Eagle & Crane

by Suzanne Rindell

  The rest of the house still gave Louis pause, though. He found he was afraid to sit on the furniture in the sitting room, afraid to open the drawers in the kitchen—afraid, even, to open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom one morning when Louis had cut himself and needed something for the wound. Perhaps “afraid” was the wrong word; it was more like that strange feeling that comes with trespassing, a feeling of holding one’s breath. Louis jumped each time he thought he heard an automobile come up the drive, as if the Yamadas were coming home and he’d been caught.

  Louis wondered if he would feel the same if not for the very specific and complicated ties between the Thorns and the Yamadas. He wondered—not aloud, of course—if he would feel as deeply uncomfortable if there wasn’t a part of him that sometimes contemplated what it would be like to keep the Yamada property, to not give it back. He wondered if Ava didn’t look disgusted with him for exactly the right reasons.

  His older brother, Guy, certainly had his own opinions on Louis’s role as guardian of the Yamada estate.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Guy said, “that property has been returned to its rightful owners. Father would roll over in his grave if he thought you’d just hand it back over to those Japs.”

  “Well, then,” Louis replied in a calm, quiet voice, “I guess Father’s rolling over in his grave, then. I promised I would give it back to Mr. Yamada, and I intend to keep my word.”

  “Then you’re a traitor, and a bigger fool than I thought you were,” Guy said.

  After that, Louis’s trips “home” to the Thorn ranch grew increasingly infrequent.

  * * *

  One day, however, Louis was specifically summoned to the Thorn ranch. His younger brother Clyde was dispatched to fetch him. Surprised, Louis blinked down into the earnest blue eyes of his little brother as he stood on the Yamadas’ front porch. Ever since Louis had begun living on the Yamada property, none of his brothers or sisters had come calling. Louis suspected that Guy had forbade it.

  “Mama said I was to come get ya.”

  “Now?”

  It was a Sunday, a lazy day. Louis had figured there’d be no rush.

  “She said the sooner I could get you to come over, the better,” Clyde said.

  “Anyone hurt?”

  Clyde shook his head. “Just . . . come.”

  “All right,” Louis agreed, puzzled by this strangely urgent yet vague request. He reached inside the entryway for where his hat hung on a hook. It was a hot day out, and the sun was directly overhead.

  Together the two brothers walked the distance from the Yamada farmhouse to the Thorn household. They arrived sticky, dusty, and thirsty.

  As they entered the little clapboard house by letting themselves in through the kitchen door, the only thing on Louis’s mind was the need for a tall glass of water. If he was being honest, he was a little nervous to see Guy again; the last time Louis had seen his brother, Guy had made it clear—yet again—that he was not pleased with Louis.

  Now, as Louis walked through the door, he immediately saw Guy sitting at the breakfast table along with his girl, Lindy, and their mother, Edith. For a fleeting moment, Louis wondered if the news was something to do with Guy and Lindy. Guy had told Louis he intended to propose; perhaps this was to be a celebration party.

  But this notion evaporated as quickly as it had come. Louis’s brow furrowed when he noticed that Lindy’s face looked downcast and his mother was quietly sobbing. Across the table, Guy held her hand, his jaw clenched as though enduring something taxing. But it was what Guy was wearing that finally caught Louis’s attention above all else: a uniform.

  Louis froze.

  After Pearl Harbor, Louis had expected that some of his brothers might enlist, but not Guy. Guy was too essential to the Thorn ranch. He had been the head of the household ever since their father died, and for some of the younger Thorn children, he was the only father figure any of them had ever known. But Louis also knew that after Pearl Harbor, Guy couldn’t stop talking about the war. He memorized every detail of every newspaper and radio report. He had opinions about tactical strategies and got himself good and worked up talking about patriotism.

  Louis stared at his brother, dressed in full Navy uniform. The last they’d seen each other, Guy had called Louis a traitor and told him to stay off the Thorn property. Louis didn’t expect a warm reception, and he didn’t get one.

  “What are you doing here?” Guy demanded, his voice an unfriendly grunt.

  “I asked Clyde to send for him,” Edith Thorn explained, mopping her face with a soiled handkerchief. “I thought he might talk some sense into you.”

  Guy stood up abruptly. The kitchen chair made a scraping sound against the weather-beaten wooden floor. “Him talk sense? I think you got that backward,” he said, indignant.

  “What in the hell are you doing, Guy?” Louis asked.

  “Language!” Edith snapped. Louis repressed an urge to roll his eyes. They all knew their mother couldn’t be bothered to police their language anywhere but church. It was too chaotic in the Thorn house: There were too many boys; as a harried widow, she was outnumbered. She only really came down hard on the two girls, Marion and Ruth, about their manners. It mattered when it came to girls, she figured.

  “Who’s going to run things here on the ranch?” Louis demanded.

  “Ma will,” Guy answered. “And Marion and Otis.”

  “I thought . . . I thought . . .” Louis looked at Lindy, sitting at the table. He stood debating how much to say, when he noticed a ring. The proposal must’ve already happened during Louis’s absence. “I thought you were getting married?”

