You look up from your phone to ask if our family were samurai. Or ninja? Your friends are asking. No, likely not—otherwise, what allure would there be in a transpacific steamer?
So we’re farmers because we’re poor?
In truth, neither of us could ever fully understand. I’m already unsure of how to tell you where everything began at all.
Your pimpled face transitions between old and new, but you’ll never grow into either. Your name, Shiro, carries an Issei birthright of my grandfather’s young brother whose choice to sail from Matsuyama to the Seattle Puget Sound was robbed by cholera. An inheritance reforged. Your duffle dumped haphazardly on the sitting room armchair is embroidered with the crest of your private Boston STEM junior high school, and my local diploma hangs in my childhood bedroom down the hall. You are Gosei, a fifth generation. So far down the American line does it even merit counting?
Grandpa Kevin, can I get the Wi-Fi password?
I hunt around the office for the tattered collections envelope where I scribbled it down last time. In the living room, you’re staring out the remodeled windows as resplendent twilight floods the horizon, soaking the flittering onion tops like glittering shoals against coral-painted bluffs. A crop duster chugs overhead, finishing up his last flight. Other than the rare car on the paved road, my parents’ farmhouse is an island adrift on green seas.
Are there wolves? Or mountain lions?
No. Just kami.
You give me a look, searching for jest. Maybe I should pretend, but I don’t—too tired for it.
You google on your phone. Like, evil ones?
I shrug. They visit in the summer. Like you.
A fleeting expression of intrigue, mischief, and determination cracks the apathy you’ve worn since the arrival terminal. Damn, my Snapchat’ll pop off.
~
Dawn, and I’m awake. You are too. The insistent button mashing from your great-aunt’s bedroom and the silver screen light slivered from the doorway tell me you haven’t slept.
After my cereal, your room goes dark. Your dad warned me about your erratic sleeping habits and that I should drag you out to the fields just like I did when he was that age. In the hallway, I peer into the gloom—your mother’s Irish auburn locks peek from the thinning duvet splattered in Easter hues. The last time you slept in this bed, you sported a five-year-old’s bowl cut. Childhood rite of passage. The door has a dreadful creak, but I coax it shut with the smallest whimper and leave a note on the kitchen counter about where to find the eggs and Cookie Crisp.
~
In my battle-worn Chevy pickup, the waning night drains from passing fields stitched like a quilt stretching into eternity. Headlights catch deer tiptoeing along the shoulder, antlers branching from the morning mist. Abandoned trucks, tractors, and storage sheds spanning half a century dot the landscape like breaching whale fins. Dark specters. Wayward thistles and vines crawl through the wood, metal, and rubber to drag these lost artifacts into earthly depths. Webs of irrigation canals and ditches thread between plots, moats excavated eighty years ago without surveying tools.
The Treasure Valley sits near the Oregon Trail’s end, but both Western and Eastern huddled masses planted roots here. The dream is clearer some days than others when I forget the Exclusion Zone’s upheaval, a banishment driving my parents from Spokane. You met Yuri and Has Kondo as an infant. They remembered you till their last breath even if you do not. As newlywed teenagers liberated from Heart Mountain, they pooled together meager field wages to build the house you’re sleeping in and surrounding three hundred acres, their undying gifts to us.
I pull off the highway onto a dirt road bordering the largest onion field. A line of cars is parked along the ditch, their Hispanic occupants unloading and mingling at the edge of the fields prepared to do a job few would, no matter what your big city politics might say. They sport wide-brimmed hats, scarves, long sleeves, dusty clothing familiar with mud, and bug spray for all the good it’ll do. Juan Aguilar directs the crew to the far edge where they will begin weeding row by row.
Donning my work gloves and unsheathing a shovel from my truck bed, I’m flagged down by the owner of Kondo Farms.
Isn’t your grandson visiting, Mr. K?
I can put some hours in, I insist.
Just the half day then.
He heads off to start the rows, beckoning and assigning. He’d saved every penny since he was nineteen to purchase a farm, and now he did. He’s comfortable in his role now, though I can tell my lingering employment traps him in the evolving question of how to treat his former boss. I’m glad you’re sound asleep for it.
