Immigration Service Camp, Kenedy, Texas – May 1944

Nearly two years had passed since a Peruvian policeman pointed a pistol at him and declared Tadashi Yamada to be “under arrest.” The employee of a Japanese food store in Lima, Tadashi, along with hundreds of other Japanese and Japanese-Peruvians, soon found himself shipped off to internment in Camp Kenedy, Texas. Seizing these people through a deal with Peruvian authorities, the United States government hoped to use them as bargaining chips in exchange for Americans held by the Japanese. But that did not happen.

Twenty-four and a veteran of Japan’s earlier war in Manchuria, Tadashi had been an unlikely soldier, spare and gangly, taller than most of his countrymen. He had a longish, sober face, clean-shaven. He’d once displayed a brush mustache, but he’d fretted it made him look Chaplinesque. He’d done away with it soon after his arrival in Texas. He donned his round-framed glasses only when he encountered small print. Tadashi viewed life in a serious manner. And now, despite the burden he bore as an internee, he brimmed with ambition. Tadashi had survived both combat in Manchuria and Peruvian hostility in Lima. He was determined to survive this captivity in Texas. The war would end, and he’d have a new beginning.

Interactions with the American INS camp guards had been strained. But, an unlikely shared interest in baseball had provided the basis for a not unfriendly relation with one of the INS guards, Tom Reardon. Tom was a sinewy, tall drink of water, blond and with a longish face. Outfitted in jeans, a blue checked shirt (featuring a badge), and boots, he displayed a large silver belt buckle.

It was Reardon who flagged the possibility of Tadashi being allowed outside the camp to perform labor on nearby farms, now short of workers. Reardon’s prediction proved to be well-founded, and in late spring a notice went out soliciting camp volunteers willing to work on nearby ranches and farms. Despite condemnation by some of the other internees, Tadashi submitted his name, and Tom Reardon provided the required endorsement. Tadashi had never performed agricultural work, but, weary with forced inactivity that shrouded him like heavy fog, he seized the opportunity to have a break from camp life and to travel outside the fence, if only for a few hours a day.

Another guard, Danny Matthews, had been assigned to deliver the detainee volunteers to their work site. He was tousle-haired, twenty-years-old, slow-moving, twangy-voiced, and a bit vacant looking. As color flooded the sky, with Danny at the wheel, Tadashi and two other detainees piled into one of the camp’s beat-up Ford trucks on a late May morning. Clouds of dust enveloped the vehicle as it rattled along an unpaved road. The passengers experienced surges of trepidation about how they might be received. But they did not complain. They’d left the watch towers and the fence behind. Danny delivered them to a farm about five miles from the camp.

Everet Schreiber owned the farm. He’d been on the place for more than thirty years, keeping twenty cows he milked twice a day. Now, with both his sons off to the war, the task of running the farm, where he also kept goats and chickens, had become increasingly burdensome for Schreiber and his wife, Charlotte. Haying season had arrived, and he needed help.

Schreiber stared at the three detainees. “I thought you were bringing out some German men,” he said to Danny.

“I reckon there weren’t any available,” Danny said. “Anyway, these three are the ones you’re getting.”

Outfitted in bib overalls and a ball cap, the farmer was a big man, broad-shouldered, and strong. Tadashi studied the farmer’s creased and weathered face. He detected no welcome in the man’s eyes.

“Neighbor helped me cut the hay last week. Now I have to get it into the barn.”

“Well, I figure these people can learn to handle a pitch fork as well as anybody,” Danny said. “Do you think it’s safe? Letting them have pitchforks?” The farmer scrutinized his prospective helpers.

“Doesn’t seem like you have much choice,” Danny said. “Anyhow, I gotta get back.” “You mean you ain’t staying? What if they try to run off?”

“Hasn’t been one escaped, yet. Where do you think they’d go?” Danny shrugged. “Back to pick them up at 5:00.” That said, he gunned the engine and headed back to camp.

“Which one speaks English? Or am I asking too much?” Schreiber said. “I speak English,” Tadashi said.

Schreiber gestured toward a rickety, tired-looking wagon. Already in harness, two horses waited to begin their task. “Okay,” the man said. “You and the others get up on the wagon.”

The three detainees clambered up. Schreiber climbed on himself, stood at the front, and took up the reins.

“Giddyap, Brownie. Giddyap, Prince.” The farmer snapped the reins and the workhorses set the wagon in motion.

For Tadashi, the horses, one brown and one gray, summoned up long-repressed images of two pack horses his platoon had used in Manchuria. Both had been killed by artillery. It seemed so long ago. He’d tried, without success, to rid himself of such memories.

Fifteen minutes later, Tadashi caught sight of the hay field and wondered at his decision to volunteer. The air was thick with the unfamiliar scent of recently cut hay. The sun blazed down on them, a soughing breeze provided little relief, and the rows of mown hay seemed to extend forever.

