Forgiveness (21 page)

The day after Ralph escaped death by snow, he found the commandant unrepentant. The bandage on Ralph’s left arm went unnoticed. Setting down a cup of green tea, the commandant was more interested in speaking to Ralph about the West. He always wanted to know about the West. He knew, to be sure, that the West would be victorious. That it was only a matter of time. There were rumours of a big bomb. He wanted to know what was coming for him.

“
MacRane
, you have a girl—a sweetheart?”

“No.” Ralph didn’t feel much like talking.

“War. Coming to an end. If you had a girl. You could see her soon I think. Your mother too.”

Oh, to see his mother. The commandant had never before spoken like this.

A few days later, American B-29s were spotted over Japan. They looked like hulking green angels. They posed a serious threat to the soldiers and prisoners alike. Night after night, the men huddled in a shallow bomb shelter. It felt more like a mass grave. If a bomb were to strike close, it surely would be.

Despite the risks, the men were almost gleeful. They knew now that they were not alone, that they had not been abandoned. To see something built in America, to know it was coming for them meant the world. They cheered as bombs exploded nearby.

After a week of aerial bombing, the Americans started to mine the harbour. One twelve-hundred-pound mine missed the water, landing right beside the camp’s guardhouse. The men were fearful they’d be forced to disarm it, but the commandant’s behaviour was warming as the Americans closed in on him. He installed a soaker bathtub while a Japanese bomb squad removed the mine.

The war’s cruelty was not quite over for the huddled men, though. Major Pulas—a captured American Marine—was caught waving to the U.S. planes as they passed overhead. Two guards scooped him out of bed and beat him mercilessly right outside the cabin door. He begged for them to stop. The dull end of two swords slammed into his back, his arms, his legs, and his hands. That was the last beating Ralph would recall.

The first morning that Major Pulas could get out of bed was the same morning that the foundry stacks were not smoking. This struck the men as impossible. Every morning the sun rose and the stacks smoked. It would take the foundry days to relight those fires in the belly of the plant. The men stood in the parade square being counted off, each looking at the stacks, then looking again. There really was no smoke. They’d be spared their daily hell for at least a few days. At the end of the count-off, the commandant confirmed what the men suspected: “No work today.”

With Major Pulas’s beating on their minds, the men tried hard not to smile. This would be a holiday unlike any they’d had.

Another day passed: no work. Then another. And another.

Then four days into their reprieve as slave labourers, they saw what they had prayed long and hard for: an American fighter bomber. They had seen the B-29s. A few of those had almost killed them. But this plane meant something entirely different, raising their spirits and their hopes.

The fighter planes were used by the U.S. Marines, and they flew from a nearby island base or an aircraft carrier. These were not long-range bombers. They didn’t venture far. Their presence meant troops—American troops, lots of them.

The plane banked hard over the camp and hailed bullets across the fence, strafing everything in sight. The men’s hearts beat hard in their chests as every foundry explosion brought them closer to their loved ones.

That was when Ralph finally allowed himself to believe. Staring at the foundry engulfed in flames, he thought to himself:
I am going to survive this.
The fire cleansed his heart. It scorched his anger. It lit a mighty hope in him. He was going to live. For the first time in five years, he was sure of it.

Most of the Japanese guards disappeared soon after the Corsairs were spotted. Only a few stuck around. Air raids become the norm. A few days later, Ralph awoke to screams of warning.

“Cover!”

“Incoming!”

Ralph scrambled out of his hut to dash to the bomb shelter. He saw two huge B-29s flying low as he ran across the parade grounds. There were no bombs going off in the harbour and the foundry had been destroyed. These B-29s were bearing straight for the camp.

“They
know
this is a POW camp. They know we are here. Right?” asked a man beside him in the shelter.

The men had painted a white cross on the mess hall. Was that enough? Would the pilots believe it? Everyone crouched and waited. Most prayed.

