Weedflower

by Kadohata, Cynthia

  Bull didn’t answer for so long that Sumiko thought he hadn’t heard her. But then he grunted, “Yes.”

  “Only that?”

  “Yes.” Then he said, “Gaman.” That meant “We must bear it.”

  After a while Bull pushed her away, and she could see he was smiling gently. “Look at that,” he said. He was gazing outside.

  She followed his gaze and saw Uncle standing in the moonlight near the outhouse, talking to it and occasionally gesturing with his arms. Whenever Sumiko saw someone talking to the outhouse, she always knew exactly where Jiichan was. She and Bull laughed, and at last she was sleepy.

  5

  SUMIKO DIDN’T WAKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, and nobody woke her up. She wondered whether that meant they all knew about the party now. She dressed and then slapped and rubbed her face to try to bring blood to her skin.

  She pulled the silk scarf from under the mattress, where she’d put it the day before. The scarf made her feel humiliated all over again, so she stuffed it back under her mattress. After that she went into the living room.

  Jiichan was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper. He glanced at her.

  “You go one party and now you think you can wake up late?” He scowled. That meant Bull hadn’t told anyone, and neither had Tak-Tak.

  “Good morning, Jiichan.”

  “You look sick;” he said. “Eyes puffy.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look sick. Go tell your auntie you’re sick.”

  Sumiko wished she were sick. She certainly didn’t feel like working today. Sunday was her day for housecleaning and reading Japanese. If she had questions about the Japanese, she would ask Jiichan.

  “Where’s Tak-Tak?” she asked.

  “Outside with horse. He get bored waiting for sleepyhead.”

  Jiichan read his Japanese newspaper the whole morning. Every so often he would say things to Sumiko like, “Get me tea” or “You start rice yet?” or “Rub my feet.” Taking care of old men’s feet was one of a woman’s jobs, according to Auntie. Auntie used to rub Jiichan’s feet until one day he accused her of trying to break his big toe. Now it was Sumiko’s job.

  She was rubbing his toes when she heard honking from the road. She went to the front window and saw a car that looked like Mr. Hirata’s driving alongside Mrs. Takahashi as she ran down the road crying. Mrs. Takahashi didn’t pay any attention to the car. Where could she be going? She lived in the opposite direction. She was seventy-three years old. Sumiko had rarely seen her walk, let alone run. The car pulled up in front of Sumiko’s house. It was Mr. Hirata—the sweet pea king. Mrs. Takahashi kept crying and ran right past the house. Sumiko opened the door before Mr. Hirata could knock.

  He was wearing his farm clothes, and his face was dirty. He breathed hard, even though he’d been driving. He removed his hat and bowed slightly to her.

  “Sumi-chan. Is your uncle home?”

  “He’s out in the field.” She paused. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No. May I talk to him?” Mr. Hirata asked, barely concealing his impatience.

  Jiichan stood up, obviously insulted. “Can I help?”

  Mr. Hirata bowed his head respectfully and said, “Matsuda-san, it’s only that—I should talk to your son, too.” He walked a couple of steps backward, nodding respectfully at Jiichan. Then he turned around and rushed through the living room with Sumiko following. They ran right through the kitchen and to the back door before he turned to her and said, “Stay here. This isn’t for children.”

  The temperature was in the seventies, a perfect Southern California December day. The holes in parts of the old cheesecloth allowed the bright sun to shine on the carnations. Some days the brightness made the flowers look artificial, as if they were made of paper. But today Sumiko thought the flowers almost seemed to glow. At Mr. Ono’s farm a man was running across a field. Maybe somebody had been hurt on a tractor. That’s what was wrong the last time Sumiko had seen this much commotion.

  When Mr. Hirata reached her uncle, everyone except Bull stopped working to watch. Auntie and Ichiro walked over. Tak-Tak was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Hirata was speaking loudly, but Sumiko couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everybody started running across the field toward the house. Tak-Tak stepped out of the stable. Uncle called out sharply to him.

  “Takao, get inside the house!”

  Sumiko wondered who had been hurt and how badly. Then she had a terrible thought. Maybe a fishing boat on Terminal Island had sunk and more than one person had been hurt!

