Irish Chain

by Earlene Fowler

  “Well, I’ve got some advice for you, honeybun.” She pointed a flour-dusty finger at me. “Going around all feather-legged like you’ve been the last week or so, you might not see it, but how a man treats a woman tells you a heap more about the man than it does the woman.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Why don’t you just spell it out for me?”

  “You want me to tell you what to do, who to choose and what to do with him after you’ve got him?”

  “That would be nice, seeing as everywhere I turn it seems like there’s a barbed-wire fence.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do it. You’re a grownup woman who was married almost fifteen years and been widowed a year now. You got to make up your own mind and get on with your life.”

  “Great,” I said, with a snort. “Now’s a fine time to start treating me like an adult.”

  “Just remember,” she said, pulling a warm loaf of bread out of the oven. “Familiar isn’t necessarily good.”

  During the ride to town with Daddy, I was relieved that he was the one person who had no opinion at all about what I should do. Or if he did, he wisely kept it to himself. We talked about the new phase of cow-calf operation he was moving into, what poor quality barley hay he was having to supplement our feed with and how hard it was to find ranch hands who actually wanted to work these days.

  “Everyone wants to play cowboy these days,” he complained. “But most of ’em can’t tell a sick cow from a rotten tree stump.”

  I declined keeping him company over his late breakfast, since by the time we reached my house I had only a half hour to change and get to my meeting with the Times reporter. He insisted on getting out and walking through all the rooms to make sure they were safe, though with Mr. Treton standing guard next door, I couldn’t see how anyone could get past his diligent twenty-four-hour surveillance.

  “Be careful, squirt,” was all Daddy said before climbing into his truck.

  While changing, I picked up Mr. O’Hara’s wooden scrapbook sitting next to my bed and stuck it in my leather backpack, figuring I’d glance through it at lunch. At the museum, I was thrilled to see that Todd had arrived before me and followed last week’s schedule as if he’d been working there for years. The quilt rack was set up and the large coffee maker cleaned out and ready to go for the Oak Terrace ladies.

  “You are a dream come true,” I said, when I found him in the kitchen putting on the small coffeepot. I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Why don’t you go down to the Donut Corral and get about three dozen doughnuts? Then take a break. You’ve certainly earned it.”

  “Thanks,” he said, looking down at his feet, embarrassed. He looked back up. “Uh ... you okay and everything?”

  My hand automatically went to the cut on my forehead. I’d managed to cover all but a small corner of the white bandage with my bangs. “Yeah, I’m doing fine. Just a little headache is all.”

  “Did they catch the guy?” he asked.

  “No, and they probably won’t. All I saw was a grotesque rubber mask and a rainbow wig. It was probably just some dopehead.” An inward shiver ran through me when I said the words. I knew good and well that the person who mugged me wasn’t a junkie, and the thought that he knew who I was and could be following my every move was too frightening to even contemplate. “Well, I survived,” I said, laughing. “Takes more than a knock on the head to get me down. Now, get going, and really, thanks for doing all this so promptly.”

  “No problem,” he said and pocketed the twenty.

  The Times reporter, a Ms. Beth Atwood, walked in about two minutes after Todd left. Somewhere in her early twenties, she was thin as a birch tree and punctuated the end of each sentence with a laugh that sounded like the silver bracelets jangling on her wrist. She showed a lively interest in the exhibit and the goals of the museum and co-op. By the time the interview was over, I felt comfortable enough to answer her curious questions about the murders back in December, though she promised they wouldn’t show up in her article. I introduced her to the ladies from Oak Terrace and she took a picture of them smiling and talking around the half-finished quilt. By ten o’clock she was gone and I sat with the ladies at the quilt rack, listening to the latest Oak Terrace gossip.

  “No new clues,” Thelma whispered to me as I helped her up into the bus at noon. “But Edwin’s been snapping everyone’s heads off for days. I bet they have a contract out on him.”

  “Be careful,” I said, not even wanting to imagine who “they” were. “Don’t do anything dangerous.”

