Shipwrecks Read online

  As Isaku put out the fire, he thought that, from what the chief’s manservant had said, his family was not the only one to have broken out in a rash. If most of the people in the village had come down with the fever at the same time, and if they were all now afflicted with the rash, it had obviously spread very quickly and must be extremely contagious. Isaku thought that the reason for getting the remaining healthy people together on the beach must be to advise them of the best way to treat their ailing family members.

  Isaku put on his shoes and went outside. The wind was strong, but he didn’t feel cold. The ground was starting to appear in places through the snow on the path. A group of men and women were sitting around the little hut near the salt cauldrons on the beach, with the elder standing in the middle. Isaku got down on his knees and bowed deeply to the old man.

  Isaku noticed a very old man sitting next to the elder. The man’s name was Jinbei; Isaku remembered seeing him several years earlier, shuffling along with a walking-stick. The old man’s health had further deteriorated, and evidently he had been bedridden since the last time Isaku had seen him. For many years he had worked as the village chief’s right-hand man, but advancing age had made him relinquish the position to the present senior elder. Now he was frail, his white hair thinned to no more than a few strands, his toothless mouth gaping. Isaku could not for the life of him understand why old Jinbei should be down there on the beach with them.

  Realising that there was something out of the ordinary in Jinbei’s presence, the villagers sat waiting tensely. ‘It looks as if everyone’s here. This is important, so listen carefully. Jinbei says the illness that has stricken the village may not be influenza after all. It may be a plague far worse than that. Jinbei was so concerned that despite his difficulties he has gone out of his way to talk to us,’ said the elder in a grave tone, bowing his head to Jinbei.

  At this, Jinbei attempted to get to his feet, and two young men stepped forward to lift him to a standing position. His sunken eyes opened wide as he stood there trembling.

  ‘When I went to the next village long ago, when I was young, I stayed in a place where I met a man from far off. I asked him how he got the terrible pockmarks on his face, and he told me that they were from smallpox. He said that smallpox is very contagious and that, after suffering from high fevers, spots appear all over your body. It drives some people mad, he said. And even if you live through the disease, you may be covered by hideous pockmarks. It sounded like such an awful disease that I can remember his words to this day.’

  Just saying that much made Jinbei gasp for breath.

  Isaku shuddered with fear but thought surely this couldn’t be the same thing. His family did have spots all over them, but the fever had gone down and they seemed to be over the worst of the illness. With them showing what appeared to be the first signs of recovery, it was unthinkable that any of them might go mad or die.

  ‘I asked the man if there is any medicine that can cure the disease, and he said no. He said that the only thing is to pray and to wear something red. When I heard that the bodies on O-fune-sama were wearing red, I didn’t think of smallpox, but when someone said that there was a red monkey mask on the ship, I thought again. Smallpox is a disease that is passed from human to human, so maybe the monkey mask was used to ward off the illness. I think the fact that the bodies on board were wearing red clothes proves that they had smallpox. The thought haunts me,’ said Jinbei in a piercing voice as he slumped back down to the ground.

  The villagers were unmoved and remained sitting impassively on the sand. Isaku remembered the monkey mask. It was only natural that a monkey’s face should be red, but it was indeed strange that the eyes and the rest of the head should be red, too. Perhaps it was to ward off disease, as Jinbei suggested.

  The senior elder stood silent for a time before saying, in a grave voice, ‘If Jinbei is right, that ship wasn’t O-fune-sama. Maybe there had been an outbreak of this plague called smallpox in some town or village, and they decided to put all those who had come down with it on a ship and send them away to stop the disease from spreading. The people on board died while the ship was drifting at sea, and eventually it ran onto the rocks in front of us. It’s possible that we took clothes that carried the poison and that our people were infected. Our chief asked whether we’d be safe taking clothes soiled by the boils on the bodies, but it was I who said there was no need to worry. If this is smallpox rather than flu, I’m to blame for everything,’ agonised the elder.

