Roots of Love

For this adult son, the time has come to make contact with his distant father in a way they understand--planting the garden. Talk of the family’s past will help them face the future.

In my father’s life, there has always been a garden. When he was a child, it provided vegetables to sustain the family during hard times, but now that he is old--and his heart is weak--the garden’s role has evolved. My father’s hunger has changed.

The patch of ground draws him outside in the early morning, when sunlight barely touches the treetops. It awakens him from naps throughout the day to view its daily, and sometimes hourly, evolution.

Most important, it keeps him in partnership with the land, keenly aware of day-to-day changes in weather, attuned to the whisper of passing seasons--each year returning spring to a life that is in winter.

My father, like his father, was a farmer. To this day, I feel a sense of failure for not having what it took to follow in their path, because there is something in farming worth saving.

I lacked every sensibility required of it. I looked at the hard work and knew I couldn’t do it. I looked at the problems and knew I couldn’t solve them. I looked at the dirt and saw only dirt.

It wasn’t until I became a stepfather seven years ago, a father a year and a half ago, that I began to understand how much I didn’t see about farming and about the most important man in my life.

There’s a mysterious relationship between fathers and sons. We can love or hate deeply without even knowing the other person. My father and I never spoke of his past, and there came a time when we didn’t speak of mine either. In many ways, we have been strangers, limiting discussions, repeated like seasons, to our beloved Denver Broncos, the status of our cars and the anticipation of fishing.

On the farm, my father was the boss. He told me what to do, when to do it. Conversations centered on work, which I had little interest in, and rarely extended to areas of greater personal concern: baseball, school, music, a path of my own choosing.

Our relationship was sometimes contentious, beginning when I was in elementary school and hated like death itself to be dragged to Rudy, the hacksaw barber, to get my hair buzzed. Perhaps that is why, even now, I wear my hair long.

I know it wasn’t just me because our combativeness had a name, “the generation gap,” indicating the widespread nature of our differences. I learned to question authority, to view his perspective as having no relevance to my life, to separate myself from him not only physically but in terms of values. I knew no better.

I am 46 now, he is 82. A pacemaker keeps his heart working. He is losing his vision and much of his hearing. Little by little, abilities and friends disappear from his life.

My mother, 78, has three shoe boxes filled with memorial folders handed out at funerals for friends and relatives, which she adds to almost every week. She has a dress for cold-weather funerals and one for when it is warm.

Someday I will have boxes of my own and think about those whose names are kept there. I have wondered how I would remember my father, a man whose childhood, whose parents I knew nothing about. I wanted to hear his stories, to understand his perspectives on life and growing old.

I didn’t know how to approach him, how to cut through the reticence of our lives. I didn’t even, really, know how to talk to him.

I telephoned home late last winter. My father is hard of hearing and is not comfortable talking on the telephone, so I told my mother I wanted to write a story about his life and our relationship. I explained that while I knew about her past, I knew almost nothing about his. I asked her to ask him what he thought.

A week later, I called again.

“He said it would give him a chance to use his mind,” my mother said. “When are you coming home?”

I had been thinking about that, and I remembered how my father would walk into fields, a straw hat on his head as he knelt and dug his fingers into the ground, scratching around to see if seeds had taken root. He would grab a fistful of dirt and crumble it in his hands, measuring moisture content, richness, hope.

It occurred to me how much he was telling me without using words. So I decided I would return to Fort Collins, Colo.--home--where he remains in touch with a part of his life that has been with him forever. I went to his garden.

I told my mother I would be home in spring.

A Return to the Land of Memories

The final leg of the drive to my parents’ home is north on I-25 from Denver. The Rocky Mountains loom like earthen giants to the west, while new buildings on what once was farmland spring up to the east. On the northern horizon is a place that reminds me of childhood. We farmed in different places, but it is there, beneath the distant, pale sky, where most of my memories begin.

It is May, and those who remain there on the land must be planting now. I often think about the people I grew up with, the friend found dead at the bottom of a pond, another who went to Vietnam and was never the same. I think about those never seduced by cities, as I was, and who chose to stay in farming.

Upon my arrival, I walk through the open garage, into the house, and look out the sliding-glass door to the backyard.

I see him leaning forward, trudging back and forth over the dirt, dragging a thin board laden with rocks. I drop my bags, walk out onto the deck and he sees me.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I reply.

We do not hug or shake hands, because that is not our way. We have never been that kind of family. He drops the wire handle connected to the board, and the two of us stand, mostly silent, looking at the ground. It is just like old times.

He asks about my trip, my wife and two daughters. All fine, I say. I ask about his health, which he describes as, “Oh, pretty good, I guess.” Then I inquire about the board he is dragging. He explains that it helps break the hard clumps of dirt formed by rain.