  When the grown-ups had almost reached her, Sumiko started to call out a question, but Uncle snapped, “Get inside!” He half pushed her through the doorway. He was usually very mild mannered. Fear washed over Sumiko. Maybe a relative had been hurt in the fishing accident? Auntie had a cousin who fished off Terminal Island.

  “What is it, Uncle?”

  She followed them into the living room, where Uncle and Auntie gave each other one of their meaningful looks that nobody else ever knew the meaning of. They had been married since they were both twenty-one. Sumiko had the feeling that each knew exactly what the other was thinking. Their faces were pale.

  Jiichan stood up, but then he sat down and said, “Nobody tell old man, that’s okay, I don’t care!” He pretended to be reading his newspaper. Still nobody spoke. Another long look passed between Uncle and Auntie. Jiichan said again, “I said I don’t care!”

  Uncle knelt on the floor and took Jiichan’s hand as if Jiichan were a little child. “Hirata-san heard on the radio that Japan bombed Hawaii,” Uncle said to Jiichan.

  Jiichan looked stricken. He softly said something that sounded like “Wah.” But Sumiko knew what he’d said: “War.”

  There was another long silence as Auntie and Uncle stared at each other. The way they looked at each other scared Sumiko. “Are they going to kill us?” she half whispered.

  Auntie said, “Of course not. Don’t talk like Tak-Tak.”

  Mr. Hirata cleared his throat, then bowed to the room and said to Uncle, “Good luck. Let’s talk later.”

  He literally ran out the front door.

  And again there was silence. Then Auntie announced, “We’ll have to burn our things.” She turned to Sumiko. “Get your notebooks that you practice Japanese in.” To Tak-Tak she said, “Find all our Japanese books and magazines.”

  Tak-Tak rushed off.

  Sumiko turned to run off, but then she turned right back to Auntie. “Burn our things?” she said. “What do you mean?” What did burning their things have to do with the Japanese bombing Hawaii?

  “Anything that might make them suspicious.”

  “But why?” Sumiko said. “Suspicious of what?”

  “Isoginasai!” Hurry!

  Auntie looked so furious that Sumiko immediately ran out of the room to fetch her notebooks. She stopped in the hallway and turned back to the living room. “Auntie!” But Auntie wasn’t listening. She was peering out the front window, so mesmerized that she didn’t even notice Sumiko slip beside her. Sumiko saw a single tail of smoke rising in the distance.

  “Others have already started,” Auntie said fretfully.

  No one answered her, but suddenly everyone except Bull was talking at once. Then everyone stopped and Bull spoke: “I should tend the flowers. We may need money.” Uncle nodded, and Bull went out to the fields.

  “I’m not going to burn my notebooks,” Sumiko announced. She had worked hard to learn to write a little Japanese.

  Uncle leaned over Sumiko and shook her shoulders just once, as if shaking sense into her. “If we are all arrested, who will take care of you? Now get your notebooks and anything else that seems un-American.” He spoke so solemnly that Sumiko felt terrified. He spoke as if he himself might be arrested simply because she could write Japanese. She ran to her closet.

  For a long while she just stood in her closet holding her notebooks close to her. Jiichan had paid old Mrs. Ige to help her write better. Mrs. Ige h
ad also taught Sumiko’s mother.

  By the time Sumiko got outside, Uncle had already started the fire on the dirt ground between the house and the flower fields. The wood in the fire looked like it had come from the bathhouse. Sumiko saw that on the Ono farm the Onos also had started a fire. Sumiko held her notebooks tightly.

  Then she saw it.

  “That’s the picture from the bureau!” she cried. “You can’t get arrested for that! That’s my parents!” She grabbed the stick her uncle was using to stoke the fire, but he took a firm hold of her arm.

  “There’s a Japanese flag in that picture,” said Uncle. “It’s dangerous to keep it.”

  She turned to her grandfather. “Juchan!”

  But for once Jiichan had nothing to say. He just scowled at her as if she were misbehaving.

