Floating City Read online

  Yas hardly spoke. No one was sure whether to call him Yas or Jacob. No one asked. He and Taiji didn’t seem so much father and son these days either. Now Yas was the brother who seemed different, the odd man out. But there was no good feeling for Frankie in that.

  Frankie sat alone in the graveyard. Beside him, the Blackwell family stone faithfully bowed. He sat night after night, hopeful for a tremor, a rumble, a message from the world under his feet. Even from the Priest. What came instead were scattered coughs throughout Tashme, then more erupting all around in a chorus. The camps and nearby Hope were overrun with consumption. Tuberculosis was the proper name for it. The only treatment was rest; for prevention, attendance at Sunday service to pray for a cure. Julia and Augusta went for the milk and cookies, dutifully toting Bibles left by the Ladies.

  Aki consented to being baptized. Not because of the tearful fussing of Miss McCracken; she dreaded being divided in any way from Yas—or Jacob—who’d been baptized in the Ladies’ care. It seemed harmless enough, and it might bring added protection from consumption. So one Sunday morning in the building that was town hall, dance hall and church, they assembled, the whole family along with the Ladies, before rows of Tashme’s newly faithful.

  Do you desire to be baptized? asked the minister who travelled from camp to camp with his common prayer books.

  I do.

  Do you believe and trust in the Holy Spirit?

  I do.

  One after another followed: Momoye, now Mary; Taiji, now Samuel; Aki, now Anne; Julia and Augusta, still Julia and Augusta. Finally, Frankie, now Francis. Water was poured into a basin and each bowed before it. The water ran cool over Frankie’s head, once, twice, three times and trickled down his neck as the minister waved his hand through the air, across, then up and down. We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie woke to such a flurry of hammering and sawing one morning that he thought he was back in Port Alberni with the bachelors. A hospital was going up for consumptives. The British Columbia Security Commission was paying twenty cents an hour to anyone who would get on the roof. Yas and Taiji, riders of logs, climbed up without fear. Frankie sat below, knocking old nails out of old beams. Father and son worked back to back in silence above him.

  Day after day, the men came to work, sawing, hammering, planing, painting, grateful for something to do and for their twenty cents an hour. The hospital took the form of a cross upon the valley floor. Fifty beds in all, with separate wards for the men and women in the front and back, a morgue on one side and offices on the other.

  On one of those days, Taiji stretched his bent back. The sun was glinting off the white mountain peaks. He leaned, then stumbled toward the edge of the roof. Frankie watched helplessly as Taiji flailed to regain balance.

  “Papa!” Yas yelped and grabbed him.

  The two steadied themselves in each other’s arms and straightened. As if the roof was just another Colossus.

  It’s a long way to Tippelary! Taiji burst out and Yas joined in. They were riding together again, in tandem once more.

  * * *

  —

  By winter, Frankie was bartering goods across the valley. His mother was using half the family’s rice rations to ferment a sake more potent than any she’d made before. From one thirsty housewife in Hope, Frankie scavenged three pairs of strap-on skates and went down to the frozen Sumallo River, where he often found Aki sitting on the rocks with Yas in the evening. Frankie dangled the blades in front of them.

  “Like this,” he said. He balanced one boot over the base of the blade and buckled the worn leather straps tightly over the ball of his foot and at the ankle. He buckled the other and set off on the ice, wobbling at first but soon gliding around the curving banks. As he skated faster, the cold wind almost swept him up into the air. He’d gone far downstream. He turned back to wave.

  They were gone. The blades sat on a rock.

  They were too big for Julia or Augusta, and no one else wanted them; the housewife in Hope wouldn’t take them back for anything. His mother raised her black brows in dismay. He’d wasted good sake in the deal.

  When Frankie wasn’t delivering sake bottles from his coat pockets or squatting alone in the graveyard, he sat as Augusta’s audience of one. She loved to sing “Oh Danny Boy,” but for him she sweetly warbled “Oh Frankie Boy”; she had a way of making fun of both him and herself that he liked.

