Tallgrass (25 page)

“Thank you,” Mrs. Hirano said. “Harry liked his work with the sugar beets. There is dignity in work.”

We finished the tea and a little plate of Japanese food— crackers and something made with rice and raisins. “Real raisins,” Daisy whispered when she handed the plate to me, and I knew she remembered a story she’d told me. When the camp was opened, a cook had fixed a vat of what the Japanese thought was rice pudding, which was placed outside on a huge table. “When we got close, we found out what we thought were raisins were really dead Hies,” Daisy said. “We were so hungry, we picked them out and ate the rice.”

Then Mom and Dad stood and told the Hiranos again that they were sorry about Harry. We went back through the crowded room, Dad nodding at one or two of the men he had met somewhere. At the door, he shook hands with Carl, who thanked us for coming and handed Mom her cake carrier.

As soon as we were on the street, Dad took off his suit coat and loosened his tie. He said he didn’t know how people could stand to live in a room like sardines in a tin can, without so much as a breath of fresh air. “You’d think the government had never heard of cross-ventilation,” he said. “Or screens.”

“I understand that saying about a bull in a china shop,” Mom told us, fanning her face with her hand. “I never felt so awkward in my life, putting my sweaty, chapped hands on that beautiful piece of silk. It was as fine as a cobweb. I was afraid I’d snag it with my rough skin.”

“Do you think they gave us more comfort than we gave them?” I asked.

“I reckon that’s so,” Dad said. “And we’re supposed to be the civilized ones.”

THE BEET HARVEST WENT
smoothly that fall, although Dad worried about some of the Ellis boys interfering with our Japanese hired hands. Carl selected a crew of boys from Tallgrass to dig the beets and top them and throw them into the wagon. Then Dad drove the wagon into town to the sugar factory. The first day the Japanese crew was there, Betty Joyce and I stood in the doorway of the house, looking at each boy to see if one of them might be Susan Reddick’s killer. But there was no way to tell. They were all young boys, not much older than we were, and polite. They didn’t look any more like killers than Carl did, and after a day or two, we stopped worrying that one of them was waiting to murder us.

The boys worked as hard as Carl, Emory, and Harry had during spring planting. Dad never had to teach them a thing twice, and they never loafed or goofed off. They weren’t surly the way some beet workers were, but seemed grateful to have jobs that took them out of the camp. And after visiting Tallgrass, I knew why those Japanese boys were glad to be on the other side of the bobwire.

Sometimes, on the way back to the farm with the empty wagon, Dad passed Beaner, Danny, and Pete leaning against the fence, watching the crew. Dad always waved and was friendly, and sometimes he stopped and exchanged a word with them. If they ever said anything nasty about the Japanese, Dad didn’t tell us. But he kept an eye on those three, and he told Carl to let him know if they didn’t behave. Carl grinned and said that with their big beet knives, the Japanese crew could handle themselves. Dad told him that was what he was afraid of. He didn’t want trouble, even if our boys were in the right.

“All we need is one little incident to set off this town. It won’t matter who’s at fault. Beaner Jack could jump one of the camp boys, but if Carl or Emory or one of the others turned around and fought back, we’d have Pearl Harbor in reverse right here in Ellis,” Dad predicted one afternoon as he dried himself with a towel we kept next to the pump. He’d pumped water over his head to cool off.

Dad told our boys to walk from the camp in a group. They weren’t to be alone, because somebody could treat them like prey. Other farmers who hired Japanese crews drove them to and from the fields so that they didn’t have to walk along the roads, where Ellis men called them dirty names or tried to start fights. Japanese people didn’t go into town much now, and when they did, they went in groups.

“They don’t understand it out at Tallgrass,” Dad told us. “Sheriff Watrous says in towns near the internment camps in California and up north in Wyoming, people are getting along all right now. Why do things have to be so bad in Ellis?”

“It’s Susan Reddick’s death. Folks just won’t stop talking about it. It’s the older Elliot boy getting killed in the South Pacific, too,” Mom replied, and Dad thought it over and guessed she was right.

