Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  It was uncanny, at such moments, how the Hawaiian men who worked for Whip would sense his mood. In twos and threes, they would appear mysteriously with ukuleles, strumming them idly in subtle island harmonies, and Whip would hear them and would cry, “Eh, you! Pupule, you come!” And the men would unostentatiously gather about him, and he would grab a ukulele and begin to chant some long-forgotten song his grandmother had taught him. He became a Hawaiian, moody, distant, hungry for the message of the night; and for hours he would sing with his men, one song after another. A field hand would grunt, “Eh, boss? You got some okolehau?” And Whip would open some whiskey, and the bottle would pass reflectively from mouth to mouth, and the old laments of Hawaii would continue. At dawn the men would inconspicuously shuffle away, one or two at a time, but the man whose ukulele Wild Whip had borrowed would linger on until at last he would have to say, “Mo bettah I go now, boss,” and the long night would end.

  After such interludes Wild Whip always turned to his pineapples. On a well-protected plateau about the size of two tennis courts, perched at the head of the Hanakai valley and about two hundred yards from the African tulip tree, he had constructed a special field and fertilized it for the propagation of pineapples, for it was Whip’s belief that ultimately the growing of this fruit on high fields and sugar on low was the destiny of Hawaii. To anyone who would listen, he was eager to explain his theories.

  “Look! The two things are natural partners. Sugar needs water, a ton of water for each pound of sugar. Pineapple doesn’t. Sugar thrives on low fields, pineapples on high. At the very point on a hillside where it’s no longer profitable to irrigate for sugar, that’s where pineapple glows best. And if you have sugar growing down here and pineapple up there, when the fruit gets ripe you drench it in sugar, can it, and sell both at a huge profit.

  “Why in hell do you suppose I came to Kauai? Because it offers an ideal combination of sugar lands and pineapple lands. Before I leave, I’ll have the secret that’ll make Hanakai the richest plantation in the world.”

  Whenever Whip looked at the land of Hawaii, with its fortunate combination of high dry fields and low wet ones, he became excited; but when he looked at his experimental pineapple beds, he became furious. For he had in his trial fields more than nineteen different kinds of pineapple, “and not one of them worth a goddamn.” He showed his visitors all that he had found so far: “That one with the savage hooks along its leaves—they’d cut you into pieces trying to harvest in a field full of them—they’re the Pernambuco and you can have every damned Pernambuco ever grown. The striped one is the Zebrina, looks good but the fruit’s foul. That interesting one in three colors is the Bracteatus, and for a time I had hopes for it, but the fruit’s too small. I have plants that look like rat tails, others that look like whips, some with teeth like sickles. The only two possibly worth bothering with are the Guatemala and the New Guinea, but they don’t prosper here.”

  “That means you have nothing really worth working on?” agriculturists asked.

  “Yep. Wouldn’t try to grow any of ’em commercially.”

  “Then you conclude that pineapples aren’t suited to Hawaii?”

  “Well … I wouldn’t admit that.”

  “You got something else in mind? Some new breed?”

  “Maybe … maybe some day we’ll find exactly the right fruit for these islands.”

  At such times Hoxworth became hard and secretive, for if he was no longer obsessed by any one woman, and if he had reached a reluctant truce with the standard patterns of love, he did entertain a positive lust for something he had once seen. In 1896 a Rio de Janeiro hotel had served him a Cayenne pineapple, and the instant he had seen that barrel-shaped, sweet and heavy fruit he had known that this was the pineapple for Hawaii. He had expected that it would be simple to go to some agriculturist and say, “I’d like five thousand Cayenne plants,” and he had tried to do so; but he quickly found that the French who controlled that part of the Guiana coast where this fortunate mutation of the pineapple family had developed were as excited about its prospects as he. No Cayenne plants were allowed outside the colony. At the seaport of Cayenne, outgoing luggage was minutely inspected, so that when Whipple Hoxworth and wife Ching-ching, from Rio, arrived in French Guiana, the government knew before they landed that he was the big planter from Hawaii and that he was going to try to steal some Cayenne plants. Consequently, with Gallic perfidy they served Whip an endless succession of perfect Cayenne pineapples, heavy, succulent and aromatic. But no Cayenne plant did he see. When he casually suggested a visit to one of the plantations, it rained. When he tried to bribe a scurrilous type to bring him some roots, the man was a government spy placed outside the hotel for that special purpose. And when in frustration he decided to go home empty-handed, the customs officials searched every cubic inch of his luggage with the smiling assurance that “we suspect attempts are being made to smuggle guns to the prisoners on Devil’s Island.” Whip smiled back and said, “I agree, you must be very careful.” So he got no pineapple plants.

