Long-time MWA member G. Miki Hayden regularly teaches a mystery writing workshop (and other courses) at Writer’s Digest online university. Her triple award-nominated, award-winning instructional Writing the Mystery is soon to be released in its third edition from UK-based JP&A Dyson. Miki has recent novels out from Portals Publishing and from Curiosity Quills Press, the current publisher of her style guide, The Naked Writer. She has had many short stories in print over the years in national publications. Her story “The Maids,” set in French-ruled Haiti and featured in another MWA anthology, won an Edgar.
“Do you have a case that you consider most memorable, Your Honor?” the young man asked with a benign smile.
On the occasion of my retirement after forty years on the bench, the boy was interviewing me for the following Sunday morning’s Herald. The photographer was gone, but the cakes and coffee my wife Madelyn had put out still sat on the glass-topped trolley in my den. I inclined my head toward the gleaming silver serving pot and gestured to refill the reporter’s cup.
“No, sir, thank you,” he declined agreeably, covering gold rim on bone china with his hand.
I smiled in turn, considering the boy—he was a boy to me—substantially naive. Twenty-five years as a criminal court judge even in this rural county of Indiana still had before me innumerable and unutterable instances of man killing man; cold-blooded and brutal sexual violation; felonious, self-centered disregard for the welfare of others—a virtual devil’s litany of ill intent and rabid villainy. Most could not be wiped away from mind, remaining forever a stain on my memory.
But I related the story I told on social occasions to someone curious about what a judge faced—a rather nice story, too, embellished only slightly over all these years. I sketched in the anecdote of a youngster caught with a car stolen for a joyride. Then I recounted the leniency I had shown the offender, with a sentence of 100 hours of community service and repayment to the victim for damages done.
“And was it worth it, Judge? Did that turn out to be the right thing to do?” Having prompted me to the recital of my coda, the journalist, at last, poured himself a little more coffee from the pot and sipped it, his tape revolving in the recorder, working in his stead. The young knew so little, and these days seemed to do so little, too.
But I was old now and severe. When his age, I had been more ignorant and bullheaded than any of these boys in the present, without a doubt.
“Oh yes, well worth it, “I remarked, settling back. “The car thief was Frank Johnson. And he tells that story on himself to remind others of the road he could have taken and was saved from.”
“Johnson Chevrolet—the dealership,” the reporter observed, his eyebrows rising, glad, no doubt, for some spice to sprinkle in his pro forma article.
I nodded in an agreement of delight. The tale was an easy one to tell. So little pain remained. Everyone had recovered from the incident almost as quickly as it had occurred, a happy conclusion. As for the fraud accusations against Frank two years ago for the sale of used cars as new, those charges had been worked out quietly between his attorney, the prosecutor, and a passel of civil litigants.
Madelyn entered to take away her lovely service and as a prompt to the boy that he should leave, that the judge’s time was valuable.
And so it was. I got in my car afterward and drove to the new putting green past Slocum’s farm, to put in an hour of preparation for retirement.
It’s funny how you can think better sometimes when in motion, and while hitting those balls with my new stainless steel putting iron, I contemplated the most memorable case I’d really ever been involved with. But that, of course, had been long before I’d gone in for the law, had been a real-life prosecutor, and had consequently been elected to hear the trials and tribulations that poured forth endlessly from Baxter County. The circumstance I meditated on, as I often did, was something that had happened during the war while I was a prisoner of the Japanese, held under unimaginable conditions among a pack of wretched, starving, disease-ridden soldiers deserted by their country on the Philippine island of Panay.
Someone had kept a calendar. God, now I don’t recall the man’s name—but his face, surely. A young face, an unwashed, oily, sweat-streaked, miserably thin face, missing a couple of teeth on the bottom of his jaw, teeth that had been loosened by malnutrition and then knocked out by a rifle butt. I honestly could not now remember if he—whatever that soldier’s name was—had survived the war. So many, many had not made it through. Twenty-five percent of the POWs held in the Pacific Theater had died by the time MacArthur and the others returned for us, as had five percent of those in the Nazi and Italian Fascist camps. But, of course, we didn’t know all that until much later.
