|
excerpt from Shadow Play
A
novel
In these scenes, the grandchildren of
immigrant Japanese and Italian farmers in the Santa Clara Valley hear the
painful story of their families’ intertwined fates The wind was blowing in gusts that shook the dry branches of the bare vines as Cheryl drove up the curving driveway from the pitted asphalt of Olivas Road. She parked in front of the ranch house and stepped out of the car. The air smelled of cut wood, rich soil and ion, an invigorating mix that made her stop halfway around the hood of the car toward Nonnie and take a deep breath. Nonnie was right. It was good to have come and the storm be damned. A crack of metal on wood. Cheryl’s head jerked toward the ranch house. Another sound, more like a thud. Cheryl put her hand to her throat. Then three more thuds, and only then did she notice the battered green nose of a car parked on the far side of the ranch house. Someone was here. She stood there, feeling the isolation of the ranch, floating here above the Santa Clara Valley next to green hills populated only by cows from what she could see, the nearest neighbor long minutes away by fast dash down the sliding gravel to the empty country road. Maybe someone knew the ranch was all but abandoned. Maybe someone did squat here, as she’d suspected the first time she’d driven up here. A kind of tearing sound of metal against wood. With a glance at Nonnie, looking questioningly up at her from behind the windshield, she stepped up onto the porch, feeling the pulse of her heart in her chest. She opened the door inward, stepped around it, her eyes shifting fast past the shrouded furniture to the kitchen, a flash of movement. She stepped forward an inch, scared. Yes, a man there, slim in white shirt and jeans bending over a peeling window frame on the kitchen table, a skein of fresh white rope next to it. The open rectangle of a window. A slender, tan hand reaching for a hammer on the seat of a chair. She flinched back against the kitchen door frame. “You’re not all alone with this now.” The man turned his head. Gold wire-rim glasses, round ball of cheekbone on his lean face. “I’m with you. Take it to court. I’ll help –“ “Stephen?” Cheryl said. He turned with hammer in hand against his thigh. “Cheryl!” His lips parted, as if he were going to say something more. Then: “What are you doing here?” “What am I doing here?” Her face flushed hot. “What are you doing here? This is mine.” She saw his chest rise behind the thin material of his shirt, slim-cut. She could see the shape of his pectoral muscles under it, and the arch of muscle from neck to shoulder. The hammer clattered against the wood tabletop and, without looking backward, he put a hand out as if to quiet whoever was there, whomever he’d been talking to, hidden in the kitchen. She backed into the hall, toward the front door and he, loose-hipped in the slim jeans, followed, his hands, with their fine-boned wrists, hanging at his sides. His eyes were inky-black behind the wire-rims. “I’m sorry,” she said. She glanced sideways to see Nonnie, both gnarled hands gripping the top of the open car door, pulling herself upward from the car seat. She turned back. “I didn’t mean to sound so . . .I mean, I appreciate what you’re doing. . .I mean, the window. . .” “I wasn’t doing it for you,” he said. His voice was flat, like his eyes, his lip thinning against his bottom teeth. Her back touched the open front door. “What do you mean?” “I was doing it for my family,” Stephen said. “Not yours.” “What do you mean, your family?” She despised her trembling voice. He was scaring her, the way his chest tightened against the white cotton, the purposeful way his hips moved, those eyes. “This is our ranch. It’s always been our ranch.” Both his hands slapped the wood of the door over her head, trapping her behind his raised arms. She flinched back, a mewing yip of startled fright escaping her lips. “Your ranch –“ His voice was a hiss between spittle-wet white teeth. “Because you stole ours.” She felt a trembling in her elbows. He was very close to her. She could see fine black hairs, missed by his razor, on his upper lip, the round half-circle of bone defining the cheek. Something spicy, musky, emanated from his armpit, close to her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I’m talking about World War II. I’m talking about Executive Order 9022. Maybe you’ve read about it in one of those books you stole.” Her face flushed dark. “Get out,” she breathed. “Or I’ll call the police.” “Hello!” Nonnie piped from the driveway. She toddled toward the steps. “Did you come to see us?” Cheryl ducked under Stephen’s arm onto the sagging porch. He stepped back and rubbed his face, his fingers reaching up under his glasses. She skimmed the steps fast, reached Nonnie, put her arm through hers, turned her back toward the car. “Come on. We have to go.” But Nonnie pulled back, toward the stairs. “We used to always have people come,” she said. “Drink wine and eat salami and play bocce. All the neighbors. The Lydells and the Talones and the Miramotos, next ranch over. . .” She stopped. Cheryl looked up again. She stood, in a plum-colored pantsuit, just beyond Stephen, a straight, slender older woman, her dark, graying hair pulled back in a bun at the back of her head, chin raised, eyes, beneath the folds of lined flesh, black with emotion. “Obaasan,” Stephen said. * Nonnie stood close to the Japanese lady, the rolls of flesh around her middle visible under the flower print dress, her brown support hose wrinkling on her legs, her gray curls mussed by the wind. “Do I know you?” she asked in her wavery voice. The Japanese lady only slightly inclined her head. “I’m Kumiko Miramoto,” she said. “My grandmother,” Stephen added. Nonnie stepped closer. She pinched a fold of Kumiko’s sleeve between thumb and forefinger. “The lady next door was named Kumiko. But she was very pretty.” Kumiko’s upper lip quivered, almost a smile. “We’ve gotten old.” “Are you her relative?” Nonnie asked. “I am Kumiko.” Kumiko paused. “Adelaide.” Nonnie stepped back and looked up at her, the black and white hairs of her brows bunching. “How do you know my name?” “I’m your neighbor, rememb—“ She stopped. “Maybe it’s convenient to pretend to forget.” “My grandmother is not pretending!” Cheryl said, her face heating. Kumiko turned coolly to Stephen. “Stephen? Will you introduce us?” Something tired in his eyes, as if he’d spent himself in anger. “Obaasan, this is Cheryl Blessura. Cheryl, this is my grandmother, Kumiko Miramoto. There was the slightest forward tilt of Kumiko’s upper body toward Cheryl. Cheryl nodded curtly back. The four stood awkwardly in the doorway. The windmill clacked and there was the lonely rattle of metal against wood somewhere near the barn. A chilling wind blew into the hall. “We have some food,” Nonnie said brightly. “That’s not necessary,” Kumiko said stiffly. “Nonnie,” Cheryl said, “we better get you . . .somewhere warm.” She didn’t know herself whether she meant bundled back in the car or inside the invaded ranch house. She hesitated with the others in awkward tableau. “I want some café,” Nonnie said. “Cheryl, can we make some café?” “We didn’t bring any, Nonnie.” She wanted, suddenly, to cry. Nonnie was so sweet, so unaware of the hostility around her. And she’d so looked forward to coming up here. And it would be the last time, Cheryl was sure of it. Cheryl reached out and took Nonnie’s hand, the smooth puff of flesh at the base of her thumb dear to her. “I just want to take my Nonnie home,” she said, her voice breaking. “We have tea,” Kumiko said. “If you’d like.” * Cheryl didn’t like the proprietary way Kumiko moved in the kitchen, nor the way Stephen came in with stacks of pruned limbs, obviously already gathered and trimmed from the orchard, and stoked the wood-burning stove. She didn’t like the fact that the big round oak dining table had obviously been scrubbed down, the chairs dusted, the floor swept, though the living room furniture was still draped with ghostly sheets and cobwebs still hung from the corners in dull strands. Kumiko must have brought her own teapot, a blue-patterned white ceramic one with a rascally-grinning, claw-pawed dragon crawling amid the chrysanthemums. There were small white handleless cups, each with a blue chrysanthemum design in the bottom. They gathered around the round table and Kumiko brought the teapot and set it on a folded cloth. The tea was pale green and grass-scented and Cheryl held the cup under her chin and let the fragrant steam bathe her face. Nonnie cupped both hands around her cup and smiled without drinking. She