“Comes and goes. Now it’s on the neck.”
She looked closely at his neck, red and raw in small areas. “Simon, do you know your earlobe is swollen?”
“Not surprised.”
She sat down on the bed, speaking carefully. “Have you seen a doctor?”
“At least half a dozen.”
“What do they say?”
He hesitated. “Say it’s the ‘crud.’ Pills take care of it, somewhat.”
Something swept her, she wanted to be ill. “What do you mean .. . ‘crud’?”
He looked out the window, looked back at her. “Effects of Agent Orange. Carcinogen. We were overexposed in ’Nam, Cambodia. I told you I wasn’t much of a bargain: Health-wise I’m a liability.” He scratched again. “Thought the pills were taking. Now this silly rash has started up again.”
“Your sores, they look like what my grandfather had.”
“Right. Patches, bloating. I’ve seen leprosy amongst the Abos. This crud’s similar. Sometimes, hits internal organs, central nervous system. Vets go blind. Their kids are freaks, a son born without an anus.” He sighed. “Not to worry sweetheart, it’s not contagious.”
She reached up gingerly and touched his arm. “Simon, you have to see another doctor.”
“After our ‘sound-and-light’ show, I promise.”
She turned off the lamp, drew him to bed. In the silence, she could feel his vulnerability, almost hear it. She took him in her arms, wanting to hold him, to comfort him. At first he seemed shy, as if she would be disgusted with his flesh, newly patched, cells cantankerous. Then he relaxed, buried his head between her breasts, and slept.
In the deepest hour of night, he woke to her mouth on him, tongue skiing unbroken rhythmns, sparking plumes of shock and color in his brain. She sucked slowly, taking all of him, as much as she could, until her jawbone creaked. She lifted her head, their eyes met, dazed and blistered. Then, her mouth went diligently back to him, tuning him, turning his shoulders silvery with sweat until, like metal poured, he came. And coming, the wet slapping of his thighs against her cheeks, he sang out in an argot, sad and lonely, all his own.
While he snored softly, Vanya touched the rash on his neck and arms, thinking of her grandfather, Duke. Then, carefully, almost reverently, she wrapped her arms round Simon and held him in fatigued tenderness, a dawning wonderment.
Paukū Manawa
* * *
A Portion of Time
FILES MOONED SEDULOUSLY OVER HER FACE, her cheeks sticky with sap, arms itchy and aching. The basket belted round her waist sagged with the weight of coffee cherries. Jess felt the pressure like a twenty-pound fetus weighing on her groin. She knelt, unbuckling the basket, relieving the terrible strain on her back. A Filipino worker helped her pour the cherries into a large burlap sack, then she collapsed, hung her head between her legs.
“Good fun, eh?” The man laughed. “You do good job, boss-lady. Today fill hundred-pound sack all by yoah self, foah shoah!”
She groaned, studied her cracked fingers, filthy nails. Forty years of this. Tutu, how did you survive?
Rachel pushed through trees, emptied her own basket, collapsed beside her in the grass. Even in long-sleeved shirt, bandanna, sun hat, flies had gotten to her, and mosquitoes, welting her left cheek. Her face was mottled, nose red with too much sun. The air they breathed was thick with juice from coffee cherries that had in it the weight of the land, vicissitudes of the weather, even the dust and sweat of pickers. Dumb with fatigue, they gazed at the road ahead, loaders hoisting hundred-pound sacks of cherries onto flatbeds headed for the mills.
The mills themselves had always been a mystery to Jess, barn-like structures full of dust, men masked like bandits throwing sacks around. Then weeks back, Kona District had celebrated its Annual Coffee Festival—cherry-picking contests, beauty pageants, parades. The Kona Coffee Council paid tribute to Pono and her forty years in the business and afterwards, a young coffee grower, Lee Sugai, had invited Jess to tour his family’s mills. “Come,” he said. “See how we process your beans.”
Run Run took her aside. “You watch out dem Sugai folks! Want sweet-talk you, buy yoah land. Maybe dat sly son want marry you, den no pay foah yoah land!”
Jess laughed. “He’s already married, Run Run.”
