by Julie Otsuka
BY MORNING the snow had turned to slush and a bitter wind was blowing down through the Wasatch Mountains. “Bundle up,” said his mother. She ripped out the pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them into the cracks in the walls. She covered the knotholes with the lids of tin cans. She brought back buckets of coal from the coal pile that occasionally appeared in the middle of the road and she lit a fire in the stove. When the War Relocation Authority announced it would be distributing military surplus from the First World War she stood in line for two hours and brought back ear-muffs and canvas leggings and three size 44 navy pea coats.
The boy put on a coat and stared at his reflection in the broken mirror. His hair was long and uncombed and his face was dark brown from the sun. The coat hung down past his knees. He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his two front teeth.
I predge arregiance to the frag . . .
Whatsamalla, Shorty?
Solly. So so solly.
He poked his thumb through a hole in the wool. “Moths,” he said.
“Try bullets,” said the girl.
Their mother pulled out a needle and a spool of black Boilfast thread. She pulled out a thimble. “Let’s have a look,” she said.
THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED to ten degrees. Five. More than once, to twenty below. Ice weighed down the thin black branches of the trees and the sheets on the laundry lines froze into strange wind-blown shapes. They are frozen white sails, the boy thought to himself. Some days the wind blew from every direction all at once and the boy could not walk without falling. Small birds lost their way and dropped out of the sky. Hungry coyotes crept in beneath the barbed-wire fence and fought with the stray dogs for scraps of food. A man disappeared and was found frozen to death three days later, ten miles west of the mountains. His face was calm and smiling, they said. His eyes were closed. He had simply lain down beneath the stars and gone to sleep. Below his head, folded into a perfect red square, was a piece of tattered old silk. In his hand was the tin handle of a bucket. They could not pry it loose from his fingers.
THE GIRL STOOD in front of the cracked mirror, staring at the red dot on her chin. She touched it again and again. She said, “Darling, kissy kiss.” She said, “Just one.” Then she frowned and she bared her teeth. They were small and bright and round, like hard glittering stones.
Gently he tapped her arm.
“What?” she said, but she was not talking to him. She was talking to her reflection in the glass. “What? What? What?”
“The horse meat.”
“What about it?”
“Where do they get it?”
She puckered her lips. “From horses.”
“What kind?”
She looked at him in the mirror. “The dead kind.”
He turned the mirror around so it faced the wall.
She went to the window and looked out across the black windswept barracks. Far away, on the other side of the fence, giant tumbleweeds were slowly rolling across the basin. Some of the horse meat, she explained, came from the racetrack. If a horse went down with a broken leg they destroyed it after the race and sent it to the cannery. But most of the horse meat came from wild horses. “They round them up in the desert,” she said, “and then they shoot them.” She asked if he remembered the wild mustangs they had seen through the window of the train and he said that he did. They had long black tails and dark flowing manes and he had watched them galloping in the moonlight across the flat dusty plain and then for three nights in a row he had dreamed of them.
“Those are the ones,” she said.
THREE IN THE MORNING. The dead time. Empty of dreams. He lay awake in the darkness worrying about the bicycle he’d left behind, chained to the trunk of the persimmon tree. Had the tires gone flat yet? Were the spokes rusted and clogged with weeds? Was the key to the lock still hidden in the shed?
But it was the little tin bell that troubled him most. His father had not fastened it securely to the handlebars. “I’ll put in the screws tomorrow,” he’d said. This was a long time ago. This was months and months ago, when the air still smelled of trees and freshly cut grass and the roses were just beginning to bloom.
“You never did,” whispered the boy.
By now, he was sure of it, the little tin bell was gone.
On December 7 it will have been a year since I last saw you. I read your letters every night before I go to bed. So far the winter here has been mild. This morning I woke up at dawn and watched the sun rise. I saw a bald eagle flying toward the mountains. I am in good health and exercise for half an hour after every meal. Please take care of yourself and be helpful to your mother.
FOR FOUR DAYS after his arrest they had not known where he was. The phone had not rung—the FBI had cut the wires—and they could not withdraw any money from the bank. “Your account’s been frozen,” the boy’s mother had been told. At dinner she set the table for four, and every night before they went to bed she walked out to the front porch and slipped her house key beneath the potted chrysanthemum. “He’ll know where to look,” she said.
On the fifth day she received a short note in the mail from the immigration detention center in San Francisco. Still awaiting my loyalty hearing. Do not know when my case will be heard, or how much longer I will be here. Eighty-three Japanese have already been sent away on a train. Please come see me as soon as possible. She packed a small suitcase full of her husband’s things—clothes, towels, a shaving kit, a spare pair of eyeglasses, nose drops, a bar of Yardley soap, a first-aid book—and took the next train across the bay.
“Was he still wearing his slippers?” the boy asked her when she returned.
