57
Tule Lake, California * October 31, 1942
Rain shower from mountain
quietly soaking
barbed wire fence.
—SUIKO MATSUSHITA
When the Yamadas arrived in late May, the muddy land that surrounded the Tule Lake Relocation Center had already baked into dry clay, and soon afterward the season transformed into a hot summer of dry dust and ash. By October, the ash had turned to mud again. Fences were erected around the camp, and Harry saw that his relief at not seeing fences when they first arrived had been foolish. It had only ever been a matter of time.
Of course, when you got down to it, the barbed-wire fences were somewhat absurd. There was no place for the internees to go, for there was nothing for miles around.
They were offered jobs—offered, the government repeated the word often, emphasizing the difference between offered and assigned. Most of the jobs involved intensive physical labor and paid less than the poorest migrant workers’ wages back home. Despite this unappealing combination, the majority of internees accepted some form of employment anyway. They were restless and bored; they needed some semblance of the lives they had known before internment, and regular work had certainly been part of that. Camp officials put Japanese men and women to work either producing goods for the war effort or coaxing vegetables from the dry earth all around the camp. Harry and his father decided to volunteer for the latter, assuming their experience on the ranch would prove useful. They found themselves having to learn everything all over again: The only crops grown at Tule Lake were potatoes, wheat, and onions. These were not crops that Kenichi or Harry knew, let alone knew well. But little by little they learned alongside their fellow internees. Soon the camp had established a steady yield, and Japanese-American agriculture proved it had earned its reputation for good reason. The soil, mostly volcanic, was actually not terrible. It was irrigation that presented the largest challenge. The summer months were so dry that everything died. The earth baked back into hard clay.
After the Yamadas’ first experience in the mess hall, the food did not improve much, and camp food turned out to be problematic for the Yamadas in more ways than one. No one except perhaps Shizue herself understood how diligently she’d been managing her epilepsy with good nutrition . . . until the camps. Over the years, on the ranch, she had been able to keep the handful of seizures Shizue was not able to avoid from her children—more or less. She had been proud of this fact, of the way she had been able to hide her illness. The episodes had been minor events compared to the seizures she’d experienced in Japan. Often she suffered a minor attack in silence—or, when she could not conceal her affliction, Kenichi knew what to do and was able to help her.
But all of that changed in the Tule Lake camp, where their food consisted mostly of starch, and sleeping through the night was a luxury. Shizue’s health deteriorated rapidly. The first seizure, a terrible one, happened in the morning, two weeks after the Yamadas had moved into the shack that was to be their home. Shizue was removing a pot of boiling water from the small camp stove they had set up to serve as a makeshift kitchenette. Her head tipped downward and, staring into the flickering flame of the camp stove as she lifted the pot, she felt the old sensations come over her.
She felt her body grow rigid and a curtain drop over her senses.
Mae was the only one to see her mother suddenly stiffen like a board and did not understand at first what was happening. It looked as though a lightning bolt had shot through her mother’s body, and seconds later her mother’s body went rigid, her eyes rolled back in her head, and Shizue keeled over—almost as though someone had flipped an electrical switch. Mae screamed as her mother hit the ground, the pot of hot water cascading down as it left the safe grip of her mother’s tea-towel-wrapped hand.
Her father and brother came running.
“Turn her on her side!” Kenichi commanded, and the three of them scrambled to accomplish this. Kenichi felt in his wife’s mouth for food or any other kind of obstruction and, satisfied, made certain she was breathing.
“Should I fetch someone?” Mae asked, recovering from the shock.
“No time,” Kenichi replied. “Haruto,” he barked in an uncharacteristically authoritative tone. “We’ll carry her to the infirmary.”
Harry nodded. Together they lifted Shizue’s limp body. Harry took most of the weight; Kenichi was quite elderly, but Harry also understood his father’s need to help carry his own wife, to keep the contact of touch between them. Harry realized he had never seen his father look so worried.
At the infirmary, Shizue regained consciousness. The nurse tended to Shizue’s burns. The water had scalded her arm badly, but the nurse assured her that it would heal.
“Camp stoves aren’t really allowed, you know, and you shouldn’t be boiling water in your barracks if you’re accident-prone,” the nurse scolded, clucking her tongue. Her tone was friendly yet firm, the same as a kindly schoolteacher.
Kenichi recoiled.
“My wife is not accident-prone,” he corrected the nurse. “She had a seizure.”
Harry flinched inwardly to hear his father’s faint Japanese accent—an accent Harry had never paid much mind to before.
“Well, I don’t see any evidence of that,” the nurse drawled, her tone still friendly but now tinged with a hint of condescension. “Low blood sugar is what I see. A simple glass of orange juice ought to fix you right up!” She smiled. The nurse had tended to Shizue’s wounds after Shizue had already come to, so Kenichi guessed that perhaps the nurse simply did not understand.
“No. It was a seizure. She has had them all her life,” Kenichi insisted.
“Well, if that’s true, then she certainly should have developed a technique for managing them,” the nurse replied. It was plain the nurse still did not believe Shizue was anything other than thin and clumsy. “Has she seen a doctor for them?”
“Yes,” Kenichi replied. “Is there a doctor here we may see?”
“Oh.” The nurse’s cheerful face fell. She wasn’t offering. The poor Japanese fellow had gotten himself confused. “No,” she replied, “I’m afraid the doctor comes twice a month, and today is not one of his days.” She paused. “I just meant has she seen a doctor in the past?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” The nurse relaxed and smiled. “Then whatever his advice was, I’m sure it was sound. If she’s always had seizures, like you say, then it’s nothing curable, and it’s a question of proper management.”
Shizue had not spoken during their entire exchange, and the nurse said these last words, “proper management,” with slow, deliberate articulation, as though the nurse wasn’t entirely certain Shizue spoke English.
The seizure scared them all, but they didn’t discuss it. Kenichi and Harry continued to toil in the fields, Mae attended the makeshift school that had been organized for the internees’ children. After she recovered, Shizue took a job sewing bandages for the troops. She wasn’t particularly chatty herself, but she liked to hear the other women gossiping over their needles and sewing machines.
And then there was communication with the outside world. They were allowed to get mail, and postal service—while slow—was often the only connection between the camp and the rest of America. Of course, there were plenty of subtle reminders that even these communications were under scrutiny. Envelopes arrived already opened, letters often had various sentences and paragraphs blacked out—sometimes even the idlest comments on food or the weather. This was especially when they contained correspondence between internees and Japanese friends or family members assigned to other camps. The hysterical notion prevailed that the entire Japanese-American population was entirely made up of spies lying in wait.
“Who’s that from?” Mae asked one day, glimpsing her brother with a letter.
“Ava,” he replied. “It’s to all of us . . . or Father, really. She’s been keeping us updated as to how the ranch is doing, how the orchards are faring . . .”
Mae frowned.
“If it’s from Ava, why don’t you look more pleased?”
Harry blinked, not sure what his sister was getting at, not sure how to respond. Mae giggled.
“C’mon. It’s obvious that you love her,” Mae said now.
Harry made a face.
“I never said anything along those lines.”
“You didn’t have to,” Mae said. “So why aren’t you happier to have a letter from her?” Mae squinted at Harry as though looking for an answer. “Oh!” she gasped, her face lighting up with sudden comprehension. “Is it that you wanted to hear from Louis?”
Harry didn’t say anything. Mae understood she had hit upon an unexpected truth.
“When was the last time Louis wrote?” Mae asked.
“He hasn’t.”
“At all?”
Harry shook his head, and with that, he turned on his heel and walked out of the bungalow they shared with the Akimotos.