The plane’s powerful engines screamed as it flew directly above the camp. Seconds of silence turned into one minute. A second minute passed. No explosions. At the three-minute mark, a few brave souls peeked out of the bomb shelter. Their view was glorious, but there were no cries of joy. The men were trying not to break down in tears. Dozens of forty-five-gallon barrels on parachutes were falling from the sky, blocking the sun. It was a supply drop. Leaflets hit
the ground first. They were in Japanese, warning the guards of stiff penalties for withholding the supplies. The warnings were largely unnecessary as the men had free rein of the camp already. They piled out to chase the barrels as they fell. It was like keeping one’s eyes on a snowflake.

Ralph remembered what a forty-five-pound barrel was capable of doing. He thought of his brother on the back of ol’ Jack. He knew these barrels would save their lives once they came back to earth, but right now they were heavy objects hurtling through the air. They were deadly.

“Let ’em land! They’re coming in fast!”

It was no use. You can’t tell a starving man to wait in line.

Ralph stood watching helplessly as two men left through the gates, following one barrel. Like everyone, they had been ravaged by war, starvation, disease, and beatings. They were skeletons. They were blinded by these offerings. They stood in the field, arms outstretched, but the barrel was coming in too fast. It clipped one man and the weight of it crushed his skull. He was dead before the parachute softly furrowed onto the ground. His blood was smeared across the U.S. Army logo.

There was no time to grieve. The men had to nourish themselves. They opened the barrels and ate beef, cheese, crackers, chocolate. They ate whatever they could. All the while, they wept. The camp doctor warned the men that they would get sick if they ate too much. Their bodies were not prepared for the food. Having discharged his medical duty, he then proceeded to gorge himself.

Ralph found something even more important than food in his barrel. Placed between a row of canned peaches and army-issue blankets was a Gideon New Testament bible. It was as if it had been packed just for him. He ate the peaches but he clutched the bible. He was going to live and he was going to live by those words.

The war was over for the Japanese Imperial Army. The rumoured bomb was real, and while the men did not see the mushroom cloud, its effects were dramatic and immediate.

For the first time in years, every morning brought hope. It also brought a large breakfast. The men cooked powdered eggs, they fried canned meat, they drank coffee. They dipped eggs into ketchup. They remembered their mothers’ kitchens and their local diners. For the first time, they thought with anticipation of friends and family. They would see their people again. They would hold loved ones in their arms. Each familiar taste, each nourishing bite brought them closer to that reunion. Not a dinner went by without someone openly sobbing. It was almost too much to handle all at once. The men were dining out on hope and lost love.

Several days later, after a large second helping of breakfast, and a bath, Ralph saw a group of men crowded around the main gate. As he approached, he saw two marines. They wore clean, dark green uniforms and polished black boots. They were shaven and each had a sidearm. Ralph held back tears as he heard one of them say, “Hang tough—we will have you out of here pretty quick. General McArthur is in Yokohama and the war is over.”

Ralph had never, ever heard anything sweeter.

The crowd stayed, pressing the two airmen for more details. They had four years to catch up on. But Ralph had heard all he needed to hear. His war—his apocalypse—was over. He had seen the four horsemen and lived. He turned and walked straight to his hut. He got on his knees beside his bunk, clutched his bible, and thanked God for sparing him. He opened the bible and ran his fingers across a single passage, Mark 11:25: “And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

That afternoon, Major Pulas demanded that he be taken to Yokohama to meet with General McArthur.

It was another week before the men left the camp. There were no goodbyes. They marched out as they had marched in. This time, each had a smile on his face and a swelled heart in his chest.

At the train station, they began boarding for Yokohama. Ralph was near the back of the line. He heard a commotion, a voice. He knew who it was before he heard the words.

“MacRane! MacRane!”

How the tables had turned. Now Kato was just Kato. No commandant. No bowing. He weaved in and out among men whom a few weeks ago he would have beaten for not moving out of his way. He reeked of whisky. Having spotted Ralph in line, he rushed over. His bloodshot eyes were full of tears. He was wailing like a bull moose. He was defeated. He was scared.

Ralph genuinely believed that, more than anything, the commandant was sorry.

