Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “Don’t ever, ever, tell anybody!” she said, and kissed him quickly, full on the lips.

  Then she turned, and her long white dress spun out like a ginger blossom. She ran down the street, her patent leather shoes scuffing with a chu-chu-chu sound, while he felt ashamed of not knowing who this Stevenson guy was.

  And what was all that about Kamehameha’s bones? It had just popped out of his mouth. Weird things happened when that girl was around.

  He did dream about bones sometimes: yellow and pitted. Scary. Giving off the awful energy of death. He feared those dreams most of all. Sometimes he felt that dark power struggling to come into his world, to leak through the bright buildings of modern-day Honolulu and sweep him into everlasting night.

  Anyway, Kamehameha had died over two hundred years ago. He was the first king to unite the Hawaiian Islands. Nobody knew where his bones were. They were hidden by kahunas - priests - as soon as he died. But she was right: bones were sacred to Hawaiians. They had much mana, much power. If your enemies got hold of them, your bones became fishhooks. It was the ultimate insult.

  He didn’t know why he dreamed about them. He figured he’d seen them on TV when he was little, or something, and they made a big impression. He could even hear them, in his dreams. Smooth, dark, long-fingered hands rolled them into an old piece of tapa cloth. They made dry, distant sounds as they clanked together and went back into darkness. The genealogy chant that his mother had taught him came back to Cen whole one night, after he woke from a nightmare, in a rush of bright, linked words. In the torrent of names, he found hers: Ka’iulani. The last Princess of Hawaii. Her real name was Victoria Kawekiu Lunalilo Kalaninuiahilapalapapa Ka’iulani. Her claim to the throne was through her mother, Princess Likelike.

  The next night he went to the library. He couldn’t hang around there during the day. Somebody might figure out that he wasn’t in school.

  The library, with its open courtyard, reminded him so much of his mother that he almost left. Fuck you! he thought at the people he thought were staring at him as he rubbed tears from his face.

  A brief shower cooled the courtyard, pattering on the enormous palms a few feet from the table he’d chosen, as he hesitated before opening the faded pictorial of old Hawaii.

  In the index, he found her name. Trembling, he turned dry pages until he came to the right one.

  It was eerie how much the same she looked.

  The old black and white photograph showed her standing on the lawn of a mansion. Ainahau, the mansion, was built by her father, Archibald Cleghorn, at Waikiki. Everyone ridiculed him for building so far from town, in the middle of a swamp. The tops of a few palm trees were visible behind the house, and the front yard was deeply shaded by a massive banyan and lots of mimosas. That would be just about right; she reminded him of those odd pink flowers, fans of soft, bright pink spines which floated to earth when the trade winds blew and filled the air with sweetness.

  Two peacocks strutted in front of her, and she was bending toward one, laughing, her long black hair loose around her face as she directly faced the camera. Robert Louis Stevenson, King David Kalakaua, and Princess Ka’iulani, the caption read.

  He got the feeling that, in the picture, it was almost time for tea.

  He leafed through the book. He found one other picture of Princess Ka’iulani. She was a child, standing next to her Aunt, Queen Lilioukakalani, on the steps of lolani Palace. She was watching the coronation of her uncle. King David Kalakaua, and his wife. Queen Kapiolani. It was 1882. Her face, even at seven, was grave and certain.

  That was all. But it was her. Beyond a doubt.

  How?

  She was a ghost. He’d more than half suspected it already, but, nevertheless, he shivered. She was a ghost - he could touch her, but still, somehow, she was a ghost. She had died more than a hundred years ago.

  He shivered again.

  During the next few weeks, he studied Ka’iulani, burning for information. When he slept, he dreamed of her: always in a white dress, walking the footpaths of old Hawaii, spinning him deeper and deeper into the ancient ways of his people. Waking, he realized that he knew more about his people than she did; from birth she had been protected, Europeanized, as befitted a future monarch. Even her name, Ka’iulani, meant “the royal sacred one.”

