At first, Ava refused to drive Earl’s old Model A truck, which would ultimately bring Harry, his sister, Mae, and their mother and father to the designated pickup location. It was plain she thought she was making a righteous stand in her refusal, that she was somehow sticking up for Harry and the Yamadas by being unhelpful. It was misguided, perhaps, but endearing.
“You know we can’t drive ourselves,” Harry said. “No automobiles are allowed in the camps; we have to leave it all here.”
Ava didn’t answer.
“We’ll just ask your mother, then,” Harry said. He laughed as though he’d gotten the last word or won some sort of staring contest.
“All right. Fine,” Ava agreed.
In the end, they all went together to see the Yamada family off: Ava; her mother, Cleo . . . and Louis, too, when he finally turned up of his own accord.
The Yamadas had packed carefully but assembled near the curb in front of a local Methodist church. (How ironic, Ava thought, that the government had designated churches as the sites of so many pickup points.) The Yamadas looked strangely disorganized, lost . . . Centuries of proud family history and decades of Kenichi Yamada’s dedicated labor had been transformed into a hurried jumble of embarrassment, with the ultimate result that they looked like a pack of hobos.
All over America, Japanese families stood on the curbs at other bus stops, their trunks and suitcases lined up, looking overstuffed and straining. The men and women and children looked a little overstuffed, too, having bundled themselves up with as many layers of clothing as they could stand, so as to be able to transport as much as possible. This would not have been so inconvenient in March and April, but by May the weather had turned unseasonably warm, and the expressions on people’s faces betrayed their discomfort.
“Do you have your list?” an Army soldier in uniform demanded.
Kenichi handed it over. They had been instructed that the head of each household was to do all the talking, all the paperwork, all the accounting for what was being toted along with them to the camps. The government intended to interact with as few individuals as possible, and the Army soldiers assigned to direct them could not be expected to attend to distressed women and crying children.
The soldier took the list and, with a group of his peers, checked the Yamadas’ baggage. It was mostly all clothes, pots and pans, toiletries. After the F.B.I.’s initial visit, the Yamadas had obediently turned in everything that had been declared contraband, the sorts of things a spy might be expected to have: radios, cameras, and so forth.
“All clear here,” the soldier declared, pounding the topmost suitcase on the Yamadas’ pile with his fist in approval. They moved on to the next family lined up along the curb.
Each family was assigned a number. Evacuation tags were tied to everything. There were quite a few families; over the decades, a large number of Japanese had settled into the areas surrounding Loomis, Penryn, and Newcastle. The farmland had been perfect for growing plums and mandarins. “The fruit basket of the nation,” folks called it. Like the Yamadas, the issei—the first generation—had immigrated years earlier, and the majority of their children had been born on American soil, where they grew up playing baseball and speaking English far better than Japanese. Of course, none of that mattered now. As far as the Army was concerned, they were all Japanese, period.
“All right! LOAD UP!” the soldier who had inspected their luggage hollered. They had finished checking all the families off their list.
In other parts of the nation, Greyhound buses and school buses had been commissioned to pick up and transport the Japanese to the internment camps. In the smaller, more rural areas, like Newcastle, the government sent military trucks instead of buses, making the rounds of all the ranch towns. Evacuees rode in the back, in the drab, olive-green darkness of the covered cargo beds, as the trucks bumped along, kicking up a terrible cloud of dust behind them.
“They mean for you to ride in there?” Ava gasped and murmured in disbelief. “Like . . . Army cargo?”
A shadow of fear darkened Mae’s eyes. She turned pale, and her face squirmed as though she was fighting back tears.
“Hey . . . no . . .” Harry tried to soothe his sister. “It’s gonna be all right.” He put his arms around his kid sister and hugged her to his chest. Over the top of Mae’s head, he shot Ava a scolding look. She bit her lip and scowled. She knew she would aid the Yamadas in their departure best by being quiet, but she couldn’t help herself. It was all too outrageous, too unjust—all of it.
Louis, meanwhile, had appeared stoic up until that point. Days earlier, he had signed the paperwork to take ownership of the Yamada property and all of the Yamadas’ remaining possessions. All of them had noticed his cold demeanor; none of them had commented on it. Louis had promised to say good-bye on the day of their departure, and now he was there, making good on his word, but he had arrived separately and had strode up with his hands in his pockets, looking detached.
However, seeing the evacuation labels dangling from the Yamadas’ luggage and from the Yamadas themselves—they had been requested to tie the same labels bearing their family number to their coats—Louis’s expression softened for the first time in a week. A small wrinkle of worry crept into his brow as he peered at the Army trucks.
The soldiers were urging the evacuees to hurry up now.
Everyone said good-bye. Ava and her mother hugged and kissed each member of the Yamada family, with Kenichi and Shizue looking particularly surprised and stiff by these unexpected embraces. Louis shook hands.
When he got to Kenichi Yamada, Louis paused. He stood up straight, placed his hands against the sides of his legs, and bowed respectfully from the waist. Harry watched in surprise. In that moment, he felt certain his father had made a wise decision entrusting Louis Thorn with all they ever had. It will be all right, Harry thought. Although he had repeated this phrase aloud several times since hearing about the evacuation order, it was the first time Harry had genuinely said it to himself and meant it.
The Yamadas shuffled into a line of people loading into the back of one of the trucks. They climbed up and took a seat on one of the benches within, clutching their suitcases in their laps. When the motor started up and the truck began to pull away, Ava and her mother waved.
It looked as though the Yamadas waved back, but it was difficult to be sure. It was a sunny day out and they were lost in the darkness of the truck’s canopy. Ava squinted and convinced herself she saw a hand moving, a flash of light in the gloom, but then a dust cloud rose up behind the truck and in a single swirl, and they were gone.