Sometimes Duke swept his hand hopelessly over bookshelves; there would not be time to read them all to her. He held precious records to his chest, so many concertos to play! With a sense of urgency, night after night, he tried to impart all he knew or suspected of the world, and in this way Pono became knowledgeable about many things. Years later people assumed she had traveled round the world, and knew all there was to know.
Now, when he wasn’t beside her, when he was in the fields overseeing the planting, or harvesting, of trees, she felt in danger of disappearing. At such times, she felt her skin grow rough, her bones grow thirsty, tasted saltwater on her lips, and wanted blood.
He would come upon her, see her skin marbling into gray, and coax her back to human form. “Beloved, don’t desert me. One day when I’m gone, you will own the land.”
“Don’t speak of it!” she screamed. “If ma‘i Pākē comes, it will take both of us. It must.”
Sometimes he watched her turn her head toward the ocean, sniffing like a dog at salt air blown in on the trades. “Do you miss your world of manō?”
“Without you,” she answered softly, “it is the only way I could exist.” But seeing how it distressed him, Pono vowed, “As long as you live, I reject that world. My jaw will not deform into a snout.”
Not dreaming there would be years she longed for it. Nights when she stood miles from sea, yet her mouth filled with saltwater, her gills opened, she became all cartilage and appetite.
Sometimes they forgot the frailness of the veil with which they camouflaged their life, their refusal to acknowledge what was coming. New clothes arrived from Hong Kong, leather-bound volumes from London. Cantonese tailors arrived at the house. And barbers. Duke wouldn’t go to town for haircuts, afraid evil kāhuna would use his hair-cuttings to work a curse on him, drive him from the island so his family sickness wouldn’t spread.
Some days they drove down the South Kona Coast past ancient sacred sites, altars, and temples. “Each night ancestors walk this land. Can you feel it?” he asked. “The island has much mana because it is the birthplace of Kamehameha I. And because Pele lives here. That’s why, I believe, you were called.”
They gazed down at the huge caldera of volcanic Kīlauea Crater, a gray skillet of lava three miles wide. Raw, empty and burnt, yet simmering, never at rest. Distant steam plumes rose from vents, constant reminders of the magma bubbling below the earth, looking for its next outlet. The air itself had uncanny weight, Pono could feel it push against her chest.
“The hand of Pele,” Duke said.
Pele, fiery Volcano Goddess. Her home was Halemaumau, fire pit of Kilauea’s main crater. She sometimes appeared to locals in human form as a wrinkled crone, or a beautiful young girl.
“When I found you on the beach,” Duke said, “I thought you were Pele. At first I was afraid.”
Pele was quiet now, but the earth itself seemed to generate an electromagnetic field that made Pono’s lungs shiver. She could feel something like breath, a coating on her skin. Crossing the bleak moonscape of Ka‘u Desert adjacent to Kīlauea, they saw nothing but rivers of hard black lava stretching to the sea. Strong taint of sulfur in the air, and wisps of steam rising from cracked earth, a reminder that the volcanoes were alive, that Pele was seething, gathering subterranean forces. Here and there, frozen in hard layers of ash, were ghostly footprints, and across the land were eerie stumps of lava-covered trees.
“Put your ear to the earth,” Duke whispered.
At first there was nothing, then through the lava’ed earth, through ‘a‘ā and pāhoehoe, she heard thunder, lightning, repeated roars, terrible moaning and screams. She sat back, frightened, as Duke explained.
“During a battle when Kamehameha I was struggling for supremacy of this island, his enemies tried to overtake him here. Pele favored Kamehameha. Causing craters to erupt, she poured molten lava down on his enemies, thousands of them.” He pointed to the eerie stumps across Ka‘u Desert. “Instantly petrified, noses joined in the act of farewell.”
One night Pono tossed and turned. The oppressive scent of flowers weighed on her, Arabian jasmine, tuberoses, frangipani. She sat up slowly, something pushing its face through the scent of the flowers, coming at her in sharp flashes. The house seemed lighter, as if freed of the weight of humans. In the morning Duke discovered two of the servants had deserted, and the gardener. They had seen the redness in his eyes, seen her tending a small lesion on his arm.
