She mulled over how to begin, staring at the shimmering silver surface of the creek.
“I kissed him,” she finally said. “Louis, I mean.”
Harry didn’t say anything.
“At Farrow’s party,” Ava added. “He kissed me . . . and I . . . I suppose I kissed him back.”
“I know,” Harry said quietly.
“But you don’t know,” Ava replied, her voice firm.
“It’s all right,” Harry said.
“It’s all right?”
He pressed on. “Louis is kind and decent, he’s—”
“Not you.”
Ava felt Harry’s body jolt with surprise as she said the words. Not you.
“The kiss didn’t mean anything, Harry,” she continued, intent on driving her point home. “And I realize the reason it didn’t mean anything is because Louis is not you. Haven’t you ever thought about . . . us?”
“No.” He shook his head.
Ava had braced herself for this, but even so, watching him shake his head now, she felt the early sting of rejection.
“You deserve someone who is more . . . like yourself . . .” Harry was floundering for words now. “Someone who is . . .”
“What?” she demanded.
“Someone who isn’t about to be detained in a camp somewhere,” Harry answered. “Louis will be here for you.”
“But I’d rather you were,” Ava said. “Do you understand? I don’t want Louis, I don’t choose Louis. I choose you.”
Harry was silent. Ava rose to her feet, angry.
“Dammit, Harry, you’re brave about everything else in life—why not about this?”
He stood and faced her. Their expressions were lost in the dark, but he seemed angry, too, Ava thought—though why, she could not comprehend.
“What on earth do you think I want to do? Don’t you understand letting you go is being brave?”
It didn’t make sense. Ava was annoyed. She let out a huge sigh of exasperation and turned to go. But as she did, she felt Harry’s hand on her arm, suddenly turning her back around. He kissed her, and she kissed him back. It was a very different kiss from the one she’d shared with Louis.
* * *
Standing in the trees some distance away, Louis watched them, a silent witness. He bristled as he watched their two bodies come together. He’d been restless, thinking matters over, and taken a walk in the wooded area at the border of the Thorn and Yamada properties, drawn to the old childhood meeting spot he’d shared with Harry. He’d planned to sit and think things over, perhaps remind himself of their friendship—old and new.
And now, here Harry was. But not alone. Louis stood there, frozen, unable to take a step closer. Unable to make his presence known. He had seen and heard things. All of them things he could neither unsee nor unhear.
Eventually, Harry and Ava walked back in the direction of the Yamada homestead. Louis remained, still as a statue. When nearly a half hour passed without a single sign of another human being, Louis began to move again. He turned on his heel and walked in the opposite direction—back in the direction of the Thorn farmhouse and everything it represented.
52
Early the next morning, Louis Thorn made his way up the dirt road that led to the Yamadas’ farmhouse, approaching their residence via the official route instead of cutting through the woods. A gentle dawn broke in the sky above, painting the clouds in pastels, and Louis moved with purpose and determination.
He had made up his mind.
Shizue Yamada answered the door when he knocked. She pushed the screen door open, slightly surprised by Louis Thorn’s presence on her porch at such an early hour. Neither of them spoke, but after a fleeting moment Shizue understood the young man wished to see her husband. She pushed the screen door open even further, giving Louis the signal to enter. Once inside, Louis crossed to the fireplace mantel and remained standing, waiting. His body language made it plain that he didn’t intend to stay long and that he didn’t intend to sit down. Shizue went to fetch her husband.
Less than a minute later, Kenichi Yamada appeared in the sitting room. He understood his young neighbor had arrived at a decision with regard to his request and was ready to give him an answer. The expression on Louis’s face was not encouraging. Kenichi coughed, clearing some of the morning’s congestion from his throat.
“Good morning,” Kenichi greeted the young man.
Louis nodded. He, too, coughed.
“I’ve made up my mind,” Louis reported, with no further preamble.
“I see,” said Kenichi. He braced himself for bad news. He looked at Louis, studying the face of his son’s best friend. Your average Caucasian boy, sandy-haired and blue-eyed. Kenichi had observed that Louis was often myopic in his view of the world but occasionally magnanimous with his sympathies once he raised his head and really saw the world around him. But Louis did not look particularly magnanimous that morning. Did this young man understand the power he held? It was a given that he understood what the Yamadas had to lose and gain. Did he understand the implications of it all?
“I’ll sign,” Louis said.
Kenichi blinked. From the expression on the boy’s face, he’d been bracing himself for a different answer.
“I’ll sign what you need,” Louis restated.
Kenichi gathered his composure.
“I cannot thank you enough,” he said. “My family cannot thank you enough.” Though he knew perfectly well the act meant nothing to Louis, Kenichi bowed, purely on instinct. It was a deep, sincere bow—a significant gesture coming from a man so advanced in his years, to bow so deeply to a young person.
“How soon can we get this done?” Louis asked abruptly, before Kenichi had quite finished bending at the waist.
Louis’s interruption, his terseness, his tone, bothered Kenichi somewhat. It was distant, cold . . . but there was something else, too. There was anger in Louis’s voice. It seemed a perplexing contrast to Louis’s gracious gesture to act as their guardian.
