The Little Exile

by Jeanette Arakawa

  “What?”

  “They don’t want us to be seen by people outside the train, I guess,” May said. Again, with a laugh, “Or maybe, they don’t want us to look out, because they suspect we’re spies!”

  “I don’t think they suspect us of being spies,” I said. “The FBI put us ‘under house arrest’ back in January. That’s what everyone called it. They moved in with us for a week. Brian and I weren’t allowed to go to school and my mother had to shop with an FBI agent. After one week they decided we were not spies or anything like that. So I don’t think they suspect us of being spies. They already took care of that. But it’s okay that we pull the shades. I’d rather not be seen riding this train anyway.”

  “Oh,” said May and smiled.

  I thought about it for a while. Then I began to wonder: would the shades be drawn as we passed through Los Angeles? My best friend in San Francisco, Beverly Jensen, had visited Los Angeles once and she said that the sidewalk curbs were very high and jumping off them on skates was difficult. Will I be able to see that for myself?

  I asked May.

  “Earlier,” May replied, “a soldier told us that we would have to pull down the shades when passing through towns, cities, train stations, roads paralleling the tracks—anywhere there was the possibility that people would be around. So that would include Los Angeles and probably most of California, I would guess. But there are large stretches of desert in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas we should be able to see. And open our windows and enjoy the desert air. It won’t be so bad. We can still have a good time,” she said with a laugh.

  I soon discovered that May loved to talk. So time passed quickly, despite not being able to look out. May was a pretty lady, with large, laughing eyes and pencil-drawn eyebrows. Her mouth was held in a perpetual smile. And when she spoke, a hearty laugh punctuated her sentences, even though what she said was not always funny.

  Although Tom wore glasses, he was as handsome as May was pretty. He had eyes that angled out slightly, giving him a gentle, kind look. Deep dimples formed in both cheeks whenever he smiled or stretched his lips a certain way.

  May and Tom had not been married very long. May was born on a farm near Lodi, a town outside Stockton, and Tom had grown up in Japan, so their childhoods were very different. Tom had been sent to Japan when he was six years old to be raised by his grandparents. He returned to the United States just before Pearl Harbor. He spoke in Japanese, mostly. May, on the other hand, had never been to Japan. Her Japanese was at the same level as Tom’s English. Tom would speak to May in Japanese and she would answer in English. It seemed to work. But he was very quiet and didn’t have much to say. He and May rarely spoke to each other at all, but that may have been because I was there.

  May also shared what seemed every detail of her childhood with me. She had grown up on her family farm with two brothers and four sisters. They were assigned chores and were responsible for the care and feeding of their chickens and cows, as well as helping with the grape harvest. She described the steps involved in her tasks, so that I felt if I ever lived on a farm, I would know exactly what to do. May also told me about how she and her siblings got into a fair amount of trouble. She and her brothers and sisters were always hungry, she said. Once they cooked some sweet potatoes on a fire in the barn on the hay-strewn floor. Their carelessness resulted in a fire that almost destroyed their barn. She showed me a scar on her leg.

  “This is a permanent reminder of my misbehavior,” she said.

  In exchange for having May tell me her life story, she wanted to hear mine. It wasn’t as interesting as hers. Since I grew up in the city I didn’t tend animals or do anything interesting like that. I didn’t do any chores to speak of, so I was of absolutely no use to my parents or my family. I just played.

  “How lucky you were that you didn’t have to do chores!” May said

  At that moment, Brian appeared in the aisle.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Actually, I want my ball. It’s under your seat.”

  The seats rested on metal legs that were nailed to the flat wooden floor. Brian and his friends were playing catch in the aisle. Whenever Brian or his friends lost control of his ball, it rolled freely like the steel ball in a pinball machine, down the aisle and in the open spaces between packages and boxes placed under the seats.

  “Get it quick, Marie, before it rolls away!” Brian shouted.

  I slipped down onto the floor and scooped it up. As I reached over to give it to him, he asked, “You want to play?”

  “No.”

  “You’re missing a lot of fun. . . .”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He had found boys to play catch with him, so he didn’t really need me to play with him, anyway. Sometimes, some of the seated adult passengers also joined in and caused a commotion. They would play “keep away” by throwing the ball to each other instead of returning it to the boys.

  The aisle had become a playground. For Brian, it had become his home away from home. He played catch in it, ran through it, and sat in it. He even stretched out and slept in it. It seemed the only time he was in his seat was when a soldier appeared.

  Brian would scramble over our luggage into his seat the moment a soldier stepped through the door.

  “Stay out of the aisle!” the soldier would shout if he saw the kids were not in their seats. But it didn’t take long for them to figure out when the soldier was coming. He had a schedule. He appeared once every hour and whenever the train began to slow down. Occasionally, though, the soldier would surprise us. I never knew when he would appear and shout at Brian. It was like watching the scary Abbott and Costello movie Hold That Ghost where dead bodies unexpectedly fell out of closets. After that, I covered my eyes whenever someone was about to open a door in a movie. Neither doors opening in movies nor the sudden appearance of soldiers seemed to bother Brian.

