Weedflower

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Sumiko stepped away from the barrack. She didn’t know what was considered the border of the camp. She took a couple of steps out, then a couple more, then a couple more. She felt nervous. She saw something in the distance growing closer. At first she thought it might be a car, but then she saw it was a horse, and finally she realized it was a man on a horse. The man rode until he was only about a hundred feet from her. He was an Indian man with long hair. Sumiko looked around. Was she just imagining this man? He seemed to nod at her before he rode away.

  A snake hissed at Sumiko from the cage behind her. “Oh, quiet,” said a deep voice, and Sumiko turned to see Mr. Moto frowning at the snake. To Sumiko he said, “We’ll eat him later.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, we’ll eat him later. You’ll be begging me for a bite, you’ll see.”

  She studied the man. She wasn’t sure whether he was kidding. He winked, or at least she thought that’s what it meant when he closed his only eye and squeezed it shut.

  “Mark my words,” he said.

  At dinnertime Sumiko got in line with her family and let the kitchen staff fill her rice bowl, plate, and cup. The cup held milk; she wasn’t sure what was on the plate and in the bowl. It wasn’t rice in the bowl, it was … something else. Something mushy.

  Kids were eating with one another instead of with their families; many of the tables seemed arranged by age rather than family units. She looked around with interest. There were even a couple of tables with kids about her age.

  Sumiko was starving until Bull said, “It looks like beef tongue in tomato sauce.”

  Ichiro smiled balefully. “And what’s this?” He lifted something mushy from his bowl and let it ooze off his fork and plop back into the bowl.

  Someone from the next table said, “Mashed potatoes.”

  It didn’t look like any mashed potatoes Sumiko had ever seen. For one thing, mashed potatoes were white. She thought curiously of Mr. Moto’s rattlesnake and tried to imagine what snake might taste like.

  She hardly ate anything at dinner. And she didn’t even wait to be excused by Auntie. She just grabbed Tak-Tak and rushed with him to Mr. Moto’s home. Mr. Moto was already outside frying his snake on a little stove he’d made from a big can and some wood chips. He smiled at her. “I’ll bet you’re ready for this, aren’t you?” He handed her a sliver of meat on a fork. The snake was pretty good with a little shoyu and ginger. It tasted like unagi: eel. Not a strong taste and not bad at all. She considered further and thought maybe it tasted more like the dark meat of a turkey. Tak-Tak loved it. He said he wanted to eat it raw.

  As they ate, Mr. Moto told them that he and his twenty-year-old son had been in this camp just a week. Sumiko was surprised. He seemed like an old hand. He looked at them, evaluating. “Can you kids work?”

  “I can,” Sumiko said.

  Tak-Tak said defensively “I can work tool”

  That’s how they found themselves carrying buckets of water from the latrines to the barrack. Mr. Moto was trying to soak the ground so the dirt would be softer and he could start building a garden. Lugging water from the latrines was hard work. On the one hand, it made Sumiko feel useful; but on the other hand, it made her feel ridiculous because it was futile. Why drag water through a desert? What kind of garden could you grow here?

  That night many of the kids, including Sumiko, slept with their cots under the stars. It was cooler outside, and the night breeze made you feel almost less than hot. The leaves from the surrounding mesquite trees hit dryly against one another. The moon had never seemed brighter.

  People were talking, but Sumiko’s mind drifted. To her this camp was entirely different from the assembly center camp. This camp felt final. This is where she would live maybe the next ten years of her life, depending on how long the war lasted. And there was something else about this camp, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Just as Sumiko sometimes told Tak-Tak to search his mind for the sleep in his head, she searched her own mind, though she was uncertain what she was searching for.

  She got the feeling that a majority of the other Nikkei seemed to understand and accept what was happening to them. Maybe some of them saw this place the same way they saw a tornado or an earthquake. You wouldn’t get mad at a tornado, would you? For Sumiko, her whole life, from the day she was born, had been a lesson in how to change your lot by accepting it and learning from it.

