Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [90]
No more was said about her own activities, but in her next letter she sent him a new poem. She said she had ‘come upon it’. No mention of the Englishman who made her laugh.
Joey put her letter with the others, in the bag beneath his bed, tucked between the pages of Boas’s History of the American Race. He put the poem aside, to look at later.
39
He had given up making drawings. He had given up reading. Anthropologists who travelled to faraway places for their encounters with strangeness offered no insights on internal exile. He avoided participant observation; shunned the festivals and took no part in the communal gardening, all the complex patterns of giving and receiving that the South Sea villagers would have recognised and approved of. Between voluntary work shifts he lay on the narrow iron bed and stared at the wall. He watched a fly, or studied a shaft of sunlight as it moved across the wall and floor of the hut, saw how its heat had bleached the raw wood, day after day, into a sunbeam pattern, the fibres of the planks drying into something resembling crushed straw.
He had arrived at a point of suspended animation that got him through the day. Curb your imagination, he had decided. Far away the war went on; battles were won or lost, people killed and got killed. Among those who got killed – bombed or blasted – was there a woman in a wood and paper room who wore a kimono, who fed chickens and ran laughing into rainstorms?
Immobilised and powerless, he had no part in life as it now was. Learn to love your blinkers. Sufficient unto the day.
Every morning, early, the trucks arrived to take workers to the beet fields, dropping them back at the gates at the end of the day. Joey was aware he would have made a poor beetfarmer: soft hands, a spine inconveniently long for crouching over low-growing plants, untutored in the ways of this curious and valuable crop. Ichir, Taro and Kazuo, urban boys without farming experience, quickly demonstrated an acceptable level of dexterity, moving along the lines of bunched green leaves, weeding, checking for disease; thinning the tightly packed rows, plucking out young plants to leave room for the rest to grow. The skill, speed and energy of the internees were saving the harvest.
Ichir was realistic about the exercise – ‘The farm boys are all GIs now, serving overseas. They’ll take anyone with the usual number of arms and legs; they’d even use you, Joey. You could earn a dollar or two. Why not come along for the ride?’
Through the window Joey watched them assembling by the trucks as the early sun cast long, attenuated shadows on to the dusty compound. They climbed aboard, voices and laughter drifting back to the hut. Engines coughed into life, grumbled, dissolved into distance and silence. He lay curled, too big for the undersized bed. Inert. He had become a rare breed of sloth, with a slowed rate of metabolism thwarting movement. Unlike the sloth, he could not rely on camouflage to protect him; no algae grew on his body, no protective disguise; he still stood out in the crowd, sore thumb, square peg, all that jazz. Everyone knows what a sloth is, what it looks like. But how does it feel? That almost immobile existence, that upside-down view of the world, how was the sloth feeling? Did it feel stranded, cut off from everything moving so fast around it, the rustling leaves, the spinning globe, the speeding birds, the racing ants, the wind that shakes the branches. Did a sloth, lost and alone, howl silently? Feel pain?
An hour passed. The sun moved across the floor. He began to re-count nails in planks.
When Mrs Tanaka knocked at the half-open door he offered a listless invitation to enter and regarded her without interest as she bowed and stood calmly waiting. After a few moments Joey cracked: he slowly got off the bed and managed a vestigial bow to the elderly woman. Through observation he was aware that this was the correct