Weedflower (12 page)

“She doesn’t look so dangerous,” said one of the lanky boys.

The other said, “If they think you’re going to kill them, they stick a sword in their stomach before you can do it. I read that.”

“Does she talk?”

Of course she talks.”

“How do you know?”

“Unless she’s a mute.”

“Maybe she doesn’t speak English.”

The boy with the scarf tilted his head at her. “She’s scared!”

“I’m not scared!” Sumiko said indignantly, although she felt more scared of them than any white people she’d ever been around.

They stepped back a bit when she spoke, as if they were surprised.

Another boy appeared from seemingly out of nowhere. “Come on, I gotta get home,” he called out.

“Hold on, Hook,” said the boy with the scarf. He blew a bubble as he continued to study Sumiko. The fourth boy came up. A hook stuck out from his left arm where a hand should have been. Sumiko was surprised to hear this boy called “Hook.” It would be like calling Mr. Moto “One Eye.” If a Japanese person had a hook for a hand, you would act like the hook wasn’t even there and get all embarrassed if you got caught staring at it.

The new boy looked at her curiously, then set his right hand on the shoulder of the boy with the scarf.
“Come on, Frank, they’re going to be here for the whole war.”

Frank started to walk away, then turned back to Sumiko. “Why don’t you people go back where you came from and leave our reservation alone?” he said.

Sumiko felt too scared to answer, and the boys sauntered off without looking back. She walked home by herself. Sachi was waiting in the doorway of Sumiko’s barrack. She ran out.

“Are you sure the Indians didn’t follow you?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Sumiko. She turned around, but all she could see were barracks and desert. “Are we on a reservation?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Sachi. “That’s why we’re in constant danger.”

“But where do they live?” In town when they’d first arrived at the camp, she’d seen only white people.

“They live everywhere, silly. They’re
Indians
. They hide at night. If we don’t behave, they’ll kidnap your family when it gets dark. You’re in special danger because you live at the camp border.” Then Sachi seemed to tire of her own lies. “Well, bye.”

“Bye,” said Sumiko, only half listening. She stared into the desert and wondered, Where
do
the Indians live?

16

A
FTER A FEW DAYS
S
UMIKO REALIZED THAT SHE DIDN’T
know what to do with herself. She remembered that sometimes at the farm she’d wished she had more time so she could go out with the friends she didn’t have. Now she was rich in time but had nothing to do. Other people, like Ichiro and Bull, immediately got busy—Bull laying foundation for irrigation canals and Ichiro driving the regular shuttle bus between Camps One, Two, and Three. The government paid them a fraction of what they might get paid outside for such work. But as Bull said, “Money is money.” Even Tak-Tak found a group of marbleplaying boys to hang around with. And Auntie,
who’d seemed so lethargic at first, joined a sewing club and immediately made pretty curtains for the barrack.

During the evenings Mr. Moto would work on his garden or his carving. Many of the Japanese men spent much of their time carving wood they gathered in the mountains. Every so often some of them would walk to the mountains or even drive one of the tractors there. But nobody ever tried to escape.

Sometimes Sumiko just sat around watching Mr. Moto carve wood or dig in his soon-to-be garden. He was one of the minority of
Nikkei
who were not farmers.

“Mr. Moto?” said Sumiko one day a week after she’d arrived. He was digging a big, round hole about three feet deep. She knew it wasn’t her place to comment, but she didn’t understand what he was doing. “If you’re going to plant something there, you don’t need to dig a big hole like that.”

He seemed a little insulted. “I’m building a pond,” he said.

“Oh!”

“I had a pond garden in my old home, so I thought I’d do the same thing here, next to my vegetables.”

He kept digging, ignoring her. He probably wanted her to leave him alone. But an idea had occurred to her. “Mr. Moto?”

He looked up, wiping sweat from his face and, in the process, smearing dirt over his only eye.

“Are you going to plant any flowers?”

“I don’t have any flower seeds,” he said.

“I have some. They’re the most beautiful flowers in the world!” she blurted out. Of course, she hadn’t actually seen Uncle’s Sumiko Strain, but she figured his hard work
must
be beautiful.

Mr. Moto nodded thoughtfully. “I was thinking of only vegetables. But I’ll tell you what. Let me sleep on it.”

Sumiko was surprised at how disappointed she felt that he needed to sleep on it. “Okay,” she said. He went back to digging. On the farm she had never done work that required a lot of physical strength, like digging in hard ground. So now she felt she needed Mr. Moto’s help. Otherwise, she could have simply planted her own garden—that is, if she ever found the energy.

Sumiko felt the ultimate boredom closing in on her. The ultimate boredom wasn’t dread of the next year or of what the government might do next; it was dread of your own mind, dread of the next day, the next hour, the next minute. You could lose your mind at any time. Like one morning, for no good reason, Sumiko actually stomped on a butterfly that landed in the dust. After she moved her foot, she saw the squished butterfly and wondered what had come over her. She hadn’t thought about it beforehand,
but had just suddenly stomped on the poor butterfly. She figured maybe she’d had a sudden attack of the ultimate boredom, and then when she’d seen the dead butterfly she snapped out of it.

One day Sumiko took the shuttle bus to Camp One to visit her father’s brother, Uncle Kenzo, on his birthday. Auntie made her do that; he was a grouch, and she’d never been close to him. So that kept her busy for a little while. She just sat in his room with his glum family for a few hours, then returned to Camp Three. On the bus to Camp One she’d been surprised to see how many gardens were already springing up all over Poston.

