Tallgrass Read online

  Then Mrs. Kruger said, “We don’t even like sauerkraut.” Everybody laughed, and she pulled her husband back down onto his chair.

  “We just can’t be too safe with the Japanese. We haven’t found any cases of espionage yet, but some folks, including Mr. Walter Lippmann, the newspaper columnist, think that just proves how sneaky they are. Myself, like I say, I don’t believe it,” Mr. Halleck said. He told us that in time the camp would have a hospital so that the Japanese wouldn’t have to use the facilities in Ellis, which made everybody laugh, too, because Ellis didn’t have a hospital. I thought that government people weren’t very smart. When I mentioned that to Dad later, he said I was pretty good at figuring things out.

  “Are their kids going to school here? Where’d we put them?” someone asked.

  “I don’t want my kids playing with Japs,” a woman called out.

  Mr. Halleck explained that the government was finishing a school at Tallgrass. “It’ll have a gymnasium and a science laboratory,” he said.

  I spotted Betty Joyce and mouthed “Wow!”

  When Mr. Halleck ignored Mr. Kruger’s hand waving in the air, Mr. Kruger yelled out, “How come they’s to have a science laboratory when we don’t have one ourself? Seems to me if the gov’ment’s so anxious to spend our money on a school, they could spend it on a school for our kids. We’ll just be training a fifth column.” When there were murmurs of agreement, Mr. Kruger looked smug and added, “You tell that to the gov’ment.” He folded his arms across his chest.

  “I certainly will,” Mr. Halleck said. He asked if anybody else had a question, then sighed and glanced at his watch when several people raised their hands.

  “I hear the Japs got all the sugar and steak they want, while we go ’thout,” Mrs. Larsoo complained. She and her husband were large people, like all the Larsoos. There was never anybody as hungry as a Larsoo. “These days, all I got to put in Olney’s sandwich is a can of Spam.”

  “You take it out of the can first?” Dad asked real loud, and people laughed. Mom sent Dad a look that told him to be still, but she also put her hand over her mouth so no one would see that she was smiling.

  I dug my elbow into Dad’s rib and muttered, “Good going.” Lately, I’d begun to think of Mom and Dad and me as the Three Musketeers, or maybe the Two-and-a-Half Musketeers. So I felt I could let Dad know when he said something funny. He grinned at me.

  A man standing in the aisle on one foot, the other braced against the wall, asked what would happen if one of the Japanese committed a crime in Ellis. “Same’s as if you did,” Mr. Halleck replied. Others worried that the water wells at the camp would cause our own wells to go dry. They complained about the searchlights and the traffic. They asked whether the government would compensate them if their property values went down. Mr. Halleck said he didn’t expect they’d go down, but I wasn’t so sure about that. Our beet workers were leaving, and if we couldn’t harvest the beets and Dad had to sell out, who would buy a farm that was less than a mile from the camp?

  I got fidgety and glanced around until I saw Susan Reddick, who lived down the road from me. She’d had polio and now had trouble walking. When she caught me looking at her, she rolled her eyes and put the top of her crutch over her head and yanked her neck to show she wished somebody would come and yank Mr. Halleck out of the room. I turned back and saw Danny Spano staring at me, and I looked away quickly, embarrassed. Although I thought a lot about boys at school, I felt strange around Danny and his crowd. I didn’t know how to act with them. I’d ask Marthalice the next time I wrote to her, because she used to joke around with Danny.

  The talk droned on and on, and people began shuffling their feet and moving around in the seats, which were too small for the men and most of the women. Kids escaped from their parents and wandered up and down the aisles. A baby cried. As far as I could tell, the only reason for holding the meeting was to give people a chance to gripe, because Mr. Halleck didn’t answer many questions. Mostly, he just said that the government was taking care of things and that he’d pass along our concerns. For all the good it did us, we could have stayed home and called him up on the party line.

  Then Dad stood up. “I’d like to know if I can get some of those Japanese fellows to help harvest my sugar beets. My hired man just got drafted, and my beet workers joined up.” Mom stared straight ahead, and I wondered if Dad had talked this over with her. He usually got her advice before he made a big decision, but he hadn’t said anything on the drive into town. If Dad had asked me about hiring them, I’d have said no go. It was bad enough having the Japanese in a camp just down the road, but I didn’t want them in our fields, swinging those long, ugly beet knives. Dad didn’t usually ask for my advice about farming, however.

