The Price of One Passage to Santos

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

Fazenda Boa Vista, near Ribeirão Preto. 14 March 1931.

Haruko,

The Moraes boy tipped a cart of manure into the ditch this morning and snapped the axle clean through, so I am writing to you with tar under my nails. Forgive the smell of this paper. I fitted a new axle from a length of peroba before the midday bell, and Senhor Benedito Moraes, the boy's father, stood over me the whole time admiring Father's drawknife as if it were a sword. He says Brazilian drawknives are made of cheese. He is not wrong.

Now the important thing. The tin under the floorboard holds one conto one hundred and fifty mil-réis. Three years of it. At the emigration company office in town they say the fare from Kobe, with the calling letter, is a little under nine hundred. So you see, it is nearly done. After this harvest I will send it.

Do not let Mother set a date with Ogata's go-between. Tell her the stars are unfavourable. Tell her anything. A widower who counts rice bales for a living does not need a second wife so much as a second abacus.

Also: I have moved up the land list. When the Senhor divides the old eastern slope into plots, I am number seventeen. Seventeen, Haruko. Our own ground, with a well.

Your brother, Tsuneo

(Here is the cart I drew for you. The wheel is wrong. It always is.)

Kumamoto. 2 June 1931.

Older Brother,

The go-between came on Tuesday with a box of dried persimmons and a date. The first day of spring next year. Mother said the stars were unfavourable and the go-between said Ogata-san has already consulted the stars and paid them. Mother ate a persimmon, which in this house is a signature.

I keep your letters in the lid of the pickle crock, under the bran. Nobody opens it but me, because nobody else can stand the smell. So your tar is in good company.

You write “nearly done” the way you used to write “nearly fixed” about the well bucket. Tell me the truth about the store. The Hamada girl's cousin went to Brazil and wrote home that the store is the real master of the fazenda. Is it?

Seventeen is a good number. Draw me the well next time instead of the cart.

Haruko

Fazenda Boa Vista. 20 August 1931.

Haruko,

It rained in July. It is not supposed to rain in July. The beans were spread across the drying yard, a whole brick field of them, red and black and turning, and the sky came over the ridge like a lid. We raked them into heaps and threw the canvas on, but there is not enough canvas on this fazenda for a sky that size. Half of it soured. You could smell it from the colony houses for a week, like old wine and wet dog.

And the price. They are burning coffee in Santos now, whole warehouses of it, because nobody in the world will buy. On Monday the administrator stood on the store steps and read out the new rate for weeding a thousand trees. It is less than what we were promised. Old Yamauchi asked if the contract meant nothing and the administrator said the contract means exactly what the price of coffee means.

You asked about the store. I have written to the bookkeeper for my account in full. I have never seen it; one signs the book with a thumb and a name and carries home the rice. I will tell you what it says. I promised you the truth and I am a man who fixes buckets eventually.

Number twelve on the list now. Two families gave up and went to the city.

Tsuneo

Escritório da Fazenda Boa Vista. 3 September 1931.

To the colono Tsuneo, house 41, colony two.

In reply to your request, I set out your account with the Company store and office from your arrival in 1928 to the end of August of this year.

Advance of passage from Kobe to Santos, with rail to Ribeirão Preto, charged at one per cent monthly: 612$400. Rice, beans, dried meat, lard, salt, sugar, kerosene and soap, thirty-nine months: 1:486$900. Two hoes, one sieve, one pair of boots: 71$000. Quinine and the doctor's visit, February 1930: 58$000. Less your credited earnings from weeding and harvest over the same period, after this year's revised rate: the balance owed by you to the Company is 1:412$300.

I must also inform you that the emigration company will not issue a calling letter for a relative unless the Fazenda certifies that the sponsor stands free of debt. I cannot sign that certificate while the balance stands.

With respect,
Aurélio Vasconcelos, bookkeeper

P.S. The figures are correct. I copy them; I do not make them. The fever in February was a bad one. I remember you did not come for the quinine until the fourth day.

Fazenda Boa Vista. 11 September 1931.

Haruko,

I have the account. I will not copy it out; it is only numbers, and you never liked numbers that did not add up to something you could eat. The short of it is that I owe the store more than there is in the tin, and the fare is on top of that, and the office will not help me bring you until I owe nothing.

So the store is not the master. It is only the landlord of the master.

Benedito Moraes came to the door last night while I was oiling Father's auger bits. He has five children and he is number twenty-two on the list, which means never. He offered to buy the tools, all of them, the drawknife, the adze, the spokeshave, the bits in their cloth, and my place on the list with them. The Senhor allows a place to be sold if the bookkeeper witnesses it. He named a price. It is a good price. He must have been saving it longer than I saved mine.

I told him Father's tools are not for sale. He said, Everything is for sale this year, Japonês, even coffee, and nobody buys that either. Then he sat on my step and smoked and we talked about his wife's cousin in Campinas.

Do not agree to anything with Ogata. I am thinking.

Tsuneo

Kumamoto. 30 November 1931.

Older Brother,

You are thinking. I know what your thinking looks like. It looks like you sitting very still with a piece of wood until the wood gives up.

Listen to me. If the fare does not come by spring I will marry the abacus and be sensible and you will buy your ground. That is a fair trade. One of us should have a well.

The go-between has brought silk for the kimono. It is the colour of a cooked prawn.

Haruko

Fazenda Boa Vista. 18 January 1932.

Haruko,

Enclosed: the draft for your fare through the emigration company's agent, and the calling letter, and a certificate signed by Senhor Vasconcelos saying I owe the Fazenda nothing. Show them all at the office in Kumamoto and do not let the clerk keep the originals.

Do not argue. The coffee is worth nothing this year, so whatever I sold was worth nothing, and it has all come out even.

Things to bring: pickled plums, as many as you can carry; the padded jacket, because it is cold off the Cape even though they will tell you it is summer; needles, because the ones here bend. Do not eat the ship's curry on the first day. Do not lend money to anyone from Hiroshima who says he has an uncle in São Paulo. Everyone from Hiroshima has an uncle in São Paulo.

My hands are free for picking now, so I will earn well at the next harvest, if God keeps the rain in its proper month. I will meet you at the quay in Santos. I will be the one who looks like Father, only shorter.

Give the prawn silk back.

Tsuneo

Aboard ship, two days out of Cape Town. 9 April 1932.

Older Brother,

You were right about the jacket and wrong about the curry. It was the second day that was terrible.

I have read your last letter so many times the fold is coming apart, and I will tell you what I have noticed, since there is nothing to do here but notice. In every letter for three years you told me your number on the land list. Seventeen. Twelve. You were at nine, I think, by autumn, though you did not say it. In this letter there is no number. And you did not draw the cart. You have drawn that cart, with its wrong wheel, at the bottom of every letter since you left Kobe, and this time there is only your name.

“My hands are free.” Free of what?

A woman from Fukuoka in the next bunk says the fazendas take everything, and that a man who sends a fare in a year like this one has sold something he cannot buy back. She said it kindly. I wanted to push her over the rail.

So I am asking you plainly, the way you promised you would tell me the truth: what did you give up?

I know what you will do. You will stand on the quay in Santos with your hat in your hands, shorter than Father, and when I ask you, you will say the coffee was worth nothing, so nothing was sold. You will say it in the voice you used when the well bucket fell in and you told Mother it had always been cracked. And then you will take my bag and start walking before I can see your face.

I have kept one of Mother's persimmons for you. It has gone quite hard. You can cut it with whatever knife you have now.

Your sister, Haruko