Tallgrass Read Free

overalls.
    “All I see are some unlucky Americans. By Dan, I dislike the enemy as much as the next fellow, but I don’t see any enemy here,” he said as Mr. Rubey turned his hands into fists. People stepped back a little. Dad wasn’t a big man, just average in height and size, and his dark hair had begun to creep back on his forehead. He didn’t look like a fighting man, but folks around Ellis knew enough not to take him on.
    Once when I was in third grade, Ralph Muggins complained to the teacher, Mr. Gross, that someone had stolen a boiled egg from his lunch bucket. Mr. Gross told us all to open our lunch pails. I had a giant boiled egg in mine, and the teacher ordered me to admit I’d stolen it and apologize to Ralph. When I wouldn’t do it, Mr. Gross made me stand in the dark cloakroom. At first, I wasn’t scared, just humiliated, knowing that the drone in the room meant my classmates were talking about me, accusing me of being a thief. When the bell rang, dismissing classes, and the room grew quiet, however, I wondered if I’d have to stay there all night. The closet was stuffy, and the closeness made me sleepy, but I was afraid to sit down, for fear of rats. Dad was in town that afternoon and heard the bell and decided to give me a ride home. He ran into Mr. Gross as he was leaving the school. “Oops, I put Rennie in the cloakroom to punish her for stealing, and I forgot about her,” Mr. Gross told Dad, giving an apologetic shrug. “Good thing you came along, Mr. Stroud. I sure wouldn’t like to have to come back all this way to let her out.” Dad rushed to the classroom, grabbed me, and carried me outside. Then he slugged Mr. Gross so hard that the teacher fell to the dirt, breaking his glasses. Dad would have killed him, but Mr. Gross refused to stand up, and Dad wouldn’t hit a man who was down. Although he apologized to me in class the next day, Mr. Gross didn’t come back the following year, and folks said he should have known all along that Mom had put the boiled egg in my lunch that morning: Mom’s eggs were the biggest in Bondurant County, and the Muggins raised guinea hens. I never liked closed, dark spaces after that. And people were careful not to cross my father.
    Dad stared until Mr. Rubey put his hands into his pockets; then Dad said, “Good day to you, sir.” He turned and, pulling me behind him, went back through the crowd, people parting to let us through. I looked over my shoulder to tell Betty Joyce good-bye, but she was watching the yellow dogs lumber onto the washboard Tallgrass Road. The yellow dogs sent up plumes of dust, which settled over the people at the depot. Men took out bandannas to wipe their faces, which were grimy with dust and sweat. A woman pulled her long apron up over her head. I’d seen pictures of California vineyards and orange groves, and I thought how bewildered the Japanese would be when they saw their new home carved out of the treeless prairie. Some would live there for three years, until V-J day.
    As Dad and I jumped off the platform next to the depot, a man with a pencil and a pad of paper got up from the running board of a car where he had been sitting, watching, and came over to us. “Seems like folks aren’t too happy about the Japs being here,” he said. Dad stared at the man until he explained who he was. “Jeff Cheever,
Denver Post.
I’m doing a story on the Tallgrass Internment Camp. Like I say, it seems that you wheat farmers aren’t too happy it’s here.”
    Dad didn’t answer at first. Instead, he pulled out the makings, sprinkled tobacco onto a cigarette paper, rolled it up, and licked it shut. The reporter took out a lighter, but before he could flick it, Dad struck a kitchen match on his overalls and lighted the cigarette, which was twisted at the ends and bent a little in the middle. Dad glanced over at a second man, who was fitting a flashbulb into a big square camera. “Sugar beets. This is sugar beet country. You better get that