  He’d seen the Ladies on Tashme Boulevard, on occasion, coming out of the town hall, a spruced-up barn. He’d looked the other way, until one day they invited him inside, promising him milk and cookies, as if he were a boy again.

  “How is Jacob?” asked Miss McCracken.

  Frankie was confused for a moment.

  “Is he cold to his own brother?” Miss Hawks hovered near.

  “Of course he is,” said Miss McCracken. “As he is to us. He says nothing to us, as if we were strangers.”

  “After the charity and goodwill we showed him,” said Miss Hawks.

  The empty barn echoed with every word and sound. He didn’t dare say a thing.

  “Come visit us whenever you like.” The Ladies smiled and each patted his hand as he rose sheepishly to leave.

  Frankie came back. Once a week at least, for a time. Miss McCracken shed tears, which seemed salted by guilt. Irredeemable soul, that was Jacob. After what they’d saved him from: the Port Alberni prison where he’d been held for days; abused, treated like a murderous saboteur and traitor, a spy and collaborator. Who knew if he’d have ever gotten out? The Mounties were about to send him far away, to a prison camp in the wilderness of northern Ontario, with the bachelors as it turned out, behind barbed wire, under armed guard day and night. Alone. She and Miss Hawks had vouched for Jacob as a good Christian, as a loyal and patriotic Canadian; they’d put themselves at risk. Perhaps they could have brought him sooner to his family, but he’d needed rest and a good scrubbing. So they’d kept him in their home, where he slept in the same bed as Frankie had, in the company of tiny Jesus. Yet he’d shown no gratitude.

  The longer Miss McCracken sat with Frankie, the drier her eyes grew, the lighter her voice. He remembered the softness of the bed in her home, the sweet scent of the pillow and her powder, and the softness of her touch on his back and behind. Now, she slipped him extra food stamps to use at the canteen, and occasionally a cigarette. He’d smoke it slowly and watch the puffs rise into the cold air. He’d smell the tobacco on his fingers for hours. But the cigarettes and Miss McCracken’s powder began to nauseate and shame him. He stopped his visits.

  * * *

  —

  Augusta squeezed his hand and then slipped a piece of paper into it. He glanced into his palm. It was a list: one yard of red satin, two spools of red thread, five pairs of white gloves, one jar of black shoe polish. He gave a shrug.

  “Frankie, please,” Augusta begged. She and everyone knew by now that whatever you wanted, Frankie Hanesaka could get. Pots, pans, string, nail clippers, nail polish, stockings, chocolate, chewing gum. He bartered, pillaged and sometimes swindled.

  So he took what he could of his mother’s sake and other items to town and traded them for the satin, the thread, the gloves and the shoe polish. Then came curtains, chairs, clothing, paint, wood: whatever was on Augusta’s list. With inspiration from Shirley Temple and assistance from Julia, Augusta was pioneering the 3-T Club: Tashme Talent Theatre.

  Then she added her oldest brother to her list. Augusta wanted Frankie to play a part in the opening pageant. How could he say no, with her hand squeezing his? He wondered what it would be like to stand on a stage, built with the scrap lumber he’d scavenged from a construction site. Frankie envied the dancing and singing boy who was to wear the red satin he’d procured.

  Waiting behind the curtain the day of the show, he felt sweat clump the rice powder on his face. Down the line of waiting performers, no one else was sweating. They all looked giddy and happy. The gra
ss skirt he’d been made to wear tickled and itched his legs. The curtain rose and he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. But the others were already swaying and singing, and he joined in, beating his chopsticks on the paint can strung around his neck.

  Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom,

  When the jungle shadows fall.

  Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock

  As it stands against the wall.

  At the frightened cries of babies in in the audience, Frankie glimpsed his mother’s stern look. He burned with shame.

  Augusta stepped forward with a garland of flowers around her neck. With the satin-sleeved boy, she twirled and sang “You’re the Top.” Frankie forgot his embarrassment. The audience laughed and smiled, and he brimmed with pride for his little sister. Then five boys, their faces smeared with black shoe polish, sang “Mammy” on their knees, waving their white-gloved hands. The babies cried louder.