  “Ha!” is all she said and I felt my heart sink. I was reluctantly beginning to understand how Gabe felt about me being involved in this.

  After they left, I decided to drive out to Eola Beach and Port San Patricio to have lunch. The Blue Seal Inn, a small restaurant-bar at the end of the pier, served great shrimp and fries and was usually pretty empty this time of year. I needed a couple of undistracted hours to work on writing up the interviews interspersing the personal stories with the historical information I’d collected.

  Up on the interstate, I rolled down the windows, cranked up KCOW and along with Alan Jackson laid a little rubber on the asphalt. The early spring air was as fresh and clean-tasting as one of Aunt Garnet’s nonalcoholic mint juleps. For my own sanity, I firmly put the problems with Gabe and Clay and the murders on the back burners of my mind. I was determined to get a good start on my writing even if I had to sit there until the bar closed at two A.M. On the turnoff to Eola Beach, four miles away, the smell of the ocean became apparent, making me ravenous, as salt air always seems to do. Eola Beach, off to my left, was still hunkered down in its winter mode. During the winter months, the only businesses that seemed to be open were a windowless no-name bar, a grocery store with a screen door advertising “Fresh Bait” with a bright orange hand-painted poster, and a small sheriffs substation. Out on the damp sand, a hump-shouldered old man in a blue watch cap slowly worked his way down the beach, the metal detector he held in front of him swaying back and forth like an elephant’s trunk.

  I turned right, heading toward the pier, taking the treacherous curve out onto the peninsula slowly. More than one car had crashed through the flimsy metal guardrail and ended up in the bay ten feet below the road. The gray February ocean lapped against the black breakwater rocks, looking so cold it caused me to shiver even though the heater was turned to high in the truck. I passed the weather-beaten Bad Cat Cafe and the Port San Patricio Harbor Patrol office, a pseudo-Spanish-style building that also held the offices of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In front of the building a small white Harbor Patrol truck was parked, and a man in a khaki uniform was pouring out a pot of coffee into some scraggly bushes. I drove to the nearest parking space on the land end of the pier, passing the dry docks where the Little Lady, Triple Star, Li’l’ Mac and the Alma T waited patiently for loving hands to scrape their hulls and gloss their decks.

  The bait and tackle shop, the Alley Cat Snack Bar and the Harbor Cruise buildings were all shut tight until April. Only the wholesale fish market next to the Blue Seal Inn was open. I glanced in the glass picture window. The room was painted pale green, the walls glossy and cold-looking. Amidst the sounds of Mexican folk music, the Latino workers sliced huge fish from head to tail, their long black-handled steel knives flashing quick as lizards. Across the fluorescent-lit room, I was surprised to see Mr. Morita and Todd talking to one of the workers. Todd looked up and caught my eye. I waved and met him at the open door.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’re you doing here?” A breeze blew through the room from the door on the other side that opened directly onto the wooden pier. The workers tossed the guts and heads of the fish onto the pier where fat tourist-fed sea gulls and brown pelicans sat perched on the knee-high railing waiting.

  Todd jerked his head in the direction of his grandfather. “I’m helping him talk with some of the wo
rkers. His Spanish is pretty bad.”

  “Do you buy your fish from here?”

  “Yeah, most of it. Some of the more expensive stuff like lobster and shrimp we buy from a wholesaler in Santa Barbara. Grandfather owns half of this place. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m going to have lunch at the Blue Seal and hopefully get some work done on those chapters for the Historical Society.”

  “Better you than me. Sounds too much like a term paper.” He grinned at me.

  I laughed. “I’ve had those exact thoughts myself. And even though I find the subject fascinating and I’ve enjoyed the reading and the interviewing, I’ve found myself avoiding the actual writing. You know how that goes.”

  “Boy, do I.” He looked back over his shoulder, where his grandfather was staring in our direction, a slightly impatient look on his face. “I have to get back and help Grandfather. What time do you need me tomorrow?”

  “Make it tenish,” I said. “You’re so efficient, I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath and see what else we need done around there.”