I’d had a good disposition in those days, and even the extreme deprivation during the first six months at Camp Mabuchi didn’t entirely knock the stuffing out of me. I had been an idealist when I’d gone to war, and I still was at that point; a clean boy, a Christian from the Midwest, trained up to all the virtues a mother wanted to stuff into her son and that he would, despite stubbornness, allow.
For some reason, then, while I still had my belief in divine-given justice, I befriended Buster after he was brought from the caves up in the hills. Anyone, though, with the slimmest of instincts for doing “right” would have chosen Buster as an object of good works.
The boy had been blinded by shrapnel from a tossed grenade and had lain in the caverns, dying, when one of the Filipino natives found him and brought some food, water, and bandages. But those caught harboring an American soldier would have been shot—or tortured and shot, a more likely outcome. Therefore Buster had been left, eventually, to his fate, and his fate had been to be “arrested.”
The minute I saw him, I took Buster under my wing for pity’s sake. And the moment I heard his Arkansas accent, I felt gratified that I had made him my charitable pick. Here was a young man my own age—we were teenagers, eighteen years old, in fact—to whom I could play the guide (literal and physical) and mentor. He was greener than even the green boy I myself was and though not younger than I, he was more rural, which made me somehow the elder. I led him where he needed to go, protected him from the bullies who would steal the blind boy’s food, and gave him small portions of my own gruel when I felt less desperate.
The men in Camp Mabuchi were a mixed bunch, from not only various services of the armed forces, but nationals enlisted under different flags. In our hut, suited to fourteen but which held about twenty-three, we were mostly Americans with a few Brits attached to a captured American unit.
Supremely patriotic though I was in those days, I was pleased with the British lieutenant in our midst, thinking he brought a touch of class to a classless assembly of privates and our one noncom, Corporal Webb. In addition to having a crisp, exotic accent that spoke to a little country boy like me of royalty and lineage, Lieutenant Hightower was what they called in England a solicitor. He was a lawyer, and although before the war I’d thought to be a doctor like my father, hanging around in the vicinity of Hightower made me think of the law as a possible profession.
While we marched off in our rags each morning to build an airfield for the Japanese, Hightower would talk about Blackstone and the concepts on which English, and thus American, law was founded. I forgot the hunger that perpetually knotted my gut as hard as hickories. I admired the man. He set a good tone for the hut, I felt—would inspire us to survival if anyone could—and I tried to emulate his actions and maintain his example of cleanliness and civility. In short, I was a boy seeking a model to base myself on. I had not yet formed a center of my own, and the normal development I would have gone through was thwarted by our situation.
Anyone who has been in that small section of the world—a few square miles of land somewhere between the Philippine and Sulu Seas—will understand that, even had all treatment of us been reasonable, conditions were not comfortable for the average person from the West. During the day, the sun blazed intently, the sand fleas bit, and those on labor detail often dropped in their tracks and simply died. The nights were sultry and malarial. Not a breeze stirred inside the hut, and those who sat outside in the humid but at least occasionally moving air risked a capricious beating from a passing guard.
Still, reasons existed to hazard sitting out alongside the building. The latrine, a trench dug behind the hut two barracks down, was closer—a necessity for those weak with stomach cramps and diarrhea. This was the spot also to access gossip exchanged from hut to hut.
From here, too, one could sometimes sneak to the barbed wire fence and pass out what of one’s treasures had not been stolen by the Japs—a ring, a watch, an extra shirt—in exchange for a blessed bit of food—a chicken, an egg, a few root vegetables—handed in by some courageous Filipino. Courageous because those caught were beheaded on the spot and because many did it solely out of sympathy for the prisoners, coming with their gifts long after we had not a single shred left to deliver in recompense. That is so much the truth that I sometimes still cry over the men who befriended us, much oftener than I shed bitter tears due to the traitorous withdrawal of MacArthur and the top brass. Or over the mindlessly brutal men who imprisoned us.