  A painful silence spread through the gathering on the beach.

  ‘What should we do?’ asked one of the men in a subdued voice.

  Neither Jinbei nor the senior elder said anything; both avoided the man’s eyes.

  Isaku quietly watched for any change in the symptoms of his sick family. That day and the next their fever continued to ease, but the spots increased in number, spreading to cover their arms, legs, neck, chest, and back. Isaku’s mother and the two sick children were listless and had no appetite. Whether or not his mother was relying on Isaku’s help to get her through the day he didn’t know, but even on days when the sea was calm she didn’t urge him to go out on the water. Isaku busied himself making tea for them and wiping the sweat from their bodies.

  As the sun started to set in the west, the straw matting covering the entrance to their house opened slightly to reveal the village chief’s manservant peering in. The man beckoned to Isaku, who stepped straight down onto the dirt floor and walked outside. The senior elder was standing there with two men at his side.

  The old man asked anxiously about Isaku’s family. Isaku told him that the fever had gone down, that he thought they were getting better.

  ‘What about the spots?’ asked the elder, intently studying Isaku’s expression.

  ‘There are more of them. They’re worst on their faces. They’re on their mouths and noses, and even inside their ears.’

  The elder nodded. The sombre look on his face was an indication that the other villagers were suffering from the same symptoms.

  ‘I’d just like to ask, if this sickness is contagious, will I get it, too, by taking care of them? Their fevers are going down, so I don’t see how it can be the horrible disease you talked about.’

  Isaku thought the elder’s grave expression looked exaggerated.

  ‘Jinbei said that with all hideous diseases one of every three people dies, one survives, and one doesn’t catch it at all. That mankind is never wiped out by disease, he says, is due to the benevolence of the gods. If that’s the case, there’s nothing strange about you or me not coming down with it,’ said the elder in a voice that was little more than a whisper. As the other men began to move away, he stepped back towards the path through the village.

  Isaku went back inside the house and sat down by the fire. Kane was restless, but their mother was sleeping soundly. Isaku had no idea what condition the other villagers were in, but at least his family seemed at last to be on the road to recovery.

  Isaku stepped onto the dirt floor to start the evening meal.

  For the next two days their fever continued to drop, but on the evening of the third day Isaku was in despair at the thought that the elder’s misgivings seemed to be coming true. The fever returned with a vengeance, and the spots became much more densely clustered on their skin.

  Kane vomited again and again, wailing and crying in between attacks. Their mother and Isokichi moaned in agony with the latest bouts of headache and backache, and when Isaku touched their foreheads he was amazed at how hot they were.

  The next morning he was horrified when he saw their faces in the clear sunlight shining into the house. The spots had turned yellow and seemed to have all burst at once, leaving a suppurating mass oozing down their faces. Their eyes were blocked with pus, but, lacking the strength to wipe it away, the three of them just lay there gasping for air.

  Isaku finally understood that this was no ordinary illness and could only be the disease called smallpox that Jinbei had
described. Yet it looked as if, rather than having a disease, they had been cursed. Even the word ‘pox’ had an eerie ring to it.

  His mother and Isokichi groaned desperately and Kane cried in a rasping voice between violent muscle spasms. Giving them herb tea was obviously having no effect, and Isaku now had no idea how he should be treating them.

  Gripped by panic, he rushed out of the house and ran down to the beach. Maybe the elder would be holding a meeting there; but not a soul was to be seen, so he headed for the village chief’s house, hoping to get some advice to help his family.

  On the way up the slope to the chief’s house, Isaku saw a dozen or so men and women standing in the yard, all deathly pale.

  ‘There’s pus all over their faces,’ Isaku shouted as he ran toward the villagers.

  ‘My family’s the same. All the sick ones are covered in pus,’ said a middle-aged man in a trembling voice.