  “We’re planning on marrying when I get back,” Guy answered stiffly. “Hopefully there’ll be more money then. Her grandmother left Lindy that old house by the railroad tracks; Lindy’s going to take in boarders while I’m gone.”

  Louis blinked, still overwhelmed. “When . . . when do you ship out?”

  “Today,” Guy replied. “I gotta report to San Francisco by tomorrow morning.”

  “And you’re going to—”

  “Japan,” Guy said, firm in his resolve. “Or the Pacific, at least.”

  Louis didn’t know what to say.

  “I guess you’ll get to kill some Japs there,” he said. “That’ll make you happy.”

  Guy looked at him, aware that Louis meant it, but inclined his head in a serious, solitary nod. “I’m happy to do my duty for our country,” he said. His voice was so full of conviction, Louis felt impressed in spite of himself. “Hell,” Guy said, shaking his head now. “It’s your duty, too. It’s this whole nation’s duty.” He paused, and looked his younger brother over from head to toe. “But I suppose you’d rather stay here and play babysitter to some Jap family’s property—property they done stole in the first place, to boot.”

  “If you won’t let him talk you out of this foolishness,” Edith snapped at Guy, “then at least you’ll say good-bye in proper fashion. You’re brothers.”

  Guy and Louis looked at each other, neither of them yielding.

  “I’ve said everything I have to say to him,” Guy said. “If he won’t admit that those Japs next door are our enemies, then he might as well be my enemy, too.” He looked at Louis. “I hope you think about that.”

  “What if you’re . . . you’re . . . killed?” Edith said, making one last attempt to reconcile her children.

  Guy shrugged. “I got nothing else to say. I’d have more respect for you if you did something useful—like enlisting yourself—but I can already tell, you ain’t gonna do anything of the sort.” He gave Louis one last look. “You’re a coward and a traitor. So I don’t give a damn about you bein’ here to see me off.”

  He turned and stalked out of the room.

  “Guy—” Lindy said, following him.

  Edith’s eyes flooded with a fresh wav
e of tears. She tipped her forehead down to her clasped hands on the table, then, after a moment, raised her head and looked up.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” she said. “I know he needed to see you, that he wants to say good-bye . . .”

  “No.” Louis shook his head. “He means it.”

  Edith only looked at him.

  “He means well . . . but he also means every word he says,” Louis added with an air of finality. He paused, and without having gotten the glass of water he had been dying for, let himself back out the kitchen door.

  * * *

  Ava noticed that Louis seemed upset after visiting his family, but she knew enough about what made Louis tick to wait several days before asking what might be troubling him.

  “Guy enlisted” was all Louis said when Ava finally asked.

  Ava knew Louis and his brother had argued over Louis’s involvement with the Yamadas. She also knew Louis looked up to Guy. Whatever had happened, Louis seemed angry with Guy, but he also seemed sad, too. A month or so later, Ava—who rarely set foot inside the Yamada house, where Louis was now sleeping—noticed a framed photograph had appeared on the mantel of the Yamadas’ fireplace. To her knowledge, Guy had gone off to the Pacific theater to fight the Japanese. It was strange and slightly unsettling to think of his photograph now displayed in the Yamadas’ house, and what that meant to all parties involved. But then, the world was getting to be a pretty strange place. Ava said nothing more to Louis on the subject. She worked hard on the orchards, thinking all the time of the Yamadas, and—if she were being honest—of Harry in particular.

  The days passed. Before she knew it, summer had come and gone, the light grew honeyed and leaned in sideways, and autumn was upon them.

  57

  Tule Lake, California * October 31, 1942

  Rain shower from mountain

  quietly soaking

  barbed wire fence.

  —SUIKO MATSUSHITA

  When the Yamadas arrived in late May, the muddy land that surrounded the Tule Lake Relocation Center had already baked into dry clay, and soon afterward the season transformed into a hot summer of dry dust and ash. By October, the ash had turned to mud again. Fences were erected around the camp, and Harry saw that his relief at not seeing fences when they first arrived had been foolish. It had only ever been a matter of time.

  Of course, when you got down to it, the barbed-wire fences were somewhat absurd. There was no place for the internees to go, for there was nothing for miles around.

  They were offered jobs—offered, the government repeated the word often, emphasizing the difference between offered and assigned. Most of the jobs involved intensive physical labor and paid less than the poorest migrant workers’ wages back home. Despite this unappealing combination, the majority of internees accepted some form of employment anyway. They were restless and bored; they needed some semblance of the lives they had known before internment, and regular work had certainly been part of that. Camp officials put Japanese men and women to work either producing goods for the war effort or coaxing vegetables from the dry earth all around the camp. Harry and his father decided to volunteer for the latter, assuming their experience on the ranch would prove useful. They found themselves having to learn everything all over again: The only crops grown at Tule Lake were potatoes, wheat, and onions. These were not crops that Kenichi or Harry knew, let alone knew well. But little by little they learned alongside their fellow internees. Soon the camp had established a steady yield, and Japanese-American agriculture proved it had earned its reputation for good reason. The soil, mostly volcanic, was actually not terrible. It was irrigation that presented the largest challenge. The summer months were so dry that everything died. The earth baked back into hard clay.

