Tallgrass

by Sandra Dallas

  Dad shrugged and finished the tea, then looked at Mom slyly. “Might be you could teach,” he said.

  Mom, who’d been sprinkling the laundry, using a green Coca-Cola bottle filled with water and plugged with a stopper that had holes in it, rolled up a damp shirt and put it into the basket before she wiped her hands on her apron. The apron was made from flowered feed sacks and had been washed so many times that the print was faded to almost nothing. She looked up at Dad. “I couldn’t teach a bird to find a worm. Besides, the only thing I know is chickens, and you told me yourself they don’t raise chickens out there.”

  “Come winter, when the rest of the Japanese women get here, you could teach them to quilt.”

  “Go on! Anybody can quilt. You’ve just to do it. Besides, why would they want to quilt? I didn’t see any of those women climbing onto the yellow dogs with scrap bags in their hands.”

  Dad said the Japanese would need quilts to keep them warm in winter.

  Mom sat down then and poured her own tea, thinking. “Oh, I don’t know, Loyal. Where’s the time to come from? Granny’s getting worse every day; you know how she wanders. She’s perfectly fine one minute, remembering the names of the men who worked the harvest last year, and the next, she doesn’t know her own name. And with Marthalice and Buddy gone away, Rennie and I are hard put to get the work done.”

  Mom was right about that. I didn’t have time to read much or make doll clothes now, although I’d gotten too big for dolls. Instead, I was doing more chores around the house. I guess this was what was meant by growing up, and I wasn’t sure I liked that part of it. Mom was so grateful for my help, however, that I didn’t resent the extra work. I wished Marthalice were around to make it more fun, however. We’d always shared the housework. She’d taught me dance steps as she vacuumed, and when we did the dishes, she’d tell me about the boys at school who draped

  themselves over her locker or left notes in her desk. She’d finish by saying, “Of course, you’ll have twice as many boyfriends as I do.” Fat chance, I’d think, but it was nice of her to say so.

  Mom brushed a strand of hair out of her face with her wrist. “What would people say? That I’m aiding and abetting the enemy? I’d be an abettor, whatever that is.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I’d not want to stir up trouble with the Jolly Stitchers. So many of them’s against the camp.”

  “You wouldn’t have to say you’re teaching,” I suggested. “You could just tell the bees you’re busy with the chickens.” Dad had dubbed the members of Jolly Stitchers sewing circle “the bees” and Mom “the queen bee.”

  Mom gave me a stern look. “That would be a lie.”

  I looked down at my arms folded on the oilcloth that covered the table. “Not a real lie.” I raised my arms, which were sweat-glued to the oilcloth, and they made a squishing sound as they came loose. “You really are busy with the chickens.” If Mom taught at Tallgrass, she’d want me to go along to help her, which meant I’d see the camp close-up and even meet some Japanese. None of the kids I knew had been inside Tallgrass.

  “Rennie,” Mom warned, and I looked down at the wet place where my arms had been. That wasn’t even fuzzy-headed logic. It was a lie, and Mom couldn’t abide a liar.

  Dad got up and straightened the strap of his overalls, then took his hat from the hook and put it on. Dad’s face was two-toned, the bottom half tanned, but his forehead was as white as milk from where that hat had shaded it from the sun. “There’s a job of work that needs done. I got to go aid and abet the cows,” he said. He told Mom to do what she wanted, and she said in that case, the teaching was out. The screen door squeaked open, then slammed shut when Dad let go of it, and I felt comforted that the door would announce anybody who tried to sneak into our house, at least anybody who came through the side door.