Up and down the rows we submerge in the crop using the shovel for support, gaze hovering above fragrant soil for malicious weed shoots. Sunlight crests the Earth as sprightly breezes vibrate the waxy-green onion tops. A killdeer cries—a hawk in the distance. Crickets hymn to a new day. Gentle plant whispers share secrets unheard. This is a rare, untouched time encapsulating both absolute silence and glorious promise. Hundreds of rows with stems reach for heaven, growing into newness from the most unassuming of beginnings, moving at both breakneck speed and considered deliberation. Mystifying aliveness cradled in consecrated ground. From here, the pearly bulbs root to everything. The first time I heard their spinning spirits, I was your age, the day after Macy Gavin prodded my “Jap ears” in social studies.
In 1955, the sky turned sapphire green and the sun was emerald blue. Behemoth trees were buildings and buildings were trees. All people gardened because it was sacred. War only existed in the abstract. The roads and fields I’d wandered bore flickers of familiarity like I’d been here before or had known their shape my whole life. Everyone looked different and spoke even differently so, but it didn’t matter. I could understand and speak to every stranger as they became more intimate than family. And I learned this world was called Amoreperfectunion.
But teenagers who ranted about utopias in parallel worlds after returning from hard field labor were dismissed as suffering heat stroke. However, every June, when the onions are their ripest, I stand in their tide and wait for the sun to rise, ignoring the weeds under my feet.
~
Dirt washes clean these arthritic hands I don’t recognize. You’re back on your phone, charging cable threading from the nearest outlet across the room—you made the effort to find an extension cord to cover the distance, but your dirty breakfast dishes catch the brown soapy water under my cupped palms.
Did you sleep well?
You yawn on cue. Hard to sleep with the smell.
Is it the tens of millions of maturing onions? Or my mother’s long-expired mirin, pickle jars, and canned umeboshi in the cellar I can’t bring myself to throw away? Or is it the honest and earned dirt and sweat? I must assure you that you’ll get used to it. If not, perhaps we have nothing left to say to one another.
You perk up with a question. Can we go to Skippy’s for lunch?
A twenty-mile drive into town and we’re standing in line. Fried food doesn’t sit well with me anymore, but you deified this local fish fry shop on your last visit as if praying something from here was still real and unchanging.
One fish n’ chip, and—chowder? Sure, you can have both.
You balance the cherry red tray and say thank you to the cashier without prompting, and I sip on my soup while you text and wolf down fries. Beyond the greasy window is the main street where horses and carriages once roamed as depicted in black and white photos on the opposite wall.
Dad wants to know if you can teach me how to drive on the farm since Mom doesn’t want me learning in Boston.
I nod. Sound logic. I can take you out on a tractor.
Unabashed light fills your eyes at the chance for something new and exotic. A feat worth sharing online and boasting about in class. However, your brows knit in uncertainty. I thought Dad said you lost the farm.
I can’t stop your dad from sharing the little he knows. We’ve traded these blows before. So I tell you the truth. I still work the ground.
We walk out as Jim Wilson comes in with his field man as this small, tightknit town reveals its double-edged ability to be seen at all times, for better or worse. He shakes my hand politely, but questions linger in his grip. His deceptive Dickies, steel-toed boots, and flannel contrast his business card carrying the EPA logo, an office man in sheep’s clothing. He comments on your height and hopes you have a good visit. I expect he’s wondering if poison taints a seed from its roots. Thankfully, you’re looking bored again.
~
Your dad calls after dinner as we sit in front of the living room TV.
Is Shiro taking his meds?
I hold the phone away from me as though I misheard. You’re gaming on your handheld console without a care.
He’s supposed to take them every night, Dad.
I’ll check.
He said you told him about the ghosts or whatever. Your father sounds protective, but he’s over two thousand miles away in a lawyer’s skyline office. It’ll give him nightmares.
You look anything but bothered slumped in the leather rocker, spine impossibly curled about the tiny screen in your hands. What is so wrong at your age?
We had a good day, I assure. We’ll try the tractor tomorrow.
A long pause. Ben’s mind whizzes even in silence. Just don’t break anything. The double meaning is not lost—I receive notifications about him checking my bank accounts every month, a Faustian bargain made when the fines pushed me into a corner.
