Fiction

DEBRIS FIELD

by Cynthia Hawkins

The day the tornado hit, Gladys and her partner Emma had lived in the screened-in back porch of the Sumner House on Mulberry Street for three weeks, their bed a camper mattress, their nightstand a moving box marked “museum catalogues” in red ink.  Pressing further into the house—a 1905 two-story craftsman with a basement and eight bedrooms and two staircases—wore them to the bone, as Emma would say, so progress had been slow.  Emma was eighty-two.  Gladys, seventy-nine.  And the house was a jumble of all the things Emma’s late grandmother had accumulated until her death in 1978.  Ever since, the responsibility of watching over the house and its contents had been passed down in Emma’s family.  “It’s every flea market I’ve ever been to, stuffed into one house,” Gladys, wedging further into the entryway, wearing a pink jacquard pantsuit she’d sewn for herself, had said when she first saw the interior.  Gladys had been a collector at one time and knew the value of the vintage Coca-Cola dispenser and the walnut Victrola in the array she could just make out from where she stood.  But it was everything else—the syrup bottles, the McCormick’s tins, the toothbrushes with the squashed bristles, the fishing tackle, the bars of soap whittled down and wrapped in waxed paper, and on and on—that made Gladys’s jaw tighten until her ears itched and her cheeks flushed and she thought maybe she’d stop breathing unless she could empty this house altogether.

Dust motes swam over the top of the Zenith, the row of radio clocks, the arched back of the Victorian settee.  Windows darkened.  Eaves popped.  Gladys maneuvered sideways through the clutter of the kitchen and onto the back porch where Emma sat on the mattress reading the copy of Wuthering Heights she’d found mildewing under a leaking elbow pipe of a bathroom sink.

Gladys held out a florist’s box with its lid removed to reveal maybe a dozen lopped-off braids of hair tied with satin ribbons.

“Oh please,” Gladys said, “please tell me we can toss this.”

Gladys gave it a shake, and Emma drew her legs further up under her broom skirt.

“Oh, Bug, we have to keep everything.”  Emma squinted up at Gladys through her glasses.

In 1953, when Emma worked at the Meeker’s factory, stitching leather handbags and belts, she had a habit of calling every girl there, as they stood in the back alley sharing mayonnaise sandwiches or menthol cigarettes or lipstick, “June Bug” because she couldn’t remember names.  They came and went, wearing the same kerchiefs and skirts and close-lipped grins.  She couldn’t be expected to keep track.  And Gladys was among them.  She was “June Bug” until Gladys stayed on and Emma began to notice how Gladys wore canvas sneakers half-on and squashed heeled, dyed her hair the color of a penny, knew everybody’s names, first and last, always, and left the taste of orange soda on her cigarette filters.  Then she was just “Bug.”

“Everything stays,” Emma said.  “You know that.”

Everything.  Gladys’s jaw tightened.  Her ears itched.  She fit the lid back onto the box.

Emma had hoped to rearrange enough of Grandma Sumner’s belongings to carve out adequate space for themselves in one of the bedrooms, restore a bathroom, clear the kitchen.  That was it.  That was all the space Emma felt she and Gladys would need.  The rest had to be preserved as it had always been.  She flipped a page, wafting the twang of mildew.

Gladys waved a hand.  “How can you stand the smell?”

“By the time I made it three chapters in I hardly noticed anymore.”

Emma once slept for three-and-a-half hours on an airport bench in Heathrow when their flight home was delayed.  She once lifted a submerged cast-iron pan from the shale of a river to show Gladys the leaches clinging to it—“isn’t this just the most fascinating thing?”—and then flung it downstream.  She could eat a truck-stop kolache without getting sick, bathe in water colored from the rust in the pipes, shave all of her hair off with pet clippers, wash her arms and neck in a rest-stop sink, buff a fruit-stand peach against her sleeve and eat it right then.  She could curl around Gladys on a camper mattress on a back porch, her hip aching against the thin foam, her spine slumped out of a natural shape, the moth-ball smell of the mattress buttons under a sheet stinging her nose, and be perfectly content.  Always content.  Gladys, though, groaned and lowered herself to sit beside the boxed museum catalogues.  She smelled the mildew of the page wavering between Emma’s fingers, and then she smelled something else entirely, something pressing through the screens in a gust.  The eaves popped.  Dirt and weeds and the odd metallic tinge of something like fertilizer or pencil shavings, that’s what she smelled.  All at once.  Amplified.  As if she’d dumped a cluster of mother-in-law tongues from a clay pot and stuck her whole head inside.  The eaves popped.  Her ears popped.  The sky past the sweet gum trees out back went black.  And then, sirens.

 

* * *

 

During the whole of Emma’s tenure as Sumner House caretaker, which had up until now mostly consisted of walking the perimeter maybe once a week when they were around to make sure nobody had busted a window and slipped in, she had never been down in the basement.  Or maybe she had as a kid and forgotten.  She couldn’t be sure, but as she and Gladys descended the wooden steps one at a time with their hands on the railing and pulled the chain for the bulb at the bottom, she studied the rows of metal bunk beds and steamer trunks with fresh surprise.  She’d expected to find it crammed like every other room in the house.  She and Gladys stood on the rubber mat of the landing while the tornado siren wailed somewhere above the wooden beams of the basement ceiling.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gladys rested her fingertips in the tiny “V” of her parted blouse collars.

“What do you think is in those trunks?” Emma wondered.  There was one at the foot of each set of bunks.

“Dead bodies,” Gladys mused.

Emma flipped the clasps of the nearest trunk to have a look.  Canned goods. Maxi pads.  Playing cards.  Canteens.  A kerosene lamp and a box of matches.  Bandage rolls.  A Reader’s Digest from August of 1957.  A paddle ball.

“How disappointing.”  Gladys crossed her arms.

“Well.”  Emma stood straight and let the steamer lid gape.  “Is this clean enough for you?  We could live down here.”

It had been Emma’s idea to move into Sumner House after thirty-eight years of its being largely uninhabited.  They’d spent most of their collective retirement on travel over the years—stateside in an ’82 Ford truck with a camper shell and abroad in hostels meant for young backpackers.  Emma would bring her camera.  Gladys would bring her collapsible fishing rod.  They’d sit on benches in museums with their sketchbooks on their knees and draw approximations of Starry Night or The Three Graces or Song to the Moonbow or Bacchus and Ariadne and pack the catalogue in the folds of Emma’s skirts in the suitcase for the trip home.  They’d highlight their paths on outdated maps falling apart at the folds and get lost and hand roll cigarettes and lie on their backs on the lawns of parks at night.  In Madrid, Gladys bought a sword she had to drag along the cobblestones, it was so heavy.  In Marfa, Emma bought a tiny box full of tiny worry dolls she lost through a hole in her skirt pocket.  In Galway, Emma played a toy guitar like a ukulele in the hostel’s kitchen while Gladys sang Kay Starr favorites, no matter the tune, and a bearded kid resembling Jesus checked the package of bread he’d found in the cabinet for mold and made toast for everyone.  And a little over a month ago when rent was due in their over-the-garage apartment on Avenue B and Byers, Gladys said they’d have to get jobs and Emma said she had a better idea.  “How about no rent at all?” she’d said.  So here they were.

“Live . . . down here?  In the basement?”  Gladys sat on a bottom bunk.  The floor overhead creaked and shuddered.  “No thank you.  It’s halfway to grave level.”

