Starting from Loomis and Other Stories

I Will Go and Return

KL 51 I Will Go and Return “I will go and return . . . itte kaerimasu,” the little boy said, repeating the Japanese expression he had learned a few days before. Even now, I can’t forget how he seemed to know that the expression is followed by some movement away, for after each time he said it he would wheel his tricycle around and drive off—to school, to work, to town, or wherever else his imagination might take him. Soon he will be saying it every morning as he goes off to school, and it will become a part of his growing up. But, like me, he will not realize the true meaning of the expression until later in life. KL I used to be like this boy. I must have said it thousands of times, never with much thought, until one time when I was seventeen years old: itte kaerimasu. “I will go and return.” And I don’t think I really said it again after that. I remember how on that day my father sat smoking and brooding in his rocking chair. He had been to town that morning and was unusually quiet after his return. The store had been closed for a few years, and Dad and Mom had been moving around, staying with friends, shareDOI : 10.5876/9781607322542:c08 i will go and return 52 cropping an occasional harvest. I was home from Los Angeles, where I spent my last year of high school. He coughed sometimes as he rocked; Mother looked up from her mending when he did. Finally he spoke: “I met a man in town who was recruiting men for the grape harvest. I told him I would go if I could.” He stopped to cough, then added above a hoarse whisper, “I’d kill myself if I went.” Suddenly, I was afraid. I wanted to leave the room, but before I could do anything Father asked, “You will go to the harvest?” His voice was deep, gentle, yet firm. “No, Papa, no!” I wanted to cry out. I was eager to continue my education ; going to the harvest would mean I couldn’t go to college. It was true that I had no special ambition at the time, but while I was at school I could forget about working the hot summer days in the orchard, the meager rations on the table, and the shanty-like house we lived in. I was a lot like the other students in that respect. I didn’t answer Father’s question. Father, too, was silent. I gazed out the window and saw the high pile of horse manure, and I thought of the animal in the barn. Beyond the dung, in the distance, the plum trees looked light and carefree, their branches again springing upward toward the sky. Those were the trees, I thought, that promised so much in the spring, that demanded so much work from us in the summer, that brought only disappointment in the fall. I wanted to run out to the orchard and shake down the leaves and pull up the trees one by one. Then I remembered the boss who owned the trees; in fact, who owned everything—the orchard, the house, the barn, the horse. But father liked working for the boss, who every once in a while rewarded him with a cigar. I think it was because of their mutual regard for work that the two men got along so well—the boss who didn’t work and Father who did the work, who practically lived for it. He began to cough again, and I noticed that Mother not only i will go and return 53 stopped mending but stopped breathing as well. Father wasn’t old in terms of years, but by the kind and amount of work he had done he was very old. He was also sick with TB. “Papa, I will go to the harvest,” I said. “Good,” he nodded, and we looked at each other. Although his arms did not reach out for me or mine to him, at that moment we were closer to each other than we had ever been. Not only was I the son, but I was the father, too. He began to tell me things about himself; I would recall them later in my life, grow to associate them not only with my father but with...