Cherry Blossom Baseball Read online

  For Ruby Jane

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  A Note from the Author

  Glossary

  AUGUST 1944

  Michiko had been making tea for her mother and her aunt for so long, she could do it in her sleep. She filled the chipped enamel kettle, placed it on the electric element, and turned the knob. Then she pulled the metal caddy from the shelf, removed the lid, and scooped cha into the blue porcelain pot. Half gone, she thought with a smile as she looked at what was left in the caddy. The lower the level of bits of green leaves and tiny twigs, the closer they were to leaving the apartment above the drugstore.

  “We already gave this place a spring cleaning,” Sadie said, entering the kitchen. “Your mother is far too fussy.” Michiko’s aunt removed the coloured kerchief tied around her head and gave her shiny, straight, black hair a toss. Her nail polish, lipstick, perfume, and earrings made her, in Michiko’s eyes, the most modern woman in the world.

  Michiko nodded as she placed the little blue cups with no handles on the table. It wouldn’t be long before the cups would be packed with the other dishes in the wooden cartons stacked next to the sink. When Michiko had suggested they make tea in the cups and pack the pot, her mother had frowned. “Tea made in a cup does not have the same taste as from a pot,” she’d said. “The teapot will be the very last thing to be wrapped.”

  The whistle of the kettle brought Michiko’s mother, Eiko, into the kitchen.

  “I’m parched,” she said as she slumped into the wooden chair. “I’d better stop, it’s almost time for the baby to wake.”

  Michiko poured each of them a steaming cup of pale green liquid. “There really aren’t a lot of things to take,” she said.

  “When I think of all we could have brought when we first came to this ghost of a town …” Sadie said in a quiet, sad voice. “You had curtains, carpets, and bedspreads. There were pictures on the wall, china, and silverware.” She put her head in her hands. Her razor-sharp hair fell across her cheek. “And I had a closet full of clothes and a whole tower of hat boxes.”

  “Stop it,” Eiko said, putting down her cup. “What are a few hats and dresses compared with meeting the man of your dreams?” Her oval face and almond-shaped eyes were almost an exact copy of Sadie’s, only more serious. “Always remember, ‘Every reverse side has its reverse side.’”

  “You sound just like Geechan,” Michiko said as she sat down.

  “I know,” her mother said. “His old sayings fill my head these days.”

  “Odd you would say that,” Sadie said. “Sometimes I think I can hear his voice.”

  “Sometimes,” Michiko said with a sigh, “I hear him in the garden.” She looked toward the back window, remembering her beloved grandfather patting down plants with long, thin fingers. His face and hands were always brown, with lots of wrinkles, just like a chestnut. When he wasn’t hoeing or weeding, he was out walking. Every day he took a new route, smiling at neighbours, talking to dogs and children, always on the lookout for the right-sized rock for his garden’s pathway. He had even spelled out the word WELCOME in small white stones across the flowerbed in front of the store. There was talk his garden could be on a postcard.

  “Look what I found,” Eiko said as she drew a small packet of blue envelopes and paper from her apron pocket and put it on the table. “They were taped to the back of the bureau.”

  Michiko undid the string that tied them together and lifted the tattered sheaves of passport papers from the top. She unfolded them to see the photograph of a young man in a dark peaked cap and high-collared jacket. “How old was he in this picture?”

  “Sixteen,” both women said at the same time.

  “Only five years older than me?” Michiko sat back in amazement. “He was so young.”

  “He came to Canada, like so many others, to make his fortune,” Sadie said. She took a small sip of tea. “Everyone in Japan told stories about the land where gold washed down the river.”

  “And Geechan was going to return with a suitcase full of it,” Michiko said, repeating the tale she had heard her grandfather tell so many times before.

  “He was very proud of his passport,” her mother said. “It was the kind that allowed him to stay in Canada.” She pulled a small, worn card from the pile.

  “What’s that?” Michiko asked, taking it from her mother’s hand. “Inspection Card,” she read out loud, “Yokohama, Japan, May, 1923. That’s funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  Michiko ran her finger across the numbers along the bottom. “They stamped it but forgot to circle the number of his cabin.”

  “That’s because he didn’t have a cabin,” Sadie said. “He travelled steerage. All he got was a bunk in the hull of the ship.”

  Michiko pulled one of the thin, almost transparent sheets of blue paper from its envelope and examined the rows of elegant black characters. “What do they say?”

  “Just a lot of old news from old friends,” her mother responded with a sigh. “Stories of people who died, people who married, and babies born.”

  Michiko slid the paper back into the envelope and turned it over. “It looks like an address on the back,” she said. “Maybe we should write to tell them that Geechan has …” She stopped, unable to bring herself to say, “died.”

  “There is no guarantee anyone would still be at the same address,” her mother said, straightening the small stack. “These were sent long ago, before the war.”

  “And,” Sadie said, “mailing letters to Japan will only arouse suspicion.” She raised her teacup to her sister for more tea and added. “Don’t forget why we are all here in the first place.”

  “Because we are all spies,” Michiko said in a flat, dis­interested voice. She put the card back on the pile of papers.

