Tallgrass (2 page)

As Dad and I jumped off the platform next to the depot, a man with a pencil and a pad of paper got up from the running board of a car where he had been sitting, watching, and came over to us. “Seems like folks aren’t too happy about the Japs being here,” he said. Dad stared at the man until he explained who he was. “Jeff Cheever,
Denver Post.
I’m doing a story on the Tallgrass Internment Camp. Like I say, it seems that you wheat farmers aren’t too happy it’s here.”

Dad didn’t answer at first. Instead, he pulled out the makings, sprinkled tobacco onto a cigarette paper, rolled it up, and licked it shut. The reporter took out a lighter, but before he could flick it, Dad struck a kitchen match on his overalls and lighted the cigarette, which was twisted at the ends and bent a little in the middle. Dad glanced over at a second man, who was fitting a flashbulb into a big square camera. “Sugar beets. This is sugar beet country. You better get that right, son.”

The reporter shrugged. “So how do you feel about the Japs?”

Dad inhaled and blew smoke out of his mouth. “There’s some would like to talk to you about it. I’m not amongst them. Good day to you.” Dad touched his straw hat to the man and started off.

“Hey,” called the reporter, “don’t you want to see your name in print?”

Dad stopped, and I hoped he’d changed his mind. Getting our name in the paper would be exciting. People would read what Dad had said and remark on it. Kids would say, “Hey, I read about your dad in the
Post.”
I’d cut out the story and paste it in my scrapbook and get extra copies to send to Buddy and Marthalice.

But Dad hadn’t changed his mind. “Are you hard of hearing, young man?” he asked.

Before the reporter could reply, Mr. Smith interrupted. “Well, I’m not so particular. I’ve got a piece to say, if you want to listen. I think they ought to ’ve shipped them to Japan, and the governor with them. If the governor had ran for office right now, he wouldn’t get my vote or anybody else’s.” When the government announced it was evacuating the Japanese from the West Coast, most states made it plain they didn’t want them, but Colorado governor Ralph Carr said it was all right to send them to Colorado. He was never elected to office again.

The reporter wrote all that down, asking, “And what was your name?”

“Lum Smith. That’s Lum for Columbus, father of our country,” Mr. Smith said. He grinned while the photographer took his picture. I wondered if Christopher Columbus was the same father of our country as the first president of the United States, Mr. George Washington.

Now that the buses were gone, people crowded around the reporter, probably hoping to get their names into the paper, too. Dad and I started toward our wagon.

“You should have talked to him, Loyal. You could have told him there’s some of us here that don’t hate the Japanese. That reporter’s going to write us up like we’re a bunch of rednecks,” said Redhead Joe Lee, who was standing at the edge of the crowd. He ran one of the two drugstores in Ellis, the one where we traded, because Mom didn’t like the way Mr. Elliot, the owner of the other, patted her on the fanny once when she went in to buy a bottle of Mercurochrome. That was okay with me, because I didn’t like Mr. Elliot’s son, Pete, who was a friend of Beaner and Danny. The Lee Drug had perfume and dusting powder on the counters and a marble soda fountain and tables with wire legs and wire chairs. Someday, I’d have a boyfriend who would take me there, and I could sit with one leg under me, the way Marthalice did, and lean my elbows on the table while I drank a Coca-Cola through a straw and flirted. Maybe he’d buy me a blue bottle of Evening in Paris cologne for my birthday. Sure, I thought, right after I win first place on “Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour.”

“You’re the fellow that can give it to him straight,” said Mr. Lee, who was in shirtsleeves and had on a vest that was buttoned wrong, maybe because he’d been in a hurry to take off his white coat and get to the depot. He was almost as handsome as Dad, and Mom called him “Ellis’s most eligible bachelor.” That didn’t mean much, however, because most of the other bachelors were hired men.

Dad smoked his cigarette down to his fingers, then dropped it in the dirt and ground it out with his foot. “I’m straight as a string, all right, Red. I sure am good-looking, too.” Dad paused. “Isn’t that right, Mother?”

Mom had come up behind me, and I turned and saw her look Dad up and down before she replied. “You got that string part right.”

