The Year of Counting Souls Read online

  “We’re not bringing patients in until we’ve scrubbed this place down. So I say brooms and buckets and mops first. Did I see a cistern? Good, we’ll need the water. And fire up the Bunsen burners, because we’ll need the water hot.”

  “Good. You’ll lead the work.”

  Anyone who could work did, and shortly they had the worst of the filth cleaned out and one small corner scrubbed enough for Dr. Claypool and Miss Frankie to attend to some minor surgeries. The older nurse began to rally from her earlier confusion and worked alongside the doctor without complaint or hesitation. Maybe she just needed to get settled and she’d be fine.

  The cots had been stacked in one room, packed in ten-year-old copies of the Manila Times, but this hadn’t kept them from rusting. Louise ordered the cots hauled outside and set soldiers to work with steel wool to scour off the rust.

  The hospital was stocked in some ways, deficient in others. Surgical instruments were packed in petroleum jelly as protection against the rust and would need to be cleaned with ether. There were large quantities of gauze and bandages, as well as plenty of linens, towels, swabs, and other necessities, but no electrical sterilizer. Instead there were steel-lined pressure cookers that could serve the same purpose.

  As for medications, the field hospital had been stocked with a mountain of all manner of trivial drugs, but little of the most critical medications. How much aspirin and bicarbonate of soda would they possibly need? Where was the quinine, the morphine, the sulfa powders? It was good that they’d only be here a few days. Hopefully their rescued supplies from the hospital would serve until then.

  The doctor and the lieutenant seemed to have patched up their differences and had come together for several whispered conversations throughout the night. At one point Louise caught them talking about the radio and figured that Kozlowski must have news from Manila. His face was grim, whatever he’d heard.

  By morning, Louise was exhausted. Two nights with little sleep, clearing out one hospital and setting up another. Then there was the drive, the nerve-rattling battle at Baliuag, and the final crawl into the hill country. Some evacuees were sleeping on the floor or outside in the truck, but others, like Kozlowski, Dr. Claypool, and the other nurses, had worked all night alongside her.

  Louise made a final inspection of her patients and stumbled outside. The clouds had cleared, and as her eyes adjusted to the brilliant tropical light, she took in her surroundings. What she saw made her draw her breath.

  Rice paddies layered up and down the hillside like a glittering quilt of green squares. Mist shrouded the surrounding mountains, which towered like sentinels all around. Brilliant red and gold birds with long tail feathers flitted across the sky between the surrounding jungle and the trees in the village.

  Sanduga was bigger than it had appeared last night, with more buildings visible through clumps of trees that had appeared as jungle in the darkness. In all there were about twenty nipa huts on stilts, half of them clustered around a small stone church with a cross, and flanked by the hospital on the opposite side. The corrugated-metal roofs of the hospital and church contrasted with the grass roofs that hung like shaggy blankets from the village houses.

  The road hooked around the hillside and disappeared on the other side, but it was impassable at the moment, blocked by the two army trucks. They’d been covered with palm branches as rudimentary camouflage, but this hadn’t stopped curious villagers from coming out to investigate. Some thirty Filipinos gathered around, watching and discussing in low voices. Children stood next to the elderly. Naked toddlers nursed at their mother’s breasts while twisting their heads to stare at Louise.

  The sound of birds squawking from the trees competed with the steady thump of someone pounding rice. Roosters crowed, and a pig snorted and snuffled alongside one of the rice paddies. A pair of village dogs trotted up, and Louise wondered what they’d make of Stumpy when they met him. The dog was inside, sleeping at the foot of Fárez’s cot.

  She didn’t spot Dr. Claypool at first. He leaned against the wall of the hospital a few feet away, smoking a cigarette. He’d taken off his smock, but flecks of blood had dried beneath eyes baggy with sleep, and he looked old and exhausted. He raised his eyebrows at Louise, as if inviting her to speak but not insisting.

  “Happy New Year,” she said.

