They hastily tried to put together a tanomoshi—a kind of collective loan cooperative dating back to samurai days—but their neighbors, though sympathetic, were also struggling to stay afloat in the tidal wake of the crash.
Taizo and Jiro, desperate to spare their wives and children the specter of potential homelessness, kept their own counsel. Together they walked down to Elder Creek, a small stream lazing through lush woods of Douglas fir and spreading oak trees. The sheltering canopy of leaves and the whispering rush of the water afforded some privacy as well as a moment of needed serenity, reminding them both of their boyhoods in Hōfuna.
It did not take long for them to decide that there was only one man in Florin with the funds to purchase their debt, and that was Joseph Dreesen.
“He did offer us sixty-five hundred dollars for the land,” Taizo noted.
“Seven years ago. He will not offer us that much again. Not in these times,” Jiro noted. “And even if he were to offer us enough to pay off the debt, what then? Where do we go? What do we do?”
Taizo considered a moment, then suggested, “What if we … offer to sell him most of the land but hold back ten or twenty acres for ourselves to farm? To support our family, nothing more?”
“An interesting idea,” Jiro allowed.
“Our only idea.”
“True enough.”
“And if he says no?”
Jiro sighed. “I worked as an itinerant laborer as a young man. I am not so old that I cannot do so again.”
“Nor I, if we are even fortunate enough to find work. But condemning our children to such a life … that would break my heart.”
Jiro nodded. He watched as a steelhead trout swam just below the surface of the creek, tail flicking as it followed the current.
“Like that fish, we can only go where the stream takes us,” he said.
Taizo nodded, not happy to be reduced to a metaphoric fish.
The next day they met Dreesen in his rustic office in back of the Florin Feed & Supply Company. His hair was a little grayer, but his face and arms were still as tanned as an old leather hide, and he greeted them from behind his walnut desk with characteristic bluntness.
“Watanabe-san.” He smiled like a wolf that had scented its prey. “Mr. Ochida told me you tried to put together some kind of Jap loan association. I figured it wouldn’t be long before you came crawling back.”
Taizo and Jiro’s spines stiffened.
“You once made us an offer, Sheriff,” Jiro said, ignoring Dreesen’s rudeness, “of sixty-five hundred dollars for our land.”
Dreesen nodded. “I did, at that. But that was a long time ago. We find ourselves in a new world today, don’t we?”
“Yes,” Jiro agreed quietly.
“I keep up with local property values. And today I’d judge the value of your land as no more than—five thousand dollars. And I’m being generous.”
Jiro looked to Taizo, who replied for him: “That is a fair appraisal, and we would be agreeable to such a sum in purchase of … ninety acres of land.”
Dreesen raised an eyebrow. “Your spread’s a hundred acres, ain’t it?”
“Yes. We will sell you everything but the house, barn, and the ten acres of land surrounding it, which we would reserve for our own use.”
Dreesen said flatly, “That wasn’t the deal we discussed.”
“As you say: We find ourselves in a new world,” Taizo replied. “Only ten acres, but enough for us to feed our family. How else are we to survive?”
“Ain’t my concern. Go back to Japan, I don’t care. It’s all or nothing.”
Jiro and Taizo called upon every bit of Japanese reserve they possessed. “What you propose,” Taizo said, “is little better than allowing the bank to foreclose on our property. And if that happens, you get nothing.”
“Then the bank will put it up for auction and I can bid on it. Maybe get it for even less.”
“You might not place the winning bid.”
Dreesen smiled his lupine smile. “I’m a gambler. I’ll take my chances.”
Then Jiro suddenly spoke up. “What if I were to suggest a way—in which we all get what we desire?”
Dreesen snorted. “And what might that be, Watanabe-san?”
“We sell you all one hundred acres, buildings included—which you then lease back to us. We work the land for you—we Japanese are good farmers, you said so yourself. We do the work, you get the profits—less a percentage of the harvest you pay for our labor.”
Taizo was as startled by this idea as Dreesen seemed to be. “You talkin’ about sharecropping?”
