Tallgrass Read Free Page A

right, son.”
    The reporter shrugged. “So how do you feel about the Japs?”
    Dad inhaled and blew smoke out of his mouth. “There’s some would like to talk to you about it. I’m not amongst them. Good day to you.” Dad touched his straw hat to the man and started off.
    “Hey,” called the reporter, “don’t you want to see your name in print?”
    Dad stopped, and I hoped he’d changed his mind. Getting our name in the paper would be exciting. People would read what Dad had said and remark on it. Kids would say, “Hey, I read about your dad in the
Post.”
I’d cut out the story and paste it in my scrapbook and get extra copies to send to Buddy and Marthalice.
    But Dad hadn’t changed his mind. “Are you hard of hearing, young man?” he asked.
    Before the reporter could reply, Mr. Smith interrupted. “Well, I’m not so particular. I’ve got a piece to say, if you want to listen. I think they ought to ’ve shipped them to Japan, and the governor with them. If the governor had ran for office right now, he wouldn’t get my vote or anybody else’s.” When the government announced it was evacuating the Japanese from the West Coast, most states made it plain they didn’t want them, but Colorado governor Ralph Carr said it was all right to send them to Colorado. He was never elected to office again.
    The reporter wrote all that down, asking, “And what was your name?”
    “Lum Smith. That’s Lum for Columbus, father of our country,” Mr. Smith said. He grinned while the photographer took his picture. I wondered if Christopher Columbus was the same father of our country as the first president of the United States, Mr. George Washington.
    Now that the buses were gone, people crowded around the reporter, probably hoping to get their names into the paper, too. Dad and I started toward our wagon.
    “You should have talked to him, Loyal. You could have told him there’s some of us here that don’t hate the Japanese. That reporter’s going to write us up like we’re a bunch of rednecks,” said Redhead Joe Lee, who was standing at the edge of the crowd. He ran one of the two drugstores in Ellis, the one where we traded, because Mom didn’t like the way Mr. Elliot, the owner of the other, patted her on the fanny once when she went in to buy a bottle of Mercurochrome. That was okay with me, because I didn’t like Mr. Elliot’s son, Pete, who was a friend of Beaner and Danny. The Lee Drug had perfume and dusting powder on the counters and a marble soda fountain and tables with wire legs and wire chairs. Someday, I’d have a boyfriend who would take me there, and I could sit with one leg under me, the way Marthalice did, and lean my elbows on the table while I drank a Coca-Cola through a straw and flirted. Maybe he’d buy me a blue bottle of Evening in Paris cologne for my birthday. Sure, I thought, right after I win first place on “Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour.”
    “You’re the fellow that can give it to him straight,” said Mr. Lee, who was in shirtsleeves and had on a vest that was buttoned wrong, maybe because he’d been in a hurry to take off his white coat and get to the depot. He was almost as handsome as Dad, and Mom called him “Ellis’s most eligible bachelor.” That didn’t mean much, however, because most of the other bachelors were hired men.
    Dad smoked his cigarette down to his fingers, then dropped it in the dirt and ground it out with his foot. “I’m straight as a string, all right, Red. I sure am good-looking, too.” Dad paused. “Isn’t that right, Mother?”
    Mom had come up behind me, and I turned and saw her look Dad up and down before she replied. “You got that string part right.”
    “Oh, she thinks I’m good-looking as a barber. She can’t hardly keep her hands off me,” Dad told Mr. Lee, grinning at Mom so openly that she shook her head and looked away. Mom was tall, and instead of being nicely plump like she used to be, she’d lost weight since