Cherry Blossom Winter

by Jennifer Maruno

  Michiko spotted her parents coming down the street to say goodbye. They joined them as Eiko and Sam were shaking Mr. Sagara’s hand and saying they were sorry that he was leaving.

  “With all your newspaper experience, you should be able to find a job,” Sam said.

  “Kiko will have a chance for a much better education,” Eiko commented.

  Kiko stood beside her uncle’s rope-tied cardboard suitcase, wearing a false smile.

  “This is for you,” Michiko’s mother said as she handed Kiko two green plastic bows attached to a cardboard strip. Kiko removed them and Eiko fastened them to either side of her head. Kiko touched the barrettes with the tips of her fingers and smiled. “Thanks,” she whispered.

  Clarence arrived carrying a package of brown paper and string. He handed it to Michiko. “Arrived just in time,” he said. Then he took Hiro’s hand.

  Hiro looked up and down the street. “Choo-choo,” he said. “Choo-choo?”

  “It won’t be stopping here,” Clarence said. “Kiko has to go to the next station.”

  It had been over two years since Michiko travelled the road from the railway station. This time she was sitting on a bench, instead of standing beside a pile of luggage in the open back of Bert’s farm truck.

  One side of the road was mountain, the other, lake. After they passed the RCMP guardhouse, Michiko tried to count the number of S turns in the road, but gave up after fifty-four. The mountaintops disappeared for a few moments into the clouds. There were patches of snow and signs warning them of avalanches. She hoped Mr. Hayashi would steer clear of the rocks on the road. If they got a flat tire, Kiko would miss her train.

  A logging truck, loaded with red-barked cedar logs the size of truck tires, passed them on the road. “That’s the company Uncle Ted works for,” Michiko told Clarence.

  But Clarence wasn’t listening. His head stuck out the back. He craned his neck in all directions, the wind whipping his hair into frenzy. “My pa said there were hot springs around here.” He turned to Michiko and smiled. “Sorta like a Japanese bath, I guess.”

  The train whistle echoed through the valley and turned the curve as they pulled into the station. Michiko handed Kiko the package. “We know you like to collect facts,” she said as the steam from the coal-eating train billowed about them. “You can make a book about Toronto.”

  A little smile lifted the corner of Kiko’s mouth. “I will keep a Commonplace Book.”

  “It won’t be very common if it’s a record of your life,” Clarence said with a grin.

  They beamed at each other like the friends they used to be.

  Kiko held the package to her chest. “Someday we will look at it together,” she said to Michiko. There seemed to be hope in Kiko’s words, but Michiko didn’t believe her. The chances of her family leaving town were as slim as a ghost.

  Mr. Sagara picked up the two suitcases and boarded the train. They watched him and Kiko make their way down, inside the car. Kiko sat by the window opening and closing her fingers as a wave. She stretched her lips across her teeth in a brief smile.

  The conductor picked up his little step and put it back inside the car. As the train lurched forward and pulled out of the station, it started to rain. Clarence and Michiko waved madly until it was just a puff of smoke in the distance. Michiko wondered what it was like in Toronto. Would Kiko be able to go into the stores and be served by the clerks? Or would it be like Vancouver?

  It was a cold journey home. The rain drummed on the body of the truck. It was a good thing there was room for them in the front. The wipers scraped away the sheet of water on the windscreen. Everything is ending, Michiko thought. Their iris had wilted into a dark, slim, snarl. Mrs. Morrison’s beautiful lilacs turned brown and shrivelled. Sooner or later the whole town would shrivel up and be gone.

  George King waited in front of the drugstore on his bike. His curly hair needed a cut. It blew about his eyes. “Did your drummer friend get on the train?” he asked Michiko.

  “That’s right, George,” Clarence answered. “Kiko’s on her way to Toronto.”

  “Toronto,” George repeated. “She’s going to Toronto?”

  “Yup,” said Clarence. “And she has invited us to come and visit whenever we want.”

  Michiko looked at Clarence and frowned. Kiko didn’t say that.