  The elder came out of the chief’s house. His white-whiskered face was gaunt and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked around the congregation and in a feeble voice said, ‘Jinbei was right. It must be smallpox. The chief’s eyes are blocked up with pus, too.’

  ‘What can we do to make it easier for them?’ asked one man imploringly.

  ‘We can do nothing but pray,’ he replied. His head bowed, he left the yard and moved unsteadily down the slope.

  The village was in uproar. The symptoms of most of the sick were more or less the same, and by all accounts many people were losing their minds. Kane was clearly insane, launching herself again and again into a bolt-upright sitting position as she wailed in a strange high-pitched voice, something between laughter and crying. After each attack Isaku laid her back down on her straw bedding.

  The next morning he heard that several people had died during the night. Kane’s condition continued to deteriorate, and after a series of violent fits around midday, she, too, died. Their mother and Isokichi had both lost consciousness, so neither was aware of what had happened.

  The following day the elder left a note in his house and then jumped to his death from the cliffs near Crow Point. The waves smashed his body onto the rocks again and again, breaking his head to pieces. The note was addressed to the village chief. It recorded the elder’s deepest apologies for bringing this terrible disease into the village by his declaration that the pus-stained red clothes were safe to wear, and explained that he had chosen to take his own life to atone for his misjudgement.

  The elder’s son was given the task of collecting the body and disposing of it in deep water. Suicide was judged a sinful act, so the custom was for the culprit’s body to be dropped into the sea rather than given an honourable burial on land.

  With the elder’s death, the village was cast into further turmoil. The number of deaths increased dramatically, and, with no indication of how the bodies should be disposed of, the surviving family members could do little but set up a light offering to the gods and pray in front of the family shrine. There was no way enough coffins could be built to handle the number of dead, so the bodies were left in the houses.

  Eventually, on Jinbei’s instructions, two men went round the village and told the people what to do with the bodies. Because there weren’t enough able-bodied people to carry so many bodies up to the crematory, they ordered that the next day the bodies should be burned on the beach and the bones carried up for burial the day after.

  Isaku wrapped Kane’s body in some straw matting and carried her outside. There was no change in either his mother’s or Isokichi’s condition; both of them lay unconscious, gasping feverishly for air.

  Isaku made a funeral pyre out of a criss-cross arrangement of pieces of wood and laid Kane’s body on top. He worked some kindling until it caught fire and the wood started to burn. The straw matting soon burned away to expose his sister’s face engulfed in flames; no tears came into Isaku’s eyes. Around him were little groups of villagers standing beside their own flaming pyres. They all looked intent on burning away the virulence harboured by the bodies of their loved ones, and all seemed to have forgotten the sorrow of losing a family member.

  Though there were many infants and young children among the dead, there were also a number of young men and women and old people. Isaku fed the fire with wood and poked at Kane’s body with a bamboo rod to make sure the flames burned their way through.

  At dusk Isaku picked up the bones and put them in a wooden tub. There was hardly anything to them.

  When he got home, he placed the tub in front of the ancestral tablet and started to grill a fish on the fire. He called out to his mother and Isokichi, urging them to have something to eat, but they just lay there gasping, incapable of uttering a word in reply. Their mouths and nostrils were full of clotted pus.

  That night a squall blew up and covered the house in sheets of rain. The downpour had stopped by morning, but the house creaked with the force of the wind.

  Isaku passed the time quietly tending to his mother and Isokichi. Their arms, legs and faces swelled even more, and fresh pus oozed from under what had already caked onto their skin, which by now was invisible under the purulent mass. It was as if they were wearing masks.

  Jinbei’s messengers called again, this time advising that recovery would begin once the scabs fell off naturally, and he must not remove them prematurely. Isaku did his best to feed his mother and Isokichi, spooning gruel into their mouths through the gap between their scab-encrusted lips.

  Day after day corpses were being burned on the beach. Uneasy, Isaku went down to the shore to help carry firewood. It seemed that the village chief was still alive but in a serious condition.

