Eventually, Harry flew back toward the heart of Napa. But he didn’t return Ava directly to their rendezvous point. Instead he flew on, passing it, and found a place to put the Stearman down in a clearing beside a pretty little lake. He circled, gestured to Ava, and brought the biplane in for a landing.
“I had a feeling you weren’t going to take me straight back,” Ava commented once he had successfully put Pollux down on the ground and cut the engine.
Harry smiled sheepishly and helped her out of the cockpit.
“Oh, yeah?” he said as they clamored down and brushed themselves off. “I guess you know everything,” he teased, but his voice was kind.
“I do know everything,” Ava joked back. “And lucky for you, I know enough to bring along provisions.” She held up the knapsack she’d brought along, and surprised him by revealing its contents: sandwiches, a bunch of grapes, a flask filled with lemonade, and a blanket. All the ingredients of an impromptu picnic. Harry grinned, but at the same time something strange happened: His cheeks colored. Ava had seen Louis blush plenty of times, but never Harry. It had a disorienting effect on her, but more disorienting still was the realization that she was flattered.
He’d landed the plane in a flat, open expanse, and now they walked toward the little lake to seek out a better view of the water, some trees, perhaps a patch of shade.
“So?” Harry said once they had picked a spot and arranged themselves and the contents of the knapsack on the blanket. “Was flying as scary as you thought it would be?”
“Yes . . .” Ava replied, “. . . and no.” She looked off into the distance, thinking of how to sum up her reaction. “It is a little frightening, but maybe in the way that reminds you that you’re alive.”
“Was that really the first time you’ve ever been up?”
She gazed at Harry for a moment and nodded solemnly. “Way back, when Earl first hired Hutch and Buzz, they offered to take me up a few times, but Earl was always in a cheap mood—‘a waste of gasoline,’ he said—and then, after a while . . . I just got comfortable with the idea of keeping my feet on the ground forever.”
“Well, that sounds awful boring.”
“I think the appeal was that it was safe,” Ava said, laughing.
“Hah—now you sound like Louis,” he joked.
“Hey, he’s not here to defend himself,” Ava objected.
Harry nodded and waved his hands in surrender. “You’re right,” he chuckled. “I suppose it’s become a reflex. That’s what Louis and I do: We heckle each other. It’s all in good fun.”
Ava cocked her head. Over the past two months she had quizzed Louis plenty about Harry, but now she had an opportunity to ask questions the other way around.
“The two of you seem as though you’ve made friends again,” she commented.
Harry blinked at her, surprised. “Louis told you we were friends before?”
Ava nodded. “When you were kids.”
Harry looked thoughtful. “It’s true, we were,” he murmured. “His friendship meant a lot to me back then. As a matter of fact . . .” He trailed off, then shook himself from his reverie and snapped back to attention. “It’s just a shame about . . . our families.”
“He mentioned there was a grievance,” Ava said.
Harry nodded. “Oh, I know all about what the Thorns think of my family. Louis’s grandfather, then his father, and now his older brother Guy—all of them—have been repeating those claims of thievery for so many years, everyone in town’s heard them.” He paused. “I wonder if the whole thing would’ve blown over by now if it wasn’t for the fact that my family and I are Japanese.” He shrugged, but there was a bitter air settling over him. “Easy enough in these parts to pile on anyone who looks a little different.”
“From what Louis has told me, it sounds like his family is pretty hard up,” Ava said. “His brother works the whole family to the bone, but they can’t seem to get ahead. Sometimes, being that poor and working hard . . . the only way it ever makes sense is if somebody stole away what should’ve been yours.” She paused, then added, “Not that that makes it right.”
Harry appeared to consider her words as he took a bite of his sandwich and chewed.
“I know we’re lucky,” he said. “These past ten years or so hit everyone pretty hard. But we didn’t make it through without a lot of hard work of our own. My father—he’s an old man now, older than most fathers—he came over from Japan when he was very young, worked hard, and saved his whole life in order to give us what we have. He didn’t steal anything from anyone.”