“So dramatic!”

“You know what this reminds me of?” Gladys said.  “Remember a few years back?  That cult that killed themselves in their bunk beds.  All wearing the same white socks and black shoes.”

“We could wear white socks and black shoes,” Emma offered.  “We could be the cult of Emma and Bug.”

“There’s a special purgatory for those caught dead in white socks and black shoes.  They’re doomed to push empty trays down a Luby’s buffet rail for all eternity.”

Emma rolled her eyes behind her glasses.  “Oh, Bug.”  The mattress sighed dust as Emma joined Gladys on the bottom bunk, leaned her knees to Gladys’s, and held her hand.  She watched the joists and beams as if the warbled striations of wood grain were on the verge of shaping a deep truth.  The bulb flickered.  She was about to ask how they’d know when it was all over when the crescendo of a growl wiped the syllables out and the room went black.  She squeezed Gladys’s hand.  Gladys squeezed back. The growl persisted.  The door at the top of the basement steps rattled in its doorframe.

When the storm finally went silent, Emma realized she was screaming, her throat going raw.  She stopped.  Swallowed.  “Is that all?” she asked Gladys.

“Yes.  Yes, I think that’s all.”

“Did we make it?”

“Looks that way.”

After they were sure they’d made it, Emma stood in the dark.  “Come with me,” she said.  “Let’s see what’s what up there.”

Hand in hand, Gladys and Emma shuffled across the concrete floor until hitting upon the rubber mat.  Gladys’s fingers found the stair rail first, and as they made their careful ascent she’d hoped to throw the door back to find that the whole house had been carried away with everything in it. For all the noise, though, Sumner House remained fairly undisturbed.  One window had burst in the front room over the settee, and the sweet gum tree had smashed their porch and pinned the back door shut with the very ends of its toppled branches.

“Grandma always hated the seed balls anyway,” Emma said when she discovered the damage through the kitchen’s back window.

“Oh god,” Gladys stood on tiptoes behind Emma, her hands on Emma’s shoulders, peering past to see for herself.  “What about our catalogues?”

“I’m sure they’re under the branches somewhere.”

“They’ll be soaked through!”

Gladys smacked her mouth in the great disappointment of it all and tugged at Emma’s shirt hem for her to follow her to the front of the house and out the door to gauge the damage in the greater neighborhood.  It was the lack of sound that hit Gladys first.  No electricity humming along the wires strewn with tangled tree limbs down the street.  No cars whirring along the asphalt.  No birds.  Nothing.  Gladys said Emma’s name just to see if her voice would register.  It did.  Without echo.  Clean as a dart meeting its target.  The houses down Mulberry stood intact as their residents gathered on their stoops blinking at the clearing sky.  Emma raised a hand in greeting, and a pot-bellied man in a tracksuit waved back.

“Huh,” Gladys breathed, stepping forward into the yard between twists of chain-link fence and roofing tiles to examine the stumps of oak branches dangling Christmas tinsel.  And when she turned a half-circle to examine the side of the house, smattered with mud, her eyes narrowed at the empty sky beyond the houses directly behind theirs.  In that direction, every roofline, every church steeple, every treetop, as far as she could see, was gone.

 

* * *

 

When Mulberry Street had finally been cleared, the trucks drove through to collect debris, and a church group from Alabama arrived to clean the lawns.  It was then that Gladys had the idea of carrying some of Grandma Sumner’s things to throw in the truck, as if they were things that had landed on their property.  She kept Emma busy out back supervising a young man who’d volunteered to remove the sweet gum from the porch.  And while the chainsaw sputtered to life, Gladys slipped out the old servant’s entrance on the side of the kitchen with the box of braids.  Somewhere around her fifth trip to the truck with her arms full of doll parts, Gladys decided that in the unlikely event that Emma noticed anything had gone missing, Gladys would say they must have been looted in the night.  So far, they hadn’t actually been looted in the night, even though Gladys would quietly unlock the front door before descending into the basement where they’d been forced to sleep for the last three days.  It was cool down there, at least, cooler than the porch had been.  And since they were still without electricity, and would be for weeks, Gladys insisted they keep one of the old kerosene lamps lit so she could, as she’d told Emma, sleep without imagining herself in a pine box.

In the back yard, Emma dragged a tree limb to a pile she was making a good distance from the back porch. The young man, in jeans and a grubby t-shirt and work goggles, nosed the chainsaw into the fallen tree.  He didn’t listen when Emma told him, her voice straining over the noise of the blades, to be careful not to cut through whatever the tree had fallen on.  “I have a very special box under those limbs.  A box of very important catalogues, you understand.”  And Emma didn’t listen when he told her, over his shoulder, to stop dragging the cut tree limbs away.  “I can do that in a bit, ma’am,” he said.  The branch sprung against the others after she added it to the pile and checked her palms.  They itched from the bark.  The tree root had taken a great chunk of ground up with it so the root, on its side, stood six feet high.  She walked around it to get to the faucet and rinse her hands.

The man let the chainsaw idle as he said, “Ma’am.  You shouldn’t use that water.”

“Oh, it’s just fine.”

“There’s a boil order.”
“A what?”  She looked up at him, the man poised on the fallen tree, holding his chainsaw aside and squinting in the goggles.

“You have to boil that water,” he said.

She hadn’t heard about a boil order.  In the hours after the tornado, they’d found three radios in the house but no batteries to run them.  So she and Gladys had no idea what was happening anywhere beyond maybe the two houses surrounding them in every direction.  After she twisted the faucet off and shook her hands dry, she walked to the front.  And there was Gladys, in her home-sewn seersucker pants and blouse with its Peter Pan collar, emptying a pillowcase into the truck, shaking its clunky contents loose with more vigor once she saw Emma plodding through the mess of the front lawn.

Emma shielded her eyes from the sun with her damp hand.  “That boy out back says there’s a boil order and we’re not to use the water right out of the faucets,” Emma said.

Gladys draped the empty pillowcase over her arm. “Well,” Gladys said, “go on back there and find out what else we’re not supposed to be doing.”  She wasn’t sure how much longer the truck would be parked at the curb.  The volunteers from the church were down to untangling the last of the debris from the boxwoods under the front windows.  “Go on.”

“Go get the car, Bug.”

“What?  Now?”

“I need to see what’s going on out there.”

Emma pressed her fists to her hips.  She stared at Gladys.  Gladys stared back.  Emma shifted her glasses up the bridge of her nose.  The sun strengthened and faded.  Then Gladys sighed and said, “I’ll get the keys,” as she walked toward the detached garage.

Gladys drove slowly in the Corolla toward the flat expanse of the tornado’s imprint while Emma leaned close to the windshield looking for street signs.  They’d been ripped away.  Pole and all.  Many of the roads were closed, marked with orange sawhorse barriers.  Gladys lost track of the turns they’d made.  Emma rifled through the glove box for a map as if by magic it could help them navigate the streets they’d both known for their entire lives, transformed into indistinct mud-splattered paths between great mounds of debris and the black, leafless stumps of trees.  Block after block.  Mangled bicycles, plywood, dish shards, insulation, winter jackets, lamp stands, bricks, sheetrock, lawn chairs, swing sets.  Gladys could feel her pulse in her ears.

“What do you think happened to everyone?” Emma wondered.

And once they finally made their way back home, the car lurching on a flat tire studded with glass, they found the Alabama volunteers, who’d moved on a few houses down from theirs, and asked.  One hundred and sixty-one dead, was the answer.  Thousands displaced.  Some had camped out in the shelters set up at the university.  The hospital was gone along with three schools and the grocery store. There was the boil order, a contaminated soil warning, a sunset curfew.

“Gracious,” Gladys said with her thumb tracing the curve of her collar.

“It was a record-breaker,” a woman in overalls and hiking boots replied.

What a cosmic joke, Gladys thought, how this town had become something like the cluttered Sumner House turned inside out. They shook the woman’s gloved hand and pivoted again toward home.  When they reached the back porch, they found the sweet gum tree, with the exception of the root ball and the circle of ground it had ripped out of place, dismantled and piled to the side along with the corrugated tin that had been the porch roof and its two-by-fours and the screens and the mattress.  The deck remained, though, and on the deck the soggy box sat slumped, its red-marker letters bleeding into illegibility.  Alongside the box, the museum catalogues had been lined up to dry in the sun.

 

* * *

 

Emma dragged a ladder-back chair and a footstool to the front lawn to read her copy of Wuthering Heights in the shadow of her wide-brimmed hat.  She could smell the mildew now.  Everything smelled like mildew.  Mildew and dirt.  It clung to her fingers.  Her skirt draped over her straight legs crossed at the ankles.  She wasn’t speaking to Gladys, who had staked out her own reading spot out back on a blanket in the crater where the tree’s root ball used to be.  Emma liked this view from the house, anyway, this view from which everything looked pretty much the same as it always had.  It was Gladys who had the view of the empty horizon clouded with the dust of a dozen bulldozers two weeks after the tornado.  And it was the bulldozers that had prompted the fight.

“That’s how it’s done,” Gladys had said, standing beside Emma, peering through a back window of a second floor room crowded with rolling clothing racks and papasan cushions and doors off their hinges as a crawler excavator scraped up debris and conveyed it to the dumping bed of a truck.  “You salvage the best and sweep away everything else.”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s how it’s done’?”

“I mean that’s what we should do,” Gladys had raised her hand to the crammed-together contents of the room they’d just finished forging a path wider than their hips through, “with all this shit.”

They’d spent days repackaging and rearranging in the stale heat of the house, still without air-conditioning, Gladys with her blouse soaked through with sweat, Emma pausing to kneed the aches out of her hands, yet Gladys could never see any real progress, as if everything were made of mercury and slipped right back into place.  And they were still sleeping in the basement, staring up at the beams bearded with cobwebs, the kerosene lamp making hunching funhouse shadows of the bunks on the walls.  There’d even been some talk on Emma’s part of taking in a few people who’d been displaced, and Gladys had to explain they barely had room for the two of them with all the clutter.  “It has to go,” Gladys had demanded.

“Don’t talk like that,” Emma had warned as she retreated from the window. “Everything stays.”

It was then Gladys told her how she’d already gotten rid of a good deal of junk when the trucks were here and Emma hadn’t even missed it.  “You see?” Gladys had said.  “Once it’s all gone you won’t even remember what was here to begin with.”

“Exactly.”

And that was the last word Emma had uttered to Gladys.

She lifted her chin to feel the breeze down her neck.  Not speaking to Gladys was sort of like fasting, she thought.  She felt light, felt her ribs squeeze in on the occasional pangs of absence.  On a picnic blanket in back, Gladys lay with a March 1984 National Geographic magazine closed on her chest.  She decided she wasn’t going to work on the house anymore.  It was futile.  She was going to lie right here and get a sunburn and blame Emma.  The beeping of dump trucks and machines in reverse droned in the distance.  Then every air-conditioner unit on Mulberry began to whir at once.  She let the magazine slide off of her chest as she hurried in to check the light switches.  In the kitchen, she tried the small fixture over the sink, and its filaments sizzled to life.  She stood over a floor vent and watched her pant hems stir.

Emma on the front lawn hadn’t heard the power surge anew through the lines.  She was marking her place in the novel with a crease when she saw a small white dog limping down the street.  A poodle mix, she thought, or a bichon frisé.  She sat the book on the woven wicker seat and walked slowly to the curb to greet her.  Kneeling, she opened her hand, and the dog padded over to her, smelling her fingertips.  Dirt and bits of splinter matted her curled fur.  No collar.  Emma tried to pick the splinters loose as she asked her questions.  “What’s your name pretty girl?  Where’s your home?”  The dog’s fur hung from ribs.  “Oh,” Emma said when she picked the dog up and fitted her back against her curled arm, “you don’t weight more than a potato.”  Nicks marked the pads of the dog’s feet, and a sliver of bright blue plastic had wedged itself between the toes of her left paw.  Emma pulled the sliver free.  “There, there.”

When she brought the dog in to the kitchen sink, she found Gladys standing over the vents with her eyes closed and the old avocado-colored Frigidaire humming and the light over the sink blaring.  She started to tell Gladys about the dog and then stopped herself.  Instead, she lowered the dog in the white porcelain dip of the sink and turned the faucet on.  Rivulets of muddy water ran off her paws and down the slotted drain.  Gladys opened her eyes at the sound of a whimpering dog, at the smell of wet fur.

“Is this my replacement?” she wanted to know.

Emma didn’t answer.  She didn’t answer when Gladys asked if the dog seemed to belong to someone.  She didn’t answer when Gladys asked where they could find food for her and how long she would stay.  She didn’t answer that evening when Gladys asked if she could move two bunks down because the dog smelled like a dried-out sewage pipe.  As long as Emma wasn’t going to interrupt her, Gladys decided to tell her about the one dog she’d ever owned, a chocolate-colored Chihuahua named Mr. Pete who wore a vest and ate shoe laces and peed down the air vents whenever he was scolded and raised his front paws together when anyone said “pray for mercy” and executed a flip when her father’s finger mimed a pulled trigger.  “I bet you’re wondering whatever happened to Mr. Pete, and I’m not going to tell you until you ask.”  Gladys folded her arms and waited.

They’d fought before, of course.  Over how to pronounce “hegemony,” over Emma infesting their room in Matalascañas with sand fleas after walking into the Mediterranean fully clothed in the middle of the night and leaving her skirt, caked in wet sand, on the foot of their bed, after Gladys backed their camper truck into a fast-food dumpster.  Small things, really.  And their fights always ended quickly because Gladys had a way of tricking Emma into forgetting they were ever fighting at all.  Now Gladys folded her arms and waited, and Emma stroked the dog curled at her side until she fell asleep.

The next day, Emma let the dog, who she’d started to call Potato, explore Sumner House as she followed her around.  Potato could needle her way into places Emma couldn’t manage.  So she knelt down and craned her neck to check on her, under an iron bed or a vanity seat, between armoires, between stacks of magazines.  Potato would pause in her sniffing to look at Emma and then dart off again, making the dust motes whirl.  And she remembered something, being in this room with its window seat, slanted ceilings, and sagging wallpaper with a pattern of tiny bachelor’s buttons.  Maybe she was six or seven.  She was sitting on the braided rag rug the dog had just plucked his toenails from as he ran off.  It had been made of men’s ties, she knew.  Her mother explained it once, how they’d cut the ties in strips and sewn the strips and coiled and stitched it into place as they went.  Where the ties had come from, she had no idea.  Where did any of this stuff ever come from?  But she’d been sitting there, age six or so, when she’d found a matryoshka doll under the bed.  She took it apart, doll after doll, nested together, and there should have been a tiny doll in the middle that didn’t open at all, a doll that was the end of the dolls, but there wasn’t.  Just a gasp of the rims of the last doll scraping apart and then nothing at all.  There was a knocking across the wall at the same time.  Probably just the knocking of water being yanked along the old pipes.  But somehow she’d convinced her young self that the ghost of her grandfather had been the knot in the middle of the doll and that she’d just released him.  She looked under the bed now, and Potato looked back.  Where did that matryoshka doll go, she wondered?  When she didn’t find it—in the dresser drawers, in the armoire, in the closet, under the bed, in the stack of hat boxes, in the sea grass baskets—she decided Gladys must have tossed it in the dump truck.

“Gladys!”  She struggled to push herself to her feet and hurried room to room, looking for Gladys, the dog at her heels.  “Gladys!”

“I’m here!”

She followed the voice to the back stairwell where Gladys was directing a wooden magazine stand in a kind of controlled fall to the first floor.  She and the stand were almost to the bottom, and she started to explain to Emma how she’d planned to move as much as she could stuff into the basement so they could at least sleep upstairs.  Emma followed her down, screaming like she’d screamed at the height of the tornado, words surfacing and losing shape.  Gladys moved the magazine table into the kitchen where the back stairwell deposited them, moved it out of Emma’s way, Gladys’s mouth agape, and Emma followed, screaming about the dump truck, the matryoshka dolls, the ghost of her grandfather.  Emma grabbed one of the Millefluers china bowls on the wooden chopping block and threw it at the wall where it shattered like a splash of water.  It was the noise that stopped her, red-cheeked and breathing heavy, the dog hiding under skirt hem.

“My goodness,” Emma whispered.

“My goodness.”  Gladys sat on the magazine stand and wiped her brow with the sash of her collar that gathered to make a bow.

Even above the whir of the air-conditioner cycling on again, they could hear the bulldozers in the distance, hear the clang and rattle of the machinery, hear the droning beeps.  It’d be this way for months on end, the dust coloring the hoods of cars and the rims of windows for miles.  Potato stretched flat on her belly in the shadow of Emma’s skirt so her paws and nose protruded out in the open.

Emma pressed her cool palms to her cheek.  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.  “I’m sorry.”

Then after a long pause, Gladys cleared her throat.  “I bet I could sew that dog a little vest, you know,” Gladys said.  “There’s a box of remnants in the downstairs linen closet.  I bet she’d like a vest.”

Emma swallowed.  “I bet she would,” she said.

“What color, do you think?”

“What?”  Emma’s palms grew hot against her face.

“What color for the vest?”

“I’ll have to think about it, Bug,” Emma said, lowering her hands.

Gladys stood to move the magazine stand toward the basement door.

Emma picked up the dish shards and slivers and listened to them crack one against the other as she dropped them in the kitchen trash.

============================================================================
Cynthia Hawkins teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio and serves as Editor of Arts and Culture at the literary site, The Nervous Breakdown. Her work has appeared in publications such as ESPN the Magazine, Passages North, New World Writing, The Good Men Project, and the anthology, The Way We Sleep.

A GOOD STEWARD

by Lawrence F. Farrar

Tendrils of coastal fog lingered over the Santa Clara Valley that March morning in 1946. The risen sun bathed the fields and orchards in nourishing warmth, and, like untethered blimps, white clouds floated here and there in the purple-blue sky. It was the first spring after the war, and strawberry picking would soon begin.

Bill Mosley and his wife, Evelyn, had just finished breakfast in the kitchen of their farm home. Gazing out the window, Mosley said, “You know, Ev, it feels good to be alive. Damned good.” He frequently said such things. After all, the war years had been bountiful for the Mosleys and other valley farmers, the fruit from their orchards in demand by the canneries for the “war effort”—profit and patriotism wrapped together.

But now Mosley spoke with even more verve, for nothing made the Mosleys feel so good that morning as the exhilarating news that their Marine son, Carl, would be released in days from the San Diego hospital where he’d long been recuperating from war wounds. Their wait had almost ended. Carl was coming home.

Yet, a scrim of apprehension muffled Bill Mosley’s jubilation. There was this business looming later in the morning with Kazuo Iwamoto. Mosley knew it had to come someday. For weeks he’d read about the relocation camps closing. Rumors flitted like hummingbirds at the feeders behind the house. The closings meant the Japanese farmers, at least some of them, would be returning to the Santa Clara Valley to reclaim their places and reestablish their communities. One of those farmers was Kazuo Iwamoto. In a hurried 1942 deal on the eve of the Iwamoto family’s government-forced departure—Mosley had purchased the adjacent Iwamoto farm; and he’d pledged to tend it, with the understanding he would return it after the war. He’d done this in good faith.

Now, however, he could conjure up a hundred reasons not to have the Iwamoto family come back. Mosley didn’t feel good about it, not by a damn sight. Your word ought to count for something. But the war had made it hard to like the Japanese, or at least to show favor toward them. The war’s stream of bitterness coursed deep; it overwhelmed everything else. And there was the Mosleys’s son, Wayne, and his pregnant wife, and the neighbors… Mosley would simply have to tell Iwamoto the situation had changed. The Japanese farmer would not be able to recover his property.

Mosley hoped to avoid a confrontation. But he expected it would likely come to that.

Up from the table, Mosley stepped out onto the porch that fronted his low-roofed, stucco farm home. The house itself was beige with barn-red trim, now faded. Mosley ignored the twittering chickadees that darted through the stand of black oaks that guarded the house. He stretched and contemplated the start of another day, just as he had for thirty years. Mosley, a third generation Californian and ag school graduate, was a lean, sinewy man in his early fifties. The sun had weathered his face and left it lined and wrinkled around the eyes. Like his hair, Mosley’s neatly clipped mustache had gone to gray. His outfit was simple: jeans, a plaid shirt, and boots. That, too, had not changed in thirty years.

Mosley loved the valley and this farm. His father and before him, his grandfather, had built the place from nothing. He had learned the stories; he had become part of them and they of him. The land belonged to him and he to the land.

As Mosley gripped the porch rail and leaned forward, a cloud of dust spewed up by a car on the county road caught his attention. Mosley shielded his eyes against the sun and monitored the car’s progress. The vehicle traveled at a leisurely pace, flanked on one side by apricot orchards green with new leaves and on the other by prune orchards mantled with white blossoms. It almost seemed as if the car’s occupants were on an inspection tour.

“Car’s coming,” Mosley said to Wayne when he came onto the porch. Wayne had walked over from the former Iwamoto place, where he and his wife now lived. He had joined his father for coffee and was about to head out to oversee the Mexican families picking early season strawberries.

“Yeah, I see it,” Wayne said. “Do you suppose it’s them?”

Wayne manipulated a jam-laden piece of toast he’d carried away from his mother’s kitchen. A dark-haired twenty-four-year-old, always in need of a shave, Wayne exhibited a near-perpetual scowl. And he inclined to bristle at the merest slight—real or perceived. How he came by such a cantankerous disposition baffled everyone. Certainly it didn’t flow from his father; people who knew Bill Mosley reckoned him an even-tempered and generous man. You couldn’t want a better neighbor, they said. It was like a mantra.

“I expect it’s them,” Mosley said. “I got a call last night from that Quaker over in San Jose saying he’d bring them by today. We’ll know soon enough.”

“Do you think it’s the whole family?”

“More likely just Iwamoto. Maybe one of his sons. Probably needs somebody to help with the English.”

“I heard the older son was in the army,” Wayne said. “Hard to believe the government trusted them to serve. I know you think I’m wrong, Pa, but I wouldn’t turn my back on one of them, if I was you.” Prone to occasional asthma attacks, Wayne had been classified 4-F and had not served in the military. He’d married young and passed the war years helping his father.

As the ’36 Ford drew closer, the men confirmed it to be the rattletrap belonging to Phil Magnuson. He had visited the Mosleys before. Ruddy faced, paunchy, and fairly oozing goodness, Magnuson represented the American Friends Service Committee. He worked to help resettle former residents like Iwamoto who sought to pick up the pieces of their damaged and disrupted lives. Local newspapers and many local townsmen and farmers hadn’t reconciled themselves to that prospect. For a goodly number, the news of the returns arrived like an unwelcome Santa Ana wind. Their deep-rooted racism came into play. So did their concern that property scooped up at 1942 fire sale prices from people under duress might now be in hazard.

So far as many farmers and ranchers were concerned; Magnuson was as unwelcome as the returning Japanese. He pushed too hard. Nobody had taken a shot at him, as they had at the Yoshidas when they reclaimed their place three weeks before. But more than one malicious caller denounced him as a “Jap Lover.” The sometimes virulent anti-Japanese sentiment embedded in the tapestry of California life, exacerbated by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the merciless war that followed, had not dissipated. The war might be over, but hand-lettered signs warned Japanese to stay away. No Jap Rats! You’re Not Wanted Here!

Mosley didn’t subscribe to such virulence, but a diet of wartime propaganda and the near-death of his son in battle had colored his thinking, made him more “understanding” of such notions.

“Well, it’s them alright. What are you going to say?” Wayne said.

Mosley shook his head. “I guess I’ll just have to explain the situation. It won’t be easy. I always liked Kaz. But don’t worry; I’ll tell him straight out.”

The car turned into the rutted road that led into the yard, scattered a flock of indignant chickens, and rolled to a stop in front of the house. Mutt and Jeff, the farm’s old collies, trotted out to greet the car’s occupants, waved their tails, and then retreated when no one paid attention to them. Although his father stepped down and approached the car, Wayne stood fast on the porch, hands on his hips.

In the driver’s seat, Magnuson had the window down.

“Figured it must be you, kicking up all that dust,” Mosley said, lifting a foot to the running board. “Sort of early in the morning for a town fellow like you.” They both laughed. Then, Kazuo Iwamoto stepped out from the passenger side, and Mosley said, “It’s been a long time, Kaz.” He hesitated and then extended his hand.

Iwamoto shook hands and said, “Yes, Mr. Mosley, four years is very long time.” Kazuo Iwamoto was an issei, a person born in Japan who’d settled in America. Five feet and not much, dark-skinned, thickset, and a bit jug-eared, Iwamoto had always struck Mosley as a hard worker, a man driven to succeed by dint of sheer effort. Clad in Levis and a denim work shirt, he had a rock-solid dignity about him, and he’d never been one to back down from a challenge.

Now, at sixty and noticeably grayer, Mosley’s former neighbor seemed somehow  subdued—perhaps camp life had dispirited him, taken the edge off. Mosley wondered how Iwamoto would take the news he intended to deliver. Mosley would be polite; he inclined toward politeness. But politeness wasn’t the same thing as generosity; and in this case, generosity was out of the question.

“Hi, Mr. Mosley. You remember me, don’t you?” Iwamoto’s second son, Richard, walked around the car. Wearing slacks, a pullover sweater, and beat-up saddle shoes, the slim Japanese-American eighteen-year-old looked more like the denizen of the local malt shop than someone headed for farm labor. Richard was a nisei, American born and a citizen by birth.

“Of course, Richard. You and Carl used to be pals. Pretty good ball players when you were kids. Let’s sit on the porch. We can talk there.”

Wayne Mosley did not deign to greet them, and by the time the men settled onto wooden porch chairs, he’d made a face of distaste and tromped back into the house, letting the screen door slam behind him. “Don’t give in, Pa,” was all he’d said.

The visitors’ expressions reflected puzzlement and discomfort. “Wasn’t that Wayne?” Richard Iwamoto said.

“Yes. You ought to know he’s kind of upset,” Mosley said. “Carl was wounded. Pretty bad. Thank God, he pulled through. He’s been in a hospital in San Diego. And he’s only finally getting home next week.”

“But, how does that—?” Magnuson started.

“It was in Okinawa, Phil. These people are Japanese, and…well, it’s hard for us not to feel something. Wayne especially. He and Carl have been close since they were little tads.”

“I am sorry your son was injured. I hope he has made good recovery,” Iwamoto said. “I am sure you will be happy to have him with you again.”

“Mr. Mosley, we didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” the younger Iwamoto interjected. “Carl was my friend; I hope he still is. But whatever happened over there shouldn’t…shouldn’t have anything to do with why we’re here today. You were always fair-minded—not like some folks here in the valley. My dad’s never doubted you’d keep your promise.”

“I know, but you have to understand; Carl saw some pretty bad things, and the people who hurt him were, well, Japanese. It’s hard for us to ignore….” Mosley felt ill-at-ease. But he was determined; the post-war world was a new world.

“We’ve been waiting a long time to come home,” Richard Iwamoto said. “We appreciate how you took care of the place. It looks great. And we don’t begrudge you any profit you took. But we want to be back in our own house. My mom and my sister have been living in a barracks—for four years. And my dad hasn’t done anything but think about those trees. Worried if they had enough water. Worried if they were pruned right.”

They all looked off toward the orchards.

“I suppose your son, Frank, is back, too,” Mosley said to the senior Iwamoto. “I remember he wanted to go to Cal.”

Iwamoto shook his head. “No, he will not be—”

“Mr. Mosley,” Richard said, “my brother won’t be going to Cal. He was killed in Italy with the 442nd, a place called Castellina.”

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard. I didn’t know him like you, Richard. I know you must be proud of him.” Caught unawares, Mosley searched for words.

“Many people lost children in war,” the elder Iwamoto said. “Frank was good boy. Very smart. I think he was good soldier. His officer wrote nice letter.”

Mosley studied his work boots. Wayne had counseled him to show these people plenty of backbone, to tell them straightaway things had changed and he would not be able to sign the deed back over to them. News of Frank Iwamoto’s death slashed into Mosley’s resolution and for a moment he wavered. Although he’d rehearsed what he would say, now he stumbled, like the time he forgot his lines in the school play.

“Look, Kaz. It’s not easy for any of us. But the war’s changed everything.” Mosley twisted his calloused hands in front of him. “Things are different now. You know I wanted to help out when you came here in ’42. I really did. But, well, now it just wouldn’t be safe for you to come back.” Again he groped for words. “Feelings are running pretty strong around here.”

“Mr. Mosley, that’s a chance we’ll just have to take,” Richard said.

Iwamoto looked at his son, trepidation shadowing his face. “Is Mr. Mosley saying he will not sign paper?”

“My dad trusted you, Mr. Mosley. Even when you didn’t write to us in the camp, like you said you would, he believed you’d keep your word.” There was an edge in his voice. “You told him you’d be a good steward. Quoted some Bible verse. He wants his place back.”