“Leasing, sharecropping, whatever you wish to call it.”
“Leasing land to Japs is illegal in California.”
“And yet it is still done. You already have such an arrangement with Mr. Ochida, do you not? How did you get around the letter of the law, Sheriff?”—a mild barb sheathed in that last word.
Dreesen frowned. “Mr. Ochida and his son are managers, not tenants. Nothing illegal about it.”
“There you are, then. We will be your managers. You may employ us only as long as the farm is making money. If it does not, you may end our employment and work the land yourself, or sell it for a profit. If it does make money, we work the land in exchange for fifty percent of the harvest.”
Dreesen reflexively countered, “Forty percent.”
“Forty percent, providing you supply us with feed and supplies. I believe that is customary in such arrangements.”
Dreesen looked torn. Taizo judged that his greed had taken up arms against his hatred of the Japanese.
“You wily goddamn Japs,” Dreesen finally spat out. But the expletive was followed by a grudging laugh. “Much as I’d like to, I can’t argue with that. Saves me the trouble of hiring laborers. And forty percent of the harvest is probably less money than I’d pay in salary.”
He stood up, all business now. “All right. I’ll have contracts drawn up and a check cut. As long as you make money for me, you can stay. But the minute that farm goes into the red, I’ll have you evicted faster than you can say sayonara. Do we understand each other?”
“Perfectly.” Jiro held out his hand. To Taizo’s surprise, Dreesen took it.
“You’re a damn sight better businessman than I gave you credit for, Watanabe-san,” he said.
Taizo was thinking exactly the same thing.
Outside, Taizo marveled, “It was an inspired idea, Jiro, but—where on earth did it come from?”
“My first job in California was as a laborer on a sharecropper’s farm. I had forgotten all about Ochida-san and his arrangement with Dreesen until the sheriff mentioned him. I gambled that he would not pass up the chance to have us ‘wily Japs’ under his thumb.”
“And you were right,” Taizo said. “Well done, Niisan.”
The honorific touched Jiro, and brought a smile to his face.
* * *
The Depression was terrible, of course, but Ruth was facing an even more implacable enemy: puberty.
She stood in her bedroom, back flat against a wall as if facing a firing squad, keeping her head level. With her left hand she raised a pencil to the top of her head and made a little stroke on the wallpaper behind her.
“Dai?” came her mother’s voice through the door. “Are you ready?”
“Not yet, Okāsan!”
She positioned one end of her mother’s cloth measuring tape by the baseboard, holding it in place with her toe while her fingers raised the tape up to the pencil mark—one of many made in previous years.
The cruel calculus of numbers decreed that Ruth stood sixty-four inches tall, confirming what she already knew.
Angrily she hurled the tape onto her bed, tears welling in her eyes.
“You do not want to be late for your first day at school, butterfly,” her mother called out to her.
“I’m not going to school!”
A sigh from the other side of the door. “And what should I tell your
teachers?”
“Tell them I’m dead. Tell them I died of … colossalitis!”
“That is not a real disease, butterfly,” came Etsuko’s amused reply.
“It is and I’m dying of it!”
Ruth—all five feet four inches of her—threw open the door. She was wearing a colorful print dress, knee stockings, and high-top shoes. “Look at me!” she cried. “I’m a circus freak!”
“Dai, you are not a ‘freak.’”
“Look!” She pointed at the height chart on the wall. “I grew an entire inch this summer alone! Three inches since last year!”
Indeed, her mother—petite, like most Japanese women—had to crane her head to address her. “You have gone through a growth spurt, that is all,” Etsuko reassured her. “Your body is still growing.”
“You mean like these?” Fruitlessly she adjusted her bra straps. “I’ve had this thing on for ten minutes and I’m already sweating like a stuck pig.”
“You are overexcited. Calm down.”
“Why is this happening to me? Why won’t I stop growing?”
Etsuko calmly took her hands in hers and squeezed them in the way that always made Ruth less anxious. “As I’ve told you before: it is probably your hapa half, your Hawaiian blood, that makes you a bit taller than most Japanese girls your age.”
