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In the late winter of 1975 Emiko Toyama was really surprised when she got a letter from a young Eskimo. It seemed he’d come across a reprinted poem of hers that he’d read in an Asian American publication that was several years old and as a fellow Asian American had taken a chance and written her in care of the magazine.

The surprise was two-fold when Alden Ryan Walunga, for that was his name, identified himself as a prisoner-patient at a federal penitentiary in the midwest. A Yupik, he was only twenty-three years old, young enough to be one of her children. She wondered whether she should write back. What commonality was there between a probably embittered young man and an aging Nisei widow in Los Angeles with several children, three still at home, whose main avocation was not writing poetry but babysitting the grandchildren? He had enclosed with his letter a photocopied prison weekly containing an essay of his and he asked for a “critique.”

More reason not to reply. The article was brief but remarkably confused. It was a passionate cry against the despoiling of his native land which somehow turned into a sermon repeating the Biblical prophecy that such an evil was only part of the wholesale corruption to precede the return of Christ, so it was like he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. And the language was imprecise, not enough to set her teeth on edge as sometimes happened, but almost.

Emiko had begun learning rather early to soft-pedal her critical instincts. As a young woman in camp, she had hung out sometimes with people who wrote and painted and she knew what vulnerable psyches resided in creative critters. And it wasn’t just them, either. She had a relative who had stopped writing letters for years because, among other things, her husband and daughter had once laughed at her syntax. And Emiko herself had once been actually pummeled by a dear friend whose poem she had made light of. This friend had stopped writing poems for years. People ought to be more callous, she knew, they ought to be more determined. But, alas, most egos were covered with the thinnest of eggshells.

And then to tamper with words written with feeling was to destroy the feeling, usually.

Nevertheless, against her own better judgment, she wrote a careful note telling Alden Ryan Walunga as tactfully as possible that the essay was eminently worth writing but that the message might be made stronger, clearer, with a revision of language here and there. She encouraged him with the observation that certainly, a strong voice was needed to speak up on behalf of the Eskimo.

He took it very gracefully, but he mentioned that he had studied two semesters at the University of Alaska and that his mother was wondering whether it was all right to send on his Air Force text of Robert Penn Warren’s Modern Rhetoric. As the sporadic exchange of letters continued, she pieced together enough to learn that he was the third of seven children with two older sisters and four younger brothers, which he attributed to the Eskimo need for survival; that he was being treated for depression (he mentioned massive doses of thorazine); that he attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous there at the prison; that he had come to Christ with such fervor that he considered the study of His Word the main preoccupation of his life.

To this end, he had already paraphrased four Pauline epistles using Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (with Greek dictionary) and he mentioned his greed for other resources like Josephus’ historical works as well as the treatises on Biblical psychology and demonology. He wrote that he was frustrated by prison rules which allowed only one book at a time to be borrowed once a month from area libraries. In one letter he said his next borrowing would be a dictionary on the Bible, more “elaborate” than the one he already had.

He also read other things: Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, and he asked whether she had read any of Yukio Mishima whom he described as “a Japanese writer who famously and traditionally committed suicide with a sword.” He also recommended Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo and a Stanford University study of the Alaskan native, as being accurate depictions of his people.

Emiko tried to send him an Asian American literary magazine on one occasion and was taken aback when it was returned to her with a form letter stipulating that she must get permission from the prison chaplain before submitting such materials. So she sent the magazine to the chaplain’s office and received a polite note saying that although an exception had been made and the magazine given to the prisoner, the chaplain’s office was authorized to pass on religious materials only and other literature should be sent in care of the education department.

She felt something like a cold hand touch her when she received these official notices-that was what being in prison was, was it, the relinquishment of every liberty that those on the outside took for granted?

But Alden Ryan Walunga seemed to be an exuberant spirit even under these stifling conditions. The whole first page of his letter would be taken up with the salutation, thusly:

DEAR EMIKO!

EMIKO!

EMIKO!

before the actual letter began on page two. Once, staring at the first page, she was amused to see that with the addition of one letter, she could write him back:

DEAR ESKIMO!

ESKIMO!

ESKIMO!

but she decided it would be rather childish and desisted.

