“I am sorry,” Jiro gasped out between sobs. “I have dishonored my family’s name. I have dishonored you, my brother. I am sorry.”
Only once had Taizo seen a grown man cry—his father, on the day Taizo’s youngest brother, born prematurely, died within hours of birth.
Seeing Jiro brought so low quelled the fury in Taizo’s heart and allowed him to think rationally again. He had no other prospects in California. What else could he do but to make the best of a bad situation? He drew a long breath to calm himself.
Taizo stepped forward and extended a hand to Jiro.
“Get up, Niisan,” he said, and the implied respect in that word so startled Jiro that he stopped weeping.
Taizo helped him to his feet.
“I would be dishonored if I allowed my own brother to lose face,” he told him. “My family and I will help you with the grape harvest. And I will look at your accounting and see if there is any way to reduce your financial burden. Once Haruo comes of age, we will see. I will not burden my eldest son with your debt, at least not unless I can find a way to expunge it.
“And I insist on one thing: from this point on I will manage your business, since you are obviously incapable of doing so.”
“Yes. Yes, whatever you say, Taizo. Thank you.”
“And the first thing we are going to do is sell that damned Ford truck. Even if we only get thirty cents on the dollar, that will help pay for laborers to finish picking the grapes and perhaps the next strawberry crop too.”
“What! But how will I transport my crop to market?”
“You have two horses. Do you still have a wagon?”
“Yes, but…”
“Today we use your expensive telephone to look for a buyer for the truck. Tomorrow we hitch horses to the wagon and work begins in earnest.”
* * *
That evening, Taizo got up the nerve to tell Etsuko what their true circumstances were, bracing himself for a justifiably furious response. But after the initial shock, Etsuko could plainly see the shame in her husband’s eyes—and chose not to worsen it. She said only, “Well. We had best get to bed, then. It will be an early morning tomorrow.”
They rose before dawn, Etsuko and Nishi putting large pots of coffee and tea on the stove and preparing a breakfast of rice, dried fish, natto—fermented soybeans—miso soup, and eggs.
By six A.M. they were in the fields. Etsuko had worked long hours with Taizo at Waimānalo but had never picked grapes before; she and the boys had to be shown what to do. Jiro and Taizo handed out “picking knives” with sharp, scythelike blades, as Taizo demonstrated their proper use.
Ruth was too young to be put to work, so she was free to play in the fields, running between rows of strawberry plants, chasing fleecy clouds propelled by swift winds, and digging holes to lovingly examine the insects, worms, and garden snakes that made their home in the earth. When she tired of this, Jiro took her to the pasture and showed her how to milk a cow.
“Very good!” he said as Ruth’s small hands produced a dribble of milk from the cow’s udder. “From now on you are the official family cow milker!”
“I like it here, Uncle Jiro,” Ruth said, beaming.
“I am glad someone does,” he replied, his meaning lost on her.
The rest of the Watanabe clan was having considerably less fun as, stooped over, they cut and picked the grapes, swatting away predatory wasps and occasionally nicking themselves with their knives. As the picking baskets filled up with fruit, Nishi and Etsuko took them to the cool interior of the barn, where they trimmed and cleaned them, then gently placed them into wooden boxes that were to be delivered daily to the Florin Fruit Growers Association—which then transferred them to train cars, packed with ice, to be shipped east.
At noon they paused to eat lunch—rice, dried fish, pickled radish—from their bentō boxes and later sang Japanese songs as they worked to keep their spirits up. By the end of a long, backbreaking day they were all aching and weary, but no one complained. Tonight all anyone wanted was a hearty dinner, a hot bath, and a good night’s sleep—knowing full well they would wake the next morning before dawn and start all over again.
As Nishi began to serve supper to Taizo and Jiro first, Taizo saw the hunger in his family’s eyes and suggested, “Inasmuch as we have all worked equally hard today, perhaps from now on everyone should be served at the same time.” Jiro made no objection, and another tradition toppled that day.
Late that night—after Ruth had fallen asleep and Taizo and Etsuko lay uncomfortably in bed, struggling to fall asleep on a mattress much softer than their familiar futon—Taizo said, quietly, into the darkness: “I am sorry, Okāsan. I should have listened to you. You were right about him.”
After a moment she replied, “What does the proverb say? ‘Let the things of long ago drift away on the water.’”
She reached out, took his hand in hers, and they lay like that until exhaustion claimed them.
* * *
On Sunday, after Taizo and Jiro had returned from Sacramento—where they sold the truck for enough money to hire itinerant laborers to help pick the remainder of the crop—the family was just sitting down to dinner when there was a knock on the front door. Jiro opened it. Standing on his doorstep was the local sheriff, a white man in his fifties with a rugged, tanned face and a sturdy build. He was wearing work denims and boots and chewing something that might have been tobacco.
“Evening, Watanabe-san,” he said, his emphasis making it sound less like an honorific than a pejorative. He peered inside. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt your supper.”
Even from where he sat, Taizo could see that Jiro was startled.
“Perfectly all right. What can I do for you, Sheriff Dreesen?”
“I understand you got some family who’ve moved in with you.”
“Yes. My brother and his family have come from Hawai'i to help me with the farm.”
“I’d like to meet your brother. And see his passport. If you don’t mind.”
The tone in his voice indicated this was not merely a request.
Jiro turned and said, “Taizo—”
“Yes, I heard. I shall get it.” Taizo went upstairs, retrieved his Japanese passport from his luggage, and came back to find his brother and Dreesen still standing on opposite sides of the doorway.
“I don’t much like takin’ off my shoes,” Dreesen said. “Mind if we talk outside?”
Taizo and Jiro put on their shoes, closing the door behind them. Jiro said, “Taizo, this is Joseph Dreesen. He is a local farmer and also serves as sheriff for the town of Florin. Mr. Dreesen, my brother Taizo.”
Dreesen just nodded and chewed. Taizo gave him his passport.
“It’s my understanding of immigration law,” Dreesen said, opening the passport, “that Japanese nationals in Hawai'i are prohibited from emigrating to California, or anywhere else in the mainland United States.”
“That is true,” Jiro said. “But exceptions are made for close family and for those coming to work on established farms in which they have a financial interest, as my brother does.”
Dreesen flipped through the passport with evident disdain, then laughed shortly.
“You wily Japs always have all the angles figured, don’t you?” he said, dropping any pretense of civility.
He handed the document back to Taizo. “Let’s take a walk.”
He started out into the fields; all Jiro and Taizo could do was follow. “Looks like you got a good crop of Tokays this year,” Dreesen noted.
“Thank you.”
“Twenty-five years ago, white men owned all this land,” Dreesen said, squinting into the distance. “Like they owned all the shops in Florin. You Japs couldn’t be satisfied sharecropping or leasing our land, you had to go buy it all out from under us.”
Dreesen turned and spat tobacco juice onto a strawberry plant.
Jiro’s face hardened. “We bought low-quality land that white men did not want and with hard work turned it into productive farmland.”
“You put native-born Californians out of work, then set about breedin’ like rats till you outnumbered real Americans.”