Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (4 page)

Martha smoothed her dress, then reached for the doll and set it carefully in her lap. “Janice will be waiting when you get back,” she said.

Later that day, a man who ran a second-hand store came to the door and said he’d buy the Itanos’ furniture.

“At least we won’t have to give things away,” Mom told Tomi. She showed the man through the house, telling him what the Itanos had paid for the sofa, the beds, the kitchen table.

“I’ll give you five dollars for all of it,” the man said.

“Five dollars?” Mom shrieked. “The sofa cost twenty-five, and it’s only two years old.”

The man shrugged. “It’s better than nothing, lady.”

Roy, who’d heard the man, was angry. “For five dollars, I’d burn it all up,” he said.

“Seven dollars then. That’s my final offer.”

“Get out,” Roy said, pointing to the door.

“Suit yourself,” the man said and left.

Other people came to the Itano house after that, hoping to buy things cheaply. Their offers weren’t much higher, but Mom knew she had to take what she could get. And so she sold the sofa for five dollars, the beds for two dollars each, the kitchen table and chairs for a dollar. The
kitchen curtains went for ten cents, and Mom sold her silk scarves for a nickel.

The highest offer for her washing machine was twenty-five cents, and Mom refused it. The washing machine was her pride. It had a wringer—two rolls operated by a crank that squeezed the water out of the clothes after they’d been washed.

“Maybe you better take the quarter for the machine,” Roy told Mom the day before they were to leave.

“No!” Mom said. “Nobody gets my washing machine for a quarter.” She went out to the shed and brought back Pop’s hammer. “I’ll smash it before I sell it for twenty-five cents.” Mom raised the hammer and broke one of the rollers. Then she hit the crank until it fell off. Roy began to laugh and took the hammer from her. He smashed the inside of the machine. When he was finished he handed the hammer to Tomi, who dented the sides, then turned the hammer over to Hiro. He chipped away at the enamel. When they were finished, the washing machine looked as if it had fallen off a truck.

Mom stood back, her hands over her mouth, as if she were ashamed of what they’d done. But then she began to laugh, maybe the first time she’d laughed since Pop had
been taken away by the FBI a few weeks before. “There, that will show
them
.”

She didn’t say who
them
was, but Tomi knew.
Them
was all those people out there who thought the Itano family was their enemy. None of them were going to use Mom’s washing machine.

1942 | CHAPTER FOUR

A HORSE-STALL HOTEL

EARLY
one morning, Mr. Lawrence picked up the Itanos in his truck, which used to be Sam’s. Mom had sold it to him for a hundred dollars, five times what the used-car lot had offered her. The Itanos had been told to report to a church in town. With their heavy suitcases, they would have had trouble walking all that distance if Mr. Lawrence hadn’t offered to drive them.

Mom wore pants. Tomi had never seen her wear slacks before. The clothing and bedding they were taking with them had been crammed into the suitcases. In addition, Mom carried a shopping bag with her teapot and cups, both the everyday cups and her good ones. She was taking them with her because “it would never be home without them,” she said, as she wrapped them in pillowcases and
underwear to keep them from breaking.

“Martha wanted to come, but I told her it would be too crowded,” Mr. Lawrence said, as he helped Tomi into the bed of the truck. Tomi was glad Martha wasn’t there. She would have been embarrassed if her friend had seen her and her family looking like this. Hiro and Roy climbed up beside Tomi, and Mr. Lawrence handed up the bags. Then he opened the truck door for Mom. She glanced back at the house, as if she might not ever see it again. She was proud of that house, and she and Tomi had scrubbed it until it shone, because that’s the way Japanese did things, Mom said. Being Americans, she told Tomi, didn’t mean they had to forget their Japanese values. “If Mr. Lawrence finds someone to rent it, I would be shamed if the house was dirty. It is like when migratory birds leave a lake. They move smoothly and do not make the water murky. We will not leave this house murky.”

“There’s a box of lunch on the seat there,” Mr. Lawrence told her. “Mrs. Lawrence was afraid they might forget to feed you on the bus.”

Mom’s voice was quiet when she said her thanks. Then she asked, “You’ll tell Sam where we are, won’t you? When he comes back, you’ll say we wanted to wait for him, but
we couldn’t wait any longer, won’t you?”

“Of course I will, Sumiko,” Mr. Lawrence replied, as if he hadn’t reassured her a dozen times already.

“Well, here we go,” Roy said, as the truck bounced onto the road. “You know what they call us?
Evacuees
. That’s because we have to
evacuate
.”

“What’s that mean?” Hiro asked.

“It means ‘leave.’ ”

Roy tried to sound jolly, but Tomi wouldn’t have it. The metal bed of the truck was cold against her legs, and she shivered. “Where are we going?”