  Mom set up the ironing board and lifted the basket of clothes she’d sprinkled onto the table. She plugged in the iron, and after a minute, she licked the tip of her finger and tested the iron’s heat. I got up and poured cream into the big glass jar that served as a churn and began to turn the paddle, watching the cream thicken and turn yellow as the wooden blades went around. After a while, Mom said, “I’d be stirring up trouble just as sure as you’re stirring up butter.” I knew better than to bring up the subject of her teaching at the internment camp again.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1942, the government had bought Tallgrass, an old ranch that had been named for a patch of tall grass that grew in the middle of our short-grass prairie. A few weeks later, hundreds of men arrived to build the internment camp, and folks in Ellis talked about the relocation of California Japanese to Colorado every bit as much as they talked about Pearl Harbor and the price of sugar beets. They didn’t discuss much whether it was right or wrong to force those people, many of them born on American soil, as Dad pointed out, from their homes and into camps. If you pressed them, people said we were at war, and better be safe than sorry. Besides, white people were making sacrifices, too, they said. Our boys were losing their lives in the service of their country, and that was a lot more serious than a Japanese family giving up a farm or a fishing boat in California.

  No, the talk around Ellis was about what Tallgrass would do to the community. At first, local people hadn’t minded the idea of a camp going in. They’d gotten construction jobs, and skilled workers had moved into Ellis, some renting spare rooms, although most lived in tents out near the campsite. There’d never been so much money in town, even before the Depression. The drugstores stocked up on first-aid products and tobacco and men’s magazines—and some said on rubbers, since a few hussies had moved into Ellis and rented the rooms above Jay Dee’s Tavern. I wasn’t absolutely sure what rubbers were, but I heard boys joking about them and knew better than to ask my mother. And since I shared Marthalice’s letters with Mom, I knew it wasn’t anything I could write about to my sister.

  The cafes stayed open until 2:00 A.M. to serve supper to the evening shift from Tallgrass. The owner of the dry goods said he could have sold twice as many pairs of work pants and hard-toed shoes, but with all the factories turning out uniforms for the soldiers, he couldn’t get them. The bars never closed, even on Sunday, although you had to go in through the back doors to buy a drink on the Sabbath. Prohibition had been over for a long time, but the bootleggers did a thriving business anyway, because some people preferred the stronger homemade stuff. Frank Martin doubled the price of dago red and still sold all he could produce. I found his empty jars, which boys threw out of their car windows as they drove along the Tallgrass Road, and once, I came across a jar that was full. I was tempted to taste it, but if I did, I was sure I’d die a terrible death. Or worse, one of the Jolly Stitchers might smell strong liquor on my breath, and my soul would be in danger.

  By the time the Japanese arrived late in the summer of 1942, the talk in Ellis had changed. Most of the electricians and plumbers and carpenters had been drafted or had moved on to other jobs, building defense plants, and the Japanese were left to finish construction.

  So the bottom dropped out of the war business in Ellis, and people turned sour. “If we had a real prison, we’d have wives and kids coming in on visiting day, staying in the tourist courts and eating at the restaurants. But who’s going to come and see a Jap?” asked the man who ran Tom-Tom Motor Court, which had eight cement wigwams with poles sticking out of their tops. “There ain’t nobody fool enough to come to Ellis on a vacation when we got five thousand Nips a mile away.”

  “What tourist ever picked Ellis for a vacation anyway?” Dad asked. He pointed out the contractors and salesmen and government officials visiting the camp were going to bring in more business than the few motorists who passed through Ellis on their way to Denver or Colorado Springs, and that the Tom-Tom ought to put up a neon sign and build half a dozen more tepees to accommodate them.

  “Besides, everybody’s hoarding gasoline, so there aren’t any tourists,” I piped up. Dad sent me a stern look that told me not to be smart. But later,
he said I was right about that.

  Some people turned hateful. Mr. Elliot, who ran the other drugstore, put a sign in his window with a cartoon of a Japanese man with teeth like a beaver and slanted eyes, NO JAPS SERVED was written on it. Folks came in and pointed to the sign and shook Mr. Elliot’s hand.

  One night, somebody broke into the Elliot Drug and stole money out of the cash register, as well as the packs of Sen-Sen and cartons of Lucky Strike. Then he tore the sign in half. Mr. Elliot claimed that proved he’d been robbed by a Japanese person who’d sneaked out of Tallgrass. Sheriff Henry Watrous said the robber might have destroyed the sign so the camp would be blamed. In fact, the sheriff went out to talk to Beaner Jack about it, but Mr. Jack said unless he’d come to arrest Beaner, Sheriff Watrous could just get off his property.

