The Buddha in the Attic Read Online Free PDF Page B

sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of the harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke, a new apron, a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear. Perhaps I shall be invited to a concert . Some years our crops were good and the prices were high and we made more money than we’d ever dreamed of. Six hundred an acre . Other years we lost everything to insects or mildew or a month of heavy rains, or the price of tomatoes fell so low that we had no choice but to auction off all our tools to pay off our debts, and we wondered why we were there. “I was a fool to follow you out into the country,” we said to our husband. Or, “You are wasting my youth.” But when he asked us if we would rather be working as a maid in the city, smiling and bowing and saying nothing but “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,” all day long, we had to admit that the answer was no.
    THEY DID NOT want us as neighbors in their valleys. They did not want us as friends. We lived in unsightly shacks and could not speak plain English. We cared only about money. Our farming methods were poor. We used too much water. We did not plow deeply enough. Our husbands worked us like slaves. They import those girls from Japan as free labor . We worked in the fields all day long without stopping for supper. We worked in the fields late at night by the light of our kerosene lamps. We never took a single day off. A clock and a bed are two things a Japanese farmer never used in his life . We were taking over their cauliflower industry. We had taken over their spinach industry. We had a monopoly on their strawberry industry and had cornered their market on beans. We were an unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if our progress was not checked the entire western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony.
    MANY NIGHTS , we waited for them. Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they dynamited our packing sheds. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same. Why even bother? At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes we were startled awake by a sound but it was nothing—somewhere in the world, perhaps, a peach had just dropped from a tree—and sometimes we slept straight through the night and in the morning when we woke we found our husbands slumped over and snoring in their chairs and we tried to wake them gently, for their rifles were still resting on their laps. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered if we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land. Is there any tribe more savage than the Americans?
    ONE OF US blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. Others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. We put away our mirrors. We stopped combing our hair. We forgot about makeup. Whenever I powder my nose it just looks like frost on a mountain . We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died . We stopped writing home to our