I open my arms to him. “It’s going to be okay,” I say. “It’s just a storm, it blows in and out like breath, yeah, and then it’s gone.”
He nods and comes to me for a hug. He’s tall for seven years old.
There’s a sudden loud crash in the yard and I hurry to the window. It could be Daniel’s bicycle, or a chair left out, or a fallen tree limb. I hope and pray it isn’t the mango tree and already grieve at the thought. I can taste the succulent fruit on the tip of my tongue. I can’t see anything outside in the dark and driving rain. Something suddenly hits the window hard and I jump back awkwardly, as if I’ve been pushed. And just as quickly, Daniel is there, arms around my waist. “It’s just the wind,” I say, thankful the window hasn’t broken.
The wind howls painfully and the rain falls in torrents, as if all the gods are crying at once. Beyond Hilo town I imagine the roar of the ocean waves pounding furiously into Hilo Bay, flooding the roadway and railroad tracks, stealing tethered boats from the wharf, and thrusting them out to sea. As with so many other storms, we’ll wake up to a mess—severed branches like torn limbs, roof shingles, siding, and unrecognizable ocean debris littering the flooded streets and shops and leaving muddy pools everywhere. In the end, I know it doesn’t matter as long as no one is hurt.
I take the lamp and sit down on the sofa with Daniel. He snuggles up to me and I try to read to him, but the storm wins again by drowning out my voice. I stroke Daniel’s hair, rub his back, and feel him finally relaxing in my lap when we’re startled by something just beyond the noise of the storm, a thud, thud, thud that makes Daniel quickly sit up and listen. It takes another moment before we both realize that someone is pounding on the front door.
“There’s someone—”
“Don’t open it, don’t open it,” Daniel says, a small plea. He pulls at my arm, frightened all over again.
I think of the knife that was in the drawer of my bedside table, the one Franklin left for our protection now gone. “It’s all right,” I say, pulling Daniel closer. Even if it isn’t, even if I’m frightened too, even if my first thoughts are: Where is Franklin? Where has he been the past year? Where is he when we need him the most?
I open the door slowly, but it’s snatched from my hand by the wind and slams against the wall as if the storm itself has entered the house. The wind and rain whip into the living room. Then, as if carried in by both, Koji rushes through the doorway and shoves the door closed behind him. I can’t believe he’s standing there looking like a crazy man, drenched and muddy in an old raincoat and hat. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life. And there’s something more that has dashed in with the storm: it’s the first time since Franklin has left that I’ve felt a stirring in me beyond anything more than just gratitude. I shake the thought away.
“Uncle Koji!” Daniel shouts, and runs to him.
“Careful, careful,” Koji says, “You’ll get wet and muddy, yeah.”
“How did you get here?” I ask.
He takes off his boots and raincoat and drops them by the door, but not before he pulls a brown box out of his coat pocket.
“I have my ways,” he says. “Wanted to make sure the house was still standing. Big storm, yeah?” He looks down at Daniel. “I know you’re taking good care of your mom, but sometimes it’s good to have two men watching over things.”
Daniel nods. He relaxes into Koji’s hug.
I can’t help but smile. “Let me get you a towel,” I say. “Don’t want you getting sick on our account.” From the moment Koji steps into the house, it’s as if all of our fears have left.
I return to see him handing the box to Daniel.
“What is it?” Daniel asks.
“You won’t know until you open it, eh.”
Daniel looks at me and I nod. Rain continues to thunder down, but my little boy no longer seems to notice. He opens the box to find a metal railroad engine that looks just like the ones that rattle through the Hilo train station, the ones he’s loved since he was a toddler.
He holds it up for me to see. “It’s an engine,” he says. Marveling, he inspects its intricacies, the shiny black paint, the smokestack, the electric lamp, and the red cowcatcher on the front.
“Not just any train,” Koji says. “It’s a Lionel number five steam engine. There are thirteen in the set, and I thought you might like to start collecting. We’ll get you some track, yeah. One day you’ll have them all.”
“What do you say?” I remind my son, raising my voice above the noise of the storm. I look up and catch Koji’s eyes before glancing shyly away.
“Thank you,” Daniel says. Across his face blooms a big smile that I haven’t seen since his father left.
As Koji explains to Daniel how the engine runs I can feel the darkness lift, while outside, the storm continues to howl and rage.
