Sumiko went into the shed and pushed open the door of Uncle’s room. She felt guilty, since she’d never been allowed in there. The room was tidy and plain, with a few dead carnations in containers. On the shelves sat several envelopes labeled in Uncle’s neat writing and probably filled with seeds. Sumiko picked up the envelopes and smiled weakly. Uncle had named his new strains after members of the family. She looked inside one labeled STOCK—SUMIKO STRAIN.
Auntie was calling for her. Sumiko took the SUMIKO STRAIN envelope outside with her.
Auntie stood in the middle of the yard. “What have you been doing?”
“Getting flower seeds.”
“Have you finished packing?” Auntie’s forehead was a mass of wrinkles.
“Almost.” Sumiko rushed back inside, where she tucked the seeds into her suitcase.
The families were supposed to bring their own linens, and that took up a lot of space. Besides the seeds, Sumiko brought her yellow knife, because it was just about the only special possession she had left. She also carried some extra clothes for her brother. She worried because Tak-Tak couldn’t carry much. But then she heard Bull saying, “Sumiko can’t carry much.”
Nobody in the neighborhood knew where they’d all end up after the temporary center, but nearly everybody assumed it would be somewhere cold, like where Uncle and Juchan and the other arrested men had been confined after they were “processed.” Sumiko hoped her entire family would be sent to the same place. Anyway, she had packed all their warmest clothes: boots and heavy sweaters and heavy slacks. Sumiko also had packed two school dresses for herself and two nice outfits for Tak-Tak.
Before they left, Bull brought in a box poked through with pinholes. “For the crickets,” he said. “The cage is too bulky.” He’d attached a string to the box so that Tak-Tak could hang it over his shoulder.
The man who was buying their truck had agreed to take them to the street where all the Nikkei from the area were supposed to await government transportation to the racetrack. The truck’s buyer was a quiet man who seemed a little embarrassed by how little he had paid for the vehicle. He didn’t meet anyone’s gaze full on.
Sumiko, Tak-Tak, and Bull sat in back with the luggage. She stared at the farm as they drove off. The flower fields rippled like a flag. Probably someone else would be moving in soon. Ichiro said they would not be allowed to return to the coast before the war ended, if ever. If the war lasted for ten years, she would be twenty-two at the end. She might already be married and living with her husband’s family.
Sumiko hoped someone would take over the farm quickly. Otherwise, all that work they’d done would be wasted.
As they drove, Sumiko saw that the community was deserted. Nobody worked the land, no kids played in the yards, no old people sat on their front porches. Cheesecloth shuddered over the lonely fields. In many houses, Sumiko saw signs hanging in the windows: I AM AN AMERICAN.
Leaving this way made Sumiko love what she’d always loved—the colors, the smells—but it made her also love what she thought she’d hated. For instance, she’d often hated the drafts in the bathhouse, but now she remembered how delicious and precious the last vestiges of warmth in the tub had seemed.
In the distance Sumiko spotted several abandoned dogs running through some flowers, smashing them. Humane societies in evacuation areas were supposedly overflowing. Mrs. Ono hadn’t been able to find someone to adopt her dog, and she refused to have the animal put down. Instead, she had left several open bags of food in her house and tacked a note about the dog on her front door. Sumiko thought nobody would want a “Jap” dog.
Bull was looking at his hands now, his forehead crinkled between his eyebrows.
“Do you think we’ll ever come back?” Sumiko said.
Bull looked up distractedly. “Probably not.”
Sumiko stared at her old neighborhood until it disappeared from sight.
As they neared the drop-off point the street grew crowded with Nikkei families and their luggage. Sumiko felt panicked, wondering suddenly whether her family could just abandon their possessions and simply run. Run and run and run—but to where? The only religious group at a national level speaking up for the Japanese was the Quakers. Maybe her family could find some Quakers and hide out with them. She wondered whether any Quakers lived nearby.
She wondered how Baba was doing.
Sumiko had tied a tag with their family ID number to Tak-Tak’s jacket button. She tightened the string. On the streets she saw other young children with tags on their buttons. The street was as silent as if it were deserted. All the girls wore their school dresses, and their faces looked scared and unhappy, which was exactly how Sumiko felt.
