“She was the smart one, could have been anything.” Pono shook her head sadly.
“She wanted me to be a surgeon, not a vet,” Jess said. “She felt you were only a doctor if you dug down into the heart and liver, the real mortality of a human. Maybe I passed that on to Anna.”
“I would have chosen .. . pathology,” Pono said.
Duke teased her affectionately. “So you could raise the dead.”
Jess tried to imagine her grandmother, kahuna of fluorescent corridors, charioting the high of sleep deprivation, wearing surgical scrubs, a beeper at her waist. She pictured her holding up a human brain, the delicate filigree and convolutions of a curdlike mass floating in her open palm. She pictured Pono talking that brain back to life outside its diseased body, jumpstarting the heart of another body that needed a healthy brain. She could do such things. Jess had seen her raise a field-worker with a crushed skull, transfer birth pains from wife to husband. She had cured a cancered pancreas by concentrating on the woman’s urine. She had paralyzed a wife-beater by standing barefoot on his spit.
“Your life has been incredible enough,” Jess said. “And I don’t know the half of it.”
Pono’s expression turned cold, almost ferocious. “And never will.”
“This wahine.” Duke patted her knee. “Everything I know of her is only sometimes true! After sixty years I only know a part of her. That is shocking. And exciting.” He winked at Jess. “Remember everything she’s taught you, keiki. This woman is all that is superior.”
Sitting at her feet, Jess moved closer to Pono, playing with a tattered lauhala fan on Pono’s lap.
“That’s what Mother said when she sent me here each summer. ‘Pono will terrify you, but she will teach you how to keep from drowning.’” Suddenly she dropped her head. “She loved the sea! I never understood why she ended in the desert.”
Duke shook his head. “Sometimes, child, we die in metaphor.”
“My father loved her, but he never felt she was white enough. He used to lie, tell people she was only one-eighth Hawaiian. One day, in front of company I asked him what the other seven-eighths were. He made me leave the room. You see, he was panicking, she seemed to get darker as she got older ...”
“So will you,” Pono said. “The blood steps forth.”
Duke straightened in his chair, threw his shoulders back. “You’re also haole, Jess. Never forget that. You’re hybrids, all of you. You’re what the future is.”
“That future scares people. My daughter, Anna, for instance. She thinks of me as ‘part-dark’ as they say down south.” Jess shook her head, extremely sad. “Sometimes I wonder when love is too much? When is it not enough? I only know not loving leaves one poor. I gave her everything, trying to compensate for what she saw as my shortcoming. Or maybe, I was making up for what my mother didn’t, couldn’t, give—warmth, companionship.”
“Things I never gave her,” Pono said. She seemed to go into a trance. “She will come one day, your daughter, Anna. She will sit with you and ask about your blood, our history.”
Jess grabbed her round the knees. “Oh, Tūtū, did you see this in a dream? How do you know?”
“Common sense. Mothers are the last riddle, the worst horror, the only consolation.” Mama handing me a pouch of pearls, “Leave. Go out in the world! We fear you. Your kahuna powers.” Mama, I forgive you. I am loved, and whole.
Thinking of her daughter, Jess covered her eyes and wept a little. Duke stroked her head, knowing she was the one Pono worried over most. The one least sure, lacking the unsettling confidence, the obstinate drive of Vanya, the beauty and indefatigable vanity of Rachel. Yet he suspected Jess was the one with physical genius. In spite of her slender build, she was the strongest of them all, with the durability of a balanced weight. He imagined, if necessary, she could be cruel, alarmingly so, to protect what was precious to her. There was so much of Pono in this one, they seemed to meld together, both having the rusty scent of ocean about them.
“Listen to me, keiki,” he said. “Forget your daughter for a while. She will come in her time. Concentrate on yourself, for you have experienced upheaval and heartache, and changed your life round completely. You are retracing your mother’s life, walking in her footsteps. This takes great energy and koa. But you have been moving much too fast, leaving parts of yourself behind. In your daughter, your marriage, in this man you mentioned, Mars.”
Jess winced at his name. As if in response, Duke winced, rubbed his chest, as if something small had kicked him in the ribs.