In the next two weeks, Pele shot flames like dragons from Kīlauea Crater. Across the island mongoose ran squealing from fields, clotting roads like rats in plague-time. But something else, more frightening than the roaring, belching earth, unsettled field-workers. They had seen the swelling in Duke’s neck, seen him rub his arm repeatedly. He held a lit match to his skin, and did not flinch. More of his workers deserted. Then the household staff, the cook. Slowly, fright rinsed faces from the coffee leaves. Untended shutters banged on the lānai. One by one, Duke closed the doors, condensing their life to three rooms. Then, two. Pono cooked for him, serving dishes in slow cortege, her face feverish, flushed, as if put together by slaps.
A lesion appeared on his toe and wouldn’t heal. In a month everyone had deserted his farm, except a stout old Chinese overseer, Tang Pin, raised by Duke’s family. Duke offered him the chance to leave and he refused but, terrified, his wife began to lose her mind, whipping peacocks viciously so at night they sobbed.
Then Pono dreamed a dream so awful she turned her head away, but her eyes registered fast enough to see. She shook Duke awake, flew around in her sleeping sarong, a white flame licking through rooms. Then they were ghostly familiars on horseback, floating away from sobbing peacocks, from Duke’s beloved land. At dawn bounty hunters appeared, following Duke’s trail up the Kona Coast. He had been seen galloping through the forests of Kohala, toward the north, into mysterious Waipi‘o Valley.
In the early hours of fleeing, Duke begged her to go back, she had no signs of ma‘i Pākē. He tied her to her horses’s saddle, slapped the brute’s flanks and sent it galloping. She straggled in from the distance, following him on foot. He raged, ignored her, and rode on. Still, she followed, falling in tangled overgrowth so he had to cut her free with a machete.
Entering the jungles of Waipi‘o, they entered ancient time. Dew evaporating on a leaf. A gecko blinking in sunlight. The languorous slide of sap. Then the whoosh of a hawk, claws curling round its squirming prey screaming like a human. They learned not to move in daylight; that was the time for vigilance. Clouds and night were the time for enterprise.
“We will live by ear and by nose,” he said, “trusting to sound and smell. As so much of sight is tricked by the jungle.”
One day from a cliff, they saw the bounty hunters far below, following their path. The urge not to run or scream, to just stand still, took up a whole day’s courage for Pono. Sometimes, still as trees among rampant growth, they watched bounty men file past, rifles slung across their backs, ever vigilant for lepers for which they were paid ten dollars a body.
Sometimes the bounty men found rags, cooking utensils, bones, where fugitive lepers had died, dissolved into the soil. Objects remained, people disappeared. Living in caves down precipitous cliffs, sometimes brushing past each other in the bush, lepers were like a race apart, fleeing the hunters, the ships to Kalaupapa, fleeing cages and human experiments. Here, when one of them died, their soul departed peacefully. Kōkua, family members who fled with them to the jungle, refused them mirrors, pushed them away from their reflections in clear streams. But lepers knew, they saw their shadows in the sun, grotesque.
One night as they lay sleeping under a roof of hau trees, Duke’s horse whinnied softly. Another answered close by. The sound of a rifle being cocked. He and Pono fled, leaving everything. Without cooking utensils, knives, they survived on what they scavenged from nature. Pink frenzy of worms like clusters of wet amethysts. Leaves like little chalices of sap. Giant moths that left dust on their lips and chee
ks, their faces glowing eerily. Something a hawk had dropped in fierce, ecstatic flight.
They saw the jungle was not paradise, but a life-and-death terrain where every footstep had to be measured. The diving scream of a body falling from a cliff meant a wrong turn in darkness. The swallowed gasp of coming upon a cave of ancient charred human bones, grinning skulls calling up the void of another century. One day they squatted near a wild sow slung beneath with squealing nurslings. Pono darted out, plucked two piglets like clothespins from its teats. Barely scorching them, they ate them on the run, pocketing the bones for sucking when they began to starve.
Duke fashioned a knife from sharpened bamboo and taught her how to trap and kill wild boar, how to hang the body parts from trees and whistle, alerting other fugitives to where the meat was hung. They had nothing now but intuition, belief in their sense of hearing and smell, and an uncanny desire to survive.
