The Fervor Read online

  But then, as his eye attempted to focus on it, it moved.

  It moved strangely, like it had arms. The arms wove left and right, up and down. With cold clarity, he knew what it was.

  A tiny translucent spider.

  His shock was cut through with a thundering boom.

  And then: he was blown backward, as if from cannon fire.

  * * *

  —

  When Archie was just a kid, there’d been a terrible accident on his parents’ farm. His uncle Ronald had gotten trapped in the grain silo when a fire broke out. It was a nightmare, the inside of the silo a whirling tornado of flame. No one had been able to get to his uncle and drag him out, no way to get water in to douse the flames. He remembers his parents’ panic, the shock of it, farm hands running and shouting, everyone helpless.

  It was a terrible accident. Everybody said so.

  Later, when neighbors came over to console Archie’s parents, Archie supposedly in bed but listening on the stairs, he remembered how his father had insisted that his brother had brought it on himself. “He was probably drunk,” he’d said bitterly before Archie’s mother had shushed him. But in that moment, it all made sense to Archie (or maybe he was just grasping at straws): how Uncle Ronald had just shown up on the doorstep one day, no mention of where his wife was. How he slept on the couch and Archie would find him in the morning reeking of alcohol. “He was a sinner. And believe you me, those who sin will meet the fire of Hell in the end,” his father had said that night.

  And the terrible feeling Archie had had, feeling that he was somehow responsible for it. His mother dismissed it as Christian sympathy. Because you are such a good boy. A good Christian soul.

  Archie sometimes looked back on that night as the start of something. A fire lit inside him. For years he tried to be good. He would refuse temptation, not give in to sin. He would be above reproach.

  All the while, however, he carried a terrible secret. A guilt that he couldn’t allow himself to acknowledge and snuffed out as soon as it came creeping back to him.

  And then, at last, he found Elsie. Because she was so virtuous, so clean, he found it easy to be good around her. The mistakes of the past were behind him forever, he thought.

  But he was wrong.

  In trembling shock, Archie climbed up from the roots and mud, staggered to his feet, lumbered toward a thick and billowing smoke. It was as if the spot where everyone had been standing had suddenly opened up, gone volcanic. He choked; smoke burned his eyes. Where was everyone?

  The colorful shapes he’d seen just a minute earlier—Elsie’s white cardigan, the Patzke girl’s blue dress, the Shoemaker boy’s plaid shirt—were gone from his field of vision. Or no, not gone. Strewn across the ground. Like laundry thrown carelessly in the air.

  Writhing.

  Screaming. Had the sound ripped from his own throat?

  He was running again, climbing over two of the clothes piles—one flailing and shrieking, one eerily still. He would trample a hundred burning children to get to Elsie. It was his greatest sin, this worship of her. It was the bit of Hell that burned inside him.

  She was screaming. Thrashing. Inhuman.

  The next thing he knew was that he was kneeling in the mud beside her—this creature who was his wife transformed. Transmuted by fire and chaos into something else. He whipped off his coat and tried to smother the flames, holding her down. Let me help you, he screamed.

  But her face was no face, it was all gash: red and pulpy, an open wound, skin seared off flesh. Her lips moved but he couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  There was moaning all around him. He was paralyzed by shock. This wasn’t real. He had plunged backward through time to the night of that fire, only this time, it wasn’t his uncle but Archie himself, at the center of the flames, burning alive.

  He didn’t know how long he knelt there, panting, choking, screams tearing his throat raw. Coughing up smoke and blood, flapping in vain at his wife’s burning body, even when she had begun to go still.

  Finally, hands fell on his shoulders—dimly, he was aware of two road workers they’d passed on the way up Dairy Creek Road. The strong hands dragged Archie along the forest floor, away from the blast, away from the still-burning pyre the mysterious parachute had become. Away from the children.

  Away from her—his life, his future, his everything.

  Just before losing consciousness, a thought came to him. This is my fate. My punishment.

  For the terrible thing he did.

  He’d thought he’d outrun it, but all this time Hell had been waiting for him with its mouth wide open.

  2

  CAMP MINIDOKA, IDAHO

  The big truck lumbered slowly through the camp gates, the ruts in the dirt road making its wide body roll like a swaybacked cow. Something unusual about it caught Meiko Briggs’s eye. Trucks came to the internment camp all the time to make deliveries, but they were always civilian. This one was painted a dull olive green and tattooed with u.s. army and strings of white numbers all over its flanks. The cargo bed was tented.

  Meiko had been walking her daughter Aiko to school that morning when the truck arrived. Her eye followed it down one of the rarely used roads toward a big barn. no internees beyond this point, the sign read. Most of the buildings at Minidoka were used by camp residents, but that one was the domain of the administrators. Lately, there had been a padlock on the doors. Guards stood waiting to close those doors as soon as the truck pulled in. They didn’t want anyone to see what was inside.

  She could not help but wonder what that was about. The military had not bothered with the camp before.

