Tallgrass Page 11

  “Shoot, my boy Cleatus could do a better job. If I’s you, I’d line up one Jap a day and shoot him, until the son of a bitch confesses.”

  The minister stepped forward then and said, “Mr. Jack, please remember that you are in the house of God.”

  Mr. Jack gave him a flinty-eyed look and stomped out, followed by his sons. Others began to leave then, and Mom told the women in the kitchen to go along and she and I would finish cleaning up. In a few minutes, we were almost alone in the hall. Redhead Joe Lee fidgeted and looked at the door, saying maybe he’d best be going. “Take a seat, Red. It’s fine to see you. It’s fine to see you anytime,” Mom said. She offered the men second helpings of cake.

  “Looks like it’s up to you to find out right quick who murdered Susan Reddick, Hen,” Mr. Lee said.

  Sheriff Watrous gave him a long look. “I guess I’m the cat in the flypaper right about now.”

  Mr. Lee shifted in his seat and added, “Oh, I’m not saying you don’t know your job. I’ve done some thinking on this, if you want to hear it.”

  “You and everybody else.” He swiped his hat against his pants leg. “This evening, right after the funeral, somebody drove past the Tallgrass Camp and put a load of buckshot into one of the barracks. Everybody was to dinner and it didn’t do no considerable damage. But some lady’s never going to use her pretty little teapot again.”

  5

  IN FEBRUARY, SIX MONTHS after the first evacuees arrived at Tallgrass, Dad went to the camp to find a crew of Japanese men to help with the sugar beet planting. He and Mom had talked about hiring some of the inmates ever since the fall harvest, and she didn’t like the idea any better now than she had then. She knew the Jolly Stitchers would complain about it, especially since Susan Reddick’s killer hadn’t been caught. But it couldn’t be helped, Mom said; the beet seed bad to go into the ground. I wasn’t keen on Japanese men working on our farm, either. What if Dad hires the one who attacked Susan and he comes after me, maybe in the barn when Dad’s in the fields and Mom’s in the house.’ I thought.

  I wished we could find white men, workers like our old hired man, who’d taught me to whittle and to snap my fingers. When baby birds hatched in spring, he’d brought me their broken shells, which I kept in my room, along with other things I’d found around the farm—arrowheads, a hornet’s nest, a rock with a leaf impression in it, a gold coin that Dad had picked up while he was plowing. But the hired men had all gone off to war. And Mom was right: We had to plant.

  Dad talked to Mr. Halleck at the camp, and when he got home, he told us that three Japanese would be at the farm the next morning. Mr. Halleck had handpicked them. More would come for hoeing and harvesting. “They’ll be good workers, because the government wants the other farmers to give the Japanese jobs, too. Mr. Halleck hopes I’ll spread the word. He said, ’We provide you with stoop labor, and you give our fellows a way to make money, so they don’t hang around the barracks playing cards and smoking cigarettes.’ It’s a good thing for them and for us, too.”

  “It is if all hell doesn’t break loose,” Mom said, adding, “Excuse my French. Rennie, would you get my sewing?” I left the room, found her sewing basket, and, as I returned to the kitchen, I heard her say, “Just as soon as they know they’re to stay out of the house and away from her, because—” I stepped back into the kitchen, and she stopped talking, and I knew I’d been sent off on one of those errands that would get me out of the room so that Mom and Dad could discuss something. It was obvious she was telling him those men were to keep clear of me. But that was okay. I didn’t want anything to do with them.

  The next morning, the three Japanese showed up just after breakfast, before I left for school. “There they are,” Mom said, leaning forward to see them from the kitchen window. She turned to Dad with a surprised look on her face. “Why, Loyal, they’re nothing more than boys. You didn’t tell me they were just young boys.” Dad waited while Mom debated with herself. “They’d better come inside just this once.” Dad had known all along that if Mom took little chicks into the kitchen to keep them warm, she wouldn’t let three boys stand out in the cold. Mom knew what he was thinking and said, “Now you watch it, Loyal Stroud.”

  Dad went to the door and called to the boys, and Carl Tanaka, Emory Kuruma, and Harry Hirano walked up to our back door. When I saw them, I was relieved. They weren’t much bigger than I was, and I bet that if they caused me any trouble, I could knock them down. I didn’t get into fights the way I had when I was a little kid, but I knew how to punch somebody if I had to.