That night, I tucked Buster into his spot on the loose dirt floor and paused in concern. The boy had a terribly bad fever again. But bringing Buster to the infirmary to get him out of work the next day would guarantee an early and pain-racked death. The report down the line was that injections given to the ill were of substances not meant to go into the human bloodstream.
Not all the Japanese there were exactly evil. How can I explain? They behaved in a manner we could never have imagined, but many did so in fear of their superiors and because, while Buster and I were ignorant country boys, these soldiers were peasants with many times less learning then us. The background of some of our guards made them rough, but made them vulnerable as well to the occasional decent act. One in particular I called Herman, because his name began with an H and I couldn’t begin to repeat how it was pronounced. Inexplicably, he took a liking to me, showed me a photo of an old farm couple in their Sunday best, while I shared a glimpse of my dad in his three-piece suit and pocket watch, my lovely mother with a set of genuine pearls around her neck, and my bright-eyed, ten-year-old brother John. After that, Herman would sometimes bring me a few grains of rice rolled together so not a grain would be lost. And yet I knew the guards themselves got little to eat, supplies not being plentiful for the Japanese forces.
Saying good night to Buster then, I wavered. My friend wasn’t likely to live until morning, but if he could, he might recover and live on. I sat back down and fetched the last two bites of a rice ball out of my pocket. “I’ll sit you up so you can eat this,” I suggested. I had weighed the possibility of my survival against the improbability of his; yet here I was again, sharing what I so sorely needed myself.
Buster shook his head, too fatigued to rise and probably too weak to swallow. I placed the remaining rice down on that photo of my family and showed his fingers where it was. “Try to eat,” I urged him and, staring at the small portion of dirty rice, swallowed down my restored appetite. “I’ll come back in a while.”
I left the fetid chamber to sit with the lieutenant and his men outside the hut. We watched the shadow of a buddy patrol pass in the moonlight and then were free to whisper among ourselves. Or rather, I listened to stories of England, a place as exotic to me as the Philippines were. I, too, longed for the countryside of Cornwall, the lanes of Yorkshire—anyplace where a man could have a shower and shave and change one shirt in for another, cleaner one.
Maybe that night my turn had come to stick my neck out by the wire fence and see if any of our Filipino benefactors had made it through. Perhaps that night I lay flat against the ground for half an hour or more, sitting up every few minutes to make a soft bird call to no response. At such times I imagined the whole world dead, the native villages mowed down with machine gun fire. Tokyo burning with more Doolittle raids. Indiana itself with Mitsubishi bombers overhead, dropping their loads. The only living reminders of our species were here, in this place, and slowly giving up our life force ourselves.
Back in the hut, I checked on Buster. The rice was gone, and I pocketed my photo and smiled. The sacrifice had been worthwhile. He had eaten. If man was dead, God still reigned.
My friend woke slightly, his fingers fluttering as if to pat the food, now gone. My face lit up. “You ate it, Buster, ate the rice,” I whispered.
He came to consciousness more fully now and shook his head slightly. “No,” he denied. “I didn’t have it.”
To say I was stunned at that pronouncement would be to put the matter mildly. If you informed me today that my retirement savings had all been embezzled, that our two-story Tudor was sold for back taxes, and that our lakeside home had gone at auction, I would not be more astonished and enraged than by those few words telling me chat what I’d surrendered for the sake of another had been plundered. A terrible wrath was ignited within me, and plenty of fodder would keep this fire burning. I was a youth turned ancient by war and by betrayal. Until that moment, I had perhaps not known just how angry I was. My head and nerves smoldered, and sweat poured off my brow in the confinement of the prison camp, the constraint of the hut, the bonds of my overwhelming emotions. Helpless tears streamed down my face. I soothed Buster’s forehead, and he fell back to a fitful sleep. Then I sought out Hightower and wet his bent ear with my story.
I couldn’t sleep, but that, I suppose, was just as well. Buster needed my murmured words of comfort through the night, up until the hour when he looked me clear in the eyes, seeing something, someone else, and died. And then I sat watch over his corpse, divided between prayer and my refusal to pray, just as God had cruelly declined to give the body next to me a mouthful of succor his last night on earth.