Fred Elliot, Pete’s brother, had joined the Marine Corps, and he’d been sent to the South Pacific. In early fall, about the time football season got under way, word came that he’d been killed. The telegram asked the Elliots not to divulge where Fred had been fighting, because it might aid the enemy. But Mr. Elliot did. He stood up in church and asked for prayers to beat the Japanese. “Fred was fighting the Japs in New Guinea. It’s my belief we got spies out at the Tallgrass Camp giving information to their relatives in Japan, and we ought to go out there and kill a dozen of them for every one of our boys they murder.”

Mrs. Elliot tugged at her husband’s sleeve to get him to sit down, and a few of the men coughed and looked embarrassed. The minister scrapped his regular sermon and preached about forgiving our enemies, which caused more foot shuffling. But after church, several men clapped Mr. Elliot on the back and said, “You told it for us.” One of the deacons said, “We know the Lord’s on our side in this war, but sometimes it seems like He sure has a funny way of showing it.”

Another added, “Those mysterious ways He works in, I sure don’t understand ’em all the time.”

Fred getting killed gave Pete an importance he’d never had before. He went around saying the Japanese at Tallgrass were nothing but a fifth column. He’d claimed that before, but now people paid attention to him. Danny and Beaner nodded and said, “You got that right, Pete.”

Things were tense even for the kids in the camp who never came in contact with people from Ellis. Little boys there played war games, just like the boys in Ellis. Daisy told us she’d watched a group of Tallgrass kids pretending they were fighting in the South Pacific and heard one complain, “How come I have to be the damn Jap all the time?”

“We’re just a tinderbox,” Dad said. “All we need is for some fool to strike the match. Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t play football against Tallgrass. Can you imagine what would have happened if Ellis had lost to those boys?”

Carl no longer let Daisy walk to and from our farm by herself. Carl and Emory and the other boys from Tallgrass who’d come to work for us brought Daisy and the two Japanese women Mom had hired to help with the cooking to our back door each morning. Mom was feeling better, but Dad told her if he had a crew to help him with the beets, she ought to have one to help her in the kitchen, and Mom didn’t argue too much about it. I was glad, because Mom worked hard just keeping up our spirits, never complaining and always being cheerful. I knew it wasn’t easy for her. Sometimes, when Daisy was outside, I’d go into the kitchen, tiptoeing so that I wouldn’t wake Mom, and I’d hear her crying. I’d sneak back to the door and slam it to let her know I was there. By the time I got to the bedroom, Mom would have dried her eyes, and she’d be smiling.

So Mom stayed in her bedroom and turned the harvest work over to Daisy. Mom made up the menus, and Dad shopped in town for what we didn’t grow ourselves.

Betty Joyce and I did our part, fixing breakfast and supper for the family and making sure coffee was ready for the boys before we left for school in the morning. One day, Daisy sent word that she was too sick to work, so Mom let us stay home from school to help cook for the crew.

“When’s her baby due?” Betty Joyce asked me as I rolled out piecrust on the floured oilcloth on the kitchen table. Four of the five pie plates in front of me already had crusts in them. Betty Joyce was peeling the apples, cutting them up, and dropping them into big mixing bowls filled with cinnamon and honey, since we were trying to stretch the sugar rations. The two women Mom had hired were outside. One was sitting in the sun snapping green beans, the other peeling potatoes and dropping them into a pan of water. We could hear them talking in Japanese. Granny sat with them, her piecing in her hands, nodding every now and then, as if she understood what the women were saying.

“Whose baby?” The piecrust tore, and I dipped my finger into a tumbler of water on the table and smeared the water over the ripped part, patching it back together. I wondered if ever in my life I’d make a perfect piecrust. Mom said men never paid attention, so I shouldn’t waste time on the looks, that only the taste counted, but women noticed. I’d heard them comment at church suppers and bake sales and knew that to them, the way a pie or cake looked was just as important as the taste. I knew if I ever became a Jolly Stitcher, I’d have to make a perfect piecrust, but that wasn’t a big worry. I’d run off and join the WAVEs before I ever became a Jolly Stitcher. “Daisy’s.”

