“. . . I birthed her in a bamboo grove, on grass thick and warm as just-baked loaves. I made my way back to Duke’s farm, but people were terrified of ma‘i Pākē. They knew it was his child, and stoned me. So I ran. I named that first child, Ming’s mother, Holo. For she was born running. For several years we lived on a sugar plantation. There, things were cut out of me, my soul. It was filthy work, and dangerous. Workers were trying to unionize, and some of them were killed. I thought Duke was dead by then. Most people with the sickness didn’t last. They had taken him to the colony on Moloka‘i, the place called Kalaupapa. A union organizer helped me trace him. Yes! He was alive ...”
She faltered, remembering. For a while her voice was stilled.
“. . . And so, I found him. And then, again, I lost him. I could not live at Kalaupapa. I was not ma‘i Pākē. I was immune. I moved to Honolulu, to Chinatown, sewing clothes for street girls and plantation workers. And, often as I could, I stowed away to Moloka‘i on the steamer, and stayed with Duke at Kalaupapa. The Depression of the thirties came, no one could afford new clothes . . .
“... I sat on street corners, telling people’s fortunes through my dreams. I was not kahuna, in that I didn’t know long sacred chants and rituals. But, yes, I had the gift of dream-seeing, prophesying. I had been born with mana. If I was kahuna, it was as kahuna na. Guardian of something. The secret I guarded was that of Duke, my life. Filipinos were my best customers, delicate, lonely men who lived on dreams. I hid Filipino strikers fighting for fair wages and conditions. You see, the ILWU had crossed the sea . . .”
She looked at Vanya. “You would have been proud of me.”
“. . . Years passed, there was another daughter, then another, and another. Duke gave the farm to me, but it had fallen down. Nothing could be grown without money and workers. Tang Pin lived there with his wife and son, overseeing no one, looking after it for me. Because I had been kind, Filipino strikers helped me rent a tiny house in Kalihi, so your mothers wouldn’t grow up near the whores and dens of Chinatown. The only decent work was at the cannery. It wasn’t so bad. Losing fingers was so common then it was almost like a Purple Heart. And it was income. And money came in from the Filipinos. They had no families, and loved my little girls, took care of them when I went to Kalaupapa . . .
“. . . I worked hard, providing for my daughters. Uniforms, Catholic school. But I was not a good mother. I made them afraid to even laugh in front of me. They walked on tiptoe through their lives. Then World War II, and everything, the islands, changed. Your mothers grew up fast. One day I was thirty-five. Then they dropped the Bomb, the war was over. And one by one, your mothers ran, married, disappeared. Who could blame them. I never showed them love . . . I had hardly touched them ...”
Pono hesitated, reached out her hand to Run Run who wept softly now.
“. . . One day a tsunami swept Run Run back into my life. She was struggling, trying to raise her grandson alone. Her son had died. The mother disappeared. Run Run saved me, saved what was left of me. She gave me something I had never known, friendship, love of another woman. We grew to be like sisters. One day we found you, Rachel, at my door. We brought you and Toru here, to the Big Island, and tried to make a go of the plantation. Those were the years! Planting, pruning, picking, meditating on improvements in the soil. But, you know, the land took hold of us the way it does . . .
“. . . Resurrecting coffee trees grown wild in the orchards. Throwing out the bad. Carrying little boxes of new coffee plants from nurseries, setting them in rows of holes in wet ground, making sure they were shaded by the sun. All stoop work, killing work, at night we couldn’t straighten up, walked round like little crones. We did it all ourselves those first years. Three, four years until new trees came into bearing. So many died. Drought, weeds, rats, disease . . .
“. . . And, oh! the picking season. That noon sun in Kona, like white fire and gray dust. And sap from coffee cherries sticky as resin, mean, it slit the skin of our fingers. And the winey, cherry pulp of the outer layer before you got to the bean, that too-sweet fruity smell that made you drunk and sick. And sweat, the grimey, ginger-colored sweat glued to your body. Some years the endless miles of coffee fields exhausted me. That line of vision, nothing but a nightmare green. Some years I prayed for death, it seemed a needed recreation. We didn’t die. We didn’t stop once in ten years . . .
