Rumors of Peace (3 page)

Under the door shone a crack of light from the dining room, where Peter slept on a couch. He was probably reading in bed. He was always poring over magazines for pictures of swing bands, which he cut out and saved. After a while the crack of light disappeared.

The house was silent. It was a small wooden house painted mustard yellow like the train depot, with geranium bushes and pepper trees around it. I had always lived in this house and could have drawn a picture of everything in it, down to the smallest detail. The walls of the living room were peach, with a few comfortable spidery cracks. On the mantelpiece stood framed photographs, some old and brown. On the embroidered runner on a side table stood the radio, dark brown and shaped like a barn. The curtains were heavy lace, and the drapes were heavy, too, cranberry-colored. All the furniture was crowded, making it cozy. In the dining room, by Peter's couch, stood our round dining-room table. It was old, but a “good piece,” as they said. When I dusted on Saturday mornings, I had to climb under it in order to get at the legs from all sides. They were heavy, ornate legs, and I knew their every
curve by heart. Near it stood the wood stove. When a fire burned inside, the isinglass glowed amber. Tears were burning down my face into my ears.

I thought of the London children I had once seen a picture of in
Life
magazine, sitting in the subway singing and playing checkers while they waited for the bombs to fall. And the more I thought of their bravery, the more I gave way to my own wretchedness, until I was convulsed with suppressed sobs. And then, all at once, caving in totally, I saw our fate flash before me in full detail.

As though on a movie screen I watched us running into the cellar, knocking over Peter's drum in the dark, throwing ourselves onto the concrete floor. Our arms were tight around each other's backs. The drone of planes grew nearer and nearer until it was a deafening roar, and there came the whistling down of long, heavy bombs and the shock of a tremendous explosion that blew everything high in a splintering of wood and concrete and our own flesh and bones. And then, in the silence, the Japs with their bayonets came floating down in parachutes to creep through the rubble and stab and slice what was left of us. . . .

I lay knotted in a ball, so terrified I couldn't breathe. Then suddenly a powerful, boiling sensation flooded through me. I hated them. My eyes flared with a picture of Japs lying headless, burned, trampled down like beetles or lice or rotten vegetation. I hated them. Forever, with my whole being, I hated them.

I felt a long, quaking breath released and lay still. I was still frightened, but differently now. As though with control. And I no longer felt ashamed.

T
HE NEXT DAY
after school I got the paper from the porch and sat down with it on the front steps.

D
EC.
10:

War Raging in Philippines!

The Philippines would fall. They said so downtown.

Contra Costa County in the War

                       
All evening activities in local schools will be rescheduled for daytime . . . local chiefs of police have canceled all leaves . . . emergency Red Cross stations are being set up throughout county fire stations. . . .

I hadn't thought that far. Not everybody would be killed. Some would only be wounded. Maybe we would be among those.

Sheriff O'Toole Reports:

                       
A pledge of wholehearted and undivided loyalty to the United States was given yesterday by the Contra Costa Japanese-American Association. We believe that most every Japanese here is a loyal
American citizen, but those few who are not we have every facility to take care of in a lawful American way. . . .

Why didn't we line them up against a wall and shoot them? But I wouldn't mention this to my family, who kept saying it was a pity there were so many hysterical rumors about these people who had been farming here for generations.

I went over to the empty lot to play, and our games were wild and gory, filled with shooting and stabbing and the dying screams of Japs. I liked it very much, but after a while I felt something was wrong; my friends kept pulling back and looking at me the way they looked at Mario when he got carried away. So I went off alone.

D
EC.
11:

Congress Votes War

On Germany, Italy

I had forgotten about Hitler and Mussolini. Almost everyone in Mendoza was Italian, but when I tried to think of Mrs. Pelegrino in her housedress being an enemy, I couldn't. Something here didn't fit. And there was Mr. Kroeger who delivered apple turnovers on Saturday mornings with a thick German accent. Dad and Mama hated the Germans, but they never slammed the door in his face. In fact they liked him. I liked him too. I felt there was beginning to be a place in my mind like a storeroom where I must shove things that didn't fit.

My face was the same, though. In the bathroom I would look at it in the mirror. My hair was the color of oatmeal, cut in a Dutch boy bob. My eyes were gray. I would look at myself until I felt embarrassed, but I kept looking. Then I would open my mouth and look down my throat. I couldn't see what was down there—heart, lungs, intestines—but it was me too. I liked it all, inside and out. It was all me, though I had never thought about it before, and I didn't really like to think about it now, because it saddened me to know that just when I began seeing myself so clearly I would be blown up.

