When the Cherry Blossoms Fell Read online

  Michiko glanced at the rows of short, gnarled trees sprouting small green leaves and shrugged. Geechan doesn’t understand we are only on vacation, she thought. But he often didn’t understand things about their life. He lived the same way he used to live in Japan, and Sadie complained about it a lot.

  She heard her mother’s and aunt’s voices coming from the side of the house and went to investigate.

  Sadie was busy tying a rope between two of the small, stunted trees. A large white apron covered her denim overalls and red plaid shirt. A red silk kerchief kept her shiny black hair in place. Only her short straight bangs showed. Michiko was used to seeing her mother in an apron, but not her aunt.

  The two women stared down at the large galvanized tub in front of them with their hands on their hips.

  As Michiko approached, she stepped on a branch, hidden by pine needles. It made a loud crack, and both women looked up.

  “Ahh, the princess is awake,” Sadie said. “But you are not Princess Minnehaha, a true daughter of the forest.” She lifted a finger to her lips. “You make too much noise when you walk.”

  “What are you doing?” Michiko asked, ignoring her aunt’s attempt at humour. She stared into the tub.

  “Diapers,” her mother responded as she picked up the tin bucket at her feet and dribbled water down the side of the washboard. “We are washing Hiro’s diapers.”

  Sadie threw in a large yellow brick of soap, but it did not sink to the bottom as Michiko expected. “The water is still cold,” Sadie complained as she swirled it around in the water. “We should have heated it longer.”

  “We can do that tomorrow,” Eiko said. “Let’s get these done, or Hiro won’t have any diapers at all.”

  Sadie took one of the diapers from the small basket on the ground. She plunged it in and out. Holding the yellow brick, she rubbed the two together. “Too bad you didn’t ship the washing machine,” she said as she plunged the diaper in again, “instead of the sewing machine.” She rubbed the diaper up and down the washboard, plunged it in once again and gave it a hard wring. Then she handed the white twist to Eiko.

  Eiko plunged the diaper up and down in the bucket. She too gave it a hard wring. Then she walked to the rope and draped the diaper over it.

  “Is Hiro awake?” she asked.

  Michiko shook her head.

  “I’ll go in,” Eiko said, removing her apron. “You can take over the rinsing.” She draped her apron over a branch.

  Michiko couldn’t believe her ears. What did her mother want her to do?

  Auntie Sadie held out the white twisted roll. “Come on,” she said. “You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

  Michiko put two fingers into the pail of water and quickly pulled them out. Aunt Sadie was right. The water was freezing.

  “I can’t wash clothes in this skirt,” she complained. “I’m not even allowed to play in it. It’s for school.”

  Sadie laughed aloud. “School?” she echoed. She tossed the diaper into the bucket. Then she grabbed her sister’s apron from the branch. “Raise your arms.”

  Michiko obeyed.

  Sadie wrapped the apron around her chest. She tied it at the back then in the front. “Put it in fast,” her aunt directed. Then her voice softened. “I know the water is cold.”

  Michiko plunged in her hands. She swished the diaper about, then she pulled it up out of the water. She swished it around again. She thought her hands would turn blue, but they only went bright red. She held the diaper over the bucket and let it drip.

  Her aunt snatched it up. She gave it a good hard twist, and water streamed out. Then she handed Michiko the twisted roll.

  Michiko took it to the clothesline. She tried to arrange the diaper over the rope the same way as the one beside it. It almost fell into the dirt, but she caught it in time. She flipped it across the rope. Then she wrapped her hands in the hem of the apron and held them between her knees to warm them.

  On the way back, Michiko stepped on the same stick, and it cracked again. The stick looked like a large fork. Michiko picked it up and stripped off the bark. She wiped it on her apron and stuck it in the pail, using it to swirl the diaper.

  “Good thinking, princess,” her aunt complimented.

  Michiko was hanging the third diaper when her mother came outside. Hiro stretched out his fat little hands. Michiko removed the apron and took him in her arms.

