Garden of Stones

“I don’t know what’s even in there,” the old woman said, steadying herself with a hand on the doorjamb and breathing hard. “He had it down the cellar six, maybe eight years. I forgot it was there when the cops were here. I’m just glad he did it at work instead of in my house. I’d never get the blood out of the carpets.”

“You think it was suicide?” Patty asked, sifting through a tangle of electric cords, a trophy, a metal stein with a beer logo etched on its surface.

“Mmm-hmm, that man was unstable. Him and Kinah, and before that, the other one. I forget her name. Besides, I don’t know who’d take the trouble to kill him. He didn’t have anybody else besides that simple boy of his, and he hasn’t been around in a long time.”

Patty wasn’t really listening. She’d sifted through the first box and found nothing interesting, but in the second, stacked neatly along one edge, were two old photo albums. She lifted them out carefully, brushing off spiderwebs and dust, and turned them over on her lap. 1939–1940 was inked in neat block letters in Magic Marker on the cloth cover of the first.

On the second was written “MANZANAR.”

9

Manzanar, Inyo County, California

March 1942

The first night in their new home, Lucy learned that the camp had a thousand different sounds.

Back in their house on Clement Street, night was the music of a small ensemble. The ticking of the furnace, the groaning of the old walls settling on their foundation, branches from the cherry tree scratching her window when the wind blew, and the squeaking of the floorboards and flush of the toilet when her parents got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. All these sounds blended together in a familiar way, soothing Lucy back to sleep whenever she woke.

But underneath the scratchy, unfamiliar blanket, Lucy shivered from the cold as noises intruded from every direction. A baby in the room next to theirs cried almost the whole night through, and Lucy heard every one of its mother’s desperate, hushed whispers through the flimsy wall. She heard murmured conversations farther down the barrack. Her mother sighed in her sleep, and when she turned, the metal cot squeaked. Several times during the night, people went to the latrine, and then Lucy heard the door opening and closing, and muffled coughing as the night air filled lungs unaccustomed to such cold.

Deep in the night, the wind picked up, and sand flung itself against the barrack’s walls and windows, the sound like an angry waterfall. Lucy could feel the rush of cold wind through gaps in the boards and then—shocking and sudden—grains of sand against her cheek. It blew up from the floor, from between the rough boards.

Lucy didn’t think she would ever sleep. But somehow, she woke with sun streaming in on her face, her eyelashes stiff with tears.

Everything was terrible at first: there were long lines for every meal, and even when a two-shift system was put into place, there was always a wait. The food seemed merely unappetizing to Lucy, but for those accustomed to a traditional Japanese diet—especially the Issei, those born in Japan—it was practically inedible. One of the first meals featured canned peaches over rice, a combination many could not force themselves to eat, to the consternation of the Caucasian cooks, who could not understand that to the Issei the combination was as incongruous as ketchup on cake.

There was also the matter of vaccinations. Everyone was required to receive a typhoid vaccine. Done assembly-line style, the dosages given the children were so high that many were sick and feverish for days. Lucy lay in her cot, fading in and out of awareness, while her mother made repeated trips to the latrine to dampen a cloth for her forehead.

Every few days, a dust storm would pummel the camp. Fine grains swept through the cracks that had formed between the floorboards as they’d cured, and came in through the rough window casings and the gaps between the roof and timbers. The dust was cagey and relentless, and the evacuees scrambled to beat it back, stuffing the cracks with straw and strips torn from rags and anything else they could find. The more enterprising took to nailing lids from food cans in overlapping rows over the cracks. But these measures seemed only to renew the storm’s efforts to find them. The fine grains felt like boulders when they found their way into one’s eyes; they were gritty in one’s teeth, sandy in one’s ears and nostrils.

At night the sound of coughing filled Lucy’s building. Everyone struggled to breathe, from the baby in the next room, whose condition was worsening by the day—her mother waited outside the temporary hospital most mornings to beg the harried doctors for medicine—to the old man at the other end of the hall who sounded like furniture being roughly pushed across a floor.

But by far, the worst of the privations was the public latrine.

On the morning after their arrival, Miyako took Lucy’s hand and they ventured out of the barrack. There were sounds of conversation up and down the row of rooms, but Miyako waited until she was sure no one else was in the hall before they left their own room.

“I will not meet my new neighbors before I have had a chance to freshen up,” she vowed fiercely, gripping Lucy’s hand so tightly that it hurt. She had a folded cloth, their toothbrushes, a comb and a tiny cake of soap in a small box that she’d had the foresight to bring for that purpose, and she had wrapped a scarf around her head and donned her dark sunglasses. Privately, Lucy thought she looked even more like a movie star in this getup, but she doubted her mother would take the observation as a compliment.

They walked the short distance to the latrine with sand blowing up under their skirts. The dust storm of the night before had settled, but sand still blew and the wind was cold on their faces. Though it was late March, the temperature had fallen below freezing the night before, and there was a rime of ice on a puddle leaking from the plumbing pipes leading into the latrine.