  He found letters in which she wrote to her Papa about her European studies; he read the books she mentioned and began to wish he wasn’t tied to just books. There were touchscreens and virtuals which could only be accessed by a library key. He hadn’t applied for one; he was illegal.

  He studied Hawaiian ghosts, too. Ka’iulani had never put in an appearance as one in the legends, but after all, she had died after the time of Old Hawaii, when they were so prevalent in the lives of the people. Perhaps, he reasoned, she was a new one. They seemed to have plenty of powers. Traveling through time was only one of them. They gave advice, and warnings. They could envelop people in dreams, and thus influence them. They could transport anyone they pleased from place to place as easily as the police moved their “missing” holos around. Pele the volcano goddess was the most famous, but there were hundreds.

  And, most importantly to him, they seemed to be strongly associated with place. As if they were manifested by the land, encountered by people who happened to walk the same path, perhaps fifty years after the last spotting, and the ghost would still be there, ageless.

  Stevenson had written a poem for her. When she was thirteen, she was sent to Europe to become educated as befitted a future queen of a kingdom, and this was his going-away present:

  Forth from her land to mine she goes,

  The island maid, the island rose.

  Light of heart and bright of face.

  The daughter of a double race.

  Her islands here in southern sun

  Shall mourn their Ka’iulani gone.

  And I, in her dear banyan’s shade.

  Look vainly for my little maid.

  But our Scots islands far away

  Shall glitter with unwonted day.

  And cast for once their tempest by

  To smile in Ka’iulani’s eye.

  Pretty hokey stuff, as far as Cen was concerned. He could probably do better himself.

  ***

  “Why don’t you want me to tell anyone where Kamehameha’s bones are?” Cen asked Ka’iulani. They were sitting in a grove of mango trees just back from the beach at Ala Moana. She had brought it up again, and he decided to play along.

  Ka’iulani laughed, picked up a ripe mango, and threw it at him. It splattered against his arm, its overripe tang exploding in his nose. She giggled, whirled and ran, hoisting her long white dress.

  Cen was surprised at how fast she could dart across the broad green lawn, which was splotched by the midday shadows of coconut palms. Still, he got close enough in a minute to catch hold of her sash. It ripped from her dress, and she turned, eyes blazing.

  “You don’t do that to a princess!” she said, and slapped him.

  His cheek stung. Angry, he said, “Just tell me about the bones, then. Princess Victoria Ka’iulani.” He had never said her name before, not since the day she’d told him, and his voice shook now.

  She stared at him. “You know.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Sit,” she said.

  They sat together and watched surf breaking out on the reef, and the brilliant green shallows inside it.

  “My governess’ father died looking for the bones,” she said. “He went out on a horse and the horse slipped off the mountain and he died. It’s kapu. Very bad luck.” She laughed. “I was cursed, by the power of the bones, the old man said.” She laughed again, her voice light and unconcerned. “Silly superstition!” He had to smile at the idea of a ghost denouncing superstition.

  She was quiet for a moment and then said, “But still, I need to see them. Me, and no one else.”

  “Why?” he asked, in a whisper.

  She stood up and turned
to look out at the ocean. A narrow strip of it was visible through the trees, with its distant edge of white. Green until it turned deep blue, suddenly, at the reef line.

  “Because I am to rule this land,” she said.

  If anyone else had uttered these words so seriously, he would have laughed in derision. But she brought dignity to everything she said. It was easy, very easy, to believe her. He felt his whole mind and being spin, then expand, into her reality, her life. So much more bright than his own. The red and black heaviness always pressing upon him dropped as he listened to her and watched her beautiful, earnest face. He realized that he had to help her in any way he possibly could. Nothing was more important than her dream of justice for Hawaiians. All around he saw his disenfranchised brothers and sisters, many of them filled with deep, debilitating anger at the descendants of those who had taken their land and their country. Still unwilling to adapt, after all these years, to a life they saw as less holy and less pure than what had been stolen from them.