“I believe you,” Ava said. “It’s possible Louis even does, too. But he can’t say so aloud—not without betraying his own blood. You must know that.”
Slowly, Harry nodded. “I do.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes and their picnic continued more somberly, with nothing but the sound of the birds chirping and their own chewing for noise. Finally, Harry broke the silence and changed the subject by inquiring after the book he’d given Ava. Always happy to talk books, Ava began describing the mixed-up plot of The Comedy of Errors.
Harry tried to make sense of her retelling. “And . . . neither knows he has an identical twin?”
“No!” Ava continued explaining all the humorous mishaps written into the plot of Shakespeare’s play.
* * *
They circled back to the subject of Louis only once more, just as they were folding up the blanket to return to the biplane.
“I don’t think we ought to tell anyone about . . . this,” Ava said. “Not even Louis.”
Harry’s hands on the blanket froze for the briefest of seconds, then continued along folding it as before.
“No,” he said quietly. “You’re right. We shouldn’t. Not even Louis.”
They exchanged a look. They had said not even Louis. But both of them knew somehow it would be more accurate to say especially not Louis.
Though it was a warm day, Ava felt a little shiver pass over her arms. There was no reason to feel guilty, she scolded herself. She liked Louis plenty, and besides, she had never promised him anything.
24
The Yamadas * 1860—1935
Kenichi Yamada of California was born Yamada Kenichi in 1860 in Osaka, Japan.
It was a peculiar time to be born in Japan, for at that time the nation had developed an idiosyncratic self-consciousness about itself as a sleepy backwater. Samurai families had ruled for centuries, but now the country wished to shake itself awake and compete with the West—or at least an influential portion of it did—and as the nation attempted to modernize, there were many challenges to the class system that ranked samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants in descending order.
Kenichi’s parents were one example of the new disruption between castes, as his mother descended from the Matsudaira, an old samurai clan, while his father’s family owned the local rice mercantile in Osaka. The match had been arranged and approved by both families, of course, but represented a bargain that was familiar the whole world over: class in exchange for money.
Still, his parents seemed happy in their union together, and Kenichi’s father taught Kenichi to stand tall, to take pride in the prosperity of the rice mercantile, and to be proud of his native city, Osaka, which was also known as “the nation’s kitchen.” His father’s point of view was not considered typical among his countrymen. Sometimes they heard the cries of peddlers hailing from over their garden walls.
“Listen to that,” Kenichi’s father would say. “Your grandfather hollered those same cries and roamed the streets as a peddler when I was just a boy. Can you imagine?”
Kenichi tried to picture his paternal grandfather—by then a frail, elderly man—shouting in the streets, buying and selling rice.
“Many people disdain peddlers, but your grandfather worked very hard as a peddler . . . That is how we
earned the mercantile we have now,” his father said. “If the city is a heart, peddlers are the blood that make it pump. Never look down on anyone who works hard.”
Hard work had always been a Japanese value, but paying the same respect to a peddler as to a shogun was not. Yet Kenichi was an unorthodox child raised in an unorthodox household; he easily took his father’s point of view on the subject for his own. As fate would have it, it was an outlook that would eventually serve him well in America.
* * *
One day, when Kenichi was ten years old, he made a discovery that steered him even further toward a nontraditional path. He was snooping around his mother’s possessions when he came upon a delicately carved wooden box. He found it buried deep within a chest, keeping company with his mother’s tea ceremony things. It was a Japanese puzzle box, and once he got it open, he saw that it contained a series of letters folded up in thick, rough, foreign-looking envelopes, all of them stamped with strange-looking postmarks. He read them without hesitation, as young children are wont to do with the private letters of adults, and determined that they were from an uncle he’d never met: his mother’s brother, Haruto.
