The Magic of Ordinary Days (8 page)

What surprised me most were not the interns' differences in dress and appearance. What surprised me was their impeccable demeanor. Despite their imprisonment, despite the fact that we were at war with the country of their ancestors, every one of the workers demonstrated the finest of manners. Every day they pulled the dry bean pods and shelled the beans. They pulled up fat onions out of the ground by hand and cropped the tops with sheep shears, grueling work to say the least. But as they boarded the trucks in the evening, even the oldest and most stooped workers still wore smiles on their faces, smiles that to my amazement seemed true.

After the first few days of harvest, I told Ray over breakfast, “Today I'd like to come and watch.”

He looked confused.

“To watch what you're doing, to see what it is to harvest.”

Ray stopped eating. “I don't understand. Everything's going just fine.”

Now I stopped eating, too. “I won't interfere. I just want to learn.”

He looked into his plate. “But it's not needed.”

Obviously I had hurt him instead of flattered him by my interest. In the past, I had found most people more than willing to show off their skills and knowledge. I thought others enjoyed demonstrating what they knew, but not Ray. He didn't want me to learn anything about farming firsthand, only through his infrequent and bland descriptions.

“Never mind,” I said and picked up my fork again. “I'm sorry I mentioned it.”

That night, after all the workers had left and Ray came in exhausted and dirty, he took me out beside the barn and showed me the collapsible wooden crates packed with fresh onions. He offered to drive me over to the place where the crates were stored for months at a time in adobe storage buildings. But I could tell he was only doing so to placate me, so I declined. And after that, although I'd been on the farm for only two weeks, I'd already decided to keep my distance from the business of farming.

The next day, I began work on the flower garden. I pulled up the old faded whirligigs, set them aside for repainting, and gathered up the colored stones that Ray's mother had collected. As Ray drove the first truckload of onion crates away toward the storage buildings, I chopped up the deep-rooted weeds in the old flower garden and prepared the soil for bulbs. These things my mother had taught me. Always, she had liked the feel of dirt between her fingers, and of course the results of her efforts—blooming flowers. Even after she had hired on household help, she cared for the flower gardens herself, often taking us girls outside with her. Mother taught us how to break up the frost-hardened topsoil after winter, how to turn and mix the dirt beds in spring, how to plant seeds and bulbs, how to shape and prune the emerging new plants. It was one of the few times we were allowed to get dirty.

In the kitchen, I expanded my efforts beyond basic dishes. Once I cooked two Mexico-style omelets from a recipe I found in the library cookbook. While he ate, Ray glanced up at me after every bite or two. He also made overly kind remarks about the quality of my cooking, but when he thought I wasn't looking, I could see him picking out the chopped onions I had folded into the eggs.

In the afternoons, I walked about the house, outbuildings, and stock pond. Sometimes I could see the dark spots of the workers' bodies far off in the distant fields. I worked in the flower garden and then made my way to the back shed. There I found other artifacts—a wire rug beater, a box of fabric scraps that had probably been collected for quilting, an aluminum teakettle, and a parlor carpet broom. The hound, whose name I found out was Franklin, dubbed in honor of our President, kept me company and often smacked his loose lips or rolled on his back as I was expanding my collection. But I wondered what to do with it all. Certainly the artifacts should be kept for future generations to study and enjoy, perhaps even in a museum. But whom could I trust to do that? Each day I was adding to the burlap bag until it rose to the brim with the pieces I thought were most worth salvaging. But what then? Perhaps, on my next trip to town, I would inquire of any collectors in the area.

Over dinner, I said to Ray, “Martha told me your grandparents once built a tarpaper shack near here. Do you know where the remains are?”

Ray finished chewing. “I know where they used to be.”

“Used to be?”

He shrugged. “I tore it down and plowed under the ground about two springs ago.”

I had to laugh. “You have to be joking.”

Now he looked confused. “It was just a bunch of weathered old boards. That's all that was left.” His lips came together, barely moving as he spoke. “It wasn't anything to look at, I tell you.”

“In the ground,” I told him. “There's no telling what pieces of history might have been in the ground, under those boards.”

He cleared his throat. “I needed that land for crops. People overseas are starving.”

Of course, I knew this already. “In just one look inside one of your sheds, I found valuable antiques. There's no telling what I might have found around that shack.”

He bumped the edge of the table with his fist. “Never thought of it.”

“Well, it's done.” I found myself shaking my head, then made myself stop. “Ray, I've noticed that you have no family photos, no personal items that belonged to your parents in this house.” I deliberately didn't mention Daniel. “Where do you keep those things?”

He cleared his throat again. “Don't rightly know. Better ask Martha.”

I couldn't hide my frustration. “You have nothing?”

He shrugged, then rose from the table. He took long strides across the room and clumped through the door of the bunkroom. He let the door close heavily behind him.

The next evening, with Franklin sniffing along at my heels, I walked one of the narrow roadways, down rutted tracks between fields. In the distance, I could see the workers. Bent over the ground, their bodies hooked like boomerangs, they were working later than usual that day. As I drew close to a recently dug onion field, I could hear the hum of their conversations marked with occasional spurts of laughter. Two young women stood apart from the rest of the workers, directly in my path. Engrossed in pursuit and moving ever so cautiously, they were either studying the ground or something near to it. One of the girls held a notebook in her hand. They didn't see me move near.

I took another step closer, and they jumped together. “Excuse us,” one of them said. Then they turned away and began to walk off.

“No please,” I said. “What are you studying?”

They turned back, and one girl answered with a smile, “Butterflies.”

