The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  After they had passed four blocks, the road curved to the right. The building on the left side of the curve was labeled “Fire Station.” On the right was an open field dotted with clumps of dusty grass. They followed the road past five more blocks on the right-hand side and a few others on the left interrupted by open spaces, coming at last to Block 39 on the left. Barracks 1 through 11 faced the road. Their apartment was in a barrack next to the latrines.

  “At least it doesn’t actually face the toilets,” remarked Yoshiko hopefully as they traversed the hundred-foot length of their barrack searching for Apartment E.

  Mitsuko said to Billy, “Can you find E for us?”

  Billy scampered on ahead, squeaking “A …B …C … D …E!”

  “E” was near the center of the long building. Goro motioned Billy inside, but he seemed hesitant to go in alone. All of them hesitated when they came together in front of the crude plank door.

  “I don’t know, I’m afraid,” Yoshiko said. “This is where we’re going to live for—who knows how long? They might keep us here forever.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Goro. “Puyallup was an ‘assembly center,’ but this is a ‘relocation camp.’”

  “Don’t tell me you believe the government is going to ‘relocate’ us somewhere nicer. Maybe if we were Nisei, but not dangerous enemy aliens like us,” Mitsuko said. She reached out and gave the door a shove. It creaked open, and the four of them took a step forward to the threshold.

  Another empty wooden box. It was larger than the Puyallup box—perhaps twenty feet deep and a little less from side to side. There were no inner walls, just bare two-by-four studs showing the green lumber of the siding and, through cracks and knotholes, the outside tar paper tacked to that. The wood was new at least, but the floor was covered by lines of fine sand which had obviously seeped in from cracks in the ceiling during the storm. Little mounds of the stuff had piled up in corners and under the window sill. The only furniture inside were four army cots and an iron potbelly stove.

  “There’s a window!” Yoshiko exclaimed.

  Mitsuko said, “Compared with our old stable, this is almost luxurious. What do you think, Billy?”

  “It smells good,” he said, twitching his nose.

  “Listen to this,” Goro said, reading from the instruction sheet he had received with the map. “‘Residents are advised not to nail up shelves until construction personnel arrive to install plasterboard walls.’ Plasterboard! I had almost forgotten that such luxuries exist! ‘Scrap lumber will be available for residents who wish to make furniture, and a committee has been organized to supervise its distribution. Approximately 400,000 board feet of lumber is now available. Hence, there will be no necessity for hoarding or pilfering.’ I’m going to turn this place into a decorator’s dream!”

  The sisters smiled at each other. This was the first sign of life that Goro had shown since his release from Missoula.

  “There’s more,” he continued. “‘You are now in Minidoka, Idaho. Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale.”

  “Wonderful,” groaned Mitsuko. “Why don’t they just call the place ‘Miami, Florida’?”

  “It’s true,” Goro said. “Ever since Pearl Harbor, they have been doing strange things with words. They call us ‘aliens,’ which we are, but the poor Nisei they call ‘non-aliens.’ I was always disappointed I could not become an American citizen, but when I heard that strange phrase, I was not so sure. I would rather be a Japanese than a non-alien.”

  “Goro!” exclaimed his wife, “Don’t let anyone hear you saying such things!”

  “Don’t worry,” he answered. “Here, the walls go all the way up to the ceiling.”

  “No more Sano snoring concerts!”

  Billy perked up at that. “I want to play with Frank!” he demanded. Mitsuko promised him they would look for Frank as soon as they had settled in.

  21

  SOON AFTER THE SUN rose each morning, the chilly night changed into raging hot day. No one in the camp wanted to do anything more strenuous during daylight hours than lie on a cot and sweat while waiting for the next meal to be served. The background babble of voices all but disappeared when the sun was at its strongest. Only after the sun set below Minidoka’s flat sand table did the camp begin to stir.

  Mitsuko would spend a few hours each evening making toys for Billy from lumber scraps. He had a sizeable collection of cars and trucks, some of which he gave away to the other boys in Block 39. One evening Mitsuko was gluing a wheel onto an axle as Billy watched, Yoshiko worked on her crocheting, and Goro dozed. There was a knock on the door and a grizzled, old man poked his shiny bald head in. Goro slowly sat up on his cot.