She and Rachel visited Sugai’s cherry mill, seeing firsthand how coffee beans were processed. Transported from the fields, sacks of coffee cherries were poured into clacking pulping machines, which removed the red fruit skin. Then they were soaked in water, removing the fleshy mucilage. Beans were then rinsed, and sun-dried for several days, until their “parchment,” a thin, golden skin, was brittle, cracked, ready to be removed.
After drying, beans were transported to the Green Mill and sent through hullers removing the parchment, then polishing the jade-colored beans. Graded by size and shape, gravity-separated and density-graded by a vibrating air table, the green beans were then inspected for size, color, taste, and number of defects per pound. Finally, they were hand-sorted, ready to be roasted, and bagged.
“It’s not an easy business,” Lee Sugai explained. “But something is happening, young people are turning it around.”
Pure Kona coffee was now in demand, competing with the best French gourmet brands. The business was attracting entrepreneurs from the mainland, trying to edge out local growers.
“I’ll help you anyway I can,” Lee said. “Just, please, don’t sell your land to outsiders.” He stood looking out across the fields, breathing in the air. “We own a few hundred acres in California. You know, I can take it or leave it. It’s not the same, not ‘aina.”
He was the only third-generation coffee farmer on the island, his family having entered it eighty years ago. One of the few remaining coffee families who owned and operated their own land and mills, Lee and his father now competed successfully with big distributors like AMFAC. After graduate school, the son had moved to the mainland, spent six years as an aerospace engineer, but he missed the islands, missed the smells and climate of Kona. He came home, studied coffee processing and roasting, business and marketing, while still hand-picking cherries with his eighty-nine-year-old grandparents. Over the years the Sugais had succeeded in expanding their brand name to markets in the mainland United States, Europe, and Asia.
Jess suspected Lee was curious, perhaps in admiration of her, too. Like him she had left another life to come home to the land. He was gracious, his wife was attractive, they offered her their friendship and advice, which made Jess all the more determined to work the farm, keep it thriving. Still, she was fearful of so much responsibility, so many workers depending on her for income.
“Suppose there’s a drought? An earthquake? Suppose I lose my nerve!”
“I keep telling you you’re not alone,” Rachel assured her. “You’ve got me and Toru. We grew up in these orchards, remember? Even as kids, we’d get drunk on fermented coffee cherries, and workers would find us hanging in the trees. They taught us to smoke tobacco made from coffee leaves. And, often as I could, I’d follow Pono, a little shadow, touching every leaf she touched. This farm is my kumu, Jess. My origins, my home.”
“I thought your house in Kahala . . .”
“Hiro’s showplace, built to intimidate his enemies. I always wanted to be here.”
They trudged toward the big house, wiping their cheeks with rags.
“I used to think you were selfish, not wanting kids. Now I see you were busy raising Hiro.”
“In the beginning, I was his child. But then ... I suppose I always had that nurturing instinct, though I denied it. You have it, too. Ming did not. Vanya, I don’t know.”
“She loved her son.”
“But the responsibility of motherhood never engaged her. The boy was a stabilizer, a sedative. In infancy, he slowed her down. But, she was already flying across the Pacific, making the rounds of conferences, when he was still a child. He was alone too much. If Vanya had paid attention, he wouldn’t have been sw
imming to Kaho’olawe. He was trying to ape his mother, be committed to a cause.”
Jess shook her head. “She’s still a ricocheting arrow looking for a target. I wonder if she’s ever really loved.”
Rachel recalled the Samoan, Ta‘a Utu. “She would have married him. I always wondered why he cast her out.”
Jess remembered taking Vanya to Ta‘a Utu after her son died. She remembered lying in a hotel room, hearing them through a wall. “He didn’t cast her out, he was running for his life.”
“What can we do to save her, Jess? What does she need?”
“Something ...” She answered slowly, trying to understand fully the implication of what she said. “... that will shock her into kindness.”
Thousands of poinsettia bushes set the roads aflame, while Christmas lights blinked off and on across the island. Strapping locals side-stepped into traffic, Christmas trees roped across their backs, and seven grass-skirted Santas flew by in a fire truck, answering alarms. A TV station broadcast the icy, blue slopes of Mauna Kea, fourteen thousand feet up, where a giant, solitary snowman held a banner. “JOY TO DA WORLD ... YOU CAN READ DIS, YOAH PLANE TOO DAMN CLOSE!”
