The next morning I woke with a lighter feeling in my heart than I’d felt for days. No reason why, except that the sun streaming through my kitchen window was warm and bright and, as I drank my coffee, an orange and black monarch butterfly performed its elaborate fan dance on the wooden ledge just for me. I mulled over the ledger books while eating my Lucky Charms cereal. No more oatmeal for me, I decided, except where it belonged, in chocolate no-bake cookies. A thought occurred to me while reading through the lists of names again.
In my bedroom, the San Celina telephone books were still piled in front of the mirror. I started looking up the names in the ledger. Out of over a hundred and fifty people to whom loans were made since 1941, twenty-five of them were still listed in the San Celina phone book. Many more of them had matching last names that could indicate a descendant of the original borrowers. I copied down the names and addresses of the twenty-five, not exactly sure why. I wouldn’t have any trouble with having a reason to talk with them—the Historical Society interviews would help me there—but how in the world would I bring up something as personal as the money loaned to them by Mr. O’Hara? I suspected that the elderly Japanese, not being raised in the sometimes-too-open atmosphere of Western Culture, would probably be reticent about discussing such a private matter as a loan. Somehow I’d have to work it into the interview questions.
I drank my now lavender-colored milk straight out of the bowl and quickly changed into a pair of brown Levi’s and an antique-white tailored shirt. Scrounging up my old leather backpack, I threw in the ledger, my tape recorder, a steno pad and a couple of mechanical pencils. Right before I left, I phoned Ramon. He’d promised to meet me at the museum and accompany me on these interviews so he could get an idea of what I wanted him and Todd to do. A little voice inside me warned me to call and remind him. Señora Aragon answered in her soothing, caramel voice.
“Buenos días, señora,” I said. “It’s Benni.”
“Buenos días, chiquita,” she said. “Como esta?”
“Muy bien, gracias. Is Ramon there?”
I heard her click her tongue. “Perro flojo! That lazy dog! He is not even out of his bed.” Her tone was scolding, but affectionate. There wasn’t much Ramon could do wrong in his mother’s eyes.
“He’s supposed to go with me today on the Historical Society interviews. Please tell him I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” Only by picking him up could I guarantee I wouldn’t be sitting at the museum waiting for him to wander in whenever the mood struck him.
“I’ll tell him, chiquita,” she said, her voice doubtful, giving me the ominous feeling I’d be doing the interviews alone today.
The sky was a bright, hard blue that caused me to hunt around in my backpack and slip on my sunglasses. The leaves on the trees shimmered from the rain last night and the breeze was downright cold. It seeped in around the rotting rubber weatherstripping of the truck windows, and by the time I drove across town to pick up Ramon, I was ready for a cup of Señora Aragon’s strong hot coffee.
The cheerful yellow and white Aragon house sat on the corner lot of a neighborhood of older San Celina homes. Like many of its neighbors, it boasted a deep front yard, a couple of stark, towering walnut trees just starting to green, and a homemade swing set made of used truck tires and water-stained four-by-fours. The eclectically styled wood-frame house reflected the history and size of the Aragon family. They’d bought the house when Elvia was born and additional rooms had been tacked on as the family grew, the painted outside walls the same color, but the wood just dissimilar enough to give it an enthusiastic but slightly cockeyed look. Pulling up into the Aragons’ narrow, flower-lined driveway always made me feel like a little girl again. I’d spent so much of my childhood staying “in town” with Elvia so I could participate in some after-school activity that this house was as much a part of my sense of “home” as the Ramsey Ranch.
When I walked into the kitchen, Ramon slumped bleary-eyed at the round maple table in a pair of his older brother’s baggy green Army pants. He rested his head in his arms, his wavy hair tumbling around his bare, bony shoulders.
“You’re not going like that, I hope,” I said, helping myself to a cup of coffee and putting one of Señora Aragon’s sweet Mexican pastries on a plate. Licking the pink frosting off my thumb, I opened the huge refrigerator and peered in.