My parents, Samuel and Amy Noriyuki, have lived in this trilevel house in this trilevel community since 1973, the year after they left farming and Dad went to work in a factory. He retired 10 years later at age 65.

My father is one of those who, I believe, inherits something ancient and absolute from the land. It seeps inside their souls and they, in exchange, give a part of themselves to the soil--buried forever like fossils and fallen leaves. It has to do with eternity, I think, and respect.

Farmers know that land, unlike bankers and weather, can be trusted. While flood, drought, hail, early snow, low prices and myriad other factors can prove disastrous, the land, lacking even water or proper fertilization, will embrace the seed and do its level best.

There is much of the land in my father. In farming, he had the instincts, the knowledge, the will and steel of a survivor. What he lacked was luck. One year flood, next year drought, then early cold that froze sugar beets still in the ground.

I remember working in the field on a tractor one summer day, watching dark clouds boiling up in the distance. You can feel and smell hail as it approaches. The winds kick up and the air turns suddenly cold, delivering the sickening, sweet smell of tattered crops.

I drove the tractor at full throttle to the yard, and my father did the same. We pulled in to a big steel shed where we stored equipment, then waited. The rain turned to hail, pounding off the shed, sounding like war. Hail stones exploded against the hard ground or ricocheted high into the air.

My father and I just watched as the ground turned white. How long would it last? How much damage would it cause? How much hope would be lost?

We didn’t speak. When the storm passed, I saw anger in my father’s face. That’s what it takes sometimes to farm: anger. Had I seen weakness, resignation, a man ready to give up, it would have been devastating.

I knew that his anger would cause him to start over and try harder. My father had two ways of addressing problems: work harder or go fishing.

“I better go take a look,” he said when the storm passed. I didn’t go with him. Instead, I went into the house, as he drove around the farm in his pickup inspecting the crops. I didn’t want to feel his silence.

His report was solemn. The crops would be set back but, in all likelihood, recover. It was too late to replant. We would just have to keep going the best we could--and work harder.

A New Approach but Less Work

Spring is fickle in Colorado, and warm days bring forth surges of anticipation, buried by lingering cold and, sometimes, snow. As we begin work on the garden, I am eager to begin work, but I sense my father is not. His movements are considered and evenly paced.

He says he has decided upon a new strategy for the garden this year. The morning after my arrival, he pulls out a roll of plastic, which we measure and cut to cover the garden space, 12 by 30 feet. It will reduce his workload by keeping weeds down and holding in moisture.

I begin asking him about his farming days, and he tells me a story about how he invented a potato harvester, planned it all out and built it out of scraps. The principles were the same utilized by current harvesters.

“I should have patented it,” he says.

We cut out holes for tomato plants, Japanese eggplants, green peppers, red peppers and cucumbers. Slits are cut for three rows of green beans, planted by seed. We shovel sheep manure into the rows.

“I like it better than cow,” he says.

The shovels we use are at least 30 years old.

“Can’t find shovels like this anymore,” he says. “They’re made of a special steel so mud doesn’t stick on them. If you could find one, it’d probably cost $40, I bet.”

We stop often to rest, to lean upon these fine shovels.

The day after the garden is planted, we sit on the deck in the shade of a wisteria, each of us with a can of black cherry soda in our hands. He speaks quietly, and I listen silently.

“I think this is the last year for the garden,” he says. “It gets to be too much. I can’t do things like I used to.”

I look out at the sheet of plastic with tiny plants sticking out of it, and later that night before going to bed I walk out and study the leaves, flickering slightly in the breeze, reflecting lights from the house. Crickets sing in the darkness beneath the stars, water sprinklers stutter in the distance. I am saddened by this final garden.

A Father Conjures Up His Father

My father’s parents died before I was born. I remember them primarily by their grave, which my parents visit each Memorial Day. This year we come two days early to avoid the crowds. My mother has brought geraniums and mums to plant.

As little as I know about my father, he knows even less about his. Matsutaro Noriyuki, it turns out, came to the United States in the early 1900s and worked on the railroads and in a Wyoming coal mine before he settled on farming. When he died in 1948 at age 68, there was coal dust in his lungs.

When I mention that I thought it was the Chinese who built the railroads, my mother snickers.

“They couldn’t tell the difference,” she says.

Like many Issei (first generation of Japanese to come to America), my grandfather had no intention of staying in America. He wanted to make money and take his family back to Japan, where they would live and he would die.

I wonder what might have happened had he returned to Japan. Would my father still be a farmer? Would he have met my mother? Who would I be? As I listen to my father talk about what little he knows about his parents, there are more questions in my mind than answers.

