Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies.

  I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services.

  This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7, and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  February 19, 1942.

  A man such as Roosevelt could not have thought of such a thing, could he? Surely he was coerced by bigoted, anti-Asian businessmen in California. What did he know of coolie labor and exclusion acts? And now, it’s the Camps.

  We pulled out of the station this morning with the blinds drawn. So we could not see out or so no one could see in? The seats on the train are wooden benches. Hard on the old Issei bones. A week after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Treasury Department froze our bank accounts and we are allowed to withdraw no more than $100 per month. Now, looking around, I see many people who have already lost their farms and homes and equipment—anything they were making payments on—so we are not only exiled, but destitute. No money, no home.

  The train lurched to a stop. There was no town, only a water tank and a switch box. Kai closed his journal and ran to the door. He jumped down, tilted his head back and inhaled dry air. Two army soldiers eyed him. They had guns. Steam from the train’s engine hissed and the great trunklike water hose swung against the black cab. Ahead, Kai could see the Rocky Mountains. Snow covered the higher peaks. “Bring clothes suited to pioneer life,” they had been advised. The thought made Kai chuckle.

  Kai climbed on the train and returned to his parents’ seat. They had slept through the stop. His mother’s mouth was open and his father’s head was tucked against his shoulder the way a bird sleeps and his glasses hung crookedly from his nose. Kai began a letter.

  Dear Li,

  Can you imagine how I feel? I don’t even know myself. A little while ago a wave of loneliness came over me like nothing I’ve felt before. It’s a kind of wrenching ache. Tell Jimmy we crossed a river called the Virgin. It runs red, can you beat that? When we left the Assembly Center I saw a man with his arms stuck through the fence, holding his girlfriend, and it made me think of you.

  For the time being I’m a family man. Isn’t that funny after all these years of being an orphan. Mom and Pop are awfully scared and sad. I’ve been trying to make the trip as comfortable as possible but it’s not easy. Some of this American food doesn’t agree with them. They probably never had a hamburger before—after all those years in Richmond. By the way, I told them about you.

  Pop has hardly said a word since he closed up the store. I don’t know how to get him to talk. I can’t believe I won’t be going to classes in the morning and in the evenings, coming to you.

  We heard that at another camp someone sent a box of oranges with a sword inside. A Nisei ran with it and the MPs shot him dead.

  I guess I’ll try to get some sleep now. It feels strange being apart—like a big hole that grows bigger and bigger where my heart has flown back to you.

  love, Kai

  Kai folded the letter, tucked it in his journal, and tried to sleep, but couldn’t. He looked at his parents again. They would not have approved of Li because she was Chinese and they would have thought her vulgar. Now their heads bobbed with the swaying and jerking of the train and the stale air in the car rose like something solid.

  The stories he had heard on the train about the early arrests of Issei shocked him. Men his father’s age who taught in Japanese language schools, or were Buddhist priests, or owned a fleet of fishing boats, or big farms along the coast, were taken off the streets by FBI agents, given twenty-four hours to pack, loaded in the back of produce trucks covered with canvas, and shipped to county jails.

  One fisherman from Terminal Island had gone out as usual at two A.M., but noticed no boats followed him. When he looked back a last time, he saw the lighthouse go dark. They made their haul and on returning at sunrise, found the harbor had been closed off with a piece of wire. A launch approached and three FBI men boarded. They arrested the captain and confiscated radios and binoculars, and a logbook the captain had been keeping.

  The train’s whistle blew long and hard and Kai heard the crossing bells where a county road intersected the tracks. There was nothing to see but grainfields, unfenced grazing land, and a tiny town in the distance shrouded by cottonwood trees. He opened his journal again:

  Shikata ga nai. There’s nothing to be done. That’s what some Issei say. But is history so irremediable, so foreordained that we can’t move it this way or that, we can’t choose?

  I heard some of these “evacuee cars” have been hooked up to the back of freight trains. Ours isn’t. There are too many of us. To outsiders we must look like a ghostly procession—blinds partly drawn, guns silhouetted against lamplights. History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes and has accidents and recovers with scars. We are history tonight.

  In the dark, the train with its five hundred passengers reached Heart Mountain Relocation Camp. The Camp was on the western edge of a wide basin. The land was dry and rough and broken, covered with bunchgrass, Great Basin rye, cactus, and sage. A series of benches tilted up toward the mountains and the Camp looked down on farmland below. As the train slowed, jackrabbits zigzagged out of its path. One or two were crushed under the wheels of the engine. Kai thought the sagebrush looked like people huddled low to the ground.

  There was no station house. Only a platform. Kai helped his parents down and worked his way through the crowd. Then a bus took them to the top of the hill, through the sentry gates. The Camp was a ghastly, monochrome city of tar paper barracks lined up along avenues, surrounded by guard towers. They said it took up a square mile.