And there was a line. As they got close, they heard the intense, agitated conversation among the women already waiting.

“Wait, suzume,” Miyako murmured, holding Lucy back. Lucy knew her mother was loath to intrude on others’ conversation; her reticence was more imperious than shy, but she was not a naturally outgoing person. This was a subject to which Lucy had already devoted a fair amount of worry: how would her mother make friends here, if in all their time on Clement Street she’d made only one? Yesterday, after they were processed at the main office, they discovered that Aiko would be living far from their block, nearly three quarters of a mile away, sharing a room with an elderly woman and her unmarried grown daughter. The entire camp was a square mile with thirty-six blocks, and they said that ten thousand people would be living there by summer. Lucy was afraid they would never see Aiko. If her mother did not make new friends, she would be all alone.

The ladies at the door of the latrine ranged in age from a young mother with a baby on her hip to a hunched, elderly crone being supported by a younger woman—a daughter, perhaps, or a daughter-in-law. Lucy strained to hear what they were saying, but the wind prevented her from making out the words.

“Mother, I have to go,” she whispered urgently.

Miyako frowned as the door abruptly opened and two women came out, their faces downcast, and hurried down the road in the other direction. Those waiting gave them a wide berth.

A second later the smell hit Lucy. The women near the door took a step away from it, before one of them resolutely walked up the steps. A moment later, the others followed.

“Mother,” Lucy pleaded. She was afraid that she couldn’t control herself much longer, that she might urinate right here outside for everyone to see.

“All right.” Miyako’s voice was thin and worried. They went inside, Miyako never letting go of her hand.

Inside, the stench was overwhelming, and Lucy’s stomach roiled. On the floor, dark runnels of murky liquid and sewage flowed freely from the toilets, all but one of which had overflowed. The line to use the remaining toilet was a dozen women deep, all of them trying to avoid the waste that seeped across the floor and through the cracks. They stood with their backs to the last working toilet, giving the only privacy they could.

Sitting on the toilet, an elderly woman was crying, tears running down her cheeks while she tried to shield her face. Her shame was palpable, her misery absolute. Next to Lucy, Miyako gasped.

Lucy would never forget what her mother did next. Miyako, who couldn’t bring herself to speak to a stranger, who walked past the greeters at church without a word, who never attended a tea or a card game or a club meeting, took the folded cloth and handed Lucy the toiletry box. She walked across the foul-smelling room, ignoring the row of curious strangers, and handed the cloth to the old woman, not meeting her eyes, unable to avoid stepping in the waste. The woman murmured a few words and took the cloth, unfolding it and draping it over her head, obscuring her face completely.

After that, Lucy and her mother waited their turn with the others. No one spoke; everyone bore the shame of the lack of privacy in silence. When it was their turn, Miyako allowed Lucy to go first. Her relief was immense. Afterward, she washed her hands and waited with her back to her mother. She had never seen Miyako unclothed—even last night her mother had waited until Lucy was in bed to undress. It was dawning on Lucy that all their privacy and modesty was to be taken from them in this place, but she was determined to give her mother all the dignity she could.

* * *

The wave of evacuees that swept Lucy and her mother into Manzanar was among the first, but within days, the earliest to arrive felt as though they had been there forever. Each day brought busloads of dazed families. Lucy learned to read in their faces the cycle of emotions as they came to understand what their new life entailed. Astonishment, dismay, horror, desperation...and slowly, slowly, the deadening of the features that signaled acceptance.

Six families to a barrack, each in a room that measured twenty by twelve feet. Surplus cots and scratchy blankets from the first war. Instead of walls, raw wood dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. Curtains instead of doors. Tar paper, unfinished wood, gaps and cracks in walls, floors, roofs. Freezing desert nights, impossible blowing sandstorms. Plumbers were recruited from within the ranks of the interned to work on the latrines, but problems persisted, and soon there was a grapevine among the women about which blocks’ latrines were working.

There were toilet-paper shortages. Food shortages. Staff shortages. Still, as the days wore on, bits of scrap started turning up from the construction going on all over the camp. Boards were turned into shelves. Packing crates were turned into dressers and tables and even chairs; curtains were fashioned from bedsheets; men whittled and women knitted, anything to pass the time.

In Manzanar, words took on new meanings. Lucy learned to use the word doorway when what she was describing was the curtain that separated each family’s room from the hallway that ran the length of the drafty barrack building. In short order they developed the habit of stamping on the floor to announce a visit, since there was no door to knock on, but they still called it knocking. Even building did not mean what it did back on Clement Street. At first the evacuees thought the barracks were unfinished, with their tar-paper walls and unpainted window casings and plywood floors, but it turned out that these humble edifices were what the government meant for the internees to live in for as long as the war raged on.

The dirt avenues filled with people, the crowds extending all the way to the razor-wire-topped fence that encircled them. Already Lucy had lost her way to her barrack several times, finally learning to orient herself by the mountain in the distance and the guard towers, entirely too close, in which soldiers peered down at them all day long, and from which searchlights projected at night, crisscrossing the bare dirt streets in dizzying patterns.

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