Read Online When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka - Free Book Online

they’re doing back home?”
    She looked at her watch one more time and then she stared up at the sky, as though she were thinking. “Right about now,” she said, “I bet they’re having a good time.” Then she started walking again.
    And in his mind he could see it: the tree-lined streets at sundown, the dark green lawns, the sidewalks, boys throwing balls in backyards, girls playing hopscotch, mothers with pink quilted mitts sliding hot casseroles out of ovens, fathers with shiny black briefcases bursting through front doors, shouting, “Honey, I’m home! Honey, I’m home!”
    When he thought of the world outside it was always six o’clock. A Wednesday or a Thursday. Dinnertime across America.
    IN EARLY AUTUMN the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some of them went north to Idaho to top sugar beets. Some went to Wyoming to pick potatoes. Some went to Tent City in Provo to pick peaches and pears and at the end of the season they came back wearing brand-new Florsheim shoes. Some came back wearing the same shoes they’d left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.
    THE SHOES WERE black Oxfords. Men’s, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father’s toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers.
    Tonight they smelled like nothing.
    The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.
    He wiped off the leather with his sleeve and put the shoes back into the suitcase. Outside it was dark and in the barrack windows there were lights on and figures moving behind curtains. He wondered what his father was doing right then. Getting ready for bed, maybe. Washing his face. Or brushing his teeth. Did they even have toothpaste in Lordsburg? He didn’t know. He’d have to write him and ask. He lay down on his cot and pulled up the blankets. He could hear his mother snoring softly in the darkness, and a lone coyote in the hills to the south, howling up at the moon. He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg, or London, or even in China, where all the men wore little black slippers. And he decided that you could, depending on the clouds.
    â€œSame moon,” he whispered to himself, “same moon.”
    ON NIGHTS when he couldn’t sleep he liked to think of the house they had left behind. He could still picture his old room very clearly: the One War One World map of the world on the wall, the
Joe Palooka
comic books spilling out from under the bed, the cowboy-and-Indian curtains his mother had sewn for him the summer before last, gently billowing in the breeze. He’d look out the window and see his father down below in the yard, plucking the caterpillars one by one off the snow pea plants with his long wooden chopsticks. He’d see the stone lantern covered with moss in the garden, and the statue of the fat round Buddha with its head thrust back, laughing up at the sky. He’d see his red Schwinn with the wide balloon tires leaning against the porch and on a good day he’d see Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt on the other side of the white picket fence, playing with her little dog in the sun.
    ELIZABETH HAD LONG YELLOW HAIR and a Pekinese dog named Lotus and was not related to the president in any way. The day before they left she had come to the house and given him her lucky blue stone from the sea. It was smooth and round and hard, like a