She joined him in Loomis. They lived, those first years, in a building that was not much more than a shack in a row of similar shacks occupied by similar people—young couples and some bachelors, some even with elders or with children. When he was moved to the internment camps at Tule Lake and later Jerome in distant Arkansas, it would often come to him that his shelter in the camps was still better than it had been during the first few years of his marriage, Kimiko bearing his first child in a room six feet wide and ten long. They named the child ­Raymond, a name Hiro had seen in an American magazine. The year was 1923 then. Hiro was twenty-two years old; Kimiko had just turned twenty.

It was soon after the birth of their first child that the voice had come from the orchard rows and Kimiko had stopped her husband with her hand, with her gentle words. Hiro was just preparing to ask her what was wrong when the voice came again—“Shit, shit, shit!”—and this time Hiro heard it himself, looking for a moment to his wife and the baby she held in her arms, and then stepping from the swirling eddies of dust and into the grass between the trees: “Hello?” he called in English. “Do you require help?”

There was at first no answer from the trees and so Hiro called again and now a voice returned—“Who’s there?”—and Hiro continued forward, calling his own name in American order, his given name first and then the family name: “Hiroshi Takahashi.” It was spring and the trees should have been bursting with new buds and many were, but here and there in the branches were leaves curled and blistered in bright orange and red as if pustules filled with blood. Hiro repeated his call, “Do you require help?”

And then there he was: a young white man, about his own age, straw hat partially obscuring his face so that Hiro could not see him fully until he tilted his head back to return Hiro’s gaze. A freckled nose. Ears larger than one might expect and canted in Hiro’s direction as if he were a horse and had swiveled his ears forward to better hear the man who stood before him. “Ah hell,” he said, clearly embarrassed, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I hear from road,” Hiro said.

“Yeah, I’m just throwing a tantrum all by myself.” His hair was light brown, not quite the yellow of some of the hakujin but close. They both wore denim bib overalls, faded to a nearly identical hue.

“Tantrum?” he said now, a faint smile on his lips.

“Angry at myself for not spraying when I should’ve,” the young man said.

“Peach leaf curl,” Hiro said simply.

“Peach leaf curl,” the young man repeated. Then he looked up. “Bordeaux I guess,” he said.

“No,” Hiro said. “Lime sulfur.”