Fall Down Seven. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ the flames and the explosions. Battleships and destroyers and cruisers had sunk to the bottom and turned over. Twisted hunks of metal littered the airfields. Fires continued to burn despite the steady fountains of water pouring from the fire boats. Ten hours later, the ambulances still flew along the streets, from the docks to the hospitals in Honolulu and Diamond Head, ferrying the wounded to overwhelmed emergency rooms.

      And still no word from Dad.

      Mom, Charlie, and I spent most of the time on the lanai after the Japanese withdrew, peering into the smoke and the chaos as if we could bring Dad home by sheer willpower. Occasionally, a soldier on his way home wandered up the road, his face smeared with soot. Charlie called to them as they passed.

      “Have you seen our dad?”

      “Who’s your dad, son?”

      “Lieutenant Commander Charles Arrington.”

      “Sorry, son, I don’t know him.”

      Finally, long after dark, when it seemed like I couldn’t stand it for another minute, I spotted the headlights of a car making its way up the winding hill. It stopped in front of our house, and a man got out. The streetlights hadn’t come on that night, and I couldn’t see the car clearly, but something about the way the man walked, with his head up and his shoulders squared, told me who it was.

      I grabbed Charlie by the hand and charged out into the street and down the hill. Dad reached out to scoop Charlie into his arms, then took my hand, but he didn’t speak as he led us home. Inside, he put Charlie down and took Mom into his arms. He held her for a long time before he turned his gaze to his children. Dad’s face was streaked with grime, and his blue eyes seemed to reach through me, as if he were staring at something on the far wall and I was as transparent as a window. But I got the message.

      Dad would be off to war, and there would be no end to the worrying, the fear that he wouldn’t return. For the next three and a half years, we’d listen to the radio every evening when the news reports came on. We’d listen to the radio and read the newspaper in the morning and watch the newsreels at the movies, like millions of other American families.

      There was a difference, though, between the Arringtons and the rest of America. Within a very few days, less than a week, we’d cease to be Japanese-Americans. Somehow, without any discussion at all, we would become Japanese.

      We would become the enemy.

      Chapter 2

      The steamship we took from Honolulu was named Clear Skies, but the morning clouds that hovered over San Francisco seemed low enough to touch as we walked down the ship’s gangplank to the long, wooden pier.

      It was April 8, 1942, and a thick fog penetrated by a slow, steady drizzle gripped us as tightly as we gripped our few suitcases. Forty-degree temperatures are unknown in the Hawaiian Islands. Even on the coldest January nights, the thermometer rarely dips below sixty degrees, while the average high tops eighty. So the Arrington family—what was left of it since Dad was at sea—found itself entirely unprepared. Within seconds the cold and the wet penetrated my light jacket and blouse to jam a thousand icy needles into my neck and shoulders.

      Next to me the Whizz shivered. “It’s cold.”

      Charlie had a gift for the obvious. On another day I might have laughed or rolled my eyes. But not on that April day. With Pearl Harbor only four months in the past, we’d lost control of our lives, as if some troll from a Grimm’s fairy tale had opened an invisible door, sucking the Arringtons into a nightmare that wouldn’t end.

      “Come,” Mom said.

      Mustn’t complain. Another of my mom’s constant reminders. Burdens, according to Mom, were there to be borne. Not Dad though.

      “Nana korobi, ya oki,” Dad had told me only a few hours before he’d shipped out. This was one of his favorite Japanese proverbs. He had learned it from Mom, but he said it a lot to me and the Whizz. It means “fall down seven times, get up eight.”

      “Fate doesn’t hang around, waiting for you to grow up. I need you to take care of your little brother.” He had put his arms around me then, pulling me in tight. “Mom too,” he had said. “I won’t be able to sleep unless I know you’re taking care of your mother.”

      At the time I hadn’t considered exactly how I’d care for the woman who was supposed to care for me. I’d been too busy holding back the tears. Bad enough that Charlie had been bawling his eyes out.

      Now, as we marched along the wooden pier, Mom seemed small and frail. Everything she’d been taught or learned—every strategy—had failed her. Somehow, after a lifetime of playing by the rules, she’d been transformed into a fugitive.

      We crossed the Embarcadero to enter the streets of a city that had already driven out every one of its Japanese residents. The government in Washington, D.C., had decided all Japanese living on the West Coast were potential traitors, ready to collaborate with the Japanese military or sabotage the American war effort. To protect the nation, every Japanese citizen, every single one—including men and women who’d been living in America for generations—were rounded up and shipped to internment camps a hundred miles inland. They would live in long barracks, six families to each, one twenty-by-twenty-foot room to a family, with army cots the only furniture and a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling the only light. No running water, no stove, no heat. And no privacy. The walls separating families were only seven feet high.

      I knew this because Mom’s uncle, Hideki Yamura, had gone through the entire process. First, he’d been placed under a curfew that confined him and his family to their home from eight o’clock at night until six o’clock in the morning. Then their bank accounts had been frozen. Then they had been given three weeks to sell their little grocery store. Then they had been hauled away like so much cargo.

      Back in Hawaii there’d been a few arrests, but no general roundup of Japanese-Americans. Most of us, though, including my dad, thought the order would come soon enough. That’s why, before he shipped out, Dad had secured passage for us all the way to his sister’s house in Gardner, Connecticut. Nobody was talking internment in Connecticut, most likely because very few Japanese-Americans lived east of the Rocky Mountains. Once we got there, we’d be safe.

      But we had to get there, and San Francisco was our first stop after six days on an ocean liner. We’d be another six days crossing the continent by train. Our family might have taken an airliner—the industry was up and running in 1942—but the cost, half as much as a new car for a one-way ticket, was well beyond our means.

      The only trip that interested me at that moment, however, was the one to the Southern Pacific Railroad depot. We knew the station was on Third Street but had only the faintest idea how to get there. The fog didn’t help either. From the deck, as our ship sailed into the harbor, the city looked no more than a vague silhouette behind a dirty, gray curtain.

      After two cabs refused us, Mom got the hint. The first cabbie made an excuse. He told us he had to return the car to the yard. The second didn’t mince words before driving away.

      “No Japanese.”

      “What made him think we’re Japanese?” I asked my mother. “How could he tell we weren’t Chinese or Filipino?”

      “I don’t know,” Mom said, “but we need to get going.”

      A man carrying a duffel bag over СКАЧАТЬ