He brought the box to his mother, and when she finished scolding him for nosing about in her possessions, she sat down and told him the story of his uncle. Kenichi had never met his uncle Haruto for reasons too tangled and complex for his young mind to understand—in part due to his mother’s marriage, but also in part due to Haruto’s involvement in the Boshin War and the unusual travels that ultimately resulted. That was the next detail that grabbed Kenichi’s attention: The letters were sent from a land an ocean away. His uncle had traveled all the way across the Pacific to America, to a place called California.
A year or so earlier, Haruto had joined a group of samurai-class families financed by Matsudaira Katamori as they set sail for San Francisco. The group landed in San Francisco on May 20, 1869. They did not linger in San Francisco very long. The group pushed onward, traveling east, through the Sacramento Valley and up into the foothills that stood at the other side, until finally they reached a place called Gold Hill, where they settled for a time. They had brought with them fifty thousand kuwa trees and six million tea seeds from Japan. Once they secured two hundred acres of land, they officially established what came to be known as the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony. It was the first Japanese colony of its kind in the so-called New World.
Kenichi was less interested in the historical details than he was in imagining his uncle roaming around an exotic, faraway country. He was riveted by his uncle’s account of the journey, sailing into the San Francisco Bay and putting into port at the strange, hilly American city full of tall clapboard houses, saloons, theaters, opium dens—all of these structures populated by Western pioneers, Chinese laborers, and European gentlemen alike. In his letters, Haruto gave detailed descriptions of ship captains, merchants, painted women, and prospectors.
Haruto enthusiastically described his new life in his letters to his sister: He spent the days practicing his English, doing business at the trading posts with the old forty-niners, planting kuwa trees, coaxing silkworms into production with the mulberry leaves, and planning for the first-ever tea harvest. He wrote about the golden hills and black oaks, the orange iron tinge to the soil. He wrote about the dry, baking heat of the summer days and the icy rapids of the American River, which hosted agitated, lumbering bears hungry for salmon, and flowed with melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. Kenichi’s mother let him read the letters again and again, and Kenichi began to memorize the contents, kanji for kanji, until this place called California began to run in his veins.
* * *
“Where is Uncle Haruto now?” Kenichi asked his mother four years later. It had been some time since any new correspondence had arrived, and Kenichi still thought of his uncle from time to time, dreaming of his uncle’s adventures.
Her face clouded.
“This was the last letter I received,” she said, pointing to a letter postmarked with the year 1871. Neither of them could know: The Wakamatsu colony had been short-lived, and its members had dispersed, some of them returning to Japan, even.
It didn’t matter: Kenichi had set his sights on following in his uncle’s footsteps. He’d set about learning everything he could about this new land, California. He’d even undertaken to learn English. His mother was vaguely alarmed, and Kenichi learned to hide the secret dreams he was nurturing.
* * *
By 1878, Kenichi was a grown man, ready to embark on his own adventure. He had worked all of his adolescent years at his father’s mercantile exchange, buying and selling rice, saving his weekly pay, and making his plans in secret.
In 1879, he set sail for the California coast from Osaka Bay. The journey was long and terrible. Kenichi had never known the ocean could stretch on like that—endless mile after endless mile. There was something utterly vacant and lonely about that much sea; it was like being in a desert made of water. Perhaps it was for this reason that, once he arrived in San Francisco, Kenichi did not stay. San Francisco was a city surrounded by water, and after his tumultuous voyage across the Pacific, Kenichi craved dry land. He’d also fallen under the spell of his uncle’s letters, which had only made him more certain he might like to try his hand at farming. To his peers who had grown up with him in Osaka, the very idea of Kenichi farming would have been laughable. He was a city boy; he may have bought and sold rice but he certainly had never farmed it. However, he could not be dissuaded. He pictured the rolling hills his uncle had described and found himself joining a wagon train out of San Francisco and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, disembarking at a town not far from the site of the now-disbanded Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony.
