Weedflower (5 page)

Sumiko went to bed early and listened to the crickets sing while the rest of the family played cards in the living room. Once, to make herself feel better, she reached under her mattress to look at the receipt book she’d found on the street a year ago. She sometimes filled out the receipts and pretended she was selling flowers at her own shop. She loved her receipt book.

When Tak-Tak came in for bed later, she didn’t say a word. Eventually, the house grew still.

And so Sumiko could finally allow herself to think about that minute alone on the porch, with the other
children staring at her from the window. And she could finally allow herself to cry. She had wanted so badly to go to that party. She had wanted so badly to look pretty in her dress. She had wanted so, so badly to make friends with some of those girls.

She didn’t even notice the door open, but suddenly Bull was by the bed, one of his big mittlike hands wiping her wet face. She sat up and sobbed in his arms. He was so big and wide, she couldn’t reach her arms around him. In the dim light she saw Tak-Tak step around the curtain of blankets. She cried out to him, “Leave me alone!”

“What did I do?” he said.

Bull turned and said quietly, “Go to bed, Takao. I’ll be right there to say good night.” He spoke kind of in grunts, the way a bull would speak if bulls could speak. She sobbed so hard, she couldn’t get her breath. Bull handed her a handkerchief. When she blew her nose, it felt like her brain was coming out of her nostrils.

“I can fix it, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“The ballerina. My mother found it on the porch.”

She cried even harder but remembered to lower her voice so Tak-Tak wouldn’t hear. “Bull, they wouldn’t let me come in the house! I didn’t go to the party! They made me leave!” She tried to cry silently, but it just made her snort when she inhaled. She
lowered her voice even more. “But, Bull, is it just because we’re Japanese?”

Bull didn’t answer for so long that Sumiko thought he hadn’t heard her. But then he grunted, “Yes.”

“Only that?”

“Yes.” Then he said,
“Gaman.”
That meant “We must bear it.”

After a while Bull pushed her away, and she could see he was smiling gently. “Look at that,” he said. He was gazing outside.

She followed his gaze and saw Uncle standing in the moonlight near the outhouse, talking to it and occasionally gesturing with his arms. Whenever Sumiko saw someone talking to the outhouse, she always knew exactly where Jiichan was. She and Bull laughed, and at last she was sleepy.

5

S
UMIKO DIDN’T WAKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, and nobody woke her up. She wondered whether that meant they all knew about the party now. She dressed and then slapped and rubbed her face to try to bring blood to her skin.

She pulled the silk scarf from under the mattress, where she’d put it the day before. The scarf made her feel humiliated all over again, so she stuffed it back under her mattress. After that she went into the living room.

Jiichan was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper. He glanced at her.

“You go one party and now you think you can
wake up late?” He scowled. That meant Bull hadn’t told anyone, and neither had Tak-Tak.

“Good morning, Jiichan.”

“You look sick;” he said. “Eyes puffy.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look sick. Go tell your auntie you’re sick.”

Sumiko wished she
were
sick. She certainly didn’t feel like working today. Sunday was her day for housecleaning and reading Japanese. If she had questions about the Japanese, she would ask Jiichan.

“Where’s Tak-Tak?” she asked.

“Outside with horse. He get bored waiting for sleepyhead.”

Jiichan read his Japanese newspaper the whole morning. Every so often he would say things to Sumiko like, “Get me tea” or “You start rice yet?” or “Rub my feet.” Taking care of old men’s feet was one of a woman’s jobs, according to Auntie. Auntie used to rub Jiichan’s feet until one day he accused her of trying to break his big toe. Now it was Sumiko’s job.

She was rubbing his toes when she heard honking from the road. She went to the front window and saw a car that looked like Mr. Hirata’s driving alongside Mrs. Takahashi as she ran down the road crying. Mrs. Takahashi didn’t pay any attention to the car. Where could she be going? She lived in the opposite direction. She was seventy-three years old. Sumiko had rarely seen her walk, let alone run. The car pulled up
in front of Sumiko’s house. It
was
Mr. Hirata—the sweet pea king. Mrs. Takahashi kept crying and ran right past the house. Sumiko opened the door before Mr. Hirata could knock.

