Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (6 page)
Read Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky Online
Authors: Sandra Dallas
THE
food wasn’t much better at Tallgrass than it had been at Santa Anita. There was something called Spam that came in a can and was sliced and fried. Tomi thought the bottom of her shoe would taste better. The only fish was tuna fish, which came from a can, too. Instead of fresh vegetables, there were canned beans and peas. And dessert was rice with syrupy fruit cocktail poured over it.
“This is not good food. I will talk to the cooks about it,” Mom said as she looked over her plate of macaroni and cheese.
“You will?” Hiro asked.
Tomi shoved him with her elbow. She liked this new Mom. The old one never would have complained, but now Mom was quick to tell someone in charge when things
were wrong. She demanded lumber so that Roy could build shelves in their apartment and a table and chairs. She complained about the bathrooms. “Ladies need privacy,” she said, after she visited the latrine. The toilets were in a big room, with no partitions around them. Some women carried pieces of cardboard to screen themselves.
“Mom’s different. She never used to say a word. Now she’s pushy,” Roy said, as they looked around for places to sit in the mess hall. Dinner had always been a family affair in California. They ate together, and no one missed supper unless there was a good reason. But now, as at Santa Anita, the evacuees sat at different tables, the children with their friends, the older people with each other.
“She’s more like Pop,” Tomi replied. “With him gone, she’s in charge.”
“Well,
I’m
supposed to be in charge. I’m the man now.” Roy spotted a seat next to a girl he had met on the train and started for it.
“You can’t be in charge. Boys your age just care about pretty girls,” Tomi told him.
“What’s wrong with that?” Roy grinned. “Maybe I’ll start up a dance band, and then I’ll have plenty of them falling all over me.”
“But if you play in the band, you won’t be able to dance with them,” Tomi pointed out.
While Roy headed for the vacant seat, Tomi looked around the room and spotted a seat next to a girl she’d seen come out of the barracks just down from where the Itanos lived. She made her way to the table and sat down.
“Hi,” she said, but the girl only nodded and stared at her plate.
“I’m Tomi. If you’ll be my friend, I’ll give you my yummy rice,” Tomi joked.
The girl looked up at Tomi then and giggled, putting her hand over her mouth. “You can’t trick me. I think it’s the worst rice I ever had.”
“Me, too.” Tomi laughed. “You want my hot dog?”
“No.”
The two laughed again. “Tonight we’re going to have Spam
tempura
,” the girl said.
Tempura
was a Japanese way of coating seafood or vegetables with a light batter, then deep-frying it.
“That’s a good one! My brother thinks they use flies instead of raisins in the rice pudding,” Tomi said, laughing.
Before long, the two were talking as if they’d known each other their whole lives.
“I’m Ruth Hayashi,” the girl introduced herself. “I’ve seen you. You’re in the building with the yellow curtains.”
“That’s our apartment. I made them out of a skirt.”
“You can sew?”
Tomi nodded. “My mother taught me.”
“She sews too? I bet my mom can’t even thread a needle. We always had somebody who did our sewing for us,” Ruth said.
Tomi couldn’t imagine a woman who didn’t sew. Then she studied Ruth for a moment. The girl was wearing a silk dress and patent-leather shoes. A pearl necklace was around her neck. Tomi asked where Ruth had come from.
“San Francisco. My dad had a company that imported things from Japan—jade, pearls, carved wooden boxes. He had to sell it when we were evacuated. We used to be rich. Now …” Ruth shrugged.
“Nobody’s rich in here,” Tomi said.
“That means Mother can’t hire anyone to do her work. She’s never even swept a floor. Good thing we have a mess hall, because she can’t cook either.”
Tomi had heard about rich Japanese women who sat on silk cushions all day. She’d thought that would be a wonderful life, never having to wash dishes or pick strawberries.
But suddenly, she felt sorry for Ruth and her mother. The camp must be awful for them. She and Mom were adjusting to Tallgrass because they had worked hard all their lives. They knew how to clean the apartment and wash clothes. They’d lived on a farm and understood how the wind picked up dirt and blew it into buildings.
Mom had been smart to take slacks and sturdy shoes to wear at Tallgrass. Tomi imaged Ruth’s mother wearing high heels and silk clothes. What would they do when winter came? She’d read about snow in Colorado.
