Their daughters. She gave not much thought to them, sometimes confusing them, forgetting their names, absent-mindedly patting a head in passing, like a dog she must remember to feed. When the day came for the inter-island steamer to Kalaupapa, she left the girls with neighbors, strangers, anyone, piling them up like sacrifices offered to the world, throwing it off her scent while she lived for this man, this one obsession.
When is love too much? she wondered. When is it not enough? If she neglected the seed for the father, was it neglect? If she sacrificed part of their lives to enrich his, was it sacrifice?
Sometimes, watching his body erupt, more lesions, a clawed hand curling tighter, his handsome face thickening into something else, Pono lost hope, afraid the disease would someday eat his brain. It happened occasionally. She saw ghosts of humans round them, silent things suspended in final vegetation. It would be worse than seeing him dead. The wonder of him, the elegance and pride of him, the dignity he gave her, would be lost to her. There would be no one to listen, to give her back herself. She would be nothing. Racked by such thoughts, some nights she raced down to the sea, wanting to feel her skin change texture, feel her hands and legs withdraw into a bag of scales, a fin break through her back, feel her body torpedo the deep. Feel nothing, only speed.
He sensed her growing terror, imagined her struggling in the world without him. When she told him she was carrying his fourth child, Duke took steps. One day he sat her down, making her sign documents before a witness, an attorney. She gasped, her skin turned incandescent, she thought they were being married. While the man looked on, Duke held her hand, slowly guiding her in the writing of one word. P . . . O . . . N . . . O. She stared blankly while the attorney told her Duke’s house, the plantation, three hundred acres of ancestral land, were now in her name. He gathered up the papers and departed.
“It all belongs to you,” Duke said. “I’ve given you the land to protect you, insure you . . .”
“But you cannot marry me, give your children a name.”
How often they had had this conversation. “Beloved, I can never marry you. The stigma. All over Kona District, people associate the Kealoha family with ma‘i Pākē. Our daughters would be ostracized.”
“You prefer to keep them bastards!”
“I prefer to think someday you’ll find a proper husband. Someone who will give them a healthy, decent name. I’ll never leave here, don’t you understand? Even if they find a cure, by then I’ll be too horrible to look upon. The land will give you dignity. Go home, please. Tang Pin is waiting.”
She threw herself against a wall. “I’ll kill this child. Destroy all of them!”
“Then you will be destroying me.”
She couldn’t fight him, couldn’t resist him, obeyed him like a child. While the new one was still growing in her womb, she took the steamer from Honolulu to the Big Island and stood with Holo on her land overlooking Kona District and the sea. But she stood uneasily, waiting for strangers to attack her, stone-throwing crowds. Tang Pin came running from the porch of the big house now fallen into awful disrepair.
“Oh, Missus, no be afraid. Folks soon forget ma‘i Pākē. They say soon find one cure.” He lifted Holo in his arms. “Big for six! Can play with my son. Ten, very smart, no crazy like his mother.” He saw alarm in Pono’s eyes. “No worry! Mad wife die, I got new bride!”
“There are two more children now,” she said, and pointed to her belly. “And one more on the way. I’ll return with the others by and by.” She knelt down, speaking softly to Holo. “Will you be good? Do you remember who Tang Pin is?”
Holo nodded gravely. She had survived six years with this woman. In six years, her mother had not killed her, so abandonment seemed fair. And Tang Pin seemed familiar. For years Pono had told her this man would give her love, ‘ohana, he would give her her history. Pono watched as she walked courageously toward Tang Pin’s son. The boy handed her a present, a porcelain China doll. She stared at the little glass-eyed corpse, feeling repulsion, a desire to maim and, without hesitation, threw it to the ground, banging its head to splinters. Then she looked to her mother for approval. Pono gasped. Tang Pin’s son retreated, but Holo soon dragged him off in search of mongoose, a palm to climb, coconuts to split.
The old house seemed to be disintegrating, little separated it from creeping foliage, the earth. Branches and vines grew through windows, animals roamed the halls. The LEPER sign was gone, but Tang Pin believed the house was haunted, explaining how each night something moaning climbed the stairs, slowly, as if exhausted, and slept in the master bed.
