Starting from Loomis and Other Stories

No Brakes

KL 161 The war was finally over for Mr. Porter when he hired Ryujin and his family to work on his pear orchard. Actually, the war had been over for almost a year, but Mr. Porter couldn’t forget that his nephew had been killed in the Philippines and had stubbornly refused to have anything to do with “Japs.” He couldn’t understand the farmers who were hiring them or even leasing their farms to them, now that more and more of them were being released from the camps where they had been detained during the war. He couldn’t understand how the farmers could stoop so low, hiring people who were our enemies. He said as much to Mrs. Porter. “And they’re members of our own Grange,” he told her. But Mr. Porter was new in the area and couldn’t know how the old-timers felt about the Japanese, many of whom had been their tenants for thirty or forty years. It was, in fact, through their forced departure that Mr. Porter was able to gain possession of his orchard. The former owner had decided to sell rather than try to operate the farm without his Japanese tenant of fifteen years. This was when Mr. Porter himself was feeling the effects of the war. The war was getting close to him in San Francisco; rumors of enemy No Brakes DOI: 10.5876/9781607322542:c25 no brakes 162 invasion were rampant on the streets and in the press, and he was beginning to lose sleep and weight worrying about the frightful things that could happen to him and his family if the “Japs” ever came. When he learned about the orchard for sale, he closed the deal without even speaking to his wife about it. But Mrs. Porter was not surprised. She had known something like that would happen. She only found it hard to explain their hasty departure to her friends when it came time to leave. At first, especially during the difficult period of adjustment to the new life, Mr. Porter was sure he had made a grave mistake. He had given up not only a secure job as an accountant in a small but established firm and a comfortable home but also most of his savings in exchange for a fifty-acre pear orchard about which he knew next to nothing. The only pears he had known were the ones he ate occasionally for dessert—and they had been canned. His new neighbors, who were indifferent to his eager overtures, quickly let him know that he couldn’t become a farmer overnight, that he couldn’t do it by reading a book or two or going to some evening classes. It took Mr. Porter a long time to get used to the feel of the shovel in his hands; the mud on his boots, which he tracked onto the kitchen’s linoleum floor; and the merciless sun that beat down on his face and reddened his neck. Yet despite his woeful inexperience and mistakes, Mr. Porter prospered . It was the war years when fruits of any size or shape—even wormy ones—were money in the pocket. The pears were windfalls that Mr. Porter salvaged, carefully dusting them with his hands and dropping them gently into the lug boxes. After three fabulous years the farm had literally paid for itself, and Mr. Porter kept telling his wife, who didn’t need telling, that the move to the country had been the best decision he had ever made. Marrying his gentle wife had been a good thing, too, for he loved her deeply, even more than he realized, but Mr. Porter was much too involved with the no brakes 163 farm to think tender thoughts about his wife, working in the field by day and then going over everything again on paper by night. As an accountant, he knew how lucky he had been and that his luck wasn’t going to last forever. Even if the high prices continued, which wasn’t likely now that the war was over, the crop yield wouldn’t be as good, especially the way he was managing the farm. His chart showed that forty-eight blighted trees had been pulled up and his crop yield was falling off each year—plus there was trouble with his help. He often wondered why he couldn’t get along better...