  From her pocket, Michiko’s mother brought out a handful of wooden pegs. They reminded Michiko of tiny people without arms. Her mother pegged the diapers to the line.

  “You keep Hiro entertained,” she mumbled past the peg in her mouth. “I’ll finish the washing.”

  Michiko shifted her little brother to her hip and looked down into his chocolate brown eyes. “Well, Prince Hiro,” she cooed, “when will your royal baby carriage finally arrive?”

  Hiro grinned and gurgled.

  Michiko sidestepped the path that led to the small grey hut. The smell of lye and lime and the wooden bench with the round hole disgusted her. Last night was the first time she had ever used an outhouse. For once, Michiko wished she could wear diapers too.

  She made her way down the rutted road, shifting her brother from one hip to the other. The weathered building at the bottom of the road reminded her of a barn, even though it wasn’t barn-like in shape.

  Across the front of the building, the ghostly outline of two pink circles rested on a bed of pale green leaves. Scrawled across the front, the faint peeling letters spelled out the word “Apples”. A row of small square-paned windows, several panes broken, ran beneath. Short stubby planks covered some of the windows haphazardly. Skeletons of vines rattled against the flaking patches of grey wood.

  The two large-planked doors stood ajar. Michiko gave one of them a push. It swung open with a creak, and she stepped into the shadowy space.

  “Ooh,” Hiro cooed. His eyes widened.

  Once her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Michiko could see long wooden benches against the walls. Broken wooden crates lay about an earth floor strewn with sawdust.

  Michiko sniffed. She recognized the aroma. Apples, she thought, I can smell the apples.

  The rays of sun streaming over her head rested on a new wall of yellow plywood. The sudden sound of several hammers pounding together startled her. Then the hammering stopped. Uncle Ted appeared from behind the wall.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, slipping his hammer into his belt. “Look who’s come to visit.” He took Hiro from her arms.

  “Thanks,” she said. “He’s heavy.” She wiggled her arms about.

  “Hey, Tadishi,” Ted called out, “come and meet my sister’s kids.”

  The man who stuck his head out from behind the partition was wearing a white bandana with a red circle across his forehead.

  “Michiko,” Uncle Ted said, “this is Tadashi.”

  Tadashi, wearing a white undershirt and khaki pants with a rope belt, stepped forward and gave her a slight nod.

  “He used to work with me at the shipyard,” Ted explained. “He arrived from Japan recently,” he explained. Under his breath, he muttered, “Very bad timing.”

  At first, Tadashi appeared to be the same age as Ted, but when he moved into the patch of sunlight, she noticed the shocks of grey hair above paper-thin eyelids that sagged and folded at the corners.

  “What are you building?” she asked. She peeked around the corner but drew back suddenly. Behind the wall were two small metal bunks. The same rough grey blankets that she had on her bed were on these. Over one of them was the staring face of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. If Sadie saw that, Michiko thought, she would rip it down, but she wasn’t sure why her aunt disliked him so much.

  “Is this someone’s home?” She could see the top of a suitcase sticking out from under one of the beds. She had intruded. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  “Sort of,” her uncle told her. “We live here, while we turn this place into barracks.”

  “Bar
racks,” Michiko repeated. “What’s that?”

  “A home for workers,” Ted told her. “We are going to fill the orchard with houses, and we need more than two men to do it.”

  Michiko clasped her hands. They were going to build a neighbourhood. She had a vision of a street of houses like the ones in her neighbourhood.

  “I’ll show you,” her uncle offered and led her to a wide makeshift table. He rolled out a long paper, placing his hammer on the curly edge to hold it down.

  Michiko realized she was looking at a house with the roof off, just like the doll’s house she had at home.

  The drawing showed one big room, divided by two half-walls. Michiko placed her finger on the words and read them out loud. In each corner, small rectangles were labelled “bunks”. A square in the middle read “cook-stove”. A circle across from it read “heat-stove”.

  She placed her finger on a line with an arrow at the end of it. “Is this the front door?” she asked.

  Ted nodded. “One house, two families,” he murmured. “The government is so kind to us.”

