Tallgrass (23 page)

“Now,” Mom warned him. She added, “People are upset because Ellis boys are getting killed, some of them by the Japanese. And the people out at Tallgrass, they’re the face of death. So it’s easy to hate them.”

“It’s Susan Reddick, too,” I added. “People still think one of the Japanese killed her.”

Dad and Mom exchanged a look over my head, and Mom said, “She’s right. Until Sheriff Watrous arrests a man, that murder hangs over Tallgrass.”

“Maybe one of the Japanese really did kill her,” I said.

“There’s that, too.” Mom went over to the stove and turned the gas knob, and fire flared up. She stared at the stove absently, then focused on the flame and shook her head. “Now, why did I turn on that burner?” Her hand slowly twisted the knob until the gas went off. “I don’t suppose you did any good with Gus Snow.”

“Not that I could tell. I probably did Betty Joyce some harm, and for that I sure am sorry. I don’t imagine that old fool will ever let her go back to school now.”

“At least you tried. What is it that makes people so stubborn?”

“You’re asking me?”

Mom sat down at the table and put her hand over Dad’s. “I never saw you stubborn when you weren’t right about a thing.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Once Dad made up his mind, he almost never changed it, even if you all but proved him wrong. Dad was as stubborn as a person could get. When I was in sixth grade, my class went to a Halloween picture show in Lamar that didn’t end until midnight. Dad said I had to be home by ten. Mom talked to him, but he wouldn’t change his mind, and I was the only kid who didn’t go. I knew Dad felt bad about that, and he bought me a sack of licorice the next time we were in town. But he wouldn’t change his mind.

“You remember your mother said that.” Dad got up and poured us all more coffee. I’d managed to get down the first cup, but I groaned to myself at the thought of having to drink more. Still, now that I’d passed this ritual into adulthood, I wouldn’t for anything admit I didn’t like coffee. I gulped down as much as I could, then emptied the rest of my coffee into the sink, rinsed the cup, and set it on the drain board. I started for the stairs, stopping when Dad said, “There’s something not right with Gus.”

“He’s a drunk is what it is. And even before that, he wasn’t much to speak of. The Stitchers never could understand why Tess

married him. I remember Bird Smith said at the wedding, ’How’d you like to go to bed with Gus Snow? That’s the acid test.’ It might be the only time I ever agreed with her.” Mom glanced up and saw that I was still in the room and clamped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my stars!”

Dad laughed. “Like you said, Rennie’s getting to be a regular woman.”

“Well, I never intended for her to hear that.”

“He could make me throw up. I don’t even like being in the same room with him. He smells,” I said.

“You can say that again.” Mom exchanged a glance with Dad.

Dad told us he meant Mr. Snow had changed recently. “Maybe that mule did something to Gus’s brain. Of course, that’s assuming he’s got one. I’m saying there’s something not right in his head.”

Mom thought that over and asked if Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce were in danger.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Mom took a handkerchief out of her pocket and touched it to her eyes. Then she blew her nose. “I wish the Stitchers could do something. I’ve thought and thought about it, but you can’t make a quilt for a person just because you don’t like her husband. Of course, she could use it to smother him.”

Dad shrugged and stood up. “And you can’t go to the sheriff and have a man arrested because he talks back to his wife and daughter.”

“Well, you ought to be able to. Maybe we could if men didn’t make all the laws.”

“Perhaps you should run for the state legislature, Mother.”

Mom dismissed Dad with a wave of her hand and looked up at him, but Dad wasn’t smiling. “I’ll do that,” she said, “right after chickens fly south.”

I NEVER KNEW FOR
sure how Betty Joyce returned to school, but I always wondered whether Mr. Yamamoto told Miss Ord what he’d overheard at the hardware store, and Miss Ord did something about it. Betty Joyce returned midway through the fall semester, after football season was under way.

There wasn’t anything more important in Ellis than football, and it wasn’t just the high school kids who got carried away with it. Everybody in town and the surrounding countryside went to the home games and drove to the other schools for out-of-town matches. Ellis had always supported its high school team, even when it wasn’t very good, which was most of the time. This year, however, it appeared that Ellis High School had a chance at the championship. Not the state championship, of course—the Denver schools always won that—but the unofficial championship of southeastern Colorado. The Ellis Chiefs beat Lamar, our archrival, and Limon, which always clobbered us. And then we beat La Junta, whose team was the powerhouse in our part of the state.

