge and prunes and watered-down canned milk was worth the wait. They ate at long tables and relieved themselves in troughs. There was no sunlight, no sea air, no lull of waves. Aki sat inside their stall for hours as if she were a sheep or pig or cow. Julia and Augusta played hide-and-seek among the sheets hung for privacy between families. Sometimes they ventured along the barbed-wire fence to gaze at a pond on the other side, and the ducks waddling across the grass. With no cooking, no brewing, no bartering, Momoye lay on her cot, lost without Taiji. No men and no house.

  For seven months, Frankie hardly saw his mother or sisters. Then he and Taiji were dispatched with other men to set up camps in the mountains. Women and children would follow. The camps were beyond the one-hundred-mile quarantine zone. A Jap, even ones born here like Frankie and his siblings, could too easily lose their minds to the infectious Yellow Peril while anywhere within a hundred miles of the Pacific coast. So it would soon be No-Jap Land. The Land of No Return began at the 101st mile mark and extended into the mountains, where they all could be settled for their own safety and that of others.

  Aboard a bus to the train station, Frankie and Taiji saw diners and a Woodward’s store posted with big NO JAPS ALLOWED signs. On the train, they passed in and out the chambers of the mountains from daylight to darkness and back again. Jostled by the ride, Taiji sat silently, gazing past Frankie and out the window. Frankie had never been alone with his father before.

  “How will the logs get to the mill now?” Frankie muttered as they passed a mountainside dense with trees. “Who’ll they get to do it?”

  With his face pressed against the glass, Frankie gazed up at the icy peaks that stabbed the sky and bled out the sun until each day came to its end. They were called the Cascade Mountains, but as far as Frankie could see they only went up and never came down. He thought of Yas, alone and left farther and farther behind with no way to catch up.

  The train left them in the town of Hope; trucks let them off fourteen miles south on an open valley floor. The rundown Fourteen Mile Dairy and Livestock Ranch had been sold to the government. A few old barns were still standing and only a handful of workers remained. Stacks of rough shiplap lumber sat waiting for Frankie and Taiji and the other fifty men. Taiji touched one stack and shook his head. “Still green,” he said.

  The Mounties who’d brought them here set the men to work hammering the one-inch-thick shiplap and laying tar paper over that. Two families would move into each box, one side per family with no inside doors or plumbing. Outhouses behind every four shacks.

  After days of work, Frankie looked over what they had built. Across the valley, identical boxes were forming rows; rows into streets into a town of identical shacks and plots. There would soon be ten avenues, from First to Tenth, intersecting with Tashme Boulevard on the south, and on the north, four bathhouses.

  The government named it Tashme for Taylor, Shirras and Meade, the principals of a mining venture that had failed here half a century ago and had left behind a ghost town. Frankie craned his neck to see to the top of the mountains around it. You couldn’t get much deeper down than this.

  In his free hours, Frankie hiked north with the wind behind him, reaching the railway tracks. In school, he’d learned about the gold rush days. Prospectors came from far and wide to pan the rivers and creeks in the area but never struck it rich. Frankie wandered away from the tracks though thick forest, divining a path to their traces. With one step and another, the forest gave way.

  It opened onto block after crooked block of gravestones. Some were plain and modest; others spread wider and rose higher than the rest and were fenced in with rusted iron rods. Some were crumbling, some sinking into knee-high grass. Frankie went down the rows reading out the names to himself: Creighton, Kingston, Stout, Willis, Stevens, Smith, Castle, Wooten, Pidwell.

  One stone leaned almost to the ground, spine cracked and bent. He squatted down to read it.

  Sacred to the memory of Henry Blackwell who departed this life on the 4th of April 1870 aged 44 years with his wife Florence, aged 40 years and Child Mary aged 4 years.

  Bad-luck number four over and over and over. Frankie pushed the stone back to try to right it, but it was stuck.

  For what is life, asked another stone. It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time and vanisheth away.

  A vapour, that was his life so far with nothing to show for itself. Everything sunk to the sea or into the ground. One day he’d lie beneath stones like these, only in a graveyard for Japs. He imagined these stones from high above, the plots in row after row, like this Tashme they were now building.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s recess all the time!” Augusta’s clamour echoed across the valley floor. She, Julia, Aki and their mother had finally arrived.

  Behind an old farm building, Frankie found a wooden chair: one arm cracked but solid. He set it by the window of their new home for his mother. When she first stepped inside, the cold blue light of the autumn sky was splintering through the slats. Taiji was right about the green lumber: it hadn’t been adequately dried. Already the planks were shrinking back on all 347 shacks, leaving gaping cracks where not only the light but also the cold and wet entered and ice began to form.

  Aki barely spoke to Frankie for making her leave Yas behind. She was pale skin and bones. Like Frankie, she walked. Sometimes he walked behind her without her knowing. She marked the perimeter of the camp with mud splattering her bare legs. She walked until the lights were snuffed one by one, wading through the dark mystery of the valley.

  One night she did speak to Frankie.

  “I saw Yas,” she said, as quiet as a rustle of leaves. In another Tashme shack.

  She had stood on one side of tinsel glass, the black sky flocked with stars overhead, clouds of her frantic breath in front. Then he, the boy whom she recognized, had come to the window and looked outside, right past her.

  “I saw his face. It was Yas.” Her lips trembled, her one eye quivering. “Please, Frankie, come with me.”

  She led him down the dark dirt street off Tashme Boulevard, clutching his hand until they arrived at a shack identical to theirs. Inside, he saw two boys. The smaller looked like Yas once looked, when Yas was a boy.

  Frankie shook his head. She was missing Yas so much, she was lost in time. He didn’t know what to say, but Aki let him take her hand and lead her home.

  * * *

  —

  Weeks passed and early one morning—too early, now that no one had any place to go—a knock came at the door. When no one answered, the door nudged open. They appeared like returning ghosts
, silhouetted in the early white sun: the Ladies. Frankie hung back. His mother began babbling, her brows arching. Taiji rose up beside her. Aki stood beside him, her one eye wild.

  “When we heard what happened, we wanted to help,” Miss McCracken sighed. She caught Frankie’s eye imploringly. “Francis.” She hugged her Bible to her breast. Both Ladies were altered, bedraggled ghosts of their ghostly selves, their blouses and hats wilted and frayed. Shrivelled weeds tucked in the bands of their hats.

  Frankie pushed himself forward. “We don’t need your help.”

  “He has been saved,” said Miss Hawks, not seeming to hear Frankie at all. “Come in now, Jacob.” Both Ladies turned to the door. “The Mounties entrusted him to us.”

  “Who’s Jacob?” asked Augusta, sleepy-eyed.

  Then there he was, just outside the doorway, a ghost too, with the morning sun behind him; a ghost grown tall and thin. Aki ran to him but stopped short. “Is it you? I can’t see you,” she said, straining on her tiptoes, her eye squinting.

  He stepped inside. “I can see you,” he said in a strange, deep voice. Yet it was Yas. So tall he had to bend down to all of them, even Frankie.

  “Yasumasu!” Taiji fell to his knees and wept at his son’s feet. He wailed, over and over until Miss Hawks urged him up.

  “There is Sunday church service in the main hall tomorrow,” she said, addressing Taiji. She pressed her Bible into his spindly hands while Miss McCracken left hers on the table. “You may give thanks to the Lord.”

  * * *

  —

  Yas was so tall that Aki had to start from the bottom of him and slowly work her way up through all the changes. One eye couldn’t take in all of him at once.