You look up as I end the call—not at me, but at the glass and lacquered cabinets housing the TV and a century’s worth of photographs. You point to the Purple Heart from Italy and the M1 helmet embedded with a thwarted North Korean carbine bullet resting on the shelf above tonight’s Naked and Afraid and just under Jesus on the cross.
Did Great-Grandpa ever talk about it?
No. He was a quiet man. Morbid boyish curiosity is doomed to curse us as we’re only left to imagine the unimaginable of our fathers before they became fathers.
Outside at the yard’s edge, under a massive pine and a carpet of chrysanthemums, lies Has’ personal cemetery: Treea the white German Shepherd found broken on the side of the road; Umi the black cat whose bluish fur earned her name and who dehydrated between the onion bin stacks; and Bob the stray Bloodhound, adopted by Ben, who buried shoes in the yard until a coyote laid him open, among countless others. All were memorialized the way many 442nd infantry weren’t. In life, Has watered the dead every day.
Can I touch it?
You open the glass cabinet door and take out the surprisingly heavy helmet, your fingerprints lifting dust. You inspect it like a fossil unearthed from a cataclysm not knowing that in the onions lives the spirit of a Has who never pointed a gun at another soul, who laughed and flirted with the church girls, and cracked jokes faster than summer lightning, and who never had enough time for all the words. A spirit exchanged for the dented manganese steel in your hands.
The helmet slips over your wayward hair and comes to a rest sagging lopsided. Too big for most. Your lips tighten slightly at engaging the world through an object other than what’s been manufactured in Silicon Valley.
You announce your retirement early, though your game is on pause, and the opportunity makes way: I ask if you’ve taken your pills. Betrayal lowers your brows—I wasn’t supposed to know.
I don’t like how they make me feel.
Ben wants me to check.
It’s not a big deal.
Then we can’t go driving.
A glint of resentment. I’m holding hostage what little reason you want to be here at all. However, you’re unaware of the threat against us both: we must do as your father says, or no more summer.
After the walls divide us both for the night, your pill bottle label rotates under my thumb and I google the jumbled letters on my phone. Maybe this is our familial curse, to kneel under the world’s incoherent, chaotic possibilities. Improbabilities. To worry we’re never enough no matter what we do.
~
Open country roads are a siren song for teenage boys behind the wheel and you are no exception. Seven feet above the sizzling asphalt in a glass cab bouncing on the spring-loaded chair with the John Deere 2040 engine roaring like a charging bear, you’re enraptured by the magic of commanding such a beast. We’re crawling at ten miles per hour, but scale supersedes speed. I open my phone camera to film for your dad and mom. You’re grinning like you can fly.
Parked at the equipment shed, your questions spill over one another. You point out the engine, the radiator, and the front loader, and extend your arms too short to span the rear wheel. Soon, your interest migrates to the combine, backhoe, lifters, and harvester lined up in the shadows like stalled stallions.
Standing before the twenty-foot aluminum booms folded like crane’s wings, you’re about to ask what this tractor’s for when you spy the colossal yellow-stained tank plumbed between the cab and the attachments. We’re both now vividly aware of the sharp smell that’s not quite gas and not quite bleach.
It’s a sprayer. I decide you’re going to ask anyway. For chemicals.
You circle this behemoth treating it as such, as though it may lunge for its prey if you lower your guard. When we return to the house, you retreat to your leather rocker, headphones plugging your ears to watch television of your choosing. When you abandon your phone on the seat to fetch a soda, a soundless video plays of a lethargic lion foaming at the mouth, poisoned meat still wedged in its slackened jaws. A savannah shepherd gleefully prods the dying cat with a stick, good riddance to the menace tormenting his herd. A jug of Furadan strapped in a shoulder sling slides into frame.
~
We drive every day. You brave a trip to the highway junction in my truck and are doing remarkably well until you fail to yield to traffic during a left-hand turn and a barrage of obscenities and one solid middle finger chase you to the shoulder.
Fuck. You wrench the shifter into park.
Language.
I don’t want to do this anymore. You unbuckle your seatbelt. You drive, Grandpa.
It was an honest mistake and no one was hurt; the mildest of punishments is shame. You give up so easily. Home isn’t far.
Double-check for oncoming traffic and make a U-turn.
Your scarlet face can’t figure out how to exorcise your humiliation so you resort to rage. This is fucking stupid. Your palm slams into the wheel with a thud like a toddler falling facedown while learning to walk.