The following day during our work detail at the airfield, Hightower and a few of us puzzled over these events while we cleared the ground, picking up stones and loading them into baskets woven from fronds to carry away. I was too worn out to grieve over Buster’s passing but not too tired to grunt in recognition when Tom King’s name came up.
In withdrawing from the Philippines, MacArthur had left behind 56,000 men under his command, but had taken with him (aside from General Wainwright) as many of the officers who could be evacuated. The remaining American army was virtually leaderless. Men like King who had been forced to obey by threat of their superiors’ actions came into their own in the POW camps. Their depraved agenda was twofold: to collaborate with our captors, the Imperial Army, and to get whatever they could for themselves, no matter the cost to other Americans. King, if not the first type, was at least the second.
My instincts told me that King was the only one among us who would have had the lack of scruples to steal a morsel from a dying man. “I’ll kill him,” I muttered, and I meant that; indeed, I intended to.
Fights break out at the slightest insult when soldiers are starving and their minds no longer function as they should. I was at the point at which emotions and lack of judgment met, capable of doing anything that occurred to my swollen, hungry brain.
Hightower calmed me and coaxed me to continue with clearing the land. I went down on my knees in the dirt and dust, searching for pebbles. A great sobbing arose from my rib-thin chest as I worked, and the men circling around me, busy with their chores, began to sing “The White Cliffs of Dover” to drown my cries. In a while, too fatigued to continue, I gathered myself and went quiet as if all were well. I still had in mind to kill King though—in any way I could and at any cost to me. Any.
When night began to fall and we marched back to the camp, my eyes scanned the lines of men for King. I expected to see a look of satisfaction on his face, I suppose, and his belly bulging with his theft—the murderous robbery of two bites of rice, the outer grains gray from several filthy hands, that food intended to save Buster’s fragile life. And, before long, I spotted King, but he was somber, like one who had spent his day working in the broiling sun, head bent like all the other heads beside him, those who still lived at the end of just another day.
I churned with passion, spooning gruel into myself in front of the hut. Automatically, I stopped eating three-quarters through that meager meal, setting aside the last portion in my mind for Buster. But Buster wasn’t there, and after a second, I swallowed the rest, feeling as bloated as if I had stolen that last meal from Buster myself.
Later, we rested outside as long as we were generally allowed, talking and catching up on the day’s gossip. One of the Filipinos had brought news of fighting at Guadalcanal, the battle reported on the illegal radio as indecisive. Not having any maps, we speculated wildly as to where Guadalcanal was located, the optimistic putting it at the door of the Philippines, the pessimistic assuring us that Guadalcanal was one of the islands closer to Hawaii. Even the educated men among us didn’t know much about the geography of the Pacific. Any maps we had owned had been taken from us as dangerous tools of insurrection.
In the end, a few fell back to contemplating the mystery of the theft of the rice and Buster’s death. The arguments ranged from whether the one could be attributed to the other, to who had done the murderous deed. King’s name was mentioned by several on that occasion, again. Most of the men plainly disliked him, having been taken advantage of in a trade or by a suspected theft, one time or another.
Corporal Webb, the leader of the American contingent at that end of the camp, a slow-speaking and reserved fellow of somewhere in his thirties (or sixty-something, if you went by his looks after eight months in Mabuchi), was the only one to counter the general accusations against King. Seeming uneasy at the degree to which the men were stirred up, Webb suggested in a word or two that “just as likely” a rat had made off with the bits of rice. This led to a controversy so strenuous that we had to shush ourselves at several points, seeing the guards staring in our direction.
I got up and went inside, realizing when I got there that I really hadn’t any task at hand. Other nights I might have taken Buster to the latrine, then tried to make him comfortable on the floor with a rolled-up pair of pants for a pillow. Tonight, I sat in silence and stewed, listening to the hushed conversations around me. Men talked more about food than they did about women here. Food at least seemed somehow possible—though it wasn’t.
A little while later, Hightower came in. Despite the inside of the hut being dark already, I could tell it was him by the shape etched in the doorway against the moonlight. Knowing where I was, he came and sank down and from time to time I could make out his features when he turned and his eyes glistened in my direction.