  Before Michiko could ask what he meant, Hiro gave out a gigantic wail.

  “He’s probably hungry,” she said. “He’s always hungry.”

  As Michiko headed back to the farmhouse, she hoped some children lived nearby. It would be nice to have someone to play with while they were on vacation.

  That night, as she listened to the sound of crickets, the wind whispering through the pines and the hoot of an owl, Michiko began to wonder why two families would want to share a house. Why wouldn’t they live in a house of their own?

  Seven

  Family Photographs

  Trucks laden with lumber travelled back and forth in front of the farmhouse daily, turning the road into two deep muddy ditches.

  Michiko made a calendar using the bottom of a cardboard box Geechan brought home. He looked for things of use wherever he went, never returning empty-handed. One day he brought a small enamel basin caked with mud. Another day it was an armful of burlap bags. Sometimes he returned with things to eat. Michiko loved the fleshy fan-shaped mushrooms he gathered from the woods.

  When he presented a pailful of wild vegetables to Michiko’s mother, she glanced into it and smiled. Auntie Sadie looked and grimaced.

  “Where did you find them?” Eiko asked.

  “Dokodemo,” he replied.

  Michiko peeked in at the smooth green stalks with tightly coiled tips.

  Geechan nudged her. “Try one.”

  She reached in. The strange green antennae were cool to the touch. Their coils were covered in short rusty-brown hairs. Michiko brushed away the hairs and bit into it. It was crisp and, to her surprise, sweet. “What are they called?”

  “Warabi,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. He did not know the name in English.

  “They’re called fiddleheads,” Sadie piped up. “See how the end looks likes the head of a fiddle?”

  Everyone ate the greens for dinner.

  “We need to find out how we can dry them,” Eiko said. “We could store them like mushrooms.”

  “Ask Mrs. Morrison,” Sadie suggested. “That woman knows everything.”

  Mrs. Morrison had visited Michiko’s family once a week since they arrived. Michiko soon came to recognize the sound of her black-laced shoes stomping up the verandah stairs. There would be a short pause before she knocked, in order for her to catch her breath.

  Eiko made her black tea, knowing this new friend wasn’t fond of the tiny twigs and leaves that floated about in the tea they drank. Mrs. Morrison sipped from the gold-rimmed china cup with pink roses that Eiko had packed. She nibbled on Ritz crackers served on the small green glass plate.

  Each visit, Mrs. Morrison brought them something. She gave Geechan a pair of black rubber boots for his walks in the countryside. She won Hiro’s affection by pulling an Arrowroot cookie from her handbag each time he sat on her lap. Sadie received a jar of cold cream. Eiko got recipes and advice, and Michiko always got something to read. Her favourite gift was the tattered gold embossed book Fifty Famous Fairy Tales.

  Mrs. Morrison taught them how to keep the reservoir on the stove full of hot water for washing faces and hands. She showed them how to place the oval copper pot with handles over two stove lids to boil water, and put bricks in the warming oven to take to bed at night.

  She let Geechan teach her how to use chopsticks, and to count to ten in Japanese.

  The same man that picked them up at the station dropped her off at the top of the road on his way out of town. He never drove into the farmhouse lane, and he never got out of the cab.

  “Would you like to invite your husband in for a cup of tea?” Michiko’s mother asked.

  “I would indeed,” Mrs. Morrison replied, “but he is too far away to do that. My husband is with the troops. That’s Bert, the farmer down the road, who brings me here.”

  “It seems we are alike,” her mother murmured, “both waiting for our husbands to return.”

  Hearing the long, low sound of the locomotive passing by, Mrs. Morrison glanced at the slim gold watch embedded in her pudgy pink wrist. “Well,” she announced, “school’s out.”

  At the word “school”, Michiko lifted her head. “I wish I was in school,” she murmured.

  “You should be in to school,” Mrs. Morrison said. She peered over her little round gold spectacles at the little girl across the table from her. “Why aren’t you?”

  Sadie laughed. “She has to be the only child I know who would rather go to school than be on holiday.”

