Castle Mountain

Castle Mountain

My mother raged when she read the letter. “We’re not enemy,” she spat, “and we’re not alien.”

“Doesn’t matter,” my father responded. “War makes its own rules.”

She began to cry. “But our girls were born here—”

“In wartime,” he said, taking her in his arms, “all bets are off.”

Whispers of ‘internment’ first came to my ears in 1915, summertime. I was sixteen. A year earlier, a Serb in Europe who wanted to free his people from Austrian oppression had shot a Duke. Uncle Peter said it was the work of the ‘Black Hand’. My father said it was the work of human folly. Whatever it was, it reverberated around the world.

I paid little attention. It had nothing to do with my teenage life in Canada. The steamer that had brought my parents and me across the deep, blue sea had docked at Montreal years ago. All I remember of the crossing is standing at the railing with a pretty little Russian girl and tossing celluloid ping-pong balls into the ship’s wake.

“They will only trouble us,” my father said, “if we trouble them.”

My mother nodded as if to convince herself. “Yes, yes . . . we are in Canada, now.”

But when he lost his job at the factory, they came to take him away. The look of helplessness on his face as he watched my mother weep, with my sisters clinging to her skirt, bruised my eyes. I scrambled, packed my duffel bag and glued myself to him. “I’m coming with you,” I insisted.

“Only men need go,” he pleaded with me.

“I am a man. A man who loves his father.”

My parents talked with their eyes and in the end they let me go. My mother and sisters went to stay with our Thunder Bay relations.  

My first view of Castle Mountain was from the train chugging through endless pine forest. I pressed my face to the grimy window and saw the rocky, defiant peak rising up like a great, medieval fortress. I wondered how long it had been there and how long it would endure.

Men in military uniforms with bayoneted rifles over their shoulders greeted us at the gate. They herded us inside a barbed-wire fence as high as a house. Some men were prodded with the guns. “Like cattle,” I said.

My father whispered to me, “Keep quiet.”

That was my first inkling this place would be different than the outside; that I was now someone other than I had been my whole life. An unsettling feeling of guilt stole over me though I had done nothing wrong. I realized those rifles were aimed on us. “They think we’re disloyal,” I said to my father. “Traitors.”

“Because they think it does not make it true,” he said to me.

My heart beat high when I first heard the word ‘prisoner’. “Bring those prisoners here,” the guard called. He meant us. I looked to my father. His expression did not change. He looked me dead in the eye without a flicker of emotion. So I determined to be brave, for his sake.

We lived in a camp of cold, canvas tents. Our bathtub was an oil drum and food was scarce. Identity dissolved. The guards, their long rifles on all sides of us, called every man Hun. “You there! Hun!” was heard all day long.

With hand tools, we worked six days a week for twenty-five cents a day building a motorway to Lake Louise. In my stink, I looked up at Castle Mountain and wondered how long it had been there and how long it would endure.

We lost our faces. “You there! Hun!”

I began to think about things that last. I took to stealing out of the tent after my father had fallen asleep and staring up at the night sky. The fortress of Castle Mountain, capped by a million stars, seemed to me like a stairway to heaven. When it was just me, the mountain and the stars, I knew I was eternal.

The camp had a meagre garden that grew tomatoes and beans. One of the men who tended it was named Ben. He was given the detail because he had a twisted foot. “What happened to your foot?” I asked him one day.

“Got stuck in a polka,” he joked.

Ben found interesting things as he turned dirt in the garden. He gave me an Indian arrowhead that had come up to the surface. “Blackfoot,” Ben said. “Gone the way of the buffalo.”

Ben liked to talk about the Blackfoot. “They pray by dancing,” he told me. “A Sun Dance . . . outlawed now, by the government.” He snorted. “As if a government can tell people what they should believe.”

When summer turned to fall, a guard shot Ben through the stomach when he was trying to escape. We saw his coffin carried out.

That night, I left the pitch black of our tent and went to his dried-up garden. The arrowhead he gave me burned in my hand. I buried it at the bottom of the garden under a starlit sky. I imagined Ben doing a Sun Dance with two good feet.

My father found me there. We turned our gazes up. “No matter what they tear down,” he said, “the stars will remain.”   

I asked him, “Why are we here?”

“The war.”

“Seems that anything can be done in the name of war.”

“Yes.”

“I hate war.”

I can still hear my father’s soft voice. “Then make peace.”