“Strikers took me in when they heard I had helped organize on the Big Island. They knew my contact, the haole shot bringing me your note.”
Leaving Holo with a Chinese couple, Pono had begun the descent down the treacherous mountains, tangled jungle undergrowth, sudden mudslides tumbling down to jagged cliffs, switchback footpaths that disappeared, wild razor-tusked boar running in packs. And finally, coming upon the hunting party from Kalaupapa. At first the patients ran from her, afraid she was “decoy,” a spy working for the planters.
“But when I said your name they took me by the hand.”
Duke described how he was in the act of strangling a doctor to death when the sailor approached him with the message from Pono. “My note was brief. I want you to go on with your life. I am incurable.”
“Never!” she cried, burying her head in his scarred, mottled chest. “As long as we live there is hope. What else is life for?”
“Listen to me.” He pulled apart from her so he could see her eyes. “You must examine Holo every night. She carries Kealoha blood—she’s more susceptible than others. This stuff incubates for years. And if she grows up healthy, she must go to university.”
Pono was silent.
“What is it, Beloved?”
“I will arrange these things, Duke, each thing you ask. But I am not returning there. I will remain with you as your kōkua.”
He shuddered, pictured her tending him down the years as he slowly decomposed. “No! You will not retire to this hell.”
She cried out, desperate. “I’m a fugitive. If they catch me I’ll be locked in isolation again. They’ll take away our child.”
“Pono. It has been two years and not one spot on you. Don’t you understand? You’re not a leper, you’re immune.”
She sobbed, beat her hands against his chest. “The world is nothing without you! The child is nothing to me without you. I am nothing.”
“Beloved . . .” She could hear the grief between his words. “I am asking you to live for me. Let me see the world, and all its awful, wondrous changes through your eyes. Return to the farm, resurrect the coffee fields, find a man worthy of you, and raise our child.”
Her eyes changed shape, like a reptile. “I will eat my own liver before another man dares touch me.”
“Pono, you are young.”
She looked right through him. “I am . . . very . . . old.”
“You will forget these years of pain, struggling alone with a child. With God’s grace these years will fade.”
She didn’t tell him she had eliminated God from her world. “Duke, you’re only twenty-three. How can you live without hope?”
“I am incurable. I lose myself in nature, music, book-swallowing. And now there is you, whom I thought I had lost forever.”
So, for a while they were safe, dreaming side by side, turning in sleep like broken shells on the ocean floor in nights full of blue volumes of ginger, jacaranda, air emptying, filling with their lungs. And somewhere across the settlement, nasal dreamshriek of a leper like a human disemboweled. Sometimes he woke at dawn, the hour least easy to bear: for he woke a healthy, strapping man, hearing the ocean call, a good day for surfing on his longboard. He would begin to rise and then, only then, Duke felt the pain, saw the lesions, thickening skin, and shrank back like a tortoise into his mottled carapace.
But now at dawn her scent was everywhere. She lay snoring, smooth dark skin tattooed white with semen, her breasts heaving and falling against him, hair like pāhoehoe splashed across the bed, eyes bruised aubergine beneath, the utter fatigue of love. Life would never thin her sensuous full lips, but there was something Duke now saw that even sleep could not erase, a wariness, a tight-hingedness to the jaw, what it took to make her way alone in the world.
He gathered her in his arms, her sweat-lather dried, now mingling with his salty, earth smell and near-sweet smell of flesh outrunning medication, beginning seriously to corrupt.
“Live,” he whispered, “Live for me!”
One day soon she would depart. And after that these moments would possess him wholly, he would grow old in them. For now, they were children of the landscape, ascending cliffs like goats, plunging headfirst into crashing surf. From the distance sharks, like burnished steel torpedoes, glided in, then cozied up behind them, drawn by the sound of their heartbeats. Pono saw their fins and smiled, untempted to join them, to dart and shoot deep coral canyons, to race in sun-stroked wet. She paused, tempered her strokes, seeing how, in spite of his still-fabulous strength, Duke moved a little slower.
