Cherry Blossom Winter

by Jennifer Maruno

  Michiko wore a borrowed dress of yellow chiffon with short puffy sleeves, too small for one of the teachers. Her satin hair band, a present from Mrs. Morrison, shone against her shiny bobbed hair. She couldn’t stop pointing her legs to admire her new snow-white knee socks and black patent shoes.

  Mr. Hayashi made sure all the men at the wedding wore suits, but the groom surprised them all. When Mr. Katsumoto arrived he took everyone’s breath away. Dressed in grey-and-white-striped pants and a black coat with tails, he looked like a diplomat. “It was a gift from my team, when I went to Japan,” he said with a grin. “All baseball stars had to dress properly.”

  The wedding banquet sat on a long trestle of sheeted planks in the backyard. Tall silver-plated candelabras stood in the middle. Roses bowed from jam jars. There were china plates and silver forks. Beside the huge platters of chicken were large bowls of potato salad, coleslaw, and sliced tomatoes. Glass dishes of pickled beets and deviled eggs sat on either side of enormous two-storey loaves of bread.

  But most amazing of all was the three-tiered wedding cake. Mrs. Morrison got every one of her friends to save sugar so she could bake and ice a proper wedding cake. It looked beautiful, but only the top layer was cake.

  “Who will know in the pictures?” beamed Mrs. Morrison. She pinned brown paper strips cut from grocery bags around two hatboxes and iced them as if they were cake. Michiko would get to scrape the iced paper later.

  “Those flowers look real,” Clarence said. He was dressed in a hand-me-down suit from his oldest brother, and smelled of the soap they sold at the drugstore.

  “They are real,” Michiko said. She helped Mrs. Morrison hold each of the pansy blossoms with tweezers while she brushed egg white across the petals. Then they sprinkled them with fine sugar and let them dry. “But you can still eat them,” Michiko assured him.

  The sound of a large truck lumbering down the lane made everyone stop chattering and look up. Ted’s lumber truck flowed with white streamers. Two wooden boxes draped in a white sheet took the place of the logs.

  “Your bridal carriage awaits you,” he announced from the cab. He was taking them back to the hotel. All the teachers bunked in with someone from the orchard to give them privacy. As they climbed into the truck, the teachers flung confetti. Hiro tried to fill his pockets with what he found on the ground.

  Eiko stepped up to kiss the bride.

  As she waved goodbye, Michiko’s only wish was that her grandfather had been there. But she stopped herself from thinking about it. Today Sadie would agree with him when he said, “We can never see the sun rise by looking to the west.”

  “Before you leave,” Edna Morrison said as she removed her new flowered hat, “there’s a letter here for you.”

  “A letter for me?” questioned Michiko’s mother. “A letter came here for me?”

  “It’s on the mantelpiece,” Edna said. “Bring the baby inside and read it.”

  Michiko ran to the baby carriage. “I’ll bring her,” she said.

  Little bristles of fear filled her chest. In a way Michiko had told a lie, pretending she was her mother when she wrote the letter to the poster of the ad she’d found on the church bulletin board. But her little sister, like herself and Hiro, was Canadian. She shouldn’t grow up in Japan. She prayed her mother would understand.

  That night, Eiko held out the letter to Sam. “Read it yourself,” she said.

  He ignored her and walked out of the room.

  Michiko’s mother followed him, waving the letter in her hand.

  “According to this,” she said, “we would live for free in a small farmhouse that has electricity, hot water, and a bathroom.”

  Her father said nothing.

  “You will work in a garden, just like you do now, only growing flowers. You will also help with sales, like you do now. I will cook and clean, just like I do now.”

  “Our rent will be free in Japan,” he said in a low voice.

  “A house for a family is included,” she said. “They are willing to pay you $6.00 a week,” Eiko continued, “and I get a salary as well.”

  Sam looked Eiko in the eye and took the letter from her hand. His chocolate eyes grew cold and stale. “I don’t know how to drive a tractor,” he complained after reading it.