“You must slow down, Jess, so that those parts of you may catch up. You must not brood, or your other selves will have no eagerness to join you. Look round, remember things you have forgotten. Names of flowers, birds. Learn new things. And when you have done that, shout out loud, ‘LOOK! I HAVE LEARNED SOMETHING I NEVER KNEW BEFORE!’ Remember the delight you felt as a child? This will make your other selves want to join you. It will make you whole again.”
“And,” Pono said, “you must spend more time in the sea. Eating from it, drinking from it. You have to let the sea know you are home so that it will begin to welcome you again. Seawater is still the best tonic, best cleanser. Three tall glasses every day. Once it is running in your veins, you will never drown, for you will have lost the fear of drowning. You will become the sea. One thing more, eat squid, plenty squid, good for muscle, brain. But no octopus, they are your cousins, very intelligent. And never, never shark.”
At another period in her life, Jess might have laughed. Now she had re-entered an ancient realm surrounded by, therefore empowered by, the sea. She would respect its laws, abide by its legends. She understood Pono was passing on to her a legacy, part of which was Hawaiian respect for myth.
She recalled one summer as a girl, hunting octopus with tough kids from down Kainali’u way. They wanted to show her and Vanya how to tear octopus brains out with her teeth. Jess had watched as a lure attracted an octopus who attached itself, slowly climbing her leg, gently clutching her, its suckers leaving small white circles on her skin. She remembered something childlike, human, in the desperation of those slender arms wrapping round her so tightly, as if asking for protection. Black eyes blinking steadily at her, Jess stared back, seeing such intelligence and intuition, her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t want to rip its brains out. She wanted to hug the thing, and take it home.
She had surfaced in shallow water with the octopus wrapped round her leg. Yipping and shouting, the toughies started swimming toward her, spear guns raised. Slowly and deliberately, Jess bared her slender skinning knife, waving it at them, threatening to slice their cheeks off. Vanya swam over, stood beside her, cursing the toughies as they dispersed down the beach, calling Jess pilau, hapa pupule, waving their spear guns like commandos. She and Vanya had stood in the shallows, stroking the octopus’s head like a puppy, calling it “dear thing,” stroking until its suckers slowly loosened. With one of its arms, it patted Jess’s leg repeatedly, almost affectionately, then floated off into the deep.
Now, Jess looked at her grandparents in the soft light of the room, and the room in the house and the house in the world in all the universe was liquid balm, a pool, and she had been dropped in the center.
“I am where I belong,” she said. “Here, where you are, your voices together, talking, arguing. It means my mother didn’t drop down from a star. It means no one was an orphan, that Tūtū had a life, a real life, all these years.” She paused. “Why don’t you two get married?”
Pono laughed so hard, her hair fell down from its pins. “I tried for years to snare him, give your mothers a name. He was too shamed. Afraid they would find out who he was. Now he wants to walk me down the aisle. Let him suffer!”
Duke shook his head. “She is my everlasting penance.”
Pono holds him at night between her thighs, still amazed at his passion, his drive, loving him for the parchment sketch that remains, faint rubbing of the lust that was. Later, after he has ejaculated, shudd
ering and sighing like a child, there is sleep, a tortured sleep, his staggered-whistle inhalations, then exhalations, long, slow knives.
Duke sat up wheezing, eyes bulging, for the third night in a row. Weeks back, a doctor had examined him, found his heartbeat alarming, and tried to admit him to the hospital. He refused.
“Promise me, Beloved. You won’t deliver me to them. I have died innumerably in institutions.”
Pono promised him. And one night she woke up with a start. In a dream she saw two corpses, two familiar faces. She sat all night, holding his hand, knowing way-finding time was drawing near. The next night she walked from room to room, weeping, touching the faces of her granddaughters, remembering the years she had examined them in sleep, looking for telltale signs, sly suppurations of ma‘i Pākē. She sat talking with Run Run all of one day, holding her while the old cook rocked herself and sobbed. One afternoon, Pono called Toru and walked him through the orchards, discussing coffee planting, fertilizing, picking, grading.
“You have always been my boy. Don’t let this go to dust.”
And she walked Jess up and down the beach, discussing her field-workers, their needs. One day she took Jess by the shoulders, looked her in the eye. “You will step into my shadow. You will fit.”