People in Ellis went crazy with excitement. It wasn’t just local pride; it was a way to forget the war. Stores put up signs supporting Ellis. Living room windows had pictures of the fighting Chiefs wearing feathers of blue and orange, the Ellis school colors. Even Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce strung blue and orange crepe paper streamers across the front of the hardware store. A farmer wrote “Go Ellis” in white rocks ten feet high on a bluff just east of town. Another painted his tractor orange and put on blue overalls and drove the tractor to town.

Tod Perkins, our quarterback and captain of the team, who’d been set to join the Marine Corps when he turned eighteen on October 13, decided to wait until the end of football season to enlist. That was after a group of Ellis businessmen called on his father at the Perkins farm and told him Tod would do more patriotic good playing for Ellis for a few more weeks than he could in boot camp. Dad thought there was an offer of next year’s fertilizer included. Folks said they’d have given Tod a convertible automobile if there had been any cars available. When Mr. Elliot announced to an assembly at school that Tod was staying on, he said, “Tod, that’s with one
d,
like God,” and everybody clapped. That’s how important football was in Ellis.

Under Tod, the Ellis Chiefs won every game they played. We didn’t win by much—an extra point, a lucky interception. Still, people saw it as the Lord’s will, and they began to think the high school might have a perfect season, which would have been the first time in memory. It seemed there wasn’t anything that could beat the Ellis team—nothing, that is, except the Tallgrass Buffaloes, the team from the internment camp high school.

I thought it was too bad the government wouldn’t let the kids from the camp attend the local schools. Maybe we’d have all gotten along better if they had. Or maybe not. Still, if the Japanese boys had gone to Ellis High, there’s no question we would have had the best football team in southeastern Colorado and maybe even the state.

It was a shame Ellis High hadn’t played Tallgrass at the beginning of the season. The game wouldn’t have mattered much then, because nobody had expected Ellis to do so well. But we were scheduled to play the Buffaloes the last game of the year, when Ellis’s perfect season was at stake. And by then, it was obvious that Tallgrass High School threatened to ruin it. That’s because the internment camp hadn’t lost a game, either, and the Tallgrass Buffaloes weren’t just lucky; they were good. The Buffaloes were coordinated and tough and aggressive. They didn’t make mistakes. They won their games not by a point, but by two or three touchdowns. Of course, I went to Ellis High and rooted for my school. Dad and Mom had gone there, too, and like everybody in Ellis, they were behind the high school team. Still, Dad always liked an underdog, and he said he admired the boys at Tallgrass for the way they played their hearts out. Dad and Carl had a two-dollar bet on the final game, and I figured Dad would pay off Carl no matter which team won.

A couple of weeks before that game, there were threats against Tallgrass. Signs went up saying
ELLIS HIGH REMEMBERS PEARL HARBOR.
Kids threw rocks at the Tallgrass team’s bus, and people started talking about avenging Susan Reddick. Men who hung out at the feed store and the barbershop said it wasn’t patriotic to play the Japanese. Mr. Tappan put the guards at the camp on overtime.

“How come my boy’s to play football with the Nips when he’s about to get drafted to fight them in the Pacific?” Lum Smith asked.

“It’s un-American,” Mr. Kruger added.

The Monday before the Saturday game, the two of them called a meeting of the parents of the Ellis High team. That night, seven fathers told the coach that their sons wouldn’t be playing football against the Tallgrass Buffaloes.

The coach went to the school board, which called an emergency meeting and announced that the stadium was closed to Japanese players. On game day, the Ellis Chiefs showed up. So did the Tallgrass Buffaloes, but the school board wouldn’t let them onto the field. Ellis claimed it won the game by default and declared itself unbeaten. The team went to the state finals, where it lost its first game. Ellis still claimed to be the football champion of southeastern Colorado, but that was unofficial, and there was always a taint to it.

Tod Perkins’s father was not at the meeting, and Tod was not one of the seven who refused to play the Japanese. A few days after football season ended, Carl was at the camp when Tod walked out there and asked to see Jimmy Matoba, the captain of the Tallgrass team. “Dang, boy, I sure did look forward to that match. We would have whipped you,” Tod told Jimmy.

