When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Page A

on a broad highland plain just north of the Mexican border. That was how his father had described it in his letters.
There are no
trees here but the sunsets are beautiful and on clear days you
can see the hills rising up in the distance. The food is fresh and
substantial and my appetite is good. Although it is still very
warm I have begun taking a cold shower every morning to better
prepare myself for the winter. Please write and tell me what you
are interested in these days. Do you still like baseball? How is
your sister? Do you have a best friend?
    THE BOY STILL LIKED BASEBALL and he was very interested in outlaws. He had seen a movie about the Dalton Gang—
When the Daltons Rode
—in Recreation Hall 22
.
His sister had won second prize in a jitterbug contest at the mess hall. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She was fine. The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family’s identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother’s nail file. At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat white stone so the tortoise could not escape. Sometimes, in his dreams, he could hear its claws scrabbling against the side of the box.
    He did not mention the scrabbling claws to his father. He did not mention his dreams.
    What he said was,
Dear Papa: It’s pretty sunny here in
Utah too. The food is not so bad and we get milk every day. In
the mess hall we are collecting nails for Uncle Sam. Yesterday
my kite got stuck on the fence.
    THE RULES about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.
    And if your kite got stuck on it?
    That was an easy one. You let the kite go.
    There were rules about language, too:
Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal
Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental
Climate, not Morale.
    There were rules about food: No second helpings except for milk and bread.
    And books: No books in Japanese.
    There were rules about religion: No Emperorworshiping Shintos allowed.
    IN LORDSBURG, the girl said, the sky was always blue and the fences were not so high. Only fathers lived there. At night they could see the stars. And during the day, eagles.
    Our father does not worship the Emperor. She said that too.
    â€œDoes he ever think about us?” asked the boy.
    â€œAll the time.”
    HIS FATHER WAS a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child, had loved to kiss. “Does it hurt?” he’d once asked him. “Not anymore,” his father had replied. He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions.
I guess you could say that’s my
forte.
Whenever the boy knocked on his door his father would look up and smile and put down whatever it was he was doing. “Don’t be shy,” he’d say. He read the
Examiner
every morning before work and he knew the answers to everything. How small a germ was and when did fish sleep and where did Kitty McKenzie go after they took her out of her iron lung?
You don’t have to worry
about Kitty McKenzie anymore. She’s in a better place now.
She’s up there in heaven. I heard they threw her a big party the
day she arrived.
He knew when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream.
Don’t ask her
too often and when you do, don’t let her know how much you
really want it. Don’t beg. Don’t