When the truck stopped, Bull said to Tak-Tak, “Hold on to Sumiko. Don’t let go until we get to the assembly center. Do you hear me?”
Tak-Tak nodded.
Bull put on his hat and jumped off to help Ichiro unload the family’s belongings. Bull owned just one hat; Ichiro used to own a dozen but had kept only the one on his head. It was his most expensive hat, but it looked out of place now.
On the sidewalk Tak-Tak clung to Sumiko, and she clung to him.
The man buying their truck reached out to shake Ichiro’s hand. Ichiro hesitated so slightly that Sumiko did not think the man noticed. They shook hands.
“Look, there’s Mrs. Ono,” said Sumiko. “Mrs. Ono!” The old woman stood alone and crying. Sumiko ran over to take her arm while Ichiro and Bull carried her baggage.
As soon as Mrs. Ono reached Auntie, she blurted out, “I hope my dog doesn’t eat all his food at once.” She sobbed and leaned on Sumiko.
Everything was so sad. Sumiko couldn’t think of one happy thing.
A big rumbling sound was growing louder. Sumiko saw a line of army trucks approaching, and she pulled Tak-Tak tightly to her. “Careful!” she said, though the trucks were still far away.
When the trucks parked, everybody on the sidewalks surged toward them. Bull and Ichiro helped other people load their things while Sumiko and Tak-Tak clung to each other on the sidewalk. Sumiko had been watching people climb up when she suddenly realized that she and Tak-Tak were two of the last Japanese standing on the sidewalk. She cried out, “Where is every—” and then felt herself lifted into the air and into the truck. Then Bull lifted Tak-Tak in and jumped in himself. The truck made a tremendous rumbling noise, as if they were in the center of a thundering cloud. A soldier closed a canvas flap, and darkness enveloped the back of the truck.
11
WHEN THE RUMBLING FINALLY STOPPED, NOBODY MOVED.
A soldier came around to pull the canvas aside. Everybody got off A big sign read SAN CARLOS RACETRACK. A tall stone wall encircled the track. Sumiko looked up at a guard tower and saw a soldier pointing a rifle at her. She froze, but then he moved his rifle toward another truck. Sumiko realized she had driven by here before, on the way to a picnic.
When soldiers opened the gate, Sumiko didn’t move. Finally Ichiro led the way, Tak-Tak’s crickets slung over his back.
Inside the racetrack Sumiko saw row after row of barracks. She followed Ichiro to a table, where a Nikkei man checked them in. “You’re assigned to Section Seven, Stable Four,” the man said, as if everything were perfectly normal, as if he were saying something as mundane as, The weather is nice today. The man continued casually, “You can drop off your things and then return to pick up your cots and fill your mattresses with straw. Mattress bags are in the corner there. Next!”
Ichiro and the rest of the family walked off, and Sumiko chased after them.
Stables lined the walls of the racetrack, while the barracks sat in the center. There was not a tree in sight. Open trenches stretched across the front of some of the barracks, with planks of wood forming a bridge into the front door. Sumiko smelled sewage.
Tak-Tak grabbed her hand and said hopefully, “Will we live with a horse?”
“No,” she said, although she honestly didn’t know. In fact, she thought anything wa
s possible now. She was still herself and her family were still themselves, but every other thing was different.
A few families were filling bags with straw. A sign said FILL MATTRESSES HERE.
“No horse?” said Tak-Tak. “Are they going to kill us?”
He spoke as if no horse and kill us were somehow related. “No, they’re giving us mattresses,” Sumiko said logically.
“So?”
“So they wouldn’t give us mattresses if they were going to kill us.” She watched him to see whether he thought that sounded as ridiculous to him as it suddenly did to her—as if mattresses were somehow related to not killing us. But he seemed satisfied.
Section Seven, Stable Four was at the far end of the grounds. Stable Four was part of a line of old wooden stables with chipping white paint. Ichiro stepped gingerly inside. Sumiko followed and then the others. Nobody spoke. It looked like a two-horse stable. It stank of manure and chlorine. Mushrooms grew in a corner. One lightbulb hung from above. Sumiko squinted at the bulb: twenty-five watts. She turned to Ichiro. “How are we going to live here?”