Jess stopped dead in her tracks.
“Yes. You. The true kanaka, struggling all these years to get back to your blood. Did you think I was blind?”
Jess shook her head. “I thought you merely tolerated me. I never thought you loved me.”
Pono brushed her words away, there wasn’t time. “Now you must help the others, keep this family intact. Rachel needs to find herself, a task to verify her life; she is stronger than she knows. And you must force discipline on Vanya. Her cause is good, but she must stay within the legal system, not become a she-dog war-slut, living underground. What will that accomplish? And she has been in sluthood for too many years.”
Jess stepped back, shock vibrating into fury. She stared at this woman who had scaled life with her teeth through sixty years of heartbreak, mutilation, loss. And yet. For sixty years she had not been alone. Someone in a sad, cursed place had pledged himself to her. Through more than half a century, someone had loved her, had lived his life for her. They had had forbidden times.
What does she know, Jess thought, of utter, total lovelessness? Of being faceless in the world? Of standing alone in middle age, totally exposed. She has had everything. We have had nothing.
In that moment Pono pulled herself up to her full, epic height. Not seeing her pain and terror, seeing her only as superior and smug, Jess lashed out at her.
“Sailors, lepers, opium, spies . . . with such a family history, how could we be anything but sluts?” She turned her back, walked away, and dove into a wave.
Those were her last words to Pono.
That night when there was nothing left, when Duke’s chest pain was so intense, he couldn’t lie down, couldn’t sit, Pono knew it was time. While the house slept, she wheeled him to the car, lifted him slowly and clumsily into the old Buick, covered him with blankets, and eased down the driveway. He seemed half conscious during the drive, leaning against her shoulder like a child. She drove on Māmalahoa Highway for a while, past Captain Cook, Kealakekua, Kainali’u, Hōlua-hoa, driving back through their past, life lived in reverse. Finally she turned onto Highway 19, heading north toward the Kohala Coast. An hour later, as they approached the port town of Kawaihae, Pono took a sharp left onto a barely visible dirt road.
Duke sat up, fully conscious, eerily alert, pointing to a huge temple on a grassy promontory hovering over them.
“Pu’ukohola!” He cried.
Pu’ukohola Heiau. One of the most sacred of all temples, place of worship for Kamehameha I, The Lonely One, greatest of all Hawaiian kings. Also sacrificial temple for his enemies. Halfway down the hill was a smaller temple, Mailikini where commoners—artisans and soldiers—worshiped in times of war. Both temples overlooked a large body of water, Shark Bay, which, out beyond the reef, emptied into the sea. It was said, in ancient times Kamehameha I, would race from the temple to the bay, swim out, and call up his ’aumākua manō, play and wrestle with them. Now the sacred bay was quiet, sharks dreaming in caves beneath the reef. Even Pu’ukohola temple was quiet, no sleepless gods about.
“Where are we going?” Duke asked, his voice harsh with pain.
Pono drove the car under kiawe trees, where she had instructed Toru to leave a big, handmade canoe. She pulled the wheelchair from the car, lifted Duke out with almost superhuman strength and settled him in the chair. Muscles straining, she pushed the Amigo through the sand, until water lapped Duke’s feet. Then she dragged the canoe from under trees out into the shallows.
He smiled, finally understanding. “Life has been full. Now we are going home.”
“Yes,” she said. “The way ancestors came. Crossing the same tracks that cannot be detected, but will be clear to those who know the way.”
He was soaked by the time she settled him in the canoe, a blanket wrapped round him. She flung her head back, looked at the stars, lips moving rapidly, then heaved the canoe farther out. When it was deep, when waves lapped her breasts, she climbed in and started paddling. And all the while she chanted, softly at first, then chanting into shouts that bounded back in echoes. Suddenly, flames leapt up from Pu’ukohola Heaiu, a jagged bolt of lightning streaked the sky, searing their faces, stunning them. For a while they lay unconscious.
In that time, Pono saw them waiting, beckoning to her. “Ming!” she cried out. “We are coming. Emma! Mina! Wait, my daughters. Wait!”
