Tallgrass (22 page)

“Goddamn Nip. I wish I had a dog to sic on you! You ever come near my store again and I’ll break your damn yellow neck!” Mr. Snow called. His face was so red with rage that I thought he might get out of bed and chase after Mr. Yamamoto. Instead, he let go of the iron bar and flopped down on the bed.

“Go,” Betty Joyce mouthed. She was too beaten down by her father to be embarrassed. I wanted to say something to show I understood, but I didn’t understand. My insides curled up as I thought of how that Japanese man must feel having those horrid words flung at him. Mr. Yamamoto seemed like a nice person who just wanted to buy a hammer. He didn’t deserve the insults. If I’d been Mr. Yamamoto, I would have gone into the back room and pounded Mr. Snow.

Betty Joyce’s father had always been surly, but he’d gotten worse since the mule had kicked him. I didn’t know what to say, so I muttered, “I’ll see you” to Betty Joyce, who nodded but didn’t look me in the eye, and then I went outside, letting the door bang behind me. I took a deep breath to rid my lungs of the stale air of the hardware store, but nothing could get the insults out of my head.

Through the screen, I heard Mr. Snow call, “Tessie, you get yourself in here. Don’t you know no better than to let some damn Jap put his hands all over Betty Joyce? You want a smack? Don’t you know nothing? Betty Joyce, fetch my medicine.”

OUTSIDE, BEANER AND DANNY
were going through the junked auto parts in the yard behind the store. Besides hardware, Mr. Snow used to sell pieces off wrecked cars and trucks, but most of them had gone to the scrap-metal drives. Only a few lay near the store.

“You in there talking to ’Axel’ Sally?” Beaner asked, kicking a broken axel from an old auto so that I got the joke, only it wasn’t funny. Betty Joyce didn’t have anything more to do with Axis Sally, who was the German version of Tokyo Rose, than I did.

Danny slapped Beaner on the back and said, “Good one.”

I squirmed. Betty Joyce was now in a class with Darlene Potts, fair game for jokes from the likes of Beaner and Danny. So that they wouldn’t say anything more about Betty Joyce, I told them, “Mr. Snow’ll cuss you out if he sees you in his stuff.”

“Let him cuss. That old jackass can’t get out of bed. He doesn’t care anyway. He’s beholden to us,” Beaner said.

“Yeah. Besides, he’d rather cuss the Japs.”

“Not everybody’s a Jap lover like your old man,” Beaner said. “Course, maybe you like them squint-eyes, too. You and your sister. I hear she likes just about anything.” His eyes slid over to Danny, and he punched Danny’s arm. “With those Nips working on your farm, maybe you want what the Reddick kid got.” Beaner leered at me, making me take a step backward.

“Maybe she already got it,” Danny said.

I thought about what Miss Ord had told me about not arguing, even though Beaner had insulted my sister, and started to walk away.

“Where you going?” Danny called.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” It was a stupid thing to say, and I was sorry the instant the words left my mouth, because it was a challenge. I’d had to fight my way out of plenty of dumb remarks like that when I was a kid. Beaner had lost interest in me, however. He’d spotted something on the ground, picked it up, and put it into his pocket.

But Danny looked at me oddly. “How’s that Jap girl you got working for you?” He winked and moved his tongue over his lips, then turned to Beaner and asked, “What’s that you found ?”

I hurried off down the Tallgrass Road before they could turn their attention back to me, and in a few minutes, I caught up with Mr. Yamamoto. As I came alongside him, he touched the brim of his hat and changed his stride to match mine.

“Mr. Snow isn’t a very nice man,” I said, a little winded.

Mr. Yamamoto slowed to let me catch my breath and looked at me, not understanding.

“He’s the man in the hardware store, the one in the back room. He got kicked in the head by a mule. That’s why he’s in bed. But that’s not why he’s a jerk. It’s his nature.”

“Ah, him.” Mr. Yamamoto smiled.

“He yells at Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce all the time. He’s so mean that he won’t let Betty Joyce go to school anymore. So you shouldn’t take it personally.”

“We’re used to it. It is hard to lose a son.”

