Snow Falling on Cedars (23 page)

‘What will you do?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘I have twenty dollars from picking season,’ said Ishmael. ‘You can have all of it – you can just have it. I’ll bring it to school in the morning.’

‘No,’ said Hatsue. ‘Don’t bring it. My father will figure out something pretty soon. I could never accept your money.’

Ishmael turned onto his side, toward her, and propped himself on his elbow. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ he said.

‘It’s so unreal,’ answered Hatsue. ‘It just isn’t fair – it’s not
fair.
How could they do this, just like that? How did we get ourselves into this?’

‘
We
didn’t get ourselves in it,’ said Ishmael. ‘The Japanese
forced
us into it. And on a Sunday morning, when no one was ready. It’s cheap, if you ask me. They – ’

‘Look at my face,’ interrupted Hatsue. ‘Look at my eyes, Ishmael. My face is the face of the people who did it – don’t you see what I mean? My face – it’s how the Japanese look. My parents came to San Piedro from Japan. My mother and father, they hardly speak English. My family is in bad trouble now. Do you see what I mean? We’re going to have trouble.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Ishmael. ‘You’re not Japanese. You’re – ’

‘You heard the news. They’re arresting people. They’re calling a lot of people spies. Last night some men stopped at the Ichiyamas’ and called them names, Ishmael. They sat out
front and honked their horn. How can this be happening?’ she added. ‘How did things get like this?’

‘Who did that?’ said Ishmael. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘It was Mr. Willets – Otto Willets. Gina Willets’s uncle and some other men. They were mad about the lights at the theater. The Ichiyamas left them on.’

‘This is crazy,’ said Ishmael. ‘This whole thing is crazy.’

‘They unscrewed his lightbulbs and then drove out to his house. They called him a dirty Jap.’

Ishmael had no answer for this. He shook his head instead.

‘I went home after school,’ said Hatsue. ‘My father was talking on the telephone. Everyone is worried about the navy transmitter, the one on Agate Point. They think it’s going to be bombed tonight. There are men going out there with shotguns to defend it. They’re going to sit in the woods along the beaches. The Shirasakis have a farm on Agate Point, and some soldiers from the transmitter station came there. They took their radio and their camera and their telephone, and they arrested Mr. Shirasaki. And the rest of the Shirasakis can’t leave their house.’

‘Mr. Timmons was going down there,’ Ishmael answered. ‘I saw him, he was getting into his car. He said he was going to the Masons’ first, where everything is being organized. They’re telling people which beaches to watch. And my mother is painting these blackout screens. She’s had the radio on all day.’

‘Everyone’s had their radios on. My mother can’t move away from ours. She sits there and listens to everything and talks on the phone to people.’

Ishmael sighed. ‘A war,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’

‘We’d better go,’ replied Hatsue. ‘It’s getting dark already.’

They crossed the small torrent of the creek below their tree and followed the path down the hillside. It was dusk and the sea wind blew in their faces. Standing in the path with their arms around each other they kissed once and then again, the second time with greater force. ‘Don’t let this hurt us,’ Ishmael
said. ‘I don’t care about what’s happening in the world. We’re not going to let this hurt us.’

‘It won’t,’ said Hatsue. ‘You’ll see.’

Ishmael, on Tuesday, went to work for his father. He answered the telephone in the office on Andreason Street and took notes on a yellow legal pad. His father told him to call certain people and made lists of questions to ask. ‘Give me a hand?’ his father had asked. ‘I can’t keep up with it all.’

Ishmael made a call to the naval station. The pilot of a daily reconnaissance plane, said an Ensign Clawson, had noticed something he’d never noticed before: the Japanese strawberry farms on San Piedro Island were planted in rows pointing straight toward the radio transmitter at the end of Agate Point. The rows of berry plants could guide Jap Zeroes straight to their target easily. ‘But those fields have been there for thirty years,’ said Ishmael. ‘Not all of them,’ replied Ensign Clawson.

The county sheriff called in. Dozens of Japanese farmers, he speculated, had stores of dynamite in their sheds and barns which could be used for sabotage. Others, he’d heard, had shortwave radios. The sheriff asked that as an act of goodwill these farmers turn in such dangerous items to his office in Amity Harbor. He wanted, he said, a message in the
Review.
He was thankful for Ishmael’s help.