“The milk’s right here,” he said in a grumpy tone. “And I’m not going at all. I think I have the flu.”
“He has the lazy sickness,” Señora Aragon said, walking into the room carrying a handful of colorful flowers in her brown, dimpled hand. She raised thick black eyebrows at me in a mocking manner that reminded me so much of Elvia, I laughed.
“Ah, Mama,” he said, lifting his head. “I really am sick. I’m not even going to class today.”
“He comes in at three o’clock in the mañana and complains he is enfermo.” She slapped his smooth back. “I should tell your papa what time you get in and we’ll see how sick you are.”
“Mama,” he whined. “You promised. I said I’d call next time.”
She turned to me, shaking her head. “What do I do? He is mocoso but ...” An indulgent look softened the heaviness around her deep brown eyes. She held out the bouquet of flowers to me. “You go see Jack today, sí? He always likes my flowers.”
I glanced over at the Sav-on Drugstore calendar attached to the white refrigerator with two ladybug magnets made of pipecleaners and a grandchild’s love. A warm flood of guilt washed over me. Today was the anniversary of the day Jack was killed, and it had begun without me even remembering. I took the flowers grown in Señora Aragon’s small greenhouse and held them up to my face. The daisies, calla lilies, and pink roses gave off a clean, earthy scent that brought back a sharp memory of Jack. The first month we were married, to make the old Harper ranch house seem more like ours, we bought a hundred dollars worth of flowers to plant in the front window boxes and flower beds. As we removed them from the trays in the screened service porch of the house, we started a dirt fight that ended with us making love on the scratchy wooden floor, rolling among the empty plastic trays in a frenzied attempt to quench the fire that seemed to perpetually burn in our nineteen-year-old bodies.
“Gracias, Mama Aragon,” I said softly, taking the flowers and squeezing her hand. “He always said you grew the prettiest flowers in the county.”
“De nada, niña,” she said, touching my cheek.
A sonorous groan filled the warm kitchen. Ramon pushed himself out of the chair with dramatic slowness, hugging his brown chest with smooth, hairless arms. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Ramon,” I said. “You were supposed to go with me today. How else will you ...” His frantic eye action stopped me. I guess his mother didn’t know about his problems in American History yet. I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it alone this time. But you promised—”
“I called Todd,” he broke in. “He said we could switch places. He’s supposed to meet you at the museum by nine o’clock.”
“You had this planned all along,” I said accusingly, looking up at the wall behind him. The red hen-shaped clock read ten minutes to nine.
“Yeah, right, Benni, like I can plan when I get the flu.” His voice was sarcastic, but his soot-colored eyes smiled at me.
“Your mother’s right, you are a brat.” I turned to her. “Why do we put up with him?” She gave me a sympathetic smile and handed me some wet paper towels and tin foil to wrap around the ends of the flowers.
Todd sat in his little white Toyota waiting for me when I arrived at the museum fifteen minutes later.
“Well, looks like it’s you and me, partner,” I said. He looked up at me, his face expressionless.
“I guess,” he said in a subdued voice. I wondered if he and Ramon had argued over who was going today. Ramon, as sweet and amusing as he could be sometimes, could also drive you crazy with his flakiness. This was probably not the first time Todd got stuck doing Ramon’s work.
“We
ll, just observe what I say and do. Don’t worry, I’ll have a list of questions for you and Ramon to use when you go out by yourselves. Usually once you get older people talking, they do most of the work. Sometimes the hardest part is breaking away.”
Our first interview was with a Mr. Kuroda who lived in a mobile home community not far from Oak Terrace. He waited for us on his front porch among an impressive array of blooming orchids. He was a wizened, balding man in his early seventies with clusters of dark brown age spots on both cheeks and a wide, ready smile. He wore a plaid sports shirt, gray slacks and a brown wool sports coat. He’d taught at the Japanese-language school in the Buddhist temple during the early forties. As I’d requested over the phone, he’d laid out piles of old black and white photographs. I set Todd to labeling Post-its with Mr. Kuroda’s name and address to place on the backs of the photographs we’d take with us.