  He bought substitutes and cared for them tenderly, for he realized that the Cayenne itself must have sprung from some chance cross-fertilization of two types which of themselves were nothing. Therefore, the meanest rat-tailed, scrawny plant in Whip’s experimental field received the same care as the best Guatemala; but the fruit that resulted fell so far short of a Cayenne that Whip became increasingly morbid on the subject. From Australia he imported plants that were supposed to be Cayennes, but they did not produce the smooth-skinned fruits he had known in South America. He could taste them now, and he imagined them being forced into cans cut to their size. He was haunted by this perfect pineapple, which he knew existed but which lay beyond his reach, and he became obsessed with the idea of acquiring a bundle of mother plants. For a time he considered a secret overland expedition from Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, but discussions with geographers who knew the area convinced him that the intervening jungle was impenetrable. He tried suborning French colonial officials, but the government trusted its own subordinates no more than it trusted Whipple Hoxworth and checked them constantly, so that even though he poured some twenty thousand dollars’ worth of bribes into Guiana, he got no pineapple plants in return.

  And then one day a lanky Englishman named Schilling rode up to Hanakai on a wobbly horse, dismounted and asked for a whiskey soda. “I believe I am the man you are looking for,” Schilling said in clipped accents.

  “I don’t need any more lunas,” Whip replied, “and besides, you aren’t husky enough.”

  “I have no intention of working for a living,” the lanky Englishman replied. “I have come to sell you something.”

  “I can think of nothing that I require,” Whip snapped.

  “I can think of something that you will want to pay a great deal of money for, Mr. Hoxworth.”

  “What?”

  “Two thousand prime Cayenne crowns.”

  As if his hand had frozen, Whip stopped pouring the whiskey. He made no pretense of not being interested, and his Adam’s apple moved up and down in his dry throat. He put the whiskey bottle down, turned, and looked steadily at his visitor. “Cayenne?” he asked.

  “Prime crowns.”

  “How?”

  “My father was a Dutchman before he became a British subject. He knows people in the Guianas.”

  “Are the crowns vital?”

  “They’re already growing in a hothouse in England.”

  Wildly Hoxworth grabbed the tall man’s arm. “You’re sure they’re growing?”

  “I’ve brought a photograph,” Schilling replied, and he produced a snapshot of himself standing inside a greenhouse with pineapples growing about his feet, and from the hearts of several of the plants rose incontestably the distinctive Cayenne fruit.

  “Mr. Schilling …” Whip began nervously.

  “Dr. Schilling, botanist. I’ll sell you the Cayennes, Mr. Hoxworth, but I want the job of raising them here in Hawaii.”

>   “A deal!” Wild Whip agreed. “I’ll send a special ship to pick them up. Can you keep them alive across the Atlantic and around the Horn?”

  “I’m a botanist,” Dr. Schilling replied.

  While he waited for the Englishman’s return, Wild Whip directed his feverish energy into laying out a special field to accommodate the two thousand crowns that Schilling had contracted to deliver, and as he worked he thought: “I’d like to find a man I could trust to care for these pineapples the way I’d do it.” And he remembered the stocky Japanese field hand who had been willing to fight him over the matter of galvanized iron for the hot bath. “That’s the kind of man I want,” he mused. “Someone with guts.”

  He saddled his horse and rode out to the sugar fields until he spotted Kamejiro. “Eh, you one fella!” he shouted.

  “You speak me?” the rugged little Japanese asked with a friendly grin.

  “How you like work boss-man one field?” And the compact was sealed. Now Kamejiro ran each morning from the camp to till the pineapple field, pulverizing the earth with his hands. And each night he ran back to tend his hot bath. Wild Whip, seeing him always in a hurry, thought: “That one does the work of three men,” and he raised his pay to seventy-five cents a day.

  Under Whip’s direction, Kamejiro plowed the land to a depth of two feet, and when its rich redness lay in the sunlight, Whip was pleased, for books had told him that above all else the pineapple required iron, and Kauai was practically solid iron. Every three months the field was turned again and special guano fertilizers were introduced to make it productive. Ditches were dug completely around the area to draw off unnecessary water, and a windbreak of wild plum and casuarina was planted to ward off any chance salt spray. Few brides have ever had homes arranged for them with the meticulous care that Wild Whip exercised in building this all-important seed bed. When it was done, he stood in the middle of its finely aerated soil and shouted to Kamejiro, “Bimeby all fields up there pineapple, eh?” And he pointed in all the upland directions as far as he could see, for he intended them all to be crowded with Cayenne plants, four thousand to the acre, and the money that he had so far made growing sugar would turn out to have been children’s coins for playing store.

  The first crop of Cayennes surpassed Whip’s hopes. Dr. Schilling proved himself both a botanist and a dipsomaniac, and from the front room of the Hanakai mansion, which he obviously intended never to leave, the tall Englishman directed the successful propagation of the plants that were to revolutionize the Hawaiian economy. Of the first two thousand Cayennes which had been abducted from the fields of French Guiana, nearly nineteen hundred grew to luscious maturity, and these first pineapples were an astonishment to the citizens of Hawaii. Whip, as was his custom, gave the fruit away and told everyone, “Start tilling your upland fields now. Gold is about to drip out of them in a fragrant flow.”