“Beats me. They haven’t had time to build the camps yet. Maybe they’ll send us to a hotel, a big one with a swimming pool,” Roy said.

But Tomi was sure there wouldn’t be a big hotel.

They were quiet then, not talking until Mr. Lawrence stopped in front of the church. A crowd of other evacuees was waiting. Like the Itanos, they wore layers of clothing and carried suitcases and boxes tied with rope. Soldiers with guns watched them.

Mr. Lawrence helped them unload their bags. He took off his hat and took Mom’s hands. She looked down at them for a moment. Then she said, “If Sam comes—”

“I’ll tell him,” Mr. Lawrence said one more time. He shook hands with Roy, got back in the truck, and left.

Mom looked confused. “I wish your father was here. I wonder what we do,” she said. Because Mom was shy, Pop had always taken care of everything.

“I’ll find out,” Roy told her, but Mom put up her hand.

“I think maybe I’m supposed to be in charge. I think that’s what Pop would want. Things are different now,” she said. That wasn’t like Mom, and Tomi and Roy exchanged glances. Mom looked around, then slowly walked toward a soldier. She stood there politely until the soldier looked down at her. He pointed to a man standing beside the church entrance, and Mom disappeared into the crowd.

“I better go help her,” Roy said.

Tomi touched his arm. She knew that Mom wanted to do this on her own, and she shook her head. “Let’s see what happens.”

They waited, and after a while, Mom returned with tags in her hand. “They gave us a family number. We are to put it on our bags and even on us. Then we can get on the bus.” When the tags were attached to the suitcases and the coats, the Itanos made their way to one of the buses, waving at people they recognized. Tomi smiled at a boy
she knew from school, and she heard a girl whisper, “Holy Smoke! That’s Roy Itano. He’s one of the Jivin’ Five.”

Roy nudged Tomi as they boarded the bus. “Hear that? This relocation business might not be so bad after all.” He patted his bag, which contained his clarinet.

When they were seated, Hiro asked where they were headed. Mom shrugged, but Roy said he’d heard they were going to Santa Anita.

“The racetrack?” Tomi asked.

Roy nodded, and Hiro said, “That’d be swell! Maybe they’ll let me ride a horse.”

“No horses,” Roy told him.

“Where will they put us? They must have a big hotel,” Mom said.

Tomi thought that over and decided there wouldn’t be a hotel large enough for all the people who were being sent to relocation camps. All the way to Santa Anita, Tomi worried about where they would sleep.

She found out when they arrived at the racetrack, which was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Soldiers with guns stood along the fence and watched from guard towers. The Itanos were given a room number and sent to a stable. Maybe they’d live in one of the
jockeys’ rooms, Roy said. But as they walked down the aisle between the stalls, Tomi realized that wouldn’t happen. The Itanos had been assigned a small cubicle—a horse stall! Mom stepped inside the small enclosure and looked around. There was fresh straw on the floor, and the walls had been whitewashed. “They didn’t do a very good job of cleaning first,” Tomi observed. She wrinkled her nose and made a face. There was the smell of horses and manure, too. “How can we live like this?” she asked.

“We can’t,” Roy said. “There’s been a mistake. I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“No mistake,” Mom said. “Did you see the tents on the racetrack? This is better.”

“A horse stall, Mom?” Tomi asked.

“
Shikata ga nai
,” Mom said. “It cannot be helped. We will make the best of our horse-stall hotel.”

They left their belongings in the stall and went outside, where people were lined up at the entrances to tents and crude buildings. “I think that’s the dining room,” Roy said, pointing to a long building made of unpainted lumber. He
had found a friend who told him what was going on. “And those buildings are for the men’s and women’s latrines.”

“You have to wait in line to go to the bathroom?” Hiro asked.

“And to take a shower. There isn’t any bathroom in our horse-stall hotel,” Roy told him.

“We must see about supper,” Mom said. “It will be nice not to have to cook for a change.”

Tomi knew Mom was trying to look on the good side of things, because she loved to cook.

They waited in line for a long time, almost an hour, before they entered a room filled with tables and long benches. At one table, men served food they dished up from big pots and dumped onto tin plates. When a man handed Tomi her plate, she wrinkled her nose in disgust at the hot dog. She’d never liked hot dogs. “Since everybody here’s Japanese, I thought we’d have Japanese food,” she said.

“There’s rice,” Hiro told her. Then he examined his own plate. “I think there are flies in the rice.”

Tomi studied the rice on her plate. “Raisins. Those are raisins.”

“Who would put raisins in rice?”

“Somebody who doesn’t know Japanese people,” Tomi replied.

Mom looked around for a place where her family could sit. The tables were crowded, and there were spaces only here and there.

“I guess we have to eat by ourselves,” Tomi said. She spotted a single space next to the boy she recognized from school and headed for it. She didn’t see the frown on Mom’s face.