Tallgrass (24 page)

AFTER THE SUPPER DISHES
were done one evening late in the fall, we all went outside. Mom and Granny rocked on the porch swing, moving back and forth in the soft dusk, while Betty Joyce and I sat on the steps with our homework. Dad leaned against the railing, whittling a stick, telling Mom that she had fixed an awful good supper. He always said that when we had pie for dessert. The night was peaceful, the kind of evening we used to have before the war started, when Dad and Buddy played catch on the front lawn and Marthalice read while I cut out paper dolls. That seemed like a long time ago.

Dad stripped curls of bark off the wood for a few minutes, then looked up and stared off into the distance, down the road, where wooden telephone poles stood out against the darkening sky like crosses. After a bit, hesaid, “I believe that’s Carl coming this way.”

Mom stopped the swing and leaned forward for a better look. Granny put down the remembrance quilt square of Sabra that she was piecing and peered over the top of her glasses. It was too dark for her to sew; just holding her piecework comforted her. “Yes, that’s Carl,” Dad said, closing his pocketknife and putting it away. He threw the stick into the yard and kicked the wood shavings off the porch with his high-top shoe. I got up and stood beside him. Carl had never been to our house at night.

He came down the road at a fast clip, low to the ground, his elbows to his sides, and leaped the fence instead of going through the gate. Carl ran across the lawn toward us, then stopped, winded, and walked a dozen yards before he picked up his pace again. When he reached the porch, he leaned over to catch his breath, holding on to the porch post. Dad went down the steps and put a hand on Carl’s arm. “Son?”

Carl looked up at him. He’d been crying. Behind me, I heard Mom barely whisper, “Daisy?” I put my hand on top of Betty Joyce’s.

Carl didn’t hear her. “Mr. Stroud.” He gasped and breathed deeply, filling his lungs with air. “It’s Harry, sir. He’s dead.”

“Oh,” Mom said, the breath going out of her. She stood up and walked over to the railing, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Oh, Carl.”

“Who?” Granny asked.

“Harry. Our friend,” Mom told her.

“That nice boy?”

“I sure am sorry to hear that.” Dad helped Carl sit down on the steps. I went inside and came back with a glass of water. We watched Carl drink it while we waited for him to tell us what had happened.

“It was some damn jeep accident.” Carl had covered up his sorrow with anger now. “The jeep blew a tire and turned over or something. Harry didn’t even have a chance to get killed in the war. It was just a dumb accident.” Carl handed the glass to me, and I went inside and refilled it. He waited until I returned. “Harry’s folks got a letter. I guess they don’t send telegrams if your son’s Japanese.” He made a fist with his right hand and socked it into his left palm. I’d never seen him angry before.

“Maybe the telegram went astray. Or they didn’t know where to send it,” Mom volunteered.

“They sure as hell knew where to send us.” Carl put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands.

Maybe Dad agreed with Carl, because he didn’t argue with him. Instead, he said, “Harry was as fine a young man as I’ve ever known, a hard worker, too.” There wasn’t any better compliment Dad could give a man than to say he was a good worker.

“He was going to show everybody, show them he was a better American than they were, better than those damn boys that hang around Ellis. He was going to be a war hero. He didn’t care if he got killed. Harry said he was a one hundred and fifty percent American. Now he’s dead in an accident. It’s not fair, Mr. Stroud.” Carl didn’t look up, and his voice was muffled.

“I don’t reckon anything about this war’s fair,” Dad said. “But you already know that, Carl.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hate this war,” I said. Mom didn’t like my saying I hated things, and sometimes she told me to use the word
dislike
instead of
hate,
but this time she nodded in agreement.

“We loved Harry as much as if he’d been one of Bud’s friends,” Mom said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mom asked how Harry’s folks were doing.

Carl looked up at her then and slumped back against the porch steps. “They’re pretty broke up.”

“And Daisy?”

“She’s broke up, too.” Carl began to cry, and Dad sal down on the steps next to him, putting his arm around Carl’s shoulder. We were all silent, listening to Carl’s sobs, which were ragged, like a piece of machinery that wasn’t hitting right. After a few minutes, they slowed and stopped, and we stayed quiet.