Carrying On
November 23–25, 1935
9
Sanctuary
The trade winds had stopped for two days after the eruption, leaving a hazy gray curtain of volcanic fog hanging across Hilo. The air stewed with heat, and everything simmered in shadows. Nori kept the market open, knowing many of the regulars would still be scurrying through the veiled daylight, bandanas tied over their mouths and noses like bandits as they made their way to the market for companionship and the latest news.
Over the years the market had provided a place not only for Nori’s Saturday afternoon game of hearts with the Hilo Aunties, but also for the old-timers to play cards and dominoes every day in the yard out back, reminiscing about the biggest fish they had ever caught, or the prettiest girl they’d ever courted, until it was time for them to head back home. Nori always made sure to have a fresh pot of coffee, guava juice, and bowls of rice crackers available for them. She’d lost track of how many times their wives had thanked her for giving them a place to congregate, keeping them out of the house. Nori knew it was just as much for her own sake. Since Samuel had retired from fishing after a back injury a couple of years ago, he spent a considerable amount of time out in the yard with the old-timers and out of her way. She had seen Samuel more in the past two years than in all the years they’d been married.
Now that Samuel was retired, she still worried about Wilson and Mano going out to sea every morning. Nori held back her fears and concerns when both of her sons followed their father into the family business. It only proved that the Okawa blood was stronger than hers. Even the eruption hadn’t stopped them.
“With all the rumbling from Loa, the fish will be scared right into our nets, yeah,” Mano said, making light of her fears.
But Nori was always waiting, waiting for when the ocean would rise or the island would rumble with fire and split open, taking everyone she loved from her.
* * *
By the third morning of the eruption Nori was relieved to see the sky had cleared. Overnight, the winds had blown the volcanic fog west, toward the other side of the island. As soon as the lunch rush was over, Nori left Jelly to watch the market and hurried to visit her old friend Leia, and her mother, Mama Natua.
Outside, the sun was warm and the smell of smoke and sulfur lingered. The streets were crowded again, groups of men smoking and playing cards on the sidewalk, hoping to get work down on the docks if they waited long enough. Nori hurried through the crowds and walked up Ponahawai Street toward the Natua house. She usually visited eighty-three-year-old Mama once a week, bringing her the salty dried plums she liked to suck on, but missed seeing her last week because of the eruption.
Today nothing could keep her away.
When Nori was young, she liked to pretend Mama was her real mother. Her feelings hadn’t changed over the years; Mama would always be special to her, loving and no-nonsense, the woman who had taught her what family meant. From the time Nori was six years old, slight and dark-eyed, a mix of Japanese and Portuguese, Nori knew by the tone of her father’s or mother’s voice if a fight was coming, the sharp sting of ti root alcohol souring the air, fo
llowed by that rising pitch that made her stop whatever she was doing and listen, waiting for the waves to come crashing to shore. “Not picking one more damn pineapple,” her mother started, followed by glass shattering on the floor or against a wall. As their voices grew louder, Nori would quickly climb out her bedroom window, or slip out the back door and hurry along the road to Mama Natua’s house, the small cluttered bungalow with a screened-in front porch to keep the mosquitoes away. Nori had spent much of her childhood in and out of the Natua house, playing with Leia and her younger sister, Noelani, and staying overnight when her drunk and volatile parents had a particularly bad fight and the hitting began.
Nori slowed down when she saw the sagging roof of her paint-stripped, childhood house, black wattle and barbwire weeds swallowing it up whole. Her muscles tensed and her stomach churned like that young girl again in no hurry to get home, black and blue blotches peppering her arms and legs like dark clouds. Her mother liked to pinch and push, slap and shove, while her father sat, too drunk to stand. Going home every day meant becoming invisible to them and staying out of the way, and it meant not being able to see Mariko until the next morning at school. Mariko had been her best friend, the keeper of all her secrets from elementary school until her death, while Mama had been her home. Nori caught her breath and shook away the sad memories. Her parents were dead now, the road to the Natua house the last thread tied to her childhood, and with it, Mama Natua, whose mind and body were fading.
