“You!” she wailed, pointing at Pono. “After all dese years, you don’t even give dah comfort of yoah arms! I lost Ming, too. Dat girl my almost favorite.”
Pono turned, crossed the room, hugging her passionately. “Oh, Run Run. Kalahala! Touch is still such a novelty, it scares me.”
Run Run nestled in her massive arms, wiped her nose, and sighed. “Dere t’ings you gotta learn fast, Pono. Life starting to subtract from us.”
She looked through the window, down through the coffee orchards to the sea. “My heart has been hard. I have been mean. But daring. Do you think they will have pity on me?”
“Who can tell?” Run Run said. “You never taught dem pity. All you can do now is break dah future to dem gently.”
“. .. and the past.”
Run Run stared at her. “What you gonna’ do?”
Pono shuddered, leaning close, as if looking for a place to hide. She thought of her granddaughters, her daughters’ scars, healed in different colors.
“There are women locked in my womb forever, the memory of their birth. All I can do now is liberate the fruit of their wombs. And it may be too late.”
For a moment, the house, the land around them fell silent, as if all life had stopped with Ming. And Pono tried to imagine this land, this place without her girls, without the beating of their hearts animating everything. Water would cease to flow, birds and flowers vanish, crops, all life, would abdicate.
“Mot’er God,” Run Run whispered. “Why you wait so long? Why now, after so many years?”
“Because I’m old, the senses are becoming dull, the pain is bearable. Or .. . maybe I am doing it for vanity.”
“Yeah, you plenty vain, tita. But if you do dis t’ing, is not for you, not for Duke, or Ming. You do it for kahe koko, flow of blood, for kahe ‘aumakua, flow of ancestors. Dese t’ings you gonna tell dem been waiting all dese years. Written by yoah mot’er’s mot’er’s mot’er’s hand. Dese girls been livin’ empty-handed in da world. Now you gonna’ give dem dere destiny.”
She felt suddenly dangerous, highly explosive. She was going to bring her life to words, cast it from her lips. And everything would change.
“Run Run, help me! Something deep inside is passing through a wall!”
Run Run crossed herself, stretched her arms round her, held her like a child. In that room, in all those ancient rooms, they could feel dread massing, like weather.
They sat back, listening as Pono’s old Buick with the sorrowful grill wheezed and shrieked, Pono’s foreman driving them in from the airport, taking the long way home. The old laboring Māmalahoa Highway curved up and up through Hōlualoa, Kainali’u, Kealakekua, that archipelago of vowels, old coffee towns, the fruity, winey smell of coffee cherries, rusty little tin-roof shacks under regal monkeypods.
Jess rolled down the window, smelling the sweet scent of a Kona evening drifting upcountry, jungle, sea, and fertile soil, mixed with charcoal fires of guava stumps and coconut-husk bark. Something tugged at her, a ticking in the ribs, a premonition. She felt chilled, wanted to keep traveling, to fall asleep in the safety of the moving car.
Passing through Kainali’u, they saw Kimura’s Fabric Store, Mrs. Kimura sweeping off the sidewalk. She squinted at the passing car, and waved. Jess turned to Rachel and Vanya who smiled, remembering the years. Tiny Mrs. Kimura flitting among her fabrics like a butterfly, face popping out of bolts of cotton, silk, batik, while Pono brooded over price.
“You like dis floral pattern? Moah bettah dis color foah you, neh?”
Hours, whole afternoons, lost among the designs—parrots, orchids, garish colors, then cool pastels. While Pono and Mrs. Kimura gossiped, the girls collapsed on hardwood floors with Coca-Colas, leaned their heads against glass counters wherein dust glowed on ancient Tootsie Rolls and bags of Okonomi Mame. Next door, a damaged phonograph played songs from West Side Story, the slapping time-step, shuffle-ball-change of pounding feet at Damron Academy of Dance.
Now, Jess looked longingly behind, watching it all recede, as Vanya asked the foreman if Pono and Run Run had seen them with their banners on TV.
He shook his head. “Nobody see. Real tragic. One small paragraph in dah papah.”