Such is the morphology of disease, that it can seem kind: paw-stroking a man year by year, rather than hammering him with its full assault. Some lepers died within six months of the first symptom; she knew Duke would endure until the lazy haole doctors found a cure. He will be cured. One day I will take him home. She knew this without dreaming it. She knew it because, without belief in it, she would let go of everything. And she continued rubbing up against his sores, sucking his saliva when they kissed. Some nights while he slept, Pono walked his face in moonlight, fingers caressing his broad, handsome Polynesian cheeks, skin now scarred and thickened. Now I, too, am scarred, mutilated. I am ka mea hana make. 0 Brother. Husband. What has life done to us? And why!
Each night before they made love, he served her tea brewed from shaved black coral, and “mad vegetation,” so she would throw out his seed.
“My blood is ‘contact blood,’ “he said, fearing another child would be ma‘i Pākē.
And every night, Pono tossed the tea aside, hard legs encircling him, determined to wrest from him another child, a link. One night, Duke whooping, thumping, cataracting into her, she felt the salutation, cells aghast, colliding, and knew she had conceived.
Two days later, a nurse came at them running almost sideways, looking back behind her. Administrators had discovered Pono’s presence in the settlement. Whereas visiting permits allowed family members visits of a few hours at a time, Pono had been living there for several weeks, hiding among patients and kōkua. The next day she was put aboard a supply boat headed round the island, then back to Honolulu.
He spoke fast while she sobbed in his arms. “Beloved, do not visit me too often. Do not flirt with this disease. Take Holo and go home to the plantation. Help Tang Pin breathe life back into the soil.”
She didn’t tell him locals would stone her, call her filthy, call her child ma‘i Pākē. She didn’t tell him she was carrying another. As the boat weighed anchor, she stood at the railing, mute, not even waving. Her eyes burned into his. She stood that way until she could no longer distinguish his features, until his form was sucked into the land. She didn’t hear his howling, or see his body fold, didn’t see handless friends embrace him, leading him home.
That night Duke studied his image in a mirror, touched the slowly thickening cheeks, the lion look preying on his features. He wondered how much longer he could let her look upon him. How much longer she could bear to.
Ka ‘ōlelo Makuahine
* * *
Mother Tongue
THE YEARS. She stared down them, nothing coming to her from the distance. The hardest thing was not to have him there. Not to have him listen and understand how hard it was without him. Still, Pono made resolutions: she would be decent to herself. She would not go back to planters’ camps, roachy shacks, rusty plates of food. She would not again do stoop work. Or kneeling scrub work. Or work again for haole. She studied the remaining black pearl and small, jade diary. She would not sell them.
“Always own something beautiful,” Duke had told her. “Something small you can gaze at on the run.”
He lived. This knowledge gave her courage, made her vibrate to a new height. She stood tall, looked people in the eye. She was no longer running, nor was she standing still.
Passing a tailor shop in Chinatown one day, she stared inside, giving the owner the maka loko ‘ino, evil eye. In two days his spine curled, knees knotted up like ginger roots. She walked in
to his shop, swearing to cure his arthritis if he rented her a sewing machine on credit.
The old Chinese stuck out his knotted legs. “Cure!”
She rubbed banana sap into his back and knees, and made him swallow spoonfuls of nutmeg that made him sick, then made him go on tiptoe like a girl. While he danced round his shop, she lifted the curse, releasing him from pain.
He stared at his unknotting knees, felt his spine uncurl and screamed. “Kahuna!”
She left the shop with a Singer sewing machine tucked beneath her arm like a fossilized, prehistoric pet. She took in sewing at night, living in a single room with Holo. The Depression of the thirties had driven down demand for pineapples and sugarcane, and out-of-work laborers drifted to the city adding to the slums. But even in the poorest parts of Chinatown there were lu ‘au, weddings, celebrations. Pono sat on a lauhala mat on street corners, dreamtelling as in the old days in A’ala Park.
In the streets, small, delicate Filipino men, homesick, drunk on ōkolehao or beer, paid her to dreamtell when they would go home to their barrios in the Philippines, or when they would have money to send for their families. She closed her eyes, and even when she dreamtold the truth—that they would never go home, never see their families—they were courteous, paid and walked away, heads hanging, shoulders narrow as young girls.
