The Era I

My coworker Morimoto's father is 86. A rice farmer in a small village in Niigata. For 62 years, he has been doing things nobody in that village understands. Every Saturday morning, he bakes an apple pie. And eats it for breakfast. With black coffee. At 5 a.m. His wife fought him on this until 1971. Then she gave up and started eating it too. He says "You bet" to everyone. It's the only English he uses. He said it to the mayor. He said it to the Buddhist priest at his own mother's funeral. The priest has learned to say "You bet" back. When a child is introduced to him, he stands up, puts out his hand, and shakes it like they're a grown man closing a deal. "Pleased to meet you." Village kids have been lining up for this since 1965. Some of them are grandparents now. They still line up. When a woman walks into a room, he stands. Every time. Every woman. The old ladies in the village giggled about it for sixty years. Now they wait in the doorway until he gets up. If something is broken at a neighbor's house, it gets fixed. A gate. A gutter. A tractor. He doesn't ask. He doesn't mention it. He's already walking home. Every Sunday at 7 p.m., he calls each of his three children. In English. He says three words. "Just checkin' in." Then he hangs up. Morimoto is 58. He has received that phone call every Sunday for forty years. He has never once been able to say anything back in time. And every night at supper, in a Buddhist farmhouse in rural Japan, the old man bows his head and says grace. In English. He closes his eyes. He thanks God for the rice and the rain and the family at the table. And he always ends the same way. "And thank you for Leonard and Ruth. Amen." Then he claps his hands twice. The way we do at a Shinto shrine. Nobody in the village knows who Leonard and Ruth are. They've been hearing their names every night since 1965. In 1964, Morimoto's father was 24, and the poorest young man in his village. A program was sending young Japanese farmers to live on American farms for a year. He went with one suitcase and almost no English. It was only nineteen years after the war. His own uncle had died in it. He'd grown up hearing what Americans were. He spent the whole flight across the Pacific sure he was going to be hated. He had decided he would bear it quietly. Work hard. Bow. Disappear. The farm was in Iowa. Corn and hogs. Flat to the edge of the world. Leonard met him at the bus station. Six-foot-three, forty years old, hands like shovels. A Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm, faded green. He had fought on Okinawa. He looked at the frightened young man for a long time. Then he put out his hand and shook it like he was a grown man. Like they were equals. "Pleased to meet you, son." That night, at the first supper, Leonard bowed his head and said grace. Tsutomu didn't understand most of it. But he understood the last line, because Ruth leaned over and said it again for him, slowly. "And thank you, Lord, for bringing us Tsutomu." He cried into his mashed potatoes. Nobody said a word about it. Ruth just passed him more gravy. For a year, he was their son. Ruth taught him pie. Leonard taught him to drive a tractor, then a truck, then to back a trailer, which took four months and a lot of yelling, which Leonard later apologized for by fixing Tsutomu's bicycle without being asked. Leonard drove three hours to Des Moines every month to buy a bag of rice so the boy wouldn't get homesick. Every Sunday night, Leonard called his own grown daughter in Omaha. "Just checkin' in." Then hung up. On his last day, at the bus station, Leonard shook his hand like a grown man. And then, for the first and only time, he hugged him. Hard. The way a man hugs when he's not used to it. "You come home anytime, son." Tsutomu never could. He went back to Japan and became a farmer and a father and a grandfather. He wrote every Christmas. Leonard wrote back every Christmas until he died in 1993. Ruth wrote until 2001. And for sixty-two years, the old man in Niigata kept doing exactly what Leonard did. The pie. The handshake. The standing up. The fixing. The phone call. The grace. All of it. Like a man carrying a lantern across an ocean, very carefully, so it wouldn't go out. Last spring, Morimoto found Leonard's granddaughter on Facebook. Her name is Jenny. She's 46. She still lives in that county. He sent her a video. His father at the supper table, eyes closed, saying grace. In English. "And thank you for Leonard and Ruth. Amen." Clap. Clap. Jenny answered two days later. She said she'd watched it thirty times. She said she had to sit down on her kitchen floor. Then she sent a photo. The refrigerator in the old farmhouse. Jenny's mother lives there now. Nobody has ever changed that refrigerator door. Two photos are taped to it. Yellow. Curling at the edges. Held on with tape that has been replaced many times. One is a young Japanese man in overalls, squinting into the sun, standing next to a tractor. 1964. The other is a young Marine in uniform. Nineteen years old. Smiling. His name was Eddie. He was Leonard's little brother. He was killed on Okinawa in 1945. Leonard was there. He came home without him. And then Jenny told him the part that nobody in Japan had ever known. In 1963, when the letter came saying a young Japanese man would be living with them for a year, Leonard didn't say anything. He went out to the barn after supper. He didn't come back in. Ruth found him there at dawn. Sitting on a hay bale. Holding Eddie's picture. She didn't know what he would say. She was afraid of what he would say. He stood up. He put the picture in his shirt pocket. And he said: "Well. He's somebody's son too." Then he walked into the house, got out a can of paint, and started painting the spare room. It was Eddie's room. That's where Tsutomu slept. For a whole year. In the bed of the brother Leonard lost. He never knew. Jenny said her grandpa never once talked about the war. Not to anyone. Not ever. But he talked about Tsutomu all the time. Morimoto drove to Niigata that weekend and read the message to his father at the kitchen table. Slowly. Translating every line. The old man didn't say anything for a long time. Then he got up, walked out the back door, and stood in the rice field until it was dark. At supper that night, his whole family was at the table. His children. His grandchildren. His great-grandchildren. Fourteen people. He bowed his head. He closed his eyes. He thanked God for the rice and the rain and the family at the table. "And thank you for Leonard and Ruth." Then he stopped. The whole table waited. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet. In the English he had learned in Iowa, sixty-two years ago. "And thank you for Eddie. I slept in his room. I tried to take good care of it." Amen. Clap. Clap.