“Daisy’s not even married.” I thought of wrapping the piecrust around the rolling pin the way Mom did and then unrolling it onto the pie plate, but I didn’t dare. The crust would tear in half and fall off, and I’d have to gather it up and roll it out again, and a reworked piecrust tasted like cardboard. Even a harvest crew would notice that. I sifted flour onto a spatula and edged it under the crust, then folded the crust in half and slid it onto the pie plate. It was a little off center, and I considered pulling it into place, but I didn’t want to rip it, so I left it alone. “That’s the last one. You can start filling these if you want to.”

I glanced up at Betty Joyce, who was standing with her hands on her hips, the big metal spoon grasped in one fist. “Don’t try to fool me,” she said. “You don’t have to be married to have a baby.”

Reaching into the bin, I took a handful of flour and spread it on the table. Then I patted out dough, picked up the rolling pin again, and began to roll the dough to make lattice strips for the tops of the pies. The rolling pin was white ceramic and had green handles. As I began rolling the dough, a tiny flake of green paint came off. I stuck my fingernail into the dough beneath it and picked out the speck, wiping it on my apron. Then I looked up at Betty Joyce.

The springs in the bedroom moved, which meant Mom was listening.

“Well, Daisy’s pregnant, isn’t she?” Betty Joyce scooped out bits of butter and flicked them on top of the apples she’d put on the piecrusts.

I set down the rolling pin so hard that I almost broke it. “Well, what if she is?” I’d hoped that if I didn’t pay attention to what she was talking about, Betty Joyce would drop it.

From the bedroom, Mom called, “Girls, those pies ought to go into the oven pretty quick now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Betty Joyce said.

I cut thick strips of lattice with a knife, thinking hard about Daisy and not caring how irregular the strips were. Of course, I knew she was pregnant. At first, I’d worried that Daisy was sick, because she threw up so much. I’d thought she was getting fat and that was why her skirts were so tight. Then one day, she wore a big, loose blouse, and I just knew she was going to have a baby. And, of course, she wasn’t married, because the father of her baby had been killed in an accident at boot camp. A couple of times, I’d asked Daisy how she was doing or if she was feeling all right, thinking she might want to talk to me, but she’d replied, “Fine,” so she hadn’t wanted to say anything, at least not to me. Why would she want to talk to me anyway? I wondered. Some help a ninth grader would be. She might have spoken to Mom. She probably had, because a couple of times, the two of them had broken off their conversation when I’d walked into the room. Nobody said anything to me, and I guess I hoped that if I ignored her condition, it might just go away. I hadn’t even written to Marthalice about it.

I crisscrossed the lattice strips over the apples, then folded the ends under the crust and pinched the edges with my fingers. I picked up the sifter and sprinkled sugar on top of the latticework. As Betty Joyce and I put the pies into the oven, the two women from the camp came back into the kitchen, chattering in Japanese, occasionally slipping into English when they said something they wanted us to hear. They put the potatoes and beans on to boil and began frying the meat for dinner.

Betty Joyce and I went outside to set up the tables. “I’m right, aren’t I ?” Betty Joyce asked as we set a plank on top of two saw-horses and shook out a tablecloth and arranged it on top.

“How would I know?” I set rocks on the corners of the table to keep the cloth from flying off in the wind and then went back into the house for the plates.

“Hey, I just asked.” Betty Joyce passed me as I came back outside. She was going in for the silverware. The Japanese women began carrying out dishpans full of sliced bread and pitchers of iced tea.

When everything was ready, Mom called to me to ring the dinner bell to bring the workers from the field. I opened the oven to peek at the pies, which had begun to brown. The juice was seeping over the crust, and you couldn’t tell where it had broken or where the strips across the top were different sizes.

“Ah,” one of the women said, looking over my shoulder. “Japanese men always like apple pie.”