  Sadie turned to Michiko. “Do you remember Geechan’s toilet story?”

  Michiko couldn’t help but smile as she remembered her grandfather telling them that they did not have toilets in Japan like the ones in Canada, and he had almost washed his face in the large white porcelain bowl when he first came to Vancouver.

  “Remember he wanted us to bow to his picture of the emperor whenever we passed it?” Sadie asked Eiko with a grin.

  “That was the day you told him the emperor had a funny nose,” Eiko said. “He was not happy about that.”

  Michiko recalled the picture of Emperor Hirohito that hung in her grandparents’ apartment in the tall wooden building on Powell Street. But her grand­father’s house and their own brick bungalow on the other side of Vancouver were just faded memories. “Geechan never asked me to bow to the emperor’s picture,” she said, turning the envelope toward her.

  “That’s because you were Canadian-born,” her mother said.

  “But you were born in Canada too,” Michiko said. “Why did he want you to bow?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” her mother said in an exasperated tone that signalled the end of the talk. She gathered up the passport and letters and put them back in the pocket of her apron.r />
  Michiko thought about the imposing emperor standing as stiff as a scarecrow in his embroidered robes and enormously thick wooden shoes. Shoes had been on her mind a lot these days. The straps of the black patents she’d worn for her aunt’s wedding already pinched her ankles. Her father had punched a new hole in the tip of the thin, pointed straps, but there was no room for another. She was so tired of polishing over the scuffs on the white leather saddle of her shoes. Michiko was desperate for a pair of running shoes, but her mother told her that not only did they not give enough support, they also looked shabby.

  “Your clothes don’t have to be expensive, but they do have to be presentable,” her mother said, time and time again. “They tell the world who you are.” She still shook her head with disapproval when she talked about the family whose children had worn dirty canvas shoes to the Sato wedding. Ever since then she’d had a strong dislike of runners.

  Even so, Michiko wrote down the page number and their cost on a piece of paper and attached it to the front of the catalogue, just in case her mother changed her mind. In weeks, Michiko hoped she would be slipping her feet into brand new running shoes, ready to race from first base to home plate in seconds.

  “Yoo-hoo,” a familiar voice hollered from the bottom of the back stairwell. Mrs. Morrison, their long-time friend, called up to them. “Are you ready?”

  “Coming,” Sadie called back. She turned to her sister with concern. “Why don’t we wait for the baby to wake up?” she whispered. “It’s a perfect day for a walk.”

  Michiko knew there was no point in expecting her mother to visit Geechan’s grave. She hadn’t visited it since he passed away. Every night, as Eiko prepared dinner, tears rolled down her cheeks in long, silent lines. Her mother pretended it was the onions, but Michiko knew it wasn’t. Like all the Japanese people in this poor, abandoned town, her mother tried to make their problems invisible by hiding her feelings.

  “I have to feed her,” Eiko said. “You go ahead.”

  Sadie took a few minutes to wrap a rice ball in a piece of wax paper.

  Michiko grabbed the red baseball cap with the large white “A” from the hook at the top of the stairs and shoved it on her head. It used to belong to her Uncle Kaz when he played for the Asahi team, but he had given it to her as a birthday present. It was a bit large, but she didn’t care. She raced down the stairs to join the woman who waited in their back vestibule.

  Mrs. Morrison’s big, red, freckled arms clutched a bunch of daisies. Her wide-brimmed straw hat and floral dress with its puffy skirt made her look like one enormous bouquet. Her thick beige stockings made Michiko smile, thinking of her aunt’s earlier story.

  “Instead of stockings,” Sadie had explained, “the movie stars wear liquid makeup.” Then she leaned back in her chair and lifted her bare leg in the air to demonstrate the application of a Helena Rubinstein leg stick. “It gives your leg a smooth, stocking-like sheen.”

  Michiko had covered her mouth with her hands and giggled. And they’d laughed out loud when Sadie lost her balance and ended up on the floor.

  “You’re looking very happy this morning,” Mrs. Morrison said, seeing the wide smile on Michiko’s face.

  “I was thinking about new shoes,” Michiko said.

  Mrs. Morrison looked down at her own worn ones. “Suppose I should think about a new pair as well, but these are just so darn comfortable, I hate to give them up.”

  She pulled three of the flowers away from the bouquet and handed them to Michiko. “Take these upstairs for your mother,” she said. “She likes to arrange a … you know, what she calls her vase for your grandfather.”

  “A tokonoma,” Michiko said, supplying the Japanese word. “She will like that.”

  Michiko knew her mother would use her special pair of short, sharp scissors to trim the stems. Then she would wind them with thin wire to keep the flowers straight and tall before placing them into the small cluster of pins that rested in the well of the square ceramic tray.

  At the cemetery, Michiko picked up the pickle jar they used for a flower vase on her grandfather’s grave. She removed the dead flowers and dumped the sour, murky water over the roots of the small cherry tree behind the gravestone. Then she carried the jar to the metal tap that stuck up out of the ground. Michiko remembered how angry Sadie had become when she’d found out there was running water for the cemetery, but not for the little huts where the Japanese people lived. But that had changed. All the wooden houses had water and electricity now.

