Weedflower (6 page)

The grown-ups started getting ready for bed, and Sumiko led Tak-Tak back to their room. “I’ll keep the blankets open,” she whispered to him as he crawled in bed. She pulled the blankets apart.

“Okay?” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

In the distance Mr. Ono had not turned on the lights over his fields. His fire was still going strong. It was as if he no longer cared if his chrysanthemums bloomed early or not. All he cared about was burning his things.

6

T
HE NEXT DAY THE
U
NITED
S
TATES DECLARED WAR ON
Japan. The declaration was a different kind of shock from the Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl Harbor was like a big noise, and the declaration of war was like a big silence. Sumiko stayed home from school. Since Auntie or Uncle didn’t tell her why she had to stay home from school, she decided it was so that nobody would take her POW or hostage. Also, on the radio she’d heard a governor from another state announce that if any “Japs” living in California tried to come to his state, they would soon be hanging from trees.

Sumiko kept checking out the front window to see if anybody was coming to get them. But all day
the road was quiet. Bull continued to work the fields, while Uncle, Jiichan, Ichiro, and even Auntie went to meetings with other people in the community.

In the early afternoon Auntie rushed into the house with her face flushed from fear and excitement. Sumiko had been scrubbing the rice pot but set it down and ran to Auntie. Auntie collapsed on the floor and held on to the side of a kitchen chair.

“Auntie!” Sumiko put her arms around her, something she had never done before. She loved Auntie, and Auntie loved her, but Auntie did not like hugs. Auntie liked worrying and working and scolding.

There was a knock at the door, and Auntie suddenly shot to her feet and exclaimed, “Oh!” She took a pouch from her coat pocket and handed it to Sumiko, hissing, “Hide this.”

Sumiko didn’t wait to hear more, just ran crazily to her bedroom and stuffed the pouch under the mattress. Her pounding heart quieted when she heard Mr. Hirata speaking in Japanese to Auntie. They were talking about somebody getting arrested. Sumiko couldn’t stop herself from lifting the mattress and opening the pouch. All it held was one twenty-dollar bill. She pushed it under the mattress again and hurried to the living room just as Jiichan and Uncle rushed in. Nobody paid any attention to her.

Mr. Hirata looked at Jiichan. “The FBI came for my father. They started arresting the community
leaders and the
Issei
yesterday. It’s still going on today.”
Issei
meant the first generation—those born in Japan who immigrated to the United States for a better life. “I heard they took the principal of the Japanese school. And they took Isoda-san because he was the principal of a Japanese school in Washington fifteen years ago. They searched his house and found many books written in Japanese.”

Jiichan had once been principal of the Japanese school. Sumiko said, “We have to hide Jiichan!”

Jiichan knelt, and hugged Sumiko quietly for a moment. Then he said, “I better pack.”

Sumiko said, “Good, you can hide at Mr. Ono’s house.”

He turned to walk out, moving as if he were very old. He
was
old, but he’d never walked that way before. She started to chase after him, but he turned and held up his palm in the
stop
gesture.

Auntie told Sumiko to clean up the house. Sumiko cried out, “But what about Jiichan? Mr. Ono will let him hide at his house!” Cleaning was ridiculous at a time like this.

Auntie pushed Sumiko toward the kitchen. “I said clean up.”

“But everything’s clean.”

“Then clean it again!”

So Sumiko scrubbed the entire house. All that afternoon, whenever she passed through the living
room, she saw Jiichan sitting in his special chair with his old suitcase on the floor beside him. That suitcase was so old, Sumiko thought it might have come on the ship to America with him decades earlier.

“Jiichan?” she said.

“Hmm.”

“Do you want me to rub your foot?”

“Just one? You make me unbalanced.” He didn’t smile, so she wasn’t sure if he was kidding.

“I can rub both.” For an answer, he kicked off his slippers. She rubbed his left foot for a while, then rubbed his right foot in exactly the same way so she wouldn’t make him unbalanced. She rubbed his feet in all the magic places that gave him peace.

After that she did her farm chores and cooked a new pot of rice. When she heard a firm knock at the door, she knew it was someone to take her grand-father. She ran into the living room. Everyone was there except Bull, who was probably still working. But nobody answered the door. The knock came harder, and Tak-Tak shouted out, “Get the rifle!” Auntie slapped him, then gaped at her own hand as if it weren’t attached to her. Tak-Tak stared at her. Sumiko pulled him into her chest and pressed her nose into his hair.

Auntie finally answered the door. Two white men in suits stood on the porch with two police officers.

None of the men took off their hats to speak to Auntie. One of them said, “We’d like to talk to Masanori Matsuda.” That was Jiichan! He picked up his suitcase and walked to the door.

“I am Masanori Matsuda.”

“We’d like to take you and your son to our office to ask you some questions.”

“My son?” Jiichan appeared to lose his balance for a moment but quickly regained it.

Ichiro stepped forward and called out, “I’m an American. Can you tell me where you are taking them?”

One of the men turned to Ichiro. “Are you Hatsumi?”

Uncle stepped forward. “I am Hatsumi. May I pack?”

“We’re running late.”

And just like that, Jiichan with his suitcase and Uncle without his followed the men up the sidewalk. The rest of the family trailed along. Sumiko saw Mr. Ono already sitting in the backseat of the car.

“Mr. Ono!” Sumiko cried out.