I wished I could think of something to say, but nothing came to me then. I knew it probably wouldn’t until after Carl had gone home. Harry was always a little disdainful, and I’d never been sure how much he liked me, but he was nice. He’d brought me a bird’s nest that the wind had blown out of a cottonwood tree, and after he heard me tell Daisy I’d lost my pocketknife in the barn, he’d spent an hour after work looking for it, finally finding it in the straw under the milking stool. Although other Ellis boys had been killed in the war,. Harry was the one I knew best. It struck me as odd that I thought of him as an Ellis boy, not as someone from the camp.

I touched my cheek and realized I was crying. Harry’s death made me feel lonely, although my family was there, and in the distance were the sounds I had heard all my life—horses moving around in the corral and chickens squawking. Mom would go out later with her shotgun, because a coyote might be hanging around. She wouldn’t think twice about killing a predator. I wished she would shoot every dang coyote in the county and everybody who was responsible for the war, too. I smacked the fist of my right hand into the palm of my left, too.

A breeze came up. It was too late for lilacs and honeysuckle, but the fall wind brought the smell of the fields. That scent made me think of Harry, how in the spring he brought the smell of freshly turned earth when he came into the kitchen to talk to Daisy.

Mom took a handkerchief from her apron pocket and wiped her eyes. “I’d like to call on Harry’s people, but I don’t know your customs, Carl. Would that be all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. I think they’d appreciate that. There’s just Mr. and Mrs. Hirano. Harry’s got a brother, but he’s at that Manzanar camp in California with his wife.”

There didn’t seem much to say after that, but it wasn’t awkward. Carl was comfortable with us, especially with Dad. After a while, he stood up. “I don’t know exactly why I came, Mr. Stroud. It just seemed like I should.”

“We’re glad you did, Carl. You knew we’d want to know about a thing like that. Harry was our friend, too. He was a good man, a fine American.” Yes, sir.

“Damn war,” Dad said.

“Yes, sir. Damn war.”

After Carl left and the others went inside, Dad and I sat on the porch in the dark. I thought about the Japanese being forced into the camp and the government making Harry join the army, and Harry getting killed before he could even go overseas. He’d never get a Purple Heart or any other medal. “Carl’s right: It’s not fair,” I said.

“Not fair at all, Squirt. But then I never heard of a war that was.”

THE NEXT MORNING, MOM
baked a chocolate cake, using our chocolate and sugar rations. She’d thought about making divinity because Harry had liked it, but cakes were what she always took to the neighbors when somebody died, and she didn’t see why she should treat the Hiranos differently just because they were Japanese.

“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Mary?” Mrs. Rubey asked her. She’d called that morning and found Mom in the kitchen by herself. Carl had told us that he and Daisy and Emory wouldn’t be coming to work for a couple of days. “Mightn’t you just be better off letting them grieve in their own way? After all, you do run the risk of offending those people.”

“Those people?”

“Oh, dear, now what have I gone and said?”

“You haven’t said anything. It is hard to know what’s right. But Carl said Harry’s people would appreciate it. I prayed about it some last night, and it came to me that all I can do is what I think is right. I have to hope that if I offend them, the Hiranos will know I acted in good faith and forgive me.”

“Just like folks in Ellis would.” They both laughed.

When the cake had cooled and Mom had iced it and put it into the metal cake carrier, she dressed in her good clothes and put on a hat. She made Dad put on his suit and a tie and told me to wear my Sunday dress. Then the three of us walked to the Tallgrass Camp to call on the Hiranos. Betty Joyce stayed behind with Granny.

I’d never been inside the camp before, and although I’d passed it dozens of times, I was surprised at all the rows of wooden barracks, which were lined up as straight as the furrows in our fields. The streets weren’t as barren as Dad had described them in the beginning. A little more than a year after the first Japanese had moved in, saplings and grass grew in the dirt, and a pretty garden with a dozen kinds of flowers and a still pond with a bridge lay behind a little fence. “Somebody’s made the desert bloom,” Mom observed. “And they’ve done it better than I ever did.”

We stopped at one of the long buildings, and Dad knocked on the door frame because the door was open and there was no screen door. The murmuring in the room stopped, and a man came to the doorway. Dad took off his hat and said, “Stroud’s my name. This here’s my wife and daughter. We’ve come to pay our respects to the Hiranos.”

