“To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand.”

~Romeo and Juliet I. i.

 

*        *        *

 

A mouse walks across the floor by my ankle.  A mouse and not a man.  Today is my wedding day.  I sit in front of an antique vanity of my mother’s, and as I pull my veil down I am reminded of a story that my Japanese grandfather told me when I first reached the age of womanhood.  It would always begin something like this. . .

 

Col. James “Canon” Hommes, a marine, sat in a chair apart from his own will.  A knife was being held to his left cheek.  He could not stop talking.  In his babbling my grandfather would listen as Canon kept removing himself from the moment, choosing to rather be in moments like this . . .

 

Walking out of the bathroom after his morning flush and floss, Canon decided that he would very much like to kiss his wife and that he would like to have eggs benedict with his coffee.  After a spray of pungent cologne, he walked downstairs and did both, but his pleasure from his time at the toilet was incomparable: the solitude, the relief, the raw passion and catharsis of a porcelain throne.  His wife poured his coffee, which he drank black and which would make him piss the rest of the day.  His yellow scrambled eggs were runny.  The way he did not like, but ate often.  He covered the eggs with lots of pepper and syrup.  The mixture of salty and sweet tantalized his masculine taste buds into an ante meridiem euphoria. 

 

These are the kinds of interpreted moments that my grandfather reconstructed from garbled yelling and blurted mumbles like “I AM KISSING . . . EGGS BENEDICT.”  Or, “toilettoilet . . . COLOGNE . . . more COFFEEEEeeeeeee.”  The problem is not that there are a lack of stories, but a lack of putting them together, of reconstructing the importance of past events.  My grandfather was chiefly concerned with bringing together those loose ties that were woven into the fabric of these lives, the lives of his men and of his prisoners.

 

Canon and Suzette had five children, five boys.  Their names are Tim, Seth, Nick, Joel, and Bo.  My grandfather knew that the boys lived in Ohio, I have to assume and that they, like my parents, are probably still alive today.  They must be so, for there isn’t much that could kill an American in the Midwest.  Col. Hommes was a young man.  The five men crowd around the colonel and he briefly winces back, shrinking as they assert themselves on him.  Nick would sit down to the table; he was the youngest.  As father, Canon would ask Nick about school in generic, time consuming questions.

 

“What are you learning at school today?”

 

“Oh, Shakespeare.”

 

“Really?” Canon replies in his most fatherly tone, “What’s the story?”

 

“It’s a love story, but it has a lot of violence in it.  I like it.”

 

“Hmmm, why do they teach you things like that at school?  How is your math class coming?”

 

“I’m trying hard dad.”  And he was.

 

It seems that the colonel loved math and would conduct endless formulas and equations in his cell with a contraband pencil, with which he could have stabbed himself, but never did.  These entire conversations were re-enacted, as Hommes lay broken on the floor or in the chair to which he would return often for interrogation.  Hommes lived in nostalgia in those awful months like some morbid Peter Pan, flying off to the second star to the right and straight on until morning.  He was a boy with a missing shadow.

 

Just as the colonel would begin thinking about who would take the children to school, blood would trickle down from his left nostril and eye.  These things happened because always in the real present Hommes was being held hostage in my Japanese grandfather’s prisoner-of-war camp.  My grandfather described Hommes as being obese and lethargic.  He wore glasses and figeted with his fingernails.  He had dark brown hair and a fu manchu.  He wore a crucifix.  Hommes had been taken at Bataan under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur.  Over 15,000 Americans died on their way to that camp.  Meanwhile, Japan was filled with brave men like my grandfather.  During that time, Japan was trying to control the Pacific, and the Americans were trying to get their revenge for D-day.  Whoever was captured alive was harshly interrogated like the American, Col. Hommes.  But unfortunately, the Japanese had not perfected their methods of interrogation.  They would mistranslate the wrong questions or cause pain without offering questions to be answered at all. 

 

The Marines would joke at base camp about men being raped in the Japanese prisons.  They would laugh about the faggots in their own prisons and would nudge each other to reassure their own masculinity.  Now, Canon didn’t think that it was funny at all. 