In one letter he wrote that a poem he had submitted a couple of years before to a New York magazine called A.D. had been accepted for publication. He had been called to the chaplain’s office to be shown a $50 check, with the warning that all literary submissions had to first be officially approved. She wrote to congratulate him.

Then, for awhile, there was no word from Alden Ryan Walunga, but Emiko, trying as usual to cope with the needs of her brood, scarcely noticed. Her husband’s insurance was adequate if she managed shrewdly, but it was always something-dentist, doctor, marijuana, living together without marriage, distressing report cards, flu, filling out unwieldy applications for college grants, keeping up with the seasonal needs of the yard, a new roof or water heater that had to be squeezed in somehow. Besides these routine cares, something else was in the air, something insidious and seemingly contagious: most of her friends, neighbors, and relatives seemed to be getting divorced, many of them after twenty-five years of marriage or more! If Mits had not died, would they too be undergoing such trauma?

So, when after some months Alden Ryan Walunga resumed corresponding with a somewhat apologetic note explaining that he had been through some kind of spiritual crisis involving “deception,” implying a self-delusion, so that he was now back to square one, she answered him with, “So what else is new?” or words to that effect. Without going into detail, she mentioned the discombobulations taking place in her neck of the woods. He wrote back that such upheavals were to be expected, of course, since pandemonium had been prophesied, and he stressed the importance of holding fast to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Alden Ryan Walunga never mentioned the reason for his incarceration and Emiko never asked. If he did not wish to reveal the nature of his crime, she did not wish to know it, but in the back of her mind she decided that he was in prison for forgery. This was because years ago she had an apartment neighbor who had twice been in prison for forgery and he was among her pleasanter memories: he played Bach on the piano but he seemed to be one of the innocents of the world, living about a foot off the ground. She especially remembered him, with his bushy grey hair and horn-rimmed glasses, because of two occasions when he had asked her to remove a sliver from his hand. Both times, when she returned with a needle which she sterilized with the flame of a match, he had begun whimpering and cringing. The first time she had laughed out loud, thinking he was kidding, until she saw that his tears and cries were real. He had actually been terrified!

Besides, Emiko was not sure that prisons were the answer to crime. It was a known fact, was it not, that prisons, as most of them were now constituted, rarely rehabilitated? Not only was she against capital punishment, she was also against prisons, even though, pinned down in an argument, she admitted that there must be some system to temporarily segregate those who persisted in preying on others. She agreed with the wise man who had called for a society “in which it is easier to be good.”

She remembered the horror of the year before, the mousetrapping and cooking alive of five young men and women who had gotten disillusioned with the establishment and taken matters into their own hands. She could not forget the extravagantly leaping fire which came across almost real on the peacock screen-so real that you could almost hear them screaming. And then to hear the mayor of the city afterwards proclaiming that it was only “morally right” to reimburse those in the neighborhood whose homes had been damaged. She had never been able to get his definition of morality out of her mind.

In February of 1976 there came a belated and elegant valentine card with the news that he was being transferred to McNeil Island Penitentiary via Terminal Island and Lompoc, and he wondered whether Emiko was anywhere in the environs of either stopping-off place. He thanked her for the snapshots of her family she had dug up and sent at his request. Bogged down by another family crisis, she wrote that she would not be able to go and meet him. But she felt guilty. “That which I should have done, I did not do,” chanted a small voice in the back of her mind.

If Alden was disappointed, he did not mention it. His first letter from McNeil Island contained an appreciation of the place:

“It is beauty that I am after in my writing. There is lots of beauty in McNeil. Today I was a little depressed as I had allowed my mind to stray away from Jesus Christ and that attitude chain-reacted to a sin that reinforced the negative feelings. After supper I isolated myself in the sloping green lawn and layed down, closed eyes.

The sun made itself felt as the cumulus clouds departed. A gentle breeze swept across. Somewhere, where there was a small sandy beach, the surfs ran back and forth, lazily, back and forth sweeping. The air’s odor reminded me of home quiescently and of my love, Ophelia. God was soothing me, telling me that I am His child and he forgives. I fell asleep, and relaxed. He massaged my soul. Alleluia!”

