People in Ellis went crazy with excitement. It wasn’t just local pride; it was a way to forget the war. Stores put up signs supporting Ellis. Living room windows had pictures of the fighting Chiefs wearing feathers of blue and orange, the Ellis school colors. Even Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce strung blue and orange crepe paper streamers across the front of the hardware store. A farmer wrote “Go Ellis” in white rocks ten feet high on a bluff just east of town. Another painted his tractor orange and put on blue overalls and drove the tractor to town.
Tod Perkins, our quarterback and captain of the team, who’d been set to join the Marine Corps when he turned eighteen on October 13, decided to wait until the end of football season to enlist. That was after a group of Ellis businessmen called on his father at the Perkins farm and told him Tod would do more patriotic good playing for Ellis for a few more weeks than he could in boot camp. Dad thought there was an offer of next year’s fertilizer included. Folks said they’d have given Tod a convertible automobile if there had been any cars available. When Mr. Elliot announced to an assembly at school that Tod was staying on, he said, “Tod, that’s with one d, like God,” and everybody clapped. That’s how important football was in Ellis.
Under Tod, the Ellis Chiefs won every game they played. We didn’t win by much—an extra point, a lucky interception. Still, people saw it as the Lord’s will, and they began to think the high school might have a perfect season, which would have been the first time in memory. It seemed there wasn’t anything that could beat the Ellis team—nothing, that is, except the Tallgrass Buffaloes, the team from the internment camp high school.
I thought it was too bad the government wouldn’t let the kids from the camp attend the local schools. Maybe we’d have all gotten along better if they had. Or maybe not. Still, if the Japanese boys had gone to Ellis High, there’s no question we would have had the best football team in southeastern Colorado and maybe even the state.
It was a shame Ellis High hadn’t played Tallgrass at the beginning of the season. The game wouldn’t have mattered much then, because nobody had expected Ellis to do so well. But we were scheduled to play the Buffaloes the last game of the year, when Ellis’s perfect season was at stake. And by then, it was obvious that Tallgrass High School threatened to ruin it. That’s because the internment camp hadn’t lost a game, either, and the Tallgrass Buffaloes weren’t just lucky; they were good. The Buffaloes were coordinated and tough and aggressive. They didn’t make mistakes. They won their games not by a point, but by two or three touchdowns. Of course, I went to Ellis High and rooted for my school. Dad and Mom had gone there, too, and like everybody in Ellis, they were behind the high school team. Still, Dad always liked an underdog, and he said he admired the boys at Tallgrass for the way they played their hearts out. Dad and Carl had a two-dollar bet on the final game, and I figured Dad would pay off Carl no matter which team won.
A couple of weeks before that game, there were threats against Tallgrass. Signs went up saying ELLIS HIGH REMEMBERS PEARL HARBOR. Kids threw rocks at the Tallgrass team’s bus, and people started talking about avenging Susan Reddick. Men who hung out at the feed store and the barbershop said it wasn’t patriotic to play the Japanese. Mr. Tappan put the guards at the camp on overtime.
“How come my boy’s to play football with the Nips when he’s about to get drafted to fight them in the Pacific?” Lum Smith asked.
“It’s un-American,” Mr. Kruger added.
The Monday before the Saturday game, the two of them called a meeting of the parents of the Ellis High team. That night, seven fathers told the coach that their sons wouldn’t be playing football against the Tallgrass Buffaloes.
The coach went to the school board, which called an emergency meeting and announced that the stadium was closed to Japanese players. On game day, the Ellis Chiefs showed up. So did the Tallgrass Buffaloes, but the school board wouldn’t let them onto the field. Ellis claimed it won the game by default and declared itself unbeaten. The team went to the state finals, where it lost its first game. Ellis still claimed to be the football champion of southeastern Colorado, but that was unofficial, and there was always a taint to it.
Tod Perkins’s father was not at the meeting, and Tod was not one of the seven who refused to play the Japanese. A few days after football season ended, Carl was at the camp when Tod walked out there and asked to see Jimmy Matoba, the captain of the Tallgrass team. “Dang, boy, I sure did look forward to that match. We would have whipped you,” Tod told Jimmy.