 

Men have a higher amount of iron in their blood.  Because they do not lose blood in a monthly cycle, the hemoglobin builds up until they are weighted down with iron.  It must have been natural for ancient tribes of men to lose blood as they fought for food in the wild.  Hemoglobin keeps the blood oxygenated, but Hommes had lost enough blood during his imprisonment that he became anemic.  If he tried to stand at all he would faint. 

 

The blue soldiers had taken the weapons from Col. Canon, as he liked to be called, immediately at his capture.  He had been shot down at a nearby post about half a mile inland—two gunshot wounds had barrelled through the large muscles of both legs.  He was unable to move or to escape and was taken easily.  James hated the Japanese names and often enumerated each of them in his cell, spitting each one out with the strongest vehemence that he could muster in those hateful days.

 

Surbachi!  Tachiiwa Point!  Kitano!  Motoyama!  These were not places, but ideas.  Airfields and fortifications.  Trenches and command posts.  Artillery for air raids and defense emplacements.  Lines and grids on map paper.

 

The blood would flush from Canon’s brain as he shifted back to a safe memory, such as a lunch break at work.  He would normally do lots of paperwork in the morning and lifted heavy objects in the afternoon.  His job was simple, and the tedium of Canon’s life had made him happy.  He had gone to university and was a great athlete.  Before the Americans began fighting again in the ‘40s, Canon’s desk position as colonel was a cush job that paid the bills.  The depression had not affected the Hommes household at great length.  In fact, the security of Canon’s job had made him very sure of himself.  It was the insecurity of the Pearl Harbor attack that threw the Hommes family and the rest of the country into a tumult. 

 

There was one particular day that my grandfather would recall as he watched Col. Hommes being tortured during those months.  Hommes began remembering those easier moments at work, remembering cigars, football, and rifles, anything to bring back his old self.  He would imagine washing his hands at a bathroom break or shredding paper for some encrypted file.  But just in one of those moments, Col. Canon felt a surge of pain in his left forefinger.  It had been removed.

 

“Talk!” one of my Japanese grandfather’s soldiers screamed.

 

“Who are you?”

 

He could never answer immediately.  On this particular day, Hommes realized the cut on his cheek impaired his speech, and as he could not return to pissing at a customary restroom break, he pissed his pants sitting in the chair.  He sat drenched in his own urine, bound and helpless before the group of onlooking men. 

 

The oddly blue uniformed Japanese soldiers laughed at his lack of will and great fear.  Canon began sobbing in his bloodstained frock.  The blood and sweat mixed gave the frock a pink hue.  He was never allowed pants.  My grandfather would recount how emasculating the prisoner’s dress was.  The frock was filthy because it was the standard dress of a prisoner and had been recycled.  The prisoners were kept in a camp away from the bunkers where rodents kept gnawing through the concrete holes and leaving filth and feces on the cell floors.  Each was forced to use his own cell as a restroom, and the smell burned their nostrils as they tried to sleep at night.  The air itself contained floating bacteria that graciously killed many of those that were captured. 

 

Though Canon wanted very much to assert his courage, in the face of pain he could never perform as trained.  His weeping would be suddenly interrupted by vomiting.  Shrill laughter of the onlooking room filled his ears.  On this fatefully humiliating day, some of the vomit had splattered upon the black boot of one of the soldiers—an unfortunate event for Canon’s physical well being and for his pride, yet he continued to talk, never stopping for quiet.  He was a man without peace.

 

Blood.  Iron.  Oxygen.

 

The things he told my grandfather were awful, and grandfather would often talk about the torture of Col. James Hommes.  Grandfather seemed extensively horrified by the man.  It always seemed that grandfather was warning me of men like Col. Hommes.  He wanted me to marry a man that could not fall as a man, a caring man that was not a soldier that could not make the indecencies that Col. James Canon Hommes made as my grandfather looked on. 

 

The Japanese soldier that had his boot soiled by Col. Canon’s vomit, as if following Bushido code, kicked him in his face, which caused Canon and his confining chair to fall backward upon the linoleum floor.  The bile-covered boot pressed itself into Canon’s mouth, which silenced his screaming for a split second. 

 

Then, taunting ensued.

 

“You piss sitting down, sir?”

 

“You piss like a girl, sir!”