I shook my head and explained that Eddie wasn’t Mr. Snow’s son. He was Mrs. Snow’s nephew, and he worked in the hardware store until he got so fed up with Mr. Snow that he joined the navy. “And what Mr. Snow said about Eddie getting killed by kamikazes, that’s hogwash. Eddie died of appendicitis. Eddie told me once hard times turned Mr. Snow into a drinking man, but everybody’s been through hard times in Ellis, and not everybody’s a drunk.”

“I don’t believe that man’s just a drunk,” Mr. Yamamoto said. I waited for him to explain, but Mr. Yamamoto only shrugged.

“I bet my dad would loan you a hammer,” I said.

“There are hammers at the camp. I just wanted one of my own.”

A truck came toward us, and Mr. Yamamoto stepped down into the ditch, pulling me with him. After it passed, he let go of me. “You never know what drivers do when they see us. Sometimes they swerve. . .. They might think you are Japanese, too.” He seemed embarrassed and fanned the air with his hat to get rid of the dust that had boiled up behind the truck. “You’re the Stroud girl, aren’t you?” he asked. “I see you when I walk past your farm.”

I nodded.

“Your father is a good man. He was the first farmer to hire boys from the camp.”

“Others do that now. Mr. Gardner’s one.” I wanted Mr. Yamamoto to know that we weren’t all like Mr. Snow. “Plenty of people like the Japanese—Sheriff Watrous and Mr. Lee, who owns the drugstore. And there’s Miss Ord, who’s my history teacher this year. She knew a lot of Japanese in California. You’d like her.”

He chuckled. “I do like her. She teaches American history at the camp on Saturdays. My wife and I are in her class.” He leaned forward and smiled. “She told us about you. She said there are girls at your school who tried to hurt you because of your father. I will tell her I met you, and that you are a fine young lady.” Then he grew very serious. “I know that the son of Mr. Stroud was captured by the Germans, and I am very sorry. I hope that he will be all right.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. People I didn’t know were always telling me they were sorry about Buddy, but it surprised me that Mr. Yamamoto knew my brother was in a prisoner of war camp. “Thank you.”

We walked on slowly now, because our drive was only a few yards away. I kicked a rock ahead of me, and when I reached it, I kicked it again. Then we came to the turnoff, and Mr. Yamamoto said, “I will also tell Miss Ord about the little girl in the hardware store who no longer goes to school.” When I looked at him curiously, he added, “I heard you talking to her before I went inside.”

He bowed, and I bowed, too, putting one hand in front of my waist and the other behind my back and bending in half like a sack of sugar.

DAD SLAMMED HIS FIST
on the table. “Gus pret’ near threw me out of the store, or he would have if he could have got out of the dang bed. By Dan, Mother, by Dan!” Dad stopped and took a deep breath and calmed himself. He didn’t often get riled up like that. “I went in the back room. It smelled like a bunch of dead owls in there. I said to him, ’Gus, we’ve been friends a long time, since we were boys. That’s too long for me not to speak my mind to you.’” Dad stopped and shook his head. “I didn’t care much for him then, and I care even less for him now, but I didn’t tell him that. I believe these days, where he walks, nothing grows.”

“I didn’t know he could walk just now,” Mom said.

“Don’t put too fine a point on it, Mother.” Dad held his coffee cup in his right hand. The index finger of his left hand traced a rose on the oilcloth.

“I don’t know how Tess and Betty Joyce have put up with him all these years.” Mom absentmindedly picked up a spoon and stirred her coffee. But she’d given up sugar for the duration and had only coffee in her cup. “You want a cup of coffee, Rennie?”

I looked at her, surprised. I’d never had coffee. Mom always said it would stunt my growth. Besides, kids didn’t sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee. Offering me a cup was almost like saying I was grown up. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“You’ve been carrying a woman’s load for some time now. I guess you’re old enough to drink coffee.” She got up and poured me half a cup of coffee and set it down on the table, pushing the cream pitcher toward me. She told me that I might want to doctor it some.

I tasted the coffee, which was bitter, and I didn’t like it much, but I wouldn’t tell her that for the world. Instead, I said it was fine the way it was. If drinking foul coffee was what it took to be an adult, I’d do it.

“I reckon coffee always tastes better with a cigarette,” Dad said.

“Loyal, you watch it!”

Dad told me, “I guess you’re not so growed up as your mother thinks.” Dad took out the makings and rolled a cigarette, struck a match on his overalls and lighted up.