  A pineapple plant produces slowly, only one fruit at the end of two years—technically it is a sorosis or bundle of fruits, each of the composite squares being the result of a separate flower—but when the fruit has matured, the plant offers four separate ways of propagating new plants: the crown of the pineapple fruit can be carefully torn off and planted; slips that have started growing from the base of the fruit can be lifted off and planted; suckers that have begun to spring out from the base of the plant can be used in the same way; or the stump itself can be cut up into chunks and planted like potatoes. From each surviving plant Dr. Schilling was thus able to recover one crown, three or four slips, two or three suckers, and two or three stump sections. By 1910 the pineapple industry was established in Hawaii.

  But in 1911 it was overtaken by disaster, for the fields which Wild Whip had so carefully prepared stopped nourishing the plants, and they began to turn a sickly yellow. In panic Whip commanded Dr. Schilling to sober up and find out what was happening, but the drunken Englishman could not focus on the problem, so Whip stormed through the mansion which he now shared with Schilling and smashed all bottles containing alcohol. Then Dr. Schilling pulled himself together and spent some time in the fields. “I must make some experiments,” he reported, and a corner of the mansion was given over to test tubes and beakers, but all Schilling was doing was using fresh pineapples for the distillation of a super-fine grade of alcohol which he liked better than whiskey, and he was soon incommunicado.

  Wild Whip solved this impasse by beating the Englishman into insensibility, then throwing him into a cold bath. Apparently others had treated Schilling in this manner, for he took no great offense, shivering in the tub and whimpering like a child. “By God,” Hoxworth shouted, “you brought these plants here and you’ll find out what’s wrong with them.”

  He dressed the gawky scientist, put his shoes on, and personally led the shaky man into the fields. “What’s wrong with those plants?” he stormed.

  “Look, Brother Hoxworth! You can’t stand there and command me to find out what’s happened. The human mind doesn’t work that way.”

  “Yours will!” Hoxworth roared.

  “Suppose I start to walk down that path and down that road and never look at these plants again. Then what?”

  “Then by the time you get to the road, Dr. Schilling, you can’t walk. Because both your legs are broken.”

  “I believe you would,” the shaken Englishman said.

  “You bet I would,” Whip growled. “Now get to work.” He stood back, stared in shock, and yelled, “Now what in hell are you doing?”

  “I’m tasting the soil,” Dr. Schilling replied.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Whip snorted and left.

  I took Dr. Schilling four weeks to make up his mind about the pineapple plants, and when he reported to his employer it was obvious that he himself scarcely believed his own conclusions. “This is extraordinary, Brother Hoxworth, and you won’t believe it, but those plants are starved for iron.”

  “Ridiculous!” Hoxworth stormed. He was sick and tired of this infuriating Englishman and was at last ready to throw him off the plantation.

  “No,” Dr. Schilling replied soberly. “I’m convinced that they are about to die for lack of iron.”

  “That’s preposterous!” Hoxworth stormed. “This goddamned island is practically solid iron. Look at the soil, man!”

  “It’s iron, that’s true,” Schilling agreed. “But I’m afraid it must be iron in some form that the plants cannot use.”

  “How can they stand in solid iron and not be able to use it?”

  “That,” Schilling said, “is why the universe will always be a mystery.”

  “Are you fooling with me?” Hoxworth asked ominously.

  “Who would dare?” Schilling replied.

  “What do you want us to do?” Hoxworth asked quietly.

  “I want to sprinkle iron, in a different kind of solution, over these plants.”

  “No! It’s totally preposterous. You get back out there and find out what’s really wrong.”

  “It’s iron,” Schilling said stubbornly.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can taste it.”

  “Have you run any tests on it?”

  “No. I don’t have to.”

  “Well, run some tests. No! Don’t! You’d just distill yourself some more alcohol. What kind of iron do you want?”

  “Iron sulfate.”

  As a result of this decision, in late 1911 Kamejiro Sakagawa marched through the experimental fields of the Hanakai Pineapple Plantation lugging a bucket of spray, which he directed onto the yellow leaves of the perishing plants, and as he passed, the solution of sulfate of iron ran down the narrow leaves and penetrated to the red soil about the roots. As if by magic the sickly plants began to revive, and within four days the yellow leaves were returning to their natural color. The Cayennes were saved, and when it was proved, as Dr. Schilling suspected, that they had been standing in iron yet starving for iron, Wild Whip joyously gathered up an armful of ripe fruit and tossed it onto the mansion floor.
r />   “Brew yourself some alcohol and stay drunk as long as you like,” he commanded.

  Sometimes Kamejiro, running to work and running back to tend his hot bath, would not see the tall Englishman for weeks at a time, and then as he cut the lawn he would find Schilling in a basket chair by the side of the cliff, staring down at the play of surf as it struck the opposite rocks.

  Schilling was a surprising man, a drunken, besotted individual who could think. One day when he was driving into Kapaa with Whip in one of the first cars on Kauai, he spotted a junk yard and said, “You ought to buy that, Brother Hoxworth.”