There were two publications there, he said, Newsbuoy, a weekly inmate paper, and Smoke Talk, “a quarterly for us American Indians.” He had attended an American Indian Alcoholic Seminar and Transactional Analysis seminar given by the Pacific Institute. He had become a member of AA, he added, and was “enjoying the spiritual aspect of it”:

“We had an AA banquet where I danced with the brave ladies recovering from the evil of that (heinous) drug. In the brotherhood of American Indians we will be having our pow wow this coming 26th. The sun rises for us and the bell tolls for us; what else can they do?”

Then life took one of those odd turns, so that Emiko felt that she was being given a second chance-maybe she and her correspondent were destined to meet after all. The only son of her childhood friend, Mary, was getting married to a girl in Seattle and Mary Fukuda insisted that Emiko go along with her and her husband. The matter was settled, she said, they were footing the bill for the plane and hotel. So Emiko wrote to McNeil and asked Alden if she might be able to see him.

She found out that she would have to get permission first from his Case Manager, so she wrote for the proper form, filled it out, and sent it back. She had not received permission by the day of departure-they left the city gratefully in the midst of a heat wave-but she did not worry too much about it. Once in Seattle, she figured, it would be a simple matter to reach the proper authorities and explain her mission. Surely, since she had already asked to be put on Alden’s visitors list, and since she was coming all the way from Los Angeles, permission would be forthcoming

Despite a soft drizzle, the early July wedding was grand, and Emiko was swept up in the before-and-after festivities for a time. The Fukudas were staying on for a few days to take in the sights and Emiko, it was agreed, would try to get over to Steilacoom from where she could take the prison boat over. The Fukuda’s son had a friend working at McNeil, so she was referred to him for assistance. In like Flynn, she thought, with such help.

But for some reason, permission was denied. Was his crime so terrible then? Or was it merely some prison protocol that had to be observed? Emiko was crestfallen but she joined the Fukudas in their sight-seeing and managed to enjoy the rest of her stay in the Northwest. She phoned home only once to make sure all was peaceful there, and as she told the Fukudas, she got the impression that the kids didn’t care if she ever got back. (Years later, she was to find out that her younger daughter, rebelling at last against her sister’s authoritarianism, had dragged her all the way around the house by her long hair.)

When she arrived home, the waiting pile of mail contained the letter from the penitentiary informing her that she had been placed on Alden Ryan Walunga’s visitors list. Thanks a lot, she thought, knowing she would probably never have occasion to go to Seattle again.

But she read the regulations out of curiosity. Steilacoom, the paper said, was thirteen miles southwest of Tacoma, and there was a free twenty-minute ride on the prison boat to McNeil Island. An inmate was permitted only four visits a month and female visitors were “requested to be careful of the attire they wear to the institution,” with “skin-tight leotards and stretch pants, short miniskirts and lowcut dresses considered improper in the prison setting.” Well, she would have to bear that in mind. No bikinis, either, she supposed.

No one was to alight from the boat until a bell rang to give permission. One could buy a $1.00 meal ticket for a box lunch (available all visiting days) to be eaten with the man being visited; vending machines and soft drinks were available in the visiting room. No food (such as cakes that might contain hacksaws or hashish brownies, Emiko interpolated) was allowed to be brought in by visitors, no article allowed to be exchanged. Pictures could be shown with permission from the Visiting Room Officer; hobby craft might be given to visitors in the visiting room with the prior approval of the Hobby Shop Officer.

A handshake and embraces were permitted before and after the visit only; “during the visit you may have no physical contact”; visits could be terminated at any time if the Visiting Room Officer detected any untoward behavior; inmates might take one sealed package of cigarettes if they wanted because they would not be allowed to carry any cigarettes from the visiting room.

Alden must have been inured to disappointment; he did not dwell on her failure to visit. He only wrote that he was happy to have her on his visitors list. Besides, he had applied for and received a Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, so he was looking forward to taking classes from Tacoma Community College in the fall. Also, armed with a course in Greek New Testament Grammar from Moody Bible Institute, he was continuing his attack on the Greek original in order to make his own translation of the Gospels.