He says my grandmother, Tsuta Noriyuki, lived just to age 42. There is only one photograph of her with my grandfather. It is framed and placed next to my parents’ obutsudan, a small Buddhist altar, kept in the corner of the downstairs family room.

It is a telling photograph. My grandmother glances away from the camera, as if there are secrets in her eyes. My grandfather’s stern nature is evident in his rigid jaw and shoulders. On my grandmother’s lap sits a baby, my father.

I wonder if the future my grandfather found was what he had in mind.

“He was born on a small farm in Japan, I guess, but there was no future,” my father says.

They had seven children. My father, the oldest, was born in a barn, where my grandparents lived in makeshift quarters. It was a hard life made more difficult by my grandfather’s explosive temper. “Noriyuki temper,” my mother calls it.

He would whip and curse the horses used for farming before they had tractors. He would yell at his wife and children incessantly. Sometimes when he argued with my grandmother, Dad would step in to defend her and transfer ill will upon himself.

My grandfather was a hard worker, but my grandmother, it seems, worked even harder. She toiled in the fields and in the home, raising crops and children with little regard for herself. Upon her death, in the same hospital where I was born, my grandfather changed. He became more even-tempered, my father says, more religious.

Each evening, he would sit by the obutsudan, where my grandmother’s urn was placed, burn incense and recite a Buddhist chant in Japanese. The younger children, my father not among them, often would sit and listen but sometimes he would chant alone, his foreign voice flowing like the pure-smelling smoke of incense into the night.

“When he died, I was with him all the time,” my father says, “and I guess he realized how hard all the kids worked. I think he was trying to apologize a little bit for not being able to do a little better for us, so I told him everything was fine with us. I told him, ‘We’re doing OK, so don’t worry about anything.’ ”

They may have been the most important words spoken between them. It was their way of saying they loved each other, the best way they could.

My father said something similar to me in 1996, when he suffered a heart attack. My sister and I were at his bedside one day, and he said he was ready to die, that he had no regrets or fear of death, but he was worried about my mother.

“Take care of her,” he said. Later I discovered he told my brother the same thing.

As I listen to stories about my father and his father, I come to realize that storms pass both in farming and in life. For my father and his, it ended while my grandfather lay dying.

“We’re doing OK, so don’t worry about anything.”

Maybe that’s what an old man needs to know before dying--that those left behind will be OK, whether it’s his children or, in my father’s case, his wife. My sister, brother and I all assured Dad we would watch over Mom if anything happened to him.

My grandparents are buried beneath one stone, my grandmother’s urn resting on top of my grandfather’s casket. We plant the flowers and water them. My father has brought a can of the lubricant WD-40, which he sprays upon the faded stone to give it a polish. The shine quickly fades.

A Rock That’s Also a Symbol of a Man

My father plants zucchini and a couple more rows of beans to fill out the garden. A week after planting, a heavy rain falls late one afternoon. The air is cold, and hail begins to fall.

My mother, father and I immediately put on raincoats and begin placing flower pots upside-down on the young plants to protect them. The work is done quickly and silently.

We return to the house and look out the back door as the hail quickly returns to rain. There is a sense of relief, not so much for ourselves but for farmers who we know are at risk of hardship.

A couple weeks after planting the garden, it is time for me to return home. I miss my family. My plan is to return two more times during the summer to learn more about my father.

Before leaving, I walk out to the garden, pick up a rock and place it in my pocket. It’s a piece of the land, perhaps it’s a piece of my father as well. I want something to keep me close to him.

During the course of our talks, there were long moments of silence in the garden, in the car on the way to the cemetery, on the couch in front of the television. I listened to both the words and the silence.

It was sometimes difficult for him to think and to talk about farming because of bad memories, which sometimes came to him in nightmares.

There were some bad memories for me, too, but I didn’t mention them. There was something urgent I wanted to tell him, something I had felt for years at the end of each visit home. I sensed that we felt something with our eyes whenever we said goodbye, but I didn’t know what it was.

It was an unfinished, gray feeling, one I could not associate with words or tears or laughter or anything tangible.

In the end, I simply say, “Goodbye, I’ll be back in a couple months.”

“OK,” he says. “Take it easy.”

I think about that feeling on the drive home, and I think about the grandfather I never knew, about his anger and eventual faith, his faded gravestone briefly brightened with WD-40.

And I think about my father and this final garden. I wonder what my mother will do when he is gone. What will I do when he is gone?

Then, a couple weeks after returning to California, my sister-in-law, Carole Noriyuki, telephones.

She says my mom had a stroke.

“The doctor said she should be OK,” Carole says. “You don’t need to come home. We’ll let you know.”

I brace myself for another call.

*

Duane Noriyuki can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].