“Oh, she thinks I’m good-looking as a barber. She can’t hardly keep her hands off me,” Dad told Mr. Lee, grinning at Mom so openly that she shook her head and looked away. Mom was tall, and instead of being nicely plump like she used to be, she’d lost weight since Buddy had joined up. Her face had become gaunt, and she seemed tired all the time. There was gray in her blond hair, too. But Dad still told her she was the prettiest thing since strawberry ice cream, and he believed it. I suppose I knew that there was something special about my parents, although I never thought much about it. They never criticized each other like the Smiths, never argued the way Betty Joyce’s parents did. They respected each other—and me, too—and I was still hoping they wouldn’t say I’d let them down by coming to the station to watch the Japanese. There wasn’t anything as hard to take as my folks’ disappointment; now that my brother and sister were gone, I had to bear all their disappointment.

“Oh, go on. Don’t talk so, Loyal,” Mom said.

“Red here thinks I should say something to that reporter over there, tell him we don’t all hate the Japanese. What do you think?”

“I think you ought not to stir up trouble. Who knows what the Jolly Stitchers would say to that?” Then she told us to come along because Granny was waiting and might wander off.

“And how is the old lady?” Mr. Lee asked, scratching at his head. He had only a fringe of hair, and his freckled bald head was always peeling, even in the winter.

“Granny forgets. And she frets about that. But then she forgets she forgets.” Dad sighed. “There’s things I’d like to forget right about now, so I guess she isn’t in such a bad way.”

My grandmother had forgotten most of what had happened in the past forty years. I loved Granny, who was sweet and smelled like cinnamon and lavender powder, and sometimes wandered into my room and slept with me. That was because when my sister went off to Denver, Mom moved me out of the big bedroom we’d shared and into Granny’s room, giving Granny the front bedroom. It was sunny, and Granny could sit by the window, piecing quilt tops. “I’m making this one for Mattie,” she’d told me last week. Mattie was her sister, who’d lived in Mingo and died there in the early part of the century. Sometimes Granny forgot she had moved into the front bedroom, and then she’d go into her old room, curling up like a kitten in the bed beside me and keeping me warm. From time to time, she would snap out of her dreamy world and recall something that had happened a long time ago—or as little as a month or two ago. “I didn’t make Buddy a quilt to take off to war, because soldier boys now have good warm blankets. Remember, Buddy wrote that in his letter,” she’d said one night at dinner.

Dad said good-bye to Mr. Lee, and as we walked away, Dad asked Mom if she’d bought the yellow material she’d had her eye on.

“I can put that quarter to better use,” she told him.

Dad said he didn’t guess we’d lose the farm for two bits. Besides, with the war, crops were going sky-high, and we’d be rolling in money. “Might be we could sell a little something to the Tallgrass Camp. They’re going to need eggs.”

“Lord, Loyal, I’d hate to make money off the Japanese. I don’t know what’s people to think if we did that.”

“Somebody has to provide them with eggs, and if we do it, those folks’ll eat choice. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government’s giving them the powdered stuff,” Dad told her. “Squirt and me will wait in the wagon with Granny whilst you buy your cloth.”

“Perhaps I will, then. Granny favors yellow.” Mom didn’t really believe the Depression was over, and it pained her to spend money on herself, so she had to be convinced that it was going for someone else.

“You might pick up a nickel’s worth of licorice, too,” Dad said. He and I were crazy about licorice, although nobody else in the family liked it.

Mom went off to the dry goods—she walked slower now than she used to—while Dad and I headed toward the wagon. We had a truck, but we drove the wagon when we could to save on gasoline and tires. We were so close to town that we might have walked if it hadn’t been for Granny.

“How do you feel about the Japanese, Squirt?” Dad asked as we reached the wagon, where Granny sat with her piecing. One good thing about being the only kid left at home was that Dad asked my opinion more often. He listened, too.

I thought hard how to answer him, because I wanted to say something that Dad would be proud of, that he would repeat at the feed store. He’d say, “You know, my daughter says. . .” But the truth was, I didn’t know how I felt. The Japanese at the depot didn’t seem like alien enemies working for the downfall of America, but how would I know? The government wouldn’t have sent them to Tallgrass if it hadn’t believed they were dangerous. That made me uneasy, and I wished the camp were someplace else. “Somebody at the depot said they were spies and that we ought to lock them up,” I said.

“If you locked up people for minding other folks’ business, the jail would be full.” Dad gave me a sly glance. “They’d have a cell just for your mom’s quilt circle.”

I thought some more, and then I said slowly, “I think the Japanese are bringing the war home to Ellis.”

