Weedflower

by Cynthia Kadohata

  “The Office of Indian Affairs wants you to stay,” he said.

  “I thought the Indians didn’t want us here,” Sumiko said, surprised.

  “Some of them don’t.” Frank looked at her with that steady gaze of his.

  “I thought you didn’t want us here.”

  “I didn’t. Neither did my family.” Then he did that thing again where he tilted his head a touch. “But we’ve changed our minds. The government is spending money to bring water to the reservation. You’re cultivating the land.”

  “That’s because we’re slave labor.”

  “I just mean you’re here anyway.” He lay back. “It’s nice in this field.” He turned lazily to her. “So what kind of flowers did your family raise?”

  “We specialized in kusabana. That means ‘weedflower.’” She felt pride well up in her. “We had some of the best kusabana at the market. We also grew carnations.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “California.” She waited for him to reply. When he didn’t, she said, “What about you? What kind of Indian are you?”

  “Mohave. We were here first. Then came the Chemehuevi. Now the government wants to bring Hopi and Navajo onto the reservation. In fact, they’re going to take over your barracks when the war ends.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “It’s better conditions than some of them have now,” he explained. “So what happened to your farm?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I mean gone for us. A lot of people lost everything they had during the evacuation.” She hugged her knees to her chest.

  He shrugged. “You’re not the first people to lose things.”

  Sumiko stared at him, then shocked herself by bursting into tears. Frank sat up, looking really surprised. Then all of a sudden she pictured Baba’s big eyes, and she cried about that. Then she was thinking about her grandfather and uncle shivering up in North Dakota, and she cried about that.

  Frank let her cry for a while and then said nervously, “Don’t go crazy on me here.”

  But she kept crying.

  Finally he sat up and touched her arm. “Weedflower Girl,” he said, “don’t cry.” He spoke with such concern, it was as if he were a different boy. Seeing this different boy made her stop crying. Then someone called his name, and he became nonchalant again. “I better go. I’ll be back in two days. Bring me more ice.” He pushed his way out of the vines.

  She scrambled after him, calling out, “My name is Sumiko, not ‘Weedflower Girl.’”

  21

  SUMIKO WISHED THERE WERE A LIBRARY IN CAMP SO SHE could look up Mohave. There was a library, actually, but it had about seven books so far. There weren’t any teachers to ask either. She wasn’t sure whether she would ever have to go to school again. In October everybody still talked of building a schoolhouse, but even if someone built a schoolhouse, there would be no books, no desks and chairs, and no teachers. When and if the time came, everyone said the kids would just have to drag their chairs to school.

  Sumiko kept busy gardening. It was selfish, but when someone asked for some of her flowers, she said no. Ordinarily, she would have given people all the flowers they wanted, but she had secretly entered the garden in the camp contest and didn’t want to sacrifice even one blossom. She had felt like a spy filling out the entry form.

  Besides gardening, Sumiko’s main pastime became trying to stay cool. Some people became obsessed with shade. Mr. Moto and a couple of men on Sumiko’s block would take their chairs outside, set them in the shade, and then move the chairs around as the shade moved. Mr. Moto called them “shadeseekers,” as opposed to another group of men on the block who were called “windchasers.” They sought out not only shade but breezes as well.

  Sumiko still couldn’t get used to the heat. It made her head feel foggy. She dreaded the afternoons and the inescapable heat. She tried both windchasing and shadeseeking. In the end, however, her solution was to try to stay as still as possible during the hottest hours of the day. The problem was that when she stayed still, all sorts of thoughts pushed their way into her head. She thought about how scary it would be to leave camp, and she thought about Frank. She wondered if he qualified as a “friend.” Sachi was a friend, and if Frank was a friend as well, that meant she had two friends. Three, counting Mr. Moto.

  Friendship was really different from the way she had envisioned it all these years. It seemed a lot more complicated. She’d thought friends just hung around together and held the same opinions on just about everything.

  Two days after she’d last seen Frank there, Sumiko returned to the same bean tunnel. When she got there, it had been cut down! But Frank called out to her from somewhere else. She saw him stand up, waving from some brush in the distance. She walked over and handed him his ice. He didn’t say a word as he slurped at it.

  She had also brought a piece of snake Mr. Moto had cooked and salted. When Frank finished the ice, he said, “What is that?”

  “I brought you some salted snake to eat.”

  He reared back a bit. “I can’t eat snake!”

  “How come? It’s good.” She was still holding the meat between her fingers. She felt insulted.

  Frank spoke patiently, as if to a child. “Mohave believe that some animals may be some of our ancestors come to visit us. So we can’t exactly eat them.”

  “What about cows?”

  “That’s ridiculous. What ancestor would come back as a cow?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe a fat ancestor.”

  “I don’t have any fat ancestors.”

  They sat quietly for a moment. It felt awkward.

  “Why aren’t you watching your brother?” he asked.

  “He’s out… somewhere.”

  “Do your parents watch him?”

  Sumiko didn’t know who was watching him. There were only Japanese around, so who would hurt him? “My parents died in a car crash.”

  He seemed genuinely disturbed to hear that. “I’m sorry.”

