The Wreckage (16 page)

1945

WISH

T
HE THREE PRISONERS CLIMBED
into the back of the open truck and sat awkwardly, all of them out of breath from the exertion. They were wearing standard prison-issue uniforms, short-sleeved shirts and shorts, though the April weather still edged toward a chill. Wish turned his face to the sky, white stars pinging in his peripheral vision.

The guard slapped his palm against the cab of the truck and they lurched up out of the valley. They drove past Nagasaki Station, the surface of the harbour on their left salted with sunlight. The water was a dark blue but for a line of black at mid-strait where a tidal current ran. Past the long dock of the shipyard they turned away from the city centre that lay out of sight among the maze of hills, travelling toward the outskirts. Wish closed his eyes, letting his head rock with the movement. Twice a month he accompanied Major McCarthy and a Dutch officer on this excursion. They were transporting the cremated ashes of POWs from the scatter of camps in the area to the French Temple, where the urns were stored in a crypt beneath the church. Wish looked forward to these trips. It was a rare pleasure to be stationary and in motion at the same time. It was almost hallucinatory, like a dream of flying.

He turned to the civilian guard who was standing against the cab and solemnly watching the road behind them. “Mr. Osano.” He patted the floor of the truck bed.
“Chakuseki,”
he said. “Have a seat.”

The guard smiled briefly and raised his hand. The same offer and refusal every time.

“You work too hard, Mr. Osano,” Wish told him. Knowing the man understood little or nothing of what he said.

“They all work too hard for my liking,” McCarthy whispered. He was an Irishman but had finished his education in England, where the sharpest crags of his accent had been ground down. He nodded toward the box of urns. “Who have we got here today?” he asked.

There were four, each marked by the name, rank and serial number of the dead. Wish lifted them out in turn. “Australian. Australian. American,” he said. He looked across at Captain van der Meulen, holding the last urn. “Dutch,” he said.

The captain spoke English but not fluently and he said very little on these trips. He came with them largely because he was Catholic and it was a chance to spend a few minutes inside a sanctuary, among the candles and stained glass and the saints. It was being Catholic himself that had gotten Wish the assignment from Major McCarthy shortly after their arrival in the camp.

The French Temple was an ornate wooden building with two slope-roofed wings framing the main hall where portal doors stood below three large stained-glass windows. It had been constructed by European missionaries centuries before. A marble statue of the Blessed Virgin stood on a pedestal in the central entrance, a high narrow steeple above it topped with a cross.

The first time Wish had come to the church he stood outside a long time. “Who does it belong to?” he asked. “I mean, who goes to it?”

“Japs, I expect,” McCarthy said.

The Blessed Virgin looked out over the square with the same blank, beatific expression as the Ocean Star at her grotto in Renews. Wish was amazed to find her here, in the heart of Japan. He’d have been less surprised to hear an animal speak.

McCarthy crossed himself and whispered, “Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.”

Wish looked at the officer. “What did you say?”

“It’s Spanish. Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.”

“Mercedes?”

“It means compassion or tender mercy. The Spaniards call Mary Our Lady of Mercies.”

Wish watched him until McCarthy said, “One of the Sisters at school was from Salamanca. Sister Concepcion.”

Not Portuguese after all. He came to think of the statue of Mary as Mercedes and every time he came to the French Temple he crossed himself before her and touched her marble feet for luck, bringing his hand to his lips.

They carried the four urns past her into the cool air of the church, up the central aisle. There was no one else in the sanctuary, but votive candles and a red oil lamp were burning near the altar, where they placed the ashes. They knelt at the rail and McCarthy and Wish led the rosary in English, van der Meulen responding in Dutch. Then Wish recited the Pater Noster in Latin, McCarthy and the Dutch officer joining in on the phrases they remembered.

“I love hearing those old words,” McCarthy said.

The soldiers left the urns at the altar to be moved into the crypt by a prelate or a priest and they started back down the aisle.

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” McCarthy said, “how there’s never a soul about when we’re here?”

It had never really occurred to Wish there might be people in the building to see, priests or nuns or parishioners. And he realized he was happy to have it empty, that it made the place seem completely theirs somehow. Sacrosanct. Unspoiled.

Osano never stepped inside the sanctuary, waited for them at the open doorway. All three soldiers bowed as they filed past him into the sunlight and he bowed in return. At the truck Osano took a lighter from his pocket and lit cigarettes for them. Then they hoisted themselves into the truck bed for the trip home to the camp.

When he finished his smoke, Wish took a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. It was the first letter he had received from her in England and the one letter from Mercedes he had carried with him through all his time in the Pacific. He unfolded it carefully, taking out the black-and-white picture that had come with it. The photograph was taken in the shop in Georgestown, Hiram’s name and address stamped on the grey backing. It had taken him a moment to recognize her, Mercedes standing in a black dress, her once straight brown hair sporting tight curls. He had no idea how she’d managed to do that. She was wearing makeup as well, lipstick and dark eye shadow, and she looked like someone out of the movies. She seemed much older than he remembered, more a woman. As if she’d made up her mind to put away childish things. His bunk-mate, Anstey, peeking over his shoulder to get a look at her the afternoon the letter arrived. “How come you’ve never mentioned her before?” he asked.

After Earle’s coaster docked in St. John’s that morning, Wish had picked his way up the steep streets from the harbour to Georgestown. Hammered hard at the door of the shop to wake Hiram and nearly knocked the man over in his rush to get in.

He’d said, “I killed him, Hiram.”

Hiram took Wish by the arm and led him into the office at the back of the shop, settled him into a chair. Coaxed the story from him.

