The Whiteness of Bones

Susanna Moore is from Hawaii but now lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels
One Last Look
,
In the Cut
,
The Whiteness of Bones
,
Sleeping Beauties
, and
My Old Sweetheart
, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Moore is also the author of a nonfiction travel book,
I Myself Have Seen It
, published by the National Geographic Society.

I

It is still said, in those small towns on the island of Kaua‘i that have remained unchanged for years, that if the legendary
menehune
do not finish a task in one night’s work, they abandon it forever at dawn. Anthropologists tell us that this is because the
menehune
, the tiny men and women who lay hidden in the wet forests through the long, hot days, were afraid to return to the same good
taro
field or water ditch, night after night, lest they be caught and bound into servitude by the lazier, bigger, more ferocious Tahitians.

The
menehune
, who were the eleventh-century forebears of the more arrogant and more recent invaders from Tahiti, died out hundreds of years ago. They do not believe this in Waimea town. There are several sightings each year of
menehune
and many of the old people leave food out for them, papayas and
‘opihi
, and the yams that the
menehune
love so much. There are royal fish ponds and ancient roads and black lava-rock temple sites hidden all over the island and to the initiated, the children who are born there and live there, these locations are revered and kept secret from outsiders.

The irrigation ditches cut into the sides of the mountain
by the industrious
menehune
were eventually built over by the industrious white men who came long after them to plant the lovely sugar cane, to sell it and to ship it far away. In place of the
menehune
ditches, diligently made by hand of cut-and-dressed stone, there now were aqueducts, wooden half-barrels laid on their sides and elevated on rusty trestles, to rush the icy spring water down the mountainside to the fields.

This system of irrigation through flumes was simple, but effective. There were miles of flumes and, although they were difficult to reach and often hidden from view in thick stands of ‘
ohe ‘ohe
and
pili
grass, the children of the island used the flumes as water slides.

The location of certain especially fast and dangerous flumes was kept secret in families for generations and passed on in unquestioned solemnity. It was against the law to use the flumes as water slides, but since the land and the water were owned by fathers or mothers or cousins, punishment, if one were so careless as to be caught, was seldom very severe.

The children had been fluming all day in Makaweli. Mamie Clarke, twelve years old, sat on the front bumper of an old army jeep as Lily Shields, in the driver’s seat, let the heavy jeep coast recklessly back down the winding mountain road. Tosi, Lily’s adopted brother, who was Japanese, held his muddy feet on top of the strawberry guavas careening back and forth on the floorboard to keep them from rolling under the clutch pedal. Mamie jumped off at the bottom of the mountain, where the dirt track met the highway. She was covered with dust and the
pakalana
lei she was wearing when she started out had only a few crushed green flowers left on its string.

“Meeting tomorrow afternoon,” Lily yelled back into the
wind. Mamie held up her hand to show that she had heard. They belonged to a club.

Mamie walked home through the sugar cane. The fields had been planted by her father’s grandfather. Sugar grew tall and pale green up the soft slopes of the mountains behind her. It swayed and bent over her as she splashed through the water in the bottom of a shallow ditch. The red, silted water was cool. The old, crooning sound of the cane came to Mamie. The cane knew different songs. That day, Mamie recognized “Tell Me Why” by Neil Young.

It had not rained in three weeks and some of the cane, the growth farthest from water, had begun to turn brown at the roots. The dust made the inside of her nose dry and tight. She could see the Filipinos in their straw hats coming back to the cane fields from lunch in the workers’ camp.

The camp glinted suddenly as the sun struck a rippled tin roof. There was a flash of bright red, too, from the leggy poinsettias that poked along the peeling wood porches of the old camp houses. Giant ferns and allamanda pressed densely around the little ramshackle houses that were like the forts a child might build with odd pieces of wood and the corroded sheet metal of abandoned cars.

She took the dirt road that ran through the camp. Piles of rotting mangoes, black with drunken fruit flies, lay under the big trees. The branches drooped low, heavy with fruit. The spoiled mangoes smelled like sweet jam.

Mamie’s hair was cut very short. Despite her boyish head, her arms and back and neck had a tender, lithe refinement. She moved with the easy grace of a child who has been brought up under the sky. In the bright sunlight, her eyes seemed as if they were yellow, but inside her father’s palm grove, in the shade, her eyes were brown. Her skin was the color of homemade taffy.

It was much cooler in the grove. Another song was serenaded there, “Waimanalo Blues,” as the rushing, rustling branches creaked and groaned above her. She picked up two coconuts, two cents, and carried one under each arm.

The palm grove had been planted by the Chiefess Deborah whose land it once was, before she removed herself and her large retinue to the more convivial, more temperate, climate on the banks of the Wailua River. Long-horned cattle brought in sailing ships by Captain Vancouver once grazed in the palm grove. There were more than five hundred trees, and generations of workers had eaten the milky meat, plaited rope from the hemp, carved bowls from the shells, and woven prized floor mats from the green, sharp-edged fronds. Now McCully Clarke paid his children a penny a coconut to collect them. The Chiefess, when she abandoned the Waimea plantation, had tired of the heat and the muddy water. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds and ten young men were needed to carry her litter to the little dock. She took the long-horned cattle with her.