“I have the papers already drawn up,” Kenichi said, repeating the information he had given Louis the day before. “It is only a matter of signing before a notary. We can visit the notary at your convenience.”
Louis nodded. His eyes bore a faraway, distracted look.
“I’ll be in town around three o’clock today,” he said. “If that suits.”
“I will tell Haruto,” Kenichi said, nodding. He bowed again—a smaller, slighter bow.
“Good,” Louis said. He turned to go.
“Wouldn’t you like to see him?” Kenichi said, surprised.
“I’ll see him this afternoon” was all Louis said in reply. He continued on his way and let himself out the front door.
Kenichi watched the young man go. Louis had agreed to sign and legally take ownership of all that the Yamada family possessed. That ought to have been a relief to Kenichi, a ray of hope in the darkness that was America’s manic political climate. Instead, Kenichi felt unsettled and on edge. Something was not quite right; something in Louis Thorn’s demeanor was not reassuring. Kenichi knew there were reasons not to trust the boy. He had hoped none of them would ultimately dictate the boy’s actions. The day before, Kenichi was confident his hopes were not misplaced. Now something had changed.
“Was that Louis who was just here?” Haruto asked, coming into the sitting room and pulling aside the curtain in order to peer outside. He quickly made out the familiar figure of his best friend retreating into the distance. It was plain that Haruto had only just woken up. His hair was rumpled and his eyes were not quite open, groggy with sleep.
“Yes,” Kenichi answered.
“What did he say?” Haruto asked.
“He said he would sign as guardian of our property,” Kenichi replied.
“That’s good of him, right?” Haruto said, but already his
voice was a little weaker, his resolve less sure. “Why didn’t he stick around? Didn’t he want to talk to me? Why didn’t you or Okāsan wake me?”
Kenichi only stared out the window to where he could see Louis Thorn’s shape growing smaller as it disappeared down the drive. He put a hand on his son’s shoulder.
“He said he would meet us at the notary at three o’clock today,” Kenichi said, hoping his voice conveyed reassurance.
His son frowned, and looked from Kenichi’s face to the window. “You mean . . . he only wanted to set up a time to sign?” he asked.
“Yes, Haruto,” Kenichi said. “It is most generous of him. We owe him a debt, to be sure.”
“Yes . . .” Haruto murmured. “I guess so.”
His son glanced again out the window, but already the familiar shape of his son’s friend had vanished.
53
At first, Ava refused to drive Earl’s old Model A truck, which would ultimately bring Harry, his sister, Mae, and their mother and father to the designated pickup location. It was plain she thought she was making a righteous stand in her refusal, that she was somehow sticking up for Harry and the Yamadas by being unhelpful. It was misguided, perhaps, but endearing.
“You know we can’t drive ourselves,” Harry said. “No automobiles are allowed in the camps; we have to leave it all here.”
Ava didn’t answer.
“We’ll just ask your mother, then,” Harry said. He laughed as though he’d gotten the last word or won some sort of staring contest.
“All right. Fine,” Ava agreed.
In the end, they all went together to see the Yamada family off: Ava; her mother, Cleo . . . and Louis, too, when he finally turned up of his own accord.
The Yamadas had packed carefully but assembled near the curb in front of a local Methodist church. (How ironic, Ava thought, that the government had designated churches as the sites of so many pickup points.) The Yamadas looked strangely disorganized, lost . . . Centuries of proud family history and decades of Kenichi Yamada’s dedicated labor had been transformed into a hurried jumble of embarrassment, with the ultimate result that they looked like a pack of hobos.
All over America, Japanese families stood on the curbs at other bus stops, their trunks and suitcases lined up, looking overstuffed and straining. The men and women and children looked a little overstuffed, too, having bundled themselves up with as many layers of clothing as they could stand, so as to be able to transport as much as possible. This would not have been so inconvenient in March and April, but by May the weather had turned unseasonably warm, and the expressions on people’s faces betrayed their discomfort.
“Do you have your list?” an Army soldier in uniform demanded.
Kenichi handed it over. They had been instructed that the head of each household was to do all the talking, all the paperwork, all the accounting for what was being toted along with them to the camps. The government intended to interact with as few individuals as possible, and the Army soldiers assigned to direct them could not be expected to attend to distressed women and crying children.
The soldier took the list and, with a group of his peers, checked the Yamadas’ baggage. It was mostly all clothes, pots and pans, toiletries. After the F.B.I.’s initial visit, the Yamadas had obediently turned in everything that had been declared contraband, the sorts of things a spy might be expected to have: radios, cameras, and so forth.
“All clear here,” the soldier declared, pounding the topmost suitcase on the Yamadas’ pile with his fist in approval. They moved on to the next family lined up along the curb.
Each family was assigned a number. Evacuation tags were tied to everything. There were quite a few families; over the decades, a large number of Japanese had settled into the areas surrounding Loomis, Penryn, and Newcastle. The farmland had been perfect for growing plums and mandarins. “The fruit basket of the nation,” folks called it. Like the Yamadas, the issei—the first generation—had immigrated years earlier, and the majority of their children had been born on American soil, where they grew up playing baseball and speaking English far better than Japanese. Of course, none of that mattered now. As far as the Army was concerned, they were all Japanese, period.