D
EC.
12:

Contra Costa County in the War

                   
During air raid warnings, the sheriff's office on Station KPA will broadcast instructions. Citizens are
advised to cut out the following list and keep it at all times by their radios.

                   
WARNING SIGNALS

                   
Yellow—Alert

                   
Blue—Planes sighted, all lights out

                   
Red—Bombing imminent, go to your cellars

                   
White—All clear

Dad cut out the list and put it on the embroidered cloth in front of the radio. He had already signed up as a block warden, and he had a white metal hat and a flashlight that he kept on top of his bureau in the bedroom.

On the night of the twelfth, early in the evening, the fire bell dinned eleven times. By the time it was finished Dad had grabbed his metal hat and flashlight and an overcoat and was gone. Mama, Karla, Peter, and I sat down by the radio. Everything was very quiet. Only a small lamp was on.

“Yellow. Yellow,” the radio voice said. “This is the yellow signal.”

I sat quietly with my heart racing, my insides twisted up. I looked at the others. They were paying serious attention, but they did not look frightened. Peter even had a book in his hand, called
The Grapes of Wrath,
and after a while he put it under the lamp and kept reading. Every few minutes the voice said, “Yellow, yellow.”

I sat looking at the floor, at Karla's extended foot, which wore a white Wedgie and striped ankle sock. I thought of Dad out on the street alone, and of the cellar. My bladder was building up such a pressure I thought I would die from holding it back. The clock on the mantel ticked.

Finally, after fifteen minutes, the voice said, “White. White. This is the white signal,” and I got up in an ordinary way and went into the bathroom, and while I sat on the toilet, I rubbed and pulled my face and took one deep sigh after the other.

D
EC.
13:

Sheriff O'Toole Reports:

                       
A motor-driven air raid siren so loud that its wail can be heard for a radius of nine miles has been purchased by the city of Mendoza and will arrive within days, when it will be installed on the roof
of the fire department. Manufactured by Belden Bros., Inc., at a cost of $627.82, the siren is powered by a Ford motor operated by remote control. . . .

I wanted it to come now. I lay awake every night because I feared the fire bell wouldn't be loud enough if you were asleep. If we got a real air raid siren, I could go to sleep at night. Ezio said the skin under my eyes looked dirty.

We went to the Saturday matinee. Ezio sat under the chandelier, but I wouldn't, in case there was a raid and it fell. It was
Small Town Deb
with Jane Withers, very good, but I couldn't concentrate. They say raids don't happen in the daytime, but if that was true, why did we have air raid drills at school, and why did men stand all day on the courthouse roof with binoculars?

D
EC.
15:

Sheriff O'Toole Reports:

                       
Keep your eyes and ears open at all times, especially around strategic spots! Be sure to take the license plate of any suspicious car. A little information tucked away by each citizen may be valuable to America. . . .

I went downtown after school with my Big Chief notebook. It was cold and drizzling, and the streets shone. On the hills to the right, Shell's big silver storage tanks were being painted black. I went to the post office first, and I saw people who looked as if they might be mailing a dangerous letter and followed them and wrote down their description, and if they got into a car, I wrote down the license number. Then I went down to the train depot, and I was surprised by all the soldiers and sailors suddenly filling the benches inside. There was nothing to write down here, so I went to Sheriff O'Toole's office, which was banked high on one side with sandbags, and watched for any spy in disguise who might shove a bomb in the shrubbery.

D
EC.
16:

Warning on Sabotage!

                       
The approaching holiday season is a period of increased danger from the fifth column. Sabotage
activities, particularly on Christmas Eve, will require special vigilance from all citizens. Remember, surprise and treachery are Axis weapons!

                   
—Culbert Olson, Governor of California

That afternoon Ezio came with me. He said to Mario, “Go home, Suse and I have to go alone.” Mario wandered away in the fog, looking back over his shoulder, his lip out. But Ezio was childish. He followed Mrs. Black, our third-grade teacher he had never liked, and took down her license number. When we passed the park, he crept around spying on old Hank the gardener, because Hank had chased him with a rake last spring for running through his flowers. And then on Main Street he saw Mr. Tatanian, the State Theater manager, and he followed him, too, because Mr. Tatanian had kicked Mario out awhile back for rolling down the aisle like a tin can.

But suddenly Ezio sharpened up and said he was going to look through Mr. Nagai's trash bin for coded messages. I didn't go with him; I waited at the corner. I tried never to think of Mr. Nagai. He had been shoved into my storeroom.