  I settled down in one of the large black booths of the Blue Seal Inn, spreading out all my notes. When my shrimp and fries came, I decided to set aside my work and relax over my meal. I dug through my backpack for a paperback novel and came across Mr. O’Hara’s wooden scrap book. Scanning the titles of the crinkled, yellowing newspaper articles he’d pasted onto the black pages, I looked for recognizable names or stories that sounded interesting. It seemed to be a collection of war-related articles about the residents of San Celina County. Many of the articles concerned people who had the last names of kids I went to school with. The boys in stiff uniforms and red-lipped girls in their ankle-strap shoes posed against old Chevys and Ford coupes, didn’t seem like living, breathing human beings, but more like characters in a movie made in the forties. I tried to imagine San Celina during those years, but couldn’t. With all the reading I’d been doing, I had all the technical details, but I just couldn’t make it real. Everyone remained as flat and hazy as the thin newsprint their stories and pictures were printed on. I flipped through the last pages as I finished my lunch. At the end of the scrapbook there was a sealed, faded business-size envelope with the return address of O’Hara’s Department Store. I hesitated for a moment before opening it, wondering if I had the right, then decided that as a representative of the Historical Society, I did. With my clean knife, I carefully slit it open and scanned the paper inside.

  It was an old telegram addressed to “Brady O’Hara, San Celina, California, 14 Dec 1941.” The kind that many people had received during that time. The kind that never brought good news. “We regret to inform you that your brother, Brian O’Hara ...”

  I read through the brief message quickly. Brian O’Hara, seaman second-class, had been missing since the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. All attempts had been made... more information to follow as soon as it became available. The name at the end of the telegram was Vice Admiral Louis Denfeld, Chief of Navy Personnel.

  Something about it pricked at my subconcious. I lingered over my coffee trying to pry information from my brain cells. Finally, in frustration, I turned back to my notes.

  “Get much done?” The waitress appeared and refilled my coffee cup.

  “Not as much as I should have.”

  She laughed. “Story of my life. Never enough time in the day.”

  “Speaking of time,” I said, glancing at my watch and gathering up my papers, “I’m late.” I had less than a half hour before my appointment with Mrs. Yamaoka. After talking to her I’d swing by the library and go through the microfilmed back issues of the Tribune. I’d been meaning to look in the newspapers from about the first few weeks before and after Pearl Harbor anyway. Mentally, I added Mr. O’Hara and his brother to my list of things to read about.

  Mariko’s peach-colored, two-story house was in one of the newer housing tracts south of town. A thick blanket of ivy covered the left side, and a trio of slim birch trees dominated the square, green front yard. The gray concrete driveway was empty, but I parked on the street in front of the black metal mailbox. Mrs. Yamaoka answered on the third ring. She wore a dark flowered dress with long sleeves and white canvas tennis shoes. Behind large round glasses, her eyes seemed happy to see me.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, opening the door wide. “I’ve made some tea.”

  We walked through the spotless living room decorated in dark woods and navy and russet-red fabrics in a sort of staid, New England elegance. Her kitchen felt cozier with its white walls and natural pine cabinets. Cherry-red and yellow calico flowers splashed across the wallpaper, curtains and seat covers. In the small white and pine breakfast nook, Mrs. Yamaoka had a white china teapot steeping. She poured me a cup and sat across from me.

  “Is in here all right?” she asked.

  “It’s great,” I said, smiling. “I always feel more comfortable in kitchens.”

  “I thought it would be easier to show these.” She touched the three photo albums sitting next to her. While I drank my tea, she turned the pages and started relating an involved story about her part in the Obon Festival at the Buddhist Temple in 1941.

  “Excuse me. Could you hold that story just a minute?” I asked, pulling out my tape recorder. “Do you mind if I record this? It’s easier than trying to take notes.”

