House of Spells Read Online Free PDF

letters, and packages to the Japanese internment camp in New Slocan. My father went with him, to buy vegetables and eggs in the camp that he sold to the railroad cooks.
    Mr. Hiraki was interned down there. He was my father’s friend from before the war. They’d worked on a section crew together, repairing track in the Odin pass, and when Mr. Hiraki had earned enough he’d bought a small farm in the valley south of our village. My father used to drive down to his farm in summer to buy vegetables.
    Mr. Hiraki grows the best vegetables in the valley, he used to say, and soon he was taking orders from the village wives and the railroad cooks.
    After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 , all Japanese-Canadians were identified as enemy aliens. Mr. Hiraki spoke out against the forced evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the coast. Many times he said to anyone in our village streets who would listen that the war was against Japan, not Japanese-Canadians. “And what about you Italians,” he’d ask the Pradolinis, the Staglianos. “Why are you not being arrested? It’s because of the colour of your skin!”
    He and his family were sent to the New Slocan camp. Before the RCMP came for them, the Hirakis asked their Canadian friends to store household goods. They thought they’d be back on their vegetable farm within a few months, that the forced internment was only brief. My father was a young man then and he was building his first house on 4th Street. They didn’t ask one Canadian family to take all their belongings, they asked three or four. My father hadn’t finished the second floor, so they asked him to take the piano and a big record player.
    One day my father went to look for his friend in the camp. He found Mr. Hiraki doing what he always did, hoeing soil to receive rain and to trouble the roots of young weeds that he pulled by hand. The garden earth smelled musty, like an empty chocolate box and it had flecks of eggshell in it. Under dark, shiny leaves my father could see the bulge of beetroots and under feathery leaves carrot tops the colour of the lichen you sometimes see on the north side of cedar trees. He saw that Mr. Hiraki loved every plant, every little tree, and he gave them tender care. Still, something was wrong, something in the way his friend moved from row to row said he was afraid of being singled out and attacked.
    Mr. Hiraki gathered sacks of beets and potatoes, carrots and lettuce for my father. Then he raised a trout on a barbless hook from his well. It was as black as charred wood and its eyes had skinned over from a lack of light.
    “The fish tells me the water is still pure,” the farmer said. Then he let it down on a rope tied to a bucket, the trout circling and nosing the sides. It lived on insects that fell into the well and it was healthy and strong.
    Mr. Hiraki said that he expected the well would be poisoned by people who attacked at night; he stayed awake at night, listening.
    When they went into the shack for tea, Mr. Hiraki spoke of ripped-up camp gardens, of young fruit trees snapped at the trunk or torn up and laid on the ground with their roots exposed as if by a windstorm.
    “Do you know who is doing this?” my father asked.
    “People from the village,” he replied. “They drive away before we can get to them, teenagers mostly. I’ve recognized a few.”
    “But it doesn’t stop there,” he went on. “The government sends us moth-infested rice. The shipment of seed potatoes that arrived last week was full of rot.”
    The shack that his family shared with the Kitagawas was divided into living sections without walls: a kitchen, two sleeping areas, a small altar in the main room. Lumber was expensive in the war years, so there were no inner walls.
    He wouldn’t accept money for the vegetables.
    “What do you want, then?”
    “Mulberry bark,” he said. “So that we can make strong paper.”
    He explained that the paper would be used to make screens to divide the