  “You know how to drive a car and a delivery truck, how can it be that much different?”

  Michiko knew her mother had made a lot of good points.

  “What are we going to do for travelling money?” asked her father. “There are five of us.”

  Michiko couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “I know!” she shouted in her eagerness to solve this new problem. “We can ask Mrs. Morrison to lend us the money.”

  The force with which her father slammed his fist on the table startled her. “Don’t you ever suggest that again,” he said in a deep firm voice. He stomped downstairs.

  Michiko didn’t understand his reaction. It couldn’t possibly be because Edna Morrison was hakujin. Maybe it was one of those old-fashioned Japanese things her mother and Aunt Sadie always talked about. Maybe a man could never borrow money from a woman.

  Her mother shook her head at Michiko, as if saying, “I told you so.”

  “I thought it was a good idea,” she murmured. “Why won’t he accept help?”

  “Your father is a proud man,” her mother said. “He would never borrow.”

  “We would pay it all back,” Michiko said.

  “There has to be another way,” was all her mother said. “We have some time. They said they have help for the flowers but not for the bulbs. If we want the position, we will have to be there by September.”

  Life went on as usual. Each morning Michiko made breakfast for her brother. She tidied the kitchen before she went to school. At noon she came home to help with the routines of the household. Monday was washing day; Tuesday, ironing. They baked on Wednesday. Thursday was for sewing and knitting, although now her mother only made minor repairs of their clothes. There was no time with the new baby to take in work from other people. Friday was for the garden. Saturday was for the bathhouse, and Sunday, church.

  “Mrs. Morrison said she wanted her house painted,” Michiko told her father after church one day. “Do you think Uncle Ted would be able to fit it in?”

  “That’s much too big a job for weekend work,” her father answered. “Ted’s working hard with the lumber company. He needs his weekends to rest.”

  “Maybe Clarence and I could do it?” Michiko suggested. “He’s looking for work.”

  “What if I helped too?” her mother added.

  “Paint a house?” Sam looked at his wife in disbelief.

  “No, silly,” she replied. “I could watch the store while the three of you paint. Mrs. Morrison would love to entertain Hiro. The baby would be fine in her carriage in the store.”

  “It would be a way of making money,” her father said tapping his finger to his chin. “I’ll have to see what she says.”

  By the end of the week they had a plan. Eiko would mind the shop in the morning. Sam, Michiko, and Clarence would paint in the morning, while it was cool. Mrs. Morrison borrowed a cot from the church and set it up on the back verandah for Hiro. While he napped, Michiko and Clarence would clean the brushes and eat their lunch. Sam would come home for lunch and work in the drugstore.

  Mrs. Morrison lent Michiko her alarm clock and showed her how to use it. As she wound the tiny key at the back, Michiko thought how there was never a need for an alarm clock when they were living at the farmhouse. The morning started with the noise of the draft creaking open, the scrape of the metal shovel and the clatter of wood going into the stove.

  They would work for $1.75 a day. Clarence would take home fifty cents. The rest would go into Geechan’s thin wooden box with the white owl on the front.

  Michiko’s mother made a few small changes in the store, adding baby toys and ladies’ magazines. When Sam came home for lunch the store was often crowded with women, playing with the
baby and making small purchases.

  “You are good for business,” Sam said taking the baby into his arms. “Time to think about giving you a name.”

  “When are we going to have the baby’s christening?” Michiko asked at dinner that night. She already had a long list of possible names for her tiny new sister. “She has to be called something.”

  “It all depends on where we are going,” was her mother’s reply. She looked long and hard at Sam. “Her name must suit her life.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HANNAH

  Each night after dinner, her father counted the money in Geechan’s cigar box. Her mother counted it a second time, dame ohsi. Bert was so impressed by the job they did on Mrs. Morrison’s house he asked them to paint his barn. Her father upped the price and Bert agreed.