Dad nodded, looking off down the Tailgrass Road. The dust had settled, and there was no sign of the evacuees or the yellow dogs. Maybe he did repeat what I said at the feed store. He told Mom, and years later, he reminded me of it. Tallgrass did indeed bring the war to us, brought it more than the shortages or rationing or the news on the radio. It made the war as close to us as what happened to Buddy. I grew up during World War II. When the war started, I was a little girl. By the time it ended, I’d become a young woman who had seen much of sorrow and sadness. Tallgrass became our own personal war.

WE DIDN’T SEE MUCH
of the Japanese at first, because they were busy getting the camp ready for the rest of the detainees, who would be shipped in over the next weeks and months. “They’ve been handed the wrong end of the stick,” I told Betty Joyce. “The government makes them move to Tallgrass, and then it tells them to build their own jail.”

“Yeah, but it beats living in a hardware store,” she replied. She was embarrassed that she lived with her folks in rooms in the back of the hardware. If I went there at night, I had to pound on the front door of the store and hope somebody would hear me. Even worse for Betty Joyce was that she had to have dirty old Mr. Snow for a father. He took a bath about once a year, less than that when we had the drought.

Another reason we didn’t see the evacuees was that while they could get passes to go into town, most of them stayed at the camp for the first months. They were as scared of us as we were of them.

But we knew the Tallgrass Camp was there. At night, the searchlights illuminated the sky like a harvest moon. Big flatbed trucks loaded with lumber and pipe and storage tanks passed our house hour after hour, sending up clouds of dirt, which settled on the leaves of the trees and on the washing Mom hung out on the line. All day long, the sounds of construction broke the peacefulness of our farm. The noise drove me stark raving crazy sometimes, and I’d climb into the hayloft with one of my Nancy Drew books to try to get away from the sound. Quiet was one of the things I’d always liked best about the farm. Before the camp went in, I could sit in the haymow, looking out the big door at the clouds, and not hear a thing except for a calf bawling or the scat sound of insects. It was as if I were the only person in the world, and I could dream about being a girl investigator with a roadster, like Nancy. Mostly, however, I built air castles, in which I was grown up. Now, the camp made more noise than a crew of beet workers, and even in the haymow, I could barely concentrate on my book.

Having the camp down the road changed me, too. I’d always felt safe on our farm, but now, I’d begun to have nightmares. When that happened, I’d get up and look out into the yard at night and see shadows that scared me. Once, sirens woke me and made me go downstairs to Mom and Dad. They’d heard the sirens, too, and said it wasn’t anything, but I feared that somebody had gone under the bobwire surrounding the camp and was going to break into our house and kill us. Maybe Mom was afraid, too, because she began locking the doors at night, something nobody in Ellis ever did, even when they went away on vacation. We’d see the yellow dogs filled with new inmates on their way to the camp, and the Japanese would stare at us when they passed our farm. People in Ellis didn’t gather at the depot to watch the evacuees get off the trains anymore, but many of them glared at the newcomers to show them that they weren’t welcome.

Dad walked down to Tallgrass, where he got a tour of the camp, which was about a mile square filled with row after row of barracks and surrounded by barbed-wire fences. The bobwire, which was deeply resented by the Japanese, was there to mark the boundaries of the camp, not necessarily to keep the evacuees inside. Armed U.S. troops in high watchtowers set several hundred yards apart made sure the evacuees didn’t leave. An armed soldier at the entrance cleared Dad to enter the camp. He returned sad and troubled. “We treat our hired man like a king compared to the way the government treats those folks. You wouldn’t let your chickens live that way,” he told Mom, putting his straw hat on a hook beside the door. The hat had left a line around his damp head, as if he’d been wearing a rubber band.

Entire families were crowded into twenty-foot-square rooms made of unpainted gypsum board, Dad said. They hung sheets across the room for privacy. The barracks were thrown up so quickly that dust sifted in through gaps in the siding and cracks around the windows. The women dusted, and the dirt blew right back in. “It doesn’t take more than thirty minutes before there’s enough dust to write your name in,” Dad said. He predicted that come winter, people would get pneumonia from wind and snow blowing in on them as they slept.

