Page 22 of The Magic of Ordinary Days
In mid-October, while General MacArthur was in the midst of battle for the Philippines, several visitors dropped by to look at the antiques.
Some of them held private collections, and others gathered for the historical society or for local museums. I let my visitors select and take anything they found useful.
I also offered refreshments, and we chatted on the porch if weather allowed, sharing thoughts about the history of the area.
Most of my visitors were friendly enough, but I noticed fairly soon that conversation beyond niceties was out of the question.
I also found it interesting that few people mentioned my obvious pregnancy.
Every day now, I wore maternity clothes, and there could be no doubt as to my condition, but most people chose to ignore it.
Speaking of pregnancy acknowledged that women were sexual beings, after all.
I was reminded of the Spanish word for pregnant, embarazada, meaning embarrassed.
I received only a few shy congratulations, and one woman offered to host a baby shower for me as the date drew nearer. Lingering on the porch sipping lemonade, she had said, “We could hold it at the church or at my home, whatever you prefer.”
It was a gracious offer, but to my surprise, I found no relief from my loneliness. Perhaps I even felt worse, even more disconnected. I said, “Perhaps the church would be more convenient.”
She looked relieved. “Yes, probably.”
I was experiencing the strangest mix of feelings.
Treated with instant respect because I had married into one of the old-generation farming families, I found myself wanting to scream at her, to shout out the truth.
I’d become a woman who dreamed of yelling at people who didn’t even know how infuriating I found them.
One day during the sugar beet harvest, Ray came back in the middle of the day, which startled me.
I knew something had to be wrong. He had with him a middle-aged male Japanese intern who had a piece of cloth wrapped around his left hand.
Through the cloth, I could see blood. Ray quickly explained to me that the man had cut himself while chopping off the top of a sugar beet and that we needed to drive him to Santa Fe Hospital in La Junta to see a doctor.
“He’s going to need stitches,” Ray said to me.
The man smiled at me and bowed. He had leathery, tanned skin that furrowed away from his eyes as he smiled, and he wore suspenders over a work shirt, scuffed pants, and scarred shoes.
I untied my apron strings and grabbed my handbag off the counter. “I can drive him over.”
Ray looked relieved. “That’d be great. Then I can get back to the fields and make sure nothing else happens.”
I led the man to the truck, got him settled inside, and drove us off.
On the way I found out that the gentleman spoke only broken English.
But he spoke the language better than he understood it.
We managed to carry on a conversation anyway, and I learned that he had been a farmer in Sonoma County, California, that he had arrived here with his wife and three sons via the Merced Assembly Center, that his sons were in junior high and high school, that he hoped to return to his farm at war’s end.
I checked him in at the emergency room and filled out the needed papers, naming Ray and me as the responsible parties.
I waited while he had his hand stitched up and wondered how much instruction he had been given in how to handle the beet knife.
He had been so pleasant with me, not bitter in the least. At the end of the day, when I returned him to the horse barn, he thanked me and said haltingly, “Be back soon.”
“Oh, no,” I told him. “You must return to Camp Amache. No more work until that hand is healed.”
He bowed and smiled out to both ears.
“Promise?”
I’m not sure he understood what I was saying, but he pretended he could. He backed away and I returned home in hopes that I wouldn’t see him again on the farm.
At the same time as the sugar beet harvest progressed, overseas, in the battle for the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, the U.S.
Navy claimed victory in the greatest sea battle in history.
On the last day of sea fighting off Leyte, however, a new and terrifying warfare tactic was introduced by the Japanese, the kamikaze.
From the Japanese word for “divine wind,” the kamikazes, a special group of suicide pilots, purposefully crashed their planes into American carriers and battleships.
The news came in, announced on the evening radio news just after sundown. At the kitchen table, I was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Ray was working on receipts for farm supplies. As the announcement came, we looked up from our work and listened.
I had never heard of such a thing in all my previous years of studying history.
Unfortunately, humankind has almost constantly been at war, and always there have been those who stood at the front line.
In the awful pecking order of battle, the soldiers first to charge surely must have known their chances of survival were not good.
But never had I heard of such calculated suicide missions as that of the kamikaze.
Never had I heard of such deliberate sacrifice of a life, and now armed with the machines of modern days, one person bent on suicide was capable of causing the large-scale death of others as never before.
Ray and I listened to the long report. The kamikaze had flown into the flight deck of one of our carriers, the St.-Lo, causing it to blow up and then sink.
I had made a custard pudding for dessert, but after the news, neither of us felt like trying it. Instead, as the station switched to playing some music, I told Ray, “I need to walk.”
“Don’t go far,” he said.
I bundled up in my overcoat, but at the door, I turned back. “Would you like to come?”
He sat up; then, pushing the receipts aside, he said, “Sure.”
Outside, the night air was cold as we walked swiftly in the direction of the bridge.
In the creekbed, a tiny trickle of clear water flowed, evidence of recent rain, and ice formed along the bank edges.
Low clouds obscured the moon and stars, making the night sky as dark as India ink.
Only when lightning lit up distant portions of the sky could we see the rolling undersides of the storm clouds, like smoke from a blue-black fire.
On the bridge, I said, “What a night sky,” to Ray as I looked up.
He said, “It’d be even colder without those clouds.”
I turned to him. “It’s hard to believe we’re standing under the same sky as our soldiers are.” I shook my head. “All over the world, people are looking at the same stars, the same moon, the same sun, every day.” Somehow, I didn’t feel so isolated when I thought of it that way.
“I suppose.”
I tilted my head to better see those seething clouds and remembered what I had come outside to forget. The kamikaze. I whispered to Ray, “How could something so awful be going on underneath this same sky?”
Ray was following my gaze. “But in the Philippines, it’s daytime.”
Now I turned to stare at him. “Don’t you ever wonder what else is out there?”
He stood still. “I wouldn’t expect to find anything I couldn’t find here.”
“You don’t care to see other parts of the world?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and studied me now. “I always did like a day drive. But I like coming back to my own place. There’s something about sleeping on your own soil.”
“Your own soil?” I said. “It seems that almost every war in human history has had something to do with ‘owning the soil.’ I like the Indian’s view—that we’re just temporary guardians of the land on which we live.”
“It’s not temporary for me.”
“Your family has owned this land for less than a hundred years. In the span of history, that’s nothing.”
That familiar line sank back in the center of his forehead, letting me know that Ray was thinking. “But in the span of a life, that’s near everything.”
At that moment, something moved inside me.
I put a hand on the spot where I felt it, low on my abdomen and just to one side of center.
It happened again, and this time, the smooth skin bulged under my fingers.
At once, I realized that the flutters I had been feeling weren’t some unusual cramping, but instead were the movements of another life.
Once my mother had told me of this moment.
She had said that the earliest stages of pregnancy seemed an illusion to her, a dream, a promise of something unbelievable.
But once she felt life, she had told me, everything changed.
From that moment onward, the baby became a being separate from her, distinct, and very real.
At that moment, I felt it, too, although I didn’t know that kind of strength simmered within me.
“The baby,” I said, looking up at Ray. “It’s moving. ”