Once off the wagon train, Kenichi felt certain he had found the place he was meant to stay, if only he could find some way to purchase a stake. He was in luck: When he inquired around town, he learned there was a young prospector eager to get a prime parcel of land off his hands. Of course, nobody told him about the poker games and bad blood between Silas Northrup and Ennis Thorn. When he happened upon Silas in the town tavern, he thought it merely a sign of his own good fortune that the young man was so desperate to sell him some land. Silas took him right away to see the land in question, and Kenichi surveyed the sloping hills and put his hands in the dirt to check the soil. He didn’t have much experience, of course, but he’d studied books about agriculture back in Japan, and the books had told him what to look for. The soil was fertile, and the terrain appeared to have good drainage; it was just right for an orchard.
“Who owns the land in that direction?” Kenichi asked, pointing. He wanted to know who his future neighbors might be.
“The Thorns,” Silas answered. “Man and his wife. Older folk. They got a son, too. It’s all apples over there, mostly.”
“Apples?”
“Sure. They got a little pasture for the cattle, and an apple orchard on the property,” Silas answered. He did not add anything more, or continue on to say, And this here land I’m selling you was a parcel belonging to Old Man Thorn that I took off him when he was too drunk to notice I had an ace hid up my sleeve . . . Instead, he remained silent, staring at the hillside as Kenichi nodded in approval.
“An apple orchard,” Kenichi repeated.
Silas’s lips moved in a slight grimace and he nodded. Just then, his eyes were drawn by a plume of dust rising in the air, far off in the distance. That would be Ennis Thorn’s wagon, he thought, headed in the direction of the Thorn farmhouse. Silas didn’t think it would be wise to linger much longer. There weren’t any drainpipes to shimmy up out there in the open fields.
“Let’s go back to town and talk it over down at the tavern,” Silas said, heading back in the direction of his horse.
“All right,” Kenichi agreed, already trying to think of the number he was willing to offer.
A few dusty miles later the t
wo men found themselves seated at the bar counter. As Kenichi hoped to stay and make this region his new home, he wanted to establish himself as a good and moral citizen. He made Silas a very fair price, and Silas accepted. They toasted the exchange over two glasses of rye.
Kenichi could not believe he’d become a landowner so quickly. Now there was only the matter of making his plans for the property. Building a little campsite, hiring a few hands of help, and deciding what to grow. Perhaps I ought to introduce myself to the neighbors, Kenichi thought. He was still new to America and unsure what the appropriate decorum might be. Little did Kenichi know, in this particular situation, he’d be hard-pressed to discover any decorum that might impress Ennis Thorn. When Kenichi began to camp on his newly acquired land, there were only three Thorns living on the property adjacent, and none of them welcomed the sight of Kenichi’s campfire in the evenings. The Thorns maintained an aloof distance from their new Japanese neighbor, establishing the relationship that would last for decades to come.
The years passed quickly. Kenichi Yamada matured from a young man into a middle-aged man. He had always assumed he would marry young. But when the first few years of his twenties passed and he had not gotten around to marrying, it did not seem so strange that another decade should pass, and then another. He was busy with plenty of hard work. The land he had bought was fruitful. Down at the growers’ exchange and packing sheds that abutted the railroad tracks in town, he regularly sold almonds, plums, and satsumas—all for very favorable prices. He built the farmhouse and then—seeing it through a potential bride’s eyes—expanded it, constantly improving it, bit by bit.
* * *
In the fall of 1916, Kenichi was finally ready for a bride, but at fifty-six he was afraid he’d waited too long, and that none would want him. The delay in marrying wasn’t entirely intentional; it was largely due to the fact that Kenichi had been busy building up the orchards and ranch—he hadn’t wanted to send back to Japan for a potential wife before everything was at its best, before everything was prosperous and ready. He was a dignified, proud man. He had insisted on making his own way in the world. His own parents had long since passed away, and Kenichi was cut off from any regular communication with Japan. Now he only had his land, his orchards, and his farmhouse to offer—and he wanted them to be perfect. The thought of asking a wife to move halfway around the world for anything less struck him as distasteful.
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