Tallgrass (3 page)

“Besides, everybody’s hoarding gasoline, so there aren’t any tourists,” I piped up. Dad sent me a stern look that told me not to be smart. But later, he said I was right about that.

Some people turned hateful. Mr. Elliot, who ran the other drugstore, put a sign in his window with a cartoon of a Japanese man with teeth like a beaver and slanted eyes,
NO JAPS SERVED
was written on it. Folks came in and pointed to the sign and shook Mr. Elliot’s hand.

One night, somebody broke into the Elliot Drug and stole money out of the cash register, as well as the packs of Sen-Sen and cartons of Lucky Strike. Then he tore the sign in half. Mr. Elliot claimed that proved he’d been robbed by a Japanese person who’d sneaked out of Tallgrass. Sheriff Henry Watrous said the robber might have destroyed the sign so the camp would be blamed. In fact, the sheriff went out to talk to Beaner Jack about it, but Mr. Jack said unless he’d come to arrest Beaner, Sheriff Watrous could just get off his property.

“I don’t understand Beaner,” Dad said when he told us the story. “Why would that boy do such a thing?”

“It’s because he’s a Jack, and they’re meaner than red ants,” I said.

Mom frowned, because she didn’t like me saying unkind things about a person, even a Jack. But Dad agreed. “I reckon that’s about right.”

Then someone set fire to the railroad trestle about five miles from Ellis. The fire burned a long time before it was spotted, and the damage held up the trains for two days. The FBI came, looking for espionage, but the agents couldn’t find any proof of that. “Just vandalism,” one of them concluded. Dad said it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Beaner Jack, but the agent told Dad vandalism wasn’t his department. Most people thought one of the Japanese had burned the trestle, and folks in Ellis were even more resentful about the internment camp.

Then that
Denver Post
reporter who’d been at the depot the day the first Japanese arrived came back to Ellis and wrote a story about how fine life was at Tallgrass. Only half of the inmates were expected to work, he wrote, and even I figured out that didn’t mean anything, because the other half were children and old folks. The Japanese had white people waiting on them in the mess hall, the article claimed, and folks in Ellis were plenty mad about the government coddling the Japanese with good food and feather beds, while their own sons ate rations in foxholes overseas. Dad had told us what the food was like, and I’d seen some of the inmates cutting prairie grass to fill their mattress ticks. The reporter hinted that the government was sending the most dangerous Japanese agents in America to Tallgrass.

“My dad says that’s a fact,” Betty Joyce told me when we talked about the article. I wondered how a dope like Mr. Snow knew anything, when all he did was sit behind the counter every day selling nails and screws and yelling at Betty Joyce and her mom. But I wouldn’t tell my friend that. Betty Joyce had enough troubles without having to defend her father for being a knothead.

After that article was printed, the tension in Ellis got so bad that the mayor called a meeting at the school and invited the head of the camp, Mr. Halleck, to talk to us. Mom tucked Granny into bed and let Mr. Hale, the hired man, stay in the house and listen to the Philco radio, so that he could keep an eye on Granny while Mom and Dad and I went to the meeting. Just before we left, Mr. Hale took Dad aside, and the two of them had a long conversation, Dad nodding and looking serious. Then Dad said, “Good luck to you, sir,” and slapped Mr. Hale on the back and shook his hand.

“What’s that jawing about?” Mom asked as the three of us got into the truck.

Dad said it was too much work to hitch up the team at night, and slow going in the wagon besides. Our Nash automobile was up on blocks because Dad couldn’t get parts for it. So we took the truck after dark. It was a beat-up old truck, which Dad had painted with red house paint and named “Red Boy.” I loved to ride around with Dad in Red Boy. He kept a little sack of hard licorice in the glove compartment for the two of us. Once, when I was waiting for Dad outside the feed store, I ate all the licorice. Then I got out of the truck and picked up black pebbles and put them into the licorice sack. I waited for about five years for Dad to discover what I’d done. Finally, he came into the kitchen one day and said, “I just broke a tooth eating a piece of licorice.” He let me squirm for a full minute before he grinned and said it was the best trick I’d ever pulled on him.

Now, as we drove into Ellis, Dad said, “He’s just got his draft notice, Mother. And the two Romeros went into town this afternoon and signed up. They’re all three of them going to war.” The Romero brothers lived in a shack across the field and had worked our beets for the past three years. Betty Joyce said they made dago red, too, because her dad bought it from them. I asked Dad if they did, and he said, “If I knew the answer to that, I’d have to tell your mother, and she’d be likely to shoot them. Now you wouldn’t want Mother to go to jail because you’re nosy, would you?” That was too complicated for me to follow, but I knew if I let on to Mom about the Romeros making wine, she would spend the rest of her life in the state penitentiary in Canon City. And I’d have to drop out of school to take care of Granny and do all the work around the house. I kept my mouth shut.