“Nah, you’d have lost bad. We had you beat in a walk.” Jimmy gave him a crooked grin, then kicked at the dirt with his shoe. “I heard you were joining up.”
“I thought I might.”
“Me, too. Maybe the army’ll let us play against each other.”
Tod considered that. “I was thinking maybe we could be on the same team.”
“Yeah, how ’bout that?” And they shook hands.
BETTY JOYCE AND i had planned to go together to that game against Tallgrass. By then, she had been attending classes for nearly a month.
Betty Joyce had been out of school for three weeks when Miss Ord asked me whether she had quit for good. I told her about Mr. Snow’s accident and how he had kept Betty Joyce at the store, and then Miss Ord asked whether it would help if she spoke to Mr. Snow.
I shrugged. “He doesn’t like people telling him what to do.”
Miss Ord talked to him anyway, and Betty Joyce told me her dad was as rude to Miss Ord as he had been to Mr. Yamamoto. I don’t know what happened after that, but a week later, I came home from school, to find Mom in my room, peering into my closet. “We’ll have to make room in here and clean out one of your dresser drawers, too. You’ll be having company.”
“Marthalice is coming home?”
Mom shook her head. “Betty Joyce is going to be living with us for a while.” She sat down on the bed. “Sheriff Watrous was here this afternoon. Your clad and I think you’re big enough to know what’s going on. Besides, you ought not to pester Betty Joyce about it. She can tell you if she wants to.” Mom patted the bed, and I sat down beside her. Outside, the chickens clucked, but Mom was figuring out what to say, so she didn’t even look out the window.
Finally, she said, “I guess I’ll tell you all of it. Doc Enyeart and the sheriff went to see Mr. Snow this morning, and they found an illegal supply of morphine, enough to supply a whole bunch of dope fiends. Mr. Snow is a morphine addict. That’s why he’s been so cussed mean. Doc gave him a little bit of morphine right after he got kicked in the head by that mule, but he cut it off a long time ago. The sheriff says there’s morphine been stolen from the camp, and he thinks somebody sold it to the person who sold it to Gus Snow. The Jack boy would be my choice for the middleman. It seems like when nobody’s around, Mr. Snow beats up on both Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce. I don’t like to think what they’ve gone through.” Mom ran her hand across the quilt—a Grandmother’s Flower Garden that Granny had pieced and the Jolly Stitchers had quilted. She stopped at a worn place where the stitching had come loose and worried at the raveled area with her finger. “Do you know what a dope fiend is?”
I nodded. I’d read about them in comic books and heard about them on radio programs, and I was horrified that my best friend had had to live with a father whose mind was crazed from drugs. Dad had figured out that there was something wrong with Mr. Snow’s brain, but who would have thought he took dope? Betty Joyce must have been scared all the time. I’d been an idiot to think I could read her mind. “Did he hurt Betty Joyce ?”
“They’ll both be all right, thank the Lord.”
“Is Mr. Snow going to jail?”
“The sheriff told Mr. Snow he could do that or he could put himself in a hospital and get help. Mrs. Snow is so worn-out, she’s going to her sister’s place for a few weeks, until she’s up to running the hardware again—that is, if she wants to. The sheriff asked if we’d take Betty Joyce until her mother’s recovered. I said of course we would.”
That afternoon, we drove into Ellis for Betty Joyce. Mr. Snow was already gone, and we waited at the store until Mrs. Snow’s sister, La Verne Booth, came from Pueblo for her. “If I’d have known . . . Why didn’t you write me, Tessie?” Mrs. Booth asked. Mrs. Booth was a fat woman, and together, the two sisters looked like Mr. and Mrs. Sprat.
“I was ashamed,” Mrs. Snow replied, so softly that we could barely hear her.
“But what about Betty Joyce? Didn’t you think about her?”
Mrs. Snow didn’t answer, only hugged her shoulders together.
“She couldn’t help it,” Betty Joyce said, talking to nobody in particular.