  They all came out on stage at the end and bowed, while the audience clapped. A girl in the third row clapped longer than most and stared boldly at him, then giggled behind a dainty hand. He burned hot again with embarrassment. Unbelievably, the girl had curls and bright red lips.

  * * *

  That spring, Tashme swelled from less than a thousand people to almost double that, while the number of shacks increased by only a quarter. Customers told Frankie it was happening in other camps as well, like New Denver, Sandon and Lemon Creek.

  “These Japs are like rabbits,” Frankie heard one Mountie remark to another amid the cries of a baby from a nearby shack. They were standing in their red serge outside the RCMP detachment as Frankie passed. “Jap-rabbits,” the other laughed.

  Frankie had noticed a girl younger than himself waddling along with swollen belly in winter; now she was strolling the boulevard, newborn held close. Frankie saw it all around him. Aging parents, even, were adding to their grown broods. In the dead of sleepless nights, especially in summer when windows flew open, Frankie caught wails and moans from nearby shacks and from inside their own, mingling with the howls of coyotes and wolves at the camp’s edge. Some nights he got up to walk, but there was no escaping those sounds that pricked the yearning in his body.

  The girl with the curls and bright lips approached him a few weeks later. Her name was Reiko; she was from Vancouver. She thrust out the hand that had hovered over her giggles and her small mouth. He noticed her fingernails were painted red too. From her wallet, she carefully drew out a square of paper with worn folds. It was a picture of a brooch in the shape of a rose.

  She looked into his eyes. “Can you find me a rose like this, Frankie Hanesaka?”

  He blushed. Her lips were the same velvet shade as a rose he’d plucked from the garden of the turreted house. She smiled, revealing a smudge of red on her front tooth. He stepped closer and took the picture—clipped from a catalogue—from her hand.

  “I’ll sure try.” He nodded and, stupidly, winked.

  Under a light grey sky, Frankie headed to the graveyard later that afternoon. Someone had been there: a rose lay outside the fence surrounding the Blackwell family plot, as if dropped by accident.

  He sat down on the prickly grass, held the rose to his nostrils and drowsed, though his legs twitched, awake and running. When he opened his eyes, it was dusk and the sun, low in the sky, had brightened to cast every mote or bit of floating tree fluff in gold. Fairy dust, Augusta would call it.

  * * *

  —

  The brooch Frankie found at a pawn shop in Hope didn’t look quite like the picture Reiko had given him, but it was close. His mother approved.

  “Oh, my!” Reiko gasped, carefully lifting the miniature rose of enamelled gold from the box he held out to her. He doubted it was real gold. She let it sit in her palm like it was magical and precious. When she reached for her purse, he held up his hands and shook his head.

  “No, please,” he said, refusing payment as his mother had instructed, to Frankie’s surprise. She’d liked the look of the girl.

  “Please accept our complimentary gift at no charge,” he said awkwardly.

  He took Reiko to the next dance at Tashme Town Hall. He pinned the rose brooch on her pale pink blouse, again as his mother had instructed. During the foxtrot, which Augusta had taught Frankie the day before, two spots of red appeared on each of Reiko’s cheeks, matching the enamel of the rose pin. He dared himself to look into her eyes. Everything about her—the curls in her hair, the colour in her cheeks, even the smell of her—brought back to him the wildflowers in his floating garden. Perhaps he’d found his Rose Queen.

  At Sunday service, Frankie introduced Reiko to Miss McCracken; he suggested—just as it came to him—that she take Rose as a Christian name. She was baptized soon after. Her forehead was dabbed three times and drops fell on the brooch pinned to her collar. When she raised her head, she was smiling at him, grateful, it seemed, to do this thing that pleased him.

  The next day, late in the afternoon, Frankie took her to the graveyard. He’d never brought anyone there. They lay down behind the Blackwell gravestone. Reiko pulled him atop her body, the only body besides his mother’s he’d ever held so close. It wasn’t soft and giving like his mother’s; its firmness strained him, while opening with ease. When he realized what he was to do, a mystery was laid to rest, the ache he’d haplessly circled round, relieved.