Filled with wonder and unease, Tadashi gazed out across the arid south Texas terrain beyond the hayfield. To a young man who’d come of age in the congested lanes of Yokohama and the wet rice paddies of rural Japan, the Texas landscape seemed vast, and empty, as alien as the surface of some other planet.

Grumbling much of the time, Schreiber instructed the detainees on how to wield their forks to scoop up and pitch hay onto the wagon as he moved it forward. The concept was simple; the work hard, especially with an unfiltered Texas sun beating down from a cloudless sky. A pair of hawks floated high above, as if monitoring the men’s labor.

Tadashi was unaccustomed to physical work. His back and shoulders soon radiated pain and his hands became red and sore. Like some noxious weed, the hay caused him to sneeze. The sun attacked his neck; sweat glistened on his face and cascaded down his back.

At first, the detainees struggled. “Lord almighty,” Schreiber said. “Is this what they sent me?”

Despite the farmer’s commentary, stopping and starting, the wagon rolled along between the rows, hay gradually piling up on its bed. In time, the three men got the hang of the job, and the pace picked up.

Once he deemed the load sufficient, the farmer said, “Okay, climb on. We’re gonna take this hay back to the barn and hoist it into the loft.”

Tadashi and the others ferreted out spots in the mounded hay and flopped down to rest as Schreiber drove the wagon back to the barn. They welcomed the respite from labor in the galling heat.

Once at the barn, a two story faded yellow structure with its loft doors open, they watched with fascination as Schreiber manipulated pulleys, levers, and retractable arms, combined with the efforts of Brownie and Prince, to hoist the load up into the hayloft. Schreiber said the hay would dry there and later be pitched down to feed the animals below.

Coming from a land where farmers planted rice by hand, Tadashi felt much impressed by all he’d witnessed.

When the load had been stored, Schreiber gestured to the three men to get back on the wagon.

“Time’s a wasting,” he said.

Just then, Charlotte Schreiber, a lanky, gray-haired woman in jeans and work shirt, appeared with a jug of water. Plain as a piece of faded burlap, she radiated a perceptible sense of thoughtful consideration.

“I figured these boys might be thirsty,” she said.

The three drank eagerly, passing the jug from mouth to mouth. It struck Tadashi as a simple thing. There had been water on the wagon. But, on reflection, he deemed it a special act of kindness from a woman whose sons were off at war. Possibly fighting against his countrymen.

They made three more trips to the hayfield that day. After the second, the farmer’s wife again delivered water, and she also provided the men with cheese sandwiches.

“No need to spoil them,” Schreiber said. “Just in case you forgot, they’re Japanese.”

“Got boys of my own,” his wife said. “They’re human beings like us.”

When they returned to the farmhouse at day’s end, they found Danny on the front porch chatting with Charlotte Schreiber.

“The crew all did fine; better than I expected,” Schreiber said to Danny. “Won’t be needing these fellows anytime soon. But you can tell your boss I’d be willing to have them again.”

That said, he reached into his overall pocket and extracted three wrinkled dollar bills. He handed each of the men a dollar.

“Best I can do, I’m afraid.”

As Danny and the three men drove away, the farmer and his wife waved until risen dust obscured them from view.

Small gestures perhaps, but the experience at the farm reinforced Tadashi’s perception that many of the Americans were good people. Why were his countrymen fighting them? What would some of his die-hard fellow internees think?

A week later, as he left the barracks on his way to a new assignment in the camp supply office, Tadashi encountered Reardon.

“Thank you for sending me to farm. It was interesting.” He did not say he had found the pair kind and generous in their treatment of a presumed enemy. But that was his assessment. “I hope I can do more work for that farmer.”

Reardon responded with a sober look.

“I don’t think so, Yamada. They ain’t looking for any more workers from the camp. Leastways, no Japanese.”

“I am sorry. Did we do bad work?”

“Ain’t that, Yamada.” Tom stared down at his boot tops.

“Day after you were there, they got one of them War Department telegrams. Their older boy was killed on some island in the Pacific.”

“I take no pleasure from this, Mr. Reardon.”

“I know, Yamada. I didn’t reckon you would.”

Lawrence F. Farrar is a former American Foreign Service officer. His thirty-year diplomatic career involved multiple postings in Japan, as well as assignments in Germany, Norway, and Washington, DC. Short term assignments took him to places as diverse as Beijing and Tehran, Caracas, and Muscat. Including an earlier appearance in Streetlight, Farrar’s work has appeared in literary magazines more than 100 times (More about the author can be found at: https://www.northoakswriter.com.) Many of his stories derive from events he experienced and people he encountered during twenty years living outside the United States. Farrar and his wife, Keiko, now live in Minnesota where he is a member of the Loft Literary Center.