Free Summerland by Michael Chabon

good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Center. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas—they never returned—that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry.
    When Ethan and his father had arrived on Clam Island, they had chosen this house, knowing nothing about its sad history, mostly because Ethan's dad had been so taken with the glass and cinderblock hulk of the old Okawa Farm strawberry packing shed. It had wide, tall doors, a high ceiling of aluminum and glass, and ample space for all of Mr. Feld's tools and equipment and for the various components of his airships, not to mention his large collection of cardboard boxes.
    "It's got to be in one of these," said Mr. Feld. "I know I would never have thrown it away."
    Ethan stood beside his father, watching him root around in a box that had long ago held twelve bottles of Gilbey's gin. It was not one of the boxes left over from their move to Clam Island, which were all stamped M AYFLOWER, with a picture of the Pilgrims' ship. There were plenty of those still standing around, in stacks, up at the house, corners crisp, sealed with neat strips of tape. Ethan tried never to notice them. They reminded him, painfully, of how excited he had been at the time of the move; how glad to be leaving Colorado Springs, even though it meant leaving his mother behind forever. He had been charmed, at first, by the sight of the little pink house, and it was enchanting to imagine the marvelous blimp that was going to be born in the hulking old packing shed. He and his father had rebuilt the shed almost entirely themselves, that first summer, with some occasional help from Jennifer T.'s father, Albert. For a while the change of light, and the feeling of activity, of real work to be accomplished, had given Ethan reason to believe that everything was going to be all right again.
    It was Albert Rideout who had told Ethan, one afternoon, about the Okawas. The son, Albert said, had been one of the best shortstops in the history of Clam Island, graceful and tall, surefooted and quick-handed. To improve his balance he would run up and down the narrow lanes between the rows of strawberry plants, as fast as he could, without crushing a single red berry or stepping on a single green shoot. After the Okawas were interned, the son was so eager to prove how loyal he and his family were to the United States that he had enlisted in the Army. He was killed, fighting against Germany, in France. It was just a story Albert Rideout was telling, as they put a final coat of paint of the cement floor of the workshop, punctuating it with his dry little laugh that was almost a cough. But from that moment on, especially when Ethan looked out at the ruins of the strawberry patch, the sky over the old Okawa Farm had seemed to hang lower, heavier, and grayer than it had on their arrival. That was when the silence had begun to gather and thicken in the house.
    "It's really a softball mitt," Mr. Feld was saying. "I played a little catcher in college, on an intramural team…hello!" From the box he was digging around in, he had already pulled the eyepiece of a microscope, a peanut can filled with Canadian coins, and a small cellophane packet full of flaky gray dust and bearing the alarming label SHAVED FISH . Like the others in the workshop, this box was tattered and dented, and had been taped and retaped many times. Sometimes Mr. Feld said that