Mosley addressed Richard’s father. “Kaz, things are unsettled right now. It’s not only the anger people still feel around here. There’s that, too. But Wayne’s worked hard on your old place, especially on the irrigation, and he’s done a nice job with the tomatoes and spinach. He and his wife are living in your old house now and she’s expecting. He had to do a lot of fixing up. Vandals really worked the place over after you left. It wouldn’t be easy for him to move. Wayne’s put a lot of time and money in that place.” Somehow the arguments seemed less convincing than when he’d hashed them over the evening before. But Mosley intended to stick to his guns.

“So did my dad, Mr. Mosley. For twenty-five years,” Richard said. “He poured everything he had into that place. He used to get so tired he could hardly move. It hurt to move. But even when he was worn out, he found the energy to go back into the orchard. It’s his, Mr. Mosley, and you know it. ”

“Take it easy, Richard.  Carl’s coming home in a couple of days, and I want to hear what he has to say. But I’m certain he will agree with me.”

“Not the Carl I know,” Richard said. “I don’t believe it. Not for a minute.”

“Mr. Mosley,” Magnuson said, “we surely hope to avoid going to court. But, given the circumstances at the time and the nominal price you paid, there are some pretty serious questions about the legality of the sale. It was $500 as I understand it.”

Mosley knew the mention of a legal action was not an idle one. Two or three cases were already in progress.

“That was for everything,” Richard said. “The land, the orchards, the house, the sheds, the car, the tractor—all of it. It was supposed to be a token payment. Five hundred bucks. Mr. Mosley said he’d look after the place for us until the war ended.”

Mosley laced his hands together in front of his chest. “You can have the car back whenever you want it,” Mosley said. “I’m sure you know gas and tires were rationed. It was up on blocks in a shed for the whole time.”

Kazuo Iwamoto gave him a sharp look. “Not just car, Mr. Mosley. My land. My trees. I made them grow. By my hand, by my sweat.” His jaw tightened and his body tensed with determination. He intended to have his farm back just as much as Mosley had intended he would not.

Mosley realized he’d encountered the same old Kaz Iwamoto, after all.

“I’ll be in touch soon,” Magnuson said. “The Iwamotos are staying at a hostel we’ve set up in San Jose. But, as Richard says, they’re eager to be home.”

The car doors slammed, and the visitors left. A rock flew out from a wheel and, almost like a sign of defiance, clanged against the mailbox as they pulled out of the drive.

Wayne rejoined his father to watch the Ford kick up more dust as it disappeared through the orchards. “You told ’em, flat out? No way are they coming back here. Right?”

“Yes. But they didn’t accept it,” Mosley said. It hadn’t been as easy as Wayne thought it would be.

It had been a reunion touched with sadness and the baleful impact of time and its changes.

———

Wayne brought Marie over, and they were all eating breakfast around the kitchen table. Evelyn Mosley smiled, watching her son, Carl, clean up his eggs and toast. “It’s just so good to have you home again, Carl,” she said. Carl’s long absence and his injuries had tugged hard at his parents’ hearts.

A large woman, Evelyn possessed heavy eyes, a prominent nose, and a round chin. She wore a print dress and sensible shoes. And, when she had to, she could pick fruit with the best of them. She looked like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. Yet Evelyn could bubble over with tenderness, especially when it came to her sons. And the prospect of her first grandchild thrilled her.

“It’s good to be home, Ma. It’s really good,” Carl said. He’d been back almost a week. Once a husky lad, he remained thin and drawn after his long convalescence. They all agreed privately his face looked better than they expected, considering the effects of the shrapnel. And he assured them he’d be rid of the cane within three or four months. “I was lucky,” Carl said. “And now I’m home, right here in our own kitchen. Just like always.”

“I expect you hate them,” Wayne said. “It must have been terrible over there.”

The parents exchanged apprehensive looks. They knew what Wayne had in mind. Despite two or three calls from Magnuson, they hadn’t yet told Carl about the Iwamoto family’s desire to come back. And they knew bad dreams about the war still troubled him.

“It’s hard to say what I feel, Wayne. I had a lot of time to think about it in the hospital. Maybe later, okay? I expect most of the men hated them—or thought they did. I did my job, but I wasn’t one of them—one of the ones who hated.”

Evelyn fussed with some wildflowers she’d installed as a centerpiece. And Mosley said, “I don’t think Carl wants to talk about all that just now.”

Undeterred, Wayne said, “Did Pa tell you the Iwamotos showed up last week?”

“No. Do they want to come back? It’s hard to imagine, after all that happened to them here.”

“I wanted to talk to you about how to handle it, Carl. Someday this place will be yours—and Wayne’s,” Mosley said. “I just wanted to see how you were doing, wanted to let you get settled in first.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Wayne said. “Pa paid for their place. It was the going price. They were lucky to get anything, if you ask me. They don’t belong here, anyway. It’s that simple.”

“It’s twenty acres or so, isn’t it, Pa?” Carl refreshed his memory. “A few hundred dollars if I remember right.”

Wayne responded before his father could speak. “Iwamoto signed over the deed, and Pa has the bill of sale. It was one hundred percent legal. The War Relocation Authority said so. If we hadn’t bought it, the government probably would have seized the farm and auctioned it off.”

“It’s been a nice addition to our place; we’ve invested quite a bit, and there’s no question it’s legally ours,” Mosley said.

“But, Pa, didn’t you tell him he could buy it back?” Carl looked at his father, somewhat puzzled. “I thought the agreement was you’d look after the place, and then you’d—”

Until that moment quiet as her centerpiece, Evelyn offered an opinion. “We did just fine on what we had before. Maybe we could let them back on their old place and they could pay us a share from the crop. After all, we improved that farm quite a bit.”

“It’s the way things were then; it could have been worse for them,” Wayne said, irritation rippling through his voice. “What’s done is done. You expect me and Marie and the baby to move back in with you? Maybe you want us to leave here altogether. So a pack of Japs can move in. They’re gone. Tell them, Carl. Tell them what vermin they are.”

“Don’t ask me that,” Carl said.

“Come on, Carl. You’re home now.”

Carl remained silent, as if collecting his thoughts. Then he spoke haltingly, with his eyes closed. “One day we dragged a Japanese soldier out of a cave. Nothing on but a loincloth. He looked just like Frank Iwamoto. I’d swear, just like Frank.” Carl battled his emotions, locked into a memory.

The others sat transfixed. “Stop, Carl. You don’t have to say any more,” Mosley said.

“I have to finish. I looked that boy straight in the face. All I could see was Frank. Remembered him on the debate team—God knows why. You know what? While I was staring at him, the gunny who was with me didn’t say a word. Just went over and cut that boy’s throat with a KA-BAR. I felt just like we killed Frank. Stupid isn’t it?”

Silence crowded the kitchen.

“You want to hear more?” Carl’s voice rose, rife with accusation, condemnation, anger. “You want to hear all about it?”

Mosley reached over and laid a calming hand on his son’s shoulder. “That’s enough, Carl. There’s no need to—”

Finally Wayne spoke in a subdued voice. “You were in a war, Carl. They all look alike. It was just your imagination. That wasn’t Frank and—”

“I think I need some sleep,” Carl said. “That’s it. I need some sleep.” His lower lip trembled and his eyes moistened with tears. He stood up unsteadily, retrieved his cane, and hobbled off in the direction of his old room.

