Julie Otsuka - When the Emperor Was Divine

She placed the tortoise in the bottom of the hole and filled up the hole with sand and then she shoved the spoon deep down into the earth. “We’ll dig him up in the spring,” she said. “We’ll resurrect him.”

HE WAS THERE, above his mother’s cot. Jesus. In color. Four inches by six. A picture postcard someone had once sent to her from the Louvre. Jesus had bright blue eyes and a kind but mysterious smile.

“Just like the Mona Lisa ’s,” said the girl.

The boy thought He looked more like Mrs. Delaney, only with longer hair and a halo.

Jesus’ eyes were filled with a secret and flickering joy. With rapture. He’d died once—“for you,” said his mother, “for your sins”—and then he’d risen.

The girl said, “Mmm.” She said, “That’s divine.”

LATE AT NIGHT, in the darkness, he could hear his mother praying. “Our father, Who art in heaven…”

And in the morning, at sunrise, coming from the other side of the wall, the sound of the man next door chanting. “ Kokyo ni taishite keirei .”

Salute to the Imperial Palace.

NOW WHENEVER HE THOUGHT of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. “My daddy’s an outlaw,” he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.

He’d be thinking these things, and then the image would suddenly float up before him: his father, in his bathrobe and slippers, being led away across the lawn. Into the car, Papa-san.

HE’LL BE BACK any day now. Any day.

Just say he went away on a trip.

Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing.

Stay inside.

Don’t leave the house.

Travel only in the daytime.

Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese.

Do not congregate in one place.

When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing.

Remember, you’re in America.

Greet him in the American way by shaking his hand.

NONE OF THE OTHER FATHERS had been taken away in their slippers. Ben Okada’s father had been arrested in his golf shoes while practicing his swing on the lawn. Woodrow Teshima’s father had been arrested in black wingtips and a rented tuxedo at a Buddhist wedding in Alameda. And Sugar Sawada’s father, who had already lost a foot and some of his memory—only the bad ones, Mrs. Sawada had always insisted, with a friendly wink and a smile—in the First World War, had bowed once toward the east before being hauled away drunk in his single black boot, waving his crutches and shouting, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

Sometimes the boy comforted himself with the thought of Tommy Tanaka’s father, who had been wearing white toe socks and an old pair of wooden geta when the FBI had caught him red-handed in the garden, cutting down last year’s chrysanthemum stalks.

Geta , the boy decided, were worse than slippers.

Much worse.

“SOMETIMES,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “I’ll look up at the clock and it’s half past five and I’m sure that he’s on his way home from the office. And then I’ll start to panic. ‘It’s late ,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘I should have started the rice by now.’”

THE TREES APPEARED suddenly, and without warning, on a sunny day in late November. They were willow saplings, trucked in on flatbeds from some faraway place. The mountains, perhaps. Or the banks of a river. Someplace where there was water. All day long the men in each block planted the trees in front of the mess halls and at evenly spaced intervals along either side of the firebreaks. Sweat covered their brows as the broad blades of their shovels twisted and flashed in the sun.

At the end of the day, when nobody was looking, the boy plucked a small green leaf from a tree and slipped it into his pocket. The next morning he put it into an envelope and sent it to Lordsburg.

“THE SOIL’S TOO ALKALINE,” said his mother. “Those trees won’t last through the winter.” She stood by the window in her nightgown slowly brushing her hair. Outside it was beginning to snow. Two searchlights crossed in the darkness and fanned out across the fence and then they went out. A few seconds later they went on again. She pulled out a gray hair from her head and let it fall to the floor. “I’ll sweep it up in the morning,” she said. Then she turned to him. “I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“It fell off somewhere between Provo and Nephi. I haven’t felt right ever since.”

He watched as she twisted her hair into a rope and pinned it up in a bun. Her hair was dark and shiny in the light but her eyes were tired. “You look okay,” he said. He did not remember his mother wearing earrings on the train.

She closed her eyes for a moment and then she opened them wide. “I wonder where it went.”

“What did it look like?”

“It looked like a pearl,” she said. “It was a pearl.”

“Maybe it rolled behind the seat.”

“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.”

He picked up the gray hair off the floor and held it up to the light. She looked at him and then at the strand of her hair in his hand and then she turned off the light and they stood there quietly in the darkness watching the snow fall across the black barrack roofs. The snow was clean and white and blowing in gusts. “I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”

BY MORNING the snow had turned to slush and a bitter wind was blowing down through the Wasatch Mountains. “Bundle up,” said his mother. She ripped out the pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them into the cracks in the walls. She covered the knotholes with the lids of tin cans. She brought back buckets of coal from the coal pile that occasionally appeared in the middle of the road and she lit a fire in the stove. When the War Relocation Authority announced it would be distributing military surplus from the First World War she stood in line for two hours and brought back ear-muffs and canvas leggings and three size 44 navy pea coats.

The boy put on a coat and stared at his reflection in the broken mirror. His hair was long and uncombed and his face was dark brown from the sun. The coat hung down past his knees. He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his two front teeth.

I predge arregiance to the frag…

Whatsamalla, Shorty?

Solly. So so solly.

He poked his thumb through a hole in the wool. “Moths,” he said.

“Try bullets,” said the girl.

Their mother pulled out a needle and a spool of black Boilfast thread. She pulled out a thimble. “Let’s have a look,” she said.

THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED to ten degrees. Five. More than once, to twenty below. Ice weighed down the thin black branches of the trees and the sheets on the laundry lines froze into strange wind-blown shapes. They are frozen white sails, the boy thought to himself. Some days the wind blew from every direction all at once and the boy could not walk without falling. Small birds lost their way and dropped out of the sky. Hungry coyotes crept in beneath the barbed-wire fence and fought with the stray dogs for scraps of food. A man disappeared and was found frozen to death three days later, ten miles west of the mountains. His face was calm and smiling, they said. His eyes were closed. He had simply lain down beneath the stars and gone to sleep. Below his head, folded into a perfect red square, was a piece of tattered old silk. In his hand was the tin handle of a bucket. They could not pry it loose from his fingers.