  A handsome couple joined Kai. They introduced themselves as Will Okubo and Mariko Abe. He was Kibei—a Japanese-American educated in Japan. They had been living in Paris. She was a painter, but Kai didn’t catch what Will said about himself. He spoke with a strong French accent and seemed to have difficulties with certain English words. He was tall and pale and used a cigarette holder. His khaki pants were held up by suspenders and he sported a white beret. Some pioneer, Kai thought. Mariko was tall for a Nisei and had a haughty look and wore trousers. She pursed her lips when she listened to someone speak and her eyes fastened on one thing, then another. She stood apart from the men with her hands on her hips. “Look at all this. I’ve never seen a jail with so much air.”

  Kai took a match from behind his ear and struck it with his thumbnail. The noise startled one of the guards. He turned his gun on Kai. Mariko quickly put her body in front of the gun and looked the soldier in the eyes.

  “Why must you do that? We are innocent, you know. We’re not criminals.”

  The soldier stared at her unblinkingly. Will Okubo pulled the cigarette from his ivory holder and threw it on the ground.

  “Fascists,” he said and s
pit at the soldier’s feet.

  Outside the mess hall Kai found his father sitting on his suitcase in a crowd of people. His glasses were still askew because the frames had become bent during the long train ride. He was looking down an avenue toward Heart Mountain. It rose up from sparsely timbered slopes like a pediment cut crookedly across the top, and he wondered aloud if there was a small shrine up there. Then he fainted.

  When Mr. Nakamura came to, Kai and Will helped him to his feet and carried his suitcase to their assigned barrack.

  The rooms were sixteen by twenty feet. There were three iron cots with no mattresses and a big coal stove and an inch of red dust on the floor. Otherwise their living quarters were unfurnished. Kai helped his parents settle in. When the beds had been arranged and some of the clothing hung on what would later become a partition, Kai went out and stood in the dusty lane between barracks. He felt unsteady, as if he were still on the train, still moving, and it made him nauseous. He wondered whether, as an exile in his own country, he would always have this motion in him, this sickness.

  “Hello …”

  Kai turned. It was Will Okubo.

  “Are you in this block?” Kai asked.

  Will tipped his head in the direction of a door. His face looked ashen and his eyes were squeezed together in a squint. He twirled the ivory cigarette holder in his hand.

  “You’re next door to us,” Kai said and Will shrugged indifferently.

  When Kai looked up again he saw the woman—Mariko—standing in the doorway. A cyclone of dust spun toward them as she watched. Kai covered his eyes when it hit but Will stood unflinching.

  The two men walked to the northern edge of the Camp. Light rode the sidehills and the sage-covered bench above them. In the distance Kai saw a band of antelope and closer, a family of deer. The grass had turned fawn-colored and the does and fawns had begun to turn their winter color—gray. Will lit a cigarette and gave one to Kai. Above, a single nighthawk plunged and climbed above them. It made a stuttering, high-pitched cry as if its vocal cords had shattered, and its shadow looked like a cross, shrinking and swelling on the ground.

  “Do you believe in God?” Kai asked.

  “Mais no, certainly not. And you?”

  “No,” he said and shrugged. “Did you meet up with Sartre when you were in Paris?”

  “I saw him once. At the Café Flôre. That’s all.”

  Kai nodded. He was looking at the hills above the Camp. A line of cattle filed by. A blackbird rode the back of a bull and a lone rider with long legs and a dark hat brought up the rear.

  “A real cowboy. Do you think he sees us?”

  Kai laughed at Will’s Parisian accent. That’ll throw them, he thought, a “Jap” who speaks French.

  Will’s cigarette burned to the edge of his ivory holder. He was shivering so Kai gave him his jacket. When the sun reached the Camp it threw a grillwork of shadows across the two young men and the shadows of the guard towers leaned sideways, penetrating the barracks and moving across the beds inside.

  “Très formidable, huh?”

  Kai threw his cigarette on the dry ground and stepped on it. “God, there’s nothing here,” he said and smiled incredulously.

  4

  The handrail over the footbridge to Bobby Korematsu’s cabin was made of barbed wire. Each evening, on the way home from the main house, he steadied himself on it the way he had held the ship’s railing forty-seven years before when he made the crossing from Japan to America. He had come by ship on the sixty yen he had saved from a job as an apprentice to a pickle-maker in Osaka. From working in cold salt solution every winter, his hands became sore and cracked though he was only thirteen at the time, and the other boys in the factory beat him and stole his food.

  The night Bobby’s ship, Saibei Maru, docked in San Francisco, he was taken to Angel Island to go through immigration, and on the third night released into the city, where he became lost in Chinatown. He couldn’t believe he was in America because all the men wore long pigtails and tunics over pantaloons and no one spoke English. That disappointed him because on the passage across the Pacific he had learned enough English to get by. The next day he wandered into a narrow room with no chairs and writing on a blackboard he couldn’t read and was asked by a white man smoking a cigar if he was looking for work. The man thought he was Chinese and Bobby didn’t correct him and took the job as cook for the Chinese crew on the Union Pacific Railroad in a place where there were mountains and snow called Wyoming.