Toru turned round from the front seat. “I told you. They gonna ignore us until there’s fireworks.”
Jess felt that ticking in the ribs again, vague uneasiness, like something was waiting for them at the house. She leaned forward, nudging the driver. “Let’s stop at Manago’s. It’s pork chop night.”
The foreman grinned and shook his head. “You girls pau wastin’ time. Make me come lose my job. Anyway . . .” He glanced back from the steering wheel. “Somet’ing up wit’ yoah tūtū. When I left da house she dressed up ... real formal kine.”
Glances darting back and forth, they hugged themselves, dug into individual corners.
She stood on the porch as they stepped from the car, then leaning heavily on her cane, turned her back and went inside. They entered slowly, feeling again the fluid, shivering air along the corridors, the haunted sunlight of each room. Place of childhood, refuge from a world that would corrupt them. Yet, returning, they felt doubly corrupted by what each room withheld.
She didn’t come to dinner. They hardly noticed for their eyes were glued to Run Run, dressed as they had never seen her. Gray hair upswept, held with small jade combs, rouged cheeks giving her the look of rampant health. She had painted on delicate black eyebrows, and smelled of jasmine. Like little ivory roots, her arms protruded from a pale blue satin cheongsam flowered with yellow chrysanthemums. She seemed full of tremor, eerie and fragile.
“Run Run?” Vanya sounded scared. “Why are you dressed like that? What’s happening?” The others only stared.
She shook her head over her plate, making a tsk! tsk! sound. And yet she didn’t eat. No one ate. The food stared back at them. It was so still, they heard the suctioning sounds, tiny fingers and toes, of geckos on the ceiling. Jess looked up, seeing a miniature blue heart beating through green skin.
Finally, Run Run picked up a fork, brought food to her lips. “Eat.” She whispered. “Chew slowly, as always.”
Rachel’s voice erupted with the falsetto of an old man’s. “This is how she operates. Theater! Mystery! Using Run Run as a prop. Calling us home, then ignoring us. Ming is dead. The only constant in my life is gone.” She stood up, throwing down her napkin. “I’m going back to Honolulu.”
“Sit!” Run Run spoke with such authority, she had to look behind her, as if someone else had shouted.
After a while she cleared their plates, hardly touched, and brought out sliced mangoes, papayas and kiwi in bowls carpeted with Jacarandas. Pinks, oranges, greens, purples—jagged, too-bright colors. They just stared.
Then she brought out ginger tea, and bottles of plum wine. “Drink,” she said. “Unshock dah blood.”
As she spoke, Pono opened double doors leading to the living room, so seldom used. She was dressed in a velvet holokū the purple-black of barking-deer lips. Her hair was wound round her head like a crown, like royalty. Shimmering dust rose in the room behind her, giving her an aura.
“Bring wine and glasses, please. And things to make you comfortable. Pillows, fans.”
A peacock skittered down the hall, stopped in the doorway, then slowly, majestically, unfolded its great tail, turquoise eyes beholding them. In the wide doorway, it preened, then turned, facing Pono.
Her hand went to her heart, she gasped.. . . I confess to remembering .. . Duke had lain his head against her breast . . . Peacocks skittering on polished floors . . . You wore a Paris gown. We waltzed . . .
Her granddaughters faced her in a semi-circle of old chairs spilling out musty kapok. Run Run dispensed wine in little glasses, and when she stopped, she chose a chair next to Pono, so they seemed a team, facing the others.
She has chosen sides, Jess thought. We’re on our own.
“I made Ming a promise when she died . . .” Pono began. “That is only a
small part of why I want to talk to you.”
Their faces were turned up to hers, and in their features she discerned their mothers, rich centripetal eddies of defenselessness and sadness near the eyes. A potential hardness, too, the ease with which they could succumb to hate and malice.
“I will talk and talk for hours. And when I finish, you will be other women. Perhaps, you will have no eyes for me.”
She watched Vanya’s skin grow darker, that deep, native tone which surfaced when she was angry or scared. Vanya hugged her arms round her waist defensively, her blouse trembling with her pulse.
Pono began. “... My life, much of it, has been lived in shadow ...”