“What do you mean ‘how’? We don’t have a choice.”
All afternoon they filled bags with straw and dragged them to their stable. Sometimes it seemed there were hundreds of people converging on the straw like flies. Ichiro had already found out that there would be almost twenty thousand people living in the racetrack until permanent camps were ready for them.
Sumiko did the only thing she knew to do when she was scared or sad: work hard. Working hard made Sumiko feel better—not good, but better.
After all the mattresses were filled, Sumiko tried lying on her straw bed. It felt uneven and prickly. She rearranged it and tried again, but it felt exactly the same. Tak-Tak was trying his out too.
“It feels pokey,” he said.
“I’ll put on an extra sheet for you,” Sumiko said.
A gong rang, and Sumiko looked at Ichiro to see what they should do. He and Bull stepped outside. Sumiko and Tak-Tak followed and saw dozens of screaming kids tearing through the aisles shouting, “Dinner! Dinner!”
Dinner was served in a huge, long room called a “mess hall.” Everybody got their food on trays and went to sit at picnic tables. The entree was cod stew. The other kids ate as if starving, and then ran out.
Sumiko’s stomach rumbled all evening, even after their lone dim lightbulb had been turned off and everybody else was asleep. Later she woke up with a desperate need to use the bathroom. When she sat up, Tak-Tak said softly, “Sumiko?”
“Yes?”
“I pooped in my pajamas.”
“All right, come on.”
She switched on the bulb to find new clothes for him.
“What is it?” Auntie said sleepily.
“Tak-Tak needs new pants,” she said. She’d packed only one pair of pajamas for him. She decided she’d put him in his long Johns. “Come on.” She took his hand.
A few steps outside their stable a searchlight caught them in its glare. Sumiko hissed, “Stay still.” Tak-Tak froze, whimpering very softly. Then she looked up and saw a soldier standing beside the searchlight. She looked down and saw another searchlight following an old man toddling down an aisle. The beam that had been on her moved and crossed the other beam, and then it began to follow somebody else. She pulled her brother to the latrine. Despite the hour, there was a line outside.
“Everybody’s got diarrhea from dinner,” an old woman told her.
Inside the latrine was a line of holes in a wooden platform. Several old women sat on some holes. Sumiko cleaned off her brother’s behind and put him in his long Johns. On the way back to the stable the searchlight followed them again, the beam accentuating Tak-Tak’s skinny legs.
Tak-Tak fell right asleep. But instead of sleeping, Sumiko lay on her straw, smelling manure and listening to her family breathe and imagining the world outside: houses and grocery stores and playgrounds. Auntie already had thought of a phrase to describe that world: out there. Sumiko remembered something she’d overheard Jiichan say once, that sometimes when you were low, all you had left in life was your right to close the door on the world and sit in your room alone where nothing further could befall you. He had said he’d felt that way when Sumiko’s mother died. He had closed the door to his room and separated himself from everything that was out there.
Beams from the searchlight reached inside through the stable slats and moved in flashes across the far wall. The searchlights were part of out there. At least Sumiko’s family was in here. At least they had a door, and at least it was closed.
12
THE NEXT MORNING SUMIKO JUMPED OUT OF BED TO peek out the front door and see if the camp looked just the way she thought it had yesterday. For some reason she didn’t know what to expect this morning. When she stepped out, not a thing had changed. Stables lined the outer wall, and barracks filled the center of the camp. Japanese people walked here and there, some of them looking dazed.
So they really were here, in a town enclosed by stone walls, and almost everybody else was out there. It all reminded her of something, but she couldn’t remember what. Then she remembered. The place was like the dioramas her class had made for geography once. The class had formed groups, and each group had made a diorama of life in a different country. That was a lot of fun, a good memory from school. Sumiko had helped make the Paraguay diorama. The teacher said all the kids did a great job. But now Sumiko thought that if you had enlarged all the dioramas, there would have been things missing, like curtains, pets, and gardens. Details. Those details were also missing from the assembly center.