  The weather grew warmer and calm days with mist rising off the sea more frequent. The snow disappeared from the slopes behind the village, the only remaining traces of winter the sparkling strips of white on the distant ridges.

  The beach was covered with the blackened charcoal remains of funeral pyres, some still burning. The number of bodies being burned was falling, an indication that the pestilence was on the wane.

  When Isaku awoke one day early in March, he noticed that the scab covering his mother’s right eye had dried up and fallen off. The eye was looking his way. The scabs covering her mouth moved and a muffled voice leaked out, ‘Kane’s dead, isn’t she?’

  Isaku nodded, replying, ‘Many people have died.’

  His mother quietly closed her eyes.

  That night both his mother and Isokichi started wailing. The itchiness under the scabs was unremitting, and, unable to scratch for fear of worsening their condition, all they could do to get some relief was to press down on the dried pus.

  The next day, while the urge to scratch at the scabs was still there, the fever had gone down somewhat. At the same time the caked mass that had covered their legs and arms was beginning to flake off. Pus no longer oozed out from under the scabs on their faces, and a pale powdery substance spread over their skin.

  No more funeral pyres were lit on the beach. The itchiness that had tormented Isaku’s mother and Isokichi gradually let up, and the scabs on their faces curled up, ready to fall off. Isaku told them it would be best to let the scabs fall off naturally, but his mother couldn’t bear them on her face any longer and started to pick at them with her finger. Nothing adverse happened as a result, and in no time they were even able to eat again unaided. The spots on the skin where the scabs had been were strangely white, with a reddish depression marking the place where the boil had been.

  Isaku finally realised that his mother and Isokichi had recovered, but he shuddered when he heard Isokichi say, ‘I can’t see anything.’ Star-shaped bulges covered the pupil of each eye.

  His mother and Isokichi would get out of bed and sit by the fire, mostly without saying a word. As the days passed, the redness where the boils had been faded, but pockmarks were left not just on their faces but all over their necks, shoulders, arms, and legs.

  Reluctant to leave Kane’s bones sitting in the house, Isaku put them in a pot and s
et off up the hill to the crematory, where he buried them. Beside him an old woman was swinging a hoe as she dug a hole to bury the bones of two dead kin.

  A few days later all the people who had not been infected by the disease were summoned to assemble on the beach. Isaku dropped what he was doing and went straight to the shore. About thirty men and women were standing in front of the little hut used in tending the salt cauldrons. He saw how few people had survived unscathed and realised how badly the village had been ravaged by the disease.

  Isaku’s eyes scanned the faces in the crowd. Sahei was there, but there was no sign of Tami.

  The village chief came down the slope to the beach sitting in a makeshift litter shouldered by four men. The pockmarks covering his face served as a graphic reminder of what he had been through. The villagers prostrated themselves, and Jinbei’s son Manbei stepped forward and knelt before the chief as the litter was set down on the sand. They spoke in whispers, then Manbei nodded his assent and turned round to address the villagers.

  ‘It is the command of our revered chief that I take up the position of elder in the village. We have been stricken by a most terrible calamity, but the disease has now passed. The chief has decided what we must do. Those still keeping the bones of dead family members in their houses should see to it that they are taken up to the crematory and buried as soon as possible. Also, most of you will be spending your time taking care of your family, but those of you who can should be out fishing or collecting shellfish on the shore or tilling the soil. Now let us join our chief in a prayer to the sea.’

  With that, Manbei sat down beside the chief.

  The latter pressed his hands together in prayer, and the assembled followed as they turned to look out to sea. Isaku heard the sound of sobbing and felt tears welling in his own eyes. The grief over Kane’s death that he hadn’t felt until now suddenly overcame him. His heart bled for his little sister when he thought that her last moments of life had been spent thrashing about like a fish on a boat’s deck.