Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  He looked along the ward filled with repats from prison camps.

  “Dysentery, typhus, cholera . . . You have to realize you people were closer to death than soldiers who might die instantly from a bullet. Their bodies are young and healthy until that moment of impact, whereas, for months and years, you folks were walking microbes, hosts to swarming bacteria. You need to start all over, like infants.”

  He was slow in comprehending. “You mean, I can’t enlist. I can’t join up and fight.”

  “Not this war. Not any war.”

  Keo turned his head away.

  “They tell me you’re a musician. That’s what these guys need, entertainment. USO clubs, dance halls, where men are R and R. They come in from Midway, Guadalcanal, they don’t know they’re human anymore. Give them something to assure them.”

  One day he shuffled down a corridor and walked into a burn ward. Shock registered through the skin round his testicles. His anus clenched. Sailors off incinerated ships burnt black. Young pilots without arms or faces. He sat down in a chair, touching his arms, his legs, his fingers, holding them like gifts.

  He started eating everything they brought him, like a dog knowing only the pleasure of fullness. Afterwards, he licked his plates. His gums hurt, his muscles hurt. He welcomed pain, it meant he was alive, coming back to living. He hounded nurses, asking about a little man named Oogh. He asked about repatriation ships arriving from Japan. Tides had turned; Japan was losing the war, their armies killing off whole camps of Allied prisoners. They blew up Red Cross ships at sea.

  He sat on a lnai, watching planes patrol the skies. “I lost her. She slipped right through my fingers.”

  Malia looked away, impatient. “She was never yours to lose. She was out to save the world. You never understood that.”

  He hung his head. “She found her sister in Shanghai. I couldn’t get them out. They’re probably dead.”

  “Women like Sunny don’t die. She’s somewhere else, that’s all.”

  “She loved me. She even had my child. Yes! A daughter, who’s probably dead, too.” He gazed at his sister. “Your problem, Malia, is that you’ve never loved. You only love ambition.”

  Moments passed. She hung her head, so full of things.

  “How is Sunny’s mother, Butterfly?” he asked. “Does she visit Mama?”

  “All pau. Too much bad feelings. You and Sunny running off. Each mother pointing the finger at the other. Her father is a shell. Sunny’s brother left Stanford for the army. Now, intelligence work in Okinawa.” She shook her head. “My God. This life.”

  He was almost afraid to ask. “And Jonah?”

  “Last letter, going into France. I can’t bear to think about it. All I do is pray.”

  “Mama says DeSoto’s safe.”

  “Australia. Defense work on Allied ships limping into Perth.”

  So many silences. Sometimes he wept with no sense of it, his whole face wept, his mouth, his nose. She saw him jump awake from sleep, eyes terrified. Each time she left the ward, she took something, a sock, his comb, small totems of his existence proving he was home.

  “Mama told you about the baby? Hnai from Rosie Perez.”

  He smiled, glad there was something added to their lives midst so many subtractions. “And Krash? Any word?”

  She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “In France, or Italy. They don’t let them say much.”

  HIS ENTRY INTO THE LANE WAS QUIET, UNSALUTED.

  “Slow. Slow.” Timoteo helped him from the cab.

  He moved with a peculiar grace, Malia supporting him, remembering he had always moved that way. Now it was a different grace, of a man both blessed and cursed, lifeswept and slightly fragile. His mother stood laughing and sobbing, holding a child in her arms. He limped into the house and sat, exhausted. They put the child on his lap; she burst into a salvo of chirping and saliva.

  Keo dropped his face against her hair. “She smells so clean, so ‘ono!” He hugged her, holding on.

  Yards were empty, curtains drawn. Behind the curtains, neighbors clutching rosaries, little Buddhas. An exhalation down the lane. One of their boys had made it home.

  He moved like someone who had slept for centuries in a city buried in sand. He roamed the house at odd hours, staring at clean water running from a faucet, weeping at the waste. He stared at the toilet, not knowing how to flush. He watched the eye on the back of a dollar bill. The eye watched him. He had forgotten the meaning of certain words. Deodorant. Mayonnaise.

  Someone said, “Shampoo!” He jumped. It sounded like a command.