put out a finger to the dragon on the teapot. “I know him.” Kumiko smiled frostily. Cheryl, through lowered lashes, watched Stephen, one arm cocked back over the chair back, his eyes vigilant, ready to leap in defense of his grandmother, the planes of his face sharp-etched, his eyes moodily opaque. She felt the same kind of energy emanating from him as when he’d trapped her in the cage of his arms by the door, but this time it seemed less personally directed at her. Just anger, an unconscious kind of force. If you slipped and the sidewalk came up and smacked you hard on your cheek, the blue-yellow bruise was the same, even if it originated from no one’s open palm. It felt like that. Nonnie scraped her chair back. “What, Nonnie?” Cheryl murmured uneasily. Nonnie didn’t answer. She toddled, feet outwards in her low pumps, to the great oak sideboard with the glass-fronted, gold-etched cabinet doors above, dimmed with dust, drawers and wood-faced cabinets below. She opened the second drawer down on the left and lifted something out on the flat of her palm and turned back toward the table. It was a piece of stiffly ironed linen, treasured between two sheets of tissue paper. Standing at Kumiko’s stiff shoulder, Nonnie turned back the tissue to expose the dark blue and pale blue stitching on the white cloth, half moons of lighter blue to form scales, overlapping concentric half-circles to indicate the waves of the sea, slashes of dark blue for the hairy, grinning stylized mouth of the same twisting, curling dragon that graced Kumiko’s teapot. Something like pain twisted across Kumiko’s face as Nonnie laid the cloth down in front of her, unfolding it to show the entire body of the serpent in a circle, his forked, flame-like tail close to the grinning mouth. “You showed me,” Nonnie said. Kumiko stroked the edge of the linen, then traced the embroidered body of the dragon with her finger. “Arita,” she said softly. “This comes from my island.” “You drew the design for me when I asked you. I remember,” Nonnie said. “Do you remember things . . . from that time?” Kumiko asked. Cheryl felt Stephen jerk beside her but he only cupped both hands around his teacup. Still, that dangerous energy pulsed. Nonnie sank into her chair next to Kumiko. “I remember lots of things.” Kumiko cocked her head just a bit. “Do you remember the war, for instance?” Nonnie gripped the edge of the table. “The war was terrible. My poor Albert.” Her face screwed up as if she were keening, but she made no noise, only rocked a little in her seat, fingertips pressed hard into the scrubbed wood of the table. “It’s obviously very painful for her,” Cheryl said coldly. Kumiko turned her elegant head toward Cheryl. “Don’t you want to know your history?” and Cheryl’s face flushed at the memory of her own bullying of Nonnie, trying to discover just that. “Don’t you remember what happened after December 7th?” Stephen’s voice was harsh. “Don’t you remember when your nice neighbors you embroidered with had to be home at eight o’clock, no exceptions for curfew? Could not travel more than five miles from their homes? Ordered to plant and harvest their crops or else be considered saboteurs, even though, directly after that hopeless labor, they would be transported like prisoners and incarcerated? Don’t you remember any of that, Mrs. Blessura?” Nonnie’s face puckered. “Stop it!” Cheryl said. “What is happening?” Nonnie said for the second time that day. “I don’t understand.” Cheryl scraped back her chair and stood up. “We’re leaving, Nonnie. That’s what’s happening.” Stephen stood up, too. “Don’t have the guts to hear the truth, do you?” Cheryl turned on him. “I can take you scapegoating us, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t have the guts to watch my grandmother cry.” “Stop!” Kumiko said. “Both of you. Stephen, sit down. Cheryl, I will not make your grandmother cry. That’s not what I want.” “What do you want then?” Cheryl asked. Kumiko smoothed the dragon embroidery with finger-flattened, stroking movements. “I want your family to understand what happened to our family.” “Why our family?” Kumiko looked up at Cheryl. “If you hear, you’ll understand. Please. Sit down.” “If Nonnie gets upset,” Cheryl said, “I’ll take –“ “I understand,” Kumiko said. “Please. Sit.” She rocked gracefully forward and lifted the teapot and poured into each of the four cups. Then she sat back with her hands nested, one atop another, in her lap. “My husband,” she began, “Stephen’s grandfather, was Keishi Miramoto. He immigrated from Japan in 1914 at the age of 19, lured by labor agents that came to our village in Kumamoto province in southern Japan. He was the youngest of a formerly well-off agriculture family of three sons. They were Samurai, but the Samurai had fallen on hard times since the breakdown of the feudal system. Maybe you know this from your studies.” Cheryl shook her head. “The land,” Kumiko went on, “would go to the eldest son. There was nothing, really, for Keishi, there. He listened to the labor agent and booked passage on a ship that landed in San Francisco, where he heard that the farm land was down here, in the Santa Clara Valley.” Her voice was almost accentless, save sometimes the hint of a clipped syllable, a very slight hesitation on her ending “s” sounds, like a zeeee trailing off. “He became a farm laborer in San Jose and lived, like the other bachelor men, in a rooming house in Nihonmachi.” “That means Japan Town,” Stephen said. “It’s still there, in San Jose, on Fifth and Sixth Streets at Jackson.” Cheryl nodded, though she hardly knew Almaden, much less the adjoining, larger San Jose. She looked across to Nonnie who had sunk back into her chair, her face turned toward Kumiko. “Gradually, he became a sharecropper with a white landowner,” Kumiko went on. “Then, when he had saved enough money, he sent for me. We married over here. I was surprised to see that he had adopted western dress, suits, stiff collars and ties. But soon, I did as well. Long skirts, waists, high-necked blouses.” Kumiko smiled a little. “I thought we looked very beautiful. We had a photograph. . .well. . .” She looked down at her fingers pleating the edge of the embroidered cloth. “. . . that’s all gone.” “All stolen, you mean,” Stephen said, his eyes smoky. “Destroyed.” “Stephen, we have an agreement with these people.” Stephen flung himself out of his chair and paced toward the kitchen. “An agreement with these people! I know what that means, it –“ “Stephen!” Kumiko said sharply. “Please sit down.” Stephen came and leaned his hands on the back of his chair. “I worked in the fields right along with my husband. All of the other Japanese wives did. Or they worked in the canneries. We saved every penny. We were going to make a life here.” “But once you saved your money, you couldn’t buy land,” Stephen said, his eyes hard on his grandmother. She kept her eyes on the embroidered cloth. “No, we couldn’t buy land.” “Why not?” he asked harshly. She looked up. “You tell them. You’re the lawyer.” “Not yet,” he said, and paced toward the sideboard. “You may not know this, Cheryl. Your grandmother certainly did at one time, but Issei were not permitted to buy land in this country after 1913.” He spun and put his hands behind him on the ledge of the sideboard. “Do you know what Issei means?” “I’m. . . not sure.” “First generation. Immigrants. The Alien Land Law of 1913, whose provisions were specifically drafted for the Japanese, or, I should say, against them, forbade Issei who were not citizens from owning land.” Cheryl glanced at Kumiko, uneasy, as she always was, in the presence of the victims of injustice. “Did they become citizens, then?” “Ah hah!” Stephen raised a finger. “The wise justices of the Supreme Court foresaw that little ploy and then denied Issei the possibility of ever getting citizenship. It took them until 1922, but they did it.” “It was necessary for us to have a child,” Kumiko said. She looked up from the nervous work of her fingers. “Of course, we wanted a child.” “Tom,” Stephen said. “Yes,” Kumiko said. “We called him Tom, to be American, but his real name was Takami. He was born on December 3, 1920.” “Well, he would have been a citizen,” Cheryl said. “Tom, I mean. Because he was born here. You could buy the land in his name, right?” Kumiko’s lips curved upward but her eyes didn’t smile. “We thought so.” “But no,” Stephen said. “The landowners around here weren’t finished with the Japanese. They closed off that little loophole with the 1920 Alien Land Law. Now, only adult Nisei, that’s second generation, could own land.” “We had twenty-one years to wait,” Kumiko said