Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/178

168 It was the year 1930. In January all agricultural work was at a standstill in the snow-covered home­ steads of Simati. But work on “the stones” went apace. The committee members went to Yotani through snow and storm to see how the work was getting on.

This time the keystone of the whole monument was hidden in old Ogawa’s house. Uncle Kurose, who was fifty-nine that year, engraved an inscription on the stone with a tool obtained somewhere or other. In the middle of January the leaders of the union, seeing that preparations were over, secretly carried three bags of cement, purchased with a little money scraped together with utmost difficulty, to Ozawa’s house.

Their efforts were childlike. They burned with their whole souls for the common cause, but their activities were nothing but the continuation of those begun by their imprisoned leaders.

Sixteenth of January. The snow was accompanied by a sharp wind, but all the men and women of Simati had been up since long before dawn. They wore their winter slippers of straw, and straw hats on their heads. Walking separately, each carried on his back the precious stones with their carved signs, wrapped in mats. The boys went in front with waving banners. They were followed by over a hundred peasants, bearing stones on their backs. Some of the front ones sang the childish peasant song, but the women and