  Cars backfired, he flew under a table. Sitting in the dim-lit bathroom during blackout made him shriek. But sitting alone in the dark, he cried. Meals were hardest. Everyone talked, so as not to stare. He studied forks and knives, confused, and ate with his fingers. He poured copious mounds of salt and sugar, together, on his food. He ate everything but meat—the sight of it took him back to an awful landscape, unspeakable things turning on spits. Sometimes, entering the kitchen, he was so swept by the surplus of food, he blacked out. Late at night Malia heard him digging in the garbage. She found half-eaten things stored beneath his bed.

  Sometimes he locked the door to his room, privacy such a novel thing. Then he threw the door wide open, terrified. Neighbors came slowly, one at a time, bringing covered dishes, holding back tears at the shock of what he looked like, what he had been reduced to.

  “So glad you home. Take time, Keo, boy—take plenny time.”

  The smell of fresh coffee took up whole mornings. The shock of toothpaste on his tongue. The scent of rain. Sounds of people laughing. The silken skin of the child nestled in his lap. Just being took up the whole day. He sat in the tiny yard, in the rich profusion of greens. The schizophrenia of flowers. He could eat a mango, he could sleep. He could do anything. Which paralyzed him. Sometimes he clutched the sleeping child, carrying her like a talisman, holding her up against his nightmares as people hold up crucifixes against vampires.

  He stood in Jonah’s room touching his football pads, his surfing gear. He studied snapshots, his big athletic body, a handsome face meant to break hearts. The smart son, destined to make the family proud. He remembered their last night together, Jonah hugging him, saying Keo was his hero.

  Then he sat on his bunk, missing older brother DeSoto, ignored in the early years, belatedly admired. The man with many layers, tier upon tier of truths difficult to reach. Each brother had always been almost superhumanly brave, indifferent to danger, not knowing how to back away. In these nights, the void of their absence was so vast, Keo went numb with terror. He thought of the odds, wondering which brother would not come home. As if, in surviving, he had sacrificed one of them.

  News came of Butchie Santiago’s son, killed in France. All day a stillness, sun turning shadows to stone. At night a wailing, like someone searching for his torn-out eyes. One night Butchie climbed the hill up past Kalihi Heights into the rain forests of the Ko‘olaus. He hanged his prize fighting-cock, then hanged himself. A little and a large corpse swinging like peculiar fruit.

  ______

  AUTUMN NOW. ONE DAY THE TAILGATE OF A TRUCK CRASHED open, spilling ripe pineapples down King Street two blocks from Kalihi Lane. With wartime rationing, pines had become so precious, locals could not afford to buy. Now, while cars spun and skidded, folks rushed out in the streets with barrels, wagons, net bags.

  “ ‘Ono loa! The best!” they cried. “Ripe to perfection.”

  Traffic slowed to a crawl as drivers squished their way through twenty thousand pounds of spoiled pines. Leilani and Timoteo bent down, grabbing and sucking smashed pieces, ravenous for their juices, then dragged their fruit-full wagon home. Turning into the lane, Leilani saw the car and sat down in gravel. She would always remember sitting there, her hand landing on a wad of gum. She would remember holding the gum in her palm like a freaky pearl, its grayness the color of hardened wax—the corpse of a candle in a shack when she was a girl. She would remember people in t
he lane coming at her, Timoteo pleading. Air, she needed air.

  The army chaplain. The things he had to say. She clutched the wad of gum, felt it softening in her palm.

  . . . A wooden shack. Mama, Papa working fields of sugarcane. Even sweating sugar. Cane pushing through rotting windows, growing in cracks and corners of her mind. . . . Into her teens, the poverty, the sugar shack. She grew into young womanhood smoke-blackened from cane fires, wondering would she ever get beyond that life. Even now in dreams, she walks forever through burnt sugar air. . . .

  Keo was sitting on the steps, the chaplain’s hand on his shoulder, the child drooling on the chaplain’s shoe. He looked out at his parents. They seemed so small, so childlike. He felt a grinding of teeth, a clenching of fists, wondering how he was going to get from where he sat to his parents. He stood slowly, took careful, intermediate steps. He had to get to them and save them.