* * *
Nori found Leia in the kitchen, a half-strung lei hanging from her arm. Tall and amicable, Leia had a quiet strength most missed but Nori held dear. Hadn’t she been the older sister who always protected her? She was a younger version of Mama, a nurturer, and had inherited her lei stringing skills. Mama Natua was once celebrated as the best lei maker in Hilo town, creating beautiful garlands from the island’s natural bounty, and was well known for weaving traditional open-ended ti leaf leis coveted by hula dancers from all the islands. The locals always joked that “Mama Natua could make a beautiful lei made out of tin cans!” Nori loved watching Mama Natua’s hands in constant motion, while the Natua porch and kitchen always resembled the outdoors—baskets of flowers, ti leaves, fern fronds, seashells, even seeds piled high on the table—the air thick with sea salt, or smelling sweetly of everything from pine to pikake when Nori walked in, her bare feet sliding across traces of sand on the wood floor. It was no different now.
“How is she doing?” Nori asked.
“She has no idea Mauna Loa has erupted,” Leia answered.
“Better that way, yeah.”
Leia nodded, and peeked into the basket Nori carried to see a banana bread and ono butter mochi. “Thank you for this,” she said, and led Nori into Mama’s dark, warm bedroom, which smelled stale and medicinal. “Lately, she doesn’t like the room too bright,” Leia whispered.
Nori nodded. When her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw white-haired Mama sitting in an old armchair.
Over the years, Mama had stubbornly refused to see a dentist or a medical doctor. She didn’t trust modern medicine. She believed that all the medicine she needed came from the plants that grew all around her. Nori hoped she might consider letting Daniel examine her since she’d known him since birth.
Once majestic, Mama was now a shrunken and wrinkled version of herself sitting in the chair. Her hands still moved in front of her as if she were stringing together the leis that had been worn by everyone from well-known hula dancers to the movie star Shirley Temple to Queen Lili’uokalani. It was believed that pure Hawaiian blood flowed through Mama’s veins too, even if it had been thinned by generations of outside marriages. She’d always been their closest connection to the old Hawaiian ways.
Mama Natua looked up. “You come home, Noelani?”
“Mama, it’s not Noelani. It’s Nori. You remember Nori,” Leia said.
Mama Natua looked from her daughter to Nori. “You change your hair, yeah?”
Nori instinctively touched the back of her hair, peppered with gray. “No, it’s the same, Mama.”
“Where your bangs?”
Nori smiled. “Mama, I haven’t had bangs since I was seven years old.”
Mama Natua watched her suspiciously. “I don’t know you,” she said, turning away.
“Of course you do, Mama,” Leia said. “It’s your favorite, Nori. Little Nori from up the street. You’ve known her all of her life.”
A look of bewilderment washed over Mama Natua’s face.
“Look what I brought you,” Nori said, hoping to bring her back. She took out the bag of salty dry plums. “I know it’s your favorite.” She opened the bag and put one in the palm of her hand.
“Nori such a smart girl, yeah,” Mama said, slipping the dry plum between her lips and sucking noisily on it. “Sometimes she looked so sad. Broke my heart.”
Nori looked at Leia.
“Good days and bad,” Leia said softly. “She comes and goes.”
“You know my younger daughter, Noelani? She’s away in Honolulu for secretarial school. First one in the family to leave the island, yeah,” the old woman said, as she sucked on the dry plum and smiled.
“Mama, that was a long time ago,” Leia explained. “Noelani’s home now and working at the Kailua Plantation. She’ll be by later to see you.”
“Why you cut your hair? Makes you look old,” Mama Natua said.
“Mama,” Leia pleaded.
“I won’t cut it so short next time,” Nori said, appeasing.
It didn’t matter what Mama said now, Nori thought. I am getting older. She would be forty-nine in a few months. Would she one day forget everyone and everything, her mind a blank canvas? Nori shook the thought away. Instead, she smiled, pulled a chair over, and sat down next to the woman who had saved her childhood. She glanced at a photo of Mama and Uncle Nestor by her bedside, taken just after they married, both so young and beautiful. Nori reached for Mama Natua’s hand, her fingers tracing the deep grooves along Mama’s open palm before she placed another dried plum in it.
Mama stared at her for a moment. “I know you,” she said, her eyes brightening.
10
Fire and Ice
Daniel stayed mostly indoors during the first two days of the eruption, getting reacquainted with his surroundings while the volcanic fog blanketed him in a sleepy haze that slowed time. As soon as the air cleared, Daniel was outside walking along the outskirts of downtown, quiet streets lined with small, single-story clapboard houses with rusted corrugated roofs and sun-bleached walls, both foreