Boyd was twenty-three years old. He was tall and pale looking like his Swedish ancestors, with a straightforward, friendly character that made him one of the few whites to gain the evacuees’ confidence. A girlfriend was waiting impatiently for him in Los Angeles, but when he saw Megumi in her white volunteer’s uniform, his heart was taken. She cleaned the wound, the doctor inserted nine stitches, and she bandaged it with professional skill without once looking him in the face, while Boyd stared at her so bedazzled that he didn’t feel the slightest pain. From that day on he hovered around her discreetly, partly because he did not want to abuse his position of authority, but above all because any mixing of the races was forbidden for the whites and was repugnant to the Japanese. Thanks to her moonlike face and the delicacy with which she moved through the world, Megumi could have had any of the most sought-after young men at Topaz, but she felt the same forbidden attraction for the guard, and also struggled with the monstrosity of racism, praying to the heavens that the war would come to an end and her family return to San Francisco so that she could tear this sinful temptation from her soul. For his part, Boyd prayed the war would never end.
On the Fourth of July there was an Independence Day celebration, just as there had been six months earlier for the New Year. On that occasion the event had been a failure, because the camp was still not properly finished, and the Japanese had not yet become resigned to the fact that they were prisoners. In July 1943, however, the evacuees tried their hardest to show their patriotism and the Americans their goodwill, despite the dust storms and the heat, which seemed to bother even the lizards. Everyone mingled cheerfully amidst the barbecues, bunting, cakes, and even beer for the men, who for once were able to avoid the dreadful liquor made clandestinely from fermented tinned peaches. Boyd was among those detailed to photograph the occasion in order to silence those ill-intentioned journalists who denounced what they saw as the inhumane treatment meted out to the Japanese--Americans. He took advantage of his assignment to ask the Fukudas to pose for him. Afterward, he gave a copy to Takao and surreptitiously passed another to Megumi, while he enlarged his own and cut out the figure of Megumi from the family group. This photo was with him for the rest of his life: he kept it protected in plastic inside his wallet and was buried with it fifty-two years later. In the family portrait, the Fukudas are standing in front of a squat black building: Takao has slumped shoulders and a dour expression, Heideko is small and defiant, James is in half profile and sullen looking, Megumi shows all the splendor of her eighteen years, and the skinny eleven-year-old Ichimei stands there with his mop of unruly hair and scabs on his knees.
In this photograph, the only one of the family at Topaz, Charles is missing. That year Takao and Heideko’s eldest son had enlisted, because he considered it his duty, not in order to escape from confinement, an accusation some young men opposed to conscription made of these volunteers. He became part of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up exclusively of nisei. Ichimei sent Alma a drawing of his brother standing at attention before the flag, with a couple of lines of writing that weren’t censored, explaining he had no room on the sheet of paper to show the other seventeen young men in uniform who were off to war. Ichimei was so talented that in just a few strokes he succeeded in capturing Charles’s expression of extreme pride, a pride that went back to the distant past, to the earlier generations of samurai in his family who went into battle convinced they would not return, ready never to surrender and to die with honor, a conviction that gave them superhuman courage. When, as he always did, Isaac examined the drawing, he pointed out to Alma the irony that those young men were willing to risk their lives defending the interests of a country that was holding their families in concentration camps.
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