  The room grew still. “Why don’t you hire a white man, Stroud?” someone asked.

  “What white man’s that?”

  “It’s un-American to hire Japs,” someone else called.

  “Seems to me it’s un-American to leave the beets in the field to rot. Last I heard, our boys in the army like a little something sweet to eat. This harvest’s for my son, by Dan.” His hands clenched, Dad looked around the room as if challenging anyone to disagree with him.

  Danny smirked at me. Although I didn’t want Japanese workers in our fields, I mouthed “Yeah!” at Danny to show him I backed up my dad. And maybe I did at that. There’d been a depression on most of my life, and I knew you could lose a farm after only one or two bad harvests. I’d rather the Japanese harvested our beets than nobody at all, I thought.

  Mom pulled at Dad’s pant leg to tell him to simmer down, but he ignored her.

  A woman in front of us turned around and told Mom, “Your husband’s a troublemaker, Mary, if you ask me.”

  Mom sat up straight and adjusted her hat and said, “Did anybody ask you?” When Mom saw people staring at her, she flushed and began picking at her fingers. But I glared at the woman, my tongue poking through my lips just a little.

  She sniffed at me and muttered, “Mind your manners, little girl.”

  Then Mr. Gardner, who grew sugar beets, too, said, “I believe Mr. Stroud’s asked a good question. I haven’t heard the answer.”

  Mr. Halleck stretched his neck. “It’s our intention to have those Japanese boys help the farmers. That’s what the government wants. Many of our inmates come from the agricultural fields in California. But we haven’t worked out the details yet.”

  “I reckon you better look into it pretty quick, because the beets’ll freeze in the ground. Mine are about ready to be dug now,” Dad said.

  “We need a straight answer and none of your government flimflam, either,” Mr. Gardner added.

  Mr. Halleck nodded at a man in the first row, who clamped his teeth around his cigarette holder and took a pad of paper out or his pocket and wrote something on it. “Name’s Gardner, young man,” Mr. Gardner called to him.

  “Now, if there are no more questions—”

  “I got one.” Mr. Spano interrupted, and Mom and Dad exchanged glances.

  Several people had gathered up their coats and hats to leave, but when they heard Mr. Spano, they stayed put, because whatever he said, it was liable to cause a stir. Mr. Spano got to his feet and slowly turned to glance down the row on either side of him to make sure people were paying attention. He was an oddly proportioned man, his arms reaching barely below his waist and his head too small for his big body. Dad had said about him once, “Little head, little wit.” Mrs. Spano was crudely made, too, so folks wondered where Danny got his looks. He got his wits from his father.

  “Who’s going to protect the womenfolk if you let them Japs out of the camp to work Stroud’s place?” Mr. Spano asked.

  Mr. Halleck’s eyes bugged out and he leaned forward over the lectern. “Sir? I don’t believe I understood you.”

  “I believe you did,” Mr. Spano said. He stood up and put his thumbs inside the straps of his overalls and worked a quid around in his mouth. “But I’ll
say again: Who’s to look after my wife and daughters if you loose them yellow devils on this community? You can’t tell me Tojo ain’t told them to go after a white woman if they got the chance.” A few of the women gasped, but Mom kept on looking straight ahead. I wondered if she was afraid. I was, although Mr. Spano’d probably made that up. Old Tojo wouldn’t have called up Mr. Spano on the long-distance telephone and shared his plans with him.

  The government man in the front row craned his neck to see Mr. Spano, then glanced at another government man, who gave a slow nod like some kind of a signal before he took out a cigarette and fitted it into a holder.

  “I say keep the Japs locked up and let them as doesn’t have hired men do their own harvest,” Mr. Spano said, and a few men muttered agreement.

  “Not everybody’s got a son at home to help,” Dad said, and some of the men grunted to back him up. Besides Danny, Mr. Spano had three other boys at home, two in school and Cleatus, who was so feebleminded that the draft board didn’t want him. Only Audie, Danny’s oldest brother, was in the service. The Spanos kept two blue stars in their window, although Danny had been mustered out after the accident at Camp Carson. “If you let me hire a few of those Japanese boys, I’ll be responsible for them,” Dad said.