  “They’re slight,” Mom observed. “The wind could blow them away.”

  “They’re sizable for Japanese, and they know about farm work, at least farm work on the West Coast. I don’t see that it’s much different from here in Ellis. One of them worked in the lettuce fields and another in a greenhouse. The oldest one, Carl, studied agriculture at college before he got yanked out and sent to the camp.” Dad and Mom exchanged a look that said, Imagine if that had happened to Bud.

  Mom’s hands were in dishwater and she shook them and reached for a towel. She leaned past Dad and called, “You boys come on inside now and get warm.”

  So the boys came into the house and shook hands with Dad. They bowed as Dad introduced them to Mom, Granny, and me. Mom fluttered around, pulling out chairs and telling the boys to sit down and she’d get hot coffee from the stove. “Or there’s tea. Maybe you’d rather have tea,” Mom said, speaking each word distinctly and a little too loudly, as if the boys were deaf.

  “Coffee’s fine. I don’t like tea,” said Carl, the tallest of the three. He had black eyes and black hair as straight as hay. It stuck out in all directions.

  “Oh, you speak English. I’m glad, because I surely don’t know Japanese,” Mom said.

  “Me, neither,” Carl told her.

  “We’re from California,” Emory added. “We were born there. All of us.” Emory was heavier and a little shorter than Carl, and his eyes looked as if they’d been chiseled into a face that was as smooth as marble. Harry, the third boy, nodded. He was small and wiry and reminded me of a bull calf. He had spaces between his teeth, although none of the boys had buckteeth like the Japanese in the propaganda pictures. By now, I was used to seeing Japanese in Ellis, but these were the first I’d ever talked to. I stared at them.

  Mom cleared her throat, and when I looked over at her, she shook her head to tell me to mind my manners. She reached for coffee mugs, thought better of it, and got out cups and saucers. “Did you boys have your breakfast?” she asked.

  They nodded. Mom looked around and spotted the tin of divinity she’d made earlier in the week, then passed it around. The divinity was special because Mom had used our sugar rations to make it.

  “Little early in the day for candy, isn’t it?” Dad asked.

  “They’ll work it off soon enough under you,” Mom told him.

  “Wow!” Carl said, biting into the divinity, which looked like clumps of snow. “I never had this. I wish my mother would make it.”

  “I’ll give her the recipe,” Mom said. She looked embarrassed then, and she told me later that she should have realized the women in the camp didn’t have cooking facilities and ate in a mess hall. “Even if they did have kitchens,” I asked, “where would they get sugar to make candy ?”

  The boys didn’t take offense, however, and Carl said, “Thanks, ma’am.”

  Dad seemed amused and sat there watching Mom chat with the boys. When she got up to make another pot of coffee, Dad finally said, “If you don’t mind me breaking up your coffee klatch, Mother, I ought to take these fellows out and show them the beet fields.”

  “Now don’t you let him work you too hard,” Mom said as everybody got up. My jaw dropped at that, because Mom had never been soft on hired men. She’d never been soft on me, either.

  “Well, they’re just boys,” Mom said.

  As the three followed Dad outside, Carl asked Mom where to set the sacks with their l
unches.

  She frowned. “I certainly hope they don’t think at that camp that we’d let our hired hands make do with a cold dinner,” she said. “You come on in at noon, and I’ll have a hot meal waiting.” As she spoke, Mom gripped the back of a chair and eased onto it.

  Dad looked worried, “You sure you’re up to it, Mary?”

  “Well, of course I’m up to it. Since when can’t I cook for farmhands?”

  Dad started to protest, but Mom waved him off, telling him that Granny would help.

  “You’ll eat awful good, then. Mrs. Stroud’s as good a cook as there is,” Dad told the three.

  “Oh, go on, Loyal,” Mom said, but she was flattered.

  “Good-bye, Miss Mary, Miss Evelina,” Harry said, bowing to Mom and then to Granny. Then he bowed at me. “Miss Rennie.”

  Nobody had ever bowed to me before or called me “Miss” anything, and I liked those three even better. I still wasn’t so sure about the camp, but I knew our boys, as we came to think of them, wouldn’t hurt anybody.

  “You just call her Rennie,” Dad said, to my disappointment.

  As they went out the door, Mom leaned forward, her hand gripping the table, and called, “Sayonara, boys.” I think she’d learned the word from a moving picture.

  Carl turned back, grinned, and said, “Sayonara yourself, ma’am.”

  AFTER THAT, THE BOYs stopped in the kitchen each morning for coffee before heading out to the fields with Dad. They were just like Ellis High School kids, talking about movies and cars and how they would spend their wages. Sometimes, I had to stop and remember that they were Japanese and that they lived in a prison and couldn’t own automobiles or go to the pictures whenever they wanted to and that most of their pay went to help their families.

  Not long after the three came to work for us, Mr. Gardner hired a Japanese crew to work his beet fields. Other farmers did the same thing. Still, many people in Ellis were skeptical of employing the Japanese. Others were more than skeptical. They were just plain mean. Mom found a dead cat hanging on our gate, which made her cry, because she hated it when anybody was cruel to an animal. It was a wild cat, but she made Dad dig a hole and bury it anyway. Somebody pitched manure into the bed of Red Boy when it was parked in town, and a man at the feed store called Dad a “Jap lover.”

  “What did you reply to that?” Mom asked.

  “I said, ’Well, bub, we got a difference of opinion.’ He was just beating his gums, so I went about my business.”

  “Didn’t you fight him?” I asked. Bud and I were proud of how Dad always came out on top. He had shown me a thing or two with my fists, and I was pretty good, too.

  Dad blew out his breath and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. “Squirt, I reckon my fighting days are over. Socking a fellow gets his attention, but it doesn’t do much to change his mind. I hope you’ll remember that.” He glanced at Mom, who looked skeptical. “I expect after a bit they’ll forget about the boys,” Dad added. “Things might be better if they caught the fellow who killed the Reddick girl, though.”

  Mom agreed with that, and so did I. At night, I shut my window so that nobody could get in, and when I walked to town, I looked behind me every so often to see whether anyone was following me. I even checked the stalls in the barn before I did the milking.

  After we hired the boys, Doris Davidson, one of the Jolly Stitchers, refused to meet at our house, telling Mom she didn’t want to fraternize with the enemy. Mrs. Davidson was short and round, with white curls like bedsprings.

  “Does she mean the boys, or the rest of the bees?” Dad asked.

  “I couldn’t say.” Mom laughed. “Doris does try my Christian forbearance sometimes. Maybe it’s good for me. After all, the Bible says, ’Tribulation worketh patience.’”

  “What’s that mean?” Dad asked.

  “If you went to church, you’d understand.”

  “Oh, so you don’t know, either.”

  The Stitchers met at our house anyway, and Mrs. Davidson stayed home. Mrs. Rubey told Mom, “Aren’t you the lucky one, Mary. Now you won’t have to take out her toenail stitches.” Toenail stitches were so big that you could catch your toenail in them. Mom was a good quilter and proud of her work, and she always examined her quilts after the Stitchers went home. More than once, she had handed me a pair of scissors and told me to rip out Mrs. Davidson’s stitches.

  I had my own problems. I didn’t tell anyone that Dad had hired the boys, but the word got out right off. I found a cartoon of three evil-looking Japanese men with thick glasses in my desk at school, with the words “Shut your traps to the Japs” printed on it.

  One morning, Edna Elliot, a high school girl and Pete Elliot’s sister, backed me up against the slide in the school yard. Edna didn’t like me, although I’d never figured out why. When we were little kids, Edgar Rubey called Edna “bacon face” and then made oinking sounds, because Edna was as fat as a hog for slaughter.

  Edna cried, and I told Edgar he stank and to take it back. Edgar was mean to tease Edna, but mostly, I was still mad at him for charging me interest on that bet on the state capital of New York.

  “You going to make me?” he’d asked.

  “Yeah.”

  So Edgar punched me, and I bloodied his nose, and we both got sent to the principal’s office, and the word got around that Edna was too fat to defend herself. Maybe she blamed me instead of Edgar for calling attention to her size, and she’d been waiting all these years to get even. I guess that morning in the school yard, she figured her chance had come. “Your dad’s cheap enough to skin a skunk to save a scent,” Edna said.