“All right! LOAD UP!” the soldier who had inspected their luggage hollered. They had finished checking all the families off their list.
In other parts of the nation, Greyhound buses and school buses had been commissioned to pick up and transport the Japanese to the internment camps. In the smaller, more rural areas, like Newcastle, the government sent military trucks instead of buses, making the rounds of all the ranch towns. Evacuees rode in the back, in the drab, olive-green darkness of the covered cargo beds, as the trucks bumped along, kicking up a terrible cloud of dust behind them.
“They mean for you to ride in there?” Ava gasped and murmured in disbelief. “Like . . . Army cargo?”
A shadow of fear darkened Mae’s eyes. She turned pale, and her face squirmed as though she was fighting back tears.
“Hey . . . no . . .” Harry tried to soothe his sister. “It’s gonna be all right.” He put his arms around his kid sister and hugged her to his chest. Over the top of Mae’s head, he shot Ava a scolding look. She bit her lip and scowled. She knew she would aid the Yamadas in their departure best by being quiet, but she couldn’t help herself. It was all too outrageous, too unjust—all of it.
Louis, meanwhile, had appeared stoic up until that point. Days earlier, he had signed the paperwork to take ownership of the Yamada property and all of the Yamadas’ remaining possessions. All of them had noticed his cold demeanor; none of them had commented on it. Louis had promised to say good-bye on the day of their departure, and now he was there, making good on his word, but he had arrived separately and had strode up with his hands in his pockets, looking detached.
However, seeing the evacuation labels dangling from the Yamadas’ luggage and from the Yamadas themselves—they had been requested to tie the same labels bearing their family number to their coats—Louis’s expression softened for the first time in a week. A small wrinkle of worry crept into his brow as he peered at the Army trucks.
The soldiers were urging the evacuees to hurry up now.
Everyone said good-bye. Ava and her mother hugged and kissed each member of the Yamada family, with Kenichi and Shizue looking particularly surprised and stiff by these unexpected embraces. Louis shook hands.
When he got to Kenichi Yamada, Louis paused. He stood up straight, placed his hands against the sides of his legs, and bowed respectfully from the waist. Harry watched in surprise. In that moment, he felt certain his father had made a wise decision entrusting Louis Thorn with all they ever had. It will be all right, Harry thought. Although he had repeated this phrase aloud several times since hearing about the evacuation order, it was the first time Harry had genuinely said it to himself and meant it.
The Yamadas shuffled into a line of people loading into the back of one of the trucks. They climbed up and took a seat on one of the benches within, clutching their suitcases in their laps. When the motor started up and the truck began to pull away, Ava and her mother waved.
It looked as though the Yamadas waved back, but it was difficult to be sure. It was a sunny day out and they were lost in the darkness of the truck’s canopy. Ava squinted and convinced herself she saw a hand moving, a flash of light in the gloom, but then a dust cloud rose up behind the truck and in a single swirl, and they were gone.
54
Tule Lake, California * May 20, 1942
The Army truck that picked up the Yamadas on the morning of May 6 brought them first to the Sacramento Assembly Center, a place otherwise known as Camp Kohler. There was little there; it had been used for years as a camp for migrant workers, outfitted—as nearly all migrant workers’ camps are—with the most Spartan of accommodations. Japanese families were packed into a series of shacks with others. Toi
lets were outhouses. Showers were nonexistent. They heard there were worse assembly centers: in the Bay Area and down near Los Angeles, for instance, Japanese families had been gathered at racetracks whose operations had been temporarily suspended. Rumor had it that the families in those facilities were sleeping in actual horse stalls.
At the assembly center just outside Sacramento, days passed as the Yamadas were asked to fill out more paperwork, until it was decided that they would be sent from the Roseville rail station up to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, where, supposedly, resources had been set aside for the internees, and more permanent lodging was waiting for them. This same decision was made about the majority of Japanese Americans who passed through Camp Kohler, but some were sent down to Manzanar in Southern California, and still others were rumored to have been sent as far away as Arkansas. All things considered, the Yamadas felt grateful to stay in California, assuming it was best not to be sent so far away from home that they might never return to Newcastle. They had pinned all their hopes on Louis Thorn, and they wanted very much to return.
A train took them north to Tule Lake, then a bus brought them from the station to the camp. Everyone held their breath, hoping this new, presumably more permanent camp would be a significant improvement over the poor facilities at the assembly centers they’d had to endure. Mae pressed her nose against the glass of the bus window, her eyes searching for anything familiar, but the land was strange to her. Its wide, flat, dry landscape was punctuated by several faraway buttes, giving the impression of an alien planet. There wasn’t much out there in the way of towns, of civilization. Perhaps that was the point: to keep them away from anything important, anything they might spy on or sabotage or think to bomb. Mae let out a grunt and a chuckle—not a chuckle of joy but a small, sarcastic, precociously bitter chuckle—to think of herself, a young girl, being so powerful as to merit being quarantined from her town, her school, her home. It was ridiculous, and would be funny if it didn’t also make her sick to her stomach.
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