  * * *

  After sunset, a soldier lit the hurricane lamps at each end of the coach and ordered us to lower the shade. Whatever light left outside trickled in through the narrow windows along the bottom of a flat dome built on the roof of the car. When that light faded, it was time to go to sleep, because it was too dark to do anything else. I used my coat as a pillow. I would put it against the window or against May and Tom’s bags, but I really couldn’t lie down. I also slept in my clothes, so technically I hadn’t gone to bed. Therefore, the following morning, I saw no need to wash up or even brush my teeth. And I didn’t.

  On the other hand, May would be the first one out of her seat as soon as the darkness was broken by the growing light of dawn. With disheveled hair, smeared eyebrows, and rumpled clothes, she would remove a few things from her suitcase and put them in a bag. Then she would disappear into the telephone-booth-sized lavatory that was stuck in the corner of the car. A long line of passengers would begin to fill the aisle. Finally, she would emerge fresh and beautiful. Like a butterfly out of a cocoon. Or Superman out of a phone booth. But May never made a comment about my poor hygiene. Nor did anyone else.

  It was May’s idea to teach me to play rummy. It happened when we were stalled in a train station. An armed soldier entered our car and stood guard at the door. That happened whenever the train slowed down or stopped. Tom, who dozed or read through most of the trip, didn’t doze or read when soldiers were in the car. His eyes grew large. Better to see the soldier and follow his every move, I thought. A spot on his jaw below his ear would begin to bulge in and out as though there was some creature trapped inside trying to pound its way out. As Tom watched the soldier, I watched Tom.

  “Honey, let’s play cards!” May said with a laugh.

  “What?”

  “We can play rummy.”

  Then she turned to me. “Do you know how to play rummy, Marie?”

  “I know how to play fish. . . .”

  “Rummy is a lot more fun. Come on. We can teach you. Can’t we, Tom.”
/>   “Yeah. Sure.”

  She stood up and rummaged through her purse that was hanging on the hook above the window and pulled out a deck of cards. Then she reached over and grabbed several large Saturday Evening Posts from the pile of reading material stacked on top of their baggage. She set them on our laps to use as individual tables. She dealt the cards and explained how the game was played. Although rummy was a little harder, May was right. It was a lot more fun than fish. . . .

  But the hardest part of the game was keeping the cards from sliding off the slick cover of the magazines. I had to concentrate on keeping my knees together so my “table” wouldn’t collapse. But I wasn’t the only one. Tom’s table would collapse, too. And May would collapse with laughter when that happened.

  “This takes concentration, Tom,” she said. “Focus on the game. You can do it!” She laughed again.

  He turned to her and sighed.

  “Let’s just play.”

  Just when I was close to “going out,” our stationary train felt like it was struck by another train. Tom and May were almost pushed out of their seats by the jolt, and our cards became a scrambled mess.

  “I guess we’ve finally hooked up with an engine,” May said as she gathered the cards together.

  We never spent a day or night without crashes, jerks, and rapid chugs of locomotives trying to grip the tracks with their spinning wheels. That was the feel and sound of one train detaching us and another attaching. And that was how May explained it. Our train would stop, then back up onto a spur line. The main train would unhook us and leave. What seemed like hours later, another train would back into us with a crash to ensure proper coupling, then move forward with a jerk to test the union. Then we slowly chugged off toward Arkansas.

  The train eventually worked through the slips and stumbles and found an even rhythm. The wheels began to click a steady beat. Eventually, a soldier came through the car announcing that the blinds could be raised. May reached over and pulled on the shade and then released it. It snapped up to the top of the window revealing what resembled a beach without the ocean. Sand dotted with short, stubby plants.

  “This will probably be all we’ll see for a while.” said May. “I think we’re in some kind of desert.”

  “I guess that means we won’t be stopping for a while,” she continued. “Let’s see if we can finish a game this time.”

  Our cars, filled with people rejected by our country, were rejected by one train after another as we slowly made our way halfway across the continent. I told May ours was a “train of rejection.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were a ‘rejection train,’” said May. “I would rather call it a ‘buttermilk train.’”

  “A what?”

  “Let me explain. Milk trains stop at every station to pick up milk at towns along its route. I know that from experience,” she added.

  “This one stops at all the stations, but with all the jerking, bumping, and shaking going on, the cream in the milk would surely be butter by now. Butter and milk. Buttermilk. Get it?” She threw her head back and laughed at her own joke.

  Then she went on to explain how she would skim the cream off milk back on the farm, and shake it in a jar until it turned to butter.

  “Try that the next time you get milk from the store,” she said. “Just pour the cream off the top . . .” She stopped in mid-sentence.

  Would I ever be able to go to a store again, I wondered. Would I ever be able to skate on sidewalks again? Would I ever be able to do anything normal again?

  It was as if she had been listening to my thoughts. She leaned forward to pull me close for a hug, just as the train came to a grinding halt without warning. I tumbled forward onto her, and we found ourselves nose to nose. We just looked at each other for a moment. Then she began to laugh, and her whole body began to shake in rhythm with her laughter. The feeling of her laughter made me laugh. Together we laughed until our blended tears rolled down our cheeks.