“. .. And there was beauty! Clouds of coffee flowers like gardenia in spring, what you know as ‘Kona snow.’ The mist and rainy season. Then fields ripe with berries. Pickers coming in their trucks! And picking all night, torches lighting up cobwebs on coffee trees, dark shining, laughing faces. And, raking beans in sunlight, drying them on the hoshidana. And donkeys carrying burlap sacks of beans, braying like nightingales! And at night, the coffee mills glowing like hung jewels out on a hillside. Clackety old machines hulling the beans, grading, sorting. The excitement of wagons, trucks, horses all loaded up, on their way from mills to waterfront, shipping our beans to Honolulu! . . .
“. . . Year after year we labored, and then we prospered. Sometimes now, old as I am, I find myself out there, still picking. I look round at workers, Mexicans, Micronesians, Filipinos working for me, an old Hawaiian. And something flows through my heart for all those sweaty faces, the ones for whom stoop-work is still a way of life. I pay them better wages than anyone, provide health insurance for their families, send their kids to college. Yes, somehow, I learned to be kind. Sometimes I want to tell workers about the man who gave me this land. I don’t, of course. I can only till the soil, keeping it alive, keeping it a memorial to him . . .
“. . . And when I pass this land to you, I am passing you his legacy. Duke Kealoha. We shared a life, a magnificent tapestry made up of scraps. When you’re only allowed the scraps, life burns deep into your soul, every word, every curve of light you see, is a sacrament. He was my life. The father of your mothers. I broke all the laws, risked everything, health, prison, dodging submarine torpedoes going to him in the war. He was my destination. He is still my destination. Where I go each month . . .”
She fell silent, they were all silent, struck dumb and witless.
Then Jess looked up at her, confused. “Where you go . . . you mean his grave, at Kalaupapa? When did Grandfather die?”
Run Run rocked herself, sobbing loudly on the floor.
“Die?” Pono whispered. Then her voice grew strong. “Don’t you understand? He lives! He is who you are.”
Something issued from Rachel, a high-pitched scream. Beside her, Vanya trembled violently, covering her mouth with her hands.
Pono wept then. Shorn, naked of all pretense, she dropped her head and wept. “He lives!”
And they were a tribe, rich with sobs, great inhalations, a turning in the blood. They stood, slowly streaming forward, each and each. Hearing them, she raised her hands before her face, as if they were coming to hit her. And they bent forward, gathering her up, she who was so broken, and so daring, gathering in a rush of limbs.
Kupuna Kāne
* * *
Grandfather
HE SAT ON THE OLD DANCE PAVILION now cracked and weather-mauled with years, behind him mist-shrouded jungle, great humpbacked cliffs that hid him from the world. Slowly he whirred round and round in his Amigo, so the seabeachjunglecliff became a lazy blur. When he stopped whirling, he faced the cemetery, miles of headstones shimmering in sun, the warriors of Kalaupapa.
He shook his head, clicking off his small, transistor radio. Newscasts of Pearl Harbor’s fiftieth anniversary ceremonies had brought back memories of the war years, patients volunteering for all-night watch up on the cliffs, nerves thrilling, hearts jackhammering as they searched with binoculars for surfacing Japanese subs, enemy planes landing on the beaches. And they had sacrificed: Food rationed, gasoline, even medical supplies. Clothes made from rags, tobacco from ti leaves. Those with fingers sat all day, rolling bandages which were then fumigated and shipped to hospitals. Those with eyes collected tin and scrap
s. But all in all, World War II had not come to Kalaupapa, as if the enemy knew better.
Then, soldiers coming home from war, parades, families wreathing them in lei. These were things the patients of Kalaupapa had to imagine. Maybe, some of them said, the whole war had been imagined! Nonetheless, they celebrated V-J Day, lū‘au, church choirs singing, and victory dances here, on this pavilion, patients playing piano, ’uke and bass, and drums, high sweet notes of trumpet, tenor sax. Lipless, fingerless musicians improvising, playing valiantly off-key.
And O! the dancers dancing, some just shuffling mutilated feet, clutching a partner, denying the terror outside the moment. Soldier boys were coming home, but most folks here would never see their homes again. Their sickness would outlive them. Patients like Johnny, the Tango Eel, frail, self-possessed, hair slicked back like a movie star, cigarette dangling at an oblique angle to his elegant mustache. Legs long and slender, buttocks tight, he had moved like a whip across the floor. Even though he coughed blood, and they could hear his tissues tearing, women fought to partner him, to couple with his fierce, ecstatic hum.
