The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  Carl joined us. We all sat listening to the music, but with one ear waiting for the weak tinkle of our battery-crank telephone. It still didn’t ring.

  Then we heard the doorbell.

  “We missed you, and hoped you were still coming,” I said quickly, giving Taro’s father a big smile as he stood under the dim yellow glow of the porch light. Then I gasped, as he limped into the brightness of the living room, a strange young man holding his arm.

  Taro’s father’s face was battered, swollen, with a large bandage over one ear, his lip split in an ugly cut, and one eye almost closed.

  First nobody knew what to say, and then everyone was talking at once. Later, from what the young stranger and Taro’s father told us, we pieced together the story of a close brush with death. Coming north from Chicago, Taro’s father gradually became aware of two men sitting behind him who kept muttering, making cracks about Japs and where they thought Japs ought to go. When he left the bus at his destination it was dusk; then he noticed that the two men had climbed from the bus behind him. Before he knew what they were doing, each had grabbed him by an elbow and whisked him past the lighted drugstore, around the corner to a dark alley.

  Here they both jumped on him, cursing, kicking, punching, one breathing hard, “Let’s give him a good one for my kid brother,” the other puffing, “Let’s finish him off. The only good Jap’s a dead one.”

  Taken by surprise, Taro’s father had gone down before the younger men, dazed and half unconscious. Then, suddenly, here was this brawny soldier landing blows right and left on the two assailants. His name, we found out, was Mike.

  “I wish I could have roughed them up more than I did, before they got away,” Mike told us ruefully, rubbing the knuckles of his big hand. “They made me so da—— Pardon, ladies, I forget my nice language when I meet such rotten skunks. It makes me so mad I can’t see straight. A man’s an American because of what he feels inside about his country. It burns me up to hear Americans of Japanese ancestry sneered at and called Japs. Plenty of those boys spilled good blood for our country. I know.”

  Mike stopped, looked around at us. It was awesome to see such a big man with tears in his eyes. Then he looked down at the floor and his voice was suddenly small for his size. “I know, because a Nisei boy saved my life. Over at Salerno. My life—my life, at the cost of his.”

  Mike had fought for freedom in Italy. Now that the war was finally over and he was home, he was still ready to fight for it.

  “I don’t know how I can ever thank Mike for what he did tonight,” Taro’s father said humbly.

  “I wouldn’t even have been around tonight,” the soldier said, “here, or anywhere, if it hadn’t been for an American boy of your ancestry.” He turned to us, apologetically. “Those skunks really gave your friend a beating. I tried to get him to go to a doctor. I think he ought to have a stitch or two in that ear. He let us stop by our house and put a bandage over it, but he insisted he didn’t want to keep you waiting. He wouldn’t even stop to report it to the police.”

  We tried to get Mike to come in and sit down, but he told us he couldn’t stay, his wife was waiting in their car. We asked him to bring her in, while we made a pot of hot cocoa. First he declined. When we urged, he started for the door.

  “Maybe you would like to meet her, at that,” he grinned. “You know I also wouldn’t have been right there, at the right place, if it hadn’t been for her. She’d been into Chicago for the day, on a shopping trip. Coming back in the bus, she was sitting a few seats back from those two thugs. She heard them muttering. When they tagged him off the bus, she became even more suspicious. I was parked in front of the drugstore to meet her, and here she comes flying out of the bus to our car and says to me, ‘Hurry, Mike, follow those two guys!’” Mike winked at Taro’s father. “I think I got me a pretty smart wife.”

  We helped Taro’s father off with his coat, and then Mike was back at the door. “I want you to meet my wife, Cherry,” he said proudly.

  We did a double take at the beautiful, black-haired girl who clung with shyness to the hand of the big blond soldier. For Cherry was Japanese.

  “After I was wounded and sent stateside, I looked up the family of this fellow who saved my life, and that was how I met Cherry.” Mike grinned down at her. “Then they sent me to Denver to school to learn Japanese for work in the Pacific. I thought she could help me.” He laughed. “She couldn’t even speak it. So I ended up trying to teach her, but I finally gave up!”