  Leilani watched his lips move. Then almost in slow motion, she lay down in the road. Her boy was dead. Her Jonah-boy.

  Entering the lane that night, everything blacked out, Malia heard muffled sobs.

  Her father weeping in the bathroom, Keo holding him like a woman. “Jonah . . . nevah see no mo’. Not possible!”

  She slid down the wall, remembering all the nights she had prayed on her knees. Mother God had heard, but not agreed.

  Keo looked up, gray and ghostly. “Go to Mama. She just lies there.”

  She went to her mother’s room, lay down beside her, and took her in her arms. “Mama. Why Jonah? Why?”

  Leilani sighed. “ ‘Oia n. So it goes. Always de innocent.”

  “Cry, Mama. Cry. Let go.”

  “No mo’ can,” she said. “Nutting left . . .”

  “I would have died for him,” Malia whispered. “I even prayed—take me, take me. Not Jonah.”

  In the dark, her mother gripped her arms. “Nevah say such t’ing again! You my life, my baby girl, my only . . . you my mama, tita, friend.”

  Malia lay still in shock. She had never known these things. Carefully she lit a candle, placed it near the bed.

  “Mama? True?”

  “True. I pray plenny hard fo’ you, asking fo’ one baby girl dat live. You my joy. You nevah know?”

  Malia shook her head in wonder.

  “And den you give me baby, girl of my girl, make me double happy. Even if we have to say hnai.”

  Still, she had fed sixteen babies to the soil. And now the soil had claimed her youngest, Jonah.

  “When life take so much from you, bumbye you pau grieving. Somet’ing in you stop remembering how. You love what left a little mo’. Oh, my beautiful, brave Jonah . . .”

  Finally she yielded, giving in to fierce dry sobs. Malia held her tightly, rocking her like an infant, the motion soothing, womanful, and ageless. Rocking her so, she thought of what she withheld from the child, the one she hardly touched.

  In time the sobbing slowed and, calming down, Leilani whispered, “Bring baby . . . from Jonah room . . .”

  She said it so softly what Malia heard was, “. . . bring baby . . . Jonah. . . .”

  She slipped away, picking the child up from her crib, and brought her to Leilani. “Here, Mama. Baby Jonah.”

  “Yes!”

  And so, for many years, that’s what she was called.

  HO‘OLOHI I N MEA NUI

  To Go Slowly, toward Things that Matter

  CHRISTMAS PASSED QUIETLY, FEW CELEBRATIONS IN THE LANE. Storms bred in the Aleutians lashed the North Pacific into wintry furies, driving monstrous swells southward to Hawai‘i. Every day storm clouds stalked the coastlines, thundering like giants. Waves built to cathedrals thirty feet high.

  Tired of war, of being cautious, surfers used black-market gas to sneak across the Pali. Loading up their trucks with surfboards, passing Keo in his yard—“E hele mai!” Come, have fun!—neighbors took him surfing with them. Driving the road across the jagged green teeth of Nu‘uanu Pali, a dizzying escarpment of the Ko‘olau Range, they headed for the north shore’s grizzled winter beaches.

  Keo watched big, husky Hawai‘ians paddle their boards through the shallows, then sit waiting for waves like looming walls. They stood poised on their boards. The strongest surfers stayed the course, riding dramatically on each wave’s crest, gliding down its face as though they were weightless.

  Standing ashore, his face sprayed with mist, Keo felt his lungs shiver. Three months since his return. Still frail and underweight, he stood thinking how, after this war, everything would be minor in comparison. Everything but the sea. How small humans seemed, going up against its waves.

  He listened to symphonic clashes, the slow excursions into fugues as waves fell down exhausted, lounging into ballads. Then preaching, bluesy ruminations of the tide receding. In that moment something in him reached out to his broken self, that searcher looking for the perfect note, the magic combination. The young man who had once breathed music, swam it like an amphibian.

  Sometimes his fingers tapped imaginary valves. He stared at an old trumpet in his closet. He thought of playing again, but couldn’t act upon it. How could he play when she was gone? Music and Sunny so connected, so merged in his mind. When he mentioned her, or his child, Malia grew sad. Yet she wished for proof of Sunny’s death, so Keo could mourn her properly once and for all, and get on with his life.