And Lomi, whose face was massacred, cheeks eerie craters, mouth a gaping maw. But when she danced the hula!—movements of her hips and thighs, long arms undulating like courting water snakes—men moaned, eyes oily with desire. There were worse: some looking like old ruins, crumbling foundations gone to moss. Some just torsos left, some with limbs like giant vegetables.
But there was beauty, too! Balmy nights, Southern Cross mirrored on the ocean, the universe of stars, the songs, “Sweet Lorraine,” “Toot Toot Tootsie, Good-bye,” “The Sheik of Araby.” Wilhelmina Lono, propped up on canes, singing “I’ll Get By” like an angel. Crimson paper lanterns swinging dancers in and out of shadow. The scent of frangipani, and jasmine eau. Throat-scalding kiss of rum and Coca-Cola, the dazzle of an earring. Nights when wild deer drifted down from the jungle, noses black as truffles, ears pricked, eyes gleaming through bamboo.
There were nights Duke had moved round the floor with partners, authoritative and superb. But most nights he had sat and thought of Pono and, watching the crucible of dancers, sometimes it seemed to him as if the pavilion had become an airy, floating, Oriental tomb, wherein all the necessities for the afterlife had been laid out for the soon-departed: music, food, clothes, perfumes, even large pets. And they danced on, with grace and destination, as if speeding up their imminent departure.
Now he canted back his head, looked at the sky and thought about the long-lost past, and memory and truth, and how remembering was easier than believing. Memory was selective, weeding out horror. The horror of the very young who, mercifully, died young. Of men with faces like matinee idols expiring in galloping rot. And glamour girls whose families had sent them boxes of cosmetics. Girls who would die without profiles, noses gone, and chins. Thousands, so many thousands, each one horribly unique, as if individuated by mad sculptors, the idiosyncratic limb, hand foreshortened into knuckles, blasted feet, elephantine earlobes. Flesh like suppurating ornaments, lipless smile, eye sockets like scorched fat.
Street girls and debutantes and matrons. Teachers and beachboys and farmers. Beggars and the very rich. Some expiring swiftly. Others, who knew why? lasting twenty, forty, even sixty, seventy years. The decades weighed on them. Some patients had been intellectuals, knowing Greek and Latin. Some were students of Chopin, Brahms, playing their records over and over, listening, listening and weeping, because Art could enrich but not cure. Could not return them to the world of normal humans.
And yet, we lived with dignity. Perhaps we lived more vividly than they.
Who could match the passion of KimChee, Hawaiian-Korean, who had long declared her love for Duke. Dancing with him, she felt his chest, his arms, knew he was konakona.
“I hear you fathful to dat witch, Pono. But I wait for you, Duke, for when she pau wit’ you.”
Blind, eyes just empty, weeping sockets, a tattered wild woman, one hand always on her hip-holstered gun. Whether a man wanted her or not, KimChee would drag him out on the dance floor, her loafing bulk thrust against his frame, point her gun at him and rip his shirt off. (Who knew if it was loaded?) Dancing wasn’t the kick it was for others unless she could feel somebody chest to chest, feel their hips and knees knocking hers. Sometimes she grabbed a blind man, the two of them lurching and banging round like barrels in a ship’s hull. Or she’d find someone with a shriveled leg who’d pump her back and forth across the dance floor like wildly off-beat metronomes. KimChee didn’t care. What she loved was music, motion, the pumping of another heart.
There were patients who could only watch, limbs so hugely bloated and disfigured, they were barely ambulatory, had to be carted and wagoned to the pavilion. There they would sit or half lie, crutches and canes beside them, their breathing loud and raspy. But some nights! some nights the songs rinsed away a little of the pain, intoxicating them. They would half stand, propped against each other laughing, and they would sway, waving their canes and crutches, like elephants rocking the tusks of their dead.
