Tallgrass (27 page)

Mrs. Hirano squeezed Mom’s fingers with her own tiny hands, which were protected from the cold by gray kidskin gloves. She wore a gray wool coat and a scarf made from some dead animal. Its legs hung over her shoulders, and its eyes must have been replaced with glass beads, because I’d never seen an animal with eyes like that. She wore high-heeled rubber boots that snapped on the sides and came up over her ankles. Mr. Hirano bowed and said, “We came to thank you for your kindness.” When Mom looked confused, he added, “The cake,” and handed her back her cake plate.

“It was nothing. There was so little we could do,” Mom said.

“You called. You were the only ones from the town. And you gave Harry a job,” Mr. Hirano said.

Mrs. Hirano stood very straight and touched the tip of a tiny gloved finger to her eye. “Thank you.” Her way of saying it seemed to tell us she did not want to talk about Harry. People were funny about the dead. Sometimes they couldn’t stop talking about a friend or relative who’d passed on, but other times they couldn’t stand even to hear the person’s name.

After a pause, Mom asked, “Will you have coffee? We don’t have loose tea, just tea bags, which Daisy says are Japan’s revenge for sending missionaries to—” Mom got a horrified look on her face, but the Hiranos smiled at the joke.

“We like coffee,” Mrs. Hirano said. She took off the gloves, straightening each finger, then folded them together and put them into her pocket.

Betty Joyce and I made the coffee and took it into the living room. The men were already in the corner, talking about beets, and we joined Mom, who was sitting at the dining room table with Mrs. Hirano. Granny sat next to them in her rocker, sewing together two sections of a quilt square with a design called Soldier Boy, which was made up of squares and triangles and rectangles.

“May I?” Mrs. Hirano asked, nodding at the pieces of the square that were pinned together in Granny’s sewing basket.

Granny smiled, and Mrs. Hirano unpinned the cut shapes and laid them out on the table, carefully fitting them together like the pieces of a puzzle to make a soldier. When she was done, she clapped her hands.

Mom said, “Nothing brings women together like sewing. You don’t even have to speak the same language. It’s like men and crops. Have you ever seen two men smell the earth?”

“Yes, you are right,” Mrs. Hirano said. “Sewing is like that for women. That’s why I’ve brought you this.” She reached into her handbag and took out the silk bag that held the needlework of the birds. “It would please me if you would accept this. I would like to know that each time you look at it, you remember Harry.”

Mom’s face went pale, and she said, “Oh, Mrs. Hirano, I couldn’t. It’s a family heirloom.”

“Please,” Mrs. Hirano said.

“She wants you to have it,” her husband said, watching from across the room. “Please.”

Mom looked at Dad, who nodded once. “It would be an honor.” Mom’s voice broke, and she took a moment to compose herself. “I will treasure it in remembrance of Harry,” she said, as if she were reading Scripture. “And one day, I will pass it on to Rennie. She valued Harry’s friendship, too. It will be our family’s heirloom now.”

The Hiranos turned to me, and, not sure what to say, I could only smile at them and mumble, “Thank you.” I was overwhelmed, too, because, like Mom, I knew what it meant for a woman to give away a piece of needlework she prized. Women treasured the things the womenfolk in their families made with their needles. Granny had quilts folded up in pillowcases that were promised to Marthalice and me when we married. Granny’s mother and grandmother had made them a hundred years ago. When I was little, I’d told Mom that if there were a fire, I wasn’t sure whether Granny would save me or the quilts. Mom had warned me to be careful with matches.

Sleet had begun falling by the time the Hiranos went home, but that wasn’t the reason Dad insisted on driving them back to camp. He didn’t want them walking down the road alone. As they left, Mom said softly to Mrs. Hirano, “Are you sure this needlework shouldn’t go to Daisy?”

“Daisy?” Mrs. Hirano looked confused for a moment. She touched the pearls at her throat, pearls the color of milk frozen in a bucket. “Oh, you mean Daisy Tanaka?” She frowned.

When the Hiranos were gone, Mom said to me, “Wasn’t that odd? It was almost as if she’d forgotten who Daisy was. I’d think Daisy would be precious to them. My goodness, that baby is all they have left of Harry.”

