Come Sunday: A Novel (45 page)

“I think he just called our farm a ‘shithouse,’ ” I tell him.

“Look here, sir, I’m going to ask you kindly to leave. As of this minute, the property on which you stand is ours and you don’t want to be in the unfortunate position of trespassing,” orders Rhiaan.

The man with his cap turns to the other two men and snorts. When he faces Rhiaan again, his contempt is a hazard sign. “Listen, mister, when you start paying my salary, then you can tell me what to do. Until then, you can kindly
piss off
and let me do my job.” This brings titters from his two cohorts.

By now a brood of children have assembled on the
stoep
, Teacher Mavis pecking at them to stay together while Nomsa grins madly and waves at our shadows.

Whatever ground Rhiaan imagines he did not stand in the past is now bearing the full weight of his umbrage. “I’d say you are dangerously close to not having a job.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let’s not do this, Rhiaan,” I interrupt. Rhiaan glances at me while the man with the red cap mutters an instruction to his associate, who
flips out his cell phone and punches numbers. My brother knows, as he so often does, what I am thinking—this time that I do not want to sell the farm, that I cannot sanction the eviction of orphans any more than I can allow a concrete parking lot to replace the orchard, especially with its bushy boughs. To my questioning eyes, Rhiaan nods his consent:
Go for it!

When I look at the man with the cap, he snatches the phone from his colleague. I take a step closer to him. “What my brother is saying is, you don’t have a job, at least not this job.”

In response, he raises an index finger requesting a minute, but it is not the voice on the other end to which he must now pay attention.

“No,” I tell him, “you can’t have a minute. What you can have is two minutes; two minutes to get into your trucks and get the hell off this property before I call the police. And you can take that monstrous contraption parked on the road with you. There won’t be any digging over here. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

Cleo’s first word contained two distinctly different syllables:
tuhr-til
. We were at the pet store buying dog food when I took her over to the little glass tank on the floor with teeny baby turtles barely distinguishable from the rocks on which they were sitting. “Turtle, Cleo.” I pointed and she repeated the word back to me as clearly as the Queen of England might have done. I yelled across the store, past the ferret-looking cashier to Greg. “Honey! She said ‘turtle’!” He came rushing while Cleo stood with her index finger pushed against the glass, saying “turtle” over and over. She was only ten months old and we looked at each other for the thousandth time, with raised eyebrows and fly-catching mouths as if to say “Star.”

First words. They are recorded in baby books, are bragged about to parents who for the life of them cannot recall what your first word was, and are the subject of press releases sent to everyone no matter how remotely related. Those with pulpits may very well do what Greg did: announce it in church. Just after the congregation had hollered its lethargic “aloooo-ha” to the first-time visitors who had been bold enough to introduce themselves, Greg boomed, “This week, there is only one announcement not printed in your bulletin worth high-lighting.”

People looked up.

“Cleo said her first word yesterday.” While the little old ladies
cheered, he came down the center aisle to the pew where I was holding Cleo, picked her up, and carried her back to the chancel steps. He held out the jade turtle pendant Jenny always wore around her neck and asked, “Cleo, what’s this?” She peered at it, then at the congregation waiting for a pin to drop, then grabbed the microphone and took a big, slippery bite out of it, making the speakers crackle and everyone laugh. “Today,” he continued, “is Turtle Sunday. It is not on the liturgical calendar, but it’s a day of great import nonetheless. This day we thank God for all shelled creators, from the ones snapping in mud ditches beside the roadside in Ohio, to the great green sea beasts that inhabit our Hawaiian waters, to those that inspire babes to utter their first words.” On cue, the organ bashed out the opening bars of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and we all stood and sang as though all things were.

But what of last words? Not the ones we the surviving kin inscribe on gravestones or send off to the obit editor, but
theirs
. The ones who speak no more. Nobody came to ask me about Boss’s last words, which I like to think were more benedictory than blasphemous, that in his terminal wail (“Jesus!”) the summoned Lord had indeed rushed to meet him—gun unfired, sins forgiven, no harm done. Surely someone wanted to know—a mother, a brother, a girl waiting at home with his baby at her breast. And yet they never came to ask.

The subject of Cleo’s last words has been the same way—like a bone, at first buried for lean times, now possibly irrecoverable. If I concentrate hard enough I can still conjure Cleo’s voice, and slowly then will the edges of her chubby face emerge, and I am as sure as ever I could pick her out of a crowd. But just as she opens her mouth to speak, the edges blur and she fades away as swiftly as a shadow on an inclement day. I once thought we had never inquired about her last words because it was easier living with what each of our sainted memories conjured for us—parting words bestowing favor, as Isaac did on the wrong son. But now I know it is because last words require an act of community. Retrieving the buried treasure cannot be done alone. Someone has to help, someone who may be responsible for there being a dry bone in the first place.

On the knuckle of Ascension Day, surrounded by boxes in my hilltop
house where the echoes run freely, I am unable to bear the unknowing any longer.

THERESA AND HER CHILDREN are living now on the other side of the island with her sister, Loma, who I take to be answering the phone.

“May I speak to Theresa, please?”

“Who’s this?” she asks abruptly.

“It’s Abbe.”

