by Dean Hughes
“Sure,” the customer said, and he got up.
“Go ahead, Sergeant Nakahara. You take that chair. But before you do, I want every man in this shop to stand up and salute you.”
It took a few seconds, but every man did stand—the men who had been waiting and the ones with cloths over them in the barber chairs. All of them saluted Yuki, including the barbers, and they waited until Yuki returned the salute. It was all he could do to hold back his tears.
The man who had given up his chair motioned for him to sit down. But Yuki didn’t want that to happen. “No, that’s all right. You finish your haircut. I’ll wait my turn. I’d like to get to know some of these fellows.” He looked around. “I get the feeling a lot of you have served in the war.” Most of the men were nodding.
“Stick around and talk to us then,” Mr. Austin said. “But get your hair cut first.”
The barber nodded, so Yuki sat down in the barber chair. The man who had been sitting there handed over the cloth that had been covering him.
“It was my boss who told us not to cut your hair,” the barber said. “He thought other customers wouldn’t like it. But I’m not like that.”
A few of the men chuckled, but Yuki didn’t. He said, “I understand. You don’t have to explain.” He reached out and shook the barber’s hand.
So Yuki got his hair cut, and the barber didn’t charge him for it. And afterward, Yuki sat by Blaine Austin. They talked about the war in Italy, and then about the lost battalion in France. Everyone listened in. When Yuki left, he shook hands with everyone in the place, thanked them all. He wasn’t naive enough to think he was finished with insults, but at least for the moment, in a barbershop in Denver, he felt like an American.
CHAPTER 18
Yuki took a train to Ogden and then a bus to Delta, Utah. He hadn’t notified his family about his arrival because he hadn’t known exactly when he would get there, and in any case, he wanted to walk in unannounced so that no one would make a fuss. When he arrived in Delta, he saw a Japanese man outside the little train station and asked how he could get a ride to Topaz. The man told him that a bus from the camp was in town and Yuki could catch that. He was an older man with heavy eyelids and a wrinkled neck. He spoke with a thick accent. “You home from war?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Yuki said.
“You the Nakahara boy?”
“Yes.”
“You great hero. Win many medals, I see.” He pointed to Yuki’s chest.
Yuki didn’t say much, only thanked the man, but before he caught the bus, he took the Silver Star and the Purple Heart off his uniform. He didn’t want anyone asking him to tell the story of how he had earned the medals.
When Yuki reached the camp and got off the bus, he felt the cold wind he remembered all too well. Spring had not come yet to this high altitude. The desert was white and lumpy, with a layer of recent snow over the greasewood and sagebrush. But he found the camp gate wide open, and when a soldier saw him in uniform, he stepped out from the guard’s shed and said, “I see you’re in the 442nd. Everyone in the States knows about you men. Here at the camp, your people all talk about you.”
Yuki only nodded, but this was something new. Before he had left the camp, the guards had sometimes been polite, but they had rarely been friendly or respectful. And as Yuki walked through the rows of barracks, he saw other changes. He could see that the AJA residents had done more to fix up the place. They had planted more gardens and some had used rocks to mark the planted areas. But there were also fewer people. He knew why, of course: Many of those interned in the camp had been allowed to leave and had been moving to other cities around the country. Some, according to his mother’s letters, had even been allowed to go back to the West Coast.
When Yuki reached his block of barracks, he saw a few people he knew, and they came to him, shook his hand. All of them wanted to tell him the same thing: They had read about him. He was a hero. “Every soldier is a hero,” Yuki told one man. But the man shook his head, told Yuki again the things he had read, and after that, Yuki didn’t try to explain. He doubted that anyone would understand.
Yuki found his mother in the quarters where the family had lived before. He quietly opened the door and saw that she was alone. She was sitting at a table, mending a shirt, staring down at a little rip in the sleeve. Softly he said, “Hello, Mother.”
She looked up and stared at him for a couple of seconds, as though she was trying to comprehend what she was seeing. “Oh, my,” she said. She dropped her sewing and cupped her hands over her face. A little sob burst from her throat. But then she was up and coming to him. “We didn’t expect you until tomorrow or the next day,” she said.
“I know.” He took her in his arms, thought she seemed thinner than before.
Yuki held his mother for a long time. He remembered how often he had longed for her to comfort him this way while he had been in Italy and France. When she finally stepped back to look at him, he saw that she had aged, looked worn down.
“Oh, Yuki,” she said, “you look so old, so sad. What have they done to you?”
He didn’t try to answer. But the emotions he had held back so long finally spilled over. He had wept for Shig, but only privately. Now he took his mother in his arms once more and allowed himself to cry hard. He felt like a child again, when only Mother could give him solace after some little injury or disappointment. He clung tight to her as sobs came in powerful waves.
His mother held him, caressed his head, patted him. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she kept saying. “You made it back to us. You made it home.”
“I didn’t think I would. You’ll never know how far away I’ve been, Mother. You’ll never understand.”
“I know how far away from us you felt, Yuki. I know how much I missed you.”
The sobs came again, and now his mother was crying as hard as he was.