“Every day I air da sheets, remake da bed,” he whispered. “Next morning, all messed up. Mirror fogged, like breath.”
In Duke’s study, photo albums rendered faceless generations. Termites had consumed whole genealogies. Years of mold had furred the walls so rooms seemed underwater; courting peacocks skittered on scatty floors, taking flight through paneless windows. At night they still sobbed in the trees like women. And on the lawn, flocks of ugly nesting birds, croaking frogs, sows wallowing in mud, and farther out, acres of forbidding, jungled coffee trees, and far across the island earthy ripples, Pele grumbling in her depths. And everywhere, the Big Island smell of volcanic sulfur.
Yet, how she wanted to be here, to have him here! She wanted to salvage it. Restore it for him. Food was plentiful, enough for them all. Mango, pomelo, avocado, papaya, starfruit, pomegranate. A small vegetable garden. And Tang Pin caught ‘ahi, mahimahi and bonito in the sea.
“Move back into the house,” she told him. “Sweep one room each day. Wash, then polish. We will rebuild from inside out.”
The last child took so much in being born, Pono thought it was a boy. But when the midwife said it was another girl, she pushed it viciously away. The old woman named her Mina, Sorrow, wet-nursed her, took her and the other girls home while Pono regained her senses. The woman wondered where the father was, maybe they all had different fathers. She wondered where the oldest girl was; maybe Pono had sold her. The old Hawaiian was afraid to ask, afraid Pono would look her to death.
In the autumn, when she and her three daughters stepped from the steamer onto the Big Island, Pono stood tall, refined, in a tailored, broad-shouldered linen dress and tight, “toepinch” high heels, a wide-brimmed hat holding down hair gathered sedately in a bun. People stared because she was so lovely, her wild beauty staunched by such pragmatic clothes. Her well-dressed cubs leaned shyly back against her legs as Tang Pin pulled up waving in the rusty Buick, bird scat along its sorrowful grill. Holo jumped from the car and ran to her mother, as crowds slowed in the port, admiring her. Then someone recognized her. She felt eyes examining her brood, heard a voice, loud, unforgettable.
“. . . kamali‘i o ma‘i Pākē .” Children of leprosy.
Perhaps she had never loved them as she did in that moment, would never again love them so passionately. She gathered Edita and Emmaline against her legs, held Mina to her ribs, put her hand over Holo’s ears, daring the world until it looked away. She and her daughters were on the next boat back to Honolulu, Tang Pin weeping, bewildered, on the dock.
Four growing girls. Two suffocating rooms in Chinatown. All-night rattling of the Singer, sewing cheongsams for prostitutes. She thought she would go mad. She dried herb, bark and roots, sold them as cures, and juice of centipede for warts, and toad for arsenic. She dreamtold, but cash was slow, the Depression was in the streets. Haole sailors now thronged Chinatown, staring when she passed. Her girls needed milk and meat, she wondered if she could do it, wear a cheongsam and close her mind and do it. She sat in the dark, stroking her human-spine cane. The thought of what they wanted from her, what they had taken from her long ago, turned her eyes a brilliant red, her teeth grew into points, ripping a cheongsam to threads. Later she wept, tried to sew the pieces together, tried to pull herself together, hold herself intact.
One day Filipinos came, men she had hidden, and fed, and comforted on nights of such degrading loneliness t
hey cried.
They handed her an envelope. “Yoah profits from da cockfights.”
She had never bet on fights. They pushed the envelope at her. “Find one bettah place for live. So girls not grow up in da street. We come and see dem by and by.”
She remembered years back, running from Kalihi Receiving Station, on the outskirts of Honolulu, a neighborhood of modest little houses, tiny yards, orchids flowering in cans.
“No sailors, no prostitutes,” she told Duke. “Nearby a Catholic school.”
She rented a small house in Kalihi, a swatch of yard for the girls, and neighbors she could trust. She bought them Buster Browns, white socks, good cotton underwear, and uniforms for Catholic school. Then, steeling herself, one day she walked down King Street toward Iwilei and Dole Cannery. Smell of syrupy pineapple in the air took her breath away, floating her remembrances of her first year in Honolulu at this same cannery.