You need these skills. My voice sounds harder than I mean to.
Or I could just cheat like you.
It’d be too easy to beat you as father figures have done since the beginning of sons. In the onions is a world made only of bloody fists where words are as obnoxious and vampiric as mosquitos. A blow could settle an argument. Or feed one.
Your disengaged gaze says you know you’ve crossed a line, but now you must hold it. Even half-heartedly. In true samurai culture, you’d disembowel yourself after such disrespect, but we’re too American to remember.
You drive us home in silence because you know it’s the right thing to do, and in the driveway, my cousin calls to tell me her aunt has passed away.
~
We pay a visit to the Yamaguchi’s several days later, on their neighboring farm. Cars spill from the lot, a manicured yard of trussed shrubs, rock and vegetable gardens, and a lawn mowed in perfect lines. Visitors pass one another carrying trays of cookies, mochi, and okazu. So many elderly Japanese faces greet us, a community shaped by common pain, who built their own farms and stores and churches when no other would have them. The family names slip by too quickly for you to grasp, though you can probably sense the tangled lineages by who is married to whom, whose children belong to whom, and which wrinkled siblings sit together. Newness and decay entwined in mutually assured destruction.
I asked you to at least comb your hair and you obliged but it made little difference. My cousin greets us at the foyer and you submit to her embrace so fully, sinking into love as though parched.
You follow your Aunt Mika Yamaguchi, who’s nearly folded in half by age, to the utility room lugging a sack of fresh corn ears—our tribute. We join other visitors around the kitchen table blanketed by a spread of donated food, paper plates, coffee, and chopsticks. You’re the center of attention—a youth returned home as so many of the younger generations have transplanted to faster cities for esteemed jobs and better schools. You and my cousin flip through a black and white photo album as she points out baseball teams, Easter gatherings, and Fourth of July picnics. Her aunt’s portrait with her deceased husband smiles gently from the table’s end where her knitting is on display for admiration.
Loss comes twofold: one for the individual, and the other for the collective. Soon, who will be left?
You’re hanging on my cousin’s every word. Her fingers trace our family trees in midair. She tells you about her mother’s side who worked the sugarcane fields and wept at Pearl Harbor smoke, and of an uncle’s father who was banned by law from owning his Californian restaurant but persisted in the profession he loved.
I sip a coffee until Bob and Margaret Ishido arrive. Bob’s a shrewd man and an ambitious farmer always riding the latest equipment and planting the newest varieties, the nearest neighbor to Kondo Farms where we once shared water and tools and grievances. Our amicable greetings aren’t lost on many I’m sure. A touch of silence daring one of us to break first.
How are the beans looking?
Bob peers from beneath the lip of his mesh baseball cap. Letting ‘em go. Letting them rot. No one’s buying from me this year. Don’t want the headache of testing them all.
The kitchen table shrinks. I’m sorry to hear that. And I am.
He doesn’t meet my eye—a curled lip is all I get. That Juan Aguilar is a good, honest kid. Working with what he’s got can’t be easy.
Margaret tactfully leans over her husband to remark on your intellect and height—that you remind her of Jason Haramoto who used to play taiko at the Buddhist Obon festival and moved to Tokyo and never came back. You are once more a pacifying sacrifice.
~
Ripe Sunday afternoon sun pours over the fields like honey as we head home. I drive with the windows down. A couple of coyotes trot through open grain as though on a mission. A skunk whizzes by, hamburger’d guts in the shape of tire tracks.
You’re leaning against the passenger window frame, neck swerving to get a better look at the roadkill out of horror more than curiosity. In your lap sits a paper bag of my cousin’s kakimochi and Pocky sticks.
Why’d you do it?
Your question bumps my pulse. Who knew you had it in you? Do what?
Use Furadan. I know you’re imagining the lion. All those chemicals—it’s just poison, even the legal ones.
You’re just parroting your mother. She’s policed your food since you were born.
Grandpa, you did it even though you knew it was wrong.
My foot crashes into the brakes. We lurch as though going over a cliff.
You sharply fold your arms, smashing the bag and crushing my cousin’s gifts. Everyone at that house knows. Why couldn’t you go organic or something?