EMORY ENLISTED IN THE
army at the end of 1943. Carl wanted to join, too, but he told Dad he would keep working for us so that he could look after Daisy, at least until the baby came. I was glad he stayed on, because things were hard for Daisy at Tallgrass, just as they would have been for an Ellis girl who was unmarried and pregnant. Daisy didn’t complain, not to me anyway, but she was quiet, and she liked to have Carl around her.

I liked him, too. Betty Joyce said I had a crush on him, which wasn’t true. But he was nice to me and never treated me like a little kid. He made me feel safe, too, the way Buddy and Dad did. And with Susan Reddick’s killer still out there somewhere, I needed to feel safe.

During the winter, Carl and Dad repaired the tractor and the truck. They rebuilt the beet drill, improvising on the parts, because with the war on, we couldn’t get them. Dad made a list of what needed to be done around the farm before spring planting—reroofing the south side of the barn, replacing corral posts, tearing out the chicken coop and rebuilding it. There was enough work for a dozen men, but then, there always was. Betty Joyce gave Dad the key to the hardware store, which had been locked up since Mr. Snow went to the hospital, and Dad kept track of the supplies he took.

Daisy continued to come to the house every day, too, helping with the cooking and light housekeeping, since Mom wouldn’t let her do heavy work. With Betty Joyce and me there and Mom feeling stronger, Mom didn’t need full-time help, but she knew Daisy didn’t want to spend her days at the camp. Besides, Mom had grown used to Daisy’s company. When their work was done, the two of them made baby clothes—knitting vests and soakers, caps and booties and cunning little sweaters with duck buttons that Mom found in her sewing basket. Or they stitched flannel jackets and gowns and embroidered them with chickens. Mom taught Daisy how to quilt, too, and Daisy made a square with a sugar beet appliqéud on it for the remembrance quilt.

For Mom, it was a little like having Marthalice around. Sometimes I’d hear her talking about Buddy, although not about Buddy being in the prison camp. She told stories of when Buddy was a boy. He’d cut off the mane of our horse Pumpkins to make himself a beard for Halloween. And the first time he drove, he put Red Boy into reverse by mistake and backed into the chicken coop. When she could laugh about the foolish things my brother had done, Mom felt Buddy was all right.

Mom made Daisy feel all right, too. One afternoon when Daisy was blue, she asked if people would ever stop hating the Japanese at Tallgrass and whether she’d have to spend the rest of her life at the camp. Mom took out her Bible and opened it to Psalms and read, ” ’Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; thou has cast out the heathen, and planted it . . . . The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars.’

“If you ask me, the Lord is talking about the Japanese right there in Psalm Eighty. He intends to give you that vine out of Egypt before long,” Mom said. “He’ll open the gates of Tallgrass and make a home for you and your baby, and for all the other folks who are in the camp, too.”

“Do you think so?” Daisy asked.

“I do. I surely do.”

I thought the Lord was a little poky about it, just as Dad said He could be late with the rain, but I never doubted Mom when she quoted the Bible. Even Dad wouldn’t do that.

DAISY’S PREGNANCY DIDN’T ESCAPE
the notice of the Jolly Stitchers. Mrs. Larsoo stopped by and remarked to Mom in a loud voice about fallen women, raising an eyebrow and narrowing her eyes at Daisy’s stomach to make sure both Mom and Daisy got the point. Mom asked whatever did she mean, then stared Mrs. Larsoo down, so that the old biddy looked away, which Mom considered a triumph. At a Jolly Stitchers’ quilting, Mrs. Smith said in her pinched-nose way that maybe they ought to put together a charity basket for poor unfortunate Daisy. Mom asked why would they do that when Daisy had everything she needed. When Mom told me that story, I thought about how Helen Archuleta had almost turned down the Jolly Stitchers’ basket, because of her pride. Mom was too proud to let Daisy take charity.

