So what did Sloan say when you told him all this?” “At first he thought I was crazy. He knew the local history, and there was no mention of Japanese people, except for fleeting references to the logging camps. I said of course. That’s because the histories were written according to the selective memories of the pioneer families, who didn’t want posterity to remember the Japanese. He was on council then and checked land titles, but he said there was no record of the family names I provided owning anything. The records were either destroyed, I told him, or they were altered. He wanted to see our redress documents from the federal government, so I showed him. But they only listed our holdings in acres and buildings and gave “B.C. Coast” as the location. That’s it. That’s all we have. He said he would look into it some more, but then I didn’t hear from him for many months. During the springtime, he started coming back, asking further questions. I said why don’t you just run the picture, let me tell my story, and maybe others would come forward. But he didn’t want to do it that way. He said he’d found a source, someone local who might be able to confirm a lot of what I was saying, but that he had to get this person to open up to him.”
“That would be Virgil Wood, the poet. The late poet.”
“I didn’t like the way he was sitting on everything. He seemed to be getting more information, because now he was acting more like he believed me, and he would ask me very specific questions, but he would never tell me what he found out at his end. He acted like it was his story now, not mine. That his telling it was more important than us having lived it.”
“A lot of reporters act that way. I didn’t think Sloan would.”
“During the last month or so, he came back several times. He kept saying he was ‘almost ready to spring it’—those were his words. ‘Don’t lose that picture,’ he’d say. ‘It won’t just be front page on the Coast; it’ll be front page from coast to coast to coast.’ But I didn’t really believe him. I’d stopped trusting him. He had me working on that replica bonsai for his missus, and I thought he’d gone maybe a little—you know—upstairs.”
“No, I think he was ready to spring it,” I said. “Do you mind if I have a smoke?”
“Go ahead.” He set an ashtray in front of me and placed the photograph back in the drawer. “But if my daughter sees it or smells it, she’ll be mad.”
“No, she thinks I’m great.” I took a long drag, dreading what was to come.
“From the looks of things,” I said, “Sloan was ready to tell his wife the story. He was a ham actor, big into theatrical productions, and even as a politician and newspaperman, he liked to show then tell. He was going to hand over that little bonsai tree then tell his wife the story, the whole story. The tree was part of it.”
Harry frowned like he blinked, with his whole face. “How is that?”
“What Sloan learned was that a man had hanged himself in that tree in April of 1949. Early April.”
Harry’s face sort of seized up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it does sound like it was Joseph Hara. In the Chronicle morgue, Sloan dug up a newspaper article from that year which described the death. The article said the dead man was a Witka native. I checked into that, and it seems that there was no such person. They invented an Indian to explain Joseph’s corpse. Awful, huh?”
Harry was staring straight ahead at the wall. A wildlife calendar showed some kind of small lizard. “Outrageous,” he muttered. His head swung around. “But that’s ludicrous. How could he know it was that very tree?”
“There’s a gash in the trunk. You can still see the mark if you go down there and look at it. The article said the man started to chop down the tree then gave up and hanged himself from it. It also said he was drunk on cheap whisky at the time. Does that sound like the way Joseph Hara would have ended it?”
Harry shook his head, his mouth puckered in rage. “No, not him. I bet they killed him,” he said.
“They might have. In those days lynchings were supposed to be confined to the Deep South. But they all listened to the same Bing Crosby songs. Why did you go to Barlow’s today?”
“My family’s frightened. We’ve been getting those strange calls. They wake my wife and daughter up at night. They don’t say anything; just that drumming and high-pitched wailing and then they hang up. One morning there was a dead fish sitting on the hood of my truck. The next morning it was a dead seagull. Looked like it was shot with a pellet gun. One of our cats has disappeared.”
“Whereabouts do you live?”
“In town, near the Gorge. Right below Barlow’s big castle. I told him about all the stuff that’s been happening. He said we had a prankster on our street. Even said it might be an old boyfriend of Ruby’s doing it. I told him that was not true. I reminded him how his father had made the family fortune: buying up confiscated Japanese Canadian lands at fire sale prices. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Said he wasn’t privy to all his father’s and grandfather’s land deals. That they did things different in those days. Oh, he was ready for me. He had land title records in his desk drawer. Pulled them out and flashed them. See, he said, see. I said we have our own records. Up here.” He tapped his skull. “And in here.” He slapped his chest.
“Then he really pissed me off by saying the federal government had compensated us a few years back, and how many times did we want to be compensated. I told him that he couldn’t buy me off; that the truth would come out. I wanted to call him a thief from a family of stinking thieves, but I held my tongue. I’m afraid I said too much as it was. I have to think of my family’s safety first.”
“Of course you do. Have you gone to the RCMP to report the threats? Because they sound like threats.”
“To say what? To say a fish landed on my truck? They’ll say it dropped out of a bird’s beak. To say that a bird landed on my truck? They’ll say a neighbour’s kid shot it out of the air. To say my cat is missing? They’d laugh at that and say I should never have let him out. To say the Barlows are land thieves and maybe killers? They’d probably lock me up for that.”
“I see your point.”
“Will you write my story?”
“I might have to,” I said, getting up. “Sad truth of the matter is, though, that it doesn’t feel like it’s over yet. I’m going to try to fill in a few blanks. I’ll be in touch.”
We shook hands.
At the counter, I gave Ruby my home phone number and told her to call if anything else happened, no matter how seemingly innocuous. I also thanked her for stepping up to the plate for me.
“We have to trust someone,” she said.
“Yes, but I think you’ve filled your quota for this month. Go easy now.”