Mrs. Booth opened the car door and said to Mrs. Snow, “I want you to sit up here in front, honeypot, right next to me.” After her sister was in the car, Mrs. Booth shut the door and told us, “No wonder she never figured out what was wrong with Gus.” Patting Mrs. Snow’s shoulder through the window, Mrs. Booth added, “Tess is awfully fine, but she’s such a timid little thing. She don’t know a morphine addict from a gum chewer.”
9
AFTER THE SUPPER DISHES were done one evening late in the fall, we all went outside. Mom and Granny rocked on the porch swing, moving back and forth in the soft dusk, while Betty Joyce and I sat on the steps with our homework. Dad leaned against the railing, whittling a stick, telling Mom that she had fixed an awful good supper. He always said that when we had pie for dessert. The night was peaceful, the kind of evening we used to have before the war started, when Dad and Buddy played catch on the front lawn and Marthalice read while I cut out paper dolls. That seemed like a long time ago.
Dad stripped curls of bark off the wood for a few minutes, then looked up and stared off into the distance, down the road, where wooden telephone poles stood out against the darkening sky like crosses. After a bit, hesaid, “I believe that’s Carl coming this way.”
Mom stopped the swing and leaned forward for a better look. Granny put down the remembrance quilt square of Sabra that she was piecing and peered over the top of her glasses. It was too dark for her to sew; just holding her piecework comforted her. “Yes, that’s Carl,” Dad said, closing his pocketknife and putting it away. He threw the stick into the yard and kicked the wood shavings off the porch with his high-top shoe. I got up and stood beside him. Carl had never been to our house at night.
He came down the road at a fast clip, low to the ground, his elbows to his sides, and leaped the fence instead of going through the gate. Carl ran across the lawn toward us, then stopped, winded, and walked a dozen yards before he picked up his pace again. When he reached the porch, he leaned over to catch his breath, holding on to the porch post. Dad went down the steps and put a hand on Carl’s arm. “Son?”
Carl looked up at him. He’d been crying. Behind me, I heard Mom barely whisper, “Daisy?” I put my hand on top of Betty Joyce’s.
Carl didn’t hear her. “Mr. Stroud.” He gasped and breathed deeply, filling his lungs with air. “It’s Harry, sir. He’s dead.”
“Oh,” Mom said, the breath going out of her. She stood up and walked over to the railing, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Oh, Carl.”
“Who?” Granny asked.
“Harry. Our friend,” Mom told her.
“That nice boy?”
“I sure am sorry to hear that.” Dad helped Carl sit down on the steps. I went inside and came back with a glass of water. We watched Carl drink it while we waited for him to tell us what had happened.
“It was some damn jeep accident.” Carl had covered up his sorrow with anger now. “The jeep blew a tire and turned over or something. Harry didn’t even have a chance to get killed in the war. It was just a dumb accident.” Carl handed the glass to me, and I went inside and refilled it. He waited until I returned. “Harry’s folks got a letter. I guess they don’t send telegrams if your son’s Japanese.” He made a fist with his right hand and socked it into his left palm. I’d never seen him angry before.
“Maybe the telegram went astray. Or they didn’t know where to send it,” Mom volunteered.
“They sure as hell knew where to send us.” Carl put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands.
Maybe Dad agreed with Carl, because he didn’t argue with him. Instead, he said, “Harry was as fine a young man as I’ve ever known, a hard worker, too.” There wasn’t any better compliment Dad could give a man than to say he was a good worker.
“He was going to show everybody, show them he was a better American than they were, better than those damn boys that hang around Ellis. He was going to be a war hero. He didn’t care if he got killed. Harry said he was a one hundred and fifty percent American. Now he’s dead in an accident. It’s not fair, Mr. Stroud.” Carl didn’t look up, and his voice was muffled.
“I don’t reckon anything about this war’s fair,” Dad said. “But you already know that, Carl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hate this war,” I said. Mom didn’t like my saying I hated things, and sometimes she told me to use the word dislike instead of hate, but this time she nodded in agreement.