  “I wonder if Geechan can see the flowers we bring?” Michiko said.

  “I think so,” Sadie said. “I think he can smell and hear, too. He just can’t taste and touch,” she said as she placed the small rice ball on the cement stone.

  “So why did you bring food?”

  “So he can smell it,” Sadie said. “The smell of good food always made him happy.”

  Michiko couldn’t argue with that. Her grandfather had loved to eat, even though he was always as thin as a rake.

  Sadie took the fresh flowers from Mrs. Morrison and spread them on the ground. One by one, she arranged them in the jar.

  They all paused for a moment at the gateway of the small stone wall that surrounded the cemetery. “He should have been buried with our mother,” Sadie murmured. “It isn’t right to be so far away from her.”

  Mrs. Morrison put her hand on top of Sadie’s and patted it.

  “Will you visit him when we’re gone?” Michiko asked.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Morrison said. She pulled a handkerchief from beneath the cuff of her sleeve and wiped a tear from her eye. “When you write to me, I will come here and read him every one of your letters.”

  GOODBYE GIFTS

  A fist rapped at window of the drugstore. “Hi, Clarence,” Michiko called out as she unlocked the front door. The small bell overhead jangled when the tall, lanky boy, with a nose covered with freckles and eyelashes that were almost invisible, stepped inside. Tufts of golden hair stuck out from his grass-stained baseball cap.

  “I thought I’d drop this off,” he said, handing her a brown paper bag.

  Michiko removed a flat, hinged box, painted sky blue. A tiny gold clasp held it shut.

  “It’s just a cigar box,” Clarence said with a shrug. “I figured it’s good for keeping stuff.”

  Michiko ran her hand across the lid. It was as smooth as glass.

  “After I sanded it, I remembered what your father told me about straining the paint first,” he said with a grin. “I used one of my sister’s socks.”

  Her father and Clarence got along well. Whenever they met, Sam gave Clarence a soft cuff on the cheek. Clarence would duck away and then put up his fists. After a few harmless jabs, her father ruffled the boy’s already unruly hair.

  “Thanks,” Michiko said, lowering her eyes. “I’m making you something too, but it isn’t quite finished.” She began to worry about his goodbye gift. A bouquet of origami flowers seemed a good idea at the time, but now she wasn’t quite sure.

  “No problem,” Clarence said, sticking his hands into his back pockets. “You won’t be leaving for a while. I just thought I’d better get this to you before one of my sisters wanted it.”

  Michiko’s eyes widened. Now she knew the flowers were a mistake. The moment he took them home, they would tease him. She would have to think of something else.

  “How about a few pitches?” Clarence asked.

  Michiko nodded. She ran up the stairs and pulled her baseball cap from its peg. “I won’t be long,” she yelled through the open apartment door.

  Clarence walked with his catcher’s mitt dangling from the end of the bat over his shoulder. “George is going to meet us at the field,” he said.

  “Are you still trying to teach George how to pitch?” Michiko asked.

  “I told him to practise skipping stones to work on his arm,” Clarence said with a grin. “That guy doesn’t know how to do anything.”

  George King knows how to m
ake trouble, Michiko thought. From the day we arrived he made sure I knew Japs weren’t welcome in his town. She grabbed Clarence’s arm. “Do you think George told anyone about my uncle’s boat?” she asked. “He promised not to say anything.”

  Clarence’s eyes narrowed. He curled back his lips and sucked through his teeth. “If he did, he’ll have me to deal with,” he said, clenching his fist, “and he knows it.”

  It was a short walk down the street to the abandoned lot that had become the town’s baseball field. The afternoon sun reddened the bare earth diamond. Clarence removed his glove and handed Michiko the bat. “Let’s practise our bunts.”

  Michiko knew bunting was so much more than just a short hit. Her Uncle Kaz had taught both of them how to land the ball halfway down the third baseline to make the throw to first base a long one. She knew exactly which way to turn her body and how to hold the bat. She was good at bunting and was proud of it.

  She stood at the rice bag stuffed with straw they used for home plate, gripping the worn bat handle. Clarence drew back his arm. He snapped it forward, and the ball came towards her. She changed the grip on her bat and bunted the ball right to the third base line. Clarence picked it up just as George King arrived.

  George reached into the carrier basket of his bike and removed his catcher’s mitt. Michiko couldn’t help admiring his new black canvas shoes with their clean white toes.

  She leaned against the bat, thinking about her Uncle Ted. The first boat he ever made was for a hakujin. When they took it out for a test, he wrote her family to say it sliced through the water like a sashimi knife. Michiko had drawn a picture of the ten men it took to help him launch it down the rails and mailed it to him.

  Ted’s reputation as a boat builder grew beyond his small garage and got him work as a designer in the Atagi shipyard near Vancouver. But after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States joined the war against Japan, the Canadian government seized all the boats that belonged to the Japanese and towed them away. Ted lost his boat, his job, and his pay. He told Michiko later, when they moved to the ghost town, that the ten men in her picture were all put in road camps to work on the railway, just like her father.