Dancers would cheer them, and dance on, dancing with all their hearts, as if the pavilion were a palette on which they wrung out all the beauty left in them, all the colors of grief and desire and madness that stained, splashed down. And they danced. Until music ran into exhaustion and night washed away. And in the dimness of near-dawn, midst sweaty, shredded clothes and lost shoes, they’d scavenge looks, tilt their heads a little closer to each other, run their listening down each other’s breathing. Hoping. Hoping that this life had been a long, bad dream and they were finally awakening. Tenderly attentive, they touched their faces, and each other’s, deep longing in their mesh to heal, to be healed, to tumble perfect back into the world. But what they felt and heard was only fraying, shredding and decay. A sweetish odor in the flesh, a tearing in the lungs. Some would laugh, turn giddy at their own lush wreckage, seeing their reflections in their partners’ eyes.
While fatigued musicians packed away their songsheets, dancers’ voices quavered, turning staticky, the fevered rush to pull apart, lie down in rooms without mirrors and sob themselves to sleep. Lovers who had been coupling on the beach dragged home and drew their curtains, men exhausted with the rush of sperm. And in the next room, women douched, splashing out that sperm. Blood that had driven their thighs now drove the brain. No children of ma‘i Pākē, death was in the egg.
In the mid-1940s sulfone drugs brought a kind of cure for leprosy. But those already ravaged had no cure. Cratered faces, caved-in bodies, weak kidneys, lungs and hearts from years of medical experiments. Many chose to stay at Kalaupapa, having been too long outside the outside world. The staring gasps of strangers would be another kind of slaughter.
The orchestra shrank to a small band. And so, the band played on. Dance steps changed from Jitterbug to Cha-cha, then something painful called the Twist. Valiantly, they Cha-cha’ed, improvised a gentle hybrid called the Hula-Twist. Their numbers dwindled, large cracks began to mar the dance floor of the pavilion. Banyan roots erupted a whole comer of cement. The columns shifted slightly, seemed to list. And when they grew too old to dance, patients came to reminisce, sat beside the dance pavilion in their wheelchairs and laughed, remembering.
“. . . Jitterbug Thaddeus, dancing till his shoes squished like galoshes, full of sweat. Jesusmaryjoseph!”
“. . . And KimChee, dat blind, wild t’ing, aiming from da hip . . . Auwē! Life been long widdout dem.”
The pavilion encapsulated for them what they had been allowed to know of youth, and grace, and dreams. And some nights, even love, the animal warmth of someone holding them, breathing with them, and into them. Life seemed to gain, subtracting more and more—friends, health, even memory. Some old-timers forgot their friends, forgot the long-lost spangled nights of dancing. But now and then, something out there near the beach, a columned structure, drew their gaze. And they would smile, not quite remembering. And yet remembering. A sobbing clarinet. Sequins winking on a dress. Moonlight
on a young man moving like a matador. Couples spinning, aerial and haughty.
I’m the Sheik of Araby / Your love belongs to me / At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep . . .
Duke smiled, dropped his head against his chest, and dozed.
Her tension seemed to hold them together. When she was still, they froze. When she resumed motion, they seemed to breathe again. Mostly they gave her eager, frightened smiles, this woman, this majestic, loving, yet still intimidating mother of their mothers, who had, finally, rendered unto them their history.
She reached forward, tapped Toru’s shoulder. “You driving like you’re pupule.”
Toru slowed the old Buick, glanced round the car at Vanya beside him, Jess and Rachel in the back, on either side of Pono, their hands all joined to hers like little girls.
He grinned. “Hey, I feel real ikaika! Finally gonna be another man in the house!”
“He is an old man,” Pono said. “And what I am about to do may kill him. You should come with us, Toru. You’re like a grandson to both of us.”
Toru shook his head. “Not my place. I’ll be waiting with the foreman, make sure everything’s ready, workers clean, the orchards . ..”
Pono sighed as he wheeled onto Highway 19 for Keahole Airport. “The orchards . . . the land . . . yes! the land.” She looked round at the others, each woman dressed carefully as if for church. “I hope all I’ve told you in these two days is not in vain. Freedom depends on possession of land. I can’t impress that upon you enough.”
“But, you have,” Jess said quietly. “It all means something now. The house, the plantation ...”
“Now? Only now, because you suddenly have a flesh-and-blood kupuna kāne?” Pono shifted in her seat, facing Jess, her old-fashioned picture hat blocking out the light. “How is it, Jess? You know so much. And yet you are naive. You think land means only trees and soil.”
Shark Dialogues Page 41