“It’s all right,” she kept telling him. “You’re here. You’re home now.”
But this wasn’t home. He wouldn’t be home until he returned to California. “Why are you still here?” he finally managed to ask. “You said that people are leaving now.”
“We’ll talk about all that,” Mother said. But she didn’t let go of him yet. “Are you still hurt?” she asked. “You look so hurt.”
“I’m getting better. I don’t feel much pain now.” He pulled back a little. He needed to sit down. He realized how exhausted he was, how much the long train and bus rides had cost him. He looked toward the chairs at the table.
“Sit down with me a few minutes,” Mother said. “Before the others come back.”
Yuki wiped the tears from his face, took some long breaths, and then pulled out a chair and sat at the table. His mother sat on the opposite side.
Yuki looked around the room. Things were about the same; he wasn’t sure why they seemed different. Then he realized that the plywood that had been nailed over the bare studs of the walls was painted now, and Mother had hung some pictures. One was a photograph of him in his uniform, looking much younger. It was a gift he had sent from Camp Shelby before he had been shipped out.
“Where is everyone?” Yuki asked.
“They’re all at school. They’ll be home before long.” She searched in an apron pocket for a handkerchief, and she wiped her tears away. Then she reached across the table and took hold of his hand. “Mick will graduate in a few months. But he works at the dining hall after school. He’s been a big help to me, Yuki. He’s grown up a lot.”
“Where’s Father?”
“He sits with the men. They play Go, or they talk—in Japanese.” She leaned back a little and folded her arms. “Your father’s not the same, Yuki. Don’t expect him to be the man you remember.”
“But I never knew him before. How will I know the change?” Yuki had never said anything like that to his mother. He didn’t know why he could be honest with her now.
“He doesn’t let anyone know him, Yuki. He doesn’t know how. But they took the lif
e out of him by keeping him locked up so long. He liked to work hard, to grow his vegetables, to enjoy the harvest and collect the coins he could earn. That meant he was a man, that he was providing for his family. They took all that away.”
“What will he do now? When are you planning to leave?”
“They’re only letting a certain number go back to California. We can apply. But we have no land, Yuki. What would we do there now?”
“Can we rent land again? And maybe buy it, in time?”
“I don’t know. The hatred is still there. The people don’t want us back.”
“Some people tell me they’ve read about our regiment. I’ve even had a few say to me that they appreciate what we did over there.”
“Yes, I read it in the newspapers, and when they let us go into Delta, some of the white ladies are very nice to me now. But Yuki, we’re still the enemy to most people. The hatred could get worse when our troops attack Japan. So many American boys will die. We might be facing the darkest days of all in the next year.”
Yuki was accustomed to thinking of the war as winding down. It was hard to accept the idea that years of fighting might still be ahead in the Pacific.
Mother reached for Yuki’s hand again. “What happened to your face?” she asked.
“I got hit by some . . .” He didn’t know what to call it, and he didn’t want to tell the story. “Debris. I just got some little cuts. They’re mostly healed now. I guess I’ll have a few scars.”
“Are you healing where they shot you?”
“I am. But I was lucky. The bullets missed my heart—one of them by just an inch or so. It went through my lung and it nicked an artery, but they operated on me and fixed those things. They tell me it will still take a while to rebuild my strength.”
“But what about you? Are you all right?”
He tried to think of the answer. How could he describe the things he had experienced, all the stuff that was in his head? Yuki only said, “I’ll be all right. The doctors weren’t sure I would live at first, but I did. And I get a little stronger every day.”
“What’s happened inside you, Yuki? I see something in your eyes—some kind of sadness.”
“I know what you mean. But I’m going to put everything behind me. That’s what I have to do.” He watched her face, saw her doubt. He knew he couldn’t let her suffer that way. “Don’t be too concerned. I’ll get back to normal. Maybe I can take a train to California. I’ll find us some land to rent. I’ll wear my medals, and maybe someone will like that—maybe give us a chance. We could start another farm. Father would have something to live for again. Maybe it’s what I would like too.”
What he knew was that he had invented every word of what he’d just said, never having thought about any of it before that moment. The truth was, he had no idea what he wanted to do, but he had to tell her something.
“I want you to go to college, Yuki. You can do that. The government will pay your tuition now that you’ve been a soldier.”
“Yeah, I might like that. The main thing is, we’ll figure things out.”
Yuki tried to look happy, but he wasn’t sure he was doing very well. Still, his mother liked his words. She was nodding, saying, “Yes, yes. That’s what I keep telling your father. Yukus is coming home. He’ll help us make a plan.”
“Should I go find him now?”
“No. Not with the other men there. He won’t know what to do or what to say in front of them. Just sit here with me for now. I need to hear more about you.”
So Yuki stayed, and he talked. He told her a little about the training in Mississippi, about the places he had seen in Italy and France, about crossing the ocean, once by sea, once by air. But he didn’t mention Shig, and she didn’t ask. And he said not a word about the battles he had fought, didn’t tell her about Mat or any of the other friends he had lost.
