The Buddha in the Attic Read Online Free

the one-room hut back home in the village: suddenly, and without warning, just as we were drifting off into sleep. They took us by lamplight. They took us by moonlight. They took us in darkness, and we could not see a thing. They took us in six seconds and then collapsed on our shoulders with small shuddering sighs, and we thought to ourselves, That’s it? They took forever, and we knew we would be sore for weeks. They took us on our knees, while we clung to the bedpost and wept. They took us while concentrating fiercely on some mysterious spot on the wall that only they could see. They took us while murmuring “Thank you” over and over again in a familiar Tohoku dialect that immediately set us at ease. He sounded just like my father . They took us while shouting out in rough Hiroshima dialects we could barely understand and we knew we were about to spend the rest of our life with a fisherman. They took us upright, in front of the mirror, and made us stare at our reflection the whole time. “You will come to like it,” they said to us. They took us politely, by our wrists, and asked us not to scream. They took us shyly, and with great difficulty, as they tried to figure out what to do. “Excuse me,” they said. And, “Is this you?” They said, “Help me out here,” and so we did. They took us with grunts. They took us with groans. They took us with shouts and long-drawn-out moans. They took us while thinking of some other woman—we could tell by the faraway look in their eyes—and then cursed us afterward when they could find no blood on the sheets. They took us clumsily, and we did not let them touch us again for three years. They took us with more skill than we had ever been taken before and we knew we would always want them. They took us as we cried out with pleasure and then covered our mouths in shame. They took us swiftly, repeatedly, and all throughout the night, and in the morning when we woke we were theirs.

WHITES
    W e settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us. And when they would not— Do not let sundown find you in this county , their signs sometimes said—we traveled on. We wandered from one labor camp to the next in their hot dusty valleys—the Sacramento, the Imperial, the San Joaquin—and side by side with our new husbands, we worked their land. We picked their strawberries in Watsonville. We picked their grapes in Fresno and Denair. We got down on our knees and dug up their potatoes with garden forks on Bacon Island in the Delta, where the earth was spongy and soft. On the Holland Tract we sorted their green beans. And when the harvest season was over we tied our blanket rolls onto our backs and, cloth bundles in hand, we waited for the next wagon to come, and we traveled on.
    THE FIRST WORD of their language we were taught was water . Shout it out, our husbands told us, the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields. “Learn this word,” they said, “and save your life.” Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and she never woke up. “I thought she was sleeping,” said her husband. “Heatstroke,” the boss explained. Another of us was too shy to shout and knelt down and drank from an irrigation ditch instead. Seven days later she was burning up with typhoid. Other words we soon learned: “All right”—what the boss said when he was satisfied with our work—and “Go home”—what he said when we were too clumsy or slow.
    HOME WAS A COT in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eye can see . Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of