  “Oh yeah! He is not!” That wasn’t the cleverest thing I’d ever said. Comebacks usually hit me when I was going home from school.

  “He is, too. That’s why he hires Japs. Those dirty Japs killed Susan Reddick.”

  “Says who?” You could fill a book with my brilliant remarks that morning.

  “Everybody knows it except a dope like you.” Edna’s friend Marjorie grabbed my lunch box and opened it. “I bet the Strouds eat seaweed and raw fish.” She threw my sandwich on the ground, then turned over the lunch box and spilled the rest of the contents, stepping on each waxed paper—wrapped packet. I was mortified, wondering if everybody on the playground was watching me. Dad had done the right thing in hiring the boys, but part of me wished he’d tried harder to find some white men to work the beets. It wasn’t easy having people hate us.

  As I looked down at my lunch, deciding I’d go hungry before I’d stoop to pick up the smashed food, Edna suddenly socked me in the chest. She wasn’t very coordinated, but she was fat; if she really had been a pig, she’d have rendered out a year’s worth of lard, but I didn’t dare tell her that because she packed a wallop. She hit me again, knocking my head against the slide, and I fell to the ground.

  I looked around for Betty Joyce. Her father had gotten kicked in the head by a mule when he was loading a roll of barbed wire onto a wagon and was laid up, however, so she’d missed a good deal of school. Now I was on my own. I knew I could take on the three of them, because they were flabby and uncoordinated and I was good with my fists. But I remembered Dad saying he’d given up fighting, and I knew he’d be disappointed if I hit Edna. “What’d you do that for?” I asked, rubbing the sore spot on my head and brushing dirt off my coat as I got to my feet.

  “Give that to your old man,” Edna said, looking at her friends, who laughed and said, “Good one, Edna.”

  “Yeah, tell your dad if he doesn’t get rid of his Jap workers, there’s more where that came from,” Ardis, another fat girl, said. The three of them were like coyotes, which weren’t worth much on their own, but they built up courage when they were in a pack.

  Marjorie added, “Your mom chews, too.” She giggled.

  “She does not!”

  “Her old man thinks he’s such a big shot, but he’s nothing but a lousy beet farmer,” Edna told them, then turned back to me. She took off her coat and h
anded it to Marjorie. “Come on, put up your dukes, you little traitor.” She made awkward fists with her hands. The others did the same thing, although they stood behind Edna.

  “You’re a coward,” Edna said.

  I couldn’t let her get away with that. Still, I didn’t slug her. Instead, I grabbed Edna’s braids, one in each hand, and yelled, “You take it back or I’ll snatch you bald-headed!” Edna dug in then, so pulling her was like tugging at a stubborn calf. As I yanked, the barrettes fastened to the ends of her braids came off in my hands. I let go to throw the barrettes on the ground, and Edna almost fell over. But I grabbed the braids again. “Take it back!”

  Edna’s friends looked at each other, either too surprised or too scared of me to come to Edna’s aid. Finally, Marjorie spotted a teacher and yelled, “Miss Ord. Rennie Stroud’s beating up on Edna, and Edna didn’t do anything to her. Rennie started it.”

  Ardis added, “Yeah, her father’s a Jap lover, too.”

  “She stole a boiled egg once,” Edna called. Turning to me, she added, “I think she’s going to lock you in the closet with crawly things. That’s what I’m thinking.”

  My mouth felt sour as I remembered having to stand in a closet in grade school for the egg I hadn’t stolen. I didn’t know Miss Beatrice Ord. She’d come to Ellis in January to replace a teacher in one of the older grades who’d joined the WACs. But the other girls knew her, so I was sure she’d take their side.

  The new teacher came over to us and said, “Rennie, you can let go of Edna’s hair now.”

  “She started it,” Edna said. Her friends nodded. “She called me a name.”

  The teacher looked hard at me, but I didn’t say anything, because I figured she wouldn’t believe me. It was three against one. I wondered if I’d get detention or be suspended from school. Miss Ord might send home a note telling Mom I’d been fighting. My folks wouldn’t punish me, but they’d feel I’d let them down, and that would be worse.