And in her crying out, dream-seeing visions of the future came: Rachel, sitting on tatami mats, dressed in somber gray kimono, instructing foreign-looking girls in the Japanese tea ceremony. Then, the sound of bombs across the islands, Vanya stumbling through jungles, hunted like prey.
Pono shouted, last-wishing for this headstrong daughter of her daughter. “Run, Vanya! Run for all your days!”
She woke chanting, voices from Pu’ukohola Heaiu chanting back. Fires from the temple turned the night to day. She rose, pointing to the outlines of the heads, ancient chieftains in a row, attendants carrying kahili, tabu sticks, images held aloft on long poles. The walls of the heaiu were now lined with living dieties. Kāhuna in white tapa cloth held their staffs out to Pono, loudly chanting prayers. Chiefs rose from their seats on the row of stones along the outside platform of the temple, wearing crested helmets, patterned cloaks of red and yellow feathers. Now kahuna chanted out her name, a sound that echoed all across the night.
Pono flung her arms out, chanting back, her hair a great cape floating about her.
“YES! I AM PONO! THIS IS MY HUSBAND DUKE WHO HAS SERVED YOU IN GREAT PAIN. WE ARE TIRED! WE ARE GOING HOME TO ‘AUMĀKUA. WHATEVER MANA YOU HAVE GIVEN ME WAS NOT ABUSED. I LIVED FAIRLY. MY HEART IS PURE!”
In that moment, the earth shuddered, huge waves stood up on their sides, the temple belched great flames, turning the sky a circus of exploding fireballs. Instantly, the dieties faded, disappeared, and there were only flames. Their canoe had been swept into deep waters and, turning to Duke, holding him, Pono saw the temple fires reflected in the golden, glowing eyes of niuhi, huge, white sacred sharks who ate only the flesh of kāhuna and those of royal blood. They swam about the boat in lazy, graceful circles.
“Beloved,” Pono said, “we are going to that deep, forever place. In eternal meditation, we will rock side by side, you and I, with our ‘aumākua. Now and then we will be touched by shafts of light which will be granddaughter-thoughts commemorating us. Through them our history will continue to grow, like hair upon the dead.”
“Pono,” he whispered, wrapping his tired arms round her waist, kissing her mouth, deeply, passionately. Then he took her face in both hands. “Think of it! There will be no time to rot.”
They lay back like lovers, waves washing over them. Then niuhi ghosted in. Golden eyes. And fins.
Nā Kaikamāhin
e o Moa‘e
* * *
Daughters of the Tradewinds
THEY FOUND RUN RUN SQUATTING in Pono’s room, staring at the huge four-poster bed, ominous for what it no longer contained. They couldn’t budge her, couldn’t make her speak.
“Where are Pono and Grandfather?” Vanya shook her almost viciously. “What’s wrong with you?”
Jess thought she’d had a stroke. Her eyes weren’t focusing. “Call Dr. Nori.” She knelt in front of Run Run, peered into her eyes and took her pulse.
“No need foah doctor,” Run Run whispered. “I like boiled peanut. Den maybe tell you what and what . . .”
Vanya brought her boiled peanuts in a bowl, then crossed her arms and sat impatient on the bed.
Run Run erupted, screaming at her. “Nevah yoah ‘ōkole touch no moah dat bed!”
She went back to her concentration on one peanut, worrying it with her tongue like a parrot. Still, she wouldn’t talk until they brought Toru. He entered the house quietly, looking neither left nor right. He climbed the stairs to Pono’s room, stood very still, staring at Run Run.
“Pono and Grandfather have been gone all morning.” Jess nodded toward Run Run. “She won’t talk. Just sits there.”
Toru knelt beside her, took her in his arms, whispering softly in Japanese. Softly, she answered.
He dropped his head, stifling a sob. “Gomen nasai! Gomen nasai!”
Run Run brushed her fingers through his hair and sighed. She motioned the others closer, until they were sitting on the floor around her. In the silence, they heard workers joking in the orchards down below.
“Basho-Gara” Run Run said. “Basho-Gara.”
“Jesus Christ, speak English,” Vanya cried. “Where are they?”
Toru sat up straight, looked at each of them. “It means . . . behavior in keeping with the circumstances. I think Pono and Grandfather Duke . . . are dead.”
Shark Dialogues Page 46