Requiem by Frances Itani

to bed on straw ticks that had been laid out on bunks in the stalls. Our family was assigned two double bunks and drab army-issue blankets. There was no privacy until the women began to hang sheets as dividers between stalls.
    That was the beginning wave, the wave that preceded the tide of families that followed, hundreds and thousands arriving month after month. More people than any of us had ever seen in one place. At its peak, Hastings Park was housing and feeding more than three thousand, most of us in animal stalls.
    The stall we lived in reeked of horse and cow, of sheep and goat, of lime and urine and mould and dirt. Clumps of manure stuck to our feet when we walked through the building. What we saw from the doorway was a high metal gate, with barbed wire encircling the park. There was no sign of Father. The only men in sight were either RCMP or guards stationed at the gate. Beyond the guards, I could hear streetcars rumbling by outside the park. I had never heard such a sound before, and I was fascinated by the rattle and clang of bells as sparks scattered and sizzled in the wires overhead.
    In the bathroom there were ten open showers, no divisions between. A series of taps dripped above a long metal shelf and I remember a row of children’s bums while we were all being washed at the same time. Hiroshi and Keiko and I stood giggling on three wobbling boards while we were soaped and rinsed, and while water ran between the boards into a drain in the floor. The toilets along one side of the room were sheet-metal troughs. There were no seats, no partitions, no privacy. Not at the beginning, not when we arrived. Only when some of the women dared to protest, only then were toilet seats brought in and flimsy partitions erected.
    Our mother and all of the other mothers began to scrub. Mother’s hair was damp; she was on her hands and knees and she pushed back the curls on her forehead. Day and night, water flowed past the edge of our stall through a long, connected trough that angled in and around the aisles of concrete. If someone was rinsing clothing farther up the aisle, soap bubbles floated past our stall. Whenever bubbles stuck to the cement sides of the trough, I reached over and popped them with my finger. Makeshift clotheslines were strung everywhere, and I remember running with other children under hanging clothes. We ran in and around sheets, blankets, long underwear and damp towels until our mothers came to collect us and restored order. There was little for children to do, but there was always washing going on, even in the night. Our own mother scrubbed our clothes after everyone else was in bed. When she undressed or changed, she climbed up onto her bunk behind army blankets or had Keiko hold two pieces of towel together in front of her, for privacy.
    But it was the maggots that disgusted her the most. I knew they were there; I could see them swarming. And they stayed in memory because Mother talked about them for years. First, she asked for disinfectant and was given some. But even after more scrubbing, the maggots stayed on—in the pallets where we slept and in manure under the boards of the shower room. Once a week, because of damp and mould, we had to drag our straw ticks outside the building so that stuffing could be removed and new straw put in. But the maggots stayed on.
    Mother wrapped us in coats to keep us warm and she draped an extra sheet to thicken the partition around our cramped living space. Other families, strangers, lived all around us. It was never quiet at night and we had to listen to the high-pitched, rhythmic sobbing of a woman whose stall was two aisles away from ours. She cried every night. And every morning she woke up with puffed and swollen eyes.
    Three times a day, we were led to the poultry building, a large, high-ceilinged area filled with rows of tables made from planks placed end to end over trestles. We ate in that lime-and-poultry smell while an RCMP officer stood on top of