Prison did have its privileges.
Frankie hadn’t been incarcerated for more than a week when he was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the other prisoners liked to play baseball. When Frankie saw some prisoners constructing a baseball diamond, he watched their progress from a discrete distance. When the games began, he stood nearby and watched till the final pitch, waiting in earnest for an opportunity to catch a foul ball and get a chance to exhibit his throwing arm. Finding a stray ball one day, he began to practice with it, throwing the ball against the backstop before and after games, until he finally lured in a sparring partner so that he could at least play catch.
As aspiring and practiced a ballplayer as Frankie was, he was younger than most of the ballplayers. And he was white; a white Jap, perhaps, but white enough to make him easy to overlook. But Frankie had his moments. He got to fill in for one of the bigger boys on occasion, and proved himself with the opportunities that he’d been provided. Frankie’s efforts on the field may not have bought him the glory that he’d dreamed of, but at least he’d made himself part of the group. He wasn’t quite as white as before.
Frankie had plenty of time for reading while he was incarcerated, so he would sometimes check out books from the Manzanar library. He read some boys’ books by Twain, Thoreau, and London. He enjoyed reading, though his reading was often wanting in comprehension.
Frankie sometimes visited one particular elderly man because Frankie liked to watch the old man carve faces in pieces of wood. The man was accomplished at sashi netsuke, a Japanese art of wood carving. After a while, Frankie began carving on his own. He began to carve within sight of the old man, hoping to attract the old artisan’s attention. The old man looked in Frankie’s direction many times, and then one day Frankie got his wish. The old man waved him over. Frankie humbly approached the old man. The artisan took Frankie’s carving and observed it. Then he put his blade between his thumb and forefinger and pressed the blade against the edge of one of Frankie’s cuts. When the old man moved his hand away, Frankie could see that the old man had given the cut an appearance of depth and shadow.
Frankie continued to get tips from the old man until the man disappeared. Perhaps he had died. Maybe he had been released or moved to another camp. Frankie didn’t know. He kept carving.
Later in the war, after camp security had been eased, prisoners were occasionally permitted to travel outside the gates of the camp. Father Steinbeck, who ran the prison chapel, started to take kids out on overnight hikes toward the mountain that towered over the camp. One time, Frankie was invited onto one of the Father’s outings. It was a lot of walking for Frankie’s short legs. It seemed to him that they hiked forever. As they hiked, the mountain grew and grew imperceptibly until it was too close to see. Finally, they camped at the foot of the great mountain, above a stream that flowed out onto the desert. Frankie wondered where the stream flowed from and where it flowed to. It must not have come from far into the mountains. There just wasn’t that much water in it. To where was it heading? Did it flow out past the orchard, or did it disappear into the desert sand before it ever got that far?
After the camping trip, something about the desert clung to Frankie. He found solace looking out at the desert through the barbed wire, even though the desert wind filled his eyes with dust. He would sometimes spend hours in a day just looking out over the low desert bush, at the mountain the inmates called “Whitney-san.”
Sometimes at night, Frankie would slip under the barbed wire perimeter fence and the tired eyes of the guards in their towers, and he’d walk out onto the desert. The desert was flat and sandy. He could cover many miles in the moonlight, and in time, he learned to even do without the moon. He could get by with the stars and the lights of the prison, and sometimes even a scent on the desert breeze. It surprised him how much his nose could detect out on the dark desert. He could even smell water.
It was during these solitary excursions on the open desert that Frankie discovered a fondness within his heart for the prison, or rather, for the orchard that predated the prison. As many times as he had seen the fruit trees, it had taken hours of solitude for him to notice that this orchard reminded him of the orchard that his father had worked. Looking out across the expanse of desert, he had realized that such orchards are not as commonplace has he had previously assumed.