“I hate being hapa,” she snapped. “I hate being half Hawaiian! Why can’t I look like everybody else?”
“You are who you are, Dai—a beautiful young girl who will grow up to be a beautiful woman. Every girl your age goes through changes like these. Now put on your ‘outside face’ like a good Japanese girl and go to school.”
“Outside face” meant the face she showed in public—quiet, not boisterous or emotional, to preserve the family honor. Ruth bowed her head, stoically accepting her fate, and went downstairs to get her box lunch and a thermos of tea. Ralph and Stanley, who had moved on to Elk Grove Union High—unlike Florin’s schools, not segregated by race—were already in the kitchen. Ralph smiled at Ruth and said, “Good try, Sis. I’d be happy to take a couple of inches off your hands, if I knew how.”
Ralph was short for a sixteen-year-old Nisei boy, barely five feet tall. Together they looked like Mutt and Jeff. “You’re welcome to them, Niisan.”
“Buck up, Sis. It won’t be so bad.”
“It’ll be worse.”
“Man, you’ve really got that Japanese fatalism jazz down pat. Ease up, Sis. It’s not the end of the world.” He gave her a fraternal pat on the back, then he and Stanley walked out to the main road to wait for the school bus.
Ruth met up with Cricket and they walked together to what was now known as Florin East Grammar School, its tar-paper roof patched over several times in the past few years, its green stucco walls fading in the bright sun to a pale lime. Cricket told her not to worry about what other kids thought, but that was easy for her to say—she was barely five feet tall.
They joined the crowd of students entering the school’s courtyard. Ruth was now a whole head taller than most of the Nisei girls and half a head taller than most boys. She felt like a giraffe striding amid a herd of penguins.
Worse: the penguins took notice. Heads turned, faces tilted up, eyes stared, violating not just her privacy but all Japanese norms of propriety. Instinctively she slouched as she entered the school, navigating the corridors in search of the eighth-grade classroom and greeted with such bon mots as:
“Wow, Ruth, you got tall as a Maypole over the summer!” said a girl.
Ruth smiled. She always smiled. But she wanted to say: Yes, and from up here I can see that dandruff problem of yours.
“Hey, stringbean, what’s the weather like up there?” said another.
This was invariably asked with a self-delighted laugh, as if he or she were the first human being on earth to conceive of this knee-slapper.
She wanted to dump the content of her thermos on his head and say: It’s raining.
“Aw, shaddup, bigmouth!” Cricket yelled at the last boy, but this only attracted more attention. Ruth cringed.
“Cricket, don’t,” Ruth begged. “It just makes things worse.”
Finally they reached their classroom. Now came the second most humiliating part of the day, as Ruth squeezed her gangly lower limbs under a school desk that seemed built for a Munchkin. She had not been able to cross her legs in class since fifth grade.
Recess was for most students a welcome respite, but for Ruth it was just another interlude in hell. Boys and girls alike played volleyball, tetherball, tag, or hide-and-seek. Ruth was no good at any of these. Hide-and-seek? Ha. Where did you hide when you were as tall as the Statue of Liberty? Tag? Her legs were long, so kids assumed she would be a good runner, but her still-growing limbs were slow to answer her brain’s orders and she often tripped over herself, landing flat on her face. There was nothing funnier than seeing a giant being brought down. The one time she had played volleyball, her freakishly long arms launched the ball with such velocity that it zoomed straight across the net and hit Cora Okabe square in the chest, propelling her backward into Lulu Koizumi, both girls toppling like tenpins. Ruth was horrified but neither of them were seriously hurt and graciously did not blame her for it. Fortunately, no one ever asked her to play volleyball again.
Her first day back eventually ended and as she left the school building, there was more droll banter about her height. But the worst remark was delivered not at top voice but sotto voce, two girls giggling and whispering:
“I bet she’s really a boy.”
Tears sprang to Ruth’s eyes and she ran all the way home. She entered the house weeping, and filthy from the dust she had kicked up along the way.