  “Ah yes. I suppose it is.” He nodded toward the surrounding bowl of mountains. “Not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s hard to imagine a more scenic place.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Almost makes you forget there’s a war out there.”

  “Almost.”

  “Let’s hope 1942 brings happier times than 1941. Maybe it will all be over by the end of the year.”

  “Don’t count on it, Louise. At this point, I’d say 1943 is looking pretty grim, too.”

  “Well then,” she said, “we can at least look forward to either being rescued or reinforced. Back behind friendly lines on Bataan—that would be something.”

  Claypool glanced at the hospital door. “Where are the rest of the girls?”

  “Clarice is on duty. Frankie and Maria Elena are sleeping. I should be, too, but I’m wound too tight.” She put her hands over her stomach. “Feels like a ball of snakes squirming in my belly.”

  “Are you sure it’s not intestinal parasites?” He winked. “Might have picked them up from that mutt.”

  “Wish there were something I could do for the nerves.”

  “Bet if you ask the villagers, they brew gallons of the stuff for just that purpose. And they’ll happily sell it to you, too. Cheap!”

  Louise smiled, cheered by the doctor’s weary good humor.

  Lieutenant Kozlowski came around the corner of the building, carrying a crate. He’d stripped to his undershirt, which revealed bulging arms and shoulder muscles, and Louise frowned to realize the crate held weaponry of some kind, based on the markings and its weight. Mines or grenades or bullets. That didn’t leave her reassured, knowing that he was preparing a defense.

  Kozlowski glanced at her as he trudged past, then gave Claypool a more significant look. The doctor returned a nod so slight that Louise might not have caught it if she hadn’t been studying them so carefully. There was something between them, a secret of some kind. She was sure of it.

  “We’re going to lose a patient,” Claypool said, which brought Louise back to the moment.

  Her stomach fell. “Private Higgs?”

  “His burns have become infected. I’ve treated the infections with sulfonamide, but he’s not fighting it off. I expect he’ll be gone by nightfall, but he might linger. They often do.”

  One of the last things she’d done this morning after getting her patients settled was to unpack personal belongings, those few things stuffed into a duffel bag upon evacuating the hospital. Small details were so important for the men to remember what they were fighting for, and by that she didn’t mean the war. She meant fighting on the long, painful road to recovery. A favorite book, a baseball and mitt. Playing cards, a jackknife for whittling. A letter from Mom.

  One of these belongings was a picture of Higgs and his best girl on some beach. Louise had only seen a man with his face melted off and didn’t recognize the handsome boy in the picture. It was only the name on the back that told her who it was. Higgs had a broad, happy grin in the photo, and the pretty brunette clinging to his arm looked up at him with an adoring expression.

  “We knew we might lose him.” Her voice felt as soft as jelly when it came out, and she composed herself before speaking again. “What about Private Smith?”

  “He’ll pull through. Therrien, too. He looks bad, but he’ll recover if we can keep him otherwise healthy. The young Jewish boy—what is his name?”

  “Rubens.”

  “That’s right, Rubens. He’s my biggest worry after Higgs. It’s too soon to say if his spinal injuries will heal, but moving him around so much didn’t help.” Claypool finished his cigarette. “You’re from Colorad
o? What part?”

  “Southern Colorado. Near Durango.”

  “Isn’t that desert? I thought you were a farmer’s daughter.”

  “It’s dry country, but you can farm with irrigation. In happy times, you can make a go of it.”

  “And were they? Happy times, I mean?”

  “My father got an agricultural degree and tried to build a scientific farm. Took out a big mortgage from the bank in early 1929 to try out his theories.”

  Dr. Claypool winced. “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, bad timing. Didn’t lose the farm, though. One year we lived on eight dollars, cash. Everything else we grew, milked, slaughtered, or salvaged.”

  The thing that drove her crazy was the uncertainty of it all. It wasn’t the hard work—that would have been bearable if it paid off. But so often it didn’t.

  You got your seed in the ground only to see drought hit, or an early frost that wiped out the crop. Or maybe there was a bumper crop, but the price of wheat collapsed due to a glut. All your lambs might die of a mysterious illness.