She shook her head, looked at Run Run whose eyes were downcast.
She began again. “... A mother has an obligation to her daughters. To pass on everything they need to survive.” For an instant, Pono saw her daughters in those long, gone-forever years, girls in starched, blue uniforms, white socks, Buster Browns. She passed her hand across her face.
“... I failed my daughters. I was silent in ten thousand tongues. In this way, I slaughtered them.”
They looked up dumb, too terrified to move.
“Ming’s mother, Holo, my oldest, knew many things. She had seen too much. I numbed her into silence. I took her mouth.”
She gazed at Vanya. “I was afraid of your mother, Edita. She was spirited, demanding love. I made her keep her distance. I froze her heart.”
She turned slightly, looked down at Jess.
Jess nodded. “I know. My mother ran off with a haole.”
“Emma. I struck her away with terror.”
Rachel stood, as if to run, but no message was transmitted from brain to limbs. She dropped back into the chair.
“My youngest daughter, Mina ... I made her rubbish.”
There was the slightest sound, a sob, then heavy breathing, as if the room were full of panting dogs. After a while, one by one, they looked at her again, shocked stares jelling into pools of light. She didn’t know what they could see: how lamplight flickered on her face, pulling out the grief, all the daughterless decades, the blood-women whose absences from her, and from each other, distributed themselves across her life like daily crucifixions.
“Many people hate and fear me. Some say I am kahuna, half shark, that fins sprout from my back in water. They say Ula, the mongoose is my husband, who I bewitched into giving me this farm. That I cursed him, made him a rodent that lives on other rodents. Some say I have prehistoric lusts, that I mate with octopi, that the sting of large scorpions excites me. They say I have kahuna’ed Run Run into slavery, that I keep her near so I appear beautiful in comparison. None of this is true. My great sin has been ambition. I have been deliberately harsh with you, so you would develop the ability to survive.”
She poured a glass of wine, watched how it shook, how before she got it to her lips the glass became half empty. She sat down, feeling dusk’s cool air eat perspiration pouring down her neck. She fanned herself, dipped a handkerchief in water, wiped her brow. Run Run was sitting on the floor now, hugging her knees, like a young lei stringer, a flower-girl beneath Aloha Tower, when people still took pleasure cruises in the fifties.
Pono continued. “... I have never offered consolation. Because of this, you have learned to depend only on each other, to trust each other. Not just with your lives, but with the memory of each other. With each other’s reputation. Yes, you criticize, resent each other, and much hukihuki. But I have seen how you defend each other, too. Apart, you suffer, you long for each other. Together, you are little girls, even now, even now. And oh! I have envied you. I know you will hold Ming forever in your hearts, I already see her in your postures, your gestures. You are the repository of each other’s lives. You accomplished this without me. I am proud of you.”
“You? Proud?” Vanya asked. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because you are courageous.”
She stood, circled the room, held on to the back of the chair like she would faint.
“Now. I am going to tell you a story. When I finish . . . you will know who you are.”
For reasons they could not discern, Run Run began to cry. She was no longer the feisty, lovable, irascible old cook, Pono’s sidekick, the one who held the keys. In spite of her wrinkles, her spine bent from seventy-five hard years, her yellow horse teeth and ginger-root feet, she seemed to regress before them, into a younger and younger version of herself. Slowly, they would see that, as Pono “talked-story,” she was telling Run Run’s history, too.
And she began:
“. . . In each life, there is someone waiting to come to our rescue. I believe it now. I didn’t know it when I first beheld this stranger, charioting the waves on what I thought was a long hard corpse. A wave-sliding board. He saw me, knew I belonged to him, but knew I did not know it yet. I was injured, and so he took me home, nursed me, and waited patiently. Until I discovered I belonged to him, discovered it for myself. . . .
“. . . His name was . . . Duke. Duke Kealoha. He lived in a house of porcelainand linen, a driveway umbrella’ed with giant ironwoods and eucalyptus. It was, and is, this house, where you grew into womanhood. I used to think he watchedyou in your sleep, watched over you. And when you flew down corridors at night, in your sleeping sarongs, like little candles flickering, he stood outside the house, walked the driveway, shouting the Night Marchers away. Asking even his ancestor ghosts to tread softly, not frighten you ...’
