Hawaii - James Michener [453]
"Sumiko-san?" everyone cried.
"She has run away to Honolulu," the stricken man wailed. "She said she could not live in Kauai any longer."
"What was the matter?" one of the older men asked. "Weren't you able to pin her down in bed?"
"We had a good time in bed," Ishii-san explained, "but she laughed at me for having no suit. I pleaded with her ... Maybe some of you heard the fights in our house."
He stood, a dejected man, ashamed of his fiasco and humiliated, and some of the men of Ishii Camp felt exceedingly sorry for him, for he could read and write and he had spent a good deal of money bringing a wife from Japan, and the one he finally got turned out to be the most beautiful Japanese girl in Hawaii, but he had not been able to hold her. There was a silence in the camp, and then Mrs. Sakagawa, the stocky, square-faced woman he had rejected, went up to him and said, "Forget this ill-mannered girl, Ishii-san. On the boat we grew to despise her and we knew she would never make a good wife. The blame 'is not yours. I announce to everyone here that the blame is not Ishii-san's."
The little scribe looked into the face of the rugged woman he had imported from Hiroshima, and in great dejection mumbled, "Then you forgive me, Yoriko-chan?"
"I forgave you long ago," the stocky peasant girl replied, "for you enabled me to find my true husband." She used the Japanese word Danna-san, Sir Master, and although she had never yet allowed Kamejiro to master her at anything, she sang the word in a lilting, wifelike manner and dropped her eyes, and all the men there thought: "How lucky Kamejiro was to make that swap."
In their own little house Kamejiro whispered to his wife, "Tonight I shivered to think that Sumiko might have been my wife."
"She would have run away from you, too."
"I was lucky! I was lucky!" Kamejiro chanted. "The four hundred thousand gods of Japan were looking out for me that day."
Yoriko looked down at her man and asked, "Did you truly strike Von Schlemm-san on the head with your zori?"
"I did."
"All Japan is proud of you, danna-san."
They fell together on the bed, and Kamejiro said, "It's very funny to me, but I knew little about girls and I thought that when a man and woman got married and slept together, babies always came along pretty quickly."
"Sometimes they do," Yoriko assured him.
"But not for us ... it seems."
"We must work harder," Yoriko explained, and they blew out the oil lamp.
She also worked hard at other tasks. When the pineapples ripened, she helped harvest them at fifty-four cents a day. Later she would get a few days' employment stripping the crowns of unnecessary leaves so that when planted they would germinate faster. For this difficult and tedious work she got seventy-five cents a thousand crowns, and by applying a dogged concentration to the job, she learned to strip upwards of four thousand a day, so that she became the marvel of the plantation, and husbands in other camps asked their wives, "Why can't you strip crowns the way Kamejiro's wife does?" and the wives snapped, "Because we are human beings and not machines, that's why."
Yoriko also took over the cooking of meals for bachelors in the long house. They provided the food and she did the work. Now both she and her husband rose at three-thirty each day, he to gather wood both for his bath and for her stove, she to prepare the men's breakfasts, and together they earned substantial wages, but their goal of $400 clear in cash continued to slip away from them. There were military events in Japan to be underwritten, and various Imperial requests forwarded by the consulate in Honolulu. There were priests to support and schoolteachers who educated the young, for who would want