  “Tell you the truth, I had enough of the farm life by the time I finished high school,” Louise said. “I was happy to get out of there.”

  “Must have taught you some good lessons in life, though. How to survive, how to be resilient.”

  “I know how to get by. And I suppose it prepared me for death. There’s a lot of that on the farm.” Louise hesitated. “Or so I thought.”

  “It’s one thing to see an animal die, another to watch a man go.”

  “I was certainly naive when I got to Manila—I’ll never forget losing my first patient. But after six months of malaria and dysentery cases, I figured I knew what was what.”

  “They said war was coming,” Claypool said. “Guess none of us really believed it. I know I didn’t—not until I saw the Japs flying over to bomb our airfields.” He studied her face. “And did you? Know what was what, I mean.”

  Louise managed a short, ironic laugh. “Yes, I think after three weeks of poor, mangled boys, now I really know.” She caught his wry smile. “You don’t think so, do you?”

  He shook his head. “There’s another layer of naiveté to strip off yet. There’s always another layer.”

  She eyed him curiously. “Miss Frankie said you were in the Great War.”

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “I grew up in farm country, too. Iowa, but we weren’t farmers. My father and my older brother were country vets back when that was mostly draft animals. Thanks to motorized tractors, my brother works with cats and dogs these days. Small-animal practice is the future.”

  Louise was surprised by the personal turn to the conversation. The doctor was serious about his work and had never shared such things before or questioned her. But she supposed it came from having been under fire, a bond that wouldn’t have been possible between a young woman and her mature superior under other circumstances.

  “Yes, I was a doctor in the Great War,” he said, shifting directions. “I’d tell you about it, paint a picture with my words, but you’ve had a taste of carnage. You can imagine easily enough without me saying a word about the trenches, about operating in an underground bunker while dirt shakes from the ceiling with every shell. You don’t need to hear the screams of dying men to imagine them—you’ve heard them yourself. Maybe I could tell you about men bleeding from their lungs or convulsing when they’ve been gassed, but I don’t think you need it. Isn’t that right?”

  “I’m already picturing it. No need for more.”

  “Ten days of artillery bombardment, you haven’t slept well in months, and your hands are shaking. But a man needs his leg amputated or he will die. What do you do?”

  “Grit my teeth and carry on.”

  “It’s Miss Frankie’s job, too. She is older, has more experience, and is your superior. Yet she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and you are not. Why?”

  “Maybe I am and I don’t know it yet. I figure I keep doing my job, maybe it will keep me going.” She shrugged. “And hopefully save the lives of these boys while I’m at it.”

  “What if the life is that of a wounded Japanese soldier?”

  “That’s my job, too, isn’t it?”

  Somewhere in this, Lieutenant Kozlowski had stopped his work after being approached by a pair of villagers: a woman and her young, shirtless boy, his skin well bronzed from the tropical sun. She had a basket of eggs, and she combined her gestures with the pidgin English of her son to negotiate their sale to the lieutenant.

  The woman and her child soon left with a few coins. The lieutenant kept the basket of eggs, which he carried over a few feet and set it down as he joined the doctor and nurse in the shade beneath the roof.

  “Has Manila fallen?” Louise asked him.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  She gave him a sharp look, but he was staring down the road toward the jungle beyond the village and didn’t catch it. But when she turned toward the doctor, he’d been studying her, and now looked away.

  “Weren’t you on the radio during the night?” she asked Kozlowski.

  He turned back to her. “I reported our location, got yelled at. You know.”

  “Is the way still open to Bataan?”

  “The highway? For now. We probably have a few more days before the main road is cut, but maybe not.”

  “So we might need to use the back road out of here, after all,” she said. “So what about Manila? Why didn’t they tell you? Why didn’t you ask?” “I didn’t need to know,” Kozlowski said. “That is a good rule of thumb in military situations.” He glanced at Claypool, who met his eye, then looked away.