Mr. Kuroda held a small red silk pillow in his lap. As he talked, he turned it over and over, smoothing the fringe with his hand. His parents had owned a small farm out near the state prison on the road to Morro Bay. They grew celery, pole beans and winter peas and sold much of their produce to Chinese restaurants up and down the coast. Like Mariko’s brother, he’d volunteered for the armed service, but had been stationed in North County at Camp Johnson teaching the Japanese language and customs to the officers of the 87th Infantry Training Battalion. It was what saved him from going to one of the relocation camps. As a teacher in the Japanese school, he would have been one of the first to go.
“The day after Pearl Harbor they started taking men,” he said. “Anyone who owned a boat or had anything to do with fishing, those who had contributed to Japanese organizations, those who taught martial arts. Even the Buddhist monks. Anything that was too Japanesy. They were sent all over—South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico. Not the regular camps, but special ones, just for the high-risk people. Luckily, I was okayed by the draft board and I spent the whole war right here in the county.”
“What happened to your family’s farm?” I asked. His smiling face became pensive.
“Right after Pearl Harbor, many people were very kind, but so many others would have liked us to just go away. The San Celina Farm Bureau, the Grower-Shipper Fruit and Vegetable Co-op, the San Celina County Farmers, the San Celina County Association of Retail Distributors, some labor unions, some posts of the American Legion. These people were our friends and neighbors, but we could see what was coming. Those who owned stores sold off as much as they could for prices that would break your heart. Then there was an article in the newspaper—an editorial that was titled ‘The Japanese Alien Menace.’ It was in January, right after a Union Oil tanker was sunk off the coast a few miles from here. Oh, the article said it wasn’t aimed at Japanese-Americans, but the distinction between the ‘enemy’ and us was already getting hazy. My father kept saying, ‘They want our land, that is the whole thing, they want our land.’” He gave an ironic laugh. “And many times, he was right.”
“Did they get your family’s farm?” I asked.
“No,” he said, hugging the silk pillow to his chest. “We were luckier than most. We had someone who bought our farm, then sold it back to us when my parents returned from the camp. But not everyone was that lucky. Our patron had only so much money.”
“Was this patron Mr. Brady O’Hara?” I asked, though I knew the answer. I’d checked the ledger before the interview. The Kurodas’ name was one of the first on the list.
“Yes,” he said, a bit surprised. “How did you know?”
“Research,” I said vaguely.
I continued with the rest of my questions, not mentioning Mr. O‘Hara again until right before the end of the interview. “Mr. Kuroda, I was just wondering one small thing about the loan from Mr. O’Hara. Why did he help you? Was he a personal friend of your parents or something?”
“Actually, no.” Mr. Kuroda’s face became puzzled. “We didn’t know him at all, though of course we traded in his store. It was the biggest department store within a hundred miles in those days. I was the one who told my parents he was buying up Japanese-owned properties with the written legal documents to sell them back to us when the war was over.”
“How did you know he was doing this?”
“Until the war, I worked with Rose Ann Violet as a teaching assistant,” he said. “Such a wonderful woman. So tragic what happened to her and Mr. O‘Hara. She was helping me fill out applications and pass the tests to go to the university in San Francisco so I could become a teacher in the public school. She asked me about my parents’ farm and then told me Mr. O’Hara could help me. That all I had to do was mention her name.”
“And he did it? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” he said.
Driving on the interstate toward our next interview with the Sukami sisters, I contemplated Mr. Kuroda’s story. Next to me, Todd sat quietly looking out the window, and after a while, I felt guilty for being so self-absorbed and tried to draw him into a conversation.
