* * *

February 18, 1942

Dear Charlie,

Did you get the Wonder Woman cartoon I sent you yet? Isn’t she awesome?

So this strange thing’s been happening. Bainbridge Island is the only home I’ve ever known but recently it’s changed. It doesn’t feel the same.

When I walk into the town library or hardware store, it feels weird. It’s not that people stare at me. It’s more like I can feel them trying not to stare. The air becomes thick and tense. And if I stay too long, or take my time sipping my ice-cream float at the soda fountain, I can sense them all willing me to leave. So they can finally exhale.

At school, everyone is just awkward around me. In Biology, we had to pair off to work on a frog experiment. There’s an odd number of students in my class, and I ended up the only one without a partner. Mr. Webb gave me a choice to either join a pair and make a team of three, or work alone. I chose alone.

Honestly, I’m fine with that. Tomorrow I’ll go out alone to the rocky shores on the west side of the island and look for a frog. For the experiment. Did you know that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will instantly leap out? But if you put it into room-temperature water, and then slowly heat the water to a boil, the frog will stupidly remain in there until it overheats and dies. Sounds pretty interesting—I’ll let you know what happens. If I can stomach killing a frog, that is.

Alex

* * *

February 19, 1942

Dear Charlie,

It took me almost an hour to find a frog. Eventually I came upon an Oregon spotted frog squeezed between two rocks. It was so wet and slimy and squirmy in my palm.

I tried. I really did. But when it came time to boil it, I couldn’t. I stood there in front of the stove for a good five minutes, trying to will myself to turn on the flame. But I froze.

Anyway, there’s more to this story. At dinner Frank was ranting about some political cartoon in the newspaper, how it put Japanese Americans in a really unfair light. He tossed the newspaper away in disgust and went to the stove for seconds. “Why is there a frog in here?” he said, pointing to the other pot. So I had to tell him about the frog experiment.

He sat back down. Chewed his food slowly. “We’re just like frogs then,” he said after a while. Mother and I stared at him quizzically. And then he snapped. Went off on us.

“All this crap happens to us,” he railed, “and we do absolutely nothing. We just sit here like a stupid frog boiling to death. The government comes and takes away our belongings? We do nothing. Our bank account gets frozen? We just sit there! Father gets yanked away by the FBI when he’s done nothing wrong? We do nothing but suffer in silence like good model citizens. We’re nothing but stupid frogs.” He slammed his fists down on the table, rattling all the dishes. “We should do something. Protest. Make our voices heard.”

He tossed the newspaper at me, jabbed his finger at the political cartoon: a crowd of bucktoothed Japanese Americans, cruelly caricatured, carrying TNT dynamite. Frank pointed at me with his fork. “Why don’t you put your drawing skills to use for once? Send in a cartoon in response to this nonsense about us being fifth columnists. Something that’ll put—” He turns the paper around, reads the signed cartoonist’s name. “—this idiot Dr. Seuss in his place.”

Mother shushed him, saying, ????????. It’s the nail sticking up that gets hammered down.

Frank said, “Well, I don’t care. Maybe we should be that nail. At least we’d be sticking up for something.” His face turned really determined like I’ve seen in football games right before he throws a winning touchdown pass.

“This is what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to write a release petition on Father’s behalf. Tell them they’ve got the wrong man, that Father is completely innocent. I suck at writing, sure. But I’m tired of sitting on my hands doing nothing. I’m not going to be that frog.”

Mother’s lips pinched together. “But that might just stir up trouble for Father.”

Frank shoved a drumstick into his mouth, reenergized. “The FBI, the gov, whatever, they’re so obviously wrong. This petition will wake them up. Because America doesn’t do this kind of thing. You just watch and see.” He reached for another helping of mashed potatoes.

Mother shook her head. “We must be patient. Don’t do anything rash.” She looked at me. “Don’t you think so, Koji-kun?”

But I wasn’t interested in getting dragged into this. I got up, put my plate in the sink, then picked up the pot. I opened the door and tossed out the frog. It hopped away into the darkness.

It’s hours later and I’m sitting here at my desk. My eyes are heavy but I can’t fall asleep. Outside my window the world is so empty and dark.

In your letter, you wrote that it wasn’t good to be alone, that I should make more friends. Maybe you’re right. But there’s only one friend I want with me here, and that’s you, Charlie.