“What happened after you fell?”

“I backed off till I come to the wall and waited for him, couldn’t see a thing in the black. By and by, I went into the kitchen and found a candle.” Wish’s face screwed tight and he bent over his lap, rocking and moaning. “He had blood coming out his mouth. And his head gone sideways against the wall.”

“It was an accident,” Hiram told him. “It was self-defence.” And he stopped in mid-thought, leaning back in his chair. “Wish,” he said. “How did you get back to St. John’s?”

“I took the Parsonses’ trap skiff over to Fogo, caught the coaster from there.”

“You stole their boat?”

“I sent it right back with a couple of youngsters.”

“You oughtn’t to have run, Wish. It doesn’t look good.”

He sat silent a moment, his mouth half open.

“What is it?”

“There was some money, Hiram. He’d brought some money with him to send me on my way. To bribe me into leaving.”

“Jesus, Wish, you didn’t take it off him?”

“I had hardly a cent left.”

“You stole money off a corpse?”

“I didn’t know how else I was going to get on a coaster. Or get the skiff back to the Cove.”

Hiram stood up out of his seat and turned his back. He was barefoot and his suspenders hung loose at his sides. He took a deep breath and touched his head delicately with both hands, thinking. He said, “We’ll have to get you out of the country.”

“What?”

“We’ll get you on the train to Port aux Basques. Next one leaves at six this evening. You can get a berth on the
Caribou
from there across to Canada.” He pulled the suspenders up over his shoulders and reached under the desk for a bottle of dark rum. “I’ll loan you enough for the fares,” he said.

“What will I do with myself over there, Hiram?” The older man sat back in his chair. “You were planning on joining up, weren’t you?”

“The army?”

“Overseas,” Hiram said.

Hiram told me everything about you and Hardy, Wish. Hardy was only knocked senseless and is up and around same as if nothing ever happened to him. I wish you’d only come and talked to me before you run off and
—there was half a line scribbled out here that Wish had spent hours trying to decipher, holding the page to the light to guess at letters and words, with no luck—
everything would be all right now. I have left the Cove for St. Johns and will wait here till you get home again, no matter how long
.

He could feel the speed in the writing, letters running into one another in her rush to finish and mail it to him, as if there was still a chance to turn things around, to bring him back. He was in the middle of basic training by the time it arrived. He’d sent Hiram the money he owed him with a note saying how he’d found his way to England. And Mercedes had written back.

Please write to me care of Hiram when you get this. Hardy come to bring me home to the Cove but I told him we are engaged and are going to marry when you come home, whenever that might be, I will be waiting if you will have me
. And there was a long Bible verse written out as a kind of P.S. at the bottom of the letter.
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God
.

Hardy was alive and fine. The relief of that flooded him like the light of revelation. The Salvationist on the St. John’s street corner had shouted out over the crowd: “Ye must be born again.” Amen to that.

Wish was stationed in England for the better part of a year, waiting to be sent into action. He and Mercedes wrote back and forth, the regular letters from St. John’s a relief from the endless parade drills and rifle exercises and early-morning calisthenics. He had been wrong about Mercedes, about how ruthless love could make her. There was no smell to the paper other than the smell of his own hands anymore but he lifted it to his face each time he read it.

In October of 1941 they sailed out of England with no word of their destination. Ten days later he sighted the rocks of Cape Race, the ship skirting the southern coast of Newfoundland on its way to Halifax. A heavy sea and he could just make out the white line of surf where it rode up the foot of the cliffs.

They had a week on leave in Halifax, and on November 8 they were ordered aboard the
Wakefield
, a former passenger liner refitted as a U.S. Navy troop ship. They departed on the tenth, part of a large convoy of American vessels transporting British soldiers, sailing south. Wish wrote to Mercedes,
I thought joining the infantry would at least keep me off the water
. Rumours had them heading for Australia or Singapore or Malaysia. The Pacific, either way, which meant the Japanese and jungle fighting.

The convoy ran dark with hatches secured from half an hour before sunset, which made the overcrowded quarters stifling. They were under U.S. Navy regulations and the ship was dry. Wish managed to jerry up a still with potato skins and sugar and water in a garbage bag that he kept hidden in a latrine, the alcohol passed around in metal cups after lights out. Major McCarthy turning a blind eye as long as none of the liquor got into the hands of American sailors.

The entire battalion was made up of green soldiers. None of them knew a thing about how the war was going in the region and they made do with rumours and crackpot theories that were passed around quarters in the dark. The Japs couldn’t see at night because of their slant-eyes, they were genetically predisposed to seasickness. They were an army of lady-boys with tiny cocks, they held hands as they marched. They cut off the heads of civilians and raised them on stakes, they used women and children for bayonet practice. Except for the lurid relief of war gossip, there was nothing in the way of distraction.

We have half an hour of exercise before breakfast, rain or shine
, Wish wrote.
A sing-song on weather decks after supper. A couple of fellows in blackface doing show tunes. The rest is just waiting
.

The convoy refuelled in Trinidad and from there went on to South Africa. Wish and Harris and Anstey mailed letters at each stop, as if they were marking a path they could follow home after the war. Wish’s last note to reach Mercedes found its way from the Maldive Islands where the
Wakefield
put in for fresh water. He knew by then that Singapore was their destination, though he couldn’t say as much. HMS
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
were sunk off the coast of Malaya in December. The Japanese had travelled south through the supposedly impenetrable jungle of that country as far as the island of Singapore in less than two months. General Percival, the commanding officer of Fortress Singapore, had sent an urgent request for all available reinforcements. Or so the stories went.