Later that day Sumiko was so bored, she just flopped to the ground right outside her barrack and didn’t move. A butterfly fluttered over her. She wondered if the butterfly were actually the ultimate boredom in disguise. She wondered whether it planned to flutter and flutter and then
strike
! She wondered if maybe she had already lost her mind. It was possible.

Sumiko felt so lazy that a few days ago instead of writing Juchan and Uncle an actual letter, she just sent them some lists she scribbled around the edges of old copies of the
Poston Chronicle
—the camp newspaper run by camp residents. In return, she received a letter from Jiichan that was written in a circle around the margin of a sheet of paper.

Dear Sumiko,

1. We don’t deserve real letter?
   
2. You so busy you can’t wnte in good penmanship?
   
3. You must be very busy
   .
   
4. Jiichan and Uncle
   

But even that didn’t affect Sumiko. She just stuck the letter in her luggage and didn’t think about it again.

Her only pleasure, if it could be called a “pleasure,” was lying outside at night under the stars. She liked to listen as people from her barrack lay on their cots outside and talked. In the background the wind would agitate the mesquite and send dust into the night like ghosts rising from the ground.

One night Mr. Moto told about the rolling green hills of the Japanese countryside. He’d been born in Seattle but educated in Japan. He said that if America sent him back to Japan, he would buy a rice farm in the country. He’d owned a grocery store at the time of the evacuation, but his parents had been rice farmers. “Before the evacuation I sold the store and my house in a package deal for one thousand dollars, even though I paid four thousand for the house in 1940.”

Another man said, “Ah,
shikata ga nai
.”

Sumiko heard that phrase all the time lately.

For instance, the previous night Mr. Moto had told Sumiko that he’d fallen on a rake as a boy. That’s how he’d lost an eye. He’d said,
“Shikata ga nai.”
That meant “This cannot be helped.” Once when Sumiko had asked Jiichan how sad it had made him when her mother died, he’d said,
“Shikata ga nai.”
When your house burned down, when someone you loved died, when your heart was broken, when you suffered any tragedy, but also when you merely broke a toenail, that’s what the Japanese said.

This cannot be helped.

After telling everyone about his house, Mr. Moto got out of his cot and leaned into his doorway. “Son?”

“What?”

“Don’t you want to be outside? Everybody is talking.”

“I’m trying to sleep, Dad.”

So Mr. Moto returned to lie in his cot. Sumiko rarely saw Mr. Moto’s son. She guessed he was just in the mood to be alone.

Mr. Moto started talking about Poston. He said he’d once wanted to be a teacher, so he liked to give little lectures once in a while. “Poston is in the Sonoran Desert,” he said. “It’s one of the hottest areas in the country. There used to be just a few buildings around here, but now the camp is the third-largest town in Arizona.”

“How did you find that out?” Sumiko asked. “I thought there are no maps in camp.”

Mr. Moto pointed to his head. “They can keep the maps out of Poston but not out of my head. I know my geography.”

“You would have made a good teacher,’ Sumiko said. “You—”

A man suddenly snapped, “Quiet!”

And Sumiko shut her mouth instantly. She knew an
inu
had just walked into view at the end of the barrack.
Inu
meant “dog,” but people used it to mean “dirty dog” or “snitch” who worked for the white administration to spy on other
Nikkei
.

The man continued to stand there, and one by one people dragged their cots inside. Sumiko was disappointed—she liked lying outside. But she dragged her cot into her barrack.

She couldn’t sleep because of the heat. After a while she heard a dust storm rising, and then she heard grunting and pounding from outside. For a second she wasn’t sure she heard the grunting, but the noises grew louder and louder. She was torn between jumping out of bed and staying as still as she could. Sweat poured from her forehead. Somehow she knew exactly what was happening, even though she had never before heard the sick sound of a man getting beaten. She knew it was the
inu
.

Finally she got up. “Stay there!” Ichiro and Bull ordered at the same time. They ran outside. Sumiko jumped up anyway and looked out the door with
Auntie and Tak-Tak. About forty feet away she could make out several men kicking another man. The dust made it seem like she was watching through a veil.

The man getting beaten was named Yamada. Everybody believed he was an
inu
. He probably
was
an
inu
. A woman had told Yamada that she secretly owned a camera, and the next day her barrack had been searched and the camera confiscated.

Ichiro and Bull returned to the room.

“Should we help him?” said Sumiko.

Ichiro shook his head. “Absolutely not.” Sumiko turned to Bull, but he just got back in bed and lay there. Sumiko wondered whether his eyes were wide open like her own.

Yamada groaned so loudly, Sumiko could hear him clearly. She heard talking, crying, shouting, pleading. She couldn’t stand it!

“Bull, I can’t stand it!” she said.

“I know,” he said.

Guilt filled her soul. Sumiko knew in her heart that Yamada was an
inu
. Some of the
inu
were very friendly and smiled when they saw you. Sumiko didn’t mind the people who were unhappy at their treatment, and she didn’t mind the people who thought they should try to make the best of things. But like everybody else, she didn’t like the
inu
. Still, the sound of Yamada’s groans made her feel like groaning herself.

It seemed they beat him forever. Sumiko felt an ache grow in her stomach. She just stood in the center of the room willing herself not to be there. I’m not here. I’m out there. I’m not here. And for a moment it came true, and she was at the farm again, watching the white cheesecloth billow over the flowers they had worked so hard to grow, watching birds fly above the cloth, and watching her family—all of them—work peacefully in the weedflowers.

Then the beating ended. And there was silence. The groaning stopped, and even the wind stopped.

Silence, finally, silence.

17