“MacRane.”
His shaky hands held out his pipe. He looked at Ralph, clearly hoping he would accept the gift.

“Here, here,” Kato said, as he pressed his tobacco pouch into Ralph’s hand. Then, Kato did something remarkable. He would have been killed for it if a Japanese officer had seen him. He ripped his rank stripes from the collar of his tunic. He placed them in Ralph’s hand, on top of the pipe and tobacco pouch, and bowed deeply.

Ralph didn’t know whether to throw a punch or offer an outstretched hand. He did neither. He closed his fist around the gifts, and looked Kato long and hard in the eye. He said nothing. He remembered the words of Mark 11:25, nodded, and boarded the train.

Thus ended four years and seven months of living under extreme duress—if you could call it living. Ralph had walked, slept, and eaten among the dead and dying. He had lost over half his body mass. He had been paralyzed twice, and blinded. His best friend had slipped through his fingers. He had been beaten and degraded. He had brushed up against his sanity on more than one occasion and stared down into the pit of death more times than he would care to talk about.

So, where could he go from there? How on earth could he move on?

The truth was, he already had.

Ralph MacLean got off the boat in Vancouver on the same dock from which he’d left. An islander buddy by the name of Sid Street met him. They had a night. Such a night! He boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway train two days later, still a little hungover.

He took the same route Mitsue and Hideo had taken, across the Rockies, into the prairies. The train stopped in Calgary amid a throng of well-wishers. Among them was a young woman named Phyllis Dee. She was as shy as she was pretty. They didn’t speak long, but it was all Ralph needed. As the train pulled out of the station, he stared at the address she had written down on his notepad. He thought about her all the way across the Canadian Shield. He was thinking about her still when he returned to the Magdalen Islands.

While his family smothered him with affection and he basked in it, he knew he could not stay. There was nothing there for him. The war had not changed that reality. He returned to Quebec City and was discharged on February 8, 1946. He wrote his mother and promised to send for her once he got himself set up out west. He was moving to Calgary.

Ralph started work at the Cominco smelter plant. Phyllis’s father got him into the outfit. Ralph moved into Phyllis’s family
home until they could marry and build their own house. It took two years. They married on May 14, 1948, and moved into their house on Victoria Crescent. Then Ralph brought his mother to live with them in Calgary.

His younger brother, Ford, would visit, moving in and out of his home and his life. Ford was wild and always needed help. Ralph always obliged, until an incident happened that changed things.

Ralph had not heard from Ford in months, when one day the phone rang. He knew something was wrong the moment he picked up the receiver. He could hear Ford gasping on the other end. “Ralphie—I’m in real trouble here,” he said Ford was in Regina, but he was on the run. He had been charged with rape. Ralph didn’t ask if it was true. He didn’t want to hear the words. He told his brother that he was sorry; this time, he just couldn’t help him. It broke his heart to hang up.

Ford called once more, a week later. He told his older big brother that the girl he was accused of raping had been hit by a car and had died. The charges against him had been dropped.

The brothers didn’t speak again for fifty years.

Ralph broke down sometimes. All the men who had been in the war did.

It was worst in the middle of the night, with his wife and three children asleep. He’d dream of electric feet, of poor Mortimer tied in the snow like an animal, of gunshots. He’d dream of Deighton. He’d see his friend’s hands reaching towards him in the night. Come morning, Ralph would have trouble making his way to work. The downtown towers would turn to soot. They’d look like the foundry. He was driving into the war. He’d turn the car around and go back to bed. He would cry into his pillow.

Ralph’s night terrors got much worse before they got better. It took him time to recover. It took medication. His bible helped. But Ralph did most of the heavy lifting himself. He never let himself get too far away from the prayer he had offered in the camp. He kept forgiveness close. It was his amen.

He worked at Cominco for forty years and twelve days.

Mitsue and her family were in Medicine Hat, still dealing with dust, heat, cold, and, at times, humiliation, but they were together. Hideo and her three children were her everything. They were her amen.