  But she yearned for the farm. An hour earlier, on the farm, she and her family might have been listening to the radio, as they sometimes did in the evenings. Jiichan was somewhat hard of hearing, so the radio was always turned up pretty loud. But there were no radios allowed in camp. She smiled as she remembered how mad Jiichan got if anybody dared to suggest the radio was too loud. “What you try to say?” he would demand. “You try to say I have old-man ears?”

  Sumiko thought about the kusabana and wondered what had become of them. She hoped that someone had rented the farm soon after they left and that the flowers were thriving.

  Bull had already built Tak-Tak a new cage for his crickets—he’d found screen from a scrap pile and made the cage his priority after he’d fetched the cots. Tak-Tak had brought the crickets outside for the night, and their chirping filled the air. A couple of bats swooped through the camp, and at one point Sumiko heard sounds of shouting—someone had been bitten by a scorpion. She kept thinking something was crawling on her and she would jump up, but there would be nothing there. Finally she settled down. She heard laughing as a group of boys ran down the block, right past Sumiko’s cot and beyond the imaginary boundary of the camp.

  A huge, beautiful moth fluttered around the cot and then flew away. Sumiko’s mother had been named Mayu, which meant “cocoon” but implied “nurturing” and also “transformation.” Jiichan always said that a larva changed itself by staying very still. The larva went from being the ugliest thing in the world to the most beautiful.

  Sumiko thought about how for the past couple of years she’d dreamed that she would go to college and get a business degree so she could run her flower shop. She knew she was just a farm girl, but deep within herself she believed that every flower she disbudded, every dish she washed, every day the girls snubbed her, every morning she woke at dawn brought her closer to her dream, to her transformation from farm girl to flower shop owner. She did not want a big flower shop, she just wanted to be surrounded by flowers every day for the rest of her life. She wanted to fill out invoices and arrange her display window. She wanted to name her first daughter Hanako, which meant “flower child.”

  But now, lying on that cot in the middle of the desert, surrounded by moths and bats and scorpions, it seemed to Sumiko that the flower shop was no longer within reach for her. Her dream was gone, and she didn’t know what would take its place.

  15

  THE SUN BATTERED SUMIKO’S FACE WHEN SHE WOKE UP. She tried to open her eyes but couldn’t. Last night they’d been so irritated by the dust that mucous had oozed out of them. The mucous had apparently dried; and now Sumiko had to pry open her eyes with her fingers.

  Everybody else who’d slept outside had already gotten up and taken their cots in. Sumiko went to stand in the line at the shower. The showerheads were arranged in a row, with no partitions. One woman carried a flimsy folding screen made of crooked wood and cloth. She folded the screen around while she showered. A couple of women took showers in their brassieres and bloomers. Even though people avoided one another’s eyes, Sumiko felt quite shy and took her shower in her underclothes. Afterward she just put her regular clothes on over her wet things.

  When she got back to her barrack, she saw several boys carrying fishing poles. There was one girl with them. She said they were walking down to the Colorado River to fish. “Come with us!” she called out. “There’s nothing else to do.”

  Sumiko peered inside her barrack and saw Tak-Tak in bed. Ichiro and Bull were off somewhere. Auntie had just gotten up. Before they’d all been relocated, Sumiko had never known Aunt
ie to sleep past sunrise. Sumiko asked, “Auntie, can I go down to the Colorado River with some kids?”

  Auntie looked up. The way she looked made Sumiko nervous. Auntie’s eyes seemed to hold hints of the ultimate boredom. “No, it’s dangerous,” Auntie said lethargically.

  “They’re all going.”

  “No.

  Sumiko went outside and told the kids she couldn’t go. One of the boys laughed. “You don’t have to ask for permission out here. You can just do whatever you want!” The boys hurried off, but the girl lingered. She was a skinny girl with a shiny face.

  “My name is Sachi Shibata.”

  “I’m Sumiko Matsuda.” Before the war she and Tak-Tak had gone by their father’s name; Yamaguchi. But to avoid confusion in camp, they now went by Uncle’s name.