“What is it?” I asked. I could feel a strangeness in his presence, and that he had something to say that would be momentous.
He shook his head, staying quiet until I asked again. “I hate to tell you, old boy, but you’ll hear the news sooner or later.” He still shook his head, and I supposed his information was something bad, very bad, that he had just heard we had been beaten at Guadalcanal, too.
The whisper came so low I had to strain at first to hear him, though Hightower wasn’t one to shirk from a duty. “They used his body for bayonet practice, the bloody swine.”
I tried to register what he had said and make sense of the words. First, I had to realize the news had nothing to do with the fight in the Solomon Islands. Second, I had to understand that the body he referred to was my dead charge, Buster.
I gripped Hightower’s arm, that’s all, just grabbed and hung on, all the feelings that remained in any part of me channeling through the strength of my fingers. I hadn’t anticipated this dimension of the nightmare we were caught in. Most of the time those generally sick enough or stupid enough to remain in camp during the day attended to tasks such as burying the dead. Abuse of Buster’s lifeless form was beyond my wildest imaginings.
“Hang on, old boy,” Hightower counseled. His hand went on top of the fingers that pinched at him. I relaxed the hold I had on his weak flesh and, worn out, lay back on the pile formed by my only set of clothes. Although I recollect that Hightower spoke to me again, I didn’t rise until the morning.
The next day when we lined up for our march to the airfield, I revealed to Hightower my intention to kill King. I was resolute, determined, and unshakable, and Hightower cast worried glances in my direction throughout the morning. Meanwhile, our hands tugged recalcitrant rocks from the mud into which an overnight rain had turned the surface of the land.
Sometimes I still dream about that undistinguished landscape: the palm trees along the far perimeter, fronds shredded by mortar shells; a lifeless sandy soil, littered with rocks and remnants of the ocean floor. I can only recall that vista as brown, the smell a salt tang with an occasional waft of the odor of carrion. I had always been there, before I had arrived. And, thereafter, I had never left.
That afternoon, Hightower began to talk up a new idea of his with great ebullience. His sense of the matter was that King should be placed on trial for theft and the murder of Buster. I could prosecute. Corporal Webb would defend, and Hightower would judge. He’d make sure that the absolute strictest courtroom protocol was applied. His enthusiasm for this business was palpable, and the others discussed how we could enforce our will over the whole camp. Hightower made it his job to petition the ranking officer in camp, an American lieutenant—Logan—to hold the hearing. I didn’t say anything, thinking it over, but at last gave in.
Hightower was right, as usual, I decided. He was a man of principle, and a fair hearing was an honorable act. Although I was still eager to be King’s executioner—almost madly zealous toward that end—I managed to rein in the power of my insane rage. I could wait a few days until King’s sentence was declared. The virtue of my position made me feel strong.
Hightower and I went to Logan with our request and were turned down. Logan told us he had “no authority to empower a kangaroo court.” He said that anyone violating the ordinary laws of human conduct and military law would be subject to a court-martial at the end of the war, including anyone carrying out an illegal trial of an enlisted man.
I have to admit that I was shocked by his response. I was so swayed by Hightower’s reasoning in proposing the prosecution that I was confident we would be given the go-ahead. Still, in my eyes, the theft of the rice was tantamount to murder, and I was absolutely positive that the thief was King.
The logic underlying my certainty was the single missing ingredient. Although I wasn’t ill, exactly, the stress and deprivation we were subject to produced strange results in all our thinking. But I don’t use this fact in my defense. I have never encouraged this type of argument in my courtroom, and I won’t excuse myself from full responsibility in this instance, either. I suppose, in terms of alleviating my ego—lest anyone aside from myself think me a downright idiot—I would merely provide this information as a footnote. If anyone cared.
The question I would ask myself now that I didn’t ask then is a simple one: How did King know that I had put down some rice for Buster that night? King wasn’t even living in our hut. My illogic stands out to me today in gigantic proportions, yet no one even suggested this brief rebuttal to me at the time. We were all carried along by the idea that King was guilty. The trial was to be fair, and being fair, would prove his culpability.