There were kindnesses, too. Mrs. Gardner brought by a crib blanket she had knit. It was so frothy and light, you could hold it up with your little finger. It was wrapped in tissue and tied with a gold ribbon, and she laughed when Daisy opened the package. “You’ll have to forgive a foolish woman, Daisy. When I saw that purple yarn, I said to myself, Now why’s a baby have to wear those silly pastels?”

“If Daisy’s baby was to have mousy brown hair like most of the little ones around here, it would look all washed out in purple. But it’ll have black hair like Daisy and will look right smart in this,” Mom told her.

Then Helen Archuleta stopped by with little Susan and a flour sack of clothes and baby blankets that Susan had outgrown and asked if Daisy would please take them because they’d hardly been used and it would be a shame to let them go to waste. “It would make me feel good to see a baby in these things,” Helen said. She was so gracious that I wondered if she had learned something from the way the Jolly Stitchers had given her the charity basket little more than a year before. Helen said she hoped Daisy would understand why she’d kept the quilt with the square that her sister had made. The two of them giggled about how it was just like falling on top of a basketball when you turned over on your stomach at night in the last months of pregnancy. I was glad Daisy had someone to laugh with, someone who didn’t care that she had no husband. But then, Helen didn’t have a husband, either. She hadn’t heard a word from Bobby since the baby was born, Mr. Lee told Dad.

Edna Elliot and her friends made a couple of nasty cracks at school about us running a home for loose women, but I’d learned that Miss Ord was right: I just walked away, and pretty soon they ignored me. Maybe they talked behind my back. They probably did, but Betty Joyce didn’t tell me about it.

Once, Danny passed me on the Tallgrass Road not far from our farm and offered me a ride in the Spanos’ old rust pot. I’d seen Danny driving that truck down the road before, riding in it by himself now that Beaner had a job at the sugar company. Dad said the refinery was so hard up for workers that it had hired a one-legged man and two wooden-headed women, so it wasn’t any surprise that it had employed a no-good like Beaner.

When I turned him down, Danny ran his hand through his greasy hair and asked me if I thought I was too good for him. I didn’t reply, just treated him the way I did Edna Elliot and kept on walking. “You’re not too good to talk to some Jap girl that’s got herself knocked up,” he said, and laughed. When I still didn’t reply, Danny sneered at me. “You’re just as stuck-up as your sister.” He took off then, swerving toward me so that the running board of his truck rubbed against my leg, and I jumped into the ditch. Danny looked at me in the rearview mirror as he hightailed it down the road, and I could see him laughing. At the crossroads past our farm, he made a U-turn and came back toward me, fish-tailing back and forth across the road, but by then, I’d reached our property, so I climbed the fence and went across the fields to the house. Danny peeled on by, honking and shouting something I didn’t catch. When I got home, Mom looked up from where she and Daisy were sewing and asked what all the noise was about. I told her it was just Danny Spano being a smart aleck.

“Stay away from him,” Daisy told me, but she didn’t have to warn me about Danny Spano,

THE DAY DAISY’S BABY
was born, we thought she and Carl had stayed home because of the blizzard. The snow was bad—so bad that Betty Joyce and I didn’t go to school. The storm started in the evening, just after chores, and kept up all night. By the time I woke up the next morning, I could tell it was still snowing, because the light through the white curtains was pink.

“Prettiest snow I ever saw, just like Lux Hakes coming down,” Mom remarked when she came into my bedroom to say that Betty Joyce and I wouldn’t be going to school that day. She told us to go downstairs and dress by the oil heater, since Dad was out milking. “We’ll have corn cakes with brown-sugar syrup and cocoa. Dad said he might get out that old sleigh and take us for a ride when the snow stops.”

The snow didn’t stop for two days, so we played checkers and worked a puzzle by a kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, because the wires were down. When we got bored, Betty Joyce and I decided to make a quilt for Daisy’s baby. Granny helped us cut out squares for a Nine Patch design, which was the simplest quilt you could make. We pressed the seams to one side with our fingers, since there was no electricity for the iron. When we finished the top, we cut the batting and backing and took turns quilting the layers together. Then we edged it with bias tape. By the time the storm was over, we had finished the little quilt.

“It will keep the baby warm,” Mom said.

