It was a fine living room, clean and quiet. He gave Susan Marie credit for that, just as he had given Carl credit for the chimney and dormers, and while he stood there admiring her hand in everything she appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Sheriff Moran,’ she called. ‘Hello.’
He knew then that she hadn’t heard. He knew it was up to him to say it. But he couldn’t just yet – couldn’t bring himself – and so he only stood there with his hat in his hand, rubbing his lips with the ball of his thumb and squinting while she came down the stairs. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Heine.’
‘I was just putting the baby down,’ she answered.
It was a far different woman from the one at church – the winsome fisher wife serving tea and coffee. Now she wore a dull skirt, no shoes, and no makeup. She had a diaper draped over her left shoulder, spittle stained, and her hair had not recently been washed. In her hand was a baby bottle.
‘What can I do for you, sheriff?’ she asked. ‘Carl hasn’t come home yet.’
That’s why I’m here,’ Art replied. ‘I’m afraid I have some … bad news to report. The worst sort of news, Mrs. Heine.’
She seemed at first not to understand. She looked at him as if he’d spoken in Chinese. Then she pulled the diaper from her shoulder and smiled at him, and it was his duty to make clear this mystery.
‘Carl is dead,’ said Art Moran. ‘He died last night in a fishing accident. We found him this morning tangled in his net out in White Sand Bay.’
‘Carl?’ said Susan Marie Heine. ‘That can’t be.’
‘It is, though. I know it can’t be. I don’t want it to be. Believe me, I wish it wasn’t true. But it is true. I’ve come to tell you.’
It was strange, the way she reacted. There was no way to have predicted it ahead of time. Suddenly she backed away from him, blinking, sat down hard on the bottom stair, and set the baby bottle on the floor beside her toes. She dug her elbows into her lap and began to rock with the diaper between her hands, wringing it between her fingers. ‘I knew this would happen one day,’ she whispered. Then she stopped rocking and stared into the living room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Art said. ‘I’m … I’m going to call your sister, I think, and ask her to come on over. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Heine?’
But there was no answer, and Art could only repeat that he was sorry and step past her in the direction of the telephone.
7
In the back of Judge Lew Fielding’s courtroom sat twenty-four islanders of Japanese ancestry, dressed in the clothes they reserved for formal occasions. No law compelled them to take only these rear seats. They had done so instead because San Piedro required it of them without calling it a law.
Their parents and grandparents had come to San Piedro as far back as 1883. In that year two of them – Japan Joe and Charles Jose – lived in a lean-to near Cattle Point. Thirty-nine Japanese worked at the Port Jefferson mill, but the census taker neglected to list them by name, referring instead to Jap Number 1, Jap Number 2, Jap Number 3, Japan Charlie, Old Jap Sam, Laughing Jap, Dwarf Jap, Chippy, Boots, and Stumpy – names of this sort instead of real names.
By century’s turn over three hundred Japanese had arrived on San Piedro, most of them schooner hands who jumped ship in Port Jefferson Harbor in order to remain in the United States. Many swam ashore with no American currency and wandered island trails eating salmonberries and matsutake mushrooms until they found their way to ‘Jap Town’: three bathhouses, two barbershops, two churches (one Buddhist, the other a Baptist mission), a hotel, a grocery store, a baseball diamond, an ice cream parlor, a tofu shop, and fifty unpainted and slatternly dwellings all fronting onto muddy roads. Within a week the ship jumpers possessed mill jobs – stacking lumber, sweeping sawdust, hauling slab wood, oiling machines – worth eleven cents an hour.
Company books preserved in the Island County historical archives record that in 1907 eighteen Japanese were injured or maimed at the Port Jefferson mill. Jap Number 107, the books indicate, lost his hand to a ripping blade on March 12 and received an injury payment of $7.80. Jap Number 57 dislocated his right hip on May 29 when a stack of lumber toppled over.