My finger jams into the driver-side glass of an onion field I once owned. See all that Lamb’s Quarter? All those dark patches? We’re going to go pull it.
You protest and whine, but I have the truck keys. With my shovel and gloves, we trek out across the rows with the soft terrain threatening to tip you off-balance, swinging legs over viridian stalks. I bend and grasp a massive weed—a miniature tree—shoulder burning savagely, yanking the thick stubborn stem from its roots. You try.
Another round of bitching, but I’m old and you’re young and it’s embarrassing. You lean back your entire body weight to counter an adjacent Lamb’s Quarter, cheeks puffed, pale forearms straining. It breaks in half—you’re ass-down in onions and weeds, palms raw.
You have to get the roots or they’ll keep growing. Every two weeks they need weeding by hand.
Your head swerves across the vast vegetation sea in denial. Bullshit.
That’s for sure. You should see when they aren’t sprayed in time.
Your arguments die down into an unspoken contest of wills. You’ll try to out-man me by covering more ground and I’m happy to oblige. No matter what we do, we’ve only made an insignificant dent against the invasion. We continue till dusk, awash in sweat, dirt, and insect bites.
You’re silent over our microwave dinners, too tired to even lift your head.
I’m going out in the morning if you want to come.
You shrug halfhearted.
The best time to find kami is at sunrise.
~
That night your bedroom is dark and quiet, and in the morning you’re in your school sweatshirt and jeans. I’m quite proud.
We join the crew only to raise our heads when direct sunlight spills over the valley. I’d like to watch your face as you pause, drinking in the Universe. But the moment is for you alone. For me, I don’t see them anymore, the other worlds. The onions remain quiet for me. Perhaps it’s a good thing to no longer be tempted nor terrorized by possibilities. To no longer be ruined by what’s not one’s own.
At lunch, your phone lies untouched and you keep searching out the window for green.
The next morning you’re up and ready before me. I find you a spare shovel and gloves. And a hat embroidered with Kondo Farms. Juan stops by and gives you a hearty handshake. Your grandpa is excited you’re here.
We’re nearing the end of our shift when we come across a patch of the dead and dying. Husks dried and flaked apart like flayed skin, worlds lost before discovery. You survey the carnage of withered leaves brown in decay and dry bulbs splitting under the heat. The further you look, the greater the graveyard.
I explain before you can ask. Thrip. They eat the leaves and spread disease to the others. From our feet, the damage spreads over a fourth of the field—such incredible destruction housed in the tiniest of pests.
Your adolescent eyes are grieving without tears. How do you stop it?
And here we stand together, the answers clear but burdensome, the crossroads between an inherited past and an ambivalent future. Between regret and grace. Sometimes, you just get desperate.
~
June is ending and your flight leaves tomorrow. The past week you’ve gone out on your own to wander the ditches running along the bluffs and sneak through abandoned houses as your nature to explore blooms. But today you drive us to the countryside cemetery where Yuri and Has are buried side-by-side among the uncounted Issei and Nissei.
I dust off the polished stone engraved with the Kondo family crest. You set down Has’ chrysanthemums in their plastic vase between the two names. Two dates mark beginning and end with a blank space representing entire lives between.
Our silence is where we say the things needing said. My parents’ land is no longer ours, but we’re still here. And when I’m in the ground beside them and this valley has shifted to a new future, you’ll still be out there somewhere, embodying our success, moving beyond history. I hope you’re thinking it too. And if not now, you’re smart enough to figure it out one day. But while we’re here, let us grieve and celebrate, for our lives demand it.
In school, they taught us about particles being able to exist in two states at once. You crouch, hands folded. I think the onions do something like that.
Never had I thought of it that way, and I can’t help but chuckle. You’d know better than me.
You haven’t broached what happened since learning about thrip but now you ask, trying to understand. Was it because there’s a world where the farm became super rich?
I don’t hold back. No, because the world we’re in was the one I saw.
You’re looking at me now with an emotion I don’t know if I’ve ever received. It’s enough to make the fields sing and clouds clear and for a heart to know everything is going to be alright.
Your fingers reach for green grass. A kami took me to a land that provided for everyone. It looked happy there. Your eyes twinkle like you want to tell me more, but it’s too soon.
I nod. It’s nice, isn’t it?
You nod. The onion smell does grow on you.