softly. “Until Tom was of age.” She sipped from her tea. “So, we waited. And worked.” “Sharecropping,” Stephen said. “Do you know what that means, Cheryl?” “I. . . the South.” She stopped. She had some vague idea of poor blacks in the South after the Civil War. Of poverty. Of never getting out of the grind. “I don’t really know.” “Sharecropping is when you get to farm a portion of land owned by some one else, but you have to share half or more of the proceeds from the crops. They had it all worked out here in the Santa Clara Valley. The Irish or English owners of the land would assign each parcel of land a number and then let a Japanese family farm that land. Like O’Shea 7, maybe, would be your plot. Sounds okay, doesn’t it?” Stephen pushed off the sideboard and paced over to the sheet-shrouded couch. “Maybe, if you worked really hard, and the Japanese did work really hard, you could make a living and put a little by, too.” “Okay.” Cheryl took a sip of her tea. It was cold. Stephen paced back. “Except how are you going to get your crops to market?” He spread his hands. “Easy. Nice Mr. O’Shea will take your crops to market, excuse me, has to take your crop to market because the distributors and the canneries won’t deal with Japanese. So Mr. O’Shea can’t be expected to do all that for free. So he takes another chunk out of your fifty per cent, say ten percent more, then gives you what’s left over.” He raised a finger. “Plus, plus, how do you, Japanese farmer back on O’Shea Number 7, know what cucumbers fetched that day? Market prices fluctuate daily and you’re down here on the farm – how do you know that what O’Shea says he got for your crops that he took 60% off the top from is what he really got? You don’t.” “But you take it,” Kumiko said. She looked up at her grandson. “It did get better, though. The Japanese got together and formed their own distribution systems. There was a Chinese cannery that was fair.” “It wasn’t a level playing field, that’s all I’m saying,” Stephen said. “Not even close.” “Not even close,” Kumiko echoed. She took a sip from her teacup, put it down, touched the side of the teapot, then glanced toward the stove. “We worked like that for a long time, then switched to leasing, which is like paying rent, but you keep the crops, all of them. But, under the law, we couldn’t lease any one piece of land longer than three years. So we had to keep moving. Strawberries in Alviso. Truck farming in Berryessa. But, always, we were looking for that piece of land that would be ours, so we would never have to leave our land again.” Cheryl darted a glance at Stephen, now leaning his lean hips against the back of the couch, arms crossed. “When Tom was 18,” Kumiko went on, “we picked out the land we wanted to buy from a man who was divesting himself of his property gradually. We felt sure, if we leased land from him for the three years allowed by law, he would sell when Tom was 21. I remember when my husband Keishi came home to tell me about it. He said it was in Almaden at the base of the foothills, just where the land began to slope upward a little.” Kumiko glanced at Nonnie. “On Olivas Road.” Cheryl stood up suddenly, moved into the kitchen, picked up the kettle, clanged it back on the iron burner. She stood hunched over its warmth, against the cold coming in from the removed window. She felt unable to go back and face Kumiko’s slow, measured unfolding of doom, Stephen’s angry energy, like the wall of heat you encounter in summer, coming out of an air-conditioned building. Palpable, as if your body could not slice through the heavy molecules. As if you were blocked, held in. The heat from the stove rose up her neck, flushed her cheek. She felt moisture under the curly tendrils of hair at her forehead. She frowned, pursuing the elusive thought. As if you were blocked, held in, by something as ephemeral as heavy air. Yes. Sitting at the table, she had the feeling they were prisoners, she and Nonnie. Prisoners of Kumiko’s and Stephen’s story, of their anger. Here, on their ranch, on what she’d always thought of as her sanctuary. She spun and walked back to the round table. Kumiko was waiting, patiently. Stephen’s eyes were on Cheryl. Nonnie sat with her hands in her lap, gripping the fabric of her dress, her brows puckered. Nonnie. Poor Nonnie. “Come on, Nonnie,” Cheryl said harshly. “Let’s go.” Stephen kept his arms-crossed stance but one side of his mouth rose upward into his lean cheek. “But you haven’t heard the rest of the story.” “I don’t want to hear the rest of the story.” She stood behind Nonnie’s chair. “Come on, Nonnie.” “But we’re just getting to the part about your family,” his voice shiny and slick as a knife blade. She touched Nonnie’s shoulders. “Nonnie. Let’s go home.” Nonnie looked up at her. “This is my home.” Cheryl let her hand slap to her thigh in frustration. She walked to the front door, jerked it open to stall for time. She couldn’t drag Nonnie out of here. A column of tension rose up the center of her body, quickening her breath and her heartbeat. She longed to be alone with outstretched arm and razor. Her right hand squeezed her left forearm hard under the sweatshirt, the quirk of pain from the unhealed scars providing a little release. She closed her eyes, willing control. She could not cut here. Standing there, with the cold on her face for what seemed long minutes, the small, claustrophobic rustles of fabrics and puffs of breath behind like an irritant, she became aware of what she was not hearing, no clang of metal in the wind, no click of windmill blades. No sighing rush of wind through the vineyards, through the barely-leafed fruit trees. Nothing. A heavy, damping, cool quiet. Waiting. She opened her eyes. She heard someone’s light step into the kitchen, the slight clang of iron as the kettle was lifted. “Come back, Cheryl,” Nonnie called in her wavering voice. * “Keishi,” Kumiko said, “was a bit of an inventor. He tinkered with leveling tools, and some of his inventions were actually used by other Japanese. We terraced the land for garden crops, because we could not wait years for fruit trees to mature, and planted snap beans, cucumbers, spinach, carrots and onions, as well as the young apricot trees, intercropping between the rows of young trees, so every available bit of land was used, something the whites did not do.” “Something the whites didn’t have to do,” Stephen mumbled. “He was a very busy, active man, Keishi. At night, he would whittle the most beautiful faucet handles, birds and squirrels and rabbits.” She closed her eyes. “I wish I had thought to take just one.” Her narrow chest lifted in a sigh. Her eyes fluttered open. “And he had also become active in the Almaden Japanese Organization. And we had the two boys, because Stephen’s father, George, had been born in 1926.” Cheryl glanced at Stephen, who had returned to the table when Cheryl did and warmed his tea from the fresh pot Kumiko had brought. He sat now, hunched over his cup, as if the shadow of the end to this story oppressed him as much as the fear of it did Cheryl. “But our whole goal was to own the land. Own the land. Sometimes, I would think of that phrase, in my own language. And I would wonder what that really meant. I imagined our ownership going down, down, deep into the earth, the lines marking the borders of our property slicing through all the layers of history, cutting through the bones of dinosaurs and sea creatures, the campfires of the native peoples who had lived here long ago, through the pressed beds of plants, cutting deeper and deeper into the core of the earth and anchoring there. Sometimes, when no one could see me, I would go out to the orchard and lie on the ground, and I would imagine I could feel the curvature of the earth arch under my back and I would stretch out my arms and grab handfuls of the soil, and I would whisper, “Watashi no. This is ours.” Her dark eyes were staring, glazed and hypnotized, at the teapot, at the grinning face of the dragon. “And so,” Kumiko said, coming back with a little shake of her head, “exactly on our son’s birthday, on Tom’s twenty-first birthday on December 3, 1941, Keishi withdrew his savings, $13,000, and called the landlord.” Kumiko rose, her fingers curled into her palms. “I told him not to do it. It was too risky. Leave the money in the bank, Keishi, I begged. It’s our heart’s blood.” Her slippers scratched on the wood floor as she paced to the couch, back to the round table, hands now on opposite elbows, squeezing. “But he couldn’t wait. And, the old landlord was ill and he put the meeting off. “I was so worried that he wouldn’t sell, worried that the money would be stolen. I said, ‘Kei, please. Put the money back in the bank. Please.’ But he said, ‘The money is safe. Don’t worry.’ But he didn’t tell me where it was. And he felt it was a good sign that the landlord was ailing. He would want to sell.” Kumiko stopped at the back of her chair and dropped a hand to the chair back, her head drooping. “Obaasan,” Stephen whispered, his eyes intent on her. “I can’t tell this,” Kumiko whispered. No one said anything for a long moment. Nonnie sat looking up at Kumiko, brow puckered. Cheryl held herself very tight, thigh muscles clenched, squeezing her hands together. Yes, leave the story here, leave unsaid whatever false accusation portended. She would get Nonnie back in the car, they would wind down the gravel drive and she would fly back east, to college and her life there, whatever that would be. Stephen would eventually give up on his hopeless, illegal dream, abandon the ranch, finish law school and become an angry crusader, no doubt channeling his own injustice into justice for others. The two old ladies would sit in the grayness of their memories and eventually, too soon, slip away. And the ranch house? Would it sink further into its foundation of rotting wood? Would the scraggly unpruned branches of the apricot trees snap in storm after storm, littering the untended ground with their gray tangle of twigs, the old touring car rust in the garage, the bocce ball court sink into mud then dry to cracked earth? Yes, and the spiders would spin their gray cotton over the Madonna, she with her melting pity for the fate of her son, too soon dead. And Cheryl would not come back to Almaden. There was nothing to come back to. “If it’s too painful. . . “ Stephen said, but his mouth twisted. “I would think,” Kumiko said slowly, “over and over, if I had done something different. . .” “You mean not been born Japanese?” Stephen scraped back his chair and stood up. “You didn’t cause Pearl Harbor, much as some Americans might have wanted to blame you for it.” “Oh,” Cheryl said, as if waking up from a dream, the dates finally making sense. “Of course. You lost your land because of Pearl Harbor, because the Japanese were interned. Now I understa—“ Stephen pointed a finger at her, cutting her off. “No, you don’t understand.” Anger rose in a wave so choking that even as Kumiko murmured, “We didn’t have the land yet to lose,” Cheryl was on her feet and leaning on two fists across the table toward her. “Then how the hell is this my poor Nonnie’s fault? You’re just looking for someone to blame, both of you. You’ve come and squatted on our land and ruined everything when all we wanted was one last afternoon together. . . “ Her voice trembled. She pointed at Nonnie. “You see how she is, yet you continue to punish her for . . .for history, unfair as it is. You accuse, you accuse, you don’t stop. . .” A spasm of trembling shook her. She felt Stephen’s fingers touch the small of her back. “Cheryl –“ She jerked away. Nonnie was sitting up very straight, eyes bright like a child’s. “Don’t cry, Cheryl.” “I’m not crying,” she said harshly. She sank down into her chair, her right hand gripping the table edge, willing her shivering spasms to stop. * It started so suddenly that at first they thought it was a plane overhead, a dull, static, soft roar. The room, already dim, darkened. Then the metallic staccato of drainpipes, a liquid dripping like rivulets of sound under the constant roar. “It’s raining!” Nonnie said and she toddled to the large front window, Kumiko gliding behind her. Stephen, frowning, slipped behind Cheryl’s chair and headed toward the kitchen. Cheryl rose. “Where would candles be, Nonnie? Do you think you have any?” and Nonnie led her to the sideboard and bent to the bottom drawer, and pulled out four beautiful tapers, spiral-carved and pale green, like lettuce when it first rises, twisting, from the dark earth. “Oh, Nonnie, these are too beautiful to use.” “I want to,” Nonnie said and bent once again, groping in the darkness of the drawer. She rose with two silver candlesticks and bore the remnants of her life as mistress of this house proudly to the table where Kumiko inserted the candles into the holder and Stephen lit them with a match curled into his palm. They sat down with their faces lit gold by the candle light, listening to the ping of the leaks into metal pot and bucket. “I want to hear the rest,” Nonnie said to Kumiko. “No, Nonnie,” Cheryl murmured. “You don’t have to,” Nonnie said. “You can lie down on the bed. You look tired. I want to hear it.” But she didn’t lie down. She sat and stared at the gray centers of the golden of the candle flames and listened to the rain that enclosed them in hushing, constant sound. * “The headline on the newspaper was five inches high,” Kumiko said. “I remember how black it was, like death, before I could even understand what it was saying, JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR. “The neighbor on the other side, Scotty Lydell, brought it, and I remember how he looked at me, from under his cap brim, and I knew right then that I was not –“ She looked up at Stephen with a bunched, pained brow, “How can I say this? That I was not to be allowed to mourn this tragedy. I was afraid even to say to him, ‘How terrible.’ I could see it in his eyes, though he’d always been very nice to us, the question, ‘Whose side are you on?’ Because this was a thing that made people choose sides.” “But the Japanese here weren’t allowed to choose,” Stephen said. Kumiko looked down at her hands. “We were given only painful choices.” She sat, with her graceful neck bent over her clasped hands, as perhaps she had sat, some twenty-six years ago, at her own kitchen table, waiting for her husband to come in from the orchard, to bend at the door to remove his mud-caked boots, to wash at the kitchen sink and carefully fold the towel then turn to her and the black accusation of the newspaper, and the end of the life they had worked so hard for. “At times like that,” Kumiko’s voice sounded thin, now, “you want to know where your loved ones are. That’s all you want to know. You want them around you, you want to touch. But Tom was off visiting his girlfriend in Mount Pleasant and George had taken his rifle that morning and hiked off into the hills. I remembered I’d envied him the climb through the fresh new grass, bright green from the rains, could almost see with him the flattened places where the deer had lain the night before, the burrowed holes of small animals, the flash of birdwing, the smell of the dark, dampened earth under his boots. “But I was to be alone that afternoon. Kei took off almost immediately. He was treasurer of the Almaden Japanese Organization, remember, and, as such, was a kind of community leader. The men met to discuss what to do, what the response of the Japanese community should be. Of course, condemn this atrocity. But how to stem the waves of hate that were rising against anyone with a face like this.” She touched her cheek with its fine texture of wrinkles. “And while he was gone, I thought of the money. And I looked for it, in the fold-down secretary and in the closet, in the barn, even, everywhere, all alone on the farm. We must secure the money, I didn’t know how, I didn’t have any good ideas. Put it back in the bank? Try to buy the land now? Hide it? Hide it? This was our life, this money. This was every day we got up with sore muscles and started all over again, stoop labor in the fields that most white men would not do, the long hard days, then the meals to cook at night, the mending of clothes and farm implements, then next day again, year after year, for the land. And now this, now this. And I was all alone that long afternoon. “And when Keishi came back, it didn’t seem that the men of the organization had done anything more valuable than I had that afternoon. Just an idea to tell the people not to panic, to cooperate, to act like good Americans.” “And the money?” Stephen asked. She looked up at him with dark eyes. “Still, he would not tell me where it was. It was safe. It was better this way. I wasn’t to worry. I remember him standing in the bedroom doorway. ‘They will not do anything to us, Kumiko. If it is war, and we believe it will be war, they will need our crops. Issei and Nisei grow 40 % of the crops in California, Kumiko. They need us. You’ll see.’ “I saw, mago. I saw. In two days, men in dark suits came. They were FBI, they said. They searched our entire house, every cupboard, closet, the pockets of our clothing.” She raised the tiny lid of the teapot. “They looked in the teapot. Then the barn. Everywhere. And they had Keishi sitting on the bed in the bedroom. ‘Where is the money? The money you withdrew? Where is it?’ They asked him why he withdrew such a large sum just before Pearl Harbor, what a coincidence, they said, walking around the bedroom in their squeaking soles, their dirty-bottomed shoes in my house, on my floors I cleaned on hands and knees, where is it, where is it, the same question I had asked my husband, and still he said nothing, and other men coming in from the barn with George’s hunting rifle, from the closet with our camera, from the living room where I sat at the table with our radio, and from the closet in the room where they kept him prisoner -- these pacing, suited men, FBI, their badges said, when Kei demanded that they identify themselves -- a folder, labeled Nihonjinkai Almaden, from his organization, and some dues checks inside, and they took that, too. And, finally, they took him, and they would tell me nothing.” Stephen spun away from the table and paced back and forth between it and the shrouded couch. Kumiko watched him. “George was like you,” she said. “Your father. Angry. Tom was more measured, trying to see what would be the best way for us. Not to panic. To think, to think. But I could not think, except about what Keishi told me as he was allowed to kiss me goodbye. ‘Take care of everything, Kumiko. The boys will help you. Take care of everything, especially the trays. The drying trays, you know, they must be tended to.’ Then he said, ‘Watashi wa aivata o aishiteru,’ ‘I love you’ in Japanese, and they pulled him away by the arm, as if he was transmitting some code to me.” She fell silent. There was only the soft scratch of Stephen’s feet on the worn wood floor and then that stopped too as he leaned against the couch with crossed arms. Over the liquid static of the downpour, Cheryl could detect some dripping rhythm, like the sounding of a bell, two beats, low-high, low-high, bamboo beating on brass, that was the sound, low-high, ta-tah, low-high, maybe it was one of the leaks in the kitchen, but Cheryl had the absurd thought that it was the sound of fate. Random, impersonal. A woman who scrubbed her floors on hands and knees, who pushed seed into the ground with her fingertips, long, long years, one day bore the fate that her husband was taken away and that she was alone on a ranch with two sons in a nation hostile to her. As alone as the four of them were now, in this cloud-darkened room with the sideways-flickering flames of the candles, again trapped by fate, this time a gray curtain of rain that would not stop, that beat this strange, plinking rhythm. Low, high, low high. “A week passed and no word, though we found out that all the officers of the Nihonjinkai Almaden had been taken away, and from the Nihonjinkai San Jose and the Alviso one, too. They must have had a list, Tom said. This happened too fast. They knew whose homes to go to. Anyone who was a leader in the Japanese community. These men were taken away and all ‘contraband,’ shortwave radios that could be used to communicate with the enemy, they said, weapons, even ceremonial swords from Japan that had been in families for generations. “A week after he was taken, in mid-December, we received a postcard from Kei. He was in something called the Immigration Detention Quarters in San Francisco. He was all right, he said, but wanted his shaving things and clean clothes. We called and were finally given permission to go see him. I remember I wore my best suit, of a deep, dark navy blue, and a crisp white blouse and pearls and a hat with a tiny black veil. I wanted to look my best for my husband.” Kumiko looked down at her hands once again and Nonnie leaned over and squeezed her forearm. “You were very pretty, then,” she said, causing Kumiko’s mouth to twist wryly. “It was a bleak, dingy place,” Kumiko went on. “We were told to wait for Kei in a small room but I remember peeking out through the window in the door and seeing Kei coming down this long, ill-lit highway in his crumpled clothes with a uniformed guard behind him and how shocked I was. That was before I began a life surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.” Stephen made a smacking noise behind Cheryl and once again the tattoo of his pacing shoes began. “He told us that he would be shipped with a number of other men to a camp in Missoula, Montana. He would not be coming home for the duration of the war, because, of course, we were now at war. “I started crying then. I couldn’t help it. I remember Kei cupping my face in both his hands and whispering to me not to cry, that it would be all right, and had I brought in the drying trays yet, how important that was, and looking over my shoulder at my two boys, dressed up in their suits, good, respectable Americans.” Cheryl heard Stephen’s deep, shivering intake of breath. “That was the last time he was truly my Kei to me,” Kumiko said, her head with its neat, graying bun drooping over her teacup. “A man. My husband.” Cheryl looked up at Stephen. A muscle tightened in his cheek. Nonnie kept her hand on Kumiko’s forearm, but she, too, seemed to sag in sorrow, these women who thought of themselves as lovers and partners forced to live lives without husbands. Something twisted inside Cheryl at this internal image of a young woman raising her tear-stained face to her husband for the last time, but the pain wasn’t just for Kumiko. It was the pain of a new tooth burrowing through the flesh of gum, an alive kind of pain, a growing pain. It was as if evidence of this type of love between a man and a woman was suddenly palpable, real. She had not really believed in it before. She had believed in exploitation, in compromise, in acts designed to wound, in despair, because that is what she’d seen growing up, between her parents. She had not seen this rose-petal face of bruised love raised to her husband. She had not believed in it. And now she did. “It was a terrible Christmas.” Kumiko’s voice was weaker now. “A horrible new year. Kei was transferred to Missoula and we sent warm clothes and I knitted at night. We could hardly bear to read the newspapers, those hated black letters, ‘JAPS.’ Or listen to the radio, full of ridiculous rumors: that Japanese Americans in Hawaii had cut arrows in the sugar cane fields to guide the Japanese bombers to Pearl Harbor. That there was some huge network of spies on the West Coast, all connected by shortwave radios. That the fishing boats were doing something or other to do with spying. That there were basement arsenals, full of weapons, ready to support an upcoming Japanese invasion of California. There was talk, almost immediately, of an evacuation. We could make no plans. “And, of course, we had no money. I didn’t know where Kei had hidden the money, or if the FBI men had really found it. And, even if he hadn’t taken all the money out of the bank, it wouldn’t have mattered much as the Japanese assets were frozen in the banks. Luckily, Tom, who was a citizen, remember, had a small bank account and we lived on that, and even George had a savings account. “I remember I became very thin, with the work and the worry, and Adelaide came over with pasta with lots of butter and garlic to fatten me up, and her wonderful, prune nut cake.” A quick, brief smile crossed Kumiko’s face and she patted Nonnie’s hand where it rested on her arm. “Then, on February 19, 1942, a day none of us will ever forget, it was announced in the newspaper that President Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066.” “Which didn’t mention race by the way,” Stephen interjected, his voice taut and staccato. “It just authorized zones from which any or all persons could be excluded. Very vague. But everybody knew what it meant. And somehow, even though there were German and Italian nationals here on the West Coast too, of course, only Japanese were evacuated.” “Everybody knew that it meant us,” Kumiko said bleakly. “We knew. But we didn’t know when. “We would learn very soon. Within a week, Terminal Island, down in Los Angeles, was completely evacuated of Japanese, mostly fishermen. Then, area by area, these Civilian Exclusion Orders would be tacked on telephone poles, and everybody in those areas would have three days to pack a few things, settle their affairs and be shipped out. We read about it: Bainbridge Island in Washington state, then one after the other. “There were a series of insulting restrictions, too. Japanese could not travel more than five miles from their homes and there was a strictly-enforced curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.” “And yet they declared it would be considered an act of sabotage if Japanese Americans did not plant their crops as usual,” Stephen said bitterly. “Crops they would never profit from themselves.” Kumiko looked up at him. “Your father, George, was angry like that. But Tom, like many Nisei at the time, felt we should cooperate as much as possible, convince everybody that we were as loyal as any American.” Kumiko gazed past Nonnie’s head, unseeingly at the sideboard. “I didn’t care, at that point, what the Americans thought of us. It was the land. I had to save, the land we’d worked so hard for. We planted, me and Tom and George. “Then,” Kumiko stood up as if in a trance, shaking Nonnie’s hand off her arm without looking at her, “the order came. Dated May 23, 1942. Tacked to telephone poles around town. We had by noon on May 30th to report to the Men’s Gymnasium at San Jose State College.” “I didn’t know. . .” Stephen said. “I just played basketball there last week.” “Yes.” A brief, ironic smile crossed Kumiko’s face.” My grandmother used to say, ‘The children play on blood.’ Because our playground in Kumamoto had been the site of some long-ago battle.” She tucked the tips of her fingers inside the sleeves of her plum-colored jacket and paced as Stephen had done. “I couldn’t sleep. We would lose this land. And, maybe the money, because it could be, must be, hidden somewhere. If the FBI men had not lied about not finding it. Tom was bitter that he couldn’t enlist, to serve his country. That had been denied all Nisei, soon after Pearl Harbor. But it was so important to him, to show loyalty, a loyalty he really felt. He was an American. He wanted to be treated like an American. He wanted to fight for America. I remember George screaming at him among the crates in those frantic days of packing, “You would die for a country that imprisons your father?” And Tom said something like, “This is bigger than your ideals, George,” but could never explain what he meant to my angry, angry George.” She touched Stephen’s cheek in passing. “On the morning of the 29th, the agricultural commissioner of Santa Clara County came around. He was making a survey of which leased lands would have to be operated by whites in our absence. The war effort required “Food for Victory,” he explained. Oh, he was very nice. But I hated him. And I remember saying to him, “This land has already been sold. To my neighbor. Mr. Blessura.” Nonnie’s head snapped up. “I swear, I had not thought of it until it came out of my mouth.” So that was it. Cheryl slid her eyes sideways to Stephen, leaning against the couch, still with arms folded, his face very still. “I remember my heart was thudding with the lie, with the idea of it. I remember George, saying, “Mom!” because he knew it wasn’t true, though he said nothing to the man. Tom was looking at me almost with pity, as if I was insane. And I remember that, of course, I knew where the money is. You’ve probably already guessed. But on a farm there are so many things to keep in order, season by season, and wood, of course, has to be protected from the rains, which is why I had made sure that Tom and George had stacked the drying trays in the barn when Keishi told me to, back in December, stacked them all the way to the ceiling, but why this insistence, when we wouldn’t use them until the apricot harvest in July, I wondered. Why? Why? The money had to be in the drying trays, those hundreds of trays, all exactly alike that no desk-job FBI man would ever think of taking down from the stacks, one by one, and looking between, until, after two hours of work, the three of us, me, Tom and George, found them, the slim packets, still bound in paper sleeves with Bank of Italy printed on them.” Kumiko clasped her hands and smiled as she paced with the triumph of that moment. “And Mr. Blessura would buy it for us and it would be here for us when the war was over. I would offer him all the money from the crops, or most of it, as we would need a little. But when we came back, the land would be ours.” Kumiko put a hand on the back of her chair. “He told me to call him Pop. Not Mr. Blessura. He offered me wine, his own wine, but I don’t drink wine. Adelaide brought me some coffee, I remember, but I hardly drank it. I was full of my idea. He could keep seventy per cent of the profits. Of course, he would have to hire laborers, maybe a manager. All those expenses would have to come out first before he figured the 70/30 split. I remember I had the money in a burlap sack we’d found in the barn near the trays. I remember the furry brown dust it left on Nonnie’s table. This very table.” Kumiko smoothed the wood grain with her fingers. “Pop was afraid,” Nonnie said. “Some people didn’t like Italians, too. The Italian fishermen in Santa Cruz who weren’t citizens could no longer fish.” “But you and Pop had your citizenship,” Kumiko said. “Yes,” Nonnie said. “And you put your hand on his, Adelaide, I remember, across this table, and you said, ‘Do it for them.’” Nonnie’s mouth trembled. “Yes.” “I pushed the sack across the table, this table, to him. The next day, he drove the three of us to the San Jose College gymnasium and shook hands with the boys and took my hand in his and told me not to worry. Then we were drawn into the crowds of people with their suitcases, by the shouted orders and confusion. And for more than two years, we were not free persons, but lived behind barbed wire in cold barracks fit for animals, not humans, first at Santa Anita Racetrack, in the horse stalls, then at Heart Mountain in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming.” “Did he send you the deed?” Stephen asked. Kumiko stopped, staring down at the worn floorboards. “Obaasan?” His voice was like wood tearing. “No,” she said. “We never received the deed.”
* It was Stephen’s turn to lean over the table, lift the teapot and stride into the kitchen for fresh tea, as if he had to move or destroy something. Cheryl watched Nonnie, who sat with both hands gripping the edge of the tabletop as if it were the dashboard of a careening car. “Nonnie,” she said. “We don’t have to listen to this.” She caught Kumiko’s sharp look. “No one wants to listen to the truth!” Cheryl turned her head toward her. “I told you. My grandmother comes first.” Stephen strode back with the teapot. “Then leave, if you can’t take it.” “To you? Leave it to you? That’s what you want, isn’t it?” “Stop it!” Nonnie and Kumiko said at the same time, Nonnie’s voice softer, more pleading, Kumiko’s like bamboo snapping. The sound of the rain, liquid and hushed, seemed to rise in the silenced room. Stephen set the teapot down on the folded cloth in the center of the table. Kumiko glided over and lifted it and poured each cup full then set it down. “I apologize if I am disturbing you, Adelaide,” she said, bowing slightly toward Nonnie, “or you, Cheryl,” with another graceful dip of her graying head toward Cheryl. “But I must finish this story. It’s almost done. I must tell my grandson, if no one else. If you like, the two of us will go into another room. I am 78 years old. I may not live much longer or I may live a long time. Or. . . “ She glanced at Nonnie. “I may forget my story. So I must tell it to my grandson, who has only heard angry pieces of it. I must tell him the whole thing. I didn’t come here to hurt you. I didn’t know you would be here at all. Stephen said. . . well, I didn’t know. I apologize.” She stood by her chair and bowed her head. “Apologize for what?” Stephen barked. Kumiko raised her head, her eyes dark. “Stephen. If you let other people dictate how you behave, even if they do you an injustice, then they are your master.” Cheryl half rose. “What injustice?” then sank down as the meaning of Kumiko’s words played back in her consciousness. Control of self. Some internal standard of behavior. Not always reacting. Not flinching. “We sent money,” Nonnie said. “I remember we sent it to Heart Mountain.” Kumiko turned toward her. “Yes, you did, for awhile. We had thought it would be more, but. . . . Your husband assured us he had bought the land. It’s what kept us going in those first dark days before Keishi was reunited with us.” “From Montana?” Stephen asked, reaching past Cheryl for his teacup. “Yes,” Kumiko said. She sat down into her chair again. “He was not the same man. He was. . . held in.” She glanced at Stephen. “Not like enryo, not in a good way, of control. But as if he had retreated to an island inside of himself and he would not come off it. Not for the boys. Not for me. Not for himself.” She cupped her teacup with her hands. “Not for life.” She looked at Stephen again. “Haji.” Stephen