Page 18 of The Magic of Ordinary Days

Later, I drove us away into wisps of dust that never got a chance to settle back to the ground during harvest days.

Dirt and grime layered the air and coated the buildings, equipment, and vehicles.

Even the trains became smoky phantoms emerging out of the earth, instead of riding the ground above it.

The sky-blue engines called the Blue Gooses were as grimy brown as the solid black steam engines of other trains.

That evening, I carried the maternity dress into my room, folded it, and smoothed it out flat inside one of my drawers. Eventually, I realized, I’d be wearing it. After all, my old coverings weren’t going to suffice forever.

The next day, Ray and I drove to church in the evening for a “social,” as he put it.

I wore the plainest dress I’d brought with me and kept my hair down.

Inside the church kitchen, I found women sitting at the table, pooling and trading ration coupons.

I realized too late I should’ve brought my coupons along.

Ray raised enough chicken and pork to feed us, so I could have traded our meat coupons for more canned goods, or even for nylons.

They discussed making butter and cheese, canning preserves, and making sausage, conversations I couldn’t even comment on.

Soon I went to the window and looked outside to see what the men were doing.

Hood up, some farmer’s old car was the center of attention.

Leaning in, the men passed tools around and worked together.

Mrs. Pratt came up to stand behind me. “They’re fixing the fluid drive on our old Chrysler, but we won’t tell the factory.” She pointed outside. “They have to take the drum apart, put in new seals, and get us driving again.”

I watched Ray in the midst of the group leaning over the engine. “Is it dangerous?”

“I doubt it. The factory says you’re not supposed to do it, but we have to figure out our own ways, nowadays.” She smiled at me. “Don’t worry. He’s going to be all right.”

I looked back outside. Children were running around the church building and the broken-down car, engaged in fantasy and games, and I wished I could join them.

That night, long after the interns had boarded the trucks and returned to their camp, I went walking on the farm.

I left the narrow roadway and walked out into an open cleared field for the first time.

Out in the middle, I looked over the remains of tangled bean vines, overturned stones, clods of dirt, and occasional pieces of trash and leaves blown in by the wind.

And stamped down into the soil, I saw hundreds of small shoe prints, many of them as small as children‘s, footprints that could only belong to the Japanese interns.

Once we had talked of shoes. Arriving from the mild climate of Long Beach, Rose and Lorelei had brought with them only sneakers and sandals.

Many of the Issei had come to camp with just their Japanese slippers.

Rose found it a good excuse to buy boots she’d always wanted, but Lorelei complained about the cold winters.

Never before had she felt such cold toes.

I recalled an article that had once been published in Reader’s Digest entitled “One Small Unwilling Captain.” A Japanese man, in a letter to an American friend, had written, “I am a small man. I am an unwilling man. I am a captain in the Japanese Imperial Army, and I do not want to do this.”

Regardless of the view taken and despite the thousands of conflicts I’d once studied in classes, war’s effect on the innocent had never come to me so strongly as it did at that moment.

It came in the remembrance of that letter and in those footprints pressed down into Singleton soil.

As I walked back to the cluster of house and outbuildings, I couldn’t shake the vision of those prints.

The wind blew in grit that coated my lips and peppered my eyes.

Up ahead, I could see that Ray was home but still out working, piling up trash behind the barn. I stopped and watched from a distance.

As I stood there, a chill swept over me. In one instant, I knew what he had done.

I began to run. A pitiful sound came out of me—wail or cry, growl or moan—I didn’t know what it was.

I didn’t even know I was capable of making such a beastly sound, but it came out of me without my will as I tore down the embankment to the barn.

At the brink of the pile, I stopped and raked my hair with claw fingers.

The trash heap now appeared as nothing but a mass of splintered wood pieces mixed with animal offal and bits of soggy newspaper. Pressure was building in my face.

“What is it?” Ray yelled as he jumped down from the tractor.

“My things. All the things I was collecting. The old tools, the antiques. I was collecting them in that burlap bag.” Now I glared at him. “Did you take it?”

I turned and walked back to the house without waiting for an answer, because I knew it already. Except for Rose and Lorelei, the only things I cared about in this dreadful place were now gone. My few sources of pleasure, and he had gone and destroyed them.

In the house, I cooked dinner, but I kept having a hard time focusing on the pages of my cookbook. Instead, the words kept blurring on the page, and I kept banging pans together as I moved them around. Even my arms were angry. The veins stood up on top of the skin in tightly pulled ropes.

Nightfall came and still no sign of Ray.

At last, later than he’d ever returned before, he clumped up the steps to the house.

He came in and stood before me with muddy water dripping down his face and pieces of smelly debris clinging to his clothes.

His arms hung at both sides, and in one fist he held the burlap bag, which he set down on the floor.

“It was in the pile but near the bottom. It’s still okay.” At that moment, I saw more expression on his face than I’d seen in all the previous weeks we had spent together. What was his expression? Pain? Exasperation? Defeat? Disbelief?

He was struggling for speech. Then his words came out in a desperate plea. “You should have told me you loved them.”

That night we ate in silence. I had tried to bake pork chops but had cooked them too long, making them tough. Cutting into those chops was like cutting into cardboard, and chewing the meat made my teeth hurt.

Ray ate it anyway, then he sat back. “This here’s a working farm, Liwy. Everything we keep around here ought to have some use. I was just cleaning things out a bit, and when I saw an old sack, I thought it’d be trash.”

I wouldn’t look up. “It’s not trash. Besides, that stuff looked as if it had been in the same shed for years. Why did you need to clean it out now?”

“I have some used equipment coming in and no place to put it up for winter.”

Now I tried eating again. “Well, it was an accident.”

He was still just sitting. “How much of that old stuff do you want to keep?”

I stared blankly ahead. I honestly didn’t know.

For a long stretch of minutes, we continued to sit without moving.

The air in between us grew as thick as the low fog that rises out of a night plain.

I could feel it pressing in on my skin, wrapping me up.

When it started to push down on my chest, too, finally I made myself look over at him.

I saw his eyes barely well up, the tears men seldom cry just held back in check.

He said, “I’d do anything to make you happy.”

I breathed out then. “I know.”