Art Moran shoved his door partway open, then took his hat from off the seat and put it on the back of his head. ‘Policeman,’ said the younger boy, and stepped in beside his brother. ‘It’s not a policeman,’ answered the older boy. ‘It’s the sheriff or somebody like that.’
‘That’s right,’ said Art. ‘I’m Sheriff Moran, boys. Is your mother home a-tall?’
The older boy gave his brother a shove. ‘Go get Mom,’ he said.
They looked like their father. They were going to be big like their father, he could see that. Sun-browned, thick-limbed German children.
‘You go ahead and play,’ he said to them. ‘I’ll just go knock. You play.’ He smiled down at the younger one.
But they didn’t go. They watched from beside the rhododendron bush while he climbed to the porch with his hat in his hand and rapped his knuckles against the front door, which was thrown open to reveal Carl’s living room. Art looked in, waiting. The walls had been paneled with varnished pine board in which the knots shone luminously; Susan Marie’s curtains were of a clean, smooth yellow, tied off crisply behind careful bows, ruffled, valenced, and undertiered. The concentric circles of a braided wool rug concealed most of the floorboards. In one far corner an upright piano loomed; in another sat a rolltop desk. There were twin oak rockers with embroidered cushions, twin walnut end tables astride a worn bench sofa, and a plush easy chair beside a gilt brass floor lamp. The chair had been pulled
up to the oversized fireplace Carl had built, inside of which stood tall, fluted andirons. The sheriff was impressed by the order of this room, its bronze, quiet, and syrupy light, and by the photographs on the wall of the various Heines and assorted Varigs who had preceded Carl and Susan Marie in the world: stout, impressive, blunt-faced Germans who never smiled for photographers.
It was a fine living room, clean and quiet. He gave Susan Marie credit for that, just as he had given Carl credit for the chimney and dormers, and while he stood there admiring her hand in everything she appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘Sheriff Moran,’ she called. ‘Hello.’
He knew then that she hadn’t heard. He knew it was up to him to say it. But he couldn’t just yet – couldn’t bring himself – and so he only stood there with his hat in his hand, rubbing his lips with the ball of his thumb and squinting while she came down the stairs. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Heine.’
‘I was just putting the baby down,’ she answered.
It was a far different woman from the one at church – the winsome fisher wife serving tea and coffee. Now she wore a dull skirt, no shoes, and no makeup. She had a diaper draped over her left shoulder, spittle stained, and her hair had not recently been washed. In her hand was a baby bottle.
‘What can I do for you, sheriff?’ she asked. ‘Carl hasn’t come home yet.’
That’s why I’m here,’ Art replied. ‘I’m afraid I have some … bad news to report. The worst sort of news, Mrs. Heine.’
She seemed at first not to understand. She looked at him as if he’d spoken in Chinese. Then she pulled the diaper from her shoulder and smiled at him, and it was his duty to make clear this mystery.
‘Carl is dead,’ said Art Moran. ‘He died last night in a fishing accident. We found him this morning tangled in his net out in White Sand Bay.’
‘Carl?’ said Susan Marie Heine. ‘That can’t be.’
‘It is, though. I know it can’t be. I don’t want it to be.
Believe me, I wish it wasn’t true. But it is true. I’ve come to tell you.’
It was strange, the way she reacted. There was no way to have predicted it ahead of time. Suddenly she backed away from him, blinking, sat down hard on the bottom stair, and set the baby bottle on the floor beside her toes. She dug her elbows into her lap and began to rock with the diaper between her hands, wringing it between her fingers. ‘I knew this would happen one day,’ she whispered. Then she stopped rocking and stared into the living room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Art said. ‘I’m … I’m going to call your sister, I think, and ask her to come on over. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Heine?’
But there was no answer, and Art could only repeat that he was sorry and step past her in the direction of the telephone.
In the back of Judge Lew Fielding’s courtroom sat twenty-four islanders of Japanese ancestry, dressed in the clothes they reserved for formal occasions. No law compelled them to take only these rear seats. They had done so instead because San Piedro required it of them without calling it a law.
