The Whiteness of Bones (2 page)

Through the palm trees, Mamie could see her mother, Mary, bending in the flowers at the side of the plantation house. She was transplanting the delicate Tahitian gardenias she had brought from Hanalei the day before and watering them from a big, square tin that once held soy sauce.

The house, long and low, sat on a wide expanse of lawn between the Pacific Ocean and the palm grove. With its damp, brown sand, glittering with mica, the beach hemmed the land like a bejeweled lace ruffle on an old green gown. The rich iron silt from the Waimea River one mile to the east and the irrigation runoff from the cane fields made the ocean the opaque color of coffee with milk. It was not a beautiful beach, with its slow, small breakers, and the children rode their bikes through the bending cane to swim
instead in the dangerous white surf at Polihale. Several people drowned at Polihale each year, usually young servicemen in tight nylon bathing suits. Cheap hotels, the children called the suits. No ballroom.

The house had a peaked, corrugated-tin roof and long verandas running the length of both sides, so that a fresh trade wind blew through the cool, open rooms day and night. On the veranda facing the ocean were rocking chairs and big
hikie‘es
where guests would sleep at night. Leaning against the inside wall of the ocean veranda were canoe paddles made of
koa
wood, some of them one hundred years old. They were used whenever McCully and the boys took the outriggers to the reef, and during the months spent training for the canoe races. Some of the paddles had been won in races, and the dates of the victories were carved on their long, smooth handles: 1903, 1928, 1931, 1952, 1969, 1971, 1972.

The flowers that surrounded the house were white flowers. Mary had planted white ginger five and six plants deep under the bedroom windows so that you fell asleep and awoke to the heavy, narcotic smell of ginger. She had not planted them outside the dining room, as she knew that the odor would be too strong, so white oleander and spider lilies, only mildly scented, were allowed to grow there. The children could eat without getting flower-headaches. The faint smell of the deadly oleander always reminded Mamie of the afternoon that Hiroshi, the gardener, found a man, woman and two children lying dead in the sea grape. They were holding in their hands sticks of leaf-stripped oleander. Perfectly grilled hot dogs swayed on the tips of the sticks. There were several bites in each of the hot dogs, or so Gertrude, the maid, had whispered to Mamie. Gertrude’s boyfriend was a part-time policeman. That the dead people were tourists was evident immediately. Not much sympathy
was felt for the visitors from Denver, so stupid as to roast hot dogs on poisonous sticks. In Waimea town, the strange deaths only strengthened the islanders’ instinctive disapproval of outsiders.

Mary planted the white, trumpet-shaped datura that grew to fourteen feet along the grove veranda. It was another deadly plant, but the gardenia with its sturdy, shiny leaves did not seem to mind, for it grew happily alongside. Only the edge of the lawn, near the eucalyptus, was left unplanted, as Mary, after years of Hiroshi’s warnings, had finally admitted that only the sea grape and the creeping purple morning glory, clinging to the sand, were able to withstand the spray from the ocean.

Mary worked in her garden all day long. She was from Oklahoma. Mamie wondered if there were any flowers or trees in Oklahoma. Mary worked in the moonlight, too, especially when the thorny, night-blooming cereus, on its three-winged stem, was opening on the lava-rock walls. She corresponded with the Horticulture Department of the University of Hawaii and botanists from the mainland came to visit her. Mamie did not fully understand, or appreciate, perhaps, just what her mother did, as it seemed to Mamie that the difficult task was to keep things from growing. If you happened to spit guava seeds on the path, it was not uncommon to see a guava shoot sprouting there a few days later. Perhaps if Mary had shown as much interest in her daughter as she showed in her plants, Mamie would have been less confused.

As Mamie stepped onto the thick lawn, she saw Hiroshi sitting in one of the folds of the banyan tree, eating his lunch from an aluminum
bento
box. Ever since her father told her that in India entire families, entire villages, lived in enormous
banyans like the one in their garden, she had been particularly interested in the tree. She did not like the smell of the banyan, a smell of rotten fruit and sap-stained leaves, but she liked imagining Indians tucked into clefts in the branches, taking sodas from an icebox wedged into a bend of the trunk, tying their turbans to air roots when it was time to sleep. She dropped the coconuts outside the laundry door and went to sit with Hiroshi.

He had been with her mother and father since before Mamie was born. After World War I, he had come from Japan when his father, working as an indentured laborer in the cane fields, had finally saved enough money to send for his family. McCully’s father had recognized Hiroshi’s gift for growing things and had given him to McCully and Mary as a wedding present.

She sat next to Hiroshi in the shade. He was eating cold cone sushi,
agé
, and he handed Mamie the damp, wrinkled end of it, the part that resembled an old woman’s elbow. She ate it as he neatly repacked his box, folding the used waxed paper precisely into fourths, shaking out the last drops of
gen mai cha
from the bamboo thermos, burying in the hard dirt the big, hairy seed from the mango. The skin on his fingers was so calloused that it was cracked and split. He had a wispy white chinbeard that Mamie liked to comb. The tufts of hair were like thin ribbons of smoke. His face was very wrinkled from years of squinting in the bright sunlight.

Mamie watched him in adoration. He patted his lap. She slid over and sat on his legs. She noticed that someone, probably Orval Nalag from the camp, had scratched “I Fock Tiny” on the trunk of the banyan.

“We’re going to Koke‘e tomorrow. You coming?” Hiroshi
tucked Mamie’s thick brown hair behind her ears. His old fingers trembled.

“For plants?”

“She like move down more ginger.”

“No,” Mamie said. She felt very comfortable leaning back against Hiroshi. He, too, had an odd smell, like camphor wood and
kim chi
.