  “My father owned the biggest potato farm in America, in Palm Springs,” Sachi said. “We used to be millionaires.”

  Sumiko hesitated; that didn’t ring true because she thought the biggest Japanese potato farmers were the Ito family from the Northwest. “Really?” she said.

  “Yes, we owned thirty horses. One of them won the Kentucky Derby.”

  Sumiko could use a friend, even a friend who lied. “We had a flower farm,” Sumiko said.

  “Have you seen the Camp Three farm?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Sumiko looked toward her barrack. She should tell Auntie that she was leaving. But she thought of what the boy had said.

  Sachi read her mind. “Nobody listens to their parents in camp. Come on!”

  So they hurried off. They stopped at a kitchen, where Sachi sweetly asked one of the cooks for two cups of ice. He gave her the cups, and she handed one to Sumiko. They ate ice and walked across the camp. Here and there in the morning sun she noticed men and a few women working on gardens outside their barracks. One man was even planting a tree. She couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten a tree.

  At the edge of camp Sumiko saw what looked like another mirage. But it really was a bean field, with beans hanging from posts and so opulent that they seemed impossible. Judging from the colors of the flowers—lilac and scarlet—there appeared to be two different kinds of bean plants. Here and there a couple of string beans hung from a vine. The posts were shaped into upside-down V’s several feet high. The irrigation ditches beside them were narrow and utterly dry. She figured the beans had been watered that morning but were already drying out in the desert sun.

  In the distance tractors roared as men leveled the land. Sumiko had seen land leveled many times. As Sachi and Sumiko watched, two white men in white shirts came up and stood nearby surveying the activity.

  The shorter of the two seemed to be admiring the beans. “I told you so—look at those beans!” he said. “The Japs sure have a knack for growing things.” He ignored Sumiko and Sachi. Sumiko had been ignored many times before by hakujin, so this was nothing new to her.

  “What else have they got to do?” the taller man replied. He seemed irritated. “Let me tell you something. We’ve found it’s easier to get our Indians to work than your Japs.”

  “Your Indians are getting paid a lot more.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?”

  The men moved away, still talking.

  “Let’s get a closer look!” said Sumiko.

  They walked into the bean field, and it was like walking into a different world. They stood right in the middle of the field, surrounded by green. Suddenly Sachi hissed, “Shh! Hide!”

  “What?”

  “Hide!”

  They slipped into a tunnel formed by the way the beans grew over the posts. Sachi and Sumiko peeked out.

  “It’s Indian boys,” Sachi whispered. “They’re not supposed to be in our camp. If they catch us, we’ll get scalped.” Sumiko crouched lower but couldn’t stop herself from peeking out.

  There were three boys, maybe Sumiko’s age or a little older. They were looking around, sometimes gazing afar at the men working, other times examining the plants close by. One of them was chewing gum, and he had a scarf tied around his head. The other two were lanky and looked like twins. “After they scalp us, they’ll cut off our fingers and boil them,” Sachi added. Sumiko’s heart pounded in her ears.

  The boys moved closer to where Sachi and Sumiko were hiding. One of the lanky boys said, “My brother said the Japs are all farmers.”

  “They’re wasteful,’ said the boy chewing gum. “They throw food out all the time!”

  Suddenly Sumiko heard a rattlesnake right near the tunnel. Sachi screamed, and they both pushed through the vines squealing. Sumiko tripped and found herself on her rear end a foot away from the snake.

  It rose in the air and hissed.

  “Walk back slowly. Slowly. It doesn’t want to hurt you,’ a calm voice said. Someone lifted her onto her feet and took hold of her shoulders and walked slowly backward with her.

  Once they were far enough away from the snake, Sumiko turned around and found herself facing the Indian boy who was chewing gum. He had short hair and wide, muscular shoulders. He shook his head. “Were you just going to sit there until it bit you?” He seemed annoyed.

  She opened her mouth to answer but couldn’t think of a thing to say. She’d never talked to an Indian before. She saw Sachi running off.