On her own, Pono dug up medicinal roots of immortality, hung them over small fires. She sang old Hawaiian chants, funneling cures into Duke’s ears while he slept, so he would wake healthy, grow vivid in his prime. Nothing worked, her mana could not overpower his sickness. With Duke, she could not cure. She prayed and began kneeling to pray, hoping she would thereby come to believe in God. When Duke showed signs of growing worse, Pono prayed ma ‘i Pākē would invade her, devour her nerves and organs. She began rubbing herself while he snored, scrubbing in the pus from his lesions, rubbing his suppurating arms across her breasts and cheeks.
After several weeks, they found a niche in a cliff covered over by guava scrub, just large enough for them to squat together. Some days they saw the glint of sun on rifles and belt buckles, bounty men still winnowing the jungle. Some days there was only the jungle, black lava beaches, the sea, miles below. On good days, Duke recalled his love of music, art, how he saw the jungle as a great outdoor Louvre, masterpiece creations that had not only withstood erosion and time, but had absorbed history, myth, heartbreak, and more beauty than the human mind could enfold.
Pono told him stories of her youth, Silvio and impotent Generalito, her childhood vision of the first ship going through the Panama Canal. Her mother sighting a silver plane through a window the moment before Pono was born, the first aerial takeoff from Hawai‘i. She described how land below looked to the pilot, the formation of volcanic craters and scarred black monoliths nudged by the haiku of jade rice-terraces in mist, golden faces looking up through bamboo groves and feathered miles of cane. The pilot died never uttering another word, she said. From the air he had seen God’s plan. He understood everything.
Some days they had nothing to tell. They sat silent, becoming each other’s memory. Some nights her hand on him was the only thing moving, for now she took the initiative.
He wanted her, he always wanted her, but self-loathing slowed him. “I’m decaying, don’t you see?”
“Can I not love that part of you, too?” she asked.
And when he was deep within her, she licked his eyes, sucked saliva from his mouth, loving him so completely she wanted to be joined in rot.
They saw no one for months, save the occasional leper sometimes so monstrously ulcerated they covered themselves head to toe in coconut fiber bags, words seeming to come from the eye slits. The ones who’d progressed beyond feeling lay still, tended lovingly by kōkua. Some nights there were shouts, gunshots, and Pono sat up, wondering, Flee, or freeze? Then a leper bleating, screams of his family pleading with bounty hunters. Torches locomoting down the cliffs, a moaning like a dirge.
One night, they heard a singsong whistle. Pono stood so still two mosquitoes mated on her neck. Recognizing the sound, Duke answered softly. Out of the mist stepped Tang Pin with clothing, dried meat, knives, matches, and fresh cloves believed to kill bacteria of ma‘i Pākē. They embraced, and he melted back into the jungle. Pono brewed clove tea in a rusty mug and they joined their hands round it, lost in the miracle of Tang Pin’s loyalty, in the miracle that they were still alive, together, at the same time on earth.
Some days Duke felt stronger and they splashed in waterfalls like young animals, Pono’s laughter a delicate web surrounding him. Some nights, moonlight touched only their eyes and cheekbones, leaving them in rags of shadow, so it was hard to tell Duke’s handsome face was coming apart. Seeing him in daylight, Pono understood they were running not just from bounty men but from the message carried in his flesh. Once, for the first time in weeks, she saw his uncovered legs and her lungs opened. She was face to face with the horror. It was cradled in her lap.
She would not give up, bathing him in streams when he was weak, rubbing his aching limbs with kukui oil and aloe. She disinfected his sores with sap of ti root and banana leaf, each sore a vacuum into which her will rushed like flames. She came to depend on the edge, the startled vigilance that kept her alert, even in her sleep. She felt time contract, if they could call it time. She felt its swift passage, and its non-passing, felt galloping terror and their unspoken love increasing the flow of meaning in each gesture, each look.
