Bat 6

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  The big kids coached us, and the grownups, too. Now that I am older, I realize the grownups coached us so they wouldn’t be idle in camp. There was nothing much for them to do. They could work in the bakery or at other jobs. But those jobs were both tiring and boring. So we had many coaches.

  The guard in the watchtower, who stood there all day long to make sure no one escaped, said my team was his favorite. He said we were the pluckiest. He could look down on the camp and see many teams play. My brother Shig and his friends called him Fatty behind his back. I don’t know why he liked us the most. We were just little kids.

  All of us had to learn to write the things we did in our games. When I was six years old I learned to spell “shortstop,” “batting average,” “inning,” and other game words. Our older cousins were our teachers and those were their favorite words to make us learn.

  Later I learned that first graders don’t have to spell those words. Many first graders can only spell their names.

  I learned to read and do arithmetic up to long division. Our teachers had us say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. And we had handwriting practice and drawing lessons and we also had a children’s chorus. And then eventually we left the camp because the war was over. I suddenly had to say good-bye to those many friends I had made. I don’t know where they all went, Ko, Min, and the many other children I had played with.

  I thought we were going back to America. We went to two places in California and stayed there a long time. I went to fourth and fifth grade there. My cousins and I voted not to eat potatoes ever again.

  While we were in California someone wrote bad words about us on my uncle’s car with paint. It washed almost all off but I can still see those words in my mind.

  And it was in California that we kids started trying not to be Japanese. I don’t remember exactly where we got that idea. One day my girl cousins and I put makeup on our eyes to make them round, and if you stood far enough away we didn’t look Japanese at all. We took turns going halfway down the block and looking. Then my cousin Kazuko tried to change her name to Sally. And we started to have a bake sale to earn money to buy hair bleach. My aunts put an end to that.

  The worst part was my aunts and my mom crying when they found out.

  My mother got so upset. She whispered with anger at me: “What if your grandmother saw you do these things? You would break her heart!”

  I hadn’t thought about that. I have seen my grandmother sit with her shoulders hunched over, not saying anything for long, long periods of time. At camp and at the places where we went later. She was so unhappy. She is old and it is hard for her to change places of living so many times. But I hadn’t thought about her heart breaking because we kids wanted to fit in better in California.

  And still I kept missing the swing, not knowing where it had gone because of my confusion of memory. Every time I asked when we would go back to the United States, my parents said we are already in the United States, and they kept pointing out flags.

  I still didn’t get it.

  I meant when would we go back to the place where the swing was. But my parents didn’t know which swing I wanted to go back to, because there had been swings in the different places where we lived. My dad helped make swings in camp for the children, and then there were swings in Sacramento where we lived with our cousins.

  I meant the cherry tree swing in Bear Creek Ridge, but I didn’t know how to say all three words of the name of the place I meant. Eventually I stopped asking, because it sounded so childish. My parents didn’t even mention Bear Creek Ridge because they were thinking we would never come back here at all.

  The McHenrys had sent my parents news from the newspaper saying there were signs that said “No Japs or Dogs” in windows of some stores down at River Bend. And the newspaper from River Bend itself said we should not come back. It was not on every page of the newspaper, just on some pages. When the McHenrys sent us this information they said we were wanted in Bear Creek Ridge but there were some people who were still keeping their old feelings from the war. The McHenrys said, “We just want you to know it will be hard on you when you come back, you should know the truth of how things are here.” And they wrote in the letters how our orchard was doing, and it wasn’t doing very well, due to the McHenrys’ not being able to take careful care of the trees along with their own orchards too, as well as the store.

  My parents took a long time to decide.

  I even dreamed about the cherry-blossom petals floating down onto my lap. But we had been so many places, the place in the dream seemed to be nowhere that existed in real life. With all the different places added up, it was six years that I wanted to come back to that swing in the United States.

  And when we came back to our own house last summer, it was hard to remember our home. Everything was overgrown with weeds, and our house was a very bad mess because the McHenrys had rented it to some people who were not careful. And the roof of the garage was caved in. The orchard had not been pruned or thinned or sprayed regularly, and the coddling moths had done much damage. My father and mother were so sad and angry, it was terrible to watch their disappointed faces.

  The McHenrys brought us seven boxes of groceries and other things from their store to welcome us back and my mother did not want to accept them but it was in neighborly goodwill. And she was glad there were baking powder and butter and sugar and three new mixing bowls to replace the ones that the renters threw against the kitchen wall in their drinking fights. In one box there were even new saddle shoes, exactly my size.

  And from the church there were towels and a tablecloth, plus jars of canned fruits and vegetables from everyone who joined in.

  And there was the swing, exactly where I remembered it, hanging from the cherry tree, and green moss had grown on the wooden seat and the ropes were green with moss too. I went very carefully to the swing and I sat very still in it. I’d grown so much that the swing was way too close to the ground for me. Then I pushed off with my feet and pumped myself high up in the tree where the ripening cherries were hanging in clusters. I was never so glad to be anywhere in my life.

  The cherry tree had grown much taller. Looking up into it, I felt I was a different person but yet the same person who had swung in it long before.