 

The soldiers would use the formal address to mock the colonel.  The truth was that Canon had always pissed sitting down because of a phobia of germs.  This taunting removed Canon from the torture for a brief moment.  As Canon would slip again from the present, his talking would refer to other moments from his past.  In this case, he relived being teased as a young boy, even talking with the lilt of a child, claiming that he would tell his mother on them.  He had had, it seemed, a bullied past.

 

Canon began to garble some form of an apology.  He was no good at apologies and his hamstrings were sliced through to the bone because of this deficiency in begging pardon.  With Canon’s eyes squinted shut, he began thinking of his dog lapping at his hands.  They were covered in blood as he clawed in his own gore and urine against the cement with vigorous strokes.  Blood was everywhere, yet Canon shrilly whistled and called for his dog in the darkly lit interrogation room.  And Canon got sick again and again.  My grandfather spoke of how much Canon talked, but how he never said the right things.  He was so silent at first, but as the torture wore him down he talked and talked.  He couldn’t stop talking. 

 

Hemoglobin.  Hemorrhage.  Hematoma. 

 

He talked about women he’d slept with—two while he was married. 

 

There is more iron in the bodies of men because they don’t lose it in a monthly cycle.

 

As the garrulous prisoner kept talking, two soldiers dragged him, each with a hand under an armpit, and legs hanging behind him to his cell.  He could not move on his own; he could not stand.  The soldiers thrust the vulnerable colonel into his cell as the few other American men looked on.  Coughing and wheezing hysterically, he began to crawl on his hands and knees to his bunk.

 

On his cot in the cell, Col. Canon looked towards the wall, curled up against himself.  He would never do push-ups or sit-ups like the other inmates.  His muscles had become long and slender from malnourishment.  He was lonely and defeated.  He stayed curled up until the end of the war, until the men planted their flag at Iwo Jima.  Once a solution to the war had been engendered, my grandfather came to America.  Everyone in the States was so happy for all of the soldiers to return home.  Hommes was never killed in the camp, but my grandfather would say that a man like that was destined for suicide.  I cannot tell from my grandfather’s stories just how Col. Hommes killed himself, but I am sure that he did, killing himself in a moment of perfect misery as a perfect cherry blossom that falls from the tree.  A gun, a rope, a knife, or re-routed car exhaust, any of these would have finished Col. Hommes’ story for me and my imagination, though I never knew for sure.

 

On my person I have kept a letter, which Col. Hommes had intended to send home to his wife Suzette.  My grandfather took it from his possessions in the last stages of his imprisonment.  It is a sad reminder to me of what I want in my husband, something better than a failed hero.  It reads thus:

 

Suzette—

 

You must not wait for me.  I am no man.  I have fought and been captured.  There is nothing left of me.  I am slowly headed for death; I can feel it in my bones.  I am nervous for the success here in Japan.  I have been here 6 mo.  and have little hope for escape.  If you don’t get this letter, I will not be surprised.  I have stopped praying.  The soldiers here are awful.  They beat us mercilessly without reason.  I have little hope of returning home.  Don’t tell the children what happened to me.  Make something up.  You always were a good storyteller.

 

Hopeless,

 

—Jim

 

I believe that Suzette was a strong woman, someone who began picking up the groceries as soon as Hommes left in 1941.  She probably was a good storyteller and lied to the boys about how heroically their father had acted.  After explaining away his suicide, she probably began a successful career as a journalist for the war and supported their five children well.  She probably was a woman who treasured Georgia O’Keefe prints and donated to the Women’s Liberation cause.  She cried only at night in the late hours and became the man of the house. 

 

My grandfather said that Hommes would sing one song over and over in his bunk.  An Irish lullaby that had the chorus:

 

          The girls that work in the arsenal

They’re working night and day,

Picking up munitions for the soldier’s far away.

And when our war is over, our governor, he will say,

“Girls, you’ve done your duty.  You deserve a holiday.”

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra  Too-ra-loo-ra-li . . .

 

As I stand up and move from my vanity, I am headed for the aisle with my father, a half-Japanese, half-Irish banker.  And I check my face one last time before I enter into a lifelong commitment to a man, a man that I have chosen to make a man, a man that I expect everything from.  And I move to the aisle and look him in the face, say my vows eventually and give myself to him eventually.  And I make him a man.  As long as I am with him, he will be a man—accepted as such, thus he performs, for we are all of us waned and waning.