As Jess passed Kamagakai Market, one of her field-workers yelled, “’Ey, Boss-lady! Mele Kalikimaka!”
It was Christmas Eve. The sounds and odors swept her when she walked into the house. KCCN broadcasting Christmas carols played on old-time ’ukulele Run Run crooning over pans of laulau cats wearing silver bells batting hunks of squid Toru smelling wonderfully of horse grass cattle strumming his old Kamaka ’uke singing softly in falsetto in the oven pork simmering and splashing a turkey mummified with stuffing and from a pail fish smell of lomi salmon Ula whining and drooling the smell of melting chocolate roasting chestnuts mixed with smell of soy sauce tripe pig’s cheeks purple poi sitting morbidly in bowls and sheets of pastries shaped like little bladders duck-sauce oyster kimchi apple pie assaulted drunk her senses all askew Jess stepped outside the kitchen damp-earth smell of coconut-husk fires blowing up the hill.
They sat at dinner discussing fertilizing, pruning, rat control, a new kind of roaster for coffee beans.
Run Run waved her fork at them. “You folks don’ know real kine work, when evert’ing done by hand. Old days, Pono and me so poor, roasted beans in wok ...”
She paused, hearing Vanya’s car in the driveway. “Late for dinna’! Gonna’ knock dat wahine down.”
Her passage through the house was strange. No slamming doors, no yelling out in greeting. She entered the dining room quietly, almost stealthily, waiting until he caught up with her.
“This is Simon Weir. I asked him home to dinner.”
No one moved. No one seemed able.
Run Run stared, then flew to her feet. “Girl, why you come late Christmas Eve!” She pulled out a chair for Simon. “Come! Come! We got plenny. You got good appetite?” She started filling up a plate. “Vanya, introduce who and who.”
Toru abruptly stood and left the room. Run Run ignored him until Simon’s plate was full and conversation going, then she stormed into the kitchen.
“You. What you doin’?”
“Fuckin’ haole. Some kind nerve!”
“Get in dinin’ room.” She picked up the carving knife.
“Hell with you. I’m not sitting at the same table. Just because she panipani him, why we have to share our food.”
Run Run grabbed his arm, spun him around. “Why you care? What he done to you?”
“He’s haole. Pilaul”
She pushed him up against the wall. “Lissen me. You no moah do-nothin’ own-nothin’ kanaka. You a landowner now. Dis man come, you lele koke like one street Flip. Toru, you gonna change. Else I skin dat tongue.”
“What do you want? Want me kiss haole feet?”
She slapped his cheek, but gently. “I want you show hanohano manners. Act like gran’son of Pono. Like man wit’ land beneat’ his feet. Dis haole, what he own? He rich?”
“He’s nothing. He left Australia for her. Can you believe? Vanya, and a haole?”
“So he not’ing. Den treat him like you treat stray dog. Kind. Wit’ dignity, like yoah grandfat’er Duke. You gotta learn dis, boy, befoah I die.”
Jess studied Simon sideways. His directness, his blatant manliness, made eye contact a challenge. He seemed all wire and taut muscle, an almost vicious fastidiousness in his clipped nasal speech. Yet he was trying, she could see he was trying, everything in him struggling to relax. She wished Vanya would take his hand. She wished . . . she was blown out of her cloud of thought as the table exploded in laughter.
“Say again? Ooh, funny dat . . .” Run Run filled his plate to the brim a second time.
“Well, you see,” he explained, “we thought it was a drink. Kept ordering it in every bar. Bourbon Dwarf, mate. Give us a round of Bourbon Dwarfs. They kept serving us cups of java! Turns out, it’s a type of bloody coffee bean in Central America.”
“Where dat? . . . Central America?” she asked.
Simon drew an imaginary map for her.
“Plenny far from Austraya. What you doin’ dere?”
“Hmmm, buying livestock.” Changing the subject, he turned to Toru. “And, how does it feel to own a decent bit of land?”
Toru looked at Run Run. She stared him down. “I feel I deserve it. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
“Fair enough,” Simon said. “But you’re not Hawaiian. That’s who the land rightfully belongs to, doesn’t it?”
