Noelle stood stiffly, resisting Joanna’s embrace, her look still wildly unfocused. Marla had heard too, and she seemed to realize what had happened as she came into the room.
“Let me,” she said.
Joanna pushed Noelle toward Marla, who drew her toward the bed and coaxed her to lie down. Though her manner was quiet, it seemed to me that her hands were rough.
“We need to talk again, Caroline,” my grandmother said grimly.
I followed her into her office, still deeply shaken. Joanna sat behind her desk, her anger with me turning to dejection, and I dropped into a chair feeling more than a little sick.
“I do understand what you’re suffering,” she said. “I only wish I could help you through this, but there’s no easy way. You must let your mother alone. Most of the time she’s gentle and perfectly amenable. But when she’s upset she can become—dangerous. I can’t bear to see her put into an institution—but that could happen if she ever injures someone seriously. Are you listening to me, Caroline?”
I was listening, but I was mute.
She went on. “This is why we’re all very gentle with her. Why we keep up the pretenses you don’t approve of. We try never to upset her. What’s the use? She’s out of our reach, and all you are doing is to make her regress. You lost your mother a long time ago, and the sooner you accept this, the better.”
I didn’t know whether I could ever accept. “Must I give up? Is that all I can do?”
“You’ll have to. I blame your father most of all. There was always a delicate emotional balance in Noelle, and he was already driving her over the edge before they went up to the crater. When he died, she couldn’t face the reality. We can’t ask her to now. It’s much too late.”
Something in me still resisted the hopeless course they’d chosen. But I lacked the wisdom to deal with this, and apparently so far I’d only made things worse. The memory of that party in the garden at Ahinahina, when my mother had gone wild with anger, was still with me, and must be added to what had just happened.
“Listen to me,” Joanna said. “Noelle was in a terribly emotional state those last few weeks. She was actually going to leave your father. She had told him that she would take you and come here to Manaolana, unless he was willing to change. She felt revengeful, and she told him straight out that while she’d leave him, she would never give him a divorce. She would fight him right down the line, and she would keep Linny.”
This startled me. “But she loved him—”
“You were too young to understand, yet I always wondered if you didn’t sense the emotions that were breaking around you during those last days with your parents. Your Grandmother Elizabeth didn’t help any when she came for a visit, because she always took his side, no matter what. She never liked or approved of Noelle.”
Joanna’s words brought everything frighteningly close, “I knew there were—secrets. Something I didn’t understand. So tell me now. Why was he changing toward my mother?”
“He was having an affair. Noelle found out about the woman and told him it had to stop. She could be fiercely determined under all her gentleness. And she had a temper when she got really upset. She may even have frightened him a little. But Keith never gave up anything he wanted, so they were heading toward serious trouble. I think it exploded that day in the crater.”
“The tapa beater?” I asked softly. “Who do you think used it?”
She was silent for a moment, and I wondered if she were making up some story meant to satisfy me. “Perhaps it was Keith. What if he attacked Noelle, and then the horses got out of hand, so that he was thrown and killed?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Does it matter? They both loved you. Neither one would give you up.”
“Who was the woman?” I asked bluntly.
“Ask David. If you need to have an answer. I really don’t know why you should, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I need to know because I don’t believe everything that’s said about my father. There’s more to the truth than you’re telling me.”
She answered me sadly. “What does it really matter, Caro? Your father is dead, and your mother is as you see her. The only wise thing for you to do now is give them both up. Go back to San Francisco. Maui isn’t your home any longer.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go yet.”
“I was afraid that was how you’d feel. I used to be stubborn, but perhaps age helps soften that a little. You have no idea how often I’ve lain awake at night wishing myself futilely back to a time that’s gone. The time when your mother and father were happy together, and you were such a delightful baby—a joy for all of us. Now I can only feel that you shouldn’t have returned. I acted emotionally when I let you come. I suppose I was trying to recover something that couldn’t be. You were better off before you knew what you know about your mother now.”
I could only shake my head. “There’s no place else I want to be. Maui has always pulled me back. Sooner or later I had to come.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, remember how Noelle still loves you. Perhaps she’s the lucky one, because you’re still in her life as you used to be, and she doesn’t recognize the truth about Keith.”
“That’s to say that madness is an advantage!”
“Who knows? You don’t enjoy accepting reality, do you? The reality that your mother has a terrible illness which doctors don’t know how to cure. We can keep her happy most of the time. And when she becomes upset there are tranquilizers. She’ll need them now, though we hate to resort to drugs. There are better ways to keep her calm. If you stay here for a little while longer, you must leave her alone.”
“She knows my father is dead,” I protested. “She told me so at Ahinahina this morning. She even knows that he died a long time ago. Just for a moment she was perfectly clear and sane. She was accepting his death.”
Joanna only shook her head. “The lucid moments never last.”
Marla came to the door and looked in on us. “She’s quiet now. She’ll go to sleep. David’s waiting for you, Caroline. I told him you’d be right out.”