  * * *

  After the Yamadas’ first experience in the mess hall, the food did not improve much, and camp food turned out to be problematic for the Yamadas in more ways than one. No one except perhaps Shizue herself understood how diligently she’d been managing her epilepsy with good nutrition . . . until the camps. Over the years, on the ranch, she had been able to keep the handful of seizures Shizue was not able to avoid from her children—more or less. She had been proud of this fact, of the way she had been able to hide her illness. The episodes had been minor events compared to the seizures she’d experienced in Japan. Often she suffered a minor attack in silence—or, when she could not conceal her affliction, Kenichi knew what to do and was able to help her.

  But all of that changed in the Tule Lake camp, where their food consisted mostly of starch, and sleeping through the night was a luxury. Shizue’s health deteriorated rapidly. The first seizure, a terrible one, happened in the morning, two weeks after the Yamadas had moved into the shack that was to be their home. Shizue was removing a pot of boiling water from the small camp stove they had set up to serve as a makeshift kitchenette. Her head tipped downward and, staring into the flickering flame of the camp stove as she lifted the pot, she felt the old sensations come over her.

  She felt her body grow rigid and a curtain drop over her senses.

  Mae was the only one to see her mother suddenly stiffen like a board and did not understand at first what was happening. It looked as though a lightning bolt had shot through her mother’s body, and seconds later her mother’s body went rigid, her eyes rolled back in her head, and Shizue keeled over—almost as though someone had flipped an electrical switch. Mae screamed as her mother hit the ground, the pot of hot water cascading down as it left the safe grip of her mother’s tea-towel-wrapped hand.

  Her father and brother came running.

  “Turn her on her side!” Kenichi commanded, and the three of them scrambled to accomplish this. Kenichi felt in his wife’s mouth for food or any other kind of obstruction and, satisfied, made certain she was breathing.

  “Should I fetch someone?” Mae asked, recovering from the shock.

  “No time,” Kenichi replied. “Haruto,” he barked in an uncharacteristically authoritative tone. “We’ll carry her to the infirmary.”

  Harry nodded. Together they lifted Shizue’s limp body. Harry took most of the weight; Kenichi was quite elderly, but Harry also understood his father’s need to help carry his own wife, to keep the contact of touch between them. Harry realized he had never seen his father look so worried.

  At the infirmary, Shizue regained consciousness. The nurse tended to Shizue’s burns. The water had scalded her arm badly, but the nurse assured her that it would heal.

  “Camp stoves aren’t really allowed, you know, and you shouldn’t be boiling water in your barracks if you’re accident-prone,” the nurse scolded, clucking her tongue. Her tone was friendly yet firm, the same as a kindly schoolteacher.

  Kenichi recoiled.

  “My wife is not accident-prone,” he corrected the nurse. “She had a seizure.”

  Harry flinched inwardly to hear his father’s faint Japanese accent—an accent Harry had never paid much mind to before.

  “Well, I don’t see any evidence of that,” the nurse drawled, her tone still friendly but now tinged with a hint of condescension. “Low blood sugar is what I see. A simple glass of orange juice ought to fix you right up!” She smiled. The nurse had tended to Shizue’s wounds after Shizue had already come to, so Kenichi guessed that perhaps the nurse simply did not understand.

  “No. It was a seizure. She has had them all her life,” Kenichi insisted.

  “Well, if that’s true, then she certainly should have developed a technique for managing them,” the nurse replied. It was plain the nurse still did not believe Shizue was anything other than thin and clumsy. “Has she seen a doctor for them?”

  “Yes,” Kenichi replied. “Is there a doctor here we may see?”

  “Oh.” The nurse’s cheerful face fell. She wasn’t offering. The poor Japanese fellow had gotten himself confused. “No,” she replied, “I’m afraid the doctor co
mes twice a month, and today is not one of his days.” She paused. “I just meant has she seen a doctor in the past?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” The nurse relaxed and smiled. “Then whatever his advice was, I’m sure it was sound. If she’s always had seizures, like you say, then it’s nothing curable, and it’s a question of proper management.”

  Shizue had not spoken during their entire exchange, and the nurse said these last words, “proper management,” with slow, deliberate articulation, as though the nurse wasn’t entirely certain Shizue spoke English.

  * * *

  The seizure scared them all, but they didn’t discuss it. Kenichi and Harry continued to toil in the fields, Mae attended the makeshift school that had been organized for the internees’ children. After she recovered, Shizue took a job sewing bandages for the troops. She wasn’t particularly chatty herself, but she liked to hear the other women gossiping over their needles and sewing machines.

  * * *

  And then there was communication with the outside world. They were allowed to get mail, and postal service—while slow—was often the only connection between the camp and the rest of America. Of course, there were plenty of subtle reminders that even these communications were under scrutiny. Envelopes arrived already opened, letters often had various sentences and paragraphs blacked out—sometimes even the idlest comments on food or the weather. This was especially when they contained correspondence between internees and Japanese friends or family members assigned to other camps. The hysterical notion prevailed that the entire Japanese-American population was entirely made up of spies lying in wait.