banged his teacup on the table, next to Cheryl’s elbow. “Why should he feel shame?” “It’s the Japanese way. He had done nothing to be ashamed of. But he had been shamed. He’d been treated like criminal. He was transported to Montana, with many others, of course, in a train with the blinds always drawn and armed guards at each exit. He was allowed to take nothing, not even a handkerchief. Once there, they were housed in barracks in the freezing cold. Finally, the Army issued them some winter clothing. But one man, whom Keishi had befriended, had already died.” Her finger traced the pattern of wood grain in the table. “He didn’t tell me everything that happened in Missoula. He was very silent. Of course, we had no privacy, the four of us all in one room with a bare bulb and a stove that did not work at first. But still, he was no longer my husband.” A deep shivering breath shook her shoulders slightly and Nonnie, once again, reached for her, petting the soft velour of Kumiko’s jacket with short-nailed fingers. “I relied on my boys.” She looked up at Stephen. “So much. But then, well, we were no longer a family, in many ways. Once Kei returned, the boys did not eat with us in the mess hall, but with their friends. George roamed the camp with a group of angry boys his age. And Tom, well, as I said before, he had wanted to enlist. But, after Pearl Harbor, he was classified, like all Japanese Americans, even though citizens, as 4C.” “What’s that mean?” Stephen demanded. “It means unfit for military service due to nationality.” Stephen spun away from the table. “Unbelievable.” “It was believable,” Kumiko said. “Everything was believable. We would say to one another, over and over, ‘Shikata ga nai.’” “What does that mean?” Cheryl asked. “It cannot be helped,” Kumiko said. “It must be endured.” She looked down at her hands. “Tom was a young man. His body ached for action. He could not bear being cooped up like an animal in a pen. So, when the government realized they needed us. “ She looked up. “Oh, yes, men had been allowed to leave the camp to pick sugar beets in Montana and other crops, to work in factories. They had made a mistake, you see. They needed our labor. So when the government, in its wisdom, saw that it needed fighting men, it reclassified all Nisei, and began drafting them.” “I would not have gone,” Stephen said. Kumiko smiled. “You are your father’s son. That’s what he said. Of course, he was only fifteen. He would go to the meetings of the Fair Play Committee which argued that before anyone participated in the draft, their rights as American citizens should be restored.” Kumiko’s smiled faded. “I’m glad George was not old enough to really be a member of the Fair Play Committee because they were imprisoned as draft-dodgers. But Tom signed up willingly and entered the 442nd combat team. And he looked beautiful in his uniform.” She smiled up at Stephen. “You’ve seen the pictures.” “Yes,” Stephen said and squeezed her shoulder, then spun away rubbing his face. “We received a letter,” Kumiko said, “in Heart Mountain, full of pride and pain. The 442nd assisted in the liberation of Dachau. I will never forget the expression on Kei’s face as he read that letter. His son, a hero, in the freeing of people from that horrible concentration camp. The letter received and read by his parents, themselves confined in a concentration camp. A much more humane one, of course. In many ways, there is no comparison. But, still, a camp.” Kumiko blinked and Cheryl saw, by the flickering light, that her eyes were liquid with tears. “He was killed, of course, soon after, in a place called Heilbronn. “ Her voice became very low and Cheryl saw Nonnie lean forward to hear. “Kei could not accept it. He stopped living, then. He would not leave the room. He would not eat, except for some thin soups I fixed myself on the stove. He would sit and stare and when I sat beside him and leaned my cheek on his shoulder, he would not react. I had lost my husband.” She stroked the back of a finger delicately under each eye. “I’m sorry,” Cheryl said, her voice husky with emotion. “I was the head of the family now,” Kumiko went on,” as I had really been since Pearl Harbor. To me fell the worry over our future. And I was worried. Because, in the last few months, the summer of 1945, as we were preparing to leave the camp, we had received no money from the Blessuras. No word at all.” Cheryl looked up at Nonnie. Her pupils looked black and huge in the flickering candlelight. Her hand fell from Kumiko’s arm and she drew it next to her stomach and clutched it with her other hand. “And when I came home, with this crippled family, there was someone else living on the land and we were turned away with harsh words I won’t repeat. I remember I told George to stay in the car we had borrowed from friends, to stay with Kei. Because I knew, climbing this gravel road up here to this very house, that something was very wrong.” Kumiko stood up and paced to the front door and looked out through the glass window at the gray rush of water. “And you told me, Adelaide, that you had lost the land.” “Pop was sick!” It was a wail from Nonnie. “He had a stroke. And my poor son. My poor Albert –“ “It was our land!” Kumiko’s voice was harsh. “It was our money.” Nonnie tried to turn herself in her chair toward Kumiko. “I gave you all the money I had.” “He killed himself!” Kumiko screamed. She gripped the raised wood panels of the door in both hands. “He put a bullet in his brain. My Kei!” “Aaaauuggh!” Nonnie cried, “Aaaaugh,” shaking her head as if there was no outlet for her pain, no words, just this clotted cry. “No!” Cheryl moaned. “You promised!” She rose up, leaned across the table with outstretched hand to her Nonnie who did not see her, who was sinking in some sea slough of sorrow, whose shoulders swayed with the buffeting of her emotion, who keened in a cry without language. Stephen pulled his grandmother’s hands from the door, enclosed her in his arms, turned her away from the gray rushing bleakness of the rain outside, and rocked her, rocked her, rocked, eyes dark with anger on Cheryl. * Nonnie sat at the round oak table with her head hanging slightly sideways on her neck like the stem of a broken flower. Cheryl was sorry she had woken her to this depressive state to sit next to the woman she had wronged, erect with righteous anger, who served steaming miso soup from a white soup tureen from Nonnie’s past. The pears they had brought, quartered and cored, were arranged on a plate and the hard cheese and French bread on cutting boards. The cone-shaped flames of the candles leaned, strove upward, golden, sensitive to every movement of arm in the reach for fruit and knife, the breaking of bread, to their exhaled breaths even. Cheryl went around the table to her grandmother, cut off a small slice of pear and conveyed its cinnamon-scented flesh to Nonnie’s lips. She turned her head away. “Ah, Nonnie,” Cheryl whispered, sinking to her knees beside Nonnie’s chair. She should have stopped it, should have arrested the relentless barrage, the cruel siege that was Kumiko’s story. “Some cheese? Or try the soup.” But her voice broke on the word “try” and she looked up to see Stephen’s eyes on her, his jaw jutting sideways and some small flicker of nerve just under the eye. “We did buy the land.” Nonnie’s voice was scratchy from disuse. Kumiko flinched. Her eyes looked inky in the wavering candlelight. “Don’t say that.” Nonnie straightened her head and looked sorrowfully into Kumiko’s eyes. “We bought it,” Nonnie said. “We bought your ranch for you.” * Stephen found some vinegary wine from Pop’s barrel in the barn and it seemed to clear the rust from Nonnie’s voice. She reminded Kumiko that Pop hadn’t wanted to take the money, that it was Nonnie who persuaded him. Pop drove out more than she did, talked with the other ranchers, drank wine with the postman and the sheriff. Pop knew things. He knew that a Japanese family’s house had been burned in Stockton, another’s farm equipment vandalized in Salinas. There had been talk of incarcerating Italian and German nationals, too. This was true war hysteria, and beyond the genuine uncertainty and fear glittered greed. An unprecedented shifting of fortunes was about to take place in the Valley. The neat, intensely cultivated farms and ranches of the Japanese, the very existence of which had incited the kind of institutionalized racism that had left the Miramotos landless up to this time, were suddenly within grasp. This was a dream come true to the type of prominent agriculturist who told the Saturday Evening Post, “It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Japs grow. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.” Nevertheless, Pop had given his word and the very next day, he drove over to Mr. Wayne’s ranch, money in hand, to buy the Miramoto land. Old Mr. Wayne wasn’t there. He was sick real bad. Pneumonia. At least that’s what his son told Pop, not looking him in the eyes and steering Pop away from the closed door off the living room. He was in the hospital, young Wayne said, and he himself was handling all his affairs. No, he didn’t think the land was for sale. Pop said he thought it was, that he’d had a conversation with old Mr. Wayne about six months ago, over wine, and Wayne had said he was going to divest himself of some of his property. That was then, said young Mr. Wayne. Pop took out the packets of the Miramoto money, still in the bank sleeves. “I’m offering you thirteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Cash.” And young Mr. Wayne didn’t touch the money, just paced across the room and threw himself in a chair and said no. But Pop could see his eyes going to the stacks of bills on the table in nervous darts, as children might look at a plate of chocolates, tantalizingly nearby. Young Mr. Wayne’s eyes told the lie but Pop realized, too, just then, that he had not been smart, either. This was no way to negotiate with a man like the younger Wayne. With his father, yes. But not the younger. And he paid for his mistake almost immediately. “The decision’s my father’s, of course. But I know what I would recommend to him,” the Wayne kid said. “What?” Pop asked. The younger Wayne stood up. “He could get twenty five thousand easy for that land. It’s war now. Gotta feed the troops. Food for Victory.” Nonnie remembered that Pop told her how he’d swept the packets of bills back into his leather valise, crushed his hat on his head and made for the door, calling the young man a war profiteer. And to his back, as he descended the porch stairs, he heard, “Jap lover.” Pop gave Nonnie the money to hide, unsure what to do until a week had passed and the older Wayne came over, looking remarkably fit for a man who’d just gotten out of the hospital. Pop poured wine, as usual, but noticed that Wayne just fingered the glass, running his thumb up and down the side, then remarked about how he was getting older, his health and energy weren’t the same as they used to be and how he was turning more and more of the running of the ranches over to his son. And Pop knew what that meant and stood up. “I’ve got a lot to do,” he told Wayne. And that’s when the old man said that he could have the land for twenty thousand, that’s the lowest he could go. And Pop took the deal, Nonnie said, not knowing what else to do. He wasn’t in a position to shop for the best deal. The Miramotos, locked up somewhere in the middle of nowhere, expected to come back to this land, that they had so painstakingly terraced and planted. He went to Bank of Italy in San Jose and got a mortgage on his own land. That’s why there was never as much to send to Heart Mountain as the Miramotos expected. Pop had to pay the taxes on both places, the workers on both, and the mortgage on his own. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Kumiko asked and Nonnie said she hoped they would never know. It was hurtful and cruel, insulting. They would get through this hard time, the Miramotos in Heart Mountain and the Blessuras with their mortgage and after the war, they would live side by side. It was their dream of peace in the midst of war even when Albert enlisted and was shipped to Marseilles and Pop had to do more and more of the work himself, with farm labor hard come by, the Japanese incarcerated, the young men off to war. Even high schools let their students out of school to help harvest the crops and a whole new wave of worker, the braceros, was coming up from Mexico into the Valley. “But then,” Nonnie faltered, “then. . .” “What?” Stephen said, too sharply. Cheryl took Nonnie’s hand. “Sssh, Nonnie, you don’t have to –“ “Yes, she does.” She looked across at Stephen, leaning forward, one elbow on his knee, the candlelight reflected in his black eyes in two gold slits, his jaw tight. “No, she doesn’t,” she said, slow enough for him to feel her anger. “I told you. The minute she gets upset. . .” “You’d leave. Go ahead,” he said, indicating the darkened front door with a sideways sweep of his arm. “Stephen!” Kumiko hissed. “Stop it.” “I want to tell,” Nonnie said in her wavering voice, turning toward Cheryl with her eyebrows bunched. Cheryl patted her hand and glared across at Stephen. “Only what you want to.” Nonnie reached out her hand for her wine glass and Stephen moved quickly to pour her more. “Go on,” he said. Nonnie took a sip of the vinegary wine then leaned forward and set the glass on the table. “Something bad happened in Italy,” she said, her lips puckered as if they would tremble, but they didn’t. “Where Albert was.” Cheryl couldn’t help her sharp intake of breath. Would Nonnie tell these people what she hadn’t told or couldn’t remember to tell Cheryl earlier? Did Cheryl want her to? Surely she knew something, at least, about the ten-year-old boy? But Victorina? Did she know of Victorina? She looked up to see Stephen looking at her and picked up her own glass and bobbed her lips into the astringent liquid to hide from his gaze. Her heart was beating in slow thuds. What did she want known about her family? What did she, herself, really want to know? “He was very upset when he came home from Italy,” Nonnie said. “Shell shock,” Kumiko said. Nonnie looked at her, almost in horror. “No. Not my boy.” “Only what you want to say, Nonnie,” Cheryl said once again and again Stephen’s sharp glance raked her. “Monsignor Cassani,” Nonnie said, “Monsignor Cassani. . .” as if she were searching with blind fingers for the thread of her story. No one encouraged her this time. Nonnie floundered into silence. She looked down into her wine glass. “Monsignor Cassani thought he should get married. It would help him, he said. He said. . .” She frowned in concentration. “. . .he would get . . . normal again, if he got married, and he knew this young nurse and she was very pretty.” Nonnie shifted on the couch to look into Cheryl’s face. “Your mom. Eileen. She was learning to be a nurse at Bishop Reddy. And she was poor. And she didn’t want to get married unless Albert had a house. So Pop bought Albert a house – the only way he could.” “He mortgaged our property.” Kumiko’s voice was harsh. Nonnie looked past Cheryl at her. “Yes.” Kumiko stood up and paced, holding her elbows. “Let me guess. You couldn’t make the payments on the mortgage.” “We did at first,” Nonnie said. “But Pop couldn’t afford to hire as many workers as he usually did, for both places. He couldn’t do it all, he couldn’t do it. And he had a brain stroke. Right out in the orchard.” She looked pleadingly at Kumiko. “After the hospital, they put him in a home for awhile. He had to learn how to use his right hand again, to feed himself and write. I tried to get workers, but there wasn’t enough money and the fruit rotted on the ground. I remember the fruit flies rising up. They were everywhere, in your hair, in your nose.” “Why didn’t you save our place, not yours?” Kumiko’s brittle staccato was cruel. “Pop’s days as a farmer were over. Why leave this place to rot and lose ours, when we were just coming back from hell?” “We didn’t leave it to rot,” said Nonnie, wounded. “Pop got better . . . later.” “But Kei,” Kumiko said, the tears shining bright in her eyes. “Kei never got ‘better.’” “Ssshhh,” Stephen said. “Sssshh. Don’t.” “So,” Kumiko said, “if it hadn’t been for your son, maybe---“ “It was the war,” Nonnie said sorrowfully. “He was always a good boy. It was the war.”
A former English instructor, reporter and editor, with an M.A. and M.F.A. in the Novel from San Francisco State University, Claire Ortalda has been published in numerous literary journals. Her short story, “A Village Dog,” was winner of the 2004 Georgia State University Fiction Prize. A poem, “Iowa,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A screenplay version of her novel, Shadow Play, achieved semi-finalist status in the Chesterfield Writers Film Project (Paramount Pictures) in 2003 and an earlier version of the novel was a finalist in the Omaha Prize for the Novel. Her story, “The Exact Meaning of Grief,” will be published in the Canadian magazine, Transition, in September, 2005. She is the editor of The Other Side of the Closet (IBS Press) and Financial Sanity (Doubleday).
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