  The gate to the camp swung shut, too, though Meiko could barely see the need. It might as well stand open, and it wasn’t as though it was ever locked. The executive order that had forced her and the other ten thousand residents to Minidoka two years ago was on the verge of being rescinded. That the residents would be freed from their prison was the talk of the camp lately. A few residents were making plans to leave—prematurely, some grumbled—but most were not. Even as they followed the drama being played out in the Supreme Court, the residents of Minidoka were quiescent. What kept them in the bare-board dormitories, overstuffed in tiny, dust-filled, lice-infested rooms, was more powerful than guards with rifles.

  It was fear of what was beyond the fence: the hatred of their fellow American citizens.

  They’d all heard stories of Japanese returning to their hometowns only to be threatened, then beaten if they didn’t leave. Not to mention finding their homes and businesses bought out from under them. There were cases where neighbors with whom they’d left belongings, neighbors who had promised to save it all until this had blown over, had instead sold out, deciding that the rightful owners would never return.

  Friends and neighbors had turned their backs on them, in three short years. The change was chilling.

  The appearance of the truck was unusual enough for Aiko to notice, too. She watched with her whole body, it seemed, even rising to her tiptoes to get a better look as it disappeared.

  This was not a good sign. The girl had been acting more and more strange lately, seemingly frightened by everything. Not unexpected for a child who had been through as much as Aiko had—living two years in what was no better than a concentration camp, her father off fighting in a war. Lately, however, it had gotten almost too much to deal with. Nightmares, bizarre stories. Claiming to hear voices and see apparitions. “Nothing to worry about. All kids go through it,” Mrs. Tanaka had told Meiko one afternoon, as they had been hanging their wash on the line. “It’s a phase. You’ll see.”

  Meiko hoped her neighbor was right.

  “What are you looking at?” The voice beside them was as sharp as the point of a bayonet. With a pang of concern, Meiko recognized the speaker. He was called Wallaby, or something like that: as a rule, the guards didn’t share their names. None of the residents liked this one. He would pull his eyelids sideways and throw slurs at them in a singsong voice, called them “little yellow men.” He plainly thought the residents were inferior, not just different from whites but altogether lacking somehow.

  Since coming to America, Meiko had come to see that this notion was pure nonsense. It wasn’t as though the belief that one race was superior to all others was alien to her—it wasn’t, because Japanese were raised to believe that they were better than others. But in Japan, where there was effectively only one race, one people, you could at least see how that notion had happened. Whereas America was made up of so many different kinds of people, you’d think they’d have gotten used to each other by now. How exhausting it must be here to hate everyone who was different.

  She knew better than to say this to this guard, however. “We’re going.” She noticed that guards were prodding other residents who had stopped to look at the army truck, too, telling them to move along.

  What made the truck more notable was that there had been an influx of government people lately, too. They’d started arriving at the camp a few weeks earlier. And it was obvious that these men weren’t locals. They seemed more sophisticated. They dressed better than the Idahoans, were better spoken. They came in fancy new cars at a time when it was hard to get one because production had been halted for the war effort. If they’d made the trip special, then obviously they had come to Minidoka for a reason, but that was a mystery. They avoided the residents and were escorted by camp officials, who, when asked, said the men were just accountants sent to make sure that the camp was being run efficiently.

  How would they explain that truck? Meiko wondered.

  The makeshift school wasn’t so far from their dormitory block but Meiko walked her daughter there whenever possible. At Minidoka, the school was nothing more than homemade tables set up in an outbuilding. A couple of the residents had been teachers before internment, but most of their instructors were camp residents pitching in to teach whatever they could remember from their own days as students: English, history, math, science. The parents worried that their children were falling behind in their educations, that they would never be able to make up these lost years. Education was important to Japanese parents. They feared their kids wouldn’t be able to get into college. That there’d be an invisible asterisk in their records for their years in the camps.

  Her daughter had mentioned once that she always walked to class alone whereas most of the children walked together in little groups, and that tugged at Meiko’s heart. There were a lot of perfectly ordinary reasons why this might be—her daughter was naturally shy—but Meiko could think of a couple unkind ones, too. Her daughter was only half Japanese, whereas, for most of the kids in camp, both parents were of Japanese descent. Japanese could be very snooty about racial purity. Aiko also didn’t like the things that other kids liked—comic books and radio shows, for example. She wasn’t fixated on movie starlets and crooners.

  Then there was her incessant drawing. Even Meiko had to admit Aiko drew pictures like a child possessed. It was hard to get her to stop, even for meals. And the creatures Aiko drew! Meiko could only imagine what the teachers must think. Aiko had started out with animals and fairies and princesses from whichever fairy tale her father had read to her that night. The usual stuff. But since coming to the camp, she’d started drawing creatures from the bedtime stories Meiko had told her, the ones Meiko had learned from her father back in Japan.

  The drawings were getting scarier and scarier. Anyone who saw them would question whether these were unnatural subjects for a child.

  Meiko crouched so she was eye level with her daughter. She straightened Aiko’s collar, which had gotten twisted. “Have a good day. Study hard. And”—she hesitated over whether she should add the next part—“try not to draw too much. It makes the teachers think you’re not paying attention to them.”