The bell sounded for breakfast. Throngs of kids were already running toward the mess hall and shouting.
Breakfast was about two tablespoons of scrambled eggs and two pieces of bacon the size of postage stamps. All the kids ate ravenously and then ran like mad to another mess hall to get more. Sumiko grabbed Tak-Tak and ran with the other kids.
After breakfast they took a walk, Tak-Tak holding tightly to Sumiko’s blouse. As they walked Sumiko saw that many people had left their doors open for ventilation. So many cots filled some of the rooms in the barracks that there was no place to walk. The walls didn’t extend all the way up, and you could see the beams in the ceilings. In one barrack three giggling boys were climbing across the beams peering into other people’s homes.
“That looks fun,” Tak-Tak said hopefully.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that.”
“Will they shoot us?”
“Stop saying that. It’s bad luck.”
Sumiko opened the door to a barrack with a sign reading RECREATION. Inside she saw an empty room with a few tables. Seeing the empty room filled her with fear of something Jiichan had once described to her. He had been sick, and he tended to ramble when he was sick. Sumiko had been sitting with him as he told her about the trip from Japan to America. “I don’t see sky for many long time. I feel close to ultimate boredom. That mean close to lose mind. Inside myself, I feel like screaming. Outside myself, I calm.” He said that the thing that kept everybody going was a single word: America. That word was the most important thing his family owned, the only thing of value they possessed.
Day after day Sumiko felt as if she were living on the edge of the ultimate boredom. Some days she stayed inside the stable, other days she wandered aimlessly. Once as she and Tak-Tak wandered she heard people rushing through the aisles hissing, “The soldiers are checking for illegal sewing scissors!” She saw a woman screaming as soldiers ransacked her barrack.
Sumiko thought of her yellow knife and felt almost faint with fear as she ran to Stable Four. She could hear Tak-Tak calling behind her, “Where are we going?”
Auntie watched uncomprehendingly as Sumiko ransacked her own luggage, found the knife, and ran outside. She stopped just long enough to snap at Tak-Tak, “You stay here!”
She ran and ran, finally stopping at the other end of the racetrack where she found a patch of dirt.
She was drenched in sweat from running. She dug a hole and rammed her knife inside before walking back, trying to appear calm. She promised herself never to mention the knife to anyone.
Sumiko’s next big surprise came a few days later when she noticed Mrs. Ono sobbing while holding a letter.
“Mrs. Ono? Can I help?” Sumiko asked.
Mrs. Ono couldn’t stop crying as she waved the note in the air. She held on to Sumiko and sobbed and laughed. Sumiko took the note and read it:
Dear Mrs. Ono,
I hope this letter reaches you and would appreciate your letting me know. I am the new resident of your house. I wished to let you know that I will be caring for your dog until your release. Please do not worry as he is in good hands during these difficult times.
Yours truly,
Mrs. Julia Donnell
Reading the letter was like seeing the sky. Sumiko thought about the woman all day. It gave her so much hope, it seemed like a miracle.
One day Sumiko sneaked back to where she’d buried her knife. She dug it up and scratched off her name before burying it again.
Otherwise, every day was the same. Oh, there were more room searches and there were electrical blackouts and the kids were going wild, but for Sumiko, whether their barrack was dark or light didn’t change her life much. Whether their barrack was ransacked by soldiers didn’t change her life at all. They had nothing to hide anymore.
Then one evening in late May, Ichiro ran inside and said, “My friend says the camp paper is going to announce tomorrow that the government will start moving us all to a permanent relocation center.”
The next day camp was in bedlam, people standing in the aisles shouting and discussing and debating and crying. The paper announced that several hundred to a thousand people would be shipped out at a time. Sumiko’s family was on the list of those leaving first.
The next day she came across some kids she didn’t know climbing a ladder up a roof. She hesitated—ladders were probably forbidden. But then she couldn’t resist, and she clambered up behind them. As she neared the top she saw the kids gaping at something. She hurried up and saw what they saw. It was something amazing: normal life. Cars drove, people walked, trees swayed in the wind. A couple of the kids on the roof started crying. Sumiko just stared in amazement.