The rooms were so hot and airless that the people couldn’t stand to be indoors. But if they went outside, they stood in the hot wind on dirt streets, because neither grass nor trees had been planted where the sage and chamisa had been bulldozed. And the Japanese had to take showers in bathhouses down the street, with one large room for men, another for women. “They say the old women don’t wash themselves until the middle of the night, when nobody’s around to see. Just imagine Granny stripping buck naked in front of the choir,” Dad said. I didn’t like getting undressed in front of anybody, even Betty Joyce, and I’d be as dirty as Mr. Snow if I had to bathe that way.

Everybody ate in a dining hall, the kids sitting with one another instead of with their families, which was no way to raise children, Dad said, and the food was heavy and coarse. “I think the government’s cornered the market on beef hearts for them,” Dad told us, and I stuck out my tongue and put my finger down my throat. I’d rather have eaten alfalfa than organ meat. Many of the Japanese, he added, were used to eating fish and fresh vegetables, and they’d gotten sick from the food, as well as from the heat and the crowding. “There’s not a hospital yet. They say a woman gave birth on a bare table, with no doctor to attend to her. Lord knows what will happen if there’s an epidemic or a catastrophe. The fire truck is a hose wrapped up on a spindle on wheels. And they don’t have a library. There’s not much of a school, either. You’d think with the way we uprooted them like pigweed, we could at least offer them a little education.”

“That’s not asking too much,” Mom agreed.

Dad studied her for a moment before he sat down at the kitchen table and poured himself a glass of iced tea from a pitcher that was damp on the outside with sweat. He sipped and frowned because he liked his tea sweetened, but we’d agreed to drink it plain to save on sugar. We raised sugar beets, but when it came to getting refined sugar, we were in the same boat as everybody else.

Dad shrugged and finished the tea, then looked at Mom slyly. “Might be you could teach,” he said.

Mom, who’d been sprinkling the laundry, using a green Coca-Cola bottle filled with water and plugged with a stopper that had holes in it, rolled up a damp shirt and put it into the basket before she wiped her hands on her apron. The apron was made from flowered feed sacks and had been washed so many times that the print was faded to almost nothing. She looked up at Dad. “I couldn’t teach a bird to find a worm. Besides, the only thing I know is chickens, and you told me yourself they don’t raise chickens out there.”

“Come winter, when the rest of the Japanese women get here, you could teach them to quilt.”

“Go on! Anybody can quilt. You’ve just to do it. Besides, why would they want to quilt? I didn’t see any of those women climbing onto the yellow dogs with scrap bags in their hands.”

Dad said the Japanese would need quilts to keep them warm in winter.

Mom sat down then and poured her own tea, thinking. “Oh, I don’t know, Loyal. Where’s the time to come from? Granny’s getting worse every day; you know how she wanders. She’s perfectly fine one minute, remembering the names of the men who worked the harvest last year, and the next, she doesn’t know her own name. And with Marthalice and Buddy gone away, Rennie and I are hard put to get the work done.”

Mom was right about that. I didn’t have time to read much or make doll clothes now, although I’d gotten too big for dolls. Instead, I was doing more chores around the house. I guess this was what was meant by growing up, and I wasn’t sure I liked that part of it. Mom was so grateful for my help, however, that I didn’t resent the extra work. I wished Marthalice were around to make it more fun, however. We’d always shared the housework. She’d taught me dance steps as she vacuumed, and when we did the dishes, she’d tell me about the boys at school who draped

themselves over her locker or left notes in her desk. She’d finish by saying, “Of course, you’ll have twice as many boyfriends as I do.” Fat chance, I’d think, but it was nice of her to say so.

Mom brushed a strand of hair out of her face with her wrist. “What would people say? That I’m aiding and abetting the enemy? I’d be an abettor, whatever that is.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I’d not want to stir up trouble with the Jolly Stitchers. So many of them’s against the camp.”

“You wouldn’t have to say you’re teaching,” I suggested. “You could just tell the bees you’re busy with the chickens.” Dad had dubbed the members of Jolly Stitchers sewing circle “the bees” and Mom “the queen bee.”

Mom gave me a stern look. “That would be a lie.”

I looked down at my arms folded on the oilcloth that covered the table. “Not a real lie.” I raised my arms, which were sweat-glued to the oilcloth, and they made a squishing sound as they came loose. “You really are busy with the chickens.” If Mom taught at Tallgrass, she’d want me to go along to help her, which meant I’d see the camp close-up and even meet some Japanese. None of the kids I knew had been inside Tallgrass.