“So, what do you think about Mr. Kuroda’s story?” I asked, turning on the road that led to the Sukami house.
“It’s sad, I guess.” He shrugged, apparently uninterested in anything that happened that long ago. “Can I change this?” He started flipping the stations on the truck’s radio before I could answer, stopping at one that was playing one of those lovely, mind-numbing rap songs. He turned his head away from me, looking out the window, beating the rhythm of the obviously familiar song on the side of the door.
“Sure,” I said, wondering for the second time today whether having Ramon and Todd help me on this project had been one of my wisest ideas. Neither seemed interested enough to be of any use to me.
The interview with the Sukami sisters, Haru and Yoshiko, was a bit more lighthearted than Mr. Kuroda’s. They were in their early seventies and had lived in San Celina since the early thirties. They regaled us with hilarious stories about learning the English language and customs and how as teenagers they managed to sneak away from their strict father and attend the beach parties held by their school chums. Even Todd cracked a smile when they told the story about their father using a metal rake to chase away an amorous boy who came calling. By the time the boy’s story made the rounds at school, the rake had become a samurai sword and their small but sturdy father had gained an impressive twelve inches and seventy-five pounds. I finally felt comfortable enough to steer the conversation around to Mr. O‘Hara and his loans, and found, not to my surprise, their story was almost identical to Mr. Kuroda’s. The only difference was their family had owned a small notions and gift store. Apparently Mr. O’Hara had not only bought up all their stock at full price, but kept the lease going on the building until they returned. Because of him, they were able to come back to San Celina County after spending the war years in Manzanar, the internment camp in the high plains of Inyo County. They were not at all reluctant to tell me about Mr. O’Hara’s kindness and were understandably shocked at his murder.
“We were very sorry to hear of his death. I wonder why there was no service?” Yoshiko, the younger sister, said.
“He requested that there wouldn’t be one,” I said.
“You know, if Mr. O‘Hara hadn’t helped our family,” Haru said, “we would have had to start over somewhere else like so many others did. Our father loved San Celina and wanted to return after the war. It was very kind of Mr. O’Hara, though we don’t know why he did it. When our father went to the department store to thank him in person, he wouldn’t see him.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “I wonder why?”
She softly crumpled the delicate ecru doily she’d been tatting during our talk. “That always bothered our father, that he could never thank him face to face. But it was all done through Mr. O‘Hara’s accountant. My father sent Mr. O’Hara a beautiful blue and white china tea set, but it was sent back with no explanation. Why he helped us, people who were strangers to him and then refused our gratitude, remained a mystery that t
roubled our father until the day he died. But he must have been good-hearted, don’t you think? Why else would he help us?”
“I have no idea,” I said. Yet, I added silently.
14
“IT’S PAST NOON. You hungry?” I asked Todd when we left the Sukami sisters and pulled onto Interstate 101. To our left, a billboard advertising Hogie’s Truckstop Cafe flashed by. A pie-faced man wearing a red ten-gallon hat and clutching an oversized knife and fork in his hands promised “Good Vittles—Two miles ahead—Biscuits and Gravy 24 hours a day.”
“I guess,” he said, turning his head to stare out the window.
“I’ll treat you to lunch. Hogie’s okay?”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. I assumed it meant that as long as he didn’t have to pay, it was fine with him.
Hogie’s had retained all the scarred, fifties truckstop linoleum ambience that made it such an interesting place to work fifteen years ago. The songs on the jukebox were by country singers who hadn’t had a hit in twenty years, there was Brach’s pick-a-mix candy in a huge green plastic bowl next to the cash register, and as Dove would say, the coffee wasn’t just strong, it was downright stout. When Jack and I were first married and our cut of the Ramsey Ranch profits was too small to meet our needs, I worked graveyard shift here three nights a week. I look back now and wonder how in the world I survived going to school, working on the ranch, sleeping in the early evening and working nights slinging ham and cheese omelettes and pouring endless cups of coffee.
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