Their parents and grandparents had come to San Piedro as far back as 1883. In that year two of them – Japan Joe and Charles Jose – lived in a lean-to near Cattle Point. Thirty-nine Japanese worked at the Port Jefferson mill, but the census taker neglected to list them by name, referring instead to Jap Number 1, Jap Number 2, Jap Number 3, Japan Charlie, Old Jap Sam, Laughing Jap, Dwarf Jap, Chippy, Boots, and Stumpy – names of this sort instead of real names.
By century’s turn over three hundred Japanese had arrived on San Piedro, most of them schooner hands who jumped ship in Port Jefferson Harbor in order to remain in the United States. Many swam ashore with no American currency and wandered island trails eating salmonberries and matsutake mushrooms until they found their way to ‘Jap Town’: three bathhouses, two barbershops, two churches (one Buddhist, the other a Baptist mission), a hotel, a grocery store, a baseball diamond, an ice cream parlor, a tofu shop, and fifty unpainted and slatternly dwellings all fronting onto muddy roads. Within a week the ship jumpers possessed mill jobs – stacking lumber, sweeping sawdust, hauling slab wood, oiling machines – worth eleven cents an hour.
Company books preserved in the Island County historical archives record that in 1907 eighteen Japanese were injured
or maimed at the Port Jefferson mill. Jap Number 107, the books indicate, lost his hand to a ripping blade on March 12 and received an injury payment of $7.80. Jap Number 57 dislocated his right hip on May 29 when a stack of lumber toppled over.
In 1921 the mill was dismantled: all of the island’s trees had been fed to the saws, so that San Piedro resembled a bald stump desert. The mill owners sold their holdings and left the island behind. The Japanese cleared strawberry fields, for strawberries grew well in San Piedro’s climate and required little starting capital. All you needed, the saying went, was one horse, one plow, and a lot of children.
Soon some Japanese leased small plots of land and entered into business for themselves. Most, though, were contract farmers or sharecroppers who worked in fields owned by
hakujin
. The law said they could not own land unless they became citizens; it also said they could not become citizens so long as they were Japanese.
They saved their money in canning jars, then wrote home to their parents in Japan requesting wives be sent. Some lied and said they’d gotten rich, or sent pictures of themselves as younger men; at any rate, wives came across the ocean. They lived in cedar slat huts lit by oil lamps and slept on straw-filled ticks. The wind blew in through the cracks in the walls. At five o’clock in the morning bride and groom both could be found in the strawberry fields. In the fall, squatting between the rows, they pulled weeds or poured fertilizer out of buckets. They spread slug and weevil bait in April. They cut back the runners on the yearlings first and then on the two- and three-year-old plants. They weeded and watched for fungus and spit bugs and for the mold that grew when it rained.
In June, when the berries ripened, they took their caddies into the fields and began the task of picking. Canadian Indians came down each year to join them at working for the
hakujin.
The Indians slept at the verges of fields or in old chicken houses or barns. Some worked in the strawberry cannery. They stayed
for two months, through raspberry season, then they were gone again.
But for at least a solid month each summer there were endless strawberries to pick. By an hour after dawn the first flats were mounded over, and the foreman, a white man, stood writing Roman numerals in a black book beside the name of each picker. He sorted the berries in cedar bins while men from the packing company loaded them onto flatbed trucks. The pickers went on filling flats, squatting in the numbered rows.
When the harvest was over in early July they were given a day off for the Strawberry Festival. A young girl was crowned Strawberry Princess; the
hakujin
put on a salmon bake; the Volunteer Fire Department played a softball game against the Japanese Community Center team. The Garden Club displayed strawberries and fuchsia baskets, and the chamber of commerce awarded trophies for a float competition. In the dance pavilion at West Port Jensen the night lanterns were kindled; tourists from Seattle poured forth from the excursion steamers to perform the Svenska polka, the Rhinelander, the schottische, and the hambone. Everybody came out – hay farmers, clerks, merchants, fishermen, crabbers, carpenters, loggers, net weavers, truck farmers, junk dealers, real estate brigands, hack poets, ministers, lawyers, sailors, squatters, millwrights, cedar rats, teamsters, plumbers, mushroom foragers, and holly pruners. They picnicked at Burchillville and Sylvan Grove, listened while the high school band played sluggish Sousa marches, and sprawled under trees drinking port wine.