Alex

9

FEBRUARY 20, 1942

In the middle of the night Alex thinks Father has returned home.

When he was young and often sick, it was Father who’d sit with him through the night. He remembers those endless hours: shivering under a mountain of blankets, the ladderback chair creaking by his bed, Father removing the damp warm washcloth from his feverish forehead. The wish-swish of the towel submerged into water, then the soft trickle of the cloth wrung out. A strangely melodic sound, soothing. Then Father would lay the cool washcloth back on his boiling forehead, and it would sizzle on his hot skin. A soft cloud against a scorching sun.

When the fever would finally break hours later, the shiver-chills subsiding, Alex’s clothes would be soaked through. Father would gently lift Alex into a sitting position, his sweaty head flopping forward, and lean him against his wiry, tensile farmer’s body. Alex, slumped and exhausted, would barely be aware of Father lifting his soaked pajama top through uplifted arms, and sliding on a fresh, dry shirt.

And even then, even after Alex had been changed, Father would stay with him. Not reading, not sleeping, not even, it seemed, thinking much about anything. He seemed content to simply sit all those hours. Not a single utterance. Strangely, it was the rare time when Father seemed untroubled. And when dawn arrived and Mother took over, Father, without having slept a wink, would go out to the fields and work a full day, none the worse for wear.

Alex will never admit this but sometimes, terrible as they were, he misses those nights.

And now, on this night, he thinks Father has come home. Already? he thinks drowsily. Frank’s release petition for Father was processed so quickly? He senses a warm hum of a presence beside him, believes he even hears the creak of the ladderback chair. He half expects to hear the trickle of water. When he opens his eyes, there is someone sitting in the chair by his bed.

“Father?” he croaks.

The person doesn’t answer. Then he sees her now, Mother. Her head is fallen to the side, her mouth opened. Softly snoring. He sits up.

In her hands, held loosely, is a small picture frame. Alex pries it gently from her, turns it around. It’s his parents’ wedding photograph, the one Alex keeps on his bedroom bureau, the only photograph ever taken of just the two of them. A black-and-white, taken at a downtown Seattle studio. She’s dressed in a kimono rented just for the shot, and Father has put on a suit, similarly rented. Their faces are stern, reluctant.

The photo was taken the day after they first met. She has described that first meeting to Alex and Frank many times. How she’d come walking down the gangplank onto the dock in Seattle, one of dozens of Japanese mail-order brides arriving in America that day. She was struggling with her suitcase when he came to her. He was wearing a threadbare

black coat and grunted her name. His breath was hideous. She’d stared in disbelief at this man old enough to be her father, who bore no resemblance to the young man in the photo. A photo she used to fawn over while lying on her tatami mat back home in Osaka, which made her smile shyly with schoolgirl fantasies.

There on the dock, he’d reached for her suitcase and tried to tug it from her grip. But she wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard he yanked; so in that manner they had walked, both carrying the suitcase. On the outside, they had the appearance of togetherness; but it was, in fact, a stubborn tug-of-war. An apt image of their initial years of marriage. Together, but not really.

She’d once told Alex—drunkenly one night when he was nine, and (or so she mistakenly thought) too young to remember, much less understand, anything—how over time she had come to, if not love, then at least respect Father. It was the way he threw himself into the work, season after season, year after year. His skin darkening, his body hardening. His chapped, tireless hands sifting through enough soil to fill Fuji-san; the way he gripped shovels and axes, dug trenches to handle excess rainfall, mixed fertilizer, planted strawberry seeds one by one, weeded grass, pulled out sickly strawberry plants, pruned fruit trees, cut leaves after harvest, removed large tree stumps, propagated rhododendron plants, fixed broken machinery and flat tires and plumbing in their home. Held her boys, cut their umbilical cords, their hair, soothed their colicky screams.

And at night—she’d mumbled this while tossing down one last cup of sake before collapsing into a drunken stupor—when those same rough, sun-blackened hands reached for her in the dark, their hangnails and calluses grating across her skin, she would let them: because of everything they had touched and healed and nurtured into submission, because of how they had so ruthlessly, doggedly, miraculously fashioned into being in a harsh and alien land, this farm, this home, this family.

Tags: Andrew Fukuda Historical
Source: readsnovelonline.net