The probable explanation for the missing rice, I now see, was exactly as Corporal Webb laid out: A rat had darted in and carried it away. Or, sometimes I am able to persuade myself that Buster did, after all, consume the mouthful of nourishment, that in his fog, he then forgot. But while eating those few grains of food, he had experienced a surge of hope. I imagine his feeling of optimism at that moment and the picture of home that formed in his mind. Certainly he would live to see Arkansas again.
I never understood at the time that I was compensating for my sense of guilt in letting Buster die. I had made myself responsible for him, and he was dead. Worse still was the fact that I myself remained alive and reasonably functional, never mind a few loose teeth, stiffness of joints, or an occasional bout of parasitic infestation.
While I plotted King’s murder, saving sharp-edged rocks from the field in my shirt, word got out quickly enough that several of us planned to place King on trial. As he was disliked, our dead-end idea was generally supported. Moreover, while concocting various schemes for how I would kill King—and, in some of the scenarios, get away with it—every time I saw the man, I conveyed my intentions through my eyes. King, despite his reputation as a happy-go-lucky type even under our conditions of imprisonment, could not remain oblivious to the rumors or my hard, cold stares. I was in such a manic state, in fact, that I was transformed from a generally likable, wholesome Midwesterner into a person my own mother would not recognize. My intractable idee fixe that King had to die gave me the first hint I’d ever had in my life that my personality had a power to it (a power I later realized needed to be curbed).
I could tell that King was aware of what I had in mind. His reaction to me was an increasingly nervous one, despite the fact that I was stick thin while he had the muscle tone of a man who daily ate a normal calorie intake. He continued to try to appear self-confident, but I watched his eyes. The expression in them became wary soon enough. Then wariness turned quite quickly into fear.
In the meantime, Hightower both distanced himself from me and tried to talk some sense into that thick head of mine. We had heard about the Americans winning control of Guadalcanal, and broadcasts were beamed at the Filipinos in their own language, encouraging them to believe that MacArthur would, without fail, return. Of course, this promise was quite a bit premature, but Hightower assured me that we wouldn’t remain in the camp too long, and that King would reap his just reward after our release. Hightower begged me not to place myself in a position of jeopardy.
In all those weeks, one might imagine that I would take definitive steps toward such a well-defined objective. Yet I didn’t. I continued to dither as to how to accomplish my goal. I discarded the idea of the rocks and hid them under the hut. I had no other weapon, no poison, no means to carry out my intent—other than my clear physical inferiority. If I attacked King, not only could he defend himself without a great deal of effort, but others would plainly intervene, even disliking him as they did. Any fuss would draw the attention of the Japanese guards, and any focus on the prisoners was not to the good.
I was frustrated all right, but I hadn’t given up. I began to sneak into King’s barrack during meals to leave threatening notes. I went out of my way to pass behind him on the walk to the latrine or as we lined up in the morning. “You’re dead meat,” I whispered. Or, “Remember Buster.” I did my utmost to master the art of psychological terror. I dreamed of enlisting others in the warfare, although by then, I had no real confederates. Maybe I didn’t even notice.
But I was a fool in every respect. In my mind, things would continue on the way they were. King would grow thin, like the rest of us, but with anxiety. He, as the rest of us—one by one—would sicken and die. Just as I saw so clearly the guilt for Buster’s death as being King’s, so, too, I viewed this little scene in my head as being played out in actuality, without room for any other possible outcome.
We were building an airfield, yet even a boy such as myself, unused to the construction trades, knew full well that the job required more than a mere few hundred hands. We had labored magnificently as far as we could. The ground in front of us was free of obstruction and knocked perfectly flat. Nonetheless, the earth was friable, subject to both the monsoons and the non-rain periods during which the land dried up under the flaming tropical sun. So either the field would wash away in days or blow away as soon as it returned to sand. Packing the soil down with a steamroller might help, but the obvious solution was to cover the level surface with macadam, creating a tarmac.