Life is running backwards. What did I do wrong?
Carrying a lunch pail, rubber gloves, wearing a steely hair net, she joined waves of women flowing through iron gates into a mechanical landscape posted with armed guards. Haggard women approached, peeling off from peak-season twelve-hour shifts at racheting machines. Pono took one last breath and then was sucked inside.
Same locker room, same bango number pinned to her shirt. Over hair net, white cap, over powdered hands the suffocating rubber gloves, and passing through the Portal of Hell, they called it, into a giant warehouse of screaming machines. She was stationed high up on a platform, guiding ripe pines flooding in from trains, pushing them into a “Ginaca” machine that chewed them out of their skins, shelled and cored hundreds of them a minute, leaving smooth cylinders of yellow fruit ready to be trimmed.
Her back nearly breaking from the strain of bending over, feeding pines to the Ginaca, they moved her downstairs to the clash of metal teeth moving conveyor belts, connecting one belt to the next, so that pines moved in tandem across the width of the huge cannery. As naked pine cyclinders shuttled by, she grabbed one, twirled it in her hand, and with a sharp knife flicked out spots of rind “eyes,” trimmed off bits of skin, replaced it on the belt and grabbed another. Hour after hour, day after day, she twirled and trimmed, twirled and trimmed until her hands were numb, arms raked with rash from dripping pine juice.
One day a forelady with a vague mustache walked her down the aisle from trimming machines to slicers. There they selected prime rounds emerging from machines and packed them in small cans. Women farther down the line selected rounds of lesser quality for larger cans. Broken slices went into tidbit cans, and badly broken bits were mashed to juice. Rounds came out of the machine clinging together, but the vibration of the belt shook them loose, so she could pick the sweetest and the yellowest. After a few days, Pono edged closer to the slicer, catching the pine as it shot from the mouth of the machine. Impatient, she reached higher and higher into the metal mouth.
One day the big Hawaiian forelady slapped her back. “You pupule? Want lose yoah hand?”
She dreamed of shark-fin soup, night after night, and woke up puzzled, distracted. One day, reaching into the mouth of the slicing machine, she felt her hand sing out. Pulling back, she looked down at her glove. A hole, a gaping mouth. Then blood frothed up like a flower. Women ran beside the conveyor belt, pointing, shrieking at something shuttling along on top of bloody pineapples. Screams echoed down the line from the choice-slice section, to tidbits, to crushed. She stood dumb, in shock, watching the squalid, dodging movements of hysterical women, until a forelady rushed at her, holding up her finger sliced off neatly at the second joint, waving it like a prize.
The ambulance, slow, sensuous hula of morphine. Three months Workmen’s Compensation. Remembering her dreams, each night Pono ate shark-fin soup, the cartilage strengthening her bones and joints, healing, healing; she even imagined the little finger growing back. The stitches smoothed over, and, but for the missing digit, the hand healed perfectly, each finger articulating as before.
In three months of healing, she had “slow-time,” time to look around. The next-door neighbors, a Chinese and his Filipino wife, were lei stringers, working for flower vendors who sat in front of smart Wakīkī hotels. Their trees and bushes, overhanging Pono’s yard, bulged ginger, jasmine, frangipani, carnations, plumeria. At dawn, the wife took the two youngest girls, giving Pono time to tend Holo and Edita and send them off to school.
Singing softly, the woman joined her husband stringing lei, Pono’s infant sleeping in her lap, while Emma dashed round gathering dew-drenched flowers from the grass. Pono watched the couple, pollinating each other with little deeds, endless conversation. She saw how life could be, one human brushing against the other each day, every day, refining one another, giving one another stature. She saw how in their small yard they had created an oasis, keeping the great risk of the world at bay. She envied them their smug and careful little life. She wished them dead.
Her own life was hazardous. Four growing girls, bills, sleepless nights, the one thing really important to her occurring in shadow. Some nights, she longed for Duke so badly she woke wounded all over, her body aching. Next day she would abuse the girls, slap or ignore them, make the three oldest eat in silence while she fed the infant with disdain. Fatherless little bastards, wondering where he is. Who he is. When they finally summoned up the nerve to ask, she told them their father worked the gold mines in Alaska.
