The Sleeping and the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

child, it’s only Jackie,” Michi said when he saw me. He stopped and put his hand against the wall to rest. “I thought you said she was a strange-ah .”
    â€œI never said she was a stranger, Michi-san. I only said I didn’t know who she was.” He turned aside and pounded up a curving staircase, taking the stairs two at a time.
    Michi waved his cane at me. “Come on in my kitchen, honey. I got thangs on the stove,” he said in his Hollywood version of a South Carolina accent. I took the squat little arm he held out to me and waited while he slowly pivoted around his cane. “Lord have mercy, you are soaked through. Do you think it will ever quit raining? My hip does act up in this weath-ah .” He played up his accent because it was startling for people to hear a redneck voice coming out of his Japanese face. I didn’t know why he still did it with me. He’d drop the accent when it became too much of a burden.
    Michi’s grandfather had been a taro root farmer in Hawaii before the war. Michi was only six when his family was moved to the Japanese internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas. After the war, they couldn’t afford to move back, they couldn’t even afford a train ticket to California, so his father moved them to Greenville, Mississippi, and took the first job he could get—sharecropping cotton for the camp commandant. Most of the local sharecroppers had moved away or joined the army during the war. So Michi grew up speaking Mississippi Delta English. He spoke almost no Japanese because his father insisted his children assimilate and become “real” Americans. Kowtowing to their cracker overlords probably kept them from being destroyed; postwar Mississippi was no place to raise a Japanese family.
    The kitchen was recently remodeled and modernized with new stainless-steel appliances, a Viking stove, and white marble countertops imported from Italy. Michi had the builders knock out a wall and construct a big bay window that looked out on the garden and elm forest in his backyard. There wasn’t much to see there now, just steel-gray columns of rain. I liked the old kitchen better. It looked like my grandmother’s kitchen. Now you could film a cooking show in Michi’s kitchen.
    Michi pointed me to a chair while he turned up the volume on something hugely operatic playing on his Bose stereo. I sat at the Skovby kitchen table in a chair by Marie-Christine Dorner. Michi always let you know the lineage of his purchases. I pushed the Sunday paper aside to make room for my camera and folder. Michi picked up a large white coffee cup and a cigarette that he’d left burning on the edge of the marble counter. “Shush!” he said as the music pounded toward its finale.
    The soothing voice of a public radio announcer came in at the end: “That was ‘Nessun Dorma,’ from the opera Turandot , by Giacomo Puccini, with Jussi Björling, directed by Erich Leinsdorf.” Michi touched a finger to his lips and the announcer continued, “Classical Afternoons are made possible by a generous grant from the Michi Mori Foundation.” He smiled and turned down the volume. He paid a lot of money to hear his name over the radio.
    He toddled over to his stove, where an eight-quart stockpot quietly steamed and a large iron skillet hissed with onions and celery. “I’m gettin’ my conebread dressin’ ready for Thanksgiving,” he said in his exaggerated drawl. He pulled back a chair and sat across from me at the table. “For my family, such as they ah . Most of them have nowhere else to eat turkey.”
    â€œIsn’t it a little early to be cooking Thanksgiving?” I opened the camera case and snapped his picture, the smoke of his cigarette caressing his wizened face. If he ever wrote a book, this photo would go on the back cover. He looked like a merry old Buddha, his sagging pectorals like an old woman’s