  Sumiko held her notebooks up and whispered, “Bye.” Then she flung them into the fire and watched them smoke and turn black. It looked like a disease had struck the papers. The fire heated Sumiko’s face. Ashes flew around her like insects. She suddenly remembered something she’d never remembered before: ashes flying around a fire as she and her parents burned garbage in an incinerator; her mother saying; “Wish on the floating ash, Sumi-chan”; and Sumiko wishing. But she couldn’t remember what she’d wished.

  Now she didn’t move until every page had turned black and shriveled. Then Auntie made her run inside to find more things to burn. She didn’t know what might be considered “disloyal.” If notebooks were somehow disloyal, then was a Japanese silk fan also bad? And what about her kimono? Surely there was nothing dangerous about a kimono. She picked hers up, but then decided to push it far back into her closet.

  Except for Bull, the family spent the rest of the day combing the house for anything that seemed Japanese in a disloyal way, whatever that meant.

  By bedtime Sumiko was exhausted. In the surrounding fields a multitude of fires lit up the black night. She felt she could no longer stand up. Tak-Tak was already asleep when she got to the bedroom. His face was black with ash. She wiped his face, but he didn’t even notice. She wiped listlessly at her own face. She remembered that she hadn’t heated the water tonight, just as she hadn’t yesterday. But nobody had said anything about it either time. She sat up in her bed and saw that, outside, her aunt and uncle were standing in the glare of the fire. Whereas earlier they had seemed feverish, now they seemed automated and emotionless. Bull was probably in the stable, talking to Baba. Bull had continued to work even after dark. She knew he would make sure they didn’t run out of money.

  Later, long after she had gotten in bed, Sumiko could hear adult voices from the living room. Finally she sneaked into the hallway to listen.

  “A friend of mine got beat up last week,” Ichiro was saying. “Some hakujin did it.” Hakujin were white people.

  Then there was silence until Bull said, “Dad, is the rifle still in the closet?”

  “No, I already took it down. It’s under my bed,” Sumiko heard her uncle say.

  Sumiko felt a chill at the word “rifle.” She’d seen the rifle only once, a couple of years ago, when there was a burglar active in the community. The burglar was never caught, and Sumiko never saw the rifle again. She turned around and found Tak-Tak standing beside her. His mouth was hanging open. He looked terrified.

  The grown-ups started getting ready for bed, and Sumiko led Tak-Tak back to their room. “I’ll keep the blankets open,” she whispered to him as he crawled in bed. She pulled the blankets apart.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  In the distance Mr. Ono had not turned on the lights over his fields. His fire was still going strong. It was as if he no longer cared if his chrysanthemums bloomed early or not. All he cared about was burning his things.

  6

  THE NEXT DAY THE UNITED STATES DECLARED WAR ON Japan. The declaration was a different kind of shock from the Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl Harbor was like a big noise, and the declaration of war was like a big silence. Sumiko stayed home from school. Since Auntie or Uncle didn’t tell her why she had to stay home from school, she decided it was so that nobody would take her POW or hostage. Also, on the radio she’d heard a governor from another state announce that if any “Japs” living in California tried to come to his state, they would soon be hanging from trees.

  Sumiko kept checking out the front window to see if anybody was coming to get them. But all day the road was quiet. Bull continued to work the fields, while Uncle, Jiichan, Ichiro, and even Auntie went to meetings with other people in the community.

  In the early afternoon Auntie rushed into the house with her face flushed from fear and excitement. Sumiko had been scrubbing the rice pot but set it down and ran to Auntie. Auntie collapsed on the floor and held on to the side of a kitchen chair.

  “Auntie!” Sumiko put her arms around her, something she had never done before. She loved Auntie, and Auntie loved her, but Auntie did not like hugs. Auntie liked worrying and working and scolding.

  There was a knock at the door, and Auntie suddenly shot to her feet and exclaimed, “Oh!” She took a pouch from her coat pocket and handed it to Sumiko, hissing, “Hide this.”