In 1921 the mill was dismantled: all of the island’s trees had been fed to the saws, so that San Piedro resembled a bald stump desert. The mill owners sold their holdings and left the island behind. The Japanese cleared strawberry fields, for strawberries grew well in San Piedro’s climate and required little starting capital. All you needed, the saying went, was one horse, one plow, and a lot of children.
Soon some Japanese leased small plots of land and entered into business for themselves. Most, though, were contract farmers or sharecroppers who worked in fields owned by hakujin. The law said they could not own land unless they became citizens; it also said they could not become citizens so long as they were Japanese.
They saved their money in canning jars, then wrote home to their parents in Japan requesting wives be sent. Some lied and said they’d gotten rich, or sent pictures of themselves as younger men; at any rate, wives came across the ocean. They lived in cedar slat huts lit by oil lamps and slept on straw-filled ticks. The wind blew in through the cracks in the walls. At five o’clock in the morning bride and groom both could be found in the strawberry fields. In the fall, squatting between the rows, they pulled weeds or poured fertilizer out of buckets. They spread slug and weevil bait in April. They cut back the runners on the yearlings first and then on the two- and three-year-old plants. They weeded and watched for fungus and spit bugs and for the mold that grew when it rained.
In June, when the berries ripened, they took their caddies into the fields and began the task of picking. Canadian Indians came down each year to join them at working for the hakujin. The Indians slept at the verges of fields or in old chicken houses or barns. Some worked in the strawberry cannery. They stayed for two months, through raspberry season, then they were gone again.
But for at least a solid month each summer there were endless strawberries to pick. By an hour after dawn the first flats were mounded over, and the foreman, a white man, stood writing Roman numerals in a black book beside the name of each picker. He sorted the berries in cedar bins while men from the packing company loaded them onto flatbed trucks. The pickers went on filling flats, squatting in the numbered rows.
When the harvest was over in early July they were given a day off for the Strawberry Festival. A young girl was crowned Strawberry Princess; the hakujin put on a salmon bake; the Volunteer Fire Department played a softball game against the Japanese Community Center team. The Garden Club displayed strawberries and fuchsia baskets, and the chamber of commerce awarded trophies for a float competition. In the dance pavilion at West Port Jensen the night lanterns were kindled; tourists from Seattle poured forth from the excursion steamers to perform the Svenska polka, the Rhinelander, the schottische, and the hambone. Everybody came out – hay farmers, clerks, merchants, fishermen, crabbers, carpenters, loggers, net weavers, truck farmers, junk dealers, real estate brigands, hack poets, ministers, lawyers, sailors, squatters, millwrights, cedar rats, teamsters, plumbers, mushroom foragers, and holly pruners. They picnicked at Burchillville and Sylvan Grove, listened while the high school band played sluggish Sousa marches, and sprawled under trees drinking port wine.
One part bacchanal, one part tribal potlatch, one part vestigial New England supper, the entire affair hinged on the coronation of the Strawberry Princess – always a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder – in an oddly solemn ceremony before the Island County Courthouse at sundown of the inaugural evening. Surrounded by a crescent of basketed strawberries, she received her crown with a bowed head from Amity Harbor’s mayor, who wore a red sash from shoulder to waist and carried a decorated scepter. In the hush that ensued he would announce gravely that the Department of Agriculture – he had a letter – credited their fair island with producing America’s Finest Strawberry, or that Ki
ng George and Queen Elizabeth, on a recent visit to the city of Vancouver, had been served San Piedro’s Best for breakfast. A cheer would fly up as he stood with scepter high, his free hand about the young maiden’s shapely shoulder. The girl, it turned out, was an unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice who allowed the festivities to go forward with no uttered ill will.
The next day, at noon traditionally, the Japanese began picking raspberries.
Thus life went forward on San Piedro. By Pearl Harbor Day there were eight hundred and forty-three people of Japanese descent living there, including twelve seniors at Amity Harbor High School who did not graduate that spring. Early on the morning of March 29, 1942, fifteen transports of the U.S. War Relocation Authority took all of San Piedro’s Japanese-Americans to the ferry terminal in Amity Harbor.