  “School holidays don’t start for a while yet,” Mrs. Morrison said. “She shouldn’t be missing her studies.”

  “I didn’t know if she would be welcome,” Eiko said quietly.

  Mrs. Morrison contemplated this until a honk came from the road where the green pick-up truck waited. “I’ll look into getting you into school,” she told Michiko. She clutched her purse to her chest and marched out the door. “Let you know next week.”

  Michiko hung her head. She hadn’t meant that she wanted to go to school here. She meant that she wanted to go to her old school.

  Her mother put a finger under her chin and raised it. “What is wrong now?”

  “I want to go to school at home,” Michiko cried and stamped her foot. “I don’t want to be here one more day.”

  “A day is only a day,” her mother said. “Even the most important days of all come and go.”

  “Like what?” Michiko demanded, tired of this vacation.

  Her mother walked to the window ledge and lifted down a small rectangular parcel. She placed it on the table and untied its brightly coloured silk. “Look,” she said, lifting the bamboo lid. “This whole box is full of important days.”

  Inside was a collection of papers and photographs.

  Eiko sifted through the layers and handed Michiko a thick card with ruffled edges. “Here is an important day,” she said. It was a black and white photograph.

  Michiko hadn’t seen this photograph before. The woman staring straight ahead was wearing a white kimono and a boat-shaped headdress. The man next to her was all in black. He wore a long loose jacket over his kimono.

  “This is a traditional Japanese wedding,” her mother said. “Do you see the white embroidered crest on his haori?” Michiko nodded. “That is my family crest. The bride wears a shiromuku. Do you know who they are?”

  Michiko shook her head.

  “This is my baachan and geechan.” Her mother stroked the faces of the bride and groom. “When my grandfather was a young man, he left Japan to see the world.”

  “Did he come to Canada?”

  “He took a steamship across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.” Eiko looked up from the photograph and smiled at Michiko. “He wore European clothes for the first time. Then he returned to his village to marry his childhood sweetheart.”

  “Why didn’t you wear a kimono on your wedding day?” Michiko asked.

  �
��I was a modern woman,” her mother responded. She sifted through the papers and brought out the photograph of her wedding day. The edges of it were uneven and jagged.

  Michiko remembered this picture in a silver frame, on top of the mantelpiece. “Where is the frame?”

  “It was too heavy,” her mother said quietly. “I left it behind.” She took the photograph from Michiko. “I wanted a store-bought hat and coat for my wedding.” She traced the folds of the gown. “But my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted on making my dress.” Her eyes glazed over. “The church at the corner of Powell Street was full. There was even a crowd of children hanging around the doors.”

  “That’s because they wanted to see the baseball players. Your father knew everyone on the Asahi team,” Sadie chimed in from the sink. “They were all at the wedding.”

  “Were there flowers?”

  “Oh yes,” sighed Eiko. “The church was full of them. She turned to her sister. “Do you remember, Sadie? I carried white lilies and scarlet snapdragons.”

  Sadie stopped drying the teacups. “I was the maid of honour,” she said. “I wore a yellow dress. My hat had a little short veil at the back. It matched my dress perfectly.” She sighed. “Our mother was a wonderful seamstress.”

  Eiko smoothed out a worn piece of newsprint. “Look, Michiko,” she said, “this was what she drew first. Then she made the pattern.” She held a faded pencil sketch of the dress in the photograph.

  “That’s where you get your drawing talent,” Sadie remarked. “Your grandmother went to one of the most famous dressmaking schools in Japan.”

  Eiko traced the drawing with her finger. “Each sleeve had fourteen lace-covered buttons. Do you remember, Sadie?”

  Sadie smiled. “I had to do them up.” She mimicked wiping her brow. “There were thirty of them down the back.”

  “The women in your mother’s class talked about that dress forever,” Sadie told Michiko.

  “My mother’s class?” Michiko repeated.

  Eiko rustled through the papers again and unfolded a rectangular document with a dark green border and a shiny red seal in the corner. “My official certificate,” she announced. “It’s from the Kawano Women’s Sewing School, in Vancouver.”