House of Spells Read Online Free PDF Page B

shack into smaller rooms for privacy; here the two bedrooms, he said, there the kitchen.
    “Paper walls,” my father said, intrigued.
    “If you’re interested,” Mr. Hiraki said, “I’ll show you how.”
    On the drive back to the village Mr. Giacomo left the camp mail sack in the back of the truck. They went through a rainstorm and when my father insisted they pull over to bring in the sack, Mr. Giacomo drove on. He said there was no room in the cab for the sack. “Besides, everything they write is censored, torn up, misplaced, forgotten.”
    My father shouted at him to pull over. Mr. Giacomo looked at him, surprised, and drove on. “No one deserves to hear from them,” he said.
    When they got to the village, the mail was a sodden mess, a pulp of cheap tissue paper and glue.
    Later that summer, Mr. Giacomo went off to a war that the Japanese were about to lose. Because his mother was Japanese-Canadian and he knew the language, he was taken to Shido Island off Korea. High-ranking prisoners of war were kept there. He interrogated officers of the Imperial Fleet, a captured prince of the imperial family. He was told to ask about artifacts and bullion that the Japanese had stolen during their occupation of Asia and their retreat.
    Mr. Giacomo was proud of what he had done on Shido Island for the war effort, and he often spoke about it.
    My father stayed behind. He was too young to go to war.
    Instead, he learned to make paper from Mr. Hiraki almost by chance.
    He delivered a truckload of mulberry branches to the New Slocan camp and stayed on to help Mr. Hiraki cut the branches to length, steam them in a steamer made out of an old dairy tank. He was ashamed of how his friend was being treated, forced off his farm to live in a shack.
    My father learned to peel the green and black bark from the white bark, as if he were peeling a stick-on label off a bottle.
    He scraped away bits of clinging bark with a knife.
    He washed the white bark in the Lemon River, to free loose specks of black bark, and in the New Slocan camp he hung the strands to dry.
    By then, the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property was selling off the inmates’ belongings for a song.
    The inmates made records of their possessions. They wrote on the new paper called washi that Mr. Hiraki made. It was so tough you could hide it in the well. They wrote letters to Canadian friends, instructing them to sell a fishing boat or a house on paper that could not be pulped in the rain. These letters had to be delivered by hand; any mail sent through the post office was censored, and the sale of unconfiscated property was illegal.
    Now, after asking about Rose, my father was making paper that he knew I loved. With no decoration, it could be cut and folded into greeting cards. The harmica petals, stuck in the fibres, were an attraction, and the cards I made from the paper sold well in the Giacomo café. I was watching the petals fall from his sifting hand onto the deckle, pale rose colour of the Illecillewaet snowfields last evening, light that I’d seen torn into a spreading grey that vanished.
    To concentrate, he kept his back to me as the sheet formed in the deckle over the vat.
    He was watching the pulp settle on the bamboo screen and now I could see what the petals had made, a leaning girl with her arms out. He could feel my stillness, my gaze, and he heard me stir and get to my feet and say, “I’ll bring the lanterns in for you.” He didn’t turn to see me go, waiting for the fibres to bind. One slight tremble of his dear hand would send out a wave that would thicken the fibres at one end and ruin the sheet.
    When I returned with the lanterns, I could tell he liked this one; he was smiling over the sheet.
    The swirl of petals made me think of Rose, one arm a gentle curve for balance as if she were leaning to place a glass on the floor. I remembered how she used to walk her family’s Clydesdales down our main street, the reins draped loosely over her arm, a