  “Lucky her,” George said mounting his bicycle. “All the way to Toronto.” He put his foot on a pedal and pushed down hard. He was halfway up the street when Michiko’s father unlocked the front door. Mr. Hayashi nodded to the two of them as he left.

  “Did that boy want something from the store?” her father asked with a hint of worry in his voice. “I only closed for a second.”

  “I don’t know,” said Michiko, wondering why her father locked the door.

  Michiko turned to Clarence. “You know, next time we go fishing,” she began.

  “I know what you are going to say,” he said rolling his eyes. “You want me to invite George to come along.”

  Michiko nodded.

  “He won’t come,” Clarence said. “You know he can’t swim and his mother wouldn’t let him.”

  “Why does his mother have to know?” she replied, knowing full well it would not go over well with her own mother if she heard what she just suggested.

  “Michiko,” her father shouted down from the top window.

  “Yes, Father?” she replied. Now he was upstairs. What was going on?

  “It is time.”

  “Okay,” she replied. But it took her a few minute to understand what he meant. Her stomach jumped with excitement. “Okay,” she said again, louder. She gave Clarence a wide smile and tore inside and up the stairs. Michiko remembered her mother saying her back felt funny the night before.

  Her father stood with her mother at the apartment door. Michiko saw a tiny drop blood on her lower lip, as if she had bitten it. Michiko picked up her mother’s small furoshiki and ran ahead to open the door downstairs. Eiko grimaced as they stepped off the porch, but never made a sound. All they had to do was get to the doctor’s house. He would drive them to the hospital.

  Michiko walked about the apartment, not sure what to do next.

  “Yoo-hoo,” called a familiar voice from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s me.”

  Mrs. Morrison stood below, grinning. “Clarence came to tell me,” she said with glee.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Michiko asked, calling down the stairs.

  “I’m not coming up,” Edna replied. “I’ll take Hiro back, to help feed the chickens.”

  “Poor chickens,” Michiko thought as she buttoned her little brother’s coat. “Niwatori?” she said to Hiro and smiled. “Are you going to feed the chickens?”

  Hiro looked up. She wiped his morning porridge from his chin and helped him down the stairs. Then she turned the sign on the door to CLOSED.

  “It’s a girl!” Sadie cried, bursting into the kitchen just as Michiko finished the dishes. “A beautiful baby girl. Your father called the school.”

  “I have a baby sister?” Michiko said in astonishment.

  “Don’t you want to see her?” Her aunt shooed her toward the door. “There’s an RCMP officer waiting in his car. He said he’d drop us off at the hospital.”

  Michiko’s new baby sister was the smallest person she had ever seen. Her head was no bigger than a grapefruit. She had chubby red cheeks and fine black hair that shot out in all directions. Her small pink hands clenched either side of her face. As she pushed one of her tiny fists into her eye, Michiko’s mother drew it away.

  “She looks like Sadie,” Michiko whispered.

  “That’s what I thought,” her mother whispered back. Her dark eyes looked tired and she smelled of medicine.

  “Perfect in every way,” said the nurse entering the room, “a very healthy child.”

  “Would you like to hold her?” asked her mother.

  “I guess,” Michiko said with a grimace.

  As she c
radled the tiny bundle in her arms the sweet smell of talcum powder drifted up. Michiko bent to kiss her soft round cheek and caught the smell of brand-new skin. A tiny fist opened. Michiko slipped her finger into it. Five tiny pink fingers closed over it. A shiver started at her fingertips and went up her arms.

  “Lucky girl,” the nurse said arranging the pillows behind Eiko’s head.

  “I guess I am,” Michiko responded.

  “I meant the baby,” the nurse said. “I always wanted a big sister.”

  That night Michiko paused over and over again while reading in bed. She couldn’t concentrate. Her sister’s tiny face kept appearing on the page. Then she heard a sob.

  Michiko put the book down and tiptoed to her brother’s doorway. He was fast asleep. She heard the noise again. It came from the kitchen.

  Her father, his head buried into his hands, was shaking.