  “Two dollars a day makes Japan far away,” Michiko told herself each night as she crossed out a day on her calendar. But she never said it out loud. She didn’t want to offend.

  Mr. Hayashi visited that night. Moving out of town wasn’t as easy as Michiko thought. Mr. Hayashi had to write to the Security Commission, telling them her father had a job and accommodations for his family in Oakville. Then her father had to take the letter from Oakville to the RCMP office down the street. Mr. Hayashi told them that they weren’t giving out anymore permits to Toronto, but they might for Oakville. No one had applied to Oakville.

  “What about the other papers?” her mother asked in a hushed voice.

  Her father shrugged.

  A strange chill went through Michiko’s mind when she saw that shrug. Did it mean Mr. Hayashi’s set of papers didn’t matter, or moving to Oakville didn’t matter? But the strangest thing of all was that her mother insisted no one know of their plans, not even Uncle Ted, Auntie Sadie, or Uncle Kaz.

  Michiko had a hard time calling her teacher Uncle Kaz. At least Raymond and the rest of the boys in her class finally stopped asking her how it felt to have such a famous person in her family. Her mother said everything was to remain the same until all was arranged. That meant at school and everywhere else. It was getting difficult for Michiko to keep such a big secret.

  “The Minagawa baby is two months old,” Aunt Sadie said one day at church. “I’m on my second name and she doesn’t even have her first.”

  Michiko’s mother smiled. “Obon,” she said, “is when we will name her.”

  “What is an Obon?” asked Clarence when she told him the christening was August 15.

  “Obon isn’t a thing,” Michiko replied. “It’s a kind of holiday.”

  “What kind of things do you do?”

  Michiko shrugged. She wished her Geechan was around. He knew all about the festivals of the Japanese Buddhists. She was going to have to ask someone else about this. She knew exactly who it would be, if she could find the courage to ask.

  “Do you want to go to the orchard with me?” Michiko asked Clarence as they laid the paint brushes in the sun to dry.

  “Who are you going to see?” he asked. Michiko hadn’t been there since Kiko left.

  Michiko took a deep breath. “I want to see Mr. Yama,” she said.

  Clarence opened his mouth and shut it. He reminded Michiko of a goldfish she once had. “Mr. Yama?” he screeched. “Why do you want to visit that guy?”

  “You just asked me about Obon,” Michiko said. “Mr. Yama could tell us.”

  “Well he won’t talk to you if I go along,” Clarence said. “I’m hi-coo-jean.”

  “Maybe we should ask George to come along,” Michiko said with a smile.

  Clarence opened and closed his mouth a second time. “Are you crazy?”

  “All Japs are crazy,” Michiko replied. “Let’s go find George.”

  Even though he had the best bike in town, George was never far from home. They spotted him pumping his tires on the front lawn.

  “We can’t just walk up to him,” Clarence said. “His mother will call him inside.”

  “I’ll go on ahead,” Michiko said with a smile. “You can do something else with him.”

  “He’ll want to know what,” Clarence said.

  “Tell him he needs to learn how to throw a baseball,” Michiko said.

  “I don’t know,” Clarence said removing his cap and running his fingers through his hair.

  “See you later,” Michiko said. She turned and walked away. Maybe, just maybe, they could learn to get along. Clarence and George might even become friends.

  On Mr. Yama’s wooden steps Michiko learned all about the Feast of Lanterns.

  “People stop work,” Mr. Yama told her in broken English. “Everyone go home.”

  “What do they do with the lanterns?” Michiko asked.

  “Lanterns go outside house,” he said. He put up his brown leathery hand to shade his eyes and look around. Just like her grandfather, Mr. Yama used his hands to explain what he meant. “Family spirits see lanterns and find way home.” He rubbed his stomach. “Then family have big feast and put food for spirit guests too.”

  “Then what happens?” Michiko prompted.