“I could teach you to sew,” Tomi said. “It’s not hard.”
“You could?” Ruth looked down at her fragile dress, which was already torn. “Maybe you could teach me to mend, too.”
Tomi had the beginning of an idea. “Maybe your mom could learn.”
“Oh, Tomi, I couldn’t teach anyone to sew,” Mom said, when Tomi told her about Ruth and her mother.
“You taught me.”
“That was different. You just told me about Mrs.
Hayashi being a high lady, and having servants.”
“Not anymore,” Tomi said. “I think they’re just like us. Ruth said Mr. Hayashi sold his business.”
“In Japan, someone like that wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”
“We’re not in Japan, Mom,” Tomi said. “We’re in America.” She glanced around the room at the crude furniture Roy had made, the tin can lids nailed over the knotholes in the wall, the sheet that screened Roy and Hiro’s cots. “Well, maybe we’re not even in America. We’re in Tallgrass.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
Tomi went to the window and looked out through the yellow curtains. Someone in the barracks across from her had collected rocks and arranged them into a nice display. “You complained about the latrines and the food. You helped women that way. What’s wrong with helping just one learn to sew? I think Pop would want you to.”
“Don’t you tell me what Pop wants,” Mom said quickly. “I’m trying hard enough on my own to do that.”
Tomi turned around and looked at her mom. “I’m sorry.”
Mom sighed. Then she went to the window. “Is that Mrs. Hayashi?” She pointed to a woman in a wrinkled
silk dress and high-heeled shoes making her way past the apartment. When Tomi nodded, Mom said, “She looks very tired. And dirty.”
“Ruth says she doesn’t know how to wash clothes, and when she went to the wash room, nobody would help her. Ruth says people don’t mix with her because she used to be rich.”
“That’s not right,” Mom said. She sighed and turned away from the window. “It’s wrong to judge people that way. We were sent to this camp because people who didn’t even know us thought we were bad. I would not want to be like them. You must invite Ruth and her mother for tea.”
“Here?”
“Of course here.” Mom went to the coal stove and removed the teapot and cups, then the tablecloth. They would find scraps of lumber and build a fire, then heat water in a pan on top of the stove. “They will be our first guests,” Mom said.
TOMI
was getting used to the camp now that she had been there for more than four months. She missed California, of course. She missed the lush fields, the strawberries still fresh with morning dew that she could pick for breakfast. And most of all, she missed being able to go where she wanted. In California, she could run for blocks, for miles even. But Tallgrass was all dirt streets, and the camp was enclosed by barbed wire. Guards in towers watched the evacuees, even the children. They were afraid to play near the fence, although the guards didn’t threaten them. Sometimes they even gave the children gum and Hershey bars.
There were things she liked about the camp. There were no strawberries to weed and pick and box, no dishes to
wash. Housekeeping was only a little dusting and sweeping. Of course, it had to be done two or three times a day, since despite the tin can lids nailed over cracks in the walls, the dirt still blew in. There was the laundry to do, too. Tomi and Mom went to the wash house every week with dirty clothes. They scrubbed clothes in the sinks, then hung them up to dry, hoping the dirt didn’t blow onto their wet clothes. Still, those duties were easy, and Tomi had plenty of time left over to play.
What Tomi liked best was school, which had opened late in the fall of 1942. At first, Japanese men and women volunteered to teach, but after a time, trained teachers were hired from outside. The school wasn’t much at first—tables instead of desks, no textbooks, not even a blackboard. Still, Tomi loved it. Her favorite subject was English. She looked forward to the stories the teacher read at the end of the day, and she liked writing her own stories, too. She kept her handwriting small, filling up each page with as many words as she could, because paper was scarce.
Ruth was in Tomi’s class, and each morning, Tomi and Hiro stopped to pick her up on their way to school.
“You’re lucky your dad’s here in the camp,” Tomi told Ruth one day, as Mr. Hayashi waved to them from the
doorway of the barracks. “I wish they’d send Pop to Tallgrass.”
“Me, too,” Hiro said, and Tomi realized how much her brother missed their father. He’d been sent away nearly a year before.