He was wearing his farm clothes, and his face was dirty. He breathed hard, even though he’d been driving. He removed his hat and bowed slightly to her.

“Sumi-chan. Is your uncle home?”

“He’s out in the field.” She paused. “Do you want to sit down?”

“No. May I talk to him?” Mr. Hirata asked, barely concealing his impatience.

Jiichan stood up, obviously insulted. “Can I help?”

Mr. Hirata bowed his head respectfully and said, “Matsuda-san, it’s only that—I should talk to your son, too.” He walked a couple of steps backward, nodding respectfully at Jiichan. Then he turned around and rushed through the living room with Sumiko following. They ran right through the kitchen and to the back door before he turned to her and said, “Stay here. This isn’t for children.”

The temperature was in the seventies, a perfect Southern California December day. The holes in parts of the old cheesecloth allowed the bright sun to shine on the carnations. Some days the brightness made the flowers look artificial, as if they were made of paper. But today Sumiko thought the flowers almost seemed to glow. At Mr. Ono’s farm a man was running across
a field. Maybe somebody had been hurt on a tractor. That’s what was wrong the last time Sumiko had seen this much commotion.

When Mr. Hirata reached her uncle, everyone except Bull stopped working to watch. Auntie and Ichiro walked over. Tak-Tak was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Hirata was speaking loudly, but Sumiko couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everybody started running across the field toward the house. Tak-Tak stepped out of the stable. Uncle called out sharply to him.

“Takao, get inside the house!”

Sumiko wondered who had been hurt and how badly. Then she had a terrible thought. Maybe a fishing boat on Terminal Island had sunk and more than one person had been hurt!

When the grown-ups had almost reached her, Sumiko started to call out a question, but Uncle snapped, “Get inside!” He half pushed her through the doorway. He was usually very mild mannered. Fear washed over Sumiko. Maybe a relative had been hurt in the fishing accident? Auntie had a cousin who fished off Terminal Island.

“What is it, Uncle?”

She followed them into the living room, where Uncle and Auntie gave each other one of their meaningful looks that nobody else ever knew the meaning of. They had been married since they were both
twenty-one. Sumiko had the feeling that each knew exactly what the other was thinking. Their faces were pale.

Jiichan stood up, but then he sat down and said, “Nobody tell old man, that’s okay, I don’t care!” He pretended to be reading his newspaper. Still nobody spoke. Another long look passed between Uncle and Auntie. Jiichan said again, “I said I don’t care!”

Uncle knelt on the floor and took Jiichan’s hand as if Jiichan were a little child. “Hirata-san heard on the radio that Japan bombed Hawaii,” Uncle said to Jiichan.

Jiichan looked stricken. He softly said something that sounded like “Wah.” But Sumiko knew what he’d said: “War.”

There was another long silence as Auntie and Uncle stared at each other. The way they looked at each other scared Sumiko. “Are they going to kill us?” she half whispered.

Auntie said, “Of course not. Don’t talk like Tak-Tak.”

Mr. Hirata cleared his throat, then bowed to the room and said to Uncle, “Good luck. Let’s talk later.”

He literally ran out the front door.

And again there was silence. Then Auntie announced, “We’ll have to burn our things.” She turned to Sumiko. “Get your notebooks that you practice Japanese in.” To Tak-Tak she said, “Find all our Japanese books and magazines.”

Tak-Tak rushed off.

Sumiko turned to run off, but then she turned right back to Auntie. “Burn our things?” she said. “What do you mean?” What did burning their things have to do with the Japanese bombing Hawaii?

“Anything that might make them suspicious.”

“But why?” Sumiko said. “Suspicious of what?”

“Isoginasai!”
Hurry!