They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on, people who had risen early to stand in the cold and watch this exorcising of the Japanese from their midst – friends, some of them, but the merely curious, mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything.
During the morning recess the accused man’s wife had come alone to the row of seats behind the defendant’s table and asked permission to speak with her husband.
‘You’ll have to do it from back there,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘Mr. Miyamoto can turn and face you all right, but that’s about it, you see. I’m not supposed to let him move around much.’
Once each afternoon, for seventy-seven days, Hatsue Miyamoto had appeared at the Island County Jail for a three o’clock visit with her husband. At first she came alone and spoke with him through a pane of glass, but then he asked her to bring the children. Thereafter she did so – two girls, eight and four, who walked behind her, and a boy of eleven months whom she carried in her arms. Kabuo was in jail on the morning their son began to walk, but in the afternoon she brought the boy and he took four steps while his father watched from behind the visiting room windowpane. Afterward she’d held him up to the glass and Kabuo spoke to him through the microphone. ‘You can go further than me!’ he’d said. ‘You take some steps for me, okay?’
Now, in the courtroom, he turned toward Hatsue. ‘How are the kids?’ he said.
‘They need their father,’ she answered.
‘Nels is working on that,’ said Kabuo.
‘Nels is going to move away,’ said Nels. ‘Deputy Martinson ought to do the same. Why don’t you stand where you can watch, Abel? But give these people some privacy.’
‘I can’t,’ replied Abel. ‘Art’d kill me.’
‘Art won’t kill you,’ Nels said. ‘You know darn well Mrs. Miyamoto isn’t going to slip Mr. Miyamoto any kind of weapon. Back off a little. Let them talk.’
‘I can’t,’ said Abel. ‘Sorry.’
But he sidled back about three feet anyway and pretended not to be listening. Nels excused himself.
‘Where are they staying?’ asked Kabuo.
‘They’re at your mother’s. Mrs. Nakao is there. Everybody is helping out.’
‘You look good. I miss you.’
‘I look terrible,’ answered Hatsue. ‘And you look like one of Tojo’s soldiers. You’d better quit sitting up so straight and tall. These jury people will be afraid of you.’
He fixed his gaze directly on hers, and she could see he was thinking about it. ‘It’s good to be out of that cell,’ he said. ‘It feels great to be out of there.’
Hatsue wanted to touch him then. She wanted to reach out and put her hand on his neck or place her fingertips against his face. This was the first time in seventy-seven days that they had not been separated by a pane of glass. For seventy-seven days she’d heard his voice only through the filter of a microphone. During this time she had never once felt composed, and she had stopped imagining their future. At night she’d brought the children into her bed, then exerted herself fruitlessly toward sleep. She had sisters, cousins, and aunts who called mornings and asked her to come for lunch. She went because she was lonely and needed to hear the sound of voices. The women made sandwiches, cakes, and tea and chattered in the kitchen while the children played, and this is how the autumn passed, with her life arrested, on hold.
Sometimes in the afternoons, Hatsue fell asleep on a sofa. While she slept these other women cared for her children, and she didn’t neglect to thank them for it; but in the past she would never have done such a thing, fall asleep, drop away in the middle of a visit while her children ran about recklessly.
She was a woman of thirty-one and still graceful. She had the flat-footed gait of a barefoot peasant, a narrow waist, small breasts. She very often wore men’s khaki pants, a gray cotton sweatshirt, and sandals. It was her habit in the summer to work at picking strawberries in order to bring home extra money. Her hands were stained in the picking season with berry juice. In the fields she wore a straw hat low on her head, a thing she had not done consistently in her youth, so that now around her eyes there were squint lines. Hatsue was a tall woman – five foot eight – but nevertheless able to squat low between the berry rows for quite some time without pain.