  Our house was so wrecked it was almost not able to be lived in. My father and my brother set up blankets over the clothesline for a tent, and we all slept outdoors on those first few nights. The Hirokos sent a crate of strawberries home with me on my first afternoon of picking, along with a quart of cream from their cow. My mother rinsed the berries and put them in bowls and poured the cream over them. Our whole family sat on the ground in front of our house and ate berries and cream, and they were so delicious, we were quiet for some length of time, just eating.

  My grandmother held her bowl of fresh strawberries in her hands and said, “We are back in the United States.”

  That was when I met Tootie, in Hirokos’ berry patch, and she said I had to be first baseman in Bat 6, and she embarrassed me with talking about how I could help our team win, and about my mother being MVP when she was a girl. I was so happy to have a friend just jump out of the berry rows, and it turned out we used to know each other before we were old enough to walk. And then we started school, and Peggy invited me over to her house and we became good friends.

  When we were making cookies at Shadean’s house, my eyes were caught by her stuffed panda in her bedroom. It suddenly came back to me: I seemed to remember having a stuffed panda, too. In the years that had gone by I had lost all thoughts of this bear. When I went home that afternoon, wearing Shadean’s skirt, I asked my mother if I had really had a stuffed panda, or if I just thought I had.

  She remembered that I did. It was probably lost in the confusion of going away, she said. So many things were lost at that time, she said. “And besides,” she remembered, “you had taken it to the swing with you so often, it was so dirty from falling on the ground.”

  And suddenly
it came back to me. Not only the swing. The swing and the bear. The swing and the bear and the cherry tree. All three of those things.

  “And it wasn’t really your favorite toy,” my mom said. “It was just a bear. And dirty.”

  She didn’t know. Nobody knew. It was my very own bear.

  Nobody suggested to me about forgetting Japanese words. It was my own idea. I would lie in my bed and try to forget them. I would imagine putting them into a bag and tossing them away into the garbage.

  And yet my grandmother would always ask me how my day at school had been and had I learned important things. And I couldn’t answer her in English if she was to understand me. So I kept changing my plan. I decided to forget all Japanese except the words I would use with my grandmother. But that wasn’t practical either, because she often would not use a word for weeks and then she would speak it. I couldn’t keep track of what I was supposed to be forgetting.

  And it was actually quite hard to forget words. I didn’t realize how hard it would be. Lying in my bed at night, I would say the English names for the things in my room, over and over again. I tried to push the Japanese names out of the edges of my mind, and still they kept coming back.

  In April, a gigantic surprise came at my birthday. Peggy and her mother made me a birthday cake, chocolate with white coconut icing and twelve candles and my name in rainbow-colored frosting. I couldn’t figure out why Peggy wasn’t coming outside for afternoon recess. Her mother was bringing the cake to school right then, I saw her carrying a box but didn’t think it had anything like a birthday cake in it. When we came back inside from recess, Mrs. Porter and Peggy and Vernell had everything arranged for a party.

  They had put up streamers in green-and-white Mountaineer colors hanging from the blackboard and from the ceiling down to my desk. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Even the boys and everybody had known about this surprise party. Jerry McHenry lit the candles and everybody crowded around and sang “Happy Birthday to You.” They yelled that I should make a wish. Well, I did make a wish. And I got all the candles in one breath. Then Mrs. Porter started cutting the cake and everybody got quiet. I didn’t understand why they would be so quiet. Even Herby and Piper and all the boys.

  But then Susannah and Shadean went in the coatroom and came out with a box with a great big bright green ribbon around it. The Mountaineers’ color again, but I didn’t think about it at that moment.

  A birthday card on top of the box had everybody’s name signed inside. Then I really got embarrassed, and I wished I didn’t have to open the present.

  But I did open it, and oh, I was so happy I almost cried, well, actually I did cry a little bit, in the box was a Spalding left-handed first baseman’s glove of cowhide, with leather laces. My very own. My very own glove to use on May 28. It was so startling to have such a present from everybody in grade six, I hardly knew what to say, but I said, “Thank you, everybody,” and they all laughed. Herby jumped up and started to show me how to adjust the strap, but I already knew.

  I began pounding my fist in that beautiful new glove right away, to break it in by May 28.

  But I had to miss practice because of picking up brush from the pruning of the fruit trees. Well, everybody else in our family was doing it too. It took only a few days, and then I was back at practice again.

  The worst part was when I was picking up brush near the new pear trees I found four of them dead, and my brother found six more. The deer tracks in the mud were a clear clue. My dad was so mad, but a deer fence between the woods and the orchard has to be at least eight feet high so the deer can’t leap over it, and we didn’t even have the money to buy the wire fencing. My father worried and wondered what to do. Shig added up what a fence would cost, and it was just too much.