She said that he was. And his bathrobe, too. She said that he had not showered or shaved for days. Then she smiled. “He looked like a hobo,” she said.
That night she had set the table for three.
IN THE MORNING she had sent all of the boy’s father’s suits to the cleaners except for one: the blue pin-striped suit he had worn on his last Sunday at home. The blue suit was to remain on the hanger in the closet. “He asked me to leave it there, for you to remember him by.”
But whenever the boy thought of his father on his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue suit. He remembered the white flannel robe. The slippers. His father’s hatless silhouette framed in the back window of the car. The head stiff and unmoving. Staring straight ahead. Straight ahead and into the night as the car drove off slowly into the darkness. Not looking back. Not even once. Just to see if he was there.
CHRISTMAS DAY. Gray skies. A bitter cold. In the mess halls there were pine trees decorated with stars cut out of tin cans and on radios throughout the barracks Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas.” Turkey was served for supper, and candy and gifts from the Quakers and the American Friends Service were distributed to the children in every block. The boy received a small red Swiss Army knife from a Mrs. Ida Little of Akron, Ohio. May the Lord look down upon you always, she had written. He sent her a prompt thank you note and carried the knife with him in his pocket wherever he went. Sometimes, when he was running, he could hear it clacking against his lucky blue stone from the sea and for a moment he felt very happy. His pockets were filled with good things.
THE WINTER SEEMED to last forever. There were outbreaks of flu and diarrhea and frequent shortages of coal. They had been assigned only two army blankets per person and at night the boy often fell asleep shivering. His hands were red and chapped from the cold. His throat was always sore. His sister left the barracks early in the morning and did not return until long after dark. She was always in a rush now. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. “Where are you going?” “Out.” She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair. One day he saw her standing in line at the mess hall in her Panama hat and she hardly seemed to recognize him at all.
Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. T
he bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea—that was another time, a different year.
WHO WAS WINNING the war? Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. “Tell me when it’s over,” she said.
On days when there was hot water she went to the laundry room and washed all their clothes on the wooden washboard. Otherwise she had no tasks. She did not apply for a job as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, or as a timekeeper down on the project farm. The pay— sixteen dollars a month—was not worth it, she said. She did not give blood to the Red Cross or sit with the other mothers knitting wool socks and mufflers for the GIs who were fighting for freedom overseas.
Most days she did not leave the room at all.
She sat by the stove for hours, not talking. In her lap lay a half-finished letter. An unopened book. She wore a thick woolen scarf around her head to keep in the heat. A pair of baggy trousers. A heavy sweater. When the dinner bell rang she sat up with a start. “What is it?” she asked. “Who’s there?” In her mind there were always men at the door. We just need to ask your husband a few questions. She would stare down at her hands in her lap, as though surprised to find them still there. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep.”
“You’re awake,” the boy would tell her.
SHE SAID she no longer had any appetite. Food bored her. “Go ahead and eat without me,” she said. The boy brought back food for her from the mess hall—a plate full of beans, a mound of pickled cabbage—and pressed a fork into her hand. But before it had even reached her mouth she stopped and stared out the window. “What is it?” he asked her. “Tell me what you want. Do you want rice?”
She said she didn’t want rice. She didn’t want anything anymore. Not a thing.
But every once in a while she got a faraway look in her eyes and he knew she was thinking of some other place. A better place. “Just once,” she told him, “I’d like to look out the window and see the sea.”
ONE DAY she said she couldn’t bear it anymore. The wind. The dust. The endless waiting. The couple next door constantly fighting. She hung a white sheet from a rope and called it a curtain and behind the white curtain she lay down on her cot and she closed her eyes and she slept. She dreamed. Of warm nights in Kagoshima and chirping bell crickets and red paper lanterns drifting one by one down the river. “I was a girl again. I was five years old and fishing for trout with my father.”
“What kind of fishing pole?” asked the boy. “Was it bamboo?”
For the first time in months he thought he saw her smile.
“Yes it was,” she said. “Bamboo. Bamboo.”
IN THE HOUSE where his mother was born there were rice paper windows and sliding wooden doors and tatami mats that lay side by side on the bare wooden floors. In the evening she would catch fireflies in the rice paddies and bring them home in a brown paper bag. All night long she would sit at her desk and practice writing Chinese characters by the fireflies’ pale glowing light.
She said she’d had six older sisters and one younger brother who’d died of scarlet fever when he was four. “I still think of him every day,” she said. She said that once a year, on her birthday, her mother would make her rice with red azuki beans. “That was a treat,” she said, and then she grew quiet. She closed her eyes and lay very still on the cot. She lay there for a long long time, breathing slowly in and out until the boy could no longer tell if she was awake or asleep.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE they had left for Tanforan he had helped her bury the silver in the garden beneath the statue of the fat laughing Buddha. It was spring, and the earth was black and damp and full of worms. He had watched them squirming in the moonlight.