  The Chinese men who laid track across the southern part of the state until it met the track of the Union Pacific, thus joining the continent in one continuous ribbon of iron, were not allowed to eat or sleep in the section cars with the white workers. They hung hammocks between the trees to one side of the tracks and Bobby cooked over an open fire. He made thirty-five dollars a month, twenty dollars less than the white cook for the same work, but still thought it was a better job than working in a pickle factory.

  When train service commenced, Bobby stayed on, graduating into the dining car of passenger trains, making his home base in a working man’s hotel over a Chinese laundry on a Laramie, Wyoming, street that faced the very tracks his crew had laid.

  He had come north in the summer of 1926 because he had never seen Yellowstone Park or Custer’s battlefield. The day he stopped in a store to buy a Coke was the day he overheard a handsome, vivacious woman with sparkling eyes tell the grocer about her son McKay’s illness—he had whooping cough—and how the other two boys had come down with the measles, and she had a haying crew to feed and couldn’t find anyone to help her because the county had slapped a quarantine sign on the ranch gate. Bobby had stepped forward and offered his services. He had never taken a vacation before and after only three days, he was tired of it, and he wasn’t frightened of contagious diseases. “One week, that’s all,” he told the gray-eyed woman. She smiled, drew a map of how to get to the ranch, and left the store.

  “And I’m still here,” Bobby thought.

  Besides cooking, he took care of all three boys, Champ, Ted, and McKay, but ministered most often to McKay, who was sicker. Secretly, he credited himself with saving the boy. He brewed special teas from medicinal herbs he had learned about from an uncle in Osaka, added to the ones he came across living with the Chinese, and in the evenings, made a “chest cloth” and “a sleep cloth”—steaming hot compresses which he applied to McKay’s chest and head.

  He had loved the boy the minute he saw him. He was pale blond, almost white-headed. Bobby noticed a look in the boy’s eyes—soft, deep, and comprehending. “You no little boy,” Bobby had mumbled to him as he thrashed with fever. “You no grown-up either,” by which he meant that McKay was neither distracted by the whims of most seven-year-olds nor jaded by adult burdens.

  At the end of the week he wired his Union Pacific boss and said he would not be returning. “Sixteen years ago …,” he thought. Now he looked to the south. The lights of Heart Mountain Camp kept intruding on his thoughts. He was not used to lights and noise out at the ranch. Now there was a steady hum and the sound of trains coming and going, bringing more evacuees. He could not help wondering if some of his own people—Korematsus—were there. He had heard once that he had an uncle living in San Jose, and a sister, born long after he had left home, was rumored to have married a lettuce farmer in Guadalupe, California. He found it difficult to think of them as his family. This ranch and these boys were his home, and before that, it had been the Chinamen. Yet, how could he help but wonder? He looked up. The sky had cleared since the first heavy storm. Now a cloud rolled in and for a moment, the Camp’s blazing light hung inside it like a swinging lantern.

  For the first time he felt his loyalties shift—not away from McKay and his brothers, but crowded now, by the possibility that members of his own distant family were near.

  A wasp, still comatose from the previous night’s hard frost, fell from the ceiling and burned to a crisp on the back lid of the cook stove. Bobby watched
it writhe and twist but did not try to save it as he usually did. That’s how he felt about the war now. It was out of his hands. When he thought about wasps, he knew they were part of a long progression, linked and curved through the seasons like the deer spine he found draped across a rock outside his cabin door. Rain, flies, and mud swallows were followed by heat, mosquitoes, and deerflies; followed by rainlessness, rattlesnakes, and grasshoppers; then, as a last gasp before the glittering apocalypse of winter—wasps and the first snows.

  But the war was different. It had no progression, no seasons. He thought about the two uniformed men who had come to the ranch the week before. McKay had talked to them from horseback. They said they were looking for Bobby Korematsu to warn him that if any suspicious activity was observed, he would be detained, or worse, sent to prison. Bobby remembered the one man had a crew cut, a cactus stand of hair, and the other one had fingers that bent up at the ends like those of wealthy men who had never worked the land. McKay had sat his horse stiffly, then ordered the two men to get off his ranch. He kicked the horse toward them as if pushing cattle down an alleyway and they retreated to their army car, backing quickly out of the yard.

  But when Bobby thought about actual fighting, everything jumbled in his mind. He knew he could no longer keep things separate—his “boys”: Champ, Ted, and the neighbor, Henry, from his own blood relatives; strangers from friends; enemies from allies. Which was which? When he looked out the window again he thought he could see them falling. As he crossed the rickety bridge to his cabin that night, the lights of the Heart Mountain Camp blazed and, clasping the handrail suddenly for balance, he punctured his hand on a barb.