  “We’ve all suffered,” she consoled. “Try to heal and go forward.”

  “You have to help me,” he said. “I need to learn how to talk to folks again. I still think of other humans as competition for food.”

  He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I’m not even sure I understand that Jonah’s dead. I keep thinking he’s out for a swim. With DeSoto, and Krash . . .”

  The mention of Krash’s name sucked her mouth dry.

  “Brother. Do you think it’s possible to really know another human being?”

  Keo shook his head. “I don’t think we can bear to.”

  “Then, how do you know . . . when you love someone?”

  He looked away. “Maybe, when they make us forget we’re going to die. When, for a while, we act out of goodness, not greed.”

  He sat at the old Steinway in the garage, its lid now furred with mildew, keys so warped it sounded prehistoric. Still, on quiet nights in blackout, Keo walked the keys, feeling the longing in his fingers. Feeling his lip tense in sleep, pressed against the memory of brass. Sometimes when he passed the closet where the horn stood, his whole body swerved. Folks read about his homecoming, his slow recuperation. Some remembered him as Hula Man. Fan letters came, long-playing records. Ellington, Fitzgerald, Bechet.

  Enlisted men, Negro soldiers on their way to combat on Tinian or Guam, tracked him down in Kalihi. They saw how frail he was, how haunted-looking. They were merciful, not asking questions, not really talking. Content to sit listening to records, commenting on an artist, an arrangement. He sensed these young men needed to sit there, touch his piano, stroke the keys, not so much because of music, but because he had been there. To the enemy.

  A youngster came from New Orleans, sent by Dew Baptiste, now entertaining troops at Fort Bragg. Keo took him by the shoulders, hugging him. They talked for hours, it didn’t matter what they said.

  When he left for combat, Keo told him, “Don’t be a hero. It’s not about heroes. You come back and see me.”

  One day the leader of the eight-piece band and hula dance troupe at Lau Yee Chai came to visit him. He had been a teenager in those long, lost nights of Keo’s trumpeting at Rizal’s Filipino Dance Hall. Seeing how frail he was, the man looked away, watching Timoteo rake rotting mangoes.

  “You were my hero,” he finally said. “Anytime you’re ready, you come play at Lau Yee Chai.”

  One of the best restaurants in wartime Honolulu. The best menu, best clientele. The band wore white dinner jackets.

  “Every night, entertainment in our beautiful back gardens.” He paused. “It isn’t really jazz we play. More hapa-haole tourist stu
ff. But everything real tasteful. Might help you get in shape.”

  Keo smiled. “Don’t know when I’ll have the strength to blow again.”

  The man tapped his arm, lapsing into Pidgin. “Den . . . come be numbah one on ‘ukulele!”

  He fingered the trumpet in the dark, holding it, feeling sounds waiting deep inside. They were there, he just didn’t know if he could pull them out, if he still had what it took. The lungs. The guts. He hummed a few notes, his fingers pressing valves, imagining the sound, clandestine, furtive, quickening the dead sea of heartache. He put the horn back in the closet. It recalled too many things—his world was too crowded with absences.

  One night he took a bus and stood in front of Sunny’s house. Through the window he saw her parents sitting, unmoving. They sat like that for hours. Two stuffed dolls, faces absent of expression. He spoke her name. Saw it linger in the mist and float away. He couldn’t accept that she was gone, couldn’t imagine this world not containing her. He stood lost again in reverie.

  . . . Driving French roads in an open car, Sunny singing at my side . . . Sun and shadow running over us in waves, her throat, her shoulders swimming through their tracery. We were driving through a sea of air. . . .

  With Sunny gone, he suddenly knew that in the time he had left to be alive, and know it—in the precious, loaned time he was allotted to contemplate, earn wisdom, be decent—he had to find her. Had to earn her back again.

  Very gradually, he ventured from the lane, into the streets of Kalihi, onto the main thoroughfare of King Street. Past ‘A‘ala Park where they once watched puppet shows and kinipp, baseball. Past honky-tonks, jukeboxes hurling out wartime hits. Moving through crowds of servicemen, their youth and pent-up tension made him feel ancient, as if he were approaching senility and they were wind-up toys.