  “What’s wrong?” Michiko cried out. “Did something happen to the baby?”

  Her father took his hands from his face and looked at her. “The baby is fine,” he said.

  Michiko slipped into the chair beside him and put her arm around him.

  “You must forgive me,” he said. “There is so much to worry about these days.”

  Michiko patted her father’s arm. “There is nothing to worry about,” she said. “Remember what Geechan always said: at the foot of the lighthouse it is always dark.”

  “Not if the lighthouse is in Japan,” her father replied.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Michiko said, a tinge of fear creeping into in her heart.

  “I mean,” he stammered, running his fingers through his hair, “before your little sister was born, Mr. Hayashi helped me fill out the papers to send our whole family to Japan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE LETTER

  “I’m glad you know the difference,” Clarence said to Michiko in their back garden. “I’m never sure what are weeds and what are vegetables.” He scraped his hair back from his freckled forehead and stuffed it under his baseball cap.

  Michiko picked up her rake. “Hello,” she said to Mrs. Morrison, who was walking toward them.

  “How’s the new baby?” was the woman’s first question every time they met.

  “Fine,” Michiko said with a smile.

  Clarence and Michiko set to work weeding.

  Mrs. Morrison talked as they worked. “There hasn’t been a baby around here in a long time,” she said. “All kinds of kids used to run up and down the main street.”

  “Now there’s only George King,” Clarence said in an aggravated tone. “George King, King of the Town, as he likes to say.”

  Michiko giggled.

  “Poor George,” Mrs. Morrison said, inspecting the beds.

  “Poor George?” echoed Clarence in astonishment. “He’s the richest kid around.”

  “George is poor in other ways,” Mrs. Morrison told them. “He is poor in health, poor at sports, and he is poor at making friends.”

  “Maybe because he is a poor sport,” Clarence said giving a dandelion a swift slash.

  “George King was the only child of the King family to survive,” she said.

  Clarence, having seven brothers and sisters, looked up in astonishment.

  Michiko blood turned cold. She opened her eyes wide.

  Edna Morrison read the fear in Michiko’s eyes. “Not that it’s a problem for a healthy baby girl like yours,” she assured her.

  “How many children did she have?” Clarence asked.

  “Three before George,” said Mrs. Morrison. “There were two girls and a boy. They never lived past their first year of life. All of them are in the church cemetery.”

  Michiko thought of the small angel statues in the children’s section. She shivered. If there was one place in the whole area that Michiko disliked, it was the cemetery. Halfway down the mountain between the farmhouse and the orchard, it was a tangled mass of wildflowers and weeds. The little iron-railed plots with gulls crying overhead made her uneasy. Trying not to think of it, she raked with gusto.

  “George was the only one to live past his first birthday,” Mrs. Morrison told them. “His mother was unable to have more children.”

  Clarence and Michiko listened as they scratched out the weeds around the vegetables.

  “George’s mother and I went to school together,” Mrs. Morrison said as she did up her cardigan buttons. “Kathleen was the only girl from a well-to-do family of boys. Her mother dressed her in frills every day.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was an only child,” Clarence said. “Our house gets real noisy at times and we are always running out of food.”

  “But you would be lonely,” Michiko said. She couldn’t imagine not having Hiro around. He got into things but she loved him. “And you’d end up being selfish,” she added.

  “Being an only child doesn’t make you selfish,” Mrs. Morrison said indignantly, putting her hands on her hips. “I was an only child. But instead of wearing frills, I had to work the farm. I had to keep the chickens, milk the cows and the goat, and tend to the gardens. I used to wash my face in goats milk trying to look as pale and pretty as Kathleen.”

  Michiko looked up at the woman’s red shiny face gleaming in the sun. One couldn’t find a more kind and generous woman. “You don’t need goat’s milk,” she said dropping her hoe. She threw her arms around Edna’s waist and buried her face in her cardigan. “You are beautiful.”

  Taken by surprise, Edna Morrison’s eyes widened. Then they softened and turned moist. “I think you are beautiful too,” she said stroking Michiko’s dark head.