  “I was just a little girl,” she said. She was pleased with how that had come out. It had sounded rather worldly.

  “And now you’re … ?” He seemed amused.

  She couldn’t tell if he was trying to insult her. “Now I’m a big girl, of course.”

  “Sensitive,” he muttered.

  “Well, what about you?” she asked. “What do your parents do?”

  “My mother is a tribal secretary.” He turned away from her. “My father is gone.”

  “Gone dead or gone away?”

  He looked at the ground. “The first.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He paused. “It’s a very bad thing to talk about the dead,” he said quietly. Then, even more quietly, he added, “I miss him.” He almost whispered, “He had a heart attack.” He looked around as if someone might be watching. He’d whispered so quietly, she had to think a moment before she figured out what he’d said. He suddenly pulled gum out of his pocket and unwrapped it. “My brother Joseph was asking about your flower farm,” he said, putting the gum in his mouth. He offered her some, but she declined. “One of my brothers joined the army a few months ago, and Joseph is going to leave for basic training soon. But I think I told you that when they come back, they’re going to farm. My brother says the water you’re bringing in is going to change our lives.”

  So she told him about disbudding flowers, and about grading, and about the different types of flowers they raised, and about the flower mart, and about everything else she could think of. And also about the ponds and waterfalls men were building in camp.

  “You use the irrigated water to build your ponds?”

  “No, well water.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “We have a well. But in the past Mohave were always dry farmers. There’s a little irrigation on the reservation but not much. Did you irrigate your flower farm?”

  “Uh-huh, we used ditch irrigation. We didn’t eve
n use turnouts. It was very simple.”

  “What’s a turnout?”

  “That’s the little thingamajig that lets water onto the field from the main ditch.”

  He looked at her intently, as if memorizing what she said. “Who set up the irrigation?”

  “Mostly Bull, but Ichiro and Uncle helped.”

  “Is Bull at your home now?”

  “He’s laying concrete today.”

  Through a gap in the brush, Sumiko saw Sachi and some other kids running and laughing through the fields. A man yelled out to them, “Hey, be careful there. This isn’t a playground!”

  They didn’t listen to the man, just kept running. “Nobody listens anymore,” Sumiko said.

  “What do you think about Joseph and Bull meeting for a talk? Before Joseph ships out?” Frank said.

  “I don’t know.” She didn’t think it was a good idea to tell Bull about Frank. She didn’t want to get in trouble for talking to an Indian.

  He stood up. “All right. I have to go pick up my baby sister at my mother’s friend’s house. You think about it, though.”

  22

  ON THE MORNING THE JUDGES WERE SUPPOSED TO LOOK over the gardens, Sumiko still hadn’t told Mr. Moto that she’d entered them in the contest.

  She was sitting at the table in her barrack getting up the courage to go tell him when someone knocked at the door. “Come in!” she called out.

  It was Mr. Moto. “I thought you might want to come outside,” he said.

  She walked slowly to the door, then stopped and blurted out, “I entered us in the contest!”

  She thought he might be angry, but instead he laughed. “Well, I entered us also!”

  They took down the cheesecloth so the judges could get an unfettered view of the garden. Sumiko cleaned up all the spent weedflowers, since there was nothing uglier than a spent weedflower. She got ice water in case the judges were hot. And she and Mr. Moto moved the crickets and snakes away, in case any of the judges didn’t like such things. They brought out a few chairs for the judges to sit on under a cheesecloth tent Mr. Moto had erected.

  And then they waited. Sumiko didn’t tell anyone, but she even wrote out a little speech in case they won first prize and someone asked them to say a few words.

  Sumiko looked at the garden. Mr. Moto had built two long ledges on one side and let some kind of vine fall over the ledges. That way their garden looked almost tropical—here in the desert! And Sumiko had gone through her flower forest and cut off a flower here and there, so that the stalks were different heights in some places. She felt this gave the impression that the flowers were wild and not cultivated. And the topper for the whole garden were the long pieces of wood that Mr. Moto had carved into perfect facsimiles of bamboo.

  When the judges came around, a number of people from the block stood around to watch. There were seven judges. Some of them knelt down and looked closely at the plants, while others stood far back to get more perspective. They all took notes on pads of paper. Nobody drank any ice water, and nobody sat under the cheesecloth tent. And nobody asked a single question. After a few minutes the judges smiled stiffly and left.

  Mr. Moto and Sumiko looked at each other. “Well, anyway, I think it’s a beautiful garden!” he said. Then he hung his head sadly. “Too bad we have no trees.” His face grew even sadder. “Sakagami-san has miniature sailboats in his pond.” Sumiko felt pretty disappointed and even jealous of Mr. Sakagami.

  That day the paper carried an item about an Indian basketball team from the local high school coming to camp after dinner to play against the Camp Three allstar basketball team. The all-stars had never played together before; still, it was a big event. The Indians had played in Camps One and Two before, but this was their first trip to Sumiko’s camp. The paper said that the Indians had been told to “stay away from the Camp Three girls.”

  When Sumiko read the article, she suspected it was written just for her by someone who somehow knew that she knew Frank. She realized her suspicion was ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling that way.