  “Not at all,” she said and began her story again. As we moved page by page further into the albums, the hostility against the Japanese-Americans progressed. The first pictures were of festivals and celebrations—an especially touching one was that of a Japanese-American float that won first place in the 1936 San Celina Fourth of July parade. Dozens of smiling Japanese children in all-white outfits waved at the camera from a float covered with flags and patriotic bunting. There was a photograph of the head of the San Celina Japanese-American League presenting twenty cherry trees to be planted in front of the city hall, and one of a smiling Japanese baseball team sitting in wooden bleachers somewhere, cleated shoes casually propped up on the seats in front of them.

  She turned the page and pointed to a jagged-edged photograph of a teenage girl standing in front of O’Hara’s Department Store. “This is my good friend Toshi Ikeda’s daughter. She worked in the linens department. Only on call, of course, or for holidays. Japanese were not hired for full time back then. Mostly we worked in our family’s fish businesses or picking fruits and vegetables in the fields. But Hati was so smart and so pretty, they had to hire her.” She touched the picture tenderly.

  By my third cup of tea, Mrs. Yamaoka had warmed up enough to me to start talking about the days right before the evacuation.

  “At first,” she said, “we’d heard only noncitizens would be sent away. It was a shock when the newspapers announced that all Japanese would have to leave. We couldn’t believe it.” Her face sagged slightly.

  “What did you do?”

  She gave me a perplexed look. “What could we do? We were good citizens. We would not break the law. We did as we were told.”

  Remembering Mr. Kuroda and the Sukami sisters and how they also seemed to passively give in when their rights were so blatantly taken away, I couldn’t help but ask, “Didn’t you say anything? Didn’t you...” I paused, not knowing exactly how to put it.

  She sighed and turned another page in the album. “You are like my grandsons. ‘Why didn’t you fight back, Granny?’ they always ask. Fight back? Against who? The president of the country? The whole army? Our friends and neighbors? We just accepted it, I tell them—the law is the law and you’ve got to obey. Then they get angry, say we were weak, say they would have been different, fought back. I say you don’t really know what you do until it happens. And I hope it doesn’t ever again. To anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed by the shallowness of my quick judgment. “What about your store? Mariko told me that you were helped by Mr. O’Hara. How did you know him? Were you friends?”

  She gazed out the window behind me
, a distant look in her dark eyes. “I think Mr. O’Hara probably have no friends. Not the happiest man. So sad how he died.”

  “Yes, it was,” I said. “I’m sorry to be so forward but why would he loan you money, then?”

  She poured another cup of tea and held it under her nose, inhaling deeply before she drank. The heat steamed her eyeglasses opaque. She removed them and wiped them off with the edge of her dress. “Toshi told us to ask him,” she finally said.

  “Did she tell you how she knew he was doing this?”

  “All she say it was least he could do after what he stole. My husband was already gone, taken away to a camp. I went to Mr. O’Hara’s store, and the lady at the desk there, when I told her Toshi’s name, sent me to the office where they do the payroll and the man there arranged to buy our store. I signed some papers that I kept with me all through the camp, wrapped in a silk scarf of my mother’s. When we get back, after the war, my husband looks at papers and goes to O’Hara. We get our store back next week. We kept it until my husband died ten years ago.”

  “Didn’t you find it odd that he would help you, a stranger?”

  “We didn’t question. So many people were unkind that when someone wasn’t, we didn’t ask why.”

  I didn’t know how to ask the next question. I spoke hesitantly. “Mrs. Yamaoka, your friend, Toshi...”

  She reached over and patted my hand, the wisdom and kindness of her age rescuing me from embarrassment. “She is gone, my friend Toshi. For eight years now. Ah, how I miss her.” She turned a page in the album and tapped her fingernail on a black-and-white photo. “Here we are, Toshi and me and Hati.” The two women in their thirties linked arms and smiled widely in the bright sun. The teenage girl stood to the side, a slight distance between her mother and Mrs. Yamaoka, wearing the mysterious half-smile of youth. They all wore plain A-line skirts and flowered blouses. Behind them, a lilac bush bloomed.

  “May I borrow this?” I asked. “I’d like to copy it for the book. I’ll take good care of it.”