  She stared out at the waves breaking on the reef “They’re talking about sending me to Europe for my education,” she said, and with those words desolation filled him. What would that mean for him? He had been seeing her for several months now. Not many times. But each time, he was drawn further into her life, her being, her loveliness, and her certainty. Everything about her was the opposite of himself. He lived to see her. He didn’t dare press her about anything. He had stopped caring why he could see her, how she could be here. It only mattered that he could.

  And now she was leaving.

  Why was he surprised? That was what had really happened, according to the books he had read. In 1888, she took a boat to San Francisco, crossed the country to New York, then sailed to England.

  “I don’t really want to go so far away,” she said, “but it’s for the good of my people that I continue my education. Yet, to help my people, I need to know everything about them. Their beliefs. “My own life is very civilized. I sit in the great room in the evenings, listening to queens and kings from my own and other countries speak. The windows are always open and the breeze blows in from off the sea and rattles the banana trees. All the foreign ambassadors are friends with my father. They come and drink gin and play cards. I’m very quiet so that they don’t chase me away. It seems that everyone wants Hawaii - the British, the Americans, even the Japanese. But we need it for ourselves. After all, it is ours.”

  She turned to look at Cen. “You are alii, like me. If you know where the bones are, you must show me. It’s not only the things in Europe I need to learn. My old nurse said that the bones give life to the land. Perhaps if I saw them, I would understand my land better.”

  Cen felt very cold. “I haven’t seen any bones,” he said. Why had he ever said such a ridiculous thing?

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, looking straight at him. “I don’t believe that you would lie to me.”

  You don’t know much about me then, he thought. “If you’re really a ghost,” he said, “why can I see you? Why can I touch you?”

  She reached over and brushed his arm with two fingers. “Because you are special. Maybe that’s the reason I can see you.”

  What is it like to be dead? He wanted to ask, but was afraid.

  His study of her became frenzied. The librarians got to know him, and he learned to ignore their smiles as he requested more and more archival information about Ka’iulani.

  The worst part was that she had died so young. It struck him to the heart to turn to the last few pages of her biography, which he had by now done many times. While she was in Europe attending expensive schools, all sorts of political shenanigans went on. Hawaii was up for grabs, too small to defend herself against greedy haole business interests. Almost all the land was finagled from the Hawaiians.

  Ka’iulani finally went to Washington herself, when she was eighteen, and met with Grover Cleveland and his wife in a last-ditch effort to keep Hawaii from being annexed by the United States. A “Provisional Government” composed of rich American businessman had ousted Ka’iulani’s aunt, Queen Liliuokalani, but as long as Cleveland was President, Hawaii remained a kingdom. In January 1895, there was a small rebel uprising which was quashed by American troops.

  And once Cleveland was out of the White House, the Annexationists had their way. On August 12, 1898, Hawaii ceased to be a sovereign country.

  In January 1899, Ka’iulani, while staying at the Parker Ranch on the Big Island, went for a horseback ride with friends. Instead of putting on her raincoat during a sudden, cold storm, she said, “What have I got to live for?” She loosed her hair and galloped off into the tempest. She caught a cold, which worsened, and within weeks was dead. She was twenty-three years old. There was talk of a kahuna’s curse.

  Her last years were filled with proud heartbreak; the desolation of knowing that she was not to fulfill her purpose in life. No wonder she walked the earth rather than resting in it.

  Cen felt weak when he closed the book. Ka’iulani was so young and beautiful, so full of life and hope. How could this terrible thing, this untimely death, have happened? It had been foretold, as the birth of Kamehameha had been foretold: the kahunas had decided before he was born that he would be the one to unite the islands.

  Hawaiians seemed to have a fascination with death. Apparently, at the time, people thought that Ka’iulani had been prayed to death, like her mother before her. Her mother had been only thirty-six when she died, after mysteriously taking to her bed. She had not only foreseen her own death, but had predicted all the major events in Ka’iulani’s life: that she would live most of it far away, that she would never marry, and that she would never be queen. What was this terrible Hawaiian power of vision?

  He walked out of the library and into the night, knees shaking. You fool, he told himself, she’s a ghost, and there’s no such thing as ghosts. He walked through narrow streets to his small room, and lay there watching the curtains puff in and out in the night trades, staving off sleep until he was exhausted enough that nightmares could not surface. He was afraid of dreaming Ka’iulani’s death.