  Mike and Cherry stayed for cocoa and graham crackers, and it was late when they left and we all went to bed. The next morning when Jane and I came down to the kitchen, there was Taro’s father sitting with his head in his hands.

  “Would you like some aspirin?” I asked. “Are you sure you shouldn’t see a doctor?”

  He managed a battered smile. “Thank you, that you are so concerned. No, my body feels stiff, but better, this morning. It is inside, now, where I am feeling bad.” He looked up with so much sadness in his eyes that I had to swallow past a stickleburr in my throat. “That turkey,” he said. “You remember, I told you I wanted to bring the turkey for the Thanksgiving dinner today? Well, Mike found my suitcase, but one of the fellows must have made away with the package with the turkey.”

  “Oh. Oh!” I was so relieved I started to laugh.

  “Is funny?” he asked, incredulous.

  “No,” I assured him, wiping my eyes. “It’s just that I’m so happy that it’s nothing worse.” I put my hand on the drooped shoulders. “It’s no matter. You go spend your time with Taro. Jane and I will make out, honestly!”

  There was no time to go out and buy a turkey, poof, just like that, even if the stores had been open—which they weren’t. We wouldn’t have had the money, anyway. Jane and I opened two cans of Spam, trimmed them to the general shape of a miniature trussed bird, molded drumsticks and wings on with the help of toothpicks, glazed the whole thing with a little brown sugar, and put it in to roast on a huge nest of seasoned stuffing.

  “A beautiful bird, a wonderful dinner,” Taro’s father said at the table, later. “A wonderful family to take care of my boy while I work. A wonderful country in which to live.” Then he added humbly, “I am very thankful.”

  As the year went by, we kept in touch with Mike and Cherry and saw more of them. Then Cherry found an opening for a worker on a large farm run by a candy company. All the workers on this particular farm were Japanese, and it would be possible for Taro to live with his father. Single men lived in a dormitory, and there were some small houses for the families. One young Japanese couple had two little boys near Taro’s age.

  “We would be happy to raise Taro with our boy, and board you both with our family,” this couple told Taro’s father, “if you want the job open here.”

  Taro’s father came to talk it over with us. We hated to give up our lovable little foster boy, since he seemed like one of our own; but we knew it was best for both of them.

  “You’ve said you miss farming,” Carl said. “Wouldn’t you be happier there, than shut up in a factory?”

  He nodded. “But Taro is so happy here, with you.”

  “Too happy for his own good,” I said gently. “If you didn’t care about him, I’d say he’d be better off if you’d let us adopt him. But you do care, and he loves you. Seeing so little of him, weeks apart, is a big strain on you both. And then, being together so seldom, he might easily grow away from you. On the farm you could be together.”

  Taro’s father smiled, and in his eyes was a hope for a new life. But we knew that Taro’s going would leave a big hole in our own family. And we also knew that, with the governor off Donny’s motor, things would not be so peaceful around our house any more.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  EARLY one summer day I decided I would transform the unfinished storeroom into a much-needed bedroom. Wallpaper had been bought for it, but Carl never had had the time to clean out the room and put
it up, and I had felt the job would be too much for me to tackle alone.

  On that day I awoke full of zing and vigor. I must have been under a spell, because I had the peculiar illusion that I could paper a dozen rooms that day, if I wanted to.

  First I mixed a dishpan full of bread dough for our weekly batch of homemade whole-wheat bread, and set it to rising in the kitchen. Then I attacked the storeroom. It would make a good child’s bedroom; although it was small, with sloping ceilings, it had a large window and was conveniently located at the end of the upstairs hall and right next to the bathroom. It had never been used, except as a catch-all for a dozen ministers’ families before us. I carted old lumber, boxes of mildewed books, and other junk down the stairs, out to the converted garage-barn, and up the ladder steps to the unused hayloft above. After the cobwebs and dirt had been swept out, I unrolled the wallpaper down the upper hall, cut it into the proper lengths, and flipped the stack upside down over newspapers. Downstairs in the kitchen I mixed up a bucket of wallpaper paste. At last I was ready to begin.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Hello,” I said, wiping my hands on my apron.