“When will he come home, Mama?”
By and by.
And yet, they held her life together. Each child a strong thread in a worn sarong. Without them she would unravel.
Filipino “uncles” came visiting, bringing gifts of money for the girls, bringing sweets and storybooks, asking only for a little “kid-watching” time. Neighbors gossiped, suspecting they were the fathers of her daughters. She began discouraging their visits, refused their gifts, even though by now two girls were in private Catholic school. Four months from the day she lost her finger, Pono walked back into that awful smell, that screaming-machinery world. Women hugged her, cheering as she took her place on Warrior Row, where those with mutilated hands twirled and trimmed pines faster than anyone because they had less fingers to intrude. Some mornings, rising at four A.M., seeing the long twelve-hour stretch before her, she wondered, How much longer can I take it? She would take it for ten years.
There were moments, epiphanies. Some days, throwing off their uniforms and Buster Browns, the girls would roll in flower piles, then run to her as she dragged home from the cannery, frangipani in their hair, the smell so sweet it gave her instant headaches. But seeing them together, little, rollicking, barefoot kānaka like flowers wearing flowers, Pono staggered under the wealth of beauty she had failed to observe, what she and Duke had achieved. And for that day, her world was larger.
Some nights in white sleeping sarongs, they ran outside dancing under stars like little fireflies. Other nights they wept, heads in their pillows so she wouldn’t hear, Holo missing Tang Pin, the only father she knew, Edita crying for her “uncles,” missing their arms round her, smell of their pomade and tobacco. Emma, shy and pale, seemed to only stare, her face already exhausted in advance of time.
Loving them, covetting them, the childless neighbors, the lei stringers, spied and gossiped. “Poor little no-name buggahs. T’ink third one, Emma, be da one go bad. Look like fool-around type, sneaky eye.”
“No. Edita, second one! She too much flirt.”
“Wonder where da mot’er go when disappear for days.”
“Maybe make extra money wid da sailors. She one good-lookin’ wahine, but hard type. Real hard.”
Sometimes she was so exhausted, on the boat to Kalaupapa she’d lean down at the rail and fall asleep, nearly falling in the sea. Duke half carried her to his small cottage where in his arms, she slept and slept. After ten or fourteen hours, she would wake weeping, wrung out at twenty-six. When she was calm they strolled beaches and lay up on the cliffs, watching sunsets, the gathering hord
es.
“This is all I want,” she said. “It seems so little to ask of life.”
They had loved for ten years, and now in this decade of her hardship, these hazardous mothering years, Duke saw how decent she was, how noble. He knew his daughters only from snapshots, yet he suspected he loved them more than she did. She was not by nature maternal, her senses seemed tuned to something much more distant. Yet she endured, sacrificing youth, beauty, even body parts, to nourish, protect, educate his seed. His love for her quickened, deepened. And they were silent, and there was nothing more to say.
Her daughters moved cautiously through those scattered years, increasingly aware of her torn state, dark mysteries—where did she go each month? Fearing, yet loving her, sometimes a gesture from her was enough. Vague smile, a nod. But when they came too close, she turned away, and when they laughed, too loud, too gay, she pinned them down again. One look.
Holo turned ten, a quiet girl, always scribbling in her diary. One day she asked, “Mama, is Tang Pin my father?”
“No, foolish girl. He is Pākē .”
“Then Tang Junior is not my brother?”
“No.”
She went back to scribbling her secrets. Edita almost eight, turned her affections to the Chinese-Filipino neighbors who sang her “uncle” songs while stringing lei. Emma, seven, watched, and followed them around. Mina had no personality it seemed, just an appetite for love, for anyone who held her.
Some nights Holo heard Pono in her sleep, moaning, struggling with something awful. She wanted to wake her mother, comfort her. To do so was to perish. But one night Pono sat up in a sweat.
“Holo. What are you doing there? Come here.” She gathered her close, looking at her face in darkness. “A dreadful thing is coming. I see it in my sleep.” She showed her money hidden in a lacquered bowl. “If something happens to me, take the girls to Tang Pin on the Big Island. He will care for you.”
Shark Dialogues Page 19