“Hurry up,” his mother had said.
He had touched the worms with his shovel. Some of them he had cut in half. Then the moon disappeared and a light rain was falling and water was dripping down through the leaves and the branches and onto his mother’s face.
But even before the rain, he remembered now, her face had been wet.
“WHEN I FIRST MET your father I wanted to be with him all the time.”
“I know what you mean.”
“If I was away from him for even five minutes, I’d start to miss him. I’d think, He’s never coming back. I’ll never see him again. But after a while I stopped being so afraid. Things change.”
“I guess so.”
“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We’d just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. ‘Next time I will,’ he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, Now he’ll always be thirsty.”
“They probably gave him a drink at the station.”
“I should have brought it to him.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Even now, in my dreams, he’s still searching for water.”
IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy thought he heard a sound. The steady thwack of a rope against dirt. He sat up and looked out the window and saw his sister jumping rope in the moonlight in her yellow summer dress. Her legs were long and thin. Her knees were scabbed. Her calves were pitted with scars from the sand and grit that blew night and day in the wind. She shouldn’t be wearing dresses, he thought to himself.
He went out and stood to one side of the door in the darkness. She did not see him and continued to jump. First on one leg, then on the other, then with her arms crossing and uncrossing until the rope pulled up short on her shoe and she tripped. She stomped her foot once in the dirt and tossed down the rope. “You better come in now,” he said quietly. “You’ll catch cold.”
She looked over at him. “How long have you been standing there?”
“A long time.”
“How did I look?”
“Good. You’re a good jumper.”
“I’m terrible. I don’t even deserve to hold the rope.”
He walked over to where she was standing and picked up the rope and looked at it. It was white and frayed. A piece of old clothesline she must have cut down from a pole. He imagined a line of white sheets sailing up into the air and out beyond the fence. “You better come in now,” he said again.
“I’m not here.”
He did not answer her.
“I’m a terrible jumper.”
“You’re awful.”
“The worst.”
He held out the rope to her. “Take it,” he said.
She grabbed one end of the rope and with the other end held tightly in his hand he led her slowly back into the barracks.
IN THE MORNING she woke burning with fever. Their mother brought her a tin cup filled with water and told her to drink but the girl refused. She said she wasn’t thirsty. “Nothing’s passing through these lips,” she said. She pulled back the blanket and began to pick at a scab on her knee. The boy grabbed her wrist and said, “Don’t.” She turned away and looked out the window. A woman in a pink bathrobe walked by carrying a chamberpot toward the latrines. “Where are we?” the girl asked. “What happened to all the trees? What country is this anyway?” She said she’d seen their father walking alone by the side of the road. “He was coming to take us away.” She looked down at her watch and asked how it had gotten to be so late. “It’s six o’clock,” she said. “He should have been here by now.”
IN FEBRUARY a team of army recruiters arrived looking for volunteers, and the loyalty questionnaire was given to every man and woman over the age of seventeen.
Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
The man next door answered no and was sent away along with his wife and his wife’s mother to join the other disloyals at Tule Lake. The following year they were repatriated to Japan on the U.S.S. Gripsholm.
Will you swear unqualified allegi
ance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?
“What allegiance?” asked the boy’s mother. She said she had nothing to forswear. She’d been in America for almost twenty years now. But she did not want to cause any trouble—“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”—or be labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan. “There’s no future for us there. We’re here. Your father’s here. The most important thing is that we stay together.”
She answered yes.
They stayed.
Loyalty. Disloyalty. Allegiance. Obedience.
“Words,” she said, “it’s all just words.”
INSIDE THE RUSTED PEACH TIN, a sudden burst of yellow.
The boy touched the petals with his finger again and again. “Gloria,” he whispered. It was March, and the nights were no longer so cold. The scorpions had become numerous again, and the earth was beginning to soften. The girl shoveled up spoonfuls of sand from beneath the barrack window but she could not find the tortoise. “He left without us,” she said.
Only the willow trees had not survived the winter. Their sap had not risen. Their branches were still bare. The girl broke off a twig and put it between her teeth. “Dead,” she said.
Secretly, the boy blamed himself. I shouldn’t have plucked that leaf. . . .
He began taking long walks again, only alone now, without his sister. Beyond the fence he saw the dark shadows of the clouds floating across the sand. In the distance, the mountaintops still dotted with snow. Sometimes a jackrabbit crossed his path, or a stray dog hurried by carrying something dark and furry in its mouth. Horned toads leaped across the dry white stones. Lizards basked in the sun. And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon.
THERE WERE DAYS, after rain, when the air suddenly filled with the sharp tang of sage. His mother would rise up from her cot and go to the window and take a deep breath. “Unearthly,” she’d utter.