  “You’re hiding something, both of you.” Louise looked back and forth between the two men. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  For a moment it looked like they would answer the question. First Dr. Claypool moved his lips as if preparing to speak, and then it shifted to Lieutenant Kozlowski, who cleared his throat. But that was all he did. A second, even briefer look passed between the two men.

  “Nothing beyond the usual doubts and fears,” Kozlowski said at last. “We’re safe enough up here for now. Now come on, we all have work to do.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sammy Mori woke in something that felt like a trance. Even drugged he knew it was morphine hanging about him, sending him visions. But he let it hold him down, aware on some deeper level that what he would find when he awoke fully would not agree with him at all.

  The morphine had an accomplice: the smell of plumeria flowers. It washed over him on a warm breeze, a heavy, perfumed scent, and it seemed to activate some deep part of his brain. He knew he was deep in the Philippine wilderness, injured and a prisoner of the Americans, and yet the smell took him back to Hawaii. There he found a memory that floated in his brain like a kami spirit lingering around an old Shinto shrine.

  It was a Saturday in early 1932. Sammy was sixteen, and his brother Yoshiko was fourteen. They were on Waikiki Beach, resting in the shade of a bent palm with their long wooden surfboards thrust into the sand nearby. Pearl Harbor swept around to their right, while behind them the rugged volcanic fin of Diamond Head cut a slash against the blue sky. The surf crested and broke into white froth that rolled toward shore in a continual rumble. A handful of surfers bobbed in the waves, occasionally riding one of the larger ones in.

  Sammy was watching for pretty girls walking along the beach while his brother, who hadn’t yet started to notice such things, complained about Father. Specifically, how he’d told them to sand the floor of the shrine when they got home. The shrine itself was an embarrassment. And why did he hang paper lamps at the gate? They blurted to any passersby that the occupants of the house were Japanese.

  Yoshi’s embarrassment at being Japanese had bloomed since Japan had started a dumb war in Manchuria. There were Chinese kids at school, and plenty of haole—white—kids who looked for an excuse to argue with the brothers about Japanese aggression. Not that there was anything to arg
ue. The Mori family was Japanese, yes, but they were not so fond of Dai-Nippon Teikoku, the Empire of the Rising Sun. Even his father had compared the incursion in China to a small dog attacking an elephant. The dog may be fierce, the elephant old and sick, but it was still an elephant.

  But the whole thing would obviously pass. The only reason it mattered at all was because they had family still living back in Japan. Sammy and Yoshi’s two older brothers were serving in the Kwantung Army.

  “It’s going to take all afternoon to sand that floor,” Yoshi said.

  “Next week is the anniversary of Grandfather’s death. Father wants it cleaned up before then.”

  “I don’t see why. Grandfather didn’t die in Hawaii, so what’s the point? And if we’re living in this country anyway, why can’t we act like it? And another thing: I’m sick of trying to learn my kanji. There’s no end to them. Why does the stupid Japanese language have so many letters? Why couldn’t they make it all katakana or something? There’s forty-something letters there alone. That should be enough.”

  “And how would you read the poets without your kanji and hiragana?”

  “Who cares if I read them or not?” Yoshi asked.

  “Father cares. At the very least, he won’t be satisfied until you know a few poems from the Great Four.”

  “A bunch of dead old men.”

  Sammy sighed. He was about to explain—again—that they weren’t going to be here forever. Father worked for a zaibatsu, one of Japan’s large, family-controlled businesses, exporting silk and tea to America. They’d spent three years in San Francisco and four now in Hawaii, but there was always the rumble in the background that they’d be returning to Tokyo. If not this year, then next. Yoshi seemed to have only scattered memories of living in Japan and was living in denial that they would ever return. Let him go back to Tokyo semiliterate, stumbling through shrines and temples like a dumb gaijin, and see how he was treated.

  But before Sammy could say as much, he glanced up to see their father standing at the edge of the sandy beach, hand shading his eyes as he looked out to the waves. Twenty or thirty boys were in the water, trying to catch the swells as they broke, but Noritaka Mori didn’t seem to know that his boys weren’t among them.