He changed the subject when he could, asked about May. “She’s all right,” Mother said. “We have two rooms now, instead of just this one. That gives her and Kay more privacy. They needed that.”
“They’re almost grown up, I guess,” Yuki said. “It’s hard for me to think of them that way.”
“May is definitely growing up. What worries me is that she likes boys too much, and she’s too pretty for her own good. She’s also too American to ever accept the old ways. She tells your father exactly what she thinks. When he first came here, he tried to control her, but he’s already given up on that.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s going to be an American woman—with opinions and a career. She may like boys, but she claims she won’t marry for a long time. She wants to go to college, and she says she’s going to be a doctor. She’ll probably do it too. She’s smarter than any of us, and she goes after the things she wants without the slightest self-doubt.”
“That’s good. Women are going to do more things now. I just hope a medical school will accept her.”
“That’s what I worry about—that America won’t let her be who she is. You used to tell us that our boys would join the army and change people’s minds. But I don’t know. Will it ever happen?”
“Maybe.” And then he told her about the barbershop in Denver, and the men saluting him.
Tears came to her eyes again as she listened to the story. “That is reason for hope, Yuki. It’s hard to see any change while we’re still here behind this barbed wire. Maybe when we get back with the people, at least some of them will see us differently.”
Yuki was not as confident about that as he wanted to be. At the very least, he knew it would take time.
“So what about Kay? How’s she doing?”
“She’ll be crazy to see you. All she does is brag about you. All the kids do. They’ll want to know everything about the war.” But when Yuki glanced away, she added, “But you won’t tell them. I can see that already.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Tell them enough so that they won’t think it’s wonderful, the way they do now. Especially Mick. He talks about killing ‘Krauts.’ He says he wants the war to last a long time so he can get there. He’s almost old enough now, and I know what he thinks: that he can be a hero like his brother.”
“We can’t let him go when he turns eighteen, Mother. I don’t want him to go at all.”
“He’ll be drafted, Yuki. It’s not like it was when you decided to join the army. I didn’t want you to go, and you went all the same. But there’s no changing that—the way boys all want to prove that they’re men.”
Yuki tried to think of himself back when he had enlisted, what he had said and felt. Those memories were still in his head, and yet they seemed part of some other person—a boy he no longer knew.
After a time, Father came home. He stepped through the door and then stopped. “Yukus,” he said, and his tone expressed his surprise. But he didn’t come to Yuki, didn’t greet him. He only stood in the doorway and stared.
“Father. It’s so good to see you.” Yuki got up, walked around the table, and stepped close. He had told himself he would embrace his father when he saw him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and Father actually stepped back a little, as though he feared that Yuki would try.
“We are very happy you have come back,” Father said. It was more English than he usually used. Yuki thought maybe he had improved his English while he was in prison.
“It’s good to be back, Father.”
There was a long silence after that, and neither could look the other in the eye. Finally, Father said, “Are you getting better?”
“Yes. I’m improving pretty fast now.”
“Very good.”
“I was just telling Mother, I’ll take a trip to California and see whether I can rent some land. I’m a veteran now, and that ought to count for something. I could rent a farm in my name, but it would really be your place. We could farm again, just like before.”
“The war is not over, Yukus. Not for me. They call me traitor.”
&
nbsp; “That’s changing, Father. People will get over that. And if my name is on the paperwork, it won’t matter anyway.”
“It matters to me.”
“I understand. I’m just saying, we can get started again, and eventually people will forget all the hatred and . . . you know, we know how to get along with people.” But Yuki wasn’t convincing himself, and he knew he wasn’t convincing his father.
Father stood straight for a time, seeming to consider, and then he said, “Yukus, you do not like to be Japanese. You never want that.”
Yuki nodded. “I know what you mean, Father. I didn’t want to be Japanese when I was a kid. But I’ve learned some things since then. You taught me honor. That’s what helped us Japanese boys fight so well. I’m not ashamed to be Japanese now. I’m proud of it.”
Father nodded.
“But I’m also an American. I’m proud of that, too.”
Father nodded again. Yuki thought it was as big a sign of satisfaction as he could ever expect. But then his father reached out and the two shook hands. At this, Yuki broke through the silent resistance he had known all his life. He wrapped his arms around his father and held him tight. His father didn’t clasp him back, didn’t say anything, but at least he let it happen.
CHAPTER 19
Yuki’s sisters came home to the barracks not long after that, and then Mick came in too. It all seemed strange—the family together, with everything to talk about but nowhere to start. But his sisters hugged him over and over, and they told him he looked good, even though he knew he didn’t. And everyone smiled and looked around at one other, words clearly not the best way to communicate what they were all feeling.
Mick did ask a few questions about the war, but Yuki purposely kept his answers vague, and everyone seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to offer any details. May admitted, “Sometimes I thought we’d never see you again. So many died, Yuki. We heard about our boys dying all the time.”
Yuki knew what she meant. The local newspaper carried pictures of all the Utah soldiers who had died or been wounded. But May meant “our” boys—the Japanese American boys who had joined the Four-Four-Two. She also meant Shig, of course, but he wasn’t ready to start that conversation.