Recently she had begun to wear mascara and lipstick. She was not vain, but she understood that she was fading. It was all right with her, at thirty-one, if she faded, for it had come to her slowly over the years, an ever-deepening realization, that there was more to life than the extraordinary beauty she had always been celebrated for. In youth she had been so thoroughly beautiful that her beauty had been public property. She had been crowned princess of the Strawberry Festival in 1941. When she was thirteen her mother had dressed her in a silk kimono and sent her off to Mrs. Shigemura, who taught young girls to dance odori and to serve tea impeccably. Seated before a mirror with Mrs. Shigemura behind her, she had learned that her hair was utsukushii and that to cut it would be a form of heresy. It was a river of iridescent onyx – Mrs. Shigemura described it in Japanese – the salient feature of her physical being, as prominent and extraordinary as baldness might have been in another girl of the same age. She had to learn that there were many ways to wear it – that she might tame it with pins or weave it in a thick plait hanging over one breast or knot it intricately at the nape of her neck or sweep it back in such a manner that the broad, smooth planes of her cheeks declared themselves. Mrs. Shigemura lifted Hatsue’s hair in her palms and said its consistency reminded her of mercury and that Hatsue should learn to play her hair lovingly, like a stringed musical instrument or a flute. Then she combed it down Hatsue’s back until it lay opened like a fan and shimmered in unearthly black waves.
Mrs. Shigemura, on Wednesday afternoons, taught Hatsue the intricacies of the tea ceremony as well as calligraphy and scene painting. She showed her how to arrange flowers in a vase and how, for special occasions, to dust her face with rice powder. She insisted that Hatsue must never giggle and must never look at a man directly. In order to keep her complexion immaculate – Hatsue, said Mrs. Shigemura, had skin as smooth as vanilla ice cream – she must take care to stay out of the sun. Mrs. Shigemura taught Hatsue how to sing with composure and how to sit, walk, and stand gracefully. It was this latter that remained of Mrs. Shigemura: Hatsue still moved with a wholeness of being that began in the balls of her feet and reached right through to the top of her head. She was unified and graceful.
Her life had always been strenuous – field work, internment, more field work on top of housework – but during this period under Mrs. Shigemura’s tutelage she had learned to compose herself in the face of it. It was a matter in part of posture and breathing, but even more so of soul. Mrs. Shigemura taught her to seek union with the Greater Life and to imagine herself as a leaf on a great tree: The prospect of death in autumn, she sai
d, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself. In America, she said, there was fear of death; here life was separate from Being. A Japanese, on the other hand, must see that life embraces death, and when she feels the truth of this she will gain tranquillity.
Mrs. Shigemura taught Hatsue to sit without moving and claimed that she would not mature properly unless she learned to do so for extended periods. Living in America, she said, would make this difficult, because here there was tension and unhappiness. At first Hatsue, who was only thirteen, could not sit still for even thirty seconds. Then later, when she had stilled her body, she found it was her mind that would not be quiet. But gradually her rebellion against tranquillity subsided. Mrs. Shigemura was pleased and claimed that the turbulence of her ego was in the process of being overcome. She told Hatsue that her stillness would serve her well. She would experience harmony of being in the midst of the changes and unrest that life inevitably brings.
But Hatsue feared, walking home over forest trails from Mrs. Shigemura’s, that despite her training she was not becalmed. She dallied and sometimes sat under trees, searched for lady’s slippers or white trilliums to pick, and contemplated her attraction to the world of illusions – her craving for existence and entertainment, for clothes, makeup, dances, movies. It seemed to her that in her external bearing she had succeeded only in deceiving Mrs. Shigemura; inwardly she knew her aspiration for worldly happiness was frighteningly irresistible. Yet the demand that she conceal this inner life was great, and by the time she entered high school she was expert at implying bodily a tranquillity that did not in fact inhabit her. In this way she developed a secret life that disturbed her and that she sought to cast off.
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