“You goaded him into it, Wayne. You goaded him into it. No wonder your brother has nightmares,” Evelyn said.

“I’m sorry, Ma. But, that doesn’t change anything. That’s our place now. And we have to tell them. Carl will agree with me when his mind settles down. He’s all confused right now.”

Evelyn poured Mosley a second cup of coffee. “You want some more, too?” she asked Wayne. He waved her off and fixed his eyes straight ahead.

Still shaken by Carl’s outburst and the mention of Frank, Mosley’s mind traveled full circuit back to the Iwamoto family. “I wonder what it was like, in those camps. It must have been hard on them—out there in the desert. What was the daughter’s name? She must have only been eleven or twelve when they went over there.”

“Diane. Her name was Diane,” Evelyn said. “I think they were someplace in Arizona.”

“Hell, Pa, there was a war on. Remember?” Wayne said. “Besides, I heard those camps weren’t bad at all. Like little towns. Just think what the American boys had to go through over there in the Philippines; think of those POWs. These people had it easy. You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

Mosley ignored his son and, thinking aloud, said, “I just wonder how we would have handled it. I mean, if we had to be in one of those camps.” He looked at Evelyn. “I just wonder.”

“I’ve got to go to work.” Wayne pushed back his chair and stalked out, letting the screen door shut hard behind him. His very pregnant wife sat in confused silence.

———

Two nights later, a jangling phone startled Mosley out of deep sleep. “Who is this?” he said, half-awake.

“No deals, Mosley,” the anonymous male caller said. “You’re one of us. Don’t do anything that wouldn’t be good for you and your family. You know what I mean?”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” Mosley exclaimed and slammed down the phone.

Still in bed, Evelyn raised her head. “What was that all about? It’s three in the morning.”

“One of our good neighbors, I guess.  Whoever it was, I’d sure like to get my hands on him. I don’t like people trying to tell me what to do.”

In the following week, the phone rang three more times. Each time the caller said the same thing: No Japs. We don’t want them back here. The last call turned out to be the most ominous. You heard about the Coopers didn’t you? You don’t want to be next. The San Jose News had carried the report. The Cooper family had cared for a farm just north of Sunnyvale for the Japanese-Americans who’d leased it. Two days after they returned the property, someone lobbed a stick of dynamite into one of the Coopers’s processing sheds.

The morning after this latest threat, Mosley drove Carl out to one of the orchards, partly to get him out of the house and partly to let him get a feel for the farm again. With allowance for Carl’s bad leg, they walked slowly, surveying the ripening fruit that hung like edible ornaments from the trees. Mosley tested an apricot with his hand.

“These ’cots aren’t quite ready, but soon, Carl, soon.” He remembered saying something like that to Carl when he was still a toddler. If time could only be snatched back, if only things could be the way they were before. Mosley knew it was an idealized notion, but he still wished for it.

When his father told him about the most recent call, Carl said, “I thought the war was over, Pa. Probably most of these heroes weren’t even in the service. Like I said before, it’s true; lots of my buddies hated the Japanese. But not all of them. And not me. I never forgot about playing ball with Richard and Frank when we were kids, and I knew they were regular guys. They were my friends. And we had a couple of nisei boys who were interpreters; took their chances like everybody else. And… And, God, why can’t everybody just shut up and try to get along?” He ran his hands across his forehead in frustrated exasperation.

“Are you talking about your brother, too?” Mosley said, a look of pain in his eyes.

“Yeah. I guess him, too. I know how he feels. But he didn’t used to talk that way. He’s worried about his wife and the kid. I know he doesn’t want to give up the place. But can’t we work something out? We’ve got over a hundred acres. Iwamoto’s old property is only twenty. Do we really need that extra twenty?”

Despite reservations—they’d always been there—Mosley had held the line; told the Iwamotos the place was his now and couldn’t be returned. Many of the Japanese weren’t coming back, maybe most of them. Why couldn’t  Iwamoto accept the trend of the times? Why did he continue to push?

But, even while he still sought to justify his own posture, Carl’s words burrowed into his being and Mosley’s rationale crumbled like the farm’s old abandoned barn. He knew full well that on that spring day in 1942 he’d made the deal with Iwamoto from a good heart; he should have a good heart now.

“I have a conscience, you know,” Mosley said.

Two hands on his cane, Carl sent him a confirming look. “I never doubted it, Pa. My vote is for giving the place back. Or selling it back; I guess that’s more accurate. Work something out for Wayne; Marie said her dad needs help. And let the Iwamotos have their farm back.”

Mosley placed his hand on Carl’s shoulder. “You know, Carl, I think that’s how your mother feels, too. She sounded a lot like Wayne before. She was pretty bitter about what happened to you. I guess I was too. And I think she’s still worried about what the neighbors will think—or do. But now that you’re home and she’s heard what you have to say, she’s more or less swung around.”

“I knew she would. She and Mrs. Iwamoto were pretty good friends before the war.”

“I have to say, though, your mom is worried about these phone calls. I’m troubled by them, too.”

“Anybody else getting those calls?”

“I guess there have been a couple of threats, but not many of the old owners are back yet. Callers don’t give their name. Like the ones calling us. Sheriff Feeney told me he had some leads. Didn’t tell me anything more.”

There had been scattered harassment incidents up and down the coast, directed toward both returning Japanese farmers and those non-Japanese who seemed willing to cooperate with them. The perpetrators faded like melting shadows, and few were ever caught. True to his word, however, the sheriff, indeed, had leads, and he tracked down the local culprits, a pair of seventeen year olds who’d made the threatening calls. He said, however, that they hadn’t thrown the dynamite. According to the sheriff, they were simply boys who “had too much time on their hands.” Mosley declared the sheriff to be damn generous in his assessment. But he felt somewhat vindicated because he had warned Iwamoto about the hostile mood, even though the argument had been somewhat contrived.

———

Mosley made up his mind. He knew he had been wrong. Perhaps he’d known it all along. Carl had confirmed it for him. The time had arrived to be true to his promise; to do the right thing. It might take time, but he felt local folks would adjust to the restoration of the property to its real owners. Convincing Wayne would involve the greatest challenge. Thank God, Marie’s aging father, a widower, seemed eager to have the young couple move into his place; he promised them a good living. After acrimonious shouting matches (with Wayne doing the shouting), Wayne agreed to vacate the old Iwamoto property. Blaming Carl for influencing his parents to change their minds, he continued to exude unhappiness.

Carl tried to reason with him, tried to win him over.

“You might be some kind of war hero, Carl, but you don’t know your ass from third base when it comes to how people feel in this valley and to what you’re doing to our family. “But in the end, Wayne gave in. He wanted to harvest the apricots in May, he said; then he’d be gone. Gone for good, he declared.

For the Mosleys, the alienation of their son was a terrible price to pay. But Carl was right, and perhaps time would place a healing patina on the rift.

At first, Mosley thought he might ask Iwamoto to give back his $500. He also toyed with the notion of claiming compensation for repairs and improvements, but Carl reminded him he’d derived good profits from the place for four years, going on five.

“You do that, Pa, and you’ll look plain cheap. Matter of fact, they’ll more likely want to be paid for some of what you made off their land. Probably they feel you owe them money. Probably right, too.”

“I’m willing to take the $500 and call it square. I hope Iwamoto will agree to that. You never know what kind of notions Magnuson might be putting in his ear.”