Duke began to understand the great moral beauty in her refusal to leave him, not just out of devotion, but out of her private perversity. She was a woman who would never do the easy thing, would always take the long way round. And he saw how, without these terrifying months of flight, certain emotions might have remained forever inaccessible to her—compassion, grave generosity, the will to believe. She was only seventeen, drinking in more than she knew. Some days Pono was frantic, talkative, all stark energy with the center drained. Running barefoot along jagged edges, beautiful and starved-looking, she grew angry, moving fastest when he moved least, coaxing him, bullying him. Other nights, she was eerily quiet, and he knew she had dreamed.
Some nights he thought of suicide. There is a point where one can quit with honor. I have a right to dispose of this body as I choose. But he knew she would follow him, his decision to die would kill her.
The sickness sharpened his intuition, equipped him with the knowledge to know when Pono was desperate, when he needed to lie. “There are cures. I will heal. We will marry.” And when she needed the punishment of truth. “There is no cure. You must be free to marry and have healthy children.” His great brown eyes surrounding her like water. Her stillness like a death. They began to speak a half-language, verbal needs reduced, as Duke’s body became his preoccupation. Patches running to mold, ears bloated, extended like vegetables, his face thickening like elephant skin. Nerve ends dead, he probed decay, occasioning a moist, flesh avalanche. A sore now ran from his eye to his jaw, theatrical and vivid.
Seasons passed, time of volcanoes, typhoons, months of battering rains. Then, heat, incessant. Then moody trades. They had run for nearly a year. In Kona, orchards of white gardenia-like coffee blossoms would have blown off in an autumn sneeze of rain. Who was harvesting the wet ruby cherries? Unpulping the green jade of raw beans? Pono saw Duke’s house in a dream and when she described abandoned, overgrown fields, and faceless coffee leaves, only Tang Pin sweeping the dung of peacocks from old Persian rugs, Duke hung his head and wept.
She woke without waking. The gun snout a cold, hard reptile striking her chest. Duke was already handcuffed, gagged, thrown into a large poke like a pig, so they wouldn’t have to touch him. Naked, under lantern light she was probed, nudged with the soles of their boots while they scanned her body for sores. And the moaning that went down the mountain, hidden lepers weeping in trees, the jungle diminished for what was now taken from it.
After he had fled his farm, already deserted by his workers, people began to see how morals were lowered in the fields and coffee towns of Kona district. Standards of pride disappeared, of hard, honest labor, gallantry toward the land. Hawaiians remembered their troubles, felt they were no longer a great nation, only a bygone people. And they saw how they had betrayed Duke Kealoha and his family’s memory.
Brought shackled out of the jungle, Pono heard the moaning spread across the land, she heard the whispering. In his year of outrun
ning bounty hunters, of outsmarting them, Duke had come to symbolize his people’s heritage; he became the embodiment of ancestor-warriors, men and women who had fought to the death for their freedom and their lands.
Days later, when he was caged on the funeral ship for Kalaupapa, “Place of the Living Dead,” people crowded the docks, calling out his name. As the ship moved into open waters, across the island natives went down on their knees and wailed. He was gone, a lion had got up and left the land.
Ka Mea Hana Make
* * *
Thing of Destruction
IMAGES GHOST IN, like reptiles coming to back to life with second skins. Pono squatting wild-eyed, groaning until, with magisterial grunt, she births. A wailing, ugly surge, seeming to sink under the weight of its own head. She contemplates it, its screaming vulgar. She gives it a healthy swat.
For days she sleeps with her eyes open, feeling the slow cortege between her legs, jellied knots of afterbirth. She mourns Duke in paralyzing stupor, refusing to accept that he is gone, and this squalling thing is permanent. She doesn’t move, doesn’t eat, hoping her teats will dry, and starve the thing, that she will exhaust it, it will come to the end of its curve.
It screams, continues screaming, until something in her genes screams back. She begins to experience vague esteem for this inchoate thing struggling inexplicably to express itself through language. Very gradually, she sees that the father inhabits this child in its gestures, its intelligent gaze.
Finally, in water-haunted sunlight, she stands, washes herself of earth, blood, umbilical waste, washing months of flight from the soles of her feet. Packing herself with moss, spider webs, kukui oil and shaved root of uhaloa, she struggles through bush and field back to the plantation, pointing the infant at the house, feeling it shiver, perhaps a rich centripetal eddy of recognition within.
Shark Dialogues Page 14