But that was the American way. We had supplies. We had suppliers. The Japanese had suffered since before the war under blockades against the import of raw materials; the war had only increased consumption but not their available resources. So we had built an airstrip on this island except for the most important ingredient. Panay was not a priority in terms of paving. Luzon, the island of the capital, Manila, might have been. The efforts of our group would not pay off.
We were glad, of course, that all our work had come to nothing. The Japs would not benefit from our slave labor. At the same time, men prefer to perform meaningful work, and we muttered among ourselves about the stupidity of the waste. But the Japanese, though cruel, had some ingenuity, and work groups were taken up a little way into the hills to the line of pine forests where, oddly, we were shown how to insert spigots to collect tree sap. Naturally, we surreptitiously experimented with the taste, but this was not for our nourishment. One of the boys from North Carolina explained that we were going to make tar—something his home state was quite famous for and the reason they called the population there Tarheels.
At any rate, soon after that, the camp commander, Captain Ichioka, began his scorched earth policy. The airfield finally denuded of every hard pebble, our work was now to render the entire island free of any growing thing other than the pines. I exaggerate, but not overly. First, we knocked down the palms, then worked our way to higher elevations and softer woods, logging skillessly as we went. We hacked the hapless trees down with much burning of calories, a matter that concerned us, and wrecking of Imperial-issue bayonets, which did not.
As nonproductive as this work was—we thought—by the end of a week or two, our band of around 249 men had dragged a pile of rubble to the near edge of our previously neat and tidy landing spot for bombers and their Zero escorts. We learned through the grapevine that we were in the process of creating coal, an appropriate thickener and stabilizer for the boiled sap, a bituminous binder. All the while during this new period of greatly efforted destruction, my own personal campaign had not been ignored. I had sent the word out to everyone I met that I was going to get King, that the trial was still on, that he would be convicted and executed without mercy. I continued to go out of my way to harass the man, and others began to pester or shun him. I enjoyed the process. In a world in which a boy is rendered impotent by circumstance, the finding of one means of having an effect is a heady brew. I had no awareness that the illusion of control was what I sought or that anything I might have done was morally objectionable. King had killed Buster, and he was my enemy.
One relatively dry and unbearably sizzling morning, under the watchful and curious eyes of our guards, we started a bonfire, which soon raged in a wild hunger to consume our work of many hours, many days. We had actually amassed quite a bundle of trees of various sorts, and the smoke that arose from the conflagration was thick and choking. Why we stood in such proximity to the pyre is another mystery of fate.
Eyes tearing, guards and soldiers alike, we coughed our way back away from the monster we had evoked. My eyes were so stung by the smoke that I didn’t even see the event—more or less the culmination of my crusade.
King, no doubt driven to some far reach of desperation by my attacks, chose this seemingly opportune moment to make an escape. Where he thought he would go (up through the pines?) or how he intended to turn the Filipinos to his own use, I have no idea. His move was a stupid one, and he might have tried regardless of my pitiful daily annoyances, but I’m not convinced. I have remained more or less certain that I was the cause behind his trying to run...and the reason my Japanese friend Herman dutifully shot King in the back.
At the sound of the rifle crack, my eyes came open, and I saw King lying dead—or nearly so—on the ground. The blood continued to flow out of him as we backed away, the blackening smoke concealing his body.
King was dead, and at once I felt a vacuum much greater than the loss of Buster himself. King was dead, long live—what? Without King, without my living hatred, I was nothing.
I’ve heard from other veterans, POWs, or just plain combatants, of singular moments that defined not only the rest of the war for them, but the rest of their lives. This was that instant of change or epiphany for me, but it wasn’t a realization that took place on the spot. Many years were required to digest this point of world-shattering truth. And maybe I’m still in the process of integrating it. As to what the meaning of all that was, I can’t say I’m certain. The essence of what I received from the incident on Panay when I was eighteen and a prisoner of war had something to do with how I had to live my life. I stood hitting golf balls from a bucket, wondering.
We were probably among the last of the Philippine islands to be liberated by the returning MacArthur. But as the American forces came closer in the Pacific, our treatment grew somewhat less severe. We still didn’t have much food, but the beatings became less frequent and with less conviction. When the American troops arrived, our guards took to the hills, where we could hear the pounding of mortar for a couple of days. Finally, we were saved by soldiers from our homeland, big men, a species alien to us though we had once been as they.