One part bacchanal, one part tribal potlatch, one part vestigial New England supper, the entire affair hinged on the coronation of the Strawberry Princess – always a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder – in an oddly solemn ceremony before the Island County Courthouse at sundown of the inaugural evening. Surrounded by a crescent of basketed strawberries, she received her crown with a bowed head from Amity Harbor’s mayor, who wore a red sash from shoulder to waist and carried a decorated scepter.
In the hush that ensued he would announce gravely that the Department of Agriculture – he had a letter – credited their fair island with producing America’s Finest Strawberry, or that King George and Queen Elizabeth, on a recent visit to the city of Vancouver, had been served San Piedro’s Best for breakfast. A cheer would fly up as he stood with scepter high, his free hand about the young maiden’s shapely shoulder. The girl, it turned out, was an unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice who allowed the festivities to go forward with no uttered ill will.
The next day, at noon traditionally, the Japanese began picking raspberries.
Thus life went forward on San Piedro. By Pearl Harbor Day there were eight hundred and forty-three people of Japanese descent living there, including twelve seniors at Amity Harbor High School who did not graduate that spring. Early on the morning of March 29, 1942, fifteen transports of the U.S. War Relocation Authority took all of San Piedro’s Japanese-Americans to the ferry terminal in Amity Harbor.
They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on, people who had risen early to stand in the cold and watch this exorcising of the Japanese from their midst – friends, some of them, but the merely curious, mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything.
During the morning recess the accused man’s wife had come alone to the row of seats behind the defendant’s table and asked permission to speak with her husband.
‘You’ll have to do it from back there,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘Mr. Miyamoto can turn and face you all right, but that’s about it, you see. I’m not supposed to let him move around much.’
Once each afternoon, for seventy-seven days, Hatsue Miyamoto had appeared at the Island County Jail for a three o’clock visit with her husband. At first she came alone and spoke with him through a pane of glass, but then he asked her to bring the children. Thereafter she did so – two girls, eight and four, who walked behind her, and a boy of eleven months whom she carried in her arms. Kabuo was in jail on the morning their son began to walk, but in the afternoon she brought the boy and he took four steps while his father watched from behind the visiting room windowpane. Afterward she’d held him up to the glass and Kabuo spoke to him through the microphone. ‘You can go further than me!’ he’d said. ‘You take some steps for me, okay?’
Now, in the courtroom, he turned toward Hatsue. ‘How are the kids?’ he said.
‘They need their father,’ she answered.
‘Nels is working on that,’ said Kabuo.
‘Nels is going to move away,’ said Nels. ‘Deputy Martinson ought to do the same. Why don’t you stand where you can watch, Abel? But give these people some privacy.’
‘I can’t,’ replied Abel. ‘Art’d kill me.’
‘Art won’t kill you,’ Nels said. ‘You know darn well Mrs. Miyamoto isn’t going to slip Mr. Miyamoto any kind of weapon. Back off a little. Let them talk.’
‘I can’t,’ said Abel. ‘Sorry.’
But he sidled back about three feet anyway and pretended not to be listening. Nels excused himself.
‘Where are they staying?’ asked Kabuo.
‘They’re at your mother’s. Mrs. Nakao is there. Everybody is helping out.’
‘You look good. I miss you.’
‘I look terrible,’ answered Hatsue. ‘And you look like one of Tojo’s soldiers. You’d better quit sitting up so straight and tall. These jury people will be afraid of you.’
He fixed his gaze directly on hers, and she could see he was thinking about it. ‘It’s good to be out of that cell,’ he said. ‘It feels great to be out of there.’
Hatsue wanted to touch him then. She wanted to reach out and put her hand on his neck or place her fingertips against his face. This was the first time in seventy-seven days that they had not been separated by a pane of glass. For seventy-seven days she’d heard his voice only through the filter of a microphone. During this time she had never once felt composed, and she had stopped imagining their future. At night she’d brought the children into her bed, then exerted herself fruitlessly toward sleep. She had sisters, cousins, and aunts who called mornings and asked her to come for lunch. She went because she was lonely and needed to hear the sound of voices. The women made sandwiches, cakes, and tea and chattered in the kitchen while the children played, and this is how the autumn passed, with her life arrested, on hold.