Ezio came running back through the fog with a little piece of paper with Japanese writing on it, and he shoved it under my eyes. “That rotten Jap! That spy!” he cried, and began running. We ran back to the empty lot where the kids were playing, and he handed the note all around. Everyone got excited and grabbed it from each other until it was so crushed and smudged you couldn't even see the pencil marks; then someone threw it in the air and they began killing each other in play, the scrap of paper completely forgotten. They were too harebrained to be patriots, they filled me with disgust. But I was glad they had forgotten about Mr. Nagai.

That night Mama said she was taking me to the doctor next week, because I was always tired.

D
EC.
17:

Germans Pushed Back from Moscow

In Russ. Counterattack!

Moscow was so far away it didn't even count; but the Russians were our allies, and they were doing their best. Everything helped.

But here was a blow from Sheriff O'Toole.

                       
Due to the immense demand for air raid warning devices, there will be a delay in the order of our powerful, remote-controlled siren. Until its arrival, air raid warnings will continue to be signaled by the fire bell.

Agian, I lay awake into the small hours.

D
EC.
18:

Frank Garibaldi

First Local

War Fatality

                       
A cable has been received by Mr. and Mrs. Aldo Garibaldi of 1402 Soledad Street that their son, Frank, 21, was killed in the recent attack on Pearl Harbor. Young Garibaldi enlisted in the Navy in 1940, and was stationed aboard the
Arizona. . . .

A long article, with his picture. I remembered him; he used to deliver groceries. Red hair, green apron, he used to whistle complicated things coming up the front walk.

I listened to my family talk about him.

I felt bad, too; but you understood that soldiers and sailors would get killed in a war, that's what war was, and if it just stuck to them, it would still be bad but not so bad.

D
EC.
19:

Hundreds of Oklahoma

Migrants Go Home

                       
With the enormous increase of defense plants and shipyards throughout the state, many of California's “Okies” have at last found the profitable jobs they left the drought for. But others, numbering in the hundreds, have turned their dilapidated trucks homeward. “Better to go back to the dust bowl,” said Fred Simmons, 51, heading a line of trucks out of Manteca this morning, “than stay here and be bombed. . . .”

Why didn't we go to the dust bowl, too? Or at least we could hike back into the hills and pitch a tent and live there. But no one thought of doing this. They were like the people in London and Rotterdam
who stayed where they were, I couldn't imagine why. I remembered that potato-digging family in Poland or wherever it was that I saw in
Life
magazine once, and I could have told them that they shouldn't have been digging potatoes in an open field. They should have run before the enemy came; then they wouldn't have been machine-gunned to death. But no one thought this way; no one seemed to understand.

D
EC.
20:

Sheriff O'Toole Reports:

                       
Our long-awaited remote-controlled air raid siren, so powerful that its wail can be heard for a radius of nine miles, will arrive Monday morning, December 22, by army truck in the city square. At 11
A.M.
, before its installation on the fire department roof, a demonstration will be performed by Sheriff O'Toole for interested citizens. . . .

On Monday forenoon—it was Christmas vacation now—Mama took me down to the doctor's office. As we walked along the street I kept waiting for the siren's blast, and just as we were going up the steps there came a great hollow pop from the direction of the square. I wondered about this all through the examination, and as soon as we left the office we discovered what had happened, the whole town was talking about it. Right on the dot of eleven, Sheriff O'Toole had begun his demonstration, but before the siren gave out with more than its first breath, it blew up in a thousand pieces, wounding three citizens and a collie dog.

The doctor said my trouble was anemia and gave me iron pills.

D
EC.
23:

Sheriff O'Toole Reports:

                       
Due to yesterday's unfortunate incident, during which the city's newly purchased air raid siren exploded because of a mechanical fault, a new order for a siren will be made. Meanwhile, damages from Belden Bros, will be sought. . . .

It was sabotage, but I couldn't even get excited about this; I could only think how long it would be now before we got another siren and I could go to sleep.

That night, past midnight, the fire bell dinned. I was out of bed in a flash, pulling Karla. Then everybody was up, and Dad was running out, and the rest of us hurried to the radio. The voice said, “Yellow. Yellow.”

Then it said, “Blue. Blue. This is the blue signal.”

Peter turned off the small lamp. Mama, who was sitting next to me on the sofa, slipped her arm around me. I had a strange numb feeling, not what I expected. My eyes were frozen in the dark, and my brain was frozen too, so that all I knew was that the pepper tree was scraping against the house in the wind. It scraped for a long time.