He also sent her a short story he had written, titled “The Coffin of 1974.”

Emiko found the story disturbing. It was afflicted with the same dichotomous anguish as that first essay of his that she had read:

Snowbirds ran through the air, rapidly singing the Bering Sea Spring song in the thin and white air, landing upon the melting and softening snow, very wild, almost invisible as they blended with the snow and exposed gravel of earth, and then suddenly they would be driven by some unfelt wind to find another place to seek out stone fly meals, flies who had long hibernated and were trying to restore the littleness of their lives.

Quietly the snowbirds were alerted as they sensed the approaching crunches on the tundra snow. Their heads became uneasy and loose, as if they were unscrewing them off. Their wings rose momentarily to flap but were doubtfully lowered back. They were getting confused. They were getting scared. Their ancestor snowbirds had transmitted them a traditional wariness against homo sapiens, especially against little Eskimo boys, fat parkas on with overflowing fur outlining their faces, armed with slingshots.

The coffin, borne by “six dark people,” was heavy because the deceased had gained 27 pounds in prison:

The sky was inky blue. The silent clouds hardly moved and seemed to refuse to move. The Bering Sea was belligerently nervous with three-foot size ripples in response to a current that was breaking up and enclosing the island with ice floes and icebergs. The breeze was tranquil and smelled of raw and recent butcher of brown walruses. The village houses appeared wet and were wooden and light brown, some with tarpaper and some with peeling and peeling white paint, and most with chimneys lazily exhaling silver smoke, but all with that glassy wet, relaxing and tired countenance. Most also had bloodied melting Bering Sea Spring snow, because the walrus spoil of the day.

The tiny black and white eyes of the little snowbirds united their focus to the approaching mystery but their little warm hearts had ceased their tachycardia. In fact, they were lining up in a file as if in response to a military and folk-hero who was honoring them a pass.

The mother was grieving for her oldest son. He was the one in the coffin. And if Emiko read the story correctly, it was the oldest son who, with a twenty-two Remington magnum rifle, had killed both his uncle (his mother’s youngest brother) and a girl relative. The girl relative had also been raped.

There was a lot of blood in the story, both walrus and human. But there was, all of a sudden, a happy ending. The oldest son had not died, after all. He was reborn in Christ, a new man, washed clean of his sins! Alleluia!

Emiko was stunned by the story. Was this, then, Alden’s story?

But she merely sent it back to him with the “corrections, suggestions, and remarks” for which he had asked, praising the poetry of the stark landscape with the snowbirds.

The last communication she got from Alden had a regular stamp on the envelope, unlike the previous envelopes with the printed prison frank. He wrote from the Seattle City Jail, where he had been transferred for his own protection after telling the authorities what he had seen of a homosexual rape at the prison. He did not much care for the Seattle City Jail with the constant sounds of traffic and sirens rising day and night from the street way down below. He expressed distaste for “the occupants of a neighboring cell, a bunch of black and white homosexuals” whose “demonic malaria becomes active in pretentious talk and behavior… the pitiful perverts are even called by their feminine nicknames by the officers.”

But he reported gladsome news, too. He had been recommended for a transfer to Alaska! That was around September. Wallowing in the mire of modern family life, Emiko did not answer Alden until just before Christmas, when she wrote him a brief note in a greeting card. She had managed, meanwhile, to send him another Asian American literary magazine on the assumption that she would no longer have to go through all the red tape as before.

The card was returned by the jail, stamped Unclaimed. But the magazine may have reached its destination, for although it was never acknowledged, neither was it returned. Emiko liked to think that Alden still kept it somewhere among his prison mementos even though paroled. He was probably very busy spreading the Word of God there in that isolated settlement overlooking the Bering Sea.

Or, if not paroled, there would be frequent visits there in the Alaska prison from his mother, his sisters and brothers, from his beloved Ophelia, and Lord knows whom else. There would be piles of studying to do, lots of poems, stories and essays to write.

Either way, Emiko-holding fast to the Lord Jesus Christ and refusing to consider any other alternatives-imagined he was probably much too busy back there on his home ground to continue to be the pen pal of some old woman way down there in California.