  The boy looked at her, evaluating. She saw his eyes flicker momentarily, but she wasn’t sure what that meant.

  The other boys walked up and stared at her. They seemed fascinated, kind of like when Tak-Tak was studying the scorpion.

  “She doesn’t look so dangerous,” said one of the lanky boys.

  The other said, “If they think you’re going to kill them, they stick a sword in their stomach before you can do it. I read that.”

  “Does she talk?”

  Of course she talks.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Unless she’s a mute.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t speak English.”

  The boy with the scarf tilted his head at her. “She’s scared!”

  “I’m not scared!” Sumiko said indignantly, although she felt more scared of them than any white people she’d ever been around.

  They stepped back a bit when she spoke, as if they were surprised.

  Another boy appeared from seemingly out of nowhere. “Come on, I gotta get home,” he called out.

  “Hold on, Hook,” said the boy with the scarf. He blew a bubble as he continued to study Sumiko. The fourth boy came up. A hook stuck out from his left arm where a hand should have been. Sumiko was surprised to hear this boy called “Hook.” It would be like calling Mr. Moto “One Eye.” If a Japanese person had a hook for a hand, you would act like the hook wasn’t even there and get all embarrassed if you got caught staring at it.

  The new boy looked at her curiously, then set his right hand on the shoulder of the boy with the scarf. “Come on, Frank, they’re going to be here for the whole war.”

  Frank started to walk away, then turned back to Sumiko. “Why don’t you people go back where you came from and leave our reservation alone?” he said.

  Sumiko felt too scared to answer, and the boys sauntered off without looking back. She walked home by herself. Sachi was waiting in the doorway of Sumiko’s barrack. She ran out.

  “Are you sure the Indians didn’t follow you?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Sumiko. She turned around, but all she could see were barracks and desert. “Are we on a reservation?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said Sachi. “That’s why we’re in constant danger.”

  “But where do they live?” In town when they’d first arrived at the camp, she’d seen only white people.

  “They live everywhere, silly. They’re Indians. They hide at night. If we don’t behave, they’ll kidnap your family when it gets dark. You’re in special danger because you live at the camp border.” Then Sachi seemed to tire of her own lies. “Well, bye.”

  “Bye,” said Su
miko, only half listening. She stared into the desert and wondered, Where do the Indians live?

  16

  AFTER A FEW DAYS SUMIKO REALIZED THAT SHE DIDN’T know what to do with herself. She remembered that sometimes at the farm she’d wished she had more time so she could go out with the friends she didn’t have. Now she was rich in time but had nothing to do. Other people, like Ichiro and Bull, immediately got busy—Bull laying foundation for irrigation canals and Ichiro driving the regular shuttle bus between Camps One, Two, and Three. The government paid them a fraction of what they might get paid outside for such work. But as Bull said, “Money is money.” Even Tak-Tak found a group of marbleplaying boys to hang around with. And Auntie, who’d seemed so lethargic at first, joined a sewing club and immediately made pretty curtains for the barrack.

  During the evenings Mr. Moto would work on his garden or his carving. Many of the Japanese men spent much of their time carving wood they gathered in the mountains. Every so often some of them would walk to the mountains or even drive one of the tractors there. But nobody ever tried to escape.

  Sometimes Sumiko just sat around watching Mr. Moto carve wood or dig in his soon-to-be garden. He was one of the minority of Nikkei who were not farmers.

  “Mr. Moto?” said Sumiko one day a week after she’d arrived. He was digging a big, round hole about three feet deep. She knew it wasn’t her place to comment, but she didn’t understand what he was doing. “If you’re going to plant something there, you don’t need to dig a big hole like that.”

  He seemed a little insulted. “I’m building a pond,” he said.

  “Oh!”

  “I had a pond garden in my old home, so I thought I’d do the same thing here, next to my vegetables.”

  He kept digging, ignoring her. He probably wanted her to leave him alone. But an idea had occurred to her. “Mr. Moto?”

  He looked up, wiping sweat from his face and, in the process, smearing dirt over his only eye.

  “Are you going to plant any flowers?”