  “Maybe you don’t care about what one of ’em does to your wife and girl, Stroud,” Mr. Spano said slowly, then spit onto the classroom floor. Danny Spano looked at his hands then, but Beaner Jack, who was sitting next to Danny, gave a sharp laugh. If Danny hadn’t been such a jerk, I might have felt sorry for him. But Danny’d always been a jerk. It was an awful thing to be born a Spano.

  Mom grabbed Dad’s hand then and dug her nails into it. She didn’t like it when Dad spoke out, and I was hoping he would sit down, because I was afraid Danny and Beaner would give me a hard time later on. But Dad didn’t pay Mom any mind. “If I thought my womenfolk were in danger, I wouldn’t let a Japanese man or any other man on my place,” he said. “Right now, I’m worried about harvesting my beets, so I can keep a roof over my family’s head.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t let no Japs within a mile of my wife and daughters,” Mr. Spano said. I had to swallow a laugh at that, because Mrs. Spano could play catch with a bail of hay and the Spano girls didn’t live in Ellis anymore. They’d married and moved away before they finished high school. “Maybe you don’t care about your women, Stroud.”

  Dad clenched his jaw, and his hands balled up into fists. I prayed he wouldn’t start something, because I knew I’d be mortified. And Mom wouldn’t be able to face the Jolly Stitchers then, either. Before Dad could reply, however, Mr. Lee jumped in front of him, blocking his view of Mr. Spano, “Mr. Halleck, we sure do want to thank you for coming out this evening.”

  Mr. Halleck looked up, surprised but glad that Mr. Lee had given him a chance to end the meeting. He said quickly, “Glad to do it. I’ll just stay here a little longer in case any of you folks have more questions. I know it’s past bedtime, and most of you have to get up with the chickens. I’m a farm boy, too.” He laughed, but nobody else did, because we weren’t so dumb that we didn’t know when somebody was talking down to us,

  Mom stood up and shooed Dad and me in front of her. “Only a fool fights a fool,” she said, just loudly enough for the three of us to hear.

  “I’m not a fool,” Dad told her. He was stubborn and not nearly as anxious to leave as Mom.

  “I didn’t say you were, Loyal. But you would be if you mixed it up with John Spano.”

  “Come on, Dad,” I said, grabbing at his hand, which had about as much effect as talking to a chicken.

  A few men came up and spoke to Dad, but more gathered around Mr. Spano to shake his hand and clap him on the back. The room seemed hostile then, and I didn’t know how people who had been our friends all of our lives could suddenly be against us, glaring at Dad—and at Mom, too, although she hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t, either, but people still looked me up and down, which made me think again about the Japanese girl at the depot and how she must have felt with people staring at her.

  “Glad you spoke up, Loyal,” Mr. Gardner said. “I couldn’t hire hands if I paid them ten dollars a day—even if I could afford ten dollars a day.”

  “That’s the truth,” Dad said. He and Mr. Gardner talked for a few minutes. Then Mr. Lee told Dad to come around to the drugstore on Sunday while Granny, Mom, and I were at church, and that he’d treat him to a chocolate soda. The others who’d spoken to Dad left, along with one or two of the government men, and I got nervous when I looked across the room at the people still standing around Mr. Spano. Susan Reddick’s father was among them, but Susan and her mother were still seated, both of them staring at the floor.

  Every now and then, one of the men with Mr. Spano turned to stare at us with narrowed eyes, as if they were talking about us. Some dope had drawn a cartoon in chalk on the blackboard of a Japanese man and underneath it was a misspelled caption: “Your a sap Mr. Jap.” One of the government men took a swipe at the picture with an eraser, leaving a swath through the face like a black-and-white rainbow.

  Dad and Mom and I went outside into a night that had turned cold, and Mom buttoned up her coat around her neck. “I sure could use that Persian lamb jacket you were going to buy me,” she said, trying to get Dad’s mind off the meeting. The two of them had joked as long as I could remember about Dad buying her a fur coat, but so far she’d never even had a fox-fur scarf.

  “I’m working on it,” Dad said, squeezing her hand, and I thought how nice it was that Mom and Dad liked each other.