  Suddenly, I was struck by the silence. Something was not right. There was not the usual bump, jerk, and chug that followed our stops. We had not been notified of the stop, nor told to lower the shades. Had we had reached our destination? Were we in Arkansas? I looked out the window. We were still in the desert. No houses. Nothing. Are they going to let us off here in the middle of nowhere?

  “May, is this it? Is this our new camp?” I shouted.

  At that moment, a soldier entered our car. “We’re stopping here to stretch our legs.”

  I sat back and felt my whole body relax and melt into the seat.

  “What a relief!” I said. Getting off the train sounded good. It was three days into our journey, and I had not walked on anything but the pitching, rolling train floor. This is great! I thought.

  As we lined up to leave, I waited until my parents and Brian were right behind me, so we could all get off the train together. Brian and I might be able to play tag or something, I thought. But as I started to step out the door, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flash. I turned to see a blade catching the sun just inches from my face. It was attached to the rifle of a soldier standing on the ground below. Obviously, this was not the first armed soldier I’d ever seen, but this was the closest I’d been to his weapon. Then I saw other flashes in the distance, out in the desert. Several other soldiers, bayonets gleaming in the sun, stood like posts of an invisible fence.

  “Don’t stop there! Keep moving!” the soldier shouted as he motioned with his rifle. As he swung his rifle I kept an eye on his bayonet so I wouldn’t get hurt. Then I moved away quickly, but not too quickly. Away from this soldier. Down the steps. Onto the stepstool and down to the ground. He would just as soon poke me with his bayonet as look at me, I thought. Playing tag with Brian would not be a good idea, either, I decided.

  I stepped away from the train and waited for Mama. It didn’t feel good standing outside the train surrounded by armed soldiers. We’re like corralled animals, I thought. I could feel my stomach churning with a mixture of fear and anger. As soon as Mama got to the ground I ran to her and threw my arms around her waist.

  “Why are they doing this to us, Mama? Why!” I shouted at her between sobs.

  Mama just held me close and stroked my head until I calmed down.

  “I just want to return to the train,” I said. “I don’t want to roam in their corral.”

  We were the first ones back on the train with the others right behind. Even Brian returned to the train without exploring the edges of our outdoor desert prison. I sat at the window and watched the people in lines waiting to board the train with the armed soldiers slowly moving in behind them.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Be Careful, It’s My Heart”

  FRANK SINATRA

  Two days later we finally arrived at the Rohwer Relocation Center. It was October 6, 1942. My tenth birthday. Rohwer was located in the southeast corner of Arkansas, in the middle of the Mississippi River bottomlands, in the middle of a forest, in the midst of barbed wire fence and guard towers.

  Our train stopped at the edge of a clearing. From the top of the steps, I could see black tar-paper houses much like the ones in Stockton Assembly Center. After days of bright desert, the black buildings set against the background of dense trees seemed dark and gloomy. It heightened my fear and indescribable loneliness. I looked around for Mama.

  “Marie!” Brian snapped. “Over here! Don’t just stand there. Come on! We need to stay together.” I said a quick “good bye” to May and Tom and ran to be with my family.

  There was a long line to board the trucks to take us to the administration building. Here we would be “processed” again. They would check our luggage and give us our apartment assignments. In order to get to our new homes before dark, we couldn’t dawdle. This was no time for daydreaming.

  We finally boarded an army truck that resembled a covered wagon. From an old wooden train onto a covered wagon to our home in the forest. Just like the movies about the olden d
ays, I thought. We climbed aboard and sat on the wooden benches in the rear of a covered truck filled to capacity with people who had not bathed or changed their clothes in four days. The air was stifling. Mercifully, a few moments later, we were getting off at the administration building. We emerged only to line up again to enter the building.

  Once inside, we were directed to a table where Papa and Mama were required to sign a bunch of papers. Brian and I looked over Papa’s shoulder and helped him when a section seemed unclear.

  A questionnaire asked what kind of work experience people had, so they could be put to work in areas they were familiar with. We also got our housing assignment.

  After processing, we stood in another line to be driven to our new home. We were the last to board another truckload of unwashed people. Being the last ones on had its advantages.

  We traveled a road between clusters of buildings, each surrounded by a moat. Like a castle would have. Except there was no water in the moats. Why would we need empty moats, I wondered.

  Our first stop was at a block in a clearing that had almost no trees. I followed Mama and Papa as they climbed down. This isn’t bad, I thought. It seemed cheery with the sun shining freely and abundantly. Then I learned it wasn’t our block. We were just making way for those in the back of the truck. After driving up and down roads through shaded blocks and sunny blocks, we were finally dropped off in the most densely forested part of the camp.

  Our new home was in Block 8 in the farthest corner of the camp at the edge of the wilderness.

  The trees were so dense, the sky was barely visible. Leaves on the branches fanned out trying their best to block out the sun. The gloom I felt when we arrived, returned. This was to be our permanent home. “For the duration,” Mama said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “That means ‘until they decide to let us out.’”

  “You mean until the war ends?”

  “Yes. I think so. That’s how others think of the ‘duration.’”