After Dad told Mom about Mr. Hale and the Romeros, the two of them were silent for a minute, and I knew they were wishing Buddy hadn’t enlisted, so that he could help with the beets. I did, too. I loved our farm, and a bad year or two might make us lose the place. “Bud would have been drafted by now anyway,” I said.

“We’ll make do.” Mom used to say that when our region was part of the dust bowl. Back then, the dirt and wind ruined our crops, and we barely held on. “With the Lord’s help, we’ll make do, Loyal,” she’d say.

When Dad told her the Lord could do His part by bringing rain, Mom said not to blaspheme. The rain finally did come, and Dad said he supposed the Almighty was better late than never. Mom replied if he went to church once in a while, the Lord might not treat him like a stranger. It wasn’t fair that the dust bowl years, when men tramped the country looking for jobs, ended just before the war. Now there was plenty of work but nobody to do it. I’d told Dad I thought God’s timing wasn’t too good on that score, either, and Dad had laughed and said not to let Mom hear me say that. He’d ruffled my hair with his knuckles. Now that Buddy was gone, I was Dad’s pal.

Folks came from all over the county to attend the meeting, which was held in the biggest classroom in the school. Not everybody could find seats, so some of the men stood up along the wall and little kids sat on their mothers’ laps or on the tops of the desks. Government officials showed up, too, trying to act like local people. But you could tell who they were because they wore suits and ties, and instead of chewing toothpicks, they smoked cigarettes in holders clinched in their teeth, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If I ever smoked cigarettes, I’d use a holder, a long black Bakelite one, set with rhinestones. Yeah, I thought. I’d take it with me when I went to the White House to visit Mrs. Roosevelt. I glanced at Dad, who was lighting a roll-your-own, and tried to think of him using a cigarette holder. The idea was so funny that I had to hold back a laugh. It came out as a snort, and I sank into my seat, hoping nobody had heard me.

After the Methodist preacher gave a prayer thanking God for backing our troops in the war, we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Then Mr. Flalleck, who’d been brought in by the government from Kansas City to run the camp, went to the teacher’s desk, where a lectern with a seal of the U.S. government on it had been set up, and he began reading facts about Tallgrass—the number of inmates, the number of guards, the amount of money spent on construction, “which some of you folks here got the advantage of,” he said. The camp was designed like an army base, with an administration area and a barracks area, he told us. “The rooms are nice, but I’m here to tell you no one’s being coddled.” He’d read the
Denver Post
article, too. Nobody smiled, so he cleared his throat. “We got a four-strand double barbed-wire fence all around the place for your safety.” He paused to let that sink in, but instead of being reassured, people looked disgusted, because there wasn’t a boy in Ellis who couldn’t get under bobwire. “Sixteen-foot watchtowers, too,” he added. “And guards assigned to them with rifles.” A few men nodded at that, but I thought about the girl at the depot who was my age, the one in saddle shoes. I figured she must feel awful living in an encampment with guards ready to shoot her. I thought the government ought to let her go back home, along with the rest of the women and children. But maybe they wanted to be with the men. If Dad were locked up someplace, Mom and I would want to go with him.

“You got a jail there, do you?” someone called out.

“We don’t need one. We think these are peaceable folks. We don’t expect one bit of trouble out of them,” Mr. Halleck said.

“Then why not leave them in California? How come you shipped them all to Colorado and locked them up?” asked Redhead Joe Lee. “If they’re so all-fired trustworthy, why didn’t you let them go about their business and save the taxpayers a lot of money?”

Dad laughed at that, but Oscar Kruger shifted in his little-kid seat and told Mr. Lee to shut up. “Ain’t you never heard of Pearl Harbor?”

“I guarantee you none of those folks out at Tallgrass dropped the bombs,” Mr. Lee said.

“A Jap’s a Jap,” Mr. Kruger told him.

“I guess that means a German’s a German. Maybe we should have a camp for Germans,” Mr. Lee taunted.

Dad touched Mr. Lee’s arm to cool him off, but I knew he wanted to say “Good one!” I gave Mr. Lee a thumbs-up sign. He ignored it, of course. Why would he care what I thought? I wrapped my fingers around my thumb so that if anybody had seen me make the sign, the person would think I was just messing around with my hand.

“Nobody can’t say I’m not one hundred percent American,” said Mr. Kruger. When he stood up, he bumped his knee against the desk and muttered something in German.

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.