The one grand thing about the long, hot train ride with no windows to look out of was that we had nothing between us but the quiet hours. After the first few, it was almost as if we hadn’t been apart at all, and it was just one long night that Papa had been gone and now it was morning again. Despite the heat, we laughed while recalling happy Christmases and brilliant Octobers and long-ago sledding mishaps and Easter egg hunts that had gone awry. We reminisced about eating caramel corn at the Mississippi Valley Fair and the time Max let loose in his bedroom a jar full of fireflies and what our favorite flavors of Iowana ice cream were: all the things that make family life so rich and comfortable and necessary. No one wanted to talk about what had happened to us since the day Lucy Hobart tried to run off with a draft dodger, and so no one did.
We’d boarded the train in the morning, and at noon we were all escorted to the dining car so that we could eat lunch. We’d been handed family identification labels in Dallas that we’d had to wear around our necks and keep prominently facing forward at all times. When we entered the dining car, the people already there looked up as we moved past them. Their eyes went first to our ID tags and second to our faces. So this is what the enemy looks like, their wordless expressions said. Papa smiled at everyone like he was just another man on a train traveling with his family. Mommi stared at her feet. We ate ham sandwiches and spears of limp pickles for our lunch.
In San Antonio, we picked up a few more families, and then, somewhere in whatever lay between San Antonio and Crystal City, both my mother and Max fell asleep. Max had his head in my lap and Mommi rested hers against Papa’s shoulder as my father and I sat across from each other. He looked down at Mommi for a long moment and then raised his gaze to me.
“Thank you for everything you did while I was away. I know it had to have been hard being strong for her.” He glanced down at Mommi again before looking back at me. “I wish you hadn’t needed to be the strong one. But I am glad you were.”
For several seconds I just stared at Papa. The only sound between us was the clacking of the rails and tracks beneath us. Is that what I had been? The strong one? I didn’t think so.
“She couldn’t have made it this long without you,” Papa continued, his facial features crumpling into a sad smile. “I know she couldn’t have. I am so very grateful, sweetheart. You’ve been very brave.”
“No, I haven’t,” I murmured.
“Yes, you have.”
A few moments of silence hovered between us.
“It’s been so terrible, Papa,” I said moments later. I wanted him to know the truth. Our letters to him had been just like his to us, full of trivialities and frivolous small talk about nothing that really mattered so that our words could not be somehow used against him.
He shook his head. “I’m so sorry about that.”
“Why should you be sorry? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know, but—”
“Everyone back home thinks you are what the FBI says you are,” I said, cutting him off. “All the awful things they accused you of, everyone believes.”
Papa sighed and opened his mouth to say something, but I again filled the space with my own words.
“People back home treated Mommi, Max, and me like . . . like we had some disgusting disease they might catch if they got too close. I lost all my friends. Even Collette. Kids at school called me names, Papa. They called you names.”
“But names are not what we are, Elise.”
I didn’t doubt my father, and yet here we all were, on a train headed to a detainee camp, shades down, with an armed guard at the door—all because of the names Papa had been called: German sympathizer. Nazi lover. Insurgent. Infiltrator. Enemy.
“It feels like they are,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment. “It’s not always going to be like this,” he finally said. “The world is at war, and war is not . . . it’s not like any other time. I know this. I was fourteen, just like you, when my father came home from the Great War. It was a terrible time, those years he was gone, and it made no sense to me what everyone was fighting over. But it didn’t last. It ended. Wars begin and wars end. There will be peace again. We only need to hold on to who we are, deep within, so that we’ll recognize ourselves on the other side when it’s over. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” I said. I’d heard him, but I didn’t know what he meant, and he knew it.
“Don’t lose sight of who you are, Elise. Don’t give in to anger and bitterness.”
“But we did nothing wrong!” I said loudly. Max stirred on my lap and then quieted.
“Sometimes it’s not about right and wrong but now and later. Right now, we are having to put up with a difficult situation that we don’t deserve, and it’s not right. But later, when the war is over, we’ll remember that we didn’t let it break us. Hmm? Do you understand?”
There would be occasions, many years after this train ride, when I’d wonder if Papa believed he came out on the other side unbroken. But on that day, I chose to believe that it was possible. I nodded.
Some minutes after he told me this, he and I fell asleep, too, as did pretty much everyone in our car. When the train approached the Crystal City station less than an hour later, the whistle blew, and the sleeping passengers began to stir. The four of us awoke and shook the sleep from our eyes.
When the train came to a stop, we were told to stay in our family units as we disembarked and to follow the guards to the bus that was waiting for us. It was now nearing four o’clock in the afternoon. Mommi, Max, and I had spent the last forty hours on a train, Papa even longer. We moved slowly, too slow for the guards, who insisted everyone walk fast. Again, as in Dallas, our little group of German and Japanese immigrants and their American-born children attracted attention from other travelers at the depot. I was too hot and hungry and tired to care this time. Even though it was late afternoon, the sun bore down on us like a soldering iron.
We climbed onto a school bus that thankfully did not have shades. It was stiflingly hot inside but at least the windows were open and we could look out. The family sitting directly behind me was Japanese—a father, mother, and two little boys, one just a baby. The baby began to cry, and the mother shushed him gently with words I didn’t understand but in a maternal tone I did. For one moment I felt myself staring at that family as my classmates had stared at me while they silently accused me of causing every horrible thing that was happening in the world. Those people bombed Pearl Harbor, an ugly little voice inside me whispered, and I nearly had to put my hands over my ears to silence it. Those people were just an ordinary father and mother and their two children. They were just like us.
The bus lumbered away from the train depot and onto city streets that looked at first glance like any boulevard in Davenport, except that tumbleweeds twirled about in the gutters and men wore wide-brimmed hats and pointed-toe boots. Some storefront signs were in Spanish, and outside of these businesses, dark-haired, dark-skinned Mexicans laughed and talked and reached for their children’s hands. As we drove past city hall, a statue of the cartoon character Popeye welcomed us to the spinach capital of the world.
“Look,” Papa said to Max, pointing to the statue. “It’s Popeye!”
“Yuck,” Max said. “I hate spinach.”
Papa laughed, and Mommi did, too. The view of the statue fell away behind us and we turned onto a long, straight road that led out of city limits.
Everyone on the bus seemed to understand that we were leaving the town, where everything looked different but normal, and were heading out to an open space where the internment camp was, a mile away and in the middle of nowhere. Adult voices stilled and even the children got quiet. There had been a few trees here and there in town, but now there were none, only an expanse of sand and cactus and parched weeds in every direction except the one we had come from. And then in the distance a rectangle emerged of what looked like children’s blocks, lined up in rows. Watchtowers loomed over the rectangle. As we got closer, the blocks became buildings. Tall barbed-wire fencing glinted in the late-afternoon sun. A few men on horseback were patrolling the perimeter, rifles in their laps, big Stetson hats on their heads.
“Cowboys!” Max whispered, almost in awe.
The men on the horses ambled over to what appeared to be the main gate. As the bus neared it, a uniformed man about my father’s age stepped out of a guard shack, unlocked the gate, and slid it open so the bus could come through. Max waved to the men on the horses, and one of them smiled and tipped his hat with one hand while steadying the rifle on his lap with the other.
The bus lurched through and the gate slid closed behind us with a loud and definitive clang. The riders drifted away and Max looked after them with longing in his eyes.