Auntie looked so furious that Sumiko immediately ran out of the room to fetch her notebooks. She stopped in the hallway and turned back to the living room. “Auntie!” But Auntie wasn’t listening. She was peering out the front window, so mesmerized that she didn’t even notice Sumiko slip beside her. Sumiko saw a single tail of smoke rising in the distance.

“Others have already started,” Auntie said fretfully.

No one answered her, but suddenly everyone except Bull was talking at once. Then everyone stopped and Bull spoke: “I should tend the flowers. We may need money.” Uncle nodded, and Bull went out to the fields.

“I’m not going to burn my notebooks,” Sumiko announced. She had worked hard to learn to write a little Japanese.

Uncle leaned over Sumiko and shook her shoulders just once, as if shaking sense into her. “If we are all arrested, who will take care of you? Now get your
notebooks and anything else that seems un-American.” He spoke so solemnly that Sumiko felt terrified. He spoke as if he himself might be arrested simply because she could write Japanese. She ran to her closet.

For a long while she just stood in her closet holding her notebooks close to her. Jiichan had paid old Mrs. Ige to help her write better. Mrs. Ige had also taught Sumiko’s mother.

By the time Sumiko got outside, Uncle had already started the fire on the dirt ground between the house and the flower fields. The wood in the fire looked like it had come from the bathhouse. Sumiko saw that on the Ono farm the Onos also had started a fire. Sumiko held her notebooks tightly.

Then she saw it.

“That’s the picture from the bureau!” she cried. “You can’t get arrested for that! That’s my parents!” She grabbed the stick her uncle was using to stoke the fire, but he took a firm hold of her arm.

“There’s a Japanese flag in that picture,” said Uncle. “It’s dangerous to keep it.”

She turned to her grandfather. “Juchan!”

But for once Jiichan had nothing to say. He just scowled at her as if she were misbehaving.

Sumiko held her notebooks up and whispered, “Bye.” Then she flung them into the fire and watched them smoke and turn black. It looked like a disease
had struck the papers. The fire heated Sumiko’s face. Ashes flew around her like insects. She suddenly remembered something she’d never remembered before: ashes flying around a fire as she and her parents burned garbage in an incinerator; her mother saying; “Wish on the floating ash, Sumi-chan”; and Sumiko wishing. But she couldn’t remember what she’d wished.

Now she didn’t move until every page had turned black and shriveled. Then Auntie made her run inside to find more things to burn. She didn’t know what might be considered “disloyal.” If notebooks were somehow disloyal, then was a Japanese silk fan also bad? And what about her kimono? Surely there was nothing dangerous about a kimono. She picked hers up, but then decided to push it far back into her closet.

Except for Bull, the family spent the rest of the day combing the house for anything that seemed Japanese in a disloyal way, whatever that meant.

By bedtime Sumiko was exhausted. In the surrounding fields a multitude of fires lit up the black night. She felt she could no longer stand up. Tak-Tak was already asleep when she got to the bedroom. His face was black with ash. She wiped his face, but he didn’t even notice. She wiped listlessly at her own face. She remembered that she hadn’t heated the water tonight, just as she hadn’t yesterday. But nobody had said anything about it either time. She
sat up in her bed and saw that, outside, her aunt and uncle were standing in the glare of the fire. Whereas earlier they had seemed feverish, now they seemed automated and emotionless. Bull was probably in the stable, talking to Baba. Bull had continued to work even after dark. She knew he would make sure they didn’t run out of money.

Later, long after she had gotten in bed, Sumiko could hear adult voices from the living room. Finally she sneaked into the hallway to listen.

“A friend of mine got beat up last week,” Ichiro was saying. “Some
hakujin
did it.”
Hakujin
were white people.

Then there was silence until Bull said, “Dad, is the rifle still in the closet?”

“No, I already took it down. It’s under my bed,” Sumiko heard her uncle say.

Sumiko felt a chill at the word “rifle.” She’d seen the rifle only once, a couple of years ago, when there was a burglar active in the community. The burglar was never caught, and Sumiko never saw the rifle again. She turned around and found Tak-Tak standing beside her. His mouth was hanging open. He looked terrified.