Weedflower (15 page)

“Are
you
thinking about leaving?” Sumiko asked.

“I’m too old to start over under those circumstances,” he said. “I’ll wait until they let us out with all our civil rights.” Sumiko wasn’t even sure what
civil rights
were, but the grown-ups talked about them all the time. Mr. Moto looked very sad then, and Sumiko figured he was thinking about his civil rights. Instead, he said, “Did you notice a few of my bean plants died?”

“Yes, but don’t worry. Every so often you lose a plant. That’s part of farming.”

Mr. Moto actually looked as if he were about to cry. “I lost seven. Maybe I’m not meant to be a farmer.”

He hung his head low and trudged into his barrack. What an emotional man! Sumiko felt responsible somehow, felt she’d let him down. After all, there was a man on the next block whose bean plants were
thriving. She had seen Mr. Moto eye the man’s garden competitively, even jealously. So she prepared all of Mr. Moto’s area with extra organic matter and took a can of water to gather more cuttings for him at the bean tunnels.

She also brought two cups of ice. In case that Frank boy was there, it would be rude to bring just one cup.

She knew Frank was there before she saw him. He wasn’t even hiding, just examining the beans. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she called out.

He glanced mildly at her, as if she were a fly and he were considering swatting her. “This is
our
land.”

“It’s ours for now. Anyway, you weren’t using it.”

“What is it with you? You think you have to be using land for it to be worth something?”

She decided right then not to offer him any ice. She felt satisfied when he couldn’t help but glance at the two cups. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Just seeing what you people are doing. What are
you
doing here?” He glanced again at the cups of ice.

“I hope you don’t think I brought this for you,” she said.

They glared at each other. Then he tilted his head the way he had done the first time she saw him. He smiled and took a cup from her. “You’re a bad liar,” he said.

“Well, at least you could say thank you.”

He said it with a mouth full of ice. They saw some
white men walking toward the field, so they slipped into a bean tunnel. They sucked on their ice as the men approached and walked by. Sumiko thought of whites as people you had to be quiet around, and Frank seemed to feel the same way.

Sumiko and Frank didn’t talk, just greedily ate their ice and then drank the cool water from the ice that had melted. When they finished, Frank looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten she was even there. “So they’re keeping you here until the end of the war?” he said.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of confusing. Now the government wants us to leave. They want us working outside to support the war effort. One family who left camp wrote back to their relatives and said they had to drive ten miles to find a grocery store that would serve them.”

“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

S
UMIKO 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 even 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

O
N 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.