  “My name is Abé,” the old man said with the old-fashioned politeness of the Isseis. “I live in Apartment C just two doors down.”

  “Hello, Mr. Abé,” Yoshiko said, getting up and bowing. “I see your wife in the laundry room. She’s the strongest woman in the block.”

  He chuckled and bowed his head, his rubbery lips opening in a broad, toothless smile.

  Mitsuko invited him in and offered him green tea.

  “No, thank you very much,” he said. “I merely dropped by to say how much I admire the toys you make. You have a real knack for wood carving. Some friends and I do ornamental carving, so I recognize skilled work.”

  “There’s so much scrap lumber,” Mitsuko noted, “it’s a wonder more people don’t take up the hobby.”

  “We don’t use that cheap wood,” Mr. Abé sniffed. “It’s much too soft. The best wood around here is bitterbrush. It grows out in the desert. It’s good and hard and it takes a nice oil finish.”

  “I’d love to see your work sometime,” she said.

  “How about right now?” the old gentleman offered.

  “I’d be delighted.”

  Leaving Billy with Yoshiko and Goro, Mitsuko went with Mr. Abé. She was amazed to find out how much he had done in a few short weeks to decorate the cubicle he shared with his wife and daughters. He showed her a wonderfully convoluted pedestal for a flower vase, some bookends and a lamp. There were also combs and mirror housings and brooches among his creations.

  “These are beautiful, Mr. Abé. Where did you ever learn to do such lovely work?”

  His rubber lips sagged open again. He was utterly unashamed of his toothless gums. “You gotta do something on a farm in winter,” he declared.

  Mr. Abé gave Mitsuko a chisel and two razor knives that he said were spares. He encouraged her to do more challenging work than the sturdy toys she had been turning out for Billy. He also sent her home with a heavy armload of wood he had collected.

  “What is that?!” Yoshiko asked when Mitsuko pushed her way in through their front door carrying the gnarled, dusty-looking pieces.

  Billy spent many evening hours watching Mitsuko create shapes out of the twisted chunks of desert growth. She tried her hand at delicate designs in relief and even little figurines. Billy especially liked the horse she made for him.

  “Here’s a nice, fat piece of wood,” she said. “How about an elephant or a hippopotamus?”

  “What’s a hippapomus?” he asked.

  Mitsuko realized with a pang that she had never taken him to the zoo—or much of anywhere other than the church.

  Billy said, “Make a goose, Mommy. Just like Nils’ goose. We can ride away in the sky.”

  Even Billy knew that their broad new surroundings made them no freer than they had been at Puyallup. “I’ll try, Billy, but I’ll have to get Mr. Abé to help me with the wings.”

  From August into September, the main topic of conversation—when anyone had the strength for conversation—was the temperature: how many degrees over 100 was it today? The second most important topic was the wind velocity: how many miles per hour had the sand been tearing at their thin shelters? They also talked about the fleas, and the rattlesn
akes lurking in the shadows of the barracks.

  By the middle of September, summer was on its way out, and a few residents began to publish a camp newspaper, the Irrigator, which provided more dependable weather reports than word of mouth. Mitsuko already knew that conditions were becoming less oppressive as the constant background chatter penetrating the barrack’s thin walls grew louder with people up and doing things.

  The Irrigator called for volunteers to participate in the increasingly complex organization of camp life. Workers were needed in the co-operative store, the accounting office, the fire brigade, the hospital, the kitchens, the Relocation Bureau, the Internal Security Patrol, the Fair Labor Board, and the Japanese language section of the Irrigator itself. At one point, the labor shortage grew so acute that the fire brigade accepted nine women volunteers.

  The more she read of this burgeoning social structure, the more Mitsuko came to identify the hum of voices with definable activity and to wish that she could be a part of it in some way. Goro finally roused himself from his lethargy and joined the Internal Security Patrol, while Yoshiko kept busy with the United Protestant Church. Mitsuko wanted to do something useful, but she also wanted to continue spending as much time as she could with Billy.

