Free The Ohana by CW Schutter Page B

from his head and kissed his knuckles, “everyone gets rich.”
     
    Kazuko thought of how foolish and naïve she had once been to believe the lies of the hakugene , the white man. In Hawaii, the reality of living the cursed, grinding life of a peasant stripped the life force from her. The hot sun was brutal at times. She wasn’t used to the sameness of the weather in a place where there were no seasons. Sometimes it rained, but the sun always followed.
    The Islands of Heaven did not exist.
     
    Several months later, as Mariko sucked on her breast, Tetsuo asked her to nurse a Korean child. Kazuko was horrified.
    "His mother is ill. The boy will die and you have often said you have milk for two," he pointed out.
    "How can you ask this of me? Is a daughter of a samurai lord to wet nurse the son of a Yobo ?" The last word came out with contempt.
    "I wish to save his son the way he saved ours," Tetsuo sat down and told her how Chaul Roong had given him the money to send both Kazuko and their newborn oldest son to the hospital.
    Kazuko listened with growing horror. When he was finished she put down Mariko atop the folded futons that served as her child's bed and buttoned her blouse.
    "I'll do this because it's a debt I owe." She paused to reflect on how low she had fallen in this world. "And because it is the life of a baby at stake." Without another word she stood and left the room.

Chapter Eight
     
    Kohala, 1931
     
    As Kazuko pressed steaming, hot rice into triangular shapes between her lightly salted and oiled palms, she looked at her brown and leathery hands with regret. How different these hands were from the white, soft hands peeking out from the hem of her silk sleeves. Those same hands once had nothing more arduous to do then pour tea now labored with the deft assurance of a peasant over hot stoves as she prepared Tetsuo’s bento of hot rice shaped into musubi , fried fish, pickled daikon , and an occasional egg. Her belly now held their fifth child. Kazuko hoped for a boy with a quick mind.
    “Plantation life is not for us,” Tetsuo said from the table with the faded checkered tablecloth.
    Kazuko arranged the food into a double-layer tin container: rice on the bottom layer, the rest of the food on top. Placing the tin pail and a corked bottle of tea into a denim lunch bag, she knotted the top and slid Tetsuo’s lunch to the side.
    “I want our own homestead,” Tetsuo got up and stood next to her. “I talked to Han san.”
    Kazuko kept making musubi , “Why do you talk to that garlic eater? You’re the only Japanese who does. You face the disapproval of the entire Japanese community for doing so.”
    “I don’t care, he’s a very smart man, even though he’s a Yobo ,” Tetsuo ran his fingers through his thick hair. “Every Sunday, Han san organizes the cockfights and betting at the Filipino camp. He says he sometimes makes sixty or seventy dollars in one day. Imagine!” He stepped closer to her and put his hand on the counter. “Han san says men like to gamble, to forget, to pretend for a little while life is not so hard and maybe they too will make a lot of easy money.”
    Tetsuo touched her elbow and turned her around so that they faced each other. “He says we can run hana fuda games. We would be the house, so we always make money as long as we don’t gamble too much ourselves. He says he can show me how to do it. He wants me to help him with the cockfights.”
    Kazuko shook him off and continued making her children’s school lunch.
    “Kazuko?”
    “I have to finish making musubi before the rice gets cold.”
    Tetsuo sat down. Kazuko shot furtive glances his way and saw how his fingers played with the knot on top of the denim lunch bag. He always played with objects when he was anxious or nervous.
    While she shaped the rice, she said, “I don’t trust Han san. How do you know he won’t cheat you?”
    Tetsuo stopped playing with the knot and rubbed his rough hands together. “Han san told me