“Pa, like I said, you don’t need his money. You made plenty off the place. Why don’t you just call it square?”

A sheepish look on his face, Mosley nodded. “You’re right.”

———

Mosley and Evelyn drove over to Sunnyvale in their old ’35 Chevrolet flatbed. Mosley told Evelyn the meeting with Iwamoto and Magnuson should only last a few minutes. After they handled the title transfer in the lawyer’s office, maybe they could take in a matinee. He’d read in the paper that the Mountain View Theater had a new show with John Garfield and Lana Turner. If she’d like, afterward they could even stop at the drug store for a phosphate. It would be a nice break for Evelyn.

Edgar Baxter, attorney at law, had his office in a private house. Surrounded by a low wall, the place featured Spanish architecture. Mosley parked on the street, and they went in through the gate. The air smelled of flowers, and off to one side of the garden a fountain with a little statue gurgled and splashed.

“Mighty fancy,” Mosley said. “Looks like real estate lawyering is pretty good business now the war’s over.”

A dark-haired man wearing gray slacks and a navy blazer greeted them when they rang the bell.

“Afternoon,” Mosley said. “I’m Bill Mosley. Here to settle up on the land transfer with Kaz Iwamoto. This is my wife Evelyn.”

“Come on in,” Baxter said. “Phil Magnuson said you’d be here this afternoon. I expect him and his clients along any time now.”

Baxter ushered the Mosleys into his office and seated them on a leather sofa. “Sounded like Mr. Iwamoto is pretty happy to be getting back on his farm.”

“Sure seems that way,” Mosley said. “His boy, Richard, came by the other night and had a good talk with our son, Carl. Said his dad dreamed about that little place all the time they stayed in that camp. The boy was pretty upset. I expect he’s happy now.”

“I guess you’ve handled a lot of these cases lately,” Evelyn said.

“Not as many as you might think, Mrs. Mosley. Quite a few of the former occupants apparently decided, for whatever reason, not to come back. And, to tell the truth, not many folks have been as cooperative as you. As a matter of fact, damn few. Pardon my French. I might be wrong, but I expect we’re going to have some dragged-out legal battles. Not sure how many of the former occupants are up to the hassle—and the expense.”

“Well, we weren’t real eager, but, after we thought about it, we knew it was the right thing to do,” Mosley said. “Our son, Carl, felt the same way, and he was in the war and fought over there. Wounded, too. And if he felt that way, it was good enough for us.”

Evelyn nodded and said, “We always got along with the Iwamotos.” Neither parent mentioned the alienation of their second son. The conflict with Wayne, and especially the hard feelings between Wayne and Carl, made them heartsick.

“Folks, if you want my honest opinion, I think most of the Japanese won’t be coming back. Those old communities are gone for good. The Santa Clara Valley is changing. Right in front of our eyes. Kind of sad. The Japanese don’t get enough credit, if you ask me. In a lot of respects they made the valley what it is.”

The phone rang on Baxter’s desk. “I see. I see,” he said. “Yes, I’ll tell them. Let me know what you decide.”

“I’m afraid we just got some bad news,” Baxter said. “That was Magnuson. Mr. Iwamoto was getting into the car to come over here, and all of a sudden he just toppled over. Landed flat on his back. They thought he stumbled but, well, he didn’t make it, and…”

“Didn’t make it?” Mosley said. “I don’t…”

Baxter shook his head. “Cerebral hemorrhage. His son was with him. All I know right now.”

“Kaz Iwamoto is dead?” Mosley said. He and his wife exchanged bewildered glances. Consternation crossed their faces like a dark cloud. It was too much to absorb all at once.

———

Several days after the funeral, Mosley, Carl, and Richard rocked solemnly on porch chairs. The apricot harvest had begun; the prunes would come next. Beyond the orchards, spurts of wind ruffled tawny fields of wild oats. A solitary red-tailed hawk floated effortlessly against the late afternoon sky, searching for a tasty morsel on the ground below. From time to time the bird’s keening voice reached them from on high.

“I appreciate your offer, Mr. Mosley. But, I have to tell you, I didn’t want to come back to be a farmer, Richard said. “I was just doing it for my dad. My dad wanted that place back. He had his heart set on it. You waited too long, Mr. Mosley.” Richard struggled to restrain his anger.

Nonplussed, Mosley said, “I sure mean it, Richard. If you change your mind, I’m not clear about the law, but we’re ready to turn the property over to you or your mother. I figure Baxter can help us. He seems to be a good man.”

Richard shook his head. “My mom says the air here is poisoned. When those kids threw eggs at our car outside the church that was it, as far as she was concerned. I tried to convince her things will get better.  But I had a hard time believing it myself. There’s too much hatred. Anyway, she’s taking Diane and going to her sister’s place in Chicago.”

“How about you, Richard?” Carl asked.

“Me? I’m not sure. My uncle over in Monterey says he can probably get me on at a cannery. Maybe I can save some money and when things get less crazy, I’d like to go to college. I’m not as smart as Frank was, but…”

“Look, Richard, even if you folks don’t want the title back right now, Carl and I talked it over, and we’d like to set aside an annual share of the profit from those twenty acres for your family. As best we can calculate it. That should help.”

Richard delivered a sardonic smile. “No thanks, Mr. Mosley. I wish you could have talked like this when my dad was still alive.”

“Well, at least for the time being, you’ve got that old Hudson Terraplane. Carl got it running in no time,” Mosley said.

“The offer still stands,” Carl said. “And if you want us to sell the farm, we can do that too. Baxter says some people are looking to build housing and some kind of factories here in the valley. Might be worth your while. Ours, too.”

“I know you mean well, Carl,” Richard said, “but my mind is made up.

“I hope you’ll come by, once you have things squared away.”

Richard did not reply.

“It’s too bad your dad never got to set foot on his own place again,” Mosley said. “I really hoped…”

“Yeah. He was pretty excited when he found everything was on track,” Richard said, his voice tinged with sadness. “When it got chilly in the camp, he’d look in this direction and wonder if you had the smudge pots lighted. I think he worried more about those trees than he did about the family.”

For a moment, the bitterness faded. They all chuckled, but it was sad laughter, marking Iwamoto’s unrealized dream. For that they felt regret. And, Mosley’s regret intensified because he’d waited too long, for himself and for Kazuo Iwamoto, to do the right thing. There was enough regret for all of them.

Evelyn appeared on the porch with a paper bag in her hands. “Here’s some fresh apricot jam to take with you, Richard.”

“No thanks, Mrs. Mosley.”

Richard Iwamoto did not look back as he drove out of the yard, again scattering the chickens. Mosley and Carl traced the dust trail until it melded into the dusk that settled over the valley. They doubted he would ever be back.

============================================================================
As a career Foreign Service officer, Lawrence F. Farrar has lived in Japan, Norway, Germany, and Washington, D.C., and traveled to more than thirty countries. A resident of Minnesota, he has taken degrees from Dartmouth (international relations) and Stanford (Japanese history). His stories have appeared in more than twenty literary magazines, including New Plains Review, Red Wheelbarrow, G.W. Review, Red Cedar Review, The MacGuffin, Colere, The Worcester Review, and others. Farrar collaborated with the author of a Hiroshima memoir that was published in New Madrid, and has contributed to the Loft Literary Center’s, “A View from the Loft.”