Caged Eagles Read Online Free Page A

know.”
    â€œDon’t ask questions. Just do as your father orders you to, stay close to your family and we will survive all of this. Understand?”
    â€œYeah … I mean, yes, sir.”
    â€œGood boy. Now go to your house and finish preparation.”
    â€œYes, sir,” I answered, and hurried away.
    I moved quickly up the path. There were far fewer people on it now than there had been earlier in the morning, when everybody in the village was out and moving things down to the boats. Now, most of what was being taken was stowed, and many people were already on board, waiting. I slowed down as my house came into view, and then stopped, looking at our home … my home.
    It was funny how I’d never really given it much thought before. It was just a place I lived with my family. My father, assisted by our neighbors, had built the house when they’d originally settled in the village twenty years ago. And then when I was born another bedroom was added, and then another when Midori was born two years later.
    It sported a brand-new coat of blue paint, sky blue. My mother loved the color of the sky. The path leading up to the front door was made up of flat stones, some of them three feet wide, that my father had hauled up from the water. Spaced at intervals on both sides of the path were shrubs, delicately shaped by my grandmother’s pruning shears. On one side of the path was a large garden, neatly furrowed, waiting for the spring planting. We’d always had a garden, vegetables in the center, ringed by two rows of beautiful flowers, but over the last month we had worked the soil so the garden would be more than double its size when we planted again.
    That was just one of my father’s projects — and the projects he’s made me do. Since he wasn’t able to fish, and there was no school for me, there was time. First we started with the boat. It was repainted, refitted, any questionable planks replaced, the nets fixed and rechecked. Then he turned his attention to the house. He repaired and repainted — even things that didn’t need to be painted. I think he would have put an addition on the house if lumber hadn’t been so scarce. That was when he decided that the garden had to be enlarged. As he explained it to me, it might even be something we needed to survive. If we weren’t allowed out of our village by summer, we’d have to survive on what we could grow, catch in the forest or harvest from the sea. That thought made putting in the garden a more meaningful task than most of the others he’d had me do. How much satisfaction is there in painting something that doesn’t need to be painted? With the garden, each row of planting might be the difference between eating and going hungry.
    Of course, it wasn’t just my father who was insisting on us doing all this work. About the most Japanese thing I could think of was working. Wasting time was something that wasn’t even considered. There was always some job that needed to be done — even when there really wasn’t.
    As I stared up at my house, the front door opened and my sisters emerged, followed by my mother and grandmother. Each had a few items in their arms. I walked up and offered to take something from them to relieve their loads.
    My mother shook her head. “Your father is waiting … inside.” They filed past me on the path. Yuri flashed me a smile and winked — or at least tried to wink — as she passed. I entered the house and closed the door behind me. I unbuttoned the top few buttons of my jacket and removed it, but left my hat on. The only fire started this morning was for cooking, and the house had already cooled down so much that I could see the faint outline of my breath.
    I was startled at the sight of my father sitting unmoving in the faint light, at the head of the low table in the dining room. I slowly walked over, trying not to make a sound, trying not