“. . . Until him, my life was a half-life. He taught me everything, how to dress, he even brushed my hair, rubbbed kukui oil into my hands, harsh from years of plantation living. He ordered clothes for me from Paris, and Hong Kong. I had suede gloves and shoes to match. And he was cultured, imported art, records, books from London and Japan. He showed me maps, explained the world to me, and other languages. He read to me, and taught me writing, though some things didn’t take. We stayed alone, and people gossiped, for we were young and arrogant, blessed with good looks, and eager for the future . . .
“. . . His family had descended from royalty. He taught me their history, going all the way back to a curing doctor who served Kamehameha the Great. I taught him about Mathys Coenradtsen, the Dutch whaler who married a Tahitian, daughter of a great chief from Papeete. These were our ancestors, your kū-puna . . .
“. . . Mostly he tried to instruct me about the coffee plantation. About soil, rainfall, ideal altitudes. Fertilizer, and planting. And picking and processing. It seemed very complicated. I was young and bored, so we went back to books, the phonograph, dancing to the latest songs from Europe and New York, pretending we were on a luxury liner crossing the Atlantic . ..
“. . . And, in time, I understood why we stayed alone, what happened to his family, a sickness in their blood. Those relatives who had not caught it fled. By then, you see, the plantation had a bad name, a stigma. Hale make. People said Duke was contagious, his workers would spread the sickness to the town. It was, of course . . . ma‘i Pākē. Eventually, a spot grew on his arm. Little by little, his coffee workers ran away, all except Tang Pin, father of Ming’s father. And, in time, the bounty hunters came . . .
“. . . And there were months of hiding, Waipi‘o Valley, living like rodents in the bush. Sometimes it was paradise, all of nature enfolding us. Sometimes it was the face of death. One wrong step would pitch you down a cliff. Some nights we slipped down to the valley floor, into the ocean, and thereby lived on fish for days. Some weeks all we ate was root. There were others with the sickness hiding in the valley. We shared when we could. Sometimes we found charred human bones. Kōkua families had burned their dead in hiding. Some nights we heard screams, bounty hunters capturing the hidden. Duke’s sickness spread, his skin ran with it . . .
“... I was seventeen. We hid in the valley for over a year. And one day looking in a stream, I saw a hag, I had grown very old. Duke said I was still beautiful, though starved-looking. His condition grew worse, much worse. Probably he woul
d have died in that jungle, nature can be vicious. But one night, after all those months that bound us together for all time, one night they found us. We woke already trussed up by the bounty hunters . . .
“. . . And we were led out of the valley. And, you know . . . people mourned him. In the villages, they wept. On the docks, as our boat pulled away, they went down on their knees. He had been to them the finest example of the human progression of the Hawaiian race, all that encompassed dignity and valor and fairness. When they took him away, people said a lion had got up and left the land ...”
She was quiet for a while, looking through the window at the night. She felt magisterial ease, a gradual deflating, like a giant sponge wringing itself dry of what it had gathered in a lifetime. Emotions would come to her this night, and sweeping grief, but just now she saw how spoken words—this orderly, almost fairy-tale accounting—gave her access to a world that had remained invisible, therefore not real, until the telling. She looked at her granddaughters, and they had changed somewhat, in their faces sorrow, wide-eyed calm. Their bodies now were flung in attitudes of listening. She went on.
“. . . I began to live then in a state of exemption. I stood apart from time. And I lived with guilt, cursing God, damning him for my perfect health. You see, I had wanted the sickness, craved ma‘i Pākē so I could ever be with Duke. Alone, running, living like a wild thing, I felt life winding up inside me in ever-increasing circles of dread. I was a woman without currency, stealing food from poor farmers, killing their chickens with bare hands. I stole their tools, entering each day with an ax. Then one day under a hau tree, a shawl of yellow petals settled on my shoulders like soft lightning. In my womb, something stirred, Duke’s child . . .
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