Our eyes dripped saline and water, but we were not jubilant. We were famished. We were numb. We were leaderless. Lieutenant Logan had died of dysentery, and Hightower, being a Brit, had not been accepted by the men.
I was shipped home to Indiana, eventually, fed along the way and fattened up. Still, when I arrived at my parents’ door, uncertain whether I might have to knock or not, my mother, who opened the door to me before I made up my mind, was horrified at my skeletal appearance.
I lay in my house two years more, bringing various foodstuffs into my room at night, and otherwise not expressing much lively motivation. At length, I went to Indiana State, graduated, and went to law school there. I had been demobilized. I had regained my place in society. All was well.
I only told my wife Madelyn once about King, wanting to share with her my sense of guilt and how it had become a primary foundation for me.
Madelyn is an intelligent and sensitive woman, down to earth. “That was the war,” she responded straight out. “Now it’s over.”
“But he’s dead. Dead forever. And it’s my fault.” I waited, breath bated, for her to see my terrible point.
“Yes, he’s dead,” she agreed. “And that’s that. There’s no going back. The war is done with.”
But does that make any sense to anyone else? We still blame the war on the Japanese people, on the Germans. And most of those we condemn for these actions weren’t even there. The Germans have paid reparations for decades, and recently the Japanese have begun to apologize to those they harmed. Those who pay and those who apologize know little of the war. I was there when King was killed. I was directly responsible. Yet I’m not reproached.
When a guilty defendant comes into my courtroom, I hand out a punishment. I alone have gone without repercussion for my crime.
I served four years in the worst hell on earth, I tell myself in consolation. But that doesn’t console me.
I tracked down King’s family and wrote them a nice letter after the war, saying what a fine young man he had been, and how proud I was to have served with him. I described how he had met his heroic end. I suppose his father wouldn’t have believed me, knowing his son. But his mother would have. I wrote the letter for her, the mother. The mothers are always willing to believe the best.
I also kept in touch with Hightower, writing him when I went to college, then to law school, and when I finally became a judge. He had been a great friend to me before the King incident. Then, after King’s death, he often paused to bring me some cheer. He was a fine man and died about fifteen years ago of prostate cancer, leaving two sons.
On my way home from the putting range (a later arrival at Mabuchi taught me to putt with a stick of bamboo), I stopped outside of Johnson Chevy, idling and gazing at the place. Frank Johnson had, from the first, put me in mind of King. I’m always careful sentencing a man to prison, since I’ve been in one, but I could never have borne to see Johnson locked up. I couldn’t have stood any possible consequences to him. To me, Johnson was King.
The mind is a funny, willful, and capricious instrument. No telling what it will come up with next. I have tried since the war not to be subject to its direction but to stick to principle—the reason why, even more than Hightower’s influence, I chose the law. Somehow the law seemed to offer a certainty.
Still, when Johnson came to me two years ago, begging me to help him with the fraud charges, I called in a couple of favors from the district attorney’s office, as if Johnson were my own son and I had to protect him. Almost as if Johnson were Buster. The logic of our thoughts, the logic of our emotions is utterly unreliable.
I do my utmost to keep Frank Johnson in line, however, and I hoped the reporter would put the story I’d told him in the paper as a reminder to Frank. Probably, though, the Herald won’t want to risk a libel suit.
Have I made peace with my war, my crimes, and the crimes committed by everyone else? I doubt if I have. But I live my life as if all that was completely in the past. And when they talk on television about prisoners of war in Vietnam or Iraq, I can’t watch. When hostages are taken in the Middle East and shown on the news, I leave the room. So long as no one is hurt, every man is allowed his quirks. Those are mine.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although no prison camp on Panay was named Camp Mabuchi, Masaaki Mabuchi was a defendant in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, and was executed in September 1946. All the atrocities depicted are well-documented. Further, the story is not meant to be anti-Japanese, but merely historic in nature; elsewhere, I write from the viewpoint of Japanese protagonists.