  “I don’t understand Beaner,” Dad said when he told us the story. “Why would that boy do such a thing?”

  “It’s because he’s a Jack, and they’re meaner than red ants,” I said.

  Mom frowned, because she didn’t like me saying unkind things about a person, even a Jack. But Dad agreed. “I reckon that’s about right.”

  Then someone set fire to the railroad trestle about five miles from Ellis. The fire burned a long time before it was spotted, and the damage held up the trains for two days. The FBI came, looking for espionage, but the agents couldn’t find any proof of that. “Just vandalism,” one of them concluded. Dad said it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Beaner Jack, but the agent told Dad vandalism wasn’t his department. Most people thought one of the Japanese had burned the trestle, and folks in Ellis were even more resentful about the internment camp.

  Then that Denver Post reporter who’d been at the depot the day the first Japanese arrived came back to Ellis and wrote a story about how fine life was at Tallgrass. Only half of the inmates were expected to work, he wrote, and even I figured out that didn’t mean anything, because the other half were children and old folks. The Japanese had white people waiting on them in the mess hall, the article claimed, and folks in Ellis were plenty mad about the government coddling the Japanese with good food and feather beds, while their own sons ate rations in foxholes overseas. Dad had told us what the food was like, and I’d seen some of the inmates cutting prairie grass to fill their mattress ticks. The reporter hinted that the government was sending the most dangerous Japanese agents in America to Tallgrass.

  “My dad says that’s a fact,” Betty Joyce told me when we talked about the article. I wondered how a dope like Mr. Snow knew anything, when all he did was sit behind the counter every day selling nails and screws and yelling at Betty Joyce and her mom. But I wouldn’t tell my friend that. Betty Joyce had enough troubles without having to defend her father for being a knothead.

  After that article was printed, the tension in Ellis got so bad that the mayor called a meeting at the school and invited the head of the camp, Mr. Halleck, to talk to us. Mom tucked Granny into bed and let Mr. Hale, the hired man, stay in the house and listen to the Philco radio, so that he could keep an eye on Granny while Mom and Dad and I went to the meeting. Just before we left, Mr. Hale took Dad aside, and the two of them had a long conversation, Dad nodding and looking serious. Then Dad said, “Good luck to you, sir,” and slapped Mr. Hale on the back and shook his hand.

  “What’s that jawing about?” Mom asked as the three of us got into the truck.

  Dad said it was too much work to hitch up the team at night, and slow going in the wagon besides. Our Nash automobile was up on blocks because Dad couldn’t get parts for it. So we took the truck after dark. It was a beat-up old truck, which Dad had painted with red house paint and named “Red Boy.” I loved to ride around with Dad in Red Boy. He kept a little sack of hard licorice in the glove compartment for the two of us. Once, when I was waiting for Dad outside the feed store, I ate all the licorice. Then I got out of the truck and picked up black pebbles and put them into the licorice sack. I waited for about five years for Dad to discover what I’d done. Finally, he came into the kitchen one day and said, “I just broke a tooth eating a piece of licorice.” He let me squirm for a full minute before he grinned and said it was the best trick I’d ever pulled on him.

  Now, as we drove into Ellis, Dad said, “He’s just got his draft notice, Mother. And the two Romeros went into town this afternoon and signed up. They’re all three of them going to war.” The Romero brothers lived in a shack across the field and had worked our beets for the past three years. Betty Joyce said they made dago red, too, because her dad bought it from them. I asked Dad if they did, and he said, “If I knew the answer to that, I’d have to tell your mother, and she’d be likely to shoot them. Now you wouldn’t want Mother to go to jail because you’re nosy, would you?” That was too complicated for me to follow, but I knew if I let on to Mom about the Romeros making wine, she would spend the rest of her life in the state penitentiary in Canon City. And I’d have to drop out of school to take care of Granny and do all the work around the house. I kept my mouth shut.

  After Dad told Mom about Mr. Hale and the Romeros, the two of them were silent for a minute, and I knew they were wishing Buddy hadn’t enlisted, so that he could help with the beets. I did, too. I loved our farm, and a bad year or two might make us lose the place. “Bud would have been drafted by now anyway,” I said.