  The old man blinked. “People take lanterns to water,” he said. He swayed his body from side to side. “They have big dance to say goodbye.” He moved his hands up and down in front of him making waves. “Lanterns go on water so spirits find way back.”

  Michiko looked at the man with the purple blotch on his face and sighed. He may not be beautiful on the outside, she thought, but he had beauty inside. “You know, Mr. Yama,” she said, getting up, “I think the people in the orchard should celebrate Obon.” She dusted off her shorts. “After all, we have a lake and a river.”

  The old man blinked as if he saw her for the first time.

  “I didn’t have to get the papers back,” Mr. Hayashi told Michiko’s parents that night. “I never sent them in. I needed two signatures. Remember, we were interrupted by the baby.”

  Michiko’s mother let out a squeal and threw her arms around the surprised security officer. “That is wonderful news,” she told him. Then she did the unthinkable. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “Are we good to go?” her father asked.

  “If you’ve got the money,” Mr. Hayashi said, “I’ll apply for your tickets tomorrow.”

  Michiko’s hands went to her mouth. All their papers were in order. Tomorrow they could buy their train tickets and they could move to Ontario. She clapped her hands. Hiro copied.

  A small cry came from the carriage. Michiko looked at the small fist waving in the air. “That’s right, baby sister,” she said rushing to her side. “You can give a cheer. Because of you, you will be growing up in Ontario.”

  Michiko’s mother lifted the baby from the carriage. “So, Hannah,” she said, “are you ready to wear your pretty white christening dress?”

  “Hana?” Michiko and her father repeated together. “We are calling her Hana?”

  “Hana is a Japanese name,” Sam said.

  “I thought it was a Canadian name,” Michiko said.

  “It’s both,” said her mother. “And it is the middle name of her soon-to-be godmother.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Michiko’s father said. “Our baby girl is a flower after all.”

  “Edna Hannah Morrison,” Michiko said. “I never knew.”

  A slight breeze swept across the cemetery slope, scattering the fallen leaves. Michiko carried the spade. She stepped across the grass, careful not to tread on anyone’s bones. Her mother, father, and aunt walked together. Mrs. Morrison held Hiro’s hand. Uncle Kaz pushed the baby carriage. Uncle Ted carried a small tree in a pot.

  Michiko watched her mother brush the leaves from the rough slab of pebbly cement. Her light touch reminded Michiko of the way she soothed Geechan’s brow in the hospital. Her father, Uncle Ted, and Uncle Kaz pulled out weeds from around the flat stone. Sadie patted the stone as if she were making rice balls. Ted dug a hole and put the cherry tree into place.

  In her dream the night before, Michiko walked thro
ugh the long grassy field of the farmhouse. Her grandfather stood against the blue sky, waving. The orchard was pink with cherry trees. She ran toward him and their fingers touched. She woke up right then and lay in bed, knowing that he would always be with them.

  Everyone drew together, holding hands around the tree. They bowed their heads and prayed in silence. Even Hiro remained quiet. The smell of the weedy grass reminded Michiko of sitting in the field with her grandfather, waiting to catch fireflies. She made up her mind to do that with Hiro. That is, if there were fireflies in Oakville.

  Japanese Vocabulary

  in Order of Appearance in Story

  origami

  Japanese art of paper folding

  cha

  green tea

  yancha

  naughty

  Geechan

  Grandfather

  kairanban

  homemade newspaper or bulletin

  Kanji

  Japanese alphabet letters

  shoyu

  soya sauce

  ofuro

  Japanese public bath

  “Ashi o kiosukete kudasai”

  “Take care of your feet”

  haikara

  too good for the neighbourhood

  “Yancha kozo de ne”

  “Such a mischievous kid”

  furoshiki

  bundle made by tying four corners of a square cloth

  miso

  red or white bean paste

  tamago yaki

  omelette

  Asahi

  famous Japanese-Canadian baseball team

  kanemochi

  upper class, people with money

  gangara

  hold on, keep going, persevere

  Ara!

  Watch Out!