Hiroshima Day – August 5, 1945

Posted on August 5, 2003 in Book of Days Prose Arcana War

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a summer night.

Around these parts, 1945. A conjecture.

It was evening in California when it happened in Japan. The night of August 5. The hands stripped down to their drawers. Each climbed into his bunk in the “shack”. They were misfits to a man. Fellows too old to be drafted, some young enough but denied the privilege of fighting for their country because of flat feet or a squint. Maybe a couple of dropouts who were underaged and pulling this job until they were old enough to join up. The women in the big white house worked the ranges these days, too. Carla the Cowgirl did her part alongside Rosie the Riveter, riding the ranges, rounding up the soon to be beef for the soldiers fighting the war in the South Pacific.

A place called Okinawa filled the newspapers. Horrible stories about Japanese women and their children who were so afraid of the American fighting men’s penises that they threw themselves off cliffs rather than be captured by the advancing army. Our troops tried to dissuade them, screaming at them in bad Japanese that they had nothing to fear. But the ladies grabbed their children and jumped anyways, their fluttering kimonos preserving their last bits of dignity until the end came on the rocks.

Talk in the ranch house that evening wasn’t about Okinawa, though. Here men came to get away from the newspapers. The big black arrows pointing at Japan got to be too much for some. Some couldn’t get enough, even here, but the agreement at the dinner table was to talk only about how the day had gone, how many cattle had gone missing and how many had been found out there among the prickly pear and the greasewood, the low forest that the cattle chewed down when the grasses got too thin.

The denim-jacketed cowpokes who broke biscuits and sopped up the gravy around the dinner table were aliens on the land, just like the wild oats and foxtails they’d seeded the meadows with. Less than a hundred years after the American invasion, all memory of the First People who’d lived here was gone. This generation thought it sprouted from the soil, the latest in a long line. A few of them knew better: the drifters who came here from elsewhere knew the land was new country. But they said nothing. They went along with the assumptions as they read a few magazines, played checkers, and got about the business of being ready for rising at dawn.

It was probably hot that night. The sandstone knife ridges soaked up a lot of heat during the day and at night, they shed it. The men sneaked out behind the bunkhouse, where the women couldn’t see them in their drawers, and spent the nights under the stars. Perhaps a few lucky ones got to stay in the high country, up at Joplin camp, under the stars and next to the creaking, anxious widowmaker Coulter Pines. They had nothing to fear: none of them were married and all of them expected to die bachelors.

This was how they risked their lives for America during the War.

June bugs, katydids, sphinx moths, mosquitos, and little brown bats soared through the night, all night. The cowhands slept until 5 am when the gong woke them. They dressed and readied themselves for working the range, chasing cattle, fixing fences, doing whatever needed to be done. They called the best hands “square”, meaning that they could do any job quickly and efficiently — do it right.

The dust gathered in their lungs and the tar from the cigarettes they stopped to smoke glued that down. At day’s end, they rode back down to the big white house and heard the news, repeated over and over again, that the United States had dropped a new kind of bomb on Japan. They did not know just how terrible it was. No one talked about the black rain or the way the fire from the flash liquified and erased faces off the faces of pretty Japanese girls. They wouldn’t see many of the pictures until years later — if they lived long enough. All they heard from President Truman was that he did it to save our boys. No one told them about how Japan was looking to end the war, how Stalin refused to relay the message to the Americans because he wanted a few islands in the north of Japan back. Even the President didn’t know that. How could he have known? Stalin kept it silent.

There was likewise no talk about giving the Japanese a demonstration, first, of what the bomb could do. Question the President? Never. He was there because he knew what was right for the country. No, on this second night of the new, dangerous world, they rubbed their shoulders and stretched their legs. Maybe they broke the rule about talking about the war, just for tonight. Maybe they talked about what all this had to mean and whether there was another bomb waiting. They’d wait three more days until they knew. And none of them had heard of either of these towns, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. All they knew was that they were filled with Japs and killing Japs was the reason they pushed the beef on the hoof around — to feed our boys. Was the war over? Would we invade? What would happen next?

The sun bent backwards into the Pacific as a couple of the hands rode up the sandstone dome at the mouth of Aliso Creek. They pointed out the landmarks: the big corrugated steel railroad siding at the Irvine Ranch. The Laguna Hills. There was Catalina and way out there beyond it, Japan. You couldn’t see Japan, but they knew now — after four long years — that you could get there. You just had to keep riding the waves to arrive. Time, steel ships, and a few airplanes were what it took.

The hands squirmed in their saddles and wondered: What would you find when you got there?

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Other Hiroshima Day bloggings:

• Spinoffs from the A-Bomb at A Clever Sheep
  
• Detaching from Hiroshima at Frog N’ Blog

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• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: “I was listening to something I heard before.”