  Sumiko didn’t wait to hear more, just ran crazily to her bedroom and stuffed the pouch under the mattress. Her pounding heart quieted when she heard Mr. Hirata speaking in Japanese to Auntie. They were talking about somebody getting arrested. Sumiko couldn’t stop herself from lifting the mattress and opening the pouch. All it held was one twenty-dollar bill. She pushed it under the mattress again and hurried to the living room just as Jiichan and Uncle rushed in. Nobody paid any attention to her.

  Mr. Hirata looked at Jiichan. “The FBI came for my father. They started arresting the community leaders and the Issei yesterday. It’s still going on today.” Issei meant the first generation—those born in Japan who immigrated to the United States for a better life. “I heard they took the principal of the Japanese school. And they took Isoda-san because he was the principal of a Japanese school in Washington fifteen years ago. They searched his house and found many books written in Japanese.”

  Jiichan had once been principal of the Japanese school. Sumiko said, “We have to hide Jiichan!”

  Jiichan knelt, and hugged Sumiko quietly for a moment. Then he said, “I better pack.”

  Sumiko said, “Good, you can hide at Mr. Ono’s house.”

  He turned to walk out, moving as if he were very old. He was old, but he’d never walked that way before. She started to chase after him, but he turned and held up his palm in the stop gesture.

  Auntie told Sumiko to clean up the house. Sumiko cried out, “But what about Jiichan? Mr. Ono will let him hide at his house!” Cleaning was ridiculous at a time like this.

  Auntie pushed Sumiko toward the kitchen. “I said clean up.”

  “But everything’s clean.”

  “Then clean it again!”

  So Sumiko scrubbed the entire house. All that afternoon, whenever she passed through the living room, she saw Jiichan sitting in his special chair with his old suitcase on the floor beside him. That suitcase was so old, Sumiko thought it might have come on the ship to America with him decades earlier.

  “Jiichan?” she said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Do you want me to rub your foot?”

  “Just one? You make me unbalanced.” He didn’t smile, so she wasn’t sure if he was kidding.

  “I can rub both.” For an answer, he kicked off his slippers. She rubbed his left foot for a while, then rubbed his right foot in exactly the same way so she wouldn’t make him unbalanced. She rubbed his feet in all the magic places that gave him peace.

  After that she did her farm chores and cooked a new pot of rice. When she heard a firm knock at the door, she knew it was someone to take her grand-father. She ran into the living room. Everyone was there except Bull, who was probably still working. But nobody answered the door. The knock came harder, and Tak-Tak shouted out, “Get the rifle!” Aun
tie slapped him, then gaped at her own hand as if it weren’t attached to her. Tak-Tak stared at her. Sumiko pulled him into her chest and pressed her nose into his hair.

  Auntie finally answered the door. Two white men in suits stood on the porch with two police officers.

  None of the men took off their hats to speak to Auntie. One of them said, “We’d like to talk to Masanori Matsuda.” That was Jiichan! He picked up his suitcase and walked to the door.

  “I am Masanori Matsuda.”

  “We’d like to take you and your son to our office to ask you some questions.”

  “My son?” Jiichan appeared to lose his balance for a moment but quickly regained it.

  Ichiro stepped forward and called out, “I’m an American. Can you tell me where you are taking them?”

  One of the men turned to Ichiro. “Are you Hatsumi?”

  Uncle stepped forward. “I am Hatsumi. May I pack?”

  “We’re running late.”

  And just like that, Jiichan with his suitcase and Uncle without his followed the men up the sidewalk. The rest of the family trailed along. Sumiko saw Mr. Ono already sitting in the backseat of the car.

  “Mr. Ono!” Sumiko cried out.

  As if deeply ashamed, Mr. Ono hung his head and didn’t meet Sumiko’s eyes.

  The car drove off. “You shamed Ono-san,” Auntie scolded her.

  Sumiko knew one of the things that made her different from the rest of her family, one of the things that made her more American than her cousins, was that she didn’t feel haji, or shame, quite as much as other Japanese did, maybe because she hadn’t attended a lot of Japanese school. All the Issei were steeped in the culture of haji. Years ago Mr. Ono had been mistakenly arrested—the police then were actually searching for a different Mr. Ono. But today Mr. Ono still felt haji over his mistaken arrest.