Uneducated, mostly illiterate, last large-scale immigrant arrivals and so, disdained by others, Filipinos seemed outcast from the world, entrenched in their lonely, bachelor ghettoes. Still, they flocked to Pono because she was kind, and beautiful, and when she closed her eyes they could gaze upon her face and be in love with her. She stopped dreamtelling in the streets, made appointments in her room, and when the landlord called her prostitute, she laughed.
“I am kahuna! I could inhale you, skinny, little man.”
To prove her powers Pono told him the little ‘ili’ili growing on his chest was a death-growth, that he must cut it off, or die. Doctors examined the growth, saw it was malignant and immediately removed it. The landlord brought it in a jar, a gift to Pono, and gave her two large rooms for “same price” if she “no moah grow ‘ili‘ili on his chest.”
She prospered from dreamtelling, no longer needing to sew for a living. But sewing was tangible and real, and she wanted Holo to see her doing normal things, not selling dreams to strangers. She was attendant to the child, sliding life to her in small portions, what to do, not do, how to behave in public, and alone. Mostly she taught her to honor the dignity of things—money, thread, material.
“These things don’t breathe, therefore can be counted on.”
Flashing scissors across crimson, she slowly joined two pieces of cloth on the sewing machine. “See how careful the stitches, how strong the thread. Cloth and thread bleed together, the color holds, the shape.”
“If so strong,” Holo asked, “then why always making new dresses?”
“Because . . . by and by the cloth goes shiny, comes into holes. Time to throw away.”
The child grew instantly alert, as each night her mother examined Holo’s body, studying her skin, her back, her scalp, even between her toes. She was looking for shiny parts, for holes. When Holo fell and slashed her knee, she took needle and thread and crawled into a closet. Pono found here there unconscious, lying in her vomit. She had tried to close the cut, stitch the hole, so Pono wouldn’t throw her away.
She bathed the wound, comforted the child. “You’re going to have a baby sister. We’re ‘ohanal No one is going to throw you away.”
But Holo dimly remembered a small mummy flying, rags unwinding, a doll cartwheeling across waves.
As time drew near, Pono had her landlord write a letter to Tang Pin on the Big Island.
“. . . If I die in childbirth, come for Duke’s child, Holo. Raise her on her father’s soil. Teach her her Kealoha history.”
Waiting for the midwife, she took the child against her voluminous stomach. “Listen now, remember. Your father is an honorable man. You will be like him. Stand straight. Look others in the eye. Trust only nature, sun and star. When you are older, swim with sharks. They are your ‘aumākua. Honor them, and you will honor me. Remember this name, Tang Pin, he will take you home.”
She didn’t die. A second girl was born, a healthy child, Edita, the midwife’s name. In post-birth hysteria, Pono tried to give the child to her, give them both to her. “Take them! Leave me free. To be with him.”
The old Hawaiian midwife laughed. “Dis wahine gone pupule. T’ink she die and gone to Jesus!”
Weeks later, she lay with Duke at Kalaupapa, describing their second child. “So healthy! If it was a boy I would have named him Duke Silvio Generalito Kealoha.”
A memory of a happy time in childhood, and also a way of acknowledging the Filipinos who came to her now, futureless, childless, paying Pono to dream, then, at night, drifting back to their lonely bachelor barracks in Chinatown. Their patronage had supported her and Holo during this second pregnancy. Duke’s plantation was dead. His disability check was used to pay land taxes. There was no income from the fields, nothing for Tang Pin to send her.
“Won’t you go back to the plantation?” he asked. “At least there is the house, a little vegetable garden, Tang Pin to watch over you ...”
“In time,” she said. “In time there will be many children, a family waiting when you return.”
He shook his head, for she would not accept the truth. Yet he was humbled by her will, her drive to spring his seed.
“Be careful with the Filipinos,” he said. “We hide them here in numbers. The Filipino Federation of Labor is organizing big strikes throughout the islands. Rumors will spread that they are meeting in your rooms.”