  We got into Red Boy and Dad turned on the motor, and we started down the Tallgrass Road. Although it was dark, the sky was bright from the spotlights at the camp. I wondered what it would be like to be a Spano, which made me shiver. Being a Spano meant sharing a house with rats, sleeping in a bed without sheets, and eating antelope. The only thing worse was being a Jack. Either possibility was too horrible to contemplate.

  Mom had been thinking about the Spanos, too, because she said, “That Mr. Spano is mean enough to step on baby chicks.” That was the worst thing Mom could say about a person, since baby chicks were helpless, and Mom loved them almost as much as she loved Buddy, Marthalice, and me. If the weather was cold, she’d take the chicks inside, two dozen or more little balls of yellow fluff, and put them into a box next to the oil stove.

  "Oh, don’t worry about John Spano and them. They perform like a circus; they’re all show,” Dad said, patting Mom’s knee. He was silent until after we reached the turn into our farm. He slowed the truck, downshifted, and straddled a hole before coming to a stop. I got out and opened the gate; then Dad drove through and waited for me to latch the gate. Instead of getting back into the truck, I stood on the running board and put my hand through the window to hold on to the backseat, because I’d have to open the barn door. Our dogs, Snow White, the collie, and Sabra, the mutt, came out and barked, then ran along beside us. We heard a clucking from the henhouse, and Mom said she thought there might be a coyote somewhere about and that she ought to take down her shotgun. Mom loved most living things, but she hated a predator, and she’d kill one if she had to. She was a good shot, too. Dad kept a picture on the dresser of Mom that had been taken when she was a little girl. She was sitting on a chair in front of a quilt, with her dog and her gun. Dad said that pretty well summed up Mom.

  I leaned my head against the roof of the truck and heard Dad say, “It may not be a Spano, but I’m afraid somebody’s going to make trouble over this camp, Mother.”

  “You stay out of it, Loyal, and don’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”

  “What about you, Mary? You feel the same way I do about the Japanese.”

  Mom laughed. “But I’m not the one who goes looking for trouble.”

  “You, Squirt? How do you feel about tonight?”

  Dad stopped the truck, and I jumped down to open the barn door and didn’t answer, because I couldn’t make up my mind about the Japanese. I agre
ed with Mom and Dad that they’d gotten a rotten deal by being sent halfway across the country to live in a camp. But still, I wished they’d been sent someplace else.

  THE NEXT WEEK, DAD and Mr. Gardner went to Tallgrass to talk to Mr. Halleck about hiring Japanese boys for the harvest, but Mr. Halleck hadn’t worked out the system yet.

  “It’s a durn shame. Those young men want to work, but the government has them sitting there playing cards,” Mr. Gardner said. “I believe cards do more to weaken the mind of a boy than an honest day’s work.”

  “I have to agree with you on that,” Dad said. After Mr. Gardner left, Dad teased Mom. “You hear what he said about cards, Mother?”

  Mom, who loved to play pinochle, sniffed. “He said boys, not women. And don’t tell me you don’t play poker on Sunday mornings down at Red Lee’s place.”

  Dad laughed and slapped her on the bottom as he went out.

  “Behave,” Mom told him, but she smiled, and I pretended I hadn’t seen them. Sometimes my folks embarrassed me.

  SO THE JAPANESE DIDN’T help with our 1942 sugar beet harvest, but Dad and Mr. Gardner found some Mexicans, young boys and old men, who worked the beets for us. “They aren’t very fast, but they make up for it by charging more,” Dad complained. Still, he didn’t have much choice, so he hired the fellows, and we got our beets in.

  I stayed out of school to help Mom with meals for the crew. Despite the hot, hard work, harvest was one of my favorite times. The kitchen smelled of homemade bread and pies. The table was stacked with plates and platters, silverware, dishes of butter, salt and pepper shakers, pitchers of iced tea. Mom treated me just like one of the women she’d hired in years past, assigning me chores and nodding her approval when I did them right. There weren’t any women to hire that year, what with so many of them working the fields in the place of sons and husbands who’d gone off to war. So we had to make do with family. Granny still pitched in. Her mind always worked fine when it came to farm work. She’d fixed meals for harvest crews from the time she and Gramp started farming in Ellis fifty years earlier, and even before that, as a girl in Fort Madison, Iowa.