“Rennie,” Mom warned, and I looked down at the wet place where my arms had been. That wasn’t even fuzzy-headed logic. It was a lie, and Mom couldn’t abide a liar.

Dad got up and straightened the strap of his overalls, then took his hat from the hook and put it on. Dad’s face was two-toned, the bottom half tanned, but his forehead was as white as milk from where that hat had shaded it from the sun. “There’s a job of work that needs done. I got to go aid and abet the cows,” he said. He told Mom to do what she wanted, and she said in that case, the teaching was out. The screen door squeaked open, then slammed shut when Dad let go of it, and I felt comforted that the door would announce anybody who tried to sneak into our house, at least anybody who came through the side door.

Mom set up the ironing board and lifted the basket of clothes she’d sprinkled onto the table. She plugged in the iron, and after a minute, she licked the tip of her finger and tested the iron’s heat. I got up and poured cream into the big glass jar that served as a churn and began to turn the paddle, watching the cream thicken and turn yellow as the wooden blades went around. After a while, Mom said, “I’d be stirring up trouble just as sure as you’re stirring up butter.” I knew better than to bring up the subject of her teaching at the internment camp again.

IN THE SPRING OF
1942, the government had bought Tallgrass, an old ranch that had been named for a patch of tall grass that grew in the middle of our short-grass prairie. A few weeks later, hundreds of men arrived to build the internment camp, and folks in Ellis talked about the relocation of California Japanese to Colorado every bit as much as they talked about Pearl Harbor and the price of sugar beets. They didn’t discuss much whether it was right or wrong to force those people, many of them born on American soil, as Dad pointed out, from their homes and into camps. If you pressed them, people said we were at war, and better be safe than sorry. Besides, white people were making sacrifices, too, they said. Our boys were losing their lives in the service of their country, and that was a lot more serious than a Japanese family giving up a farm or a fishing boat in California.

No, the talk around Ellis was about what Tallgrass would do to the community. At first, local people hadn’t minded the idea of a camp going in. They’d gotten construction jobs, and skilled workers had moved into Ellis, some renting spare rooms, although most lived in tents out near the campsite. There’d never been so much money in town, even before the Depression. The drugstores stocked up on first-aid products and tobacco and men’s magazines—and some said on rubbers, since a few hussies had moved into Ellis and rented the rooms above Jay Dee’s Tavern. I wasn’t absolutely sure what rubbers were, but I heard boys joking about them and knew better than to ask my mother. And since I shared Marthalice’s letters with Mom, I knew it wasn’t anything I could write about to my sister.

The cafes stayed open until 2:00
A.M.
to serve supper to the evening shift from Tallgrass. The owner of the dry goods said he could have sold twice as many pairs of work pants and hard-toed shoes, but with all the factories turning out uniforms for the soldiers, he couldn’t get them. The bars never closed, even on Sunday, although you had to go in through the back doors to buy a drink on the Sabbath. Prohibition had been over for a long time, but the bootleggers did a thriving business anyway, because some people preferred the stronger homemade stuff. Frank Martin doubled the price of dago red and still sold all he could produce. I found his empty jars, which boys threw out of their car windows as they drove along the Tallgrass Road, and once, I came across a jar that was full. I was tempted to taste it, but if I did, I was sure I’d die a terrible death. Or worse, one of the Jolly Stitchers might smell strong liquor on my breath, and my soul would be in danger.

By the time the Japanese arrived late in the summer of 1942, the talk in Ellis had changed. Most of the electricians and plumbers and carpenters had been drafted or had moved on to other jobs, building defense plants, and the Japanese were left to finish construction.

So the bottom dropped out of the war business in Ellis, and people turned sour. “If we had a real prison, we’d have wives and kids coming in on visiting day, staying in the tourist courts and eating at the restaurants. But who’s going to come and see a Jap?” asked the man who ran Tom-Tom Motor Court, which had eight cement wigwams with poles sticking out of their tops. “There ain’t nobody fool enough to come to Ellis on a vacation when we got five thousand Nips a mile away.”

“What tourist ever picked Ellis for a vacation anyway?” Dad asked. He pointed out the contractors and salesmen and government officials visiting the camp were going to bring in more business than the few motorists who passed through Ellis on their way to Denver or Colorado Springs, and that the Tom-Tom ought to put up a neon sign and build half a dozen more tepees to accommodate them.