  And so when she heard that schools would be opening on October 19, she felt anxious about being apart from Billy but looked forward to contributing to camp life. Five hundred children living in Blocks 21 through 44 would be attending “Stafford Elementary School,” named in honor of the kindly camp director Harry L. Stafford. At least the school would be close by, in Block 32, at the curve in the road.

  Billy, too, seemed apprehensive about the opening of school. He wanted to go there with his friends from the Block, he said, but there were other children in camp, some of the older ones, who made fun of his blond hair and called him names. “Can Frank go to school with me?” he asked. The Sanos lived in Block 40, just across the road.

  Mitsuko laughed and hugged Billy. “Frank is much too big to go to school. Don’t worry. The teachers will take care of you just as well as Frank did.”

  But Billy stayed quiet and gripped her hand as they walked through the dust to Block 32 that first Monday morning, increasing her own apprehensions. To the mass of children and parents assembled outside the school barrack, a cheerful-looking woman introduced herself as the principal, Mildred Bennett. She told them of the accomplishments she hoped for in the coming school year, and announced that parents of kindergartners and first graders could accompany their children to their assigned classrooms. Billy turned his frightened blue eyes up to Mitsuko as the crowd began to stir, and she hugged him encouragingly.

  In the classroom, just another bare room in the barracks, were rows of little desks and chairs. The school furniture was badly worn and covered with carved initials—discards from a nearby school district. An American flag hung at the front of the room and patriotic posters had been tacked to the walls between studs: “Don’t Waste: It Pleases the Enemy,” “Young and Old Can Save,” “Save All You Can,” “Carelessness Aids the Enemy.” Mitsuko wondered if the teacher, Miss Pollock, a petite, sandy-haired woman, was nervous about confronting a roomful of little enemies. And she worried how Billy would fare if he became the white teacher’s pet. Mitsuko stood at the back of the classroom, sending hopeful glances to Billy as long as she could, but when Miss Pollock signaled the parents to withdraw, she walked outside.

  Standing at the curve in the road, Mitsuko hesitated. She could spend the day in their room waiting for Billy, or she could plunge into some camp activity. For one, the Irrigator’s Japanese page had enough grammatical slips to suggest that it could use the help of someone who had not been living outside of Japan for forty years. Then she noticed the brick smoke stack of the hospital towering over the far western end of the camp. There she could bring comfort to the sick Isseis who had been cruelly snatched away from a lifetime of work in this country.

  She worried that the hospital was far away from Billy, while the newspaper office was in Block 23, just a few hundred yards beyond the school. Frank Sano was working there with some of the other college-educated Niseis. She walked over to the office.

  Frank himself stood to greet her. He introduced her, and the rest of the newspaper staff welcomed her enthusiastically. She started that day.

  Each morning, Mitsuko walked with Frank and Billy as far as the school, then continued on with Frank to the Irrigator editorial offices. Her duties were to translate articles into Japanese and inscribe them onto mimeograph masters. Much of what she translated had to do with the weather. Minidoka went directly from scorching summer to freezing winter. On November 15, Mitsuko described the gale that snatched off the garage shed and carried it fifty feet. “The camp,” she wrote, “seems to be at the center of a never-ending blizzard.”

  On the evening of December 1, Mitsuko, Yoshiko, Goro and Billy were huddled around the pot-bellied stove, faces bright red with the heat while the cold stabbed them from behind. Suddenly the door opened and there came the familiar old-country greeting, “Gomen kudasai”—“May I please come in?” After thirty years in this country, Mrs. Abé could not bring herself to do anything so American as to knock on a door. She was a wiry little woman with stark white hair and a sharp chin. Always a bundle of nervous energy, she seemed especially on edge tonight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought my husband might be here. He’s not with any of the usual bunch—the old geezers he carves wood with.”

  Mitsuko smiled at the term she used for her husband and his friends. “I haven’t seen him for days.”

  “He was going to go hunt for wood, but no one’s seen him all day.”

  “You mean they let him outside?” Goro asked, wide-eyed.