“We loved Harry as much as if he’d been one of Bud’s friends,” Mom said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mom asked how Harry’s folks were doing.
Carl looked up at her then and slumped back against the porch steps. “They’re pretty broke up.”
“And Daisy?”
“She’s broke up, too.” Carl began to cry, and Dad sal down on the steps next to him, putting his arm around Carl’s shoulder. We were all silent, listening to Carl’s sobs, which were ragged, like a piece of machinery that wasn’t hitting right. After a few minutes, they slowed and stopped, and we stayed quiet.
I wished I could think of something to say, but nothing came to me then. I knew it probably wouldn’t until after Carl had gone home. Harry was always a little disdainful, and I’d never been sure how much he liked me, but he was nice. He’d brought me a bird’s nest that the wind had blown out of a cottonwood tree, and after he heard me tell Daisy I’d lost my pocketknife in the barn, he’d spent an hour after work looking for it, finally finding it in the straw under the milking stool. Although other Ellis boys had been killed in the war,. Harry was the one I knew best. It struck me as odd that I thought of him as an Ellis boy, not as someone from the camp.
I touched my cheek and realized I was crying. Harry’s death made me feel lonely, although my family was there, and in the distance were the sounds I had heard all my life—horses moving around in the corral and chickens squawking. Mom would go out later with her shotgun, because a coyote might be hanging around. She wouldn’t think twice about killing a predator. I wished she would shoot every dang coyote in the county and everybody who was responsible for the war, too. I smacked the fist of my right hand into the palm of my left, too.
A breeze came up. It was too late for lilacs and honeysuckle, but the fall wind brought the smell of the fields. That scent made me think of Harry, how in the spring he brought the smell of freshly turned earth when he came into the kitchen to talk to Daisy.
Mom took a handkerchief from her apron pocket and wiped her eyes. “I’d like to call on Harry’s people, but I don’t know your customs, Carl. Would that be all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. I think they’d appreciate that. There’s just Mr. and Mrs. Hirano. Harry’s got a brother, but he’s at that Manzanar camp in California with his wife.”
There didn’t seem much to say after that, but it wasn’t awkward. Carl was comfortable with us, especially with Dad. After a while, he stood up. “I don’t know exactly why I came, Mr. Stroud. It just seemed like I should.”
“We’re glad you did, Carl. You knew we’d want to know about a thing like that. Harry was our friend, too. He was a good man, a fine American.” Yes, sir.
“Damn war,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir. Damn war.”
After Carl left and the others went inside, Dad and I sat on the porch in the dark. I thou
ght about the Japanese being forced into the camp and the government making Harry join the army, and Harry getting killed before he could even go overseas. He’d never get a Purple Heart or any other medal. “Carl’s right: It’s not fair,” I said.
“Not fair at all, Squirt. But then I never heard of a war that was.”
THE NEXT MORNING, MOM baked a chocolate cake, using our chocolate and sugar rations. She’d thought about making divinity because Harry had liked it, but cakes were what she always took to the neighbors when somebody died, and she didn’t see why she should treat the Hiranos differently just because they were Japanese.
“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Mary?” Mrs. Rubey asked her. She’d called that morning and found Mom in the kitchen by herself. Carl had told us that he and Daisy and Emory wouldn’t be coming to work for a couple of days. “Mightn’t you just be better off letting them grieve in their own way? After all, you do run the risk of offending those people.”
“Those people?”
“Oh, dear, now what have I gone and said?”
“You haven’t said anything. It is hard to know what’s right. But Carl said Harry’s people would appreciate it. I prayed about it some last night, and it came to me that all I can do is what I think is right. I have to hope that if I offend them, the Hiranos will know I acted in good faith and forgive me.”
“Just like folks in Ellis would.” They both laughed.
When the cake had cooled and Mom had iced it and put it into the metal cake carrier, she dressed in her good clothes and put on a hat. She made Dad put on his suit and a tie and told me to wear my Sunday dress. Then the three of us walked to the Tallgrass Camp to call on the Hiranos. Betty Joyce stayed behind with Granny.
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