I sat for a moment longer staring at my grandmother. She’d put her face in her hands in a gesture of resignation that was unfamiliar and dispairing. I felt numb, empty of feeling, as I followed Marla down the hall.
“Never mind, Caroline,” Marla said. “I know you didn’t mean to upset your mother. You couldn’t know that would happen.” She held something out to me. “You remember that I asked if you’d return this to the crater? I’ve wrapped the lava rock in ti leaves, so I wouldn’t have to touch it, and because that’s the proper way to make an offering to Pele. It’s for you to take it. When you leave it up there say something appropriate—the right words will come if you’ll let them.”
It was hard to return to Marla’s fantasy, but I took the rock in its wrapping of big green leaves. Holding it was still repugnant to me. This was the sort of superstition I wanted to resist.
Marla spoke earnestly. “Do you think there isn’t good and evil out there, Caroline? Perhaps you can change what your father started. This could be the way to stop all the bad luck that’s come to us.”
The young part of me that still belonged to Maui and to all those Hawaiian legends couldn’t reject her request as the older part of me wanted to.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it up there.”
She came with me to the door and waited while I crossed the lawn to David’s car in the side driveway. When I looked back she was gone. As I got into the car David saw my face.
“What’s happened?”
“More than I can handle right now.”
“All right—tell me when you feel like it. I can listen, at least. Maybe I can even understand.”
His calm presence was reassuring. I didn’t need the excitement that could sometimes rise in him. He noticed what I held in my hand. “Ti leaves? An offering to Pele?”
This at least, I could a
nswer. “Marla claims that my father offended Pele a long time ago by taking a rock from the crater. She says it must go back, and I’m the one to take it and make amends.”
He didn’t laugh, and I remembered the David of our climb to the Needle—the boy who believed in the old stories. “I know where you can leave it,” he said, accepting the idea easily.
We drove to Makawao and took the road across to the Haleakala Highway. Above us, the crater rim rose free of clouds, though they had drifted in below to hide the switchbacks from view.
I was grateful not to talk. I had to become quiet inside myself first, so that my own inner trembling could stop. It was too easy to relive the moment in Noelle’s room when my mother had hurled the wooden carving at me, no longer her gentle self, but someone frightening, unknown—and entirely out of control. There was horror here, and I dared not think about it.
At the lower levels cactus often grew beside the road, and there were trees with shaggy bark—eucalyptus, perhaps. Wild morning glory vines clung wherever they could find a hold, adding to the floral backdrop that was always Hawaii. Sometimes we bumped over cattle guards set into the pavement.
Fields of pineapple covered a section of hillside—green dots against the reddish earth, the symmetry of the fields following the contour of the land, forming a marvelously decorative pattern.
Houses were few as we climbed higher toward the summit. A sign warned: TURN ON HEADLIGHTS IN CLOUDS—so that cars coming down could see our lights. Though the white fluff was close overhead, the road was still visible.
At seven thousand feet we reached the lower Visitor’s Center. We didn’t go in, but David wanted me to see the pen of nene—the brown, speckled geese that were native to the crater and were almost extinct until recent efforts to save them were begun.
After nine thousand feet there was little growth on the mountain. Black rocks, sometimes jagged and broken, banked the road, and we’d climbed through an opening in the clouds and were on the high switchbacks, turning sharply up to each new level, always looking down upon the road below, where we’d been.
Now we could see Science City, with its observatory and experimental stations perched along the rim of the crater far above. White paint and metallic domes shone against the enormous blue of the sky.
Once a string of bike riders coasted past us, their clothes bright red and highly visible, all of them intent on the steep road down.
“Pigs and goats and the exotic plants were all brought in by early visitors, and they’ve damaged a lot of what was indigenous to Hawaii,” he told me. “Native plants and birds didn’t have the strength of the newcomers and they’ve been overpowered—some of them wiped out. The mongoose is an enemy stranger, for instance, and does a lot of damage. These rare geese are being bred up here now by the Park.”
Our goal, David said was the highest overlook point, more than ten thousand feet up. We drove on to a still higher level, and when he’d parked the car we got out into the cold wind that always blew in those high, exposed places. In the winter there would be snow and ice up here, but those months still lay ahead. David zipped up his jacket and helped me with my short coat.
We walked to where the ground plunged steeply away, and I looked for the first time into the vast crater whose floor was three thousand feet below where we stood. At first it seemed like a barren moonscape, wild and black and desolate. But as my eyes became accustomed to the shock of a sight that was like nothing I’d ever seen before, I began to make out color in red cinder cones that rose from black shadow, and towered within the crater. Minerals that had been frozen into once molten rock sparkled with touches of green and yellow and gunmetal. Volcanic sands swirled down slopes in wide avenues to the crater floor, a lighter red than the dark rust and mauve of the cinder cones.
“You could fit all of Manhattan and some of Queens into this crater space,” David said.
Two great gaps opened far across in the crater walls, and through these gaps clouds could pour in—sometimes from opposite directions, forming currents of air that warred with each other. The sun, dropping down the afternoon sky, lengthened smoky shadows in the tremendous bowl, and I began to feel tiny and unimportant, occupying as I did only a speck of time in the life of such tumultuous creation. Human awe mingled with a sense of something ancient and enormously powerful, so that my own problems seemed much less urgent. I could understand why Hawaiians regarded this as a holy place, formed by the gods as no human could ever build.
