Cherry Blossom Baseball Read Free

skipping stones to work on his arm,” Clarence said with a grin. “That guy doesn’t know how to do anything.”
    G eorge King knows how to make 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.
    In the ghost town, Ted was put in charge of building the houses in the orchard. The government had told him to burn the leftover lumber, but Ted was not one to waste. He built a little rowboat and launched it on Carpenter Creek, behind the old apple depository. As her family watched it bob on the water, their hearts soared with hope. Not hopes of escape, or of spying, but of fresh fish for dinner, sunny days on the lake, and swimming adventures.
    But any thoughts of her uncle’s little red boat worried Michiko to no end. Last week, having dropped off her mother’s quilt square at the church hall, she heard Mrs. Morrison talking to someone on the church’s front step.
    Michiko recognized George’s mother’s voice and hid behind the snowball bush to watch and wait for her to leave. She didn’t like this tall woman with her cold, superior smile.
    â€œI am only doing my patriotic duty,” Mrs. King had said in her sharp, shrill voice. “I take no pleasure in informing the authorities.”
    â€œWhat is it now?” Mrs. Morrison responded wearily.
    Michiko saw Mrs. King look around the street and then lean in to speak. “I have reason to believe one of those Japanese men has a boat.”
    â€œWhat makes you think that?” Mrs. Morrison asked. “And where would he keep it?”
    â€œHidden, of course,” Mrs. King said with a wave of her hand. “The point is it is