Something came over Toru, a confidence that left him calm. “I was born here, that makes me Hawaiian. I fought this country’s war. They didn’t ask me, they told me to. For fifteen years I’ve humped up north for a wealthy haole rancher. My broken bones, my blood, are in his soil. Know what I got to show for it? A horse that was a gift from Rachel. I don’t even own the shack I live in. You see, I deserve ten acres, because I killed for it. I slaved for it, in a system that wants to keep us slaves.”
Simon answered thoughtfully. “Can’t argue with that, mate. I know the drill by heart.”
Vanya shifted in her chair, and took his hand under the table. The gesture, so welcomed, touched Jess, and she smiled. Then something eclipsed her reaction, in fact, jolted her to her very bowels. As Simon talked, turning his head, she noticed his flushed, slightly swollen earlobe. Below it, small patch of whitish skin. As Run Run gouged the stomach of a trout enmeshed in seaweed, something in Jess cracked open like a rib.
They entered slowly, crowding the little Painted Church at Honau-nau for midnight mass. From somewhere they heard the sound of weeping. A young priest, Father Florin, welcomed everyone, then ma-halo’ed Krash Kiwaha for donating his time and heavy machinery clearing the cemetery of old guava and mango trees whose fruit kept splashing the tombstones. He explained that Hualani Amarino was crying because someone had “borrowed” her pahu hula and it was Christmas and would they give it back.
Then he raised his hands. The choir upstairs began Handel’s “Messiah” in Hawaiian, the aging showoff twins, Daisy and Pansy Freitas, still outsinging everyone. The congregation chimed in, modestly at first, people joining hands. Jess sang softly, feeling the vital current pass from hand to hand, Rachel on her right, Vanya on her left, beyond that, Run Run, Toru, even Simon Weir. She sang for Ming, Grandfather, Pono, feeling their breath, their pulse, within. She sang for her daughter, Anna, who didn’t need her, for her mother, Emma, dead of thirst, for Rachel’s mother lost so young. She sang, and singing, wept a little because it was Christmas, because the congregation was singing terribly off-key. Because she was not alone.
A memory closed in, Junior Girls Choir singing in Hawaiian, in this very church, Jess eleven, terrified. Pono outside on the grass, waving through a window, pulling out of Jess a light, a soaring, so that her voice, her singing brought people to their feet. She would always see Pono through that window, arms waving like a maestro, head inclined, inspiring her, giving her equilibrium.
Young Father Florin seemed to ha
ve fallen into a trance, eyes wide, his body collapsed in a chair. Jess suspected locals had given him too much Christmas ‘ōkolehao. The choir just sang on and on, “Joy to the World” carrying them to operatic heights, so that wooden columns supporting the balcony seemed to creak and sway. And in the singing congregation, dark faces shone with the candor of glass, people sitting, stood, and people standing moved into the aisles, arms outstretched toward their neighbors.
Candles along the walls cast people in giant shadows, so that in front of them, Jess saw her cousins thrown down in radiance, their lengthened shadows prodigious and bold. She felt the heat of bodies, vibrations of the pouring out of song, the dagger-tip point of the present moment, everything, in searing clarity. And in that warm, pulsating crowd, a chill came over her, a blueness brushed her bones.
In that moment, she stopped singing, even her breathing was stilled. She was suddenly swept with visions, clear as pictures on a screen. Rachel on a train moving through Malaysia.
Milimili Jess,
I am traveling up the peninsula toward Chiang Mai. It is beautiful and strange. The people tiny-boned like birds. They wave from their paddies. The smell of sewage everywhere, and jasmine. I drink bottled water. There is a rice-bird in the sun.
Then, Jess had another vision. Vanya, running through green fire.
‘A‘a Me Pāhoehoe
* * *
The Rough and the Smooth (Lava)
RADIO, TV BROADCASTS, ENERGIZED THEM hour after hour. For weeks now, there had been the call to march, demonstrate, join sit-ins, moratoriums, observing the Centennial of Queen Lili‘uokalani forced from her throne, the lands stolen from the people on January 17, 1893. Now, Christmas festivities were interrupted by crowds of Hawaiians already holding all-night vigils in front of the Royal Mausoleum in Honolulu. ‘Iolani Palace was swathed in black, and during Commemoration Week, the United States flag would be removed from the state capitol and all government buildings. Only the Hawaiian flag would fly.
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