  “We’ll make do.” Mom used to say that when our region was part of the dust bowl. Back then, the dirt and wind ruined our crops, and we barely held on. “With the Lord’s help, we’ll make do, Loyal,” she’d say.

  When Dad told her the Lord could do His part by bringing rain, Mom said not to blaspheme. The rain finally did come, and Dad said he supposed the Almighty was better late than never. Mom replied if he went to church once in a while, the Lord might not treat him like a stranger. It wasn’t fair that the dust bowl years, when men tramped the country looking for jobs, ended just before the war. Now there was plenty of work but nobody to do it. I’d told Dad I thought God’s timing wasn’t too good on that score, either, and Dad had laughed and said not to let Mom hear me say that. He’d ruffled my hair with his knuckles. Now that Buddy was gone, I was Dad’s pal.

  Folks came from all over the county to attend the meeting, which was held in the biggest classroom in the school. Not everybody could find seats, so some of the men stood up along the wall and little kids sat on their mothers’ laps or on the tops of the desks. Government officials showed up, too, trying to act like local people. But you could tell who they were because they wore suits and ties, and instead of chewing toothpicks, they smoked cigarettes in holders clinched in their teeth, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If I ever smoked cigarettes, I’d use a holder, a long black Bakelite one, set with rhinestones. Yeah, I thought. I’d take it with me when I went to the White House to visit Mrs. Roosevelt. I glanced at Dad, who was lighting a roll-your-own, and tried to think of him using a cigarette holder. The idea was so funny that I had to hold back a laugh. It came out as a snort, and I sank into my seat, hoping nobody had heard me.

  After the Methodist preacher gave a prayer thanking God for backing our troops in the war, we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Then Mr. Flalleck, who’d been brought in by the government from Kansas City to run the camp, went to the teacher’s desk, where a lectern with a seal of the U.S. government on it had been set up, and he began reading facts about Tallgrass—the number of inmates, the number of guards, the amount of money spent on construction, “which some of you folks here got the advantage of,” he said. The camp was designed like an army base, with an administration area and a barracks area, he told us. “The rooms are nice, but I’m here to tell you no one’s being coddled.” He’d read the Denver Post article, too. Nobody smiled, so he cleared his throat. “We got a four-strand double barbed-wire fence all around the place for your safety.” He paused to let that sink in, but instead of being reassured, people looked disgusted, because there wasn’t a boy in Ellis who couldn’t get under bobwire. “Sixteen-foot watchtowers,
too,” he added. “And guards assigned to them with rifles.” A few men nodded at that, but I thought about the girl at the depot who was my age, the one in saddle shoes. I figured she must feel awful living in an encampment with guards ready to shoot her. I thought the government ought to let her go back home, along with the rest of the women and children. But maybe they wanted to be with the men. If Dad were locked up someplace, Mom and I would want to go with him.

  “You got a jail there, do you?” someone called out.

  “We don’t need one. We think these are peaceable folks. We don’t expect one bit of trouble out of them,” Mr. Halleck said.

  “Then why not leave them in California? How come you shipped them all to Colorado and locked them up?” asked Redhead Joe Lee. “If they’re so all-fired trustworthy, why didn’t you let them go about their business and save the taxpayers a lot of money?”

  Dad laughed at that, but Oscar Kruger shifted in his little-kid seat and told Mr. Lee to shut up. “Ain’t you never heard of Pearl Harbor?”

  “I guarantee you none of those folks out at Tallgrass dropped the bombs,” Mr. Lee said.

  “A Jap’s a Jap,” Mr. Kruger told him.

  “I guess that means a German’s a German. Maybe we should have a camp for Germans,” Mr. Lee taunted.

  Dad touched Mr. Lee’s arm to cool him off, but I knew he wanted to say “Good one!” I gave Mr. Lee a thumbs-up sign. He ignored it, of course. Why would he care what I thought? I wrapped my fingers around my thumb so that if anybody had seen me make the sign, the person would think I was just messing around with my hand.

  “Nobody can’t say I’m not one hundred percent American,” said Mr. Kruger. When he stood up, he bumped his knee against the desk and muttered something in German.