David had known this would happen to me. He had brought me here so that all that troubled me could recede for a little while in the face of something so immense and mysterious.
He drew my hand through the crook of his arm, as though humans needed to touch each other. It didn’t seem strange to me to hold on to him tightly for a moment, just as I’d done as a small child. There was no mockery or censure in him now—this was my old friend who had brought me here. But I was no longer a small child. I was older, and lonely, and my response to his touch was far stronger than I’d expected—a sudden rush of warm feeling that startled me. I wasn’t ready for this. Not yet.
I withdrew my hand from his arm and he led me to where a low-walled enclosure guarded silversword plants that had been set here to preserve and increase their number.
“The crater used to be full of silverswords,” David said. “This species grows only in lava soil on this mountain. Unfortunately, wild goats and sheep and pigs as well as trampling cattle in the past, and vandalizing visitors, have made them almost extinct, like the geese. The Park Service is trying to save them with these plantings, as well as by controlling the animals who run wild so destructively. Of course, cattle no longer graze in the crater, and no one must pick the plants.”
I had seen pictures, but never the real thing before. I looked down upon long rows of silver balls with curving saber leaves. The plants were a foot or so in diameter, with hundreds of pale gray-green leaves curving up from a central rosette.
“We’re lucky,” David said. “Look over there where three of them are blooming.”
The blooming plants were astonishing. The silverswords had shot up central stalks covered with tiny purple flowers—stalks that made them as tall as a man. When the flowers faded after this once-in-ten-years blooming, the life of the plant ended. These three were fully in bloom, starred with purple—spectacular in their last glory.
I thought of Noelle sitting in the red sands of the crater, plucking futilely at silver leaves, and I asked a question. “David, where did it happen? The accident, I mean?”
“You can’t see the place from here. It’s an hour’s ride or more into the crater by horseback. It occurred at a place where the trail runs along the shoulder of a steep cinder hill. A misstep could send horses and riders plunging, and that’s what happened. There’s been more than one accident out there. Park rangers patrol the area on horseback and on foot, but they can’t be everywhere.”
“Still—three horses falling?” I said. “All at once?”
He looked at me and then quickly away. “I flew in by helicopter one time and saw the spot where it happened. If one horse frightened another, they could all go down.”
“I’d like to believe it was only an accident. But I don’t think I do. I’ve a lot to tell you, David.”
“I’ll listen, whenever you want to talk. Let’s get out of the wind. There aren’t many visitors right now, so if we climb up to the observation room we can talk quietly.”
I stood for a moment longer looking down into the oval disk of the crater. There were a great many cinder cone hills of various sizes down there—some black, some garnet red, with valleys of shadow folding in among them. It all seemed bare and stark and desolate—yet I could see cliffs far across where patches of green showed life. That was where rain must fall, where the forests began.
I was aware of a silence so immense, so untouched, that the laughter of a child somewhere behind me had no effect on the vast stillness, any more than a single treble note st
ruck on a piano would have broken the silence. Only drums would stir those sleeping echoes, I thought, and I wanted to hear no drums on Haleakala.
David touched my arm, bringing me back, and I turned away from so disturbing a mystery, and went with him.
8
The highest building crowned a hill that was part of the crater’s rim, and we climbed steep steps, my breath coming short in rarefied air. The circular observation room, with its surrounding panes, offered far views in all directions. Other islands of the Maui County cluster floated on blue seas, with West Maui resembling the separate island it had once been. Lanai and Molokai lay beyond, and Kahoolawe, the island the Navy had used for practice bombing. Even Oahu was visible on the horizon until clouds began to billow in. In the other direction, the Big Island of Hawaii could be seen, its active volcanoes quiet for the moment.
Up here we were on the same level as Science City, which rose outside the Park limits and wasn’t open to visitors. However, it was the dormant volcano itself that held my attention with its enchanted moonscape.
“It is a place for the gods,” I said.
“There used to be heiaus down there—outdoor altars,” David told me. “The stones of one were found in a cinder-cone crater by two young girls earlier in this century. Stones that are in the Bishop Museum now. In the days of the chiefs, when people moved about on foot, the way through the crater was a shortcut to Hana and other villages on the water. One legend has it that Egyptians found their way here in ancient times, and their word for altar, heikal, is strangely like heiau.”
I turned my back on a bleak immensity that was more than I could absorb. Now that I’d gained enough distance from my own problems, I could talk about them quietly.
“I’d like to tell you,” I said.
David led me to a bench away from the few visitors who stood at the windows. As I began to talk, it all came back to me vividly—yet I could deal with it more quietly now as I described the scene in my grandmother’s office, when she had showed me the tapa beater with its ominous stain, and what Tom O’Neill had said about finding it. Then I went on to the moment when I’d come upon the carved Pele figure and had taken it to Noelle’s room.
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