Arthur printed the sheriff’s message. He printed a notice from the defense authority telling Japanese nationals on San Piedro that as of December 14 they could no longer ride the ferries. Twenty-four men, he wrote in a news article, had been named by Larry Phillips to the civilian defense auxiliary fire force, including George Tachibana, Fred Yasui, and Edward Wakayama. ‘Yes, I did, I singled those three out,’ he explained when Ishmael asked about it. ‘Not every fact is just a fact,’ he added. ‘It’s all a kind of … balancing act. A juggling of pins, all kinds of pins, that’s what journalism is about.’

‘That isn’t journalism,’ Ishmael answered. ‘Journalism is just the facts.’

He had been learning about journalism at school, from a textbook, and it seemed to him that his father had abridged some basic journalistic principle.

‘But which facts?’ Arthur asked him. ‘Which facts do we print, Ishmael?’

In the next issue Arthur reminded island businesses to extinguish display lights promptly at dusk; it was Christmas and the temptation was to leave them on. He announced that on New Year’s Eve a public dance would be held under the slogan ‘Remember Pearl Harbor – It Could Happen Here!’; men in uniform would be admitted at no charge; all islanders were encouraged to attend. Arthur informed his readers that a quota of $500 had been set by Mrs. Lars Heineman of the San Piedro Red Cross Relief Fund and that the Japanese-American Citizens’ League had immediately donated $55 – the largest contribution to date. Another article reported that at the Japanese Community Center hall in Amity Harbor a reception had been held for Robert Sakamura, who’d been inducted into the army. Speeches were made and food was served; a salute to the American flag and the loud singing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ rounded out the evening.

The
San Piedro Review
printed a reminder to its readers that it was pledged to remain silent on military news that might comfort or aid the enemy. It furthermore counseled islanders ‘not to talk carelessly of army or navy maneuvers which may be observed.’ The construction of the island’s first fishing resort, at Protection Point, was delayed, Arthur wrote, because of the war. Nick Olafsen died while stacking wood; the George Bodines escaped death when their kitchen stove exploded, but Mrs. Bodine broke a leg and an arm. The PTA began a paper drive and took a special interest in Christmas wrappings. The island Grange committed itself to the defense of San Piedro and promised in a letter to the secretary of agriculture to ‘see to the production of such fruits and vegetables as can be grown on our island and as our fighting forces might need.’ The army asked owners of mules and horses on San Piedro to register
their animals with the county agent, describing the request in the pages of the
Review
as ‘a patriotic obligation’; islanders were also asked to check their automobile tires and to drive in a manner consistent with preserving them: rubber was in short supply.

The navy warned islanders, in a message printed in the
Review,
‘to kill a rumor by refusing to carry it further.’ Another benefit dance was held, and the enlisted men at the Agate Point station were invited as guests of honor. The defense fund committee came to the school board with a request that the high school auditorium be made available for two future dances; the board in return asked for written assurance that there would be no smoking or drinking. A draft registration desk was set up at Fisk’s Hardware Center, meanwhile a sudden warm spell turned San Piedro’s roads to mud and sank automobiles up to their running boards. Eve Thurmann, who was eighty-six, stalled out on Piersall Road in her ’36 Buick, then showed up at Petersen’s with mud caked on her knees; she’d walked two miles into town. Air raid rules, the
Review
reminded readers, were now posted on many electrical poles: keep calm and cool; stay home; put out lights; lie down; stay away from windows; don’t telephone. Ray Ichikawa scored fifteen points for the Amity Harbor High School basketball team in its victory over Anacortes. A half-dozen residents of West Port Jensen claimed to have seen a mysterious creature sunning itself in the shallows; it appeared to have a swanlike neck, the head of a polar bear, and a cavernous mouth from which emerged puffs of steam. When islanders rowed out to get a closer look the creature disappeared beneath the waves.

‘This doesn’t go in the paper, does it?’ Ishmael asked his father. ‘A sea creature at West Port Jensen?’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ answered Arthur. ‘But do you remember the bear stories I ran last year? The bear who was responsible for everything, suddenly? Dead dogs, broken windows, missing chickens, scratched cars? A mysterious creature – that’s news, Ishmael. The fact that people see it – that’s news.’