  It was our neighbor, an elderly man from the “old country” who lived alone in a shack down the street. His faded overalls were tucked into high boots, and his frayed blue shirt was open at the neck. Although his nose wasn’t overly huge, he reminded me of Jimmy Durante, with his wistful, crooked smile.

  “Hullo,” he said, and rolled his battered felt hat in his gnarled hands.

  The children swarmed to the door from all directions to cluster around me.

  “Where’s the milk?” Donny asked. Our neighbor milked another neighbor’s cow for half the milk, selling us what he couldn’t use.

  “I apologize, no milk. The cow she go dry. After she fresh again, I bring milk, okay?”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “How come the cow hasn’t got any more milk?” Donny asked.

  The old man knelt down to the children’s level, and they crowded about him. “Well you see this Mama cow will pretty soon go out for walk in meadow. What nice surprise you think she gonna find in bushes?”

  “Ice cream?” Teddy said.

  “No, no! This Mama cow, she gonna find something she like better. She find little baby calf! Then, after she get her calf, she have more milk for all us peoples to drink.”

  “Oh,” Donny said. He thought a moment, then lifted his round blue eyes. “When did you take her to see the Daddy cow?”

  I saw the red flushing through the sunburn on the old man’s grizzled neck. “Donny,” I said quickly, “would you run out to the kitchen and see if that’s a faucet running?”

  “Don’t hear any faucet running,” Donny said. “Will the cow—”

  “Donny! Mother asked you to go and see.”

  Donny went skipping off, and the old man fumbled with his hat and glanced shyly at me.

  “What I really want to ask,” he explained, pointing to our cherry tree, “is would you want me pick cherries? I pick for half of crop, you want that?”

  “I would,” I said. Our tree, which had borne a niggling yield the year before, was this year about to break under its load. The fruit was a tiny pie-cherry, too sour for eating out of hand, but excellent for canning. I knew that Carl could never get around to them.

  “Okay,” he smiled, replacing his comical hat on his white hair. “I get ladder and buckets.”

  Back in the kitchen I found Donny with dough and flour paste covering his arms beyond his elbows, and all over the front of him.

  “I punched down your bread dough,” Donny said. “It was puffing up and falling over the dishpan. I punched down the dough in the bucket, too, but it’s all gooey.”

  I pulled my own hair to keep from pulling his. “Oh, Donny! That’s paste for the wallpaper in that bucket.” As I scraped the goo from his clothes, washed him, and found a clean set of clothes, I wondered why I couldn’t reason with a five-year-old. I soon found out.

  “See how much work you’re making?” I appealed. “I know you want to help Mama, and I appreciate it. But you should ask, first. How would you feel, when you are grown up, and then your little boy made a mess like this? Right when you were busy—”

  “No bother,” Donny said earnestly, his face untroubled. “I’d have my wife clean it up.”

  I lugged the paste bucket upstairs and began brushing paste on the back of the first wallpaper strip. It was evenly smeared when the doorbell rang again. I ran downstairs. The old man was standing outside the door with a shy smile and two buckets of cherries. I thanked him and emptied my fruit into a large kettle, returning his buckets to him. I started back to my job. All the way up the stairs were small, whitish footprints. In the upper hall the footprints were black, all down the length of pasted paper. I turned at the top of the stairs.

  “Children!” I called.

  Five heads poked around the corner from the downstairs playroom.

  “Who walked all over Mama’s pasted wallpaper?”

  “Us had to go to the baff-room,” Susie said.

  “It’s a nice day,” I suggested. “Why don’t you children all go play in the back yard, until Mama gets the wallpaper up?”

  I rushed to put the first strip up, but it wouldn’t stick around the edges, where the paste had dried. When I pulled it from the wall to repaste it, a piece stuck and left a hole in the middle of the paper. Again the doorbell rang. I flew downstairs, tripping over a pull-toy at the bottom of the steps.