Standing and facing me together now, I saw that they were nearly identical in stature, with the same shade of glossy, blue-black hair fixed in bubble-cut style. They wore checkered cotton work shirts and slacks over sneakers. The older of the two had a fuller face with a few pockmarks on her cheeks. The younger of the two had a face perfectly oval in shape and not a mark on it. A practice rug and a masterpiece, I thought. And certainly they were sisters.

“Do you collect?”

They laughed together, at the same pitch and stopping at the same moment. But there the similarities ended. Lorelei, the younger of the two Umahara sisters, introduced herself, flipped a curl around her ear, and said, “Rose could never kill anything.” She held my eyes with a firm, bold-eyed gaze and spoke with a siren of a voice that told me she didn't bow to anyone.

Rose's voice had half the strength of her sister‘s, and she talked with crossed arms and lowered lids, as if uncertainty were her frequent companion. “We log our observations in this notebook.”

“I'm Livvy.” Turning back toward the house, I said, “I live in the farmhouse.”

When both girls looked back down to the ground, back to the place where earlier they had been studying, I asked, “And what did I cause you to miss?”

Again they laughed. “We thought it was the Purple Hairstreak, a butterfly only found in Colorado or nearby,” Rose answered. “But upon closer look, we found that it wasn't.”

“We look for butterflies,” Lorelei said. “It's our hobby.”

I knew little of insects and honestly had never found them of much interest, but I didn't want them to leave yet. “Are there many species?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Thousands of varieties,” answered Lorelei. “And the names are as wonderful as the creatures themselves.”

“Silver-Spotted Skippers,” said Rose.

“Eyed Hawkmoths,” said Lorelei.

“And Speckled Woods.”

My mother had once felt the same way about flower names. I remembered how the words had rolled off her tongue like silk off the bolt. Lady Slippers, Monkeyflowers, Snapdragons, and Johnny Jump-ups. At the university, the professors who genuinely loved their subjects were always the most interesting teachers. Enthusiasm for a topic made it enticing to others. And these two girls were clearly crazy for butterflies.

“Lovely,” I said.

After a moment of silence, Franklin weaseled up between the girls and me, sniffing over the ground and effectively scaring off any butterflies that might still have been near. Lorelei folded the notebook and stuck it under her arm. Rose glanced back over her shoulder, toward the other workers. Clearly they were reluctant to talk longer, but before they left, I invited them to come visit me at the house. “I have cold bottles of Coca-Cola in the icebox that I'd love to share,” I told them.

They smiled, nodded, and said they would come, but I didn't know whether to plan on it or not. They turned back to the field, and I headed back to the house. Before I left their sight completely, however, I looked back over my shoulder. As they walked away, both girls, their silhouettes dark against the deepening sunshine, stepped about on tiptoes, around the dandelions, looking for what I could only presume were more butterflies. The sight of them together, backed by the sunlight, made me turn and walk away even faster.

Abby and Bea. Only a few hours' travel away in Denver, they might as well have been oceans away.

Six

The U.S. forces infiltrated Germany for the first time in mid-September, and we in the U.S. heard details of the offensive over the next few days by radio and newspapers. The progress made an Allied victory in Europe seem inevitable, but in the Pacific, over nine thousand men died in eleven days of fighting to capture just one small island named Peleliu. Even as the end of the war drew nearer, the news kept getting bleaker.

The following Sunday, Ray convinced me to attend church, something that, for reasons not yet clear to me, I had been avoiding. But I longed for a change of company, so I donned what had always been my favorite Sunday suit and joined Ray, who wore his brown suit again for the first time since our wedding day.

Outside the church building, I saw many parked cars and trucks, all of them covered in the layer of brown dust that had already grown familiar to me, grime that disguised the true colors of most everything. Groups of people worked their way into the building, letting me know that despite the outward appearance of emptiness down the web of roads, indeed many people lived there. Before the service began, I met some of the congregation members and noticed that here, wartime fashion had yet to be introduced. In the face of plain prints and faded hats, I became conscious of the quality of my suit. Ray introduced me as his wife, and judging by the surprised looks we received, I didn't think he had told anyone I was coming. At Ray's side, however, I received a much different response from the one I'd received in Trinidad, alone. With him, people didn't hesitate to smile and greet me.

“So pleased to meet you,” one woman said. “Goodness me.” Then she congratulated Ray.

Another woman said, “We had no idea.”

Her husband pumped Ray's hand up and down, then patted him on the back before we entered the sanctuary.

Reverend Case began his service with the usual prayers, hymns, and Bible readings. But then he moved from behind the pulpit and spoke directly to the congregation without the burden of that barrier between us. In the sermon, his message was one of forgiveness and sympathy for our enemies.

“I hope we can be so great a nation that we choose charity in the face of victory.” He paused for reflection. “Sympathy over condemnation.”

It felt as if he were engaged in intimate conversation alone and with each one of us. “I hope that we may find love for the countrymen of our enemy.” Then he stood perfectly still. “The common man among our enemies may be more victim than we know.”

Graciousness against our enemies? In Denver, I had been more accustomed to dirty “Heine” jokes and “Jinx the Japs” rallies than to the substance of this talk. At one point in the early years of the war, a game atmosphere had even prevailed. Everyone had believed that the U.S. forces were obviously superior, that victory would be easy. Bent on revenge for Pearl Harbor, we caricatured our enemy, attended parties and rallies, and held parades. It was definitely a good-versus-evil thing, and we in the U.S. were the good guys. But after years of it, I had grown weary of celebrations and children wearing cast-off uniforms and shooting toy guns. And now, in this unlikely place, I was listening to words that mirrored my sentiments. The difference between Reverend Case and the stern men of the pulpit I had known before was remarkable. After the first years of the war, I never thought of celebrating victories in the same way that once I'd done it before. With so much loss taken along the way, victories didn't feel very triumphant anyway.