As if deeply ashamed, Mr. Ono hung his head and didn’t meet Sumiko’s eyes.

The car drove off. “You shamed Ono-san,” Auntie scolded her.

Sumiko knew one of the things that made her different from the rest of her family, one of the
things that made her more American than her cousins, was that she didn’t feel
haji,
or shame, quite as much as other Japanese did, maybe because she hadn’t attended a lot of Japanese school. All the
Issei
were steeped in the culture of
haji
. Years ago Mr. Ono had been mistakenly arrested—the police then were actually searching for a different Mr. Ono. But today Mr. Ono still felt
haji
over his mistaken arrest.

The family just sat in the living room. They didn’t even eat dinner. Sumiko couldn’t remember ever having not eaten dinner. At one point Ichiro went and got the rifle, and then they all sat silently with the rifle leaning on the couch. At another point Sumiko cried out, “Aren’t we going to do anything?” but Auntie just shot her an angry look.

Every now and then Bull looked outside at the dark fields, no doubt concerned about what would happen to the flowers.

Nobody even bothered to turn on a light as they sat in the living room throughout the evening.

Then a terrible thought occurred to Sumiko. “Will Uncle and Jiichan be tortured?”

“I don’t know,” Ichiro said.

That night Auntie went to her room early and wailed so loudly, Sumiko could hear her even though her bedroom was across the house.

When Sumiko herself went to bed and pulled the blanket room divider shut, she examined the items
under her mattress: Auntie’s pouch; Sumiko’s own savings of six dollars from occasionally helping on the other farms; the receipt book; and the silk scarf that had cost Uncle four dollars. She felt sick with guilt about the cost of the scarf.

She heard the crickets, and she saw that someone had turned Mr. Ono’s lights on over the chrysanthemums.

Tak-Tak said, “Sumiko?”

“Yes?”

“Uncle taught me how to use the rifle. I can protect you.”

“Don’t talk like that!” But she could feel in the darkness that he was about to cry now, so she added, “Thank you, I know you’ll protect me.”

And she knew he would.

7

W
HEN
S
UMIKO OPENED HER EYES THE NEXT MORNING
, her first thought was, This is day three. Auntie came in as the room was just getting light. She held her finger to her mouth to shush Sumiko.

“Where’s my pouch?” she whispered.

“It’s under the bed,” Sumiko whispered back.

“Did you look inside?”

“Yes,” Sumiko admitted.

“That’s all right. We’ll leave the money there for now. They’ve frozen all the accounts at our bank. I managed to get that much out, but I wasn’t able to get to our main bank in time. Why don’t you children sleep in today? I don’t want
ou going to school until things have settled down.”

Auntie left, and Sumiko heard her brother’s bed squeak. She got up and peered around the blankets.

“Auntie says to sleep in today.”

He lay still for a moment. Sumiko got back in bed.

After a time Tak-Tak said, “But I’m not sleepy.”

“Just concentrate on falling back to sleep,” Sumiko said. “Find the sleep in your head.”

Tak-Tak said, “I can’t. Aren’t you going to school?”

“No,” Sumiko said.

“But you have a math test.”

Sumiko lay with her eyes wide open and counted to five hundred. “Well, that’s enough, I’m getting up,” she said.

She didn’t look over her dresses in the closet, just walked straight to the bureau to grab slacks and an old blouse. Tak-Tak squinted at her.

“I can’t find my glasses.”

Sumiko went to his bed to look around. His glasses lay on the floor with the lenses facedown. He stuck them on. The elastic band pushed his hair straight up. She smiled.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because you look like a pineapple.” He seemed to think that over as she matted down his hair.

After they were dressed, they went into the kitchen. For the second day in a row nobody went to
the flower market. Sumiko walked through the fields and saw valuable flowers turning past their prime. She’d never seen their flowers go to waste before. It was almost like watching an animal die and not trying to help.

Their whole lives revolved around getting the flowers to market. For a special treat Uncle had occasionally taken her and Tak-Tak to the market. They went to bed early and got up at midnight and rode in the truck to Los Angeles with him. They got to eat waffles and chow mein at the café next to the market. Everybody in the market was Japanese; across the street was the so-called American market. That was where the
hakujin
flower sellers worked.

Sumiko wondered if the Japanese market was empty today. She looked all around her. The fields seemed funny without Uncle and Jiichan out there. Thinking about them made Sumiko’s stomach hurt. She wished she knew where they were. She was glad Jiichan had packed before he left.

Sumiko was back to work grading by midday. At midnight Ichiro planned to take the flowers to the market. He and Bull kept saying, “We might need money.”

Sumiko felt like she was in limbo for the following weeks. All she did was work and wait for whatever might come next. Some
Nikkei
kids did return to
school, but others, like Sumiko, were kept at home. On those rare occasions when Sumiko went to buy meat or vegetables with Auntie, the Christmas decorations she saw in store windows seemed out of place. Christmas was the last thing on her mind.

For Christmas, Auntie cooked a turkey, but the family had decided that to save money, nobody should give gifts. Christmas meant absolutely nothing to Sumiko that year.

On New Year’s Day they usually attended a party at Mr. Muramoto’s big house. His house was just as nice as Marsha Melrose’s. But this year, for the first time in twenty years, Mr. Muramoto did not hold his annual New Year’s Day party. Sumiko and what was left of her family went outside on New Year’s evening to pray and meditate, something they’d never done together.