We waited while he took a couple of puffs and laid his cigarette in the ashtray. Dad hadn’t gone to the hardware store right away. He’d waited more than a week after I’d stopped to see Betty Joyce, hoping maybe that it wouldn’t be necessary for him to talk to Mr. Snow, that Betty Joyce might go back to school after all. Dad also wanted to give Mr. Snow a chance to settle down after Mr. Yamamoto’s visit. There was no reason to step into a hornet’s nest, he’d said. So he waited until Saturday morning, when he’d needed to go to the hardware to buy some wire anyway.

“You going to tell us what he said, or just come up with ways to lure your younger daughter into sin?” Mom asked, nodding at the cigarette that was smoldering away. She took a sip of coffee. Dad and I did, too, and we sat there, just like three old farmers. I saw the rest of my life stretched out in front of me, seventy-five more years of sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. I was convinced those would be long years if I didn’t develop a taste for the stuff.

Dad picked up his cigarette and smoked it down to the end, then snubbed it out. “I said, ’Gus, you had your time to finish high school, and it wasn’t easy on your folks, ’cause they could have used you at home. But they wanted you to get an education. Betty Joyce is smart as a whip. You let her finish high school and maybe college, and she’ll get a good-paying job and help you out in your old age, do it a lot better than selling saws and rakes.’” He picked up the tobacco bag and wound the gold drawstring around his finger. That sounded pretty good to me. I couldn’t see how Mr. Snow wouldn’t get the logic of it, except that he was crazy.

“Then what?” Mom prodded.

“Then Tessie says, ’She will, Gus. You know she will. She’ll put us on easy street.’ And Betty Joyce chimed in she would at that.”

I sipped the coffee again. Mom pushed the sugar bowl toward me, and I took a spoon from the spooner in the middle of the table and stirred in a day’s ration of sugar. I liked the idea of stirring coffee. This time, the coffee tasted better.

“And?” Mom asked. “I’ll pick a Jolly Stitcher over you any day of the week for someone to talk to.”

Dad nodded his head up and down, thinking. “He told Tessie to be still and said right back at me he thought he wouldn’t take any advice from a Jap lover.” Dad glanced at me and lowered his voice. “Then Gus said he guessed since we’d been friends so long, he could speak his mind, too, and he asked me what kind of a father I was that I let my daughter be around Japanese boys, who’d give her a dose of what Susan Reddick got. He said, ’My guess is that you wouldn’t hinder them boys from what they wanted to do.’” That was an awful thing for Dad to have to repeat.

Mom got up then and went to the sink and stood there, her back to us. “Well, what do you expect?” she asked angrily.

“Now, Mary, we hashed this out a long time ago—”

“Oh, I’m not mad at you, Loyal. I’m just saying we ought not to have expected cream from a bull. That man just spreads iniquity.” She turned around, her arms crossed, rubbing her hands along her forearms as if she were cold. “I’ll be so glad when this war’s over and the Japanese are gone and things are back to normal. I’d just like to sit down with my friends and sew again the way we used to, without arguing about the people in the camp all the time, without having to take sides. I get so tired of the meanness, the hatefulness. We’ve got a boy in a prison camp in Germany. Now that’s something to worry about. But some people here only think about hate. Do you know, three Japanese women came to church last Sunday, and one of the elders told me he wished they wouldn’t come back, because they might be spies. Now I ask you, what’s there to spy on at the Methodist church? You think Tojo cares about the sermon? I couldn’t hardly understand it myself.”

Dad chuckled.

“I told Afton Gardner about how those three were treated, and she said she’d invite them to the Mormon church, if they had a Mormon church in Ellis, because the Mormons knew a thing or two about persecution. I never knew she was a Mormon.”

“The Gardners are good people.” Dad paused. “I don’t see that things’ll hardly ever be back to normal, not for a long time anyway. They’ve gotten worse, too, from when the Japanese people first arrived, and I can’t put a reason to it. I thought folks would settle down after a bit, especially since so many of the men from the camp have joined up. That shows they’re as American as we are. And every one of the Japanese boys who’ve gone to work on the farms around here has done a fine job. The farmers can’t say enough good things about them. You’d think that would count for something. But it doesn’t. I expect they’d try to storm the camp again if they weren’t so afraid of you out there in your nightgown.”