  Peggy and I were tied for winner of the school spelling bee, and one of us was going to go down to River Bend the next week after the Bat to compete against the 6th graders from the other schools. While we ran around the bases at recess, Ellen and Susannah and some others shouted words to us and we had to spell them. “Franchise!” “Galaxy!” “Occupation!” “Electoral!” “Opportunity!” “Migration!” “Immigration!” We had to spell them very fast, between one base and the next. Sometimes it was very silly when I would get almost to the bag with a whole bunch of letters to go. I wanted it to be Peggy who went to the county bee because I’d be so embarrassed in front of all those people.

  Forgetting how to speak Japanese wasn’t working. I couldn’t unlearn what I had known. At school of course I never spoke any. None of us four Nisei did. When I walked out of the house in the morning to get on the school bus, I was all American for the whole day. Then when I got off the bus in the afternoon, I was Japanese again. It was so hard to unlearn words I had said all my life.

  When I was with my friends it was easier. I often spent the night at Peggy’s, and never thought in Japanese while I was there. Peggy has her very own sheep which she has raised, and it got to know me. At night Peggy and I brushed each other’s hair in front of her mirror. She said she wished her hair wasn’t so bendy and boring brown, she said mine is much nicer. I don’t know if she meant it or if she was just being nice.

  You can’t always tell 100 percent with hakujin, if they are saying the truth or not. I tried to forget that word and thousands of others. I kept thinking there would be some way to make it work.

  Some kids in our class were able to unlearn things. Donald might not remember from Friday to Monday about moving the decimal point, and Vernell could forget a word or a fact overnight.

  And I couldn’t forget simple things like hashi, chopsticks, or ayatori, cat’s cradle. I tried to think that cat’s cradle had no other name but cat’s cradle. But it didn’t work.

  And I couldn’t change my eyes. They are my eyes.

  Even with all the mess of our house and the deer eating our pear trees, and even being the only Japanese in our grade, I was so happy to be back in Bear Creek Ridge. I had so many good things here. And in spring when the cherry trees came into bloom again, it was as if they were wearing enormous white dresses. I would sit in the swing, which Shig and I raised higher off the ground, and pump myself up in the air. I would empty out my mind and swing. Like a little kid. There was no panda anymore, but the swing was still there, and I was in it.

  Manzanita and Shazam

  Manzanita, left field

  I refused to believe what they were saying about how Shazam’s mother Floy was not even married when she got Shazam inside her. They said her and a boy did it and she got in the family way and she had to go away.

  I flat refused to go along with it.

  I decided to think about the things I knew for positive were true. It was when I had to hoe the ground for the garden I did the thinking. My mom did not want Darlene’s mom to get ahead of her on tomatoes. They try to beat each other every year.

  I knew I could be depended on to play my part on the team. There were those that didn’t think so. They thought God would put the spirit in me when I was supposed to be fielding, they didn’t know how God is at all.

  God wants me to do my best every day in everything I do, so why in heaven’s name would He put the spirit in me when I was supposed to be doing my job, I ask you? Coach Rayfield kept telling us all the time how we had to “take good care of the ball.” God wouldn’t want me not to take good care of the ball if I was anywhere near it, would He?

  Well, I didn’t let it bother me none. God lets everybody know what their job is, I knew I could depend on Him always and forever into eternity, Amen. I fielded very good, Coach said I had good judgment also. So how could I have bad judgment on game day? I hoed the garden breaking up the dirt for the vegetables and I knew I could just go on leaning on His everlasting arms.

  When Alva got her fielder’s glove in her Easter basket just exactly the glove she wanted, it was clear proof of God. The glove was Wilson genuine cowhide with a perfect pocket for catching. She earned the whole $6.75 herself, working chore
s for the third-grade teacher that got her leg broke. Alva took her new glove to Sunday School on Easter, she was breaking it in already.

  So we all had our gloves, even Shazam, due to Coach’s daughter Dotty sending her one from the sports department at the state college. Dotty was all set to be our first-base coach and she sent Shazam the glove in the mail, it was her pleasure she said.

  We knew we was lucky to have Dotty Rayfield come up from the college to be our first-base coach, she was MVP in her year, 1940. She come up already twice, at Christmas and her spring vacation. She made us learn her signals whether to go on or stay on first, and we did drills to remember them.

  My dad mended the backstop, and him and Hallie’s dad and some fathers from up on the Ridge made new bleacher benches for three that was split. And Ila Mae’s dad brought his tractor and mower and he cut the grass around the edge of the field so our home field would be neat looking.

  And I had only 1 hole in my face from scratching at a chicken pock. A very small hole. I did not have the self-control I should of had.

  Those were my thoughts in the hoeing. And setting out the tomatoes and planting the peas and spinach also. The dirt was even warming up. We was running along the road quite regular to build up our endurance, and we only had to have indoor practices 4 times on account of rain.

  When Shazam found out we would get to wear white shirts with red numbers sewed on the back, and our red shorts, she chose the number 7, and she bragged on how her grandmother would sew her number on. Most of us wanted to sew our own but there was no rule about we had to. I knew Shazam would not have the patience with the needle and thread when it knotted up on her, so it was better her grandmother was doing it.

  We had so many flowers starting. It was like they say a new beginning when Jesus rose on Easter, and the earth had growing things popping out of it in blessed springtime.