She promised to be prudent, not telling him her rooms now bulged, a safe house for Filipino strikers on the run, evicted from their camps by planters. Even though production and demand were down, plantation workers were organizing in larger and larger numbers, fighting to bargain collectively through labor unions. There was another reason Filipinos flocked to Pono’s rooms. Deprived of families, they came back from their savage cockfights, and gambled for the privilege of sitting with her girls, feeding them, coddling them like little mothers. Even as she slept beside Duke at Kalaupapa, her infant daughter, Edita, was rocked in the arms of a weeping man as he sang her songs of his native Ilocos.
In 1934, a month after the birth of her third daughter, Emmaline, for Duke’s mother and Pono’s grandmother, one day a well-dressed hapa-haole knocked at her door. Wary, Pono drew her children round her, speaking Pidgin, a language she could hide behind. The man had something to do with the governor’s office. He had come to ask her to appear at ‘Iolani Palace.
“What I done?” she asked. “What law I break?” Two Filipino fugitives were standing in her closet.
The hapa laughed. “On the contrary, we want to ask you a big favor. Something that would please the governor, bring honor to Hawaiians.”
He told her Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, was visiting Hawai‘i. This meant not much to Pono. Had it been Hirohito of Japan, the leader of China, or the Philippines, people she had lived among, she would have been impressed.
“Roosevelt wants to see real Hawaiians,” the hapa said. “See the hula danced, eat kālua pig, enjoy a hukilau. His aide heard about kāhuna, and someone’s cook remembered you dreamtelling at street fairs. We would like you to do that for Mr. Roosevelt!” He laughed, uncomfortable. “Or, just pretend.”
The man neglected to say they also wanted Roosevelt to see a prime example of the islands’ majestic “aborigines,” a stately reminder of what Hawaiians had once been. Except for the Olympic gold medal swimmer, Puke Kahanamoku, nearing forty-five, there were fewer and fewer pure examples of this once-great rapidly dwindling race. Reluctantly, Pono made her way to ‘Iolani Palace on the appointed day.
Women rubbed her skin with aloe, coconut and jasmine so it glowed, brushed her hair until it shone like pāhoehoe cascading down
her back. They dressed her in a white holokū with flowing maile leaves, and they stepped back. At the Governor’s Reception, when she stood before President Roosevelt, all background motion ceased. Diplomats, island nobility, even the governor of Hawai‘i stared. Her great height, her quiet dignity and beauty reminded them of what ancient Polynesians had been, fearless Vikings of the Pacific.
Pono bowed, shook hands warily, studied Roosevelt’s handsome, tired face, his braced legs, then sat down at his feet, closed her eyes and dreamed. People in the Throne Room smiled, amused, but Roosevelt leaned forward, admiring the dreaming beauty. Then, unaccountably, she moaned, rocking back and forth. She hugged herself, beat her fists upon her chest, and wept. Alarmed Secret Service men surrounded Roosevelt; he pushed them back, curious, somewhat apprehensive. Pono rocked the longest time, sweat pouring down her arms. She woke, stood slowly, looked into his face and could not tell what she had seen.
But, to prove she was kāhuna, she raised her head and fairly shouted in clear tones.
“YOU WILL FIRESIDE-CHAT FOUR TERMS!”
Roosevelt guffawed. U.S. presidents weren’t elected more than twice. Pono fell silent, and after a while she shook his hand, and left. Years later when Roosevelt set historical precedence, the only president in U.S. history to be elected to a third term, then a fourth, he would remember her. And he would wonder what else the Hawaiian beauty had dreamed, what she had kept from him.
“Exploding ships, running men on fire,” she told Duke. “I smelled it. I tasted devastation.”
She wondered how it would affect their lives. She thought of the years passing, the ebb and flow of her journeys back and forth, Honolulu to Moloka‘i, living for that motion, everything else, her life, a blur. Would the devastation she envisioned really come? Or was it just an idle dream, flexing of her tired mind?
Duke thought her vision was a warning of coming catastrophe, volcanic eruption, earthquake. “We’ve taken too much from the land. The land always takes back. I wish you would take our daughters home where they belong, they would be safer there.”
Shark Dialogues Page 18