  He felt like that sun dipping low in the sky, his body’s heat and sweat lifting to a hazy vapour. Walking down Tashme Boulevard later that evening, his arm slung over Reiko’s shoulders, her head resting on his shoulder, he whispered Reiko, Reiko, Reiko. Then Rose, my Rose. She giggled and shook in his arms. To hear his own voice say her name like a spell or a chant and claim her: that was certainly magic.

  He and Reiko went to the graveyard, raced there, whenever they could; sometimes twice in a day, through spring, summer, fall and even winter; their breath rising up between the markers, their bodies pressing long grass or fresh snow under them. He spent every spare moment with her. He wasn’t tagging after Yas and Aki anymore, a squeaky third wheel.

  He came upon them one summer afternoon by the creek.

  “This joins with a bigger river and goes southwest,” Aki was saying. “I saw it on a map.” She was sitting on a dock dangling her feet in the current. Yas sat on another.

  “No, it just ends in some pond south of here,” said Yas.

  “All water wants to go to the ocean,” Frankie chimed in, showing himself. He thought of the great Fraser River flowing south through the hundred-mile zone into the Strait of Georgia and back to the Pacific where their floating house must lie in splinters.

  Without a word, Yas slid off the rock and sank into the water. Slowly, he was taken by the current. Frankie stretched to see his brother’s head bob up and down among the rocks. Aki was up now, scrambling along the banks beside him.

  “You come back!” she called. “You’ll get scraped on the rocks!”

  She stopped abruptly and hid her face. She was crying. Yas pulled himself from the water and huddled with her on the bank. Frankie turned to leave them alone.

  Then came a squeal, a child’s, but no, it was Aki in the water, riding the current just behind Yas. Frankie had never heard such a sound from her before, not even when she was little. He glimpsed her face, her eye lit up with delight.

  * * *

  —

  The war did end. They crowded around a radio procured by Frankie to listen to the news and to hear what the Japanese people had heard. In the Hope Herald, they saw what the Japanese people saw. The divine emperor had taken the form of a bespectacled mouse of a man scurrying among the blasted ruins of the country squeaking at crippled soldiers, starving mothers and children and charred shadows: Bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable.

  On the radio and in the Herald, they learned of the powerful bombs that had desecrated the emperor’s divinity and melted his people. Melted! Like the Wicked Witch of the West, Augusta shrieked. Frankie had taken h
is little sister to see The Wizard of Oz at the Port Theatre and shivered at his memory of the witch, a hideous old woman who shrank away to nothing but her shoes.

  Japan seemed not just one but many worlds away from Tashme. Here they were safe in tar-papered huts thanks to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. On the very night the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the 3-T Club was performing Yankee Doodle Dandy with the satin-sleeved boy, now a teenager, tap-dancing in army uniform.

  Still, it was unimaginable, un-dream-up-able: that flesh and bone might be melted by a ball dropped from the sky. Could the Japanese be so evil as to deserve such a fate? The people of Hiroshima, his mother’s left-behind home? Could this evil have followed them here to the New World, to Canada, and survived the generations, survived in him?

  Inside the house, they all sat close, waiting. Like they had when they’d gotten news of the Japs bombing Pearl Harbor. “What will become of us?” Augusta murmured, feigning a swoon. It was the same old question. Frankie knew that what Augusta wanted most was to keep playing leading lady in the 3-T Club to the satin-sleeved boy’s leading man.

  That night, his mother fell asleep in her chair. She woke him with babbling and chanting. He hadn’t heard that in a long while.

  * * *

  —

  The answer to Augusta’s question fell from the sky in spring. Paper fluttered down from planes circling overhead telling the enemy aliens of Tashme and the valley the camps would soon close. They were free! Free to make one of three choices: They could go east in Canada. But the Mounties would tell them exactly where so there wouldn’t be too many Japs in one place. But not west in Canada. Still no Japs allowed in No-Jap Land.

  Or they could stay put and keep their shack and the patch of land on which it sat. A gift from Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the Canadian people. For the babies born here, now children growing up, Tashme was home.