  Still, day after day, he was bursting to tell her how much he knew, the poems he’d memorized, like “I Want To Go Down To The Sea Again. “When he stacked fish on the ice in Lu-Wei’s stand in the Chinese Market, he went over a new poem every few days. When he ran the guts out of a mahi with his thumb, while he wrapped it in paper, took the money, and said Thank you ma’am to Miss Jenny Wang with her cute, narrow eyes, he was thinking. And the stars to steer her by. Even gutting fish while they were still alive - which his customers, serious eaters of fish, preferred - didn’t seem to bother him so much anymore.

  She was learning Shakespeare, so he tried Richard III, reading slowly, pretending he was speaking out loud to get the sense of it, with a dictionary next to him, and wondered how she stood it. Nasty stuff, nasty man.

  Finally, he got tired of waiting. One afternoon he hopped on the bus on King Street and went downtown. Past Ala Moana Park, with the peninsula made of garbage, a good place to stalk careless people who hid their wallets under their towels, and then swam out to the reef. Past Ala Moana shopping center, a great place to pick pockets. Past the Ala Wai yacht club - nothing but hard work there, skinny captains wanting you to rub their teak decks with 000 steel wool for a couple of weeks while they drank expensive whisky at the club.

  The sky was bright blue, as usual, full of fluffy white clouds snagged by the peaks of the steep green mountains just inland. He smelled smog and exhaust, and, when he got off the bus across from the beach, coconut oil.

  The Princess Ka’iulani Hotel was in the middle of Waikiki. Cen stood on the site of her childhood home, ʻĀinahau, which her father had tried to turn into a park after her death, but was thwarted by his wife’s heirs. While horns blared and tourists jostled him, he yearned for the things he had seen in the books: a green, still lawn, a botanical paradise, peacocks, and Chinese ginger blossoms. Victoria Kawekiu Lunalilo Kalaninui
ahilapalapapa Ka’iulani. The girl in the long white dress who now lived in his dreams. This was her sacred ground, filled with her life, her thought, her being.

  He stepped forward, intending to enter the lobby.

  But instead, it was suddenly all new and clear and bright. He saw people around him, clearly Hawaiians, standing proudly, speaking with conviction, though he couldn’t quite catch the words. Two men in old-fashioned suits stood to his right, on the lawn, with glasses in their hands.

  Then Ka’iulani ran up to him. “I’m so happy you came! This is my last day here.’’

  “Why?” He felt a rush of panic.

  “I’m going to England, to go to school! I’m sailing to San Francisco on the Umatillo.”

  He knew. Once in England, she would live in Northamptonshire, in a place called Harrowden Hall.

  “Oh, I’m so excited!” She whirled around, hugging herself “There’s so much to learn! So much to know!”

  What did he know? Stinking fish and a few poems.

  “You’re a ghost,” he whispered, but she didn’t seem to hear. He looked up, and the sun blazed in the clear sky.

  It was very quiet. Only the sound of surf, and the cries of peacocks now and then. The skyscrapers shimmered, as if trying to come back into existence, then vanished. A swamp of taro lay between him and the sea, and to his right were a few blocks of frame houses.

  Yet, he was not afraid. Though His chest tightened, and he gasped a few times, it was because he felt close to tears of happiness, and of pain. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  A haole waiter walked up to them. He was dressed in a white jacket, wore white gloves, and held a round tray above his head.

  “Drink, sir?”

  “The ginger beer is good,” said Ka’iulani, and again he saw that glimmer of mischief in her eyes.

  “I’ll try one of those,” he said. “Thank you,” some long-lost part of himself thought to add. He and Ka’iulani sipped ginger beer. “This is really special,” she said. “The old people have a word for it.”

  “For what?” They sat on wrought iron chairs. Her breasts were very apparent now, beneath her white, high-collared dress, and she wore a straw hat with a broad brim and a sash tied in a large bow beneath her left ear.