  “You hurry too fast,” the old man sympathized through the screen door, as he held up his buckets, again full of cherries. “Shouldna hurry, I got lotsa time. I no hurry.”

  He exaggerated. It seemed he was picking our tree with a lightning speed that kept increasing in tempo. All my pots and pans were rapidly filling with cherries.

  I detoured to the yard, to check on the children. They had been busy. From tin cans out of the trash barrel they had torn labels, and slapped them to the side of the house with a paste of mud.

  “Pitty, hmmmm?” Susie asked, pointing to the uneven rows of gaily pictured tomatoes, beans, peas, and applesauce.

  “But not there!” I pleaded. “Please, if you want to paste, I’ll give you some scrapbooks. But good heavens, not on the walls!”

  “You pasting on the walls,” Laura pointed out.

  After we gathered up the labels and washed off the side of the house, the children followed me back upstairs. The next time I ran down to answer the doorbell and dump cherries in the kitchen, the children tracked up and down again on the freshly pasted strip.

  “Us all had to go baff-room,” Rita explained.

  In desperation I put all five of them into the big, old-fashioned bathroom, laid a chair on its side across the doorway, and handed in a box of assorted toys.

  “How about staying in there like little angels?” I asked. “You can watch Mama, or play with your toys, while I finish my job.”

  “Us wants to help,” Susie said.

  “Believe me,” I said. “This is the best way you can help.”

  I brushed paste on a strip of ceiling paper, having decided it would be better to finish the top before I did the other sides to the room. Teetering on a board across two chairs, I tried to pound one end of the paper up with my dry smoothing brush, but the other end kept coming down. I shoved it back hard and my fist poked a hole through the damp paper. Then the first end plopped down in my face and wrapped around my neck. I lost my balance and fell with a loud crash.

  Teddy, craning his neck around the bathroom door, called, “See, Mama? You should of let us help.”

  After a hot lunch, the children all took naps. They had been awake, and back playing in the bathroom, as I began on the last wall.

  The doorbell was still ringing regularly. All afternoon I had protested to our neighbor that we really had plenty of cherries now, that he was welcome to the rest. He thought I was just being polite.

  “Plenty cherries for me,
already,” he said with his disarming smile. “So many you can use, with all these little kids you got.”

  I felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who, in the absence of his master, started a broom to fetching water—which it did, faster and faster, until the place was threatened with inundation. Like that apprentice, I felt vaguely responsible for starting the whole business, yet at my wit’s end for the magic word which could stop it. Every time the old man hurried up our front steps with his heaping buckets, I remembered the symphonic scherzo which Paul Dukas wrote as a musical illustration to the old folk tale; the melody ran through my head like a stuck record.

  I ran out of places to empty the prolific cherry buckets. All my pots and pans were full, the sink was full, and the bread was overflowing in the dishpan. When I went back upstairs, the water was overflowing in the washbowl and running down the hall on top of my wallpaper strips.

  “No, no, no!” I shouted, as I waded through the bathroom to turn off the faucet.

  “We were sailing boats,” Donny said.

  “You gave us boats,” Susie said. “In that toy box, boats.”

  I mopped up the water and went doggedly on with my papering. Just three more strips, and I would be through.

  The doorbell rang again. There was no counter space left in the kitchen, no empty pans, no boxes. I dumped the cherries on the floor under the kitchen table, and dragged back upstairs. The children were busy. Donny was cutting pictures from the middle of the next wallpaper strip, and Teddy and Laura were pasting them in one of Carl’s books. Rita was stirring the paste, slopping it all over the floor, and Susie was doing finger painting on the woodwork. When they saw me coming, they scrambled back over the chair into the bathroom and turned up innocent faces.

  “You said we could paste in a book,” Donny argued.

  The doorbell rang in the middle of my clean-up.

  The busy bucket-bearer looked sad. “So sorry, but all picked, now. Not one cherry left on tree.”