There was a stir in the room then, and Carl came forward and shook Dad’s hand. Carl wore a suit and a tie, and I knew Mom had been right to make Dad dress up. “Come on in,” Carl said. Mom and Dad stepped inside, and I followed them reluctantly, suddenly feeling like an intruder. Maybe the Japanese don’t want us here, I thought. After all, white people had sent them to Tallgrass. I didn’t care to be someplace where people resented me. But then I realized that maybe Mom was right and they would appreciate our good intentions, even if those intentions came out wrong.

The Japanese opened a pathway between the door and a cot, where a man and woman sat, and we walked to them. Carl introduced us to Mr. and Mrs. Hirano, who stood and bowed.

“We are honored,” Mr. Hirano said.

“We’re so sorry. Harry was a fine young man,” Mom told Mrs. Hirano, who nodded solemnly. Her face was white, and her dress was a shade of pink so pale that it was almost white, too.

“A good worker,” Dad added.

The Hiranos looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I glanced around and saw a girl about my age, who gave me the wisp of a smile. I smiled back. “He always teased me.”

“Ah,” Mr. Hirano said. He smiled, and the corners of his wife’s mouth turned up the tiniest bit. Behind me, someone laughed. I should have said what a nice boy Harry was, and I flushed with embarrassment. But people began to whisper and then to talk again. “He liked to tease the pretty girls,” Mr. Hirano said, and there was quiet laughter. I looked at the girl again. She was small, with sleek black hair and smooth skin. With my scraggly hair and washed-out suntan, I felt awkward. I watched as the girl glided out the door, thinking that in a hundred years of practice, I could never move like that.

A man brought chairs for us, small, rough, hand-fashioned chairs that might have been made at the camp, and Mom gave Mrs. Hirano the cake. “Chocolate,” Mrs. Hirano said. “Harry liked your cooking. He said the first day he went to work for you, you made special white candy.”

“Divinity. I almost brought some.”

“Chocolate cake is good.” Mrs. Hirano handed the cake to a woman, who placed it on a table that was covered with a white cloth. Other food was spread out there—Japanese food, I knew, because it was strange to me. Some of it was almost too pretty to eat. At the back of the table stood a tall white vase with three odd-shaped flowers on long stems. Daisy emerged from the side of the room with tea in tiny white cups like eggshells. She gave them to us without speaking.

Mrs. Hirano told Mom she was sorry about Buddy being taken prisoner by the Germans, which brought tears to Mom’s eyes. “Imagine, in her own grief, she thought of us,” Mom said later.

Mr. Hirano asked Dad how his sugar beets were doing, and the two of them talked about crops. Then Mrs. Hirano told Daisy to get out a piece of needlework to show Mom. “It has been in my family for several generations. Daisy says you make many beautiful quilts with your needle.”

Daisy pulled a suitcase from under another cot across the room and took out a silk bag and gave it to Mrs. Hirano, who carefully removed a white silk cloth and opened it. The cloth was an embroidery of birds done in blue and white, and it was so beautiful that Mom drew in her breath. “Oh my,” Mom said as women on either side of her peered over her shoulders to admire it. Mrs. Hirano handed the embroidery to Mom and gestured for her to take it to the single lightbulb that hung in the center of the room, so that she could see it better. The women gathered around Mom and muttered signs of approval. After she examined it, Mom folded the cloth, making sure she did not fold it along the old lines, and handed it back to Mrs. Hirano. “Some of those stitches are as small as poppy seeds. I never saw anything so nicely made. It’s a treasure, a sure enough treasure. You’re smart to protect it from all the dirt around here.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Hirano returned the cloth to its bag and handed it to Daisy. “It is too dirty here for us to leave it out.” I looked at the windowsill and saw a film of dust, and I knew that no matter how often Mrs. Hirano cleaned, there would always be dust in the room.

Mom asked then if the Hiranos were planning a service for Harry, admitting she didn’t know Japanese customs.

“He was buried at the camp where he died, but we had a service here this morning at Tallgrass. We are Methodist, not Buddhist,” Mr. Hirano told us.

“The Methodists in town didn’t want us,” a woman said, and there were shushing sounds. Mrs. Hirano looked embarrassed, as though the woman had been impolite.

Mom ignored the remark and said, “I’m sorry we didn’t know. We would have attended to show our love for Harry.”