“Nah, you’d have lost bad. We had you beat in a walk.” Jimmy gave him a crooked grin, then kicked at the dirt with his shoe. “I heard you were joining up.”

“I thought I might.”

“Me, too. Maybe the army’ll let us play against each other.”

Tod considered that. “I was thinking maybe we could be on the same team.”

“Yeah, how ’bout that?” And they shook hands.

BETTY JOYCE AND
i had planned to go together to that game against Tallgrass. By then, she had been attending classes for nearly a month.

Betty Joyce had been out of school for three weeks when Miss Ord asked me whether she had quit for good. I told her about Mr. Snow’s accident and how he had kept Betty Joyce at the store, and then Miss Ord asked whether it would help if she spoke to Mr. Snow.

I shrugged. “He doesn’t like people telling him what to do.”

Miss Ord talked to him anyway, and Betty Joyce told me her dad was as rude to Miss Ord as he had been to Mr. Yamamoto. I don’t know what happened after that, but a week later, I came home from school, to find Mom in my room, peering into my closet. “We’ll have to make room in here and clean out one of your dresser drawers, too. You’ll be having company.”

“Marthalice is coming home?”

Mom shook her head. “Betty Joyce is going to be living with us for a while.” She sat down on the bed. “Sheriff Watrous was here this afternoon. Your clad and I think you’re big enough to know what’s going on. Besides, you ought not to pester Betty Joyce about it. She can tell you if she wants to.” Mom patted the bed, and I sat down beside her. Outside, the chickens clucked, but Mom was figuring out what to say, so she didn’t even look out the window.

Finally, she said, “I guess I’ll tell you all of it. Doc Enyeart and the sheriff went to see Mr. Snow this morning, and they found an illegal supply of morphine, enough to supply a whole bunch of dope fiends. Mr. Snow is a morphine addict. That’s why he’s been so cussed mean. Doc gave him a little bit of morphine right after he got kicked in the head by that mule, but he cut it off a long time ago. The sheriff says there’s morphine been stolen from the camp, and he thinks somebody sold it to the person who sold it to Gus Snow. The Jack boy would be my choice for the middleman. It seems like when nobody’s around, Mr. Snow beats up on both Mrs. Snow and Betty Joyce. I don’t like to think what they’ve gone through.” Mom ran her hand across the quilt—a Grandmother’s Flower Garden that Granny had pieced and the Jolly Stitchers had quilted. She stopped at a worn place where the stitching had come loose and worried at the raveled area with her finger. “Do you know what a dope fiend is?”

I nodded. I’d read about them in comic books and heard about them on radio programs, and I was horrified that my best friend had had to live with a father whose mind was crazed from drugs. Dad had figured out that there was something wrong with Mr. Snow’s brain, but who would have thought he took dope? Betty Joyce must have been scared all the time. I’d been an idiot to think I could read her mind. “Did he hurt Betty Joyce ?”

“They’ll both be all right, thank the Lord.”

“Is Mr. Snow going to jail?”

“The sheriff told Mr. Snow he could do that or he could put himself in a hospital and get help. Mrs. Snow is so worn-out, she’s going to her sister’s place for a few weeks, until she’s up to running the hardware again—that is, if she wants to. The sheriff asked if we’d take Betty Joyce until her mother’s recovered. I said of course we would.”

That afternoon, we drove into Ellis for Betty Joyce. Mr. Snow was already gone, and we waited at the store until Mrs. Snow’s sister, La Verne Booth, came from Pueblo for her. “If I’d have known . . . Why didn’t you write me, Tessie?” Mrs. Booth asked. Mrs. Booth was a fat woman, and together, the two sisters looked like Mr. and Mrs. Sprat.

“I was ashamed,” Mrs. Snow replied, so softly that we could barely hear her.

“But what about Betty Joyce? Didn’t you think about her?”

Mrs. Snow didn’t answer, only hugged her shoulders together.

“She couldn’t help it,” Betty Joyce said, talking to nobody in particular.

Mrs. Booth opened the car door and said to Mrs. Snow, “I want you to sit up here in front, honeypot, right next to me.” After her sister was in the car, Mrs. Booth shut the door and told us, “No wonder she never figured out what was wrong with Gus.” Patting Mrs. Snow’s shoulder through the window, Mrs. Booth added, “Tess is awfully fine, but she’s such a timid little thing. She don’t know a morphine addict from a gum chewer.”