“Every stitch taken with love,” Granny added. Her mind was working fine that day, and she had entertained us with stories about people being snowbound, not just long ago but as recently as last year, when Mr. Jack had had to spend the night in the barn during a blizzard because he couldn’t see his way to the house. None of the Jacks had even missed him.

Neither Mom nor Granny said a work about the workmanship on the Nine Patch, but we knew Daisy would be pleased, and we were, too. We laughed when we looked at the quilt up close and saw how crude it was. “We ought to call ourselves the
Folly
Stitchers,” I said.

After the snow stopped, Carl came to our house. The big snow-plows had made .a path down the center of the road so that supply trucks could get to the camp. Still, Carl looked like a snowman because he’d had to make his way through the drifts from the road to the house. We all jumped when he stamped his boots on the side porch, and Mom got up and wrapped her hands in her apron when she saw who it was. “Daisy?” she asked, worry spreading across her face.

Carl grinned. “I’m an uncle.”

“By Dan, isn’t that fine! Take off those galoshes and sit right down,” Dad said. “Boy or girl?”

“Slow down. You tell us how Daisy is first,” Mom chicled.

“Oh, she’s swell,” Carl said. “Girl. Cutest girl in the wholeworld.”

“Girl,” Mom said, sitting back down next to Dad at the table, where we were finishing breakfast. “Oh, I was hoping for a girl, a girl or a boy.”

Dad reached over and slapped her on the knee. “I’ll bet if it wasn’t a girl, it would have been a boy.”

Mom swatted his hand. “Oh, go on with you.”

Dad stood up. “I think we have a bottle of whiskey here somewhere.”

“Loyal! It’s eight o’clock in the morning!”

“This young man came through four-foot of drifts to bring us the news. You don’t expect me to give him a cup of coffee, now do you?” Dad went to cupboard and took down a bottle of Four Roses and two glasses. Then he asked, “Mother?”

She nodded, and I exchanged a look with Betty Joyce. I’d never seen my mother drink liquor before. “I’ll tell the Jolly Stitchers,” I said, kidding her.

“I wouldn’t care if you did,” Mom said, although I knew she would care, just as she knew I’d never tell.

Dad removed the ice tray from the refrigerator and put a cube into each glass, then poured a half inch of liquor into the glasses and passed them around. He held up his and said, “To Daisy.” They sipped.

Then Mom held up her glass and said, “To Amy Elizabeth.”

“Amy Elizabeth?” Dad asked.

“Isn’t that what Daisy named her?”

“How’d you know?” Carl asked.

“Daisy told me Amy Elizabeth was a teacher she had in California, the finest woman she ever knew, and she thought that Amy Elizabeth was the prettiest name she’d ever heard. I don’t imagine she’d pick the second-prettiest name for her baby.”

“It doesn’t sound Japanese,” Betty Joyce said.

“It sounds American,” I told her.

Later, Dad hitched our horse Nancy to the sleigh. Carl had changed into some of Buddy’s dry clothes, and Mom heated bricks in the oven and wrapped them in burlap bags for our feet, because, while the snow had stopped, the temperature was below zero and the wind was up. Then we all climbed into the sleigh and covered ourselves with quilts and Dad drove us to the camp to see Daisy. The doctor wouldn’t let us go inside the infirmary, so we sat in the sleigh and waved to Daisy through the window. Carl had given his sister the quilt Betty Joyce and I had made, and she wrapped the baby in it and held her up. Her face looked like a giant walnut.

“Prettiest baby I ever saw.” Granny sighed.

“Told you,” Carl said.

MOM AND BETTY JOYCE
had taken Granny into the house, and Dad and I were rubbing down Nancy when Sheriff Watrous came into the barn. He must have parked on the road and walked in, because we hadn’t heard his car. “Mr. Stroud,” he said, then touched his hat to me as if I were a grown woman.

“That’s some snow we had,” Dad said.

“It surely is. I see you got your old sleigh out. I always liked a sleigh ride, especially with a pretty girl.” He smiled at me.

“Beats a gasoline vehicle in a storm like this.”