  “He told me they would. The weather wasn’t so bad this morning, but now …”

  Goro left with the old woman to check with the Internal Security Patrol. He came back shivering an hour later, after Billy had been tucked in bed and the fire in the stove had died down.

  “Nobody knows a thing. I think he’s out there somewhere,” he said, waving toward the chilly blackness. “His wife acts tough, but she’s worried sick.”

  Mitsuko spent the next day bundled up and running back and forth from the Irrigator office to the Abé apartment to the security headquarters and the hospital and back again. She did not want to believe what seemed undeniably true. A truckload of guards was sent out into the snow fields, but they returned at twilight having seen no one.

  The truck pulled out again early the next morning. Mitsuko was working on a new masthead for the Japanese page of the Irrigator, trying not to think about Mr. Abé, when Goro burst into the office.

  “They found him! It’s horrible!”

  “No!” Mitsuko shrieked. “He can’t be dead.”

  “They took his body to the morgue. Frozen stiff. I’ve never seen anything like it. All curled up like a baby …”

  Mitsuko grabbed her coat and dashed out into the burning cold air. She could hear Goro padding in the snow far behind her, calling her name, but she could not wait for him. The wind tore at her face as she ran half the length of the camp to the hospital area. She was turned away at the door of the morgue. “Mrs. Abé’s with the body,” a sandy-haired young woman in a striped pinafore told her. “She just sits there, not making a sound.”

  Mrs. Abé maintained her silence when they buried her husband in the desert that had killed him. A wailing teenaged daughter on either arm, she stared straight ahead, hardly blinking. It had taken two days for the workmen to dig the hole in the frozen ground.

  Mitsuko could not rid herself of the feeling that she had been at least partially responsible for Mr. Abé’s death by helping to deplete his supply of bitterbrush. It only made her feel worse to hear from Yoshiko that Mrs. Abé, once such a flinty old bird, seemed suddenly to have shriveled up. A week after her husband’s burial, she was admitted to the hospital.

  Finally, though, Mitsuko knew, the blame for su
ch a terrible death would not rest with her. Nor was it the fault of the camp administration, which had been trying to allow the old man to enjoy his favorite pastime when it gave him permission to hunt for wood. The blame lay with far larger forces that had dragged them all out here to the desert against their will.

  The approach of the Christmas season brought this home to her through an argument that erupted among the Irrigator staff. The problem started when Editor-in-Chief Kenny Kawachi asked Frank Sano to write a “Letter from Santa” for the children of the camp.

  “Boy, you couldn’t have picked a worse candidate!” Frank protested. “First of all, I was raised Buddhist. And second of all, I don’t even believe in that crap anymore, let alone Santa Claus.”

  “Hell, Frank, nobody past the age of five believes in Santa Claus,” said Kawachi, his slender hand slashing the air. “It’s just a seasonal thing we ought to have in the paper.”

  “Yeah, calm down, Frankie boy,” said the paper’s portly cartoonist, Jerry Yamaguchi.

  “But don’t you see what you’re doing?” retorted Frank. “Mindlessly preserving a tradition of mindlessness that accomplishes only one thing—keeps people in their place.”

  “Here we go again!” groaned Yamaguchi, rolling his eyes. “The camp philosopher.”

  “This camp damn well needs a philosopher. It needs somebody to think about why we’re spending the winter in this desert out in the middle of hell somewhere. If it weren’t for Santa Claus, we probably wouldn’t even be here!”

  Yamaguchi threw his head back and let out a howl. “Whoo-ie! Let’s hear this one!”

  “Just think about it,” continued Frank. “Kenny, you yourself said not even kids believe in Santa Claus.”

  Kawachi nodded.

  “Then what the hell is Santa Claus for? He’s a decoy, that’s what. He’s been set up for children to learn to dis-believe in, to deflect any doubts they might have away from the grown-ups’ God. The grown-ups set up this decoy, this straw man, this obviously unbelievable father figure to contrast with the ‘real’ God-father. Compared with Santa Claus, God seems as real and tangible as this desk.” He pounded the desk top with his fist.