A beat. “I don’t think you have anything more you need to say to my sister,” Loma hisses.

“Please, it’s important.”

As though she has not heard, she continues, “They are all ghosts now, okay?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Ghosts. They are gone: your daughter; Jakes. We talk now of the living.”

“Please,” I repeat, feeling the burn of defeat. “Please, let me talk to her; it won’t take a minute.”

After a hundred years go by, she relents. “She is almost a ghost herself, you know.”

When I first saw the Grand Canyon I was surprised there were places where anyone could walk up to its edge and look miles down into the deep crack in the earth without the security of railings. Where the drafts billow up heat and wild taunts of jumping. At great heights, the soles of my feet tingle as if they want to sprout roots and my lungs shrink as if the merest of sighs could disturb my balance. This is what I felt at the joist of the Grand Canyon and what I now feel as I clutch the phone and listen to the pat-pat-pat of Theresa’s feet carrying her body to the phone.

“Hello?”

“Theresa.”

And she says resignedly, “Hello, Abbe.”

“There’s something I want to talk about and I was hoping we could meet . . . It shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay,” she agrees. And it is as simple as that. “When?”

“I could come now, if that’s okay.”

She gives me the address and hangs up.

I spend fifteen minutes looking for a pair of shoes. In the three weeks I have been back Jenny has applied first-grade pedagogy to packing so that there is a system of boxes all color-coded and labeled-in A-is-for-apple letters. Still, it does not help me in the matter of last-minute necessities like shoes, or for that matter, guts. When I at last find a pair of flip-flops in a laundry basket along with the dustpan, an extra toilet roll, and the dog leash (I have my own system of packing too!), I am no nearer to being ready. Still, I head for the garage.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, I stare in my rearview mirror at the blank space where Cleo’s car seat used to be. It is a full five minutes before the urge to vomit passes. When I shift the gear into reverse, sweat trickles down the sides of my body though it is at least ten degrees from the midday high.

Theresa’s sister lives in Waimanalo, which means I have to take the highway over the Pali Mountains. Along the roadside there are a few makeshift memorials for those who did not make it all the way over, conspicuous with their gaudy bouquets. I slow down near one of them—“Aloha Kanani”—to catch a glimpse of the girl’s photo. The other cars ride up to my bumper and then surge ahead. One carries a face frowning its disapproval: Why don’t you drive, lady! I pull over. Surrounding Kanani’s face, smiling as though nobody’s had the heart to break the news to her, are words of farewell and pledge: “We will always remember you”; “The world will miss you”; “Till we meet again.” Nowhere to be found are Kanani’s last words to the world.

The house is on the old Waikupanaha Street, where the locals live and sell their produce in front of abandoned cars rusted into flowerpots. Not many
haoles
live in these parts, but as in Langa, they are frequently bused through in air-conditioned coaches for “a taste of old Hawaii-nei.” Just past the hand-painted sign advertising “apple-bananas” is the turn for Loma’s driveway, and as I approach the Hawaiian ranch house I notice half a dozen wild-haired children piled like puppies in a stained old bathtub in the middle of the front yard. Tess, at the top of
the heap, is laughing and brushing her long hair out from the corners of her mouth.

I pull up to the house and nobody is outside, just two half-starved mongrels too hot to bark. Before I get out, my mind announces what my loosening bowels already know: it is too late for second thoughts. For one horrible minute I think I will have to knock on their door just to use their toilet. Suddenly there is a thump against my door and I see little Tess shouting at me with excitement, “ABBE! ABBE! ABBE!”

I roll down the window and smile. “Hello, Tess.”

“Abbe! I remember you!”

“I remember you too.” Gone from her features is the poodle-cuteness of a preschooler, and in a glance I can see all the promise of her becoming.

“Did you come from your house?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you coming to my house?”

“Yes, I am; I have come to see your mom.”

“Is Cleo coming?”

She has forgotten, then remembered all at the same time, and I reach down out of the window to rub her head. “No, love, Cleo isn’t coming.”

She whisks around as she hears her mother call. “Go on in the house, Auntie Loma has haupia pie for you,” Theresa says, and Tess dashes off, but not before waving. “Bye-bye, Abbe.”

“She’s grown so much,” I tell Theresa as she approaches my window. But here is a woman who needs no reminding of how time is fashioning one daughter and not another.

“Yes, she has. Are you going to come in?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think I can. Would it be all right if we talk in the car?”

“Okay.” She shrugs and heads around to the passenger side as I stretch over to unlock the door. Her heavy frame eases into the seat.

“This may turn out to be a mistake,” I say, finding the equilibrium between words. “I haven’t rehearsed—no, that’s not true; I haven’t rehearsed as much as I would have liked.”

Theresa responds with a smile and we sit quietly side by side.

I look over at her. “I am sorry about Jakes.”

“Thank you,” she says politely.

“He was a good man. I should have said that at the funeral.”

“Yes, he was. And yes, you should have.”

My mouth has gone dry and I think about Kanani’s poster board. “The world will miss him.”

“Jenny told me what happened to you,” Theresa interjects, and I know she has seen the scar.

“Other than the heads of states in a few backwater nations, I think she told everyone.”