In the following issue Arthur printed a public service advertisement urging islanders to buy war bonds. He explained that the civilian defense commission was registering boats that might be available in the event of an evacuation. William Blair, he told his readers – son of Zachary and Edith Blair of Amity Harbor – graduated in the U.S. Naval Academy’s first emergency class and shipped out for the European theater. The island lost power for four hours one morning when a half-dozen of the army’s captive balloons broke away and dragged down power lines. The defense commissioner, Richard Blackington, appointed nine district air raid wardens to be responsible for the effectiveness of an island blackout; he also attended, in Anacortes, a chemical warfare training class and afterward busied himself disseminating flyers about it. Meanwhile the children of San Piedro Island had been numbered and registered in their school classrooms against the possibility of separation from their families. Arthur published a War Department chart showing wing and tail markings of airplanes. He also printed a photograph of Japanese-Americans in Fresno, California, standing in line to get citizen registration cards.

Four more islanders of Japanese descent – this was a front-page article – enlisted in the United States Army. Richard Enslow, who taught wood shop at the high school, resigned his position and joined the navy. Mrs. Ida Cross of South Beach knitted socks for sailors, sent them off, and received a thank-you note from an antiaircraft gunner stationed near Baltimore. The coast guard banned fishing on the west side of the island and bore down on gill-netters in the middle of the night who had set nets near restricted areas. In late January islanders experienced a temporary fuel shortage and were made to turn their oil heaters down by order of the civilian defense commission. The commission asked farmers for ten thousand sandbag sacks – gunny, feed, or flour. One hundred and fifty islanders attended first-aid courses offered by the Red Cross auxiliary. Petersen’s store cut back on deliveries, citing fuel and labor shortages.

‘Seems like you’re favoring the Japs, Art,’ an anonymous
Review
reader wrote one day. ‘You’re putting them on the front page every week and writing all about their patriotism and loyalty while saying nothing about their treachery. Well, maybe it’s time you pulled your head from the sand and realized – there’s a war on! And who are you siding with, anyway?’

In January fifteen islanders canceled their subscriptions, including the Walker Colemans of Skiff Point and the Herbert Langlies of Amity Harbor. ‘The Japs are the enemy,’ wrote Herbert Langlie. ‘Your newspaper is an insult to all white Americans who have pledged themselves to purge this menace from our midst. Please cancel my subscription as of this date and send refund immediately.’

Arthur did so; he sent a full refund to each customer who canceled, and a personal note written in a cordial style. ‘One day they’ll be back,’ he predicted. But then the Price-Rite store in Anacortes canceled its weekly quarter-page advertisement; then Lottie’s Opsvig’s apparel shop on Main Street, then Larsen’s Lumberyard and the Anacortes Cafe. ‘We won’t worry about this,’ Arthur told his son. ‘We can always put out four pages instead of eight if that’s what we have to do.’ He printed the letter from Walker Coleman and another one like it from Ingmar Sigurdson. Lillian Taylor, who taught English at the high school, wrote back in angry condemnation of the ‘spirit of small-mindedness evident in the letters of Mr. Walker Coleman and Mr. Ingmar Sigurdson, two well-known islanders who quite obviously have lost their grip on their senses while in the grip of war hysteria.’ Arthur printed that, too.

Two weeks later, on February 4, a black Ford threaded through the Imadas’ fields, making for the house of cedar slats. Hatsue was standing at the verge of the woodshed, filling her apron with cedar kindling from a pile underneath a sheet of waxed canvas, when she noticed – this was odd – that the Ford’s headlights had been blackened; she heard the car before she saw it. It came to a halt just in front of her house; two men emerged in suits and ties. They shut their doors gently and looked at each other; one of them straightened his coat a little – he was bigger than the other, and his sleeves were not long enough to cover even half of his shirt cuffs. Hatsue stood silently with her apron full of kindling while the men mounted the porch and knocked on the door, holding their hats in their hands. Her father answered in his sweater and sandals, his newspaper dangling from his left hand neatly and his reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose; her mother stood just behind him.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ said the smaller of the men, producing a badge from his coat pocket. ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation,’ he announced. ‘Are you He-say-o Imada?’