She kicked off her shoes and went straight upstairs. When Etsuko saw her, Ruth just gave her a look that said don’t comfort me, her bedroom door slamming shut behind her. She fell onto her bed and wept into her pillow.
After a few minutes there was a familiar scratching at the door. Ruth opened it to admit Mayonaka. Ruth picked her up and brought her to the bed, where she curled up on Ruth’s arm, offering warmth and comfort, as always, soothing Ruth’s troubles with her purr.
Ruth skipped supper, but when the house was quiet she crept downstairs, pilfered some bread and jam from the kitchen, then slipped out the back door. She went to Bucky’s stall and combed his mane, feeling calmer in his gentle presence. She gave him a kiss on his muzzle, then went over to the redwood split-rail fence that surrounded the corral, climbed it, and sat down on the top rail. It wasn’t comfortable, but she didn’t want to be comfortable right now. She sat there in the gathering twilight, eating her bread and jam, staring out at endless rows of green strawberry plants and painterly strokes of gold and purple in the sky above a distant treeline.
After a few minutes she heard someone behind her and turned to see Ralph. “Hi,” he said, swinging his short legs over the top rail. “Rough day?”
“Yeah. You?”
“It was all right.”
Now that he was closer, even in the dimming light, Ruth could see that he had a bruise above his left eye. “What happened to your eye?” she asked.
He shrugged it off. “Nothing. I’m swell.”
“Give.”
“Aw, just some guys horsing around. Kind of a … tradition.”
“Did somebody hit you?” she said, alarmed.
“Naw, that’s not it.” He shrugged, as if it were nothing important. “There’s these two hajukin guys. Every year, first day of classes, they got their little routine they go through.”
“Routine? What are you talking about?”
“They pick me up, turn me upside down, and lower me into a big barrel with my feet sticking out. That’s their little joke,” he said matter-of-factly.
Ruth was shocked. “But that’s … awful!”
“Eh, all the Nisei kids from Florin get picked on, Sis. Stanley got tossed into the showers once with his clothes on. Sometimes there’s a fistfight.”
“
How—did you get out of the barrel?”
“Easy. I shift my weight—before I pass out ’cause I’m upside down—and when the barrel rolls onto the ground, I crawl out backward. Banged myself in the forehead when I hit this time, that’s why the bruise.”
“And they do this to you every year?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’m hoping for one more growth spurt. Just enough so I don’t fit so easy in the barrel.”
“You never told me any of this before,” she said softly.
“And you better not tell anyone I told you—even Stanley.”
“I promise.”
She reached out and took his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry, Ralph.” She felt suddenly ashamed. “I … guess I don’t have it so bad.”
“Naw, you do. We both do. But we’ll live.”
She squeezed his hand, the way her mother squeezed hers. He smiled.
Silently they watched the last traces of the sun’s light retreating below the treetops, urgently waiting for puberty to end.
Chapter 6
1931–1935
By the time Ruth entered high school she had grown another inch, standing five feet five, certain that P. T. Barnum would be calling any day now. AMAZING! COLOSSAL! screamed the circus banners of her imagination. SEE THE ORIENTAL GIANTESS! HEAR HER TRAGIC STORY! STEP RIGHT UP!
At least this was what she envisioned on the school bus en route to her first day at Elk Grove Union High School. She was more than a head taller than most of the Nisei girls on the bus; even sitting down they all seemed like Lilliputians to her. Everyone on the bus shared some anxiety about going to a new school. But when Ruth stepped inside the large, red-brick building—so much more imposing than Florin East—her worries evaporated.
Elk Grove was not a segregated school, like Florin; the student body was made up of about three hundred whites, forty or fifty Nisei, and a few Hispanics. Walking its hallways for the first time, Ruth was astonished to find herself at eye level with most of the white male students. Even most white girls were only a few inches shorter than she; a few were nearly as tall. And to her wonderment, Ruth felt downright petite alongside the school’s six-foot-tall basketball and football players. No longer was she a giraffe among penguins. She felt almost … normal.
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