He rested his hands on the elastic waist of her faded red
palaka
shorts. The water in the bottom of the irrigation ditch had rinsed the red dirt from her feet, but a henna anklet of dried mud prettily encircled her brown calves.

“You got
chawan
hair,” he said, fondly stroking the back of her head.

“I don’t like
chawan
hair,” she said. She shook her head to push his hand away.
Chawan
hair was hair that had been cut under an inverted rice bowl. She could hear him chuckling behind her. She laughed, too.

He slid one of his old hands inside her faded shorts and moved it down inside her warm, white cotton underpants until it was resting softly on her labia.

She turned to look at him. She was not frightened of him. She was confused. There were tears in the wrinkles of his face. She took his big, hardened hand by the wrist and pulled it away from her. There was a little snap of the elastic waistband as both their hands came awkwardly out of the shorts. She placed his hand palm-down in the dirt.

She could see her mother, Mary, binding the straggling, willful shoots of a cape jasmine to a post of the veranda. Her younger sister, Claire, was standing on the veranda steps with her mongoose, Jimmy. She could hear Gertrude loudly singing a maudlin Filipino love song in the laundry room.

She lifted herself from Hiroshi’s bow legs. She walked slowly
across the lawn. She felt as though her body, by some mistake or accident, had passed out of her keeping. I did not have it very long, she thought.

She padded noiselessly through the cool forest of Norfolk pine, the dry brown needles cushioning the earth beneath the bare feet that used to belong to her, and went through the banana plantation, the banana leaves tattered and flapping, and the heavy, purple, inflorescent banana blossom hanging from its notched rope. The cone was like a part of the human body not meant to be exposed, a heart swinging on a spiny string of vertebrae or the pink tip of a dog’s penis emerging harmlessly from its sheath.

She followed the dirt road into the workers’ camp. The wooden houses were silent in the middle of the afternoon. There were big fishing nets thrown to dry on porch railings. A smell of brine and salt fish came from the nets. Rows of pale blue Japanese glass balls lined the rickety steps of the houses. A spindly papaya tree grew in each small, pretty yard. Mangy, happy dogs with protruding hip bones rushed out, yelping, to sniff her hands. She could smell fried Portuguese sausage. The bare legs and feet of Orval Nalag stuck out from under a two-tone, turquoise-and-white 1959 Chevrolet. The soles of his feet were blotted with motor oil. Coffee cans planted with pink bougainvillaea closely marked the neat boundary between Daldo Fortunato’s house and the house of his first cousin, Ray. These plantings in old oil drums and tin cans, the plants outgrowing the containers quickly, made her mother furious.

“Why can’t they plant them in the
ground?
” she would ask.

“Perhaps because it is not their ground,” McCully would answer quietly.

Mamie was looking for McCully.

She found him in his office at the sugar mill.

They walked slowly back through the camp. McCully had to stop only once to admire the sweet-smelling wooden weather vane of two men fighting with machetes that Daldo Fortunato, one of the mill foremen, had just finished carving. McCully patiently helped Daldo attach it with chicken wire to the top of Daldo’s aluminum mailbox. Then they all made small bows to Mrs. Nagata, standing on her tiny green lawn, more like a baby’s quilt than a lawn, watering her vanda orchids.

Mamie took McCully’s hand as they came nearer to the house. She was relieved to see that Mary was no longer on the veranda. McCully stopped at the edge of the garden. They both saw Hiroshi at the same time, still sitting in the fold of the banyan, smoking his stained ivory pipe, his torn straw hat in his lap. He looked as if he were waiting for them.

She watched from the screened window of her bedroom as McCully and Hiroshi stood under the banyan tree. McCully was much taller than Hiroshi, and from a distance it looked as if McCully were talking to a child. Hiroshi held his hat respectfully in both hands. They were not there long, McCully with his hand on Hiroshi’s rounded shoulder for a moment, nodding his head as he listened to the old man. Then McCully put his hands in the pockets of his baggy khaki pants and turned to stare at the calm brown sea and Hiroshi looked back at the house once. Looking for me, Mamie thought. “Looking for me, my sweet Hiroshi,” she said aloud, weeping. Her face burned with shame.

She knew that she would never see him again.

When Claire banged her way into the room, flinging open the screen door, and saw Mamie standing at the window, she said loudly, “Oh, no, don’t tell me you’ve been reading
The Constant Nymph
again!”

Mamie wiped her face quickly, the face that used to be her own, said yes, and vomited.

Mamie and Claire were accustomed to walking each late afternoon into Waimea to the Dairy Queen, where they would buy two enormous root beer floats and one cheese dog and carefully carry them back along the quiet two-lane highway to the palm grove. They would then untie the pacing Jimmy from an old gate and sit in the grove while the sun went down behind them. Some of the palms, planted to commemorate great events, long forgotten now, had been trained to grow crookedly and Claire liked to sit on an old tree that grew horizontally, its long fronds shading her like a parasol.

Mamie would read aloud. She tended to choose mysteries or suspense stories that would best lend themselves to serial reading. It was understood that the book was only to be read together in the grove, and even though Mamie was often tempted to read ahead on her own, she never cheated. She read from a Judge Dee mystery: “ ‘She was clad only in a transparent underrobe; her white, muscular legs hung down on to the floor. Her thin bare arms were flung out, her broken
eyes stared up at the ceiling. The left side of her throat was a mass of blood that was slowly spreading on the reed-matting of the bench. Fingermarks in blood stood out on her bony shoulders. Her heavily made-up, mask-like face, with its long nose and distorted mouth that showed a row of small sharp teeth, reminded the judge of the snout of a fox.’ ”