  “Doesn’t anyone think I am beautiful?” Clarence asked, leaning against his shovel with his cap shoved to the back of his head.

  Michiko released Mrs. Morrison with a giggle.

  “Time for my visit,” the woman announced, heading in the door.

  Michiko bent to straighten the rickety peony cage, fashioned out of rusty fence wire. The scraggly plant trapped inside looked limp. “Maybe we should try to make friends with George.”

  “How?” asked Clarence. “His mother won’t let him play with me. I’m from the wrong side of the tracks. And you are …” But he stopped talking.

  “I am an enemy of the country,” Michiko finished for him. “I come from a whole family of spies.” She remembered what Kiko had said once about being a spy. “Maybe,” she said, “we could do it in secret. Isn’t that what spies do?”

  “He’ll only cause trouble,” Clarence said. “That is the one thing he isn’t poor at.” He stopped raking and rested his chin on the handle. “Why don’t you invite him to the wedding?”

  Michiko threw a dandelion plant at him.

  The wedding was producing as much excitement as the summer baseball games. Mrs. Morrison organized the church women into cleaning every inch of the chapel.

  Before long Mrs. Morrison returned, carrying the large tin can of used tea leaves. “Your mother told me if I scatter them about the floor when I sweep, it will help keep down the dust.”

  I bet she didn’t tell you where we are going, Michiko thought. These days her mother’s face was expressionless. Her pale, thin lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. She cleaned the house from top to bottom, took down the curtains, and moved the furniture. Michiko knew her mother was not happy about moving to Japan.

  “Why don’t you come with me to the church,” Mrs. Morrison suggested. “The flower beds could do with a weeding before the wedding.” She giggled at what she said.

  When they arrived at the church, Mabel, in a large cotton apron with a knotted tea towel about her head, appeared in the doorway. “Do we take everything off the notice board as well?” she asked.

  Edna replied, “Michiko can do the notice board. Clarence, you tackle the dandelions.”

  Michiko dropped her rake onto the grass. She entered to the sound of Mabel pumping the carpeted pedals, making the old organ wheeze out the wedding march.

 
; The notice board was so full it was a wonder anyone noticed anything. An unclaimed mitten from last winter covered some of the messages and announcements. Michiko decided to remove everything, throw out what was out of date, and rearrange.

  Along with the usual notices of choir practices, upcoming events, and club meetings was a small newspaper clipping. It was so small the brass thumbtack holding it up covered most of it. She pried back the tack and read.

  Family Wanted: Owners of gladiola farm need help with business and household. Man required. Must be able to operate tractor, harvest and sort bulbs, sell flowers. Woman needed for housework and meals. Small house included. Will accept Asian family. Write for details.

  Michiko stared at what she held in her hand. She turned it over to see if there was a date. All that it said on back was, “Raspberry Jam — 24 oz jar — 29 cents with two preserves coupons.”

  How long had this ad been here? Michiko asked herself. The paper wasn’t yellow or faded. How many other Japanese families had read it? Taking a deep breath, Michiko folded the tiny strip of words and slipped it into her blouse pocket. This just might be the answer to my prayers.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE WEDDING

  Mrs. Morrison’s rickety camera had a lever that kept on getting stuck. “I hope this doesn’t make the pictures blurry,” Mr. Hayashi mumbled.

  Sadie Minagawa and Kaz Katsumoto celebrated their wedding in Mrs. Morrison’s back garden. Dark orange lilies bobbed along the fence. Roses filled the air with their sweet perfume. The huge lilac tree by the gate wore a white bow around its trunk.

  Sadie made an enchanting bride in her white satin dress. Michiko’s mother laboured many nights after the baby slept, stitching tiny pearl buttons along the neck. Her white high-heel shoes came from the catalogue courtesy of the female teachers. “It’s an investment,” Sadie told everyone with a laugh “They all hope to use them some day.” She smiled down at her huge bouquet of field daisies and wild ferns tied with a white ribbon.