  The basketball court was dirt that had been sprayed with water to create a hard pack. Everybody in camp was curious to see the Indian team. In the early evening there was a silence when the Indians stepped off their bus. The Indians and the Japanese looked at each other curiously. Sumiko followed in a crowd of kids as the Indians walked to the court. The Indians were taller than most of the Japanese players, except for the Japanese center, a boy who actually had to duck when he entered doorways. But on a good day he was about as fast as a turtle.

  Though the Indians and the Japanese seemed curious about each other, Sumiko didn’t know if they liked each other. They seemed to want to stay separate. She could tell by how they stood at a distance when they looked at each other.

  The Indians all wore their hair short, not long like in pictures Sumiko had seen, and their names were either Anglo or Spanish. Sumiko had thought Frank and his friends might have been unusual, since they all wore their hair short. But so did these older boys.

  The Japanese were fast and pesky, and the game stayed close. The crowd cheered wildly for the allstars. But the Indians won by three points.

  After the game a Japanese girl was talking to one of the Indian players when all of a sudden a Japanese boy stepped between them and said warningly, “You stay away from our girls.” Sumiko recognized the boy—he lived on the same block as her. She worried what would happen if he found out she knew Frank.

  Before the player could reply, the center for the Indian team came over and said, “He’s not interested in your girls.”

  “What’s wrong with our girls?” said the Japanese boy. He tried to push the Indian center, but the Japanese center held him back.

  Members of both teams had been shaking hands with each other. Now there was a silence like the silence at the party when Sumiko had walked into the living room. It rolled across the crowd in the same way. A moment ago everybody had seemed happy to have played a great game, but now both teams were glaring at each other. Then Bull was there, slapping the boy on the shoulder and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with our girls.” He reached out to shake hands with the Indian center. “Great game—we’ll get you next time!” The center hesitated but nodded, and people started to disperse.

  Later Sumiko saw a couple of boys about TakTak’s age, following the girl who’d talked to the Indian. The boys were saying, “Indian lover” and pulling at her skirt as she walked with her head high. Ichiro always said that holding your head high was a sign of dignity.

  Seeing the boys taunt the girl shook Sumiko up, because she was starting to think Frank wasn’t so bad. In fact, she almost liked him. If people pulled at her skirt and called her names, she wondered if she would have the courage to hold her head high like that girl. Whenever she’d thought of having friends, she’d thought about how they would act toward her. Now she saw that if she and Frank were friends, she had responsibilities.

  When she got home, she found something hanging on her door: a yellow ribbon. Third place! She grabbed the ribbon and ran into Mr. Moto’s barrack, forgetting for the moment about the day’s events.

  “Congratulations!” he said. He slapped her on the back. “I cooked you up some snake!”

  23

  AFTER THE BASKETBALL GAME SUMIKO MADE EXTRA SURE that nobody saw her when she went to the fields. But the next few times she went, Frank wasn’t there anyway.

  By late October the camp had managed to find enough teachers to start a school, which was to be held in empty barracks. One day Sumiko and Sachi walked by the barracks where some teachers had just moved in. “One of the teachers is Negro,” Sachi said. “I saw her. Another one is German. Her father is a Nazi. I saw her, too.”

  Sumiko never knew what ratio of lies to truth Sachi told, and even if she knew the ratio, she wouldn’t have known which was the truth percentage and which was not.

  Just to find out how it felt to tell a whopper, Sumiko said, “
One of the teachers is from the circus. She used to be a trapeze artist.” Sachi looked wonderingly at Sumiko, which made Sumiko feel kind of good. Lying certainly offered satisfactions, but the problem was it left a bad aftertaste.

  On the first day of school Sumiko braided her hair and put on her mint green dress. It was tight under the arms and shorter than it used to be. At first she thought it had shrunk, but then she realized she’d grown. But it was still the best dress she owned. She and Tak-Tak each took a chair from their home and stepped outside. As they walked they saw dozens of other kids also carrying their chairs in the dust.

  Sumiko dropped Tak-Tak off at his classroom and saw that his teacher was Negro. She wondered whether her own teacher would be the daughter of a Nazi!

  Inside her classroom there were no tables; in fact, there was nothing at all except a young, sweaty white woman standing at the front of the room. She held up a sign that read I AM MISS KELLY. Miss Kelly asked the kids to set their chairs along the walls.

  “I am Miss Kelly,” said Miss Kelly. “This is my first teaching assignment, and I’m very excited to be here.” A drop of sweat fell into her eye, and she wiped it away. Sumiko noticed dust on Miss Kelly’s skirt. “I’d like everybody to go around the room and tell us your name and what your parents did before the war.”

  The kids mostly obeyed glumly though some of the bad boys slouched in their chairs and openly chewed gum. Miss Kelly seemed nervous. When Sumiko’s turn came, she stood up and said, “Sumiko Matsuda. We were flower farmers.”

  When everyone had finished, Miss Kelly made them sing patriotic songs for an hour. Then Miss Kelly asked whether anybody had any questions.

  Someone raised his hand. “Miss Kelly!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you married?”

  Everyone giggled. Miss Kelly’s mouth fell open, and then she smiled and said, “That’s personal.”