  “I am paying attention. But the demons . . .” Aiko trailed off.

  Meiko knew what her daughter was going to say. But the demons want me to pay attention to them, too.

  Her daughter said the demons followed her. They sat in the corner and giggled at things the teacher said. They told her which residents did bad things when no one was watching, which children stole coins from their mother’s purse, and which parents waited until everyone else had gone to bed to beat their children.

  The demons, Aiko said, knew everything.

  Aiko looked at her mother, stricken. “Mama, I know you don’t want me to talk about the demons but . . .” She wriggled, bound by conscience.

  She is trying. She really is a good kid. With a sigh, Meiko said, “What is it?”

  “Mama, that truck we saw on our way here? The demons say we have to stay away from it. They say there’s something bad inside it.”

  This was new. Aiko had never exhibited any anxiety about the camp, the guards, or the administrators, the others who ruled their lives but generally—blessedly—left the children alone. No, Aiko’s stories had all been about the other Japanese and her social anxieties, the kinds of things that made sense for a child to be worried about.

  “What do they say is inside it?” Meiko asked. She couldn’t imagine it was anything out of the ordinary: surplus office equipment, maybe, or run-of-the-mill supplies. Maybe getting Aiko to explore her anxieties would help.

  “They didn’t tell me, they just said we shouldn’t go near it. That whatever’s inside can make you very, very sick.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They told me things are going to get worse soon. They said we won’t be able to escape because they’re going to make us stay inside the camp. Because they want us to be trapped.”

  Meiko’s stomach twisted. “Who wants to trap us inside the camp?”

  But Aiko’s expression begged not to make her say any more.

  Meiko felt the color drain from her face. She could hardly believe it was her child, her normally cheerful and obedient daughter. In Japan, her father had told her scary stories once upon a time, when he was trying good-naturedly to frighten her. But then he’d tickle her, or do something to break the tension, and she would know that it was all make-believe.

  Here, there was no one to help with her daughter. She did not even have her husband, Jamie, the one who normally dispensed the tickles and kisses and reassurances.

  At that moment, one of the teachers stepped out, ringing the big silver bell, calling the children to class. Aiko ran off to join the other children before Meiko could think what to say to her.

  * * *

  —

  Meiko went to the kitchen next. She had a shift that day. She went to her usual station, where someone had already deposited a load of vegetables from the garden to be prepped. Potatoes, turnips, and carrots. How they managed to grow anything in the hard prairie soil was a testament to the skill of the farmers among them, men and women who’d run big commercial farms in Oregon and Washington State. It was a miracle they were able to coax anything to grow on a couple rocky, arid acres.

  “What’s wrong, Meiko? You look like you saw a ghost.” Mayumi Seiko was chopping radish to make pickles. She was the most plainspoken of the kitchen crew, uncharacteristically blunt for Japanese. But then, Meiko had to constantly remind herself that most of these people were Nisei, born in America, not Japanese natives, Issei, like herself.

  She slid the carrots in a bucket of water. “An army truck just arrived at the camp.” She didn’t mention what Aiko had said. A few of them already thought she was a little strange.

  “Maybe they’re sending soldiers.” Patsy Otsuka pushed back a curl that had fallen over her forehead. Every morning she carefully curled her hair to look like Betty Grable’s. “Or it could be medical staff to help with the outbreak.”

  The outbreak. That was the only name they had for the illness that was sweeping through the camp the past couple weeks. No one knew what it was, though the best guess was some kind of flu or ague. It hit people differently—some had fever, some had chills and sweating, others complained of headaches so debilitating that they couldn’t stand noise or light—but it was undeniably virulent. Entire dormitories seemingly came down with it overnight. An entire dorm block would get sick and then it would spread to the blocks on either side in just a matter of days. Mostly, people took to their beds shivering and vomiting, but it had affected tempers, with some turning belligerent and argumentative, then violent. Fights were starting to break out among residents, sometimes even with guards. Heads were cracked by truncheons, men dragged to the makeshift jail.

  Before the outbreak, they hadn’t needed one.

  People were frightened by the mystery illness. No one wanted to catch it.

  No wonder Aiko said the demons were warning her that people were going to become very ill. No one had died from the outbreak yet—not that Meiko had heard—but it was all around them. The kids probably talked among themselves, scared to death that their parents might be taken from them. It was probably all they could think about.

  The poor kid was probably overwhelmed. Swamped with fear.

  “If they’ve sent medical help—well, hallelujah. It’s about time,” Hiroji Kubo muttered. He was butchering chickens at a table in the back, out of sight. The cleaver came down on the chopping block with a decisive thwack. “The camp doctor, he’s been useless. No help at all. They don’t care if we get sick because we’re Japanese.”

  “They act like it’s our fault.” It was Mayumi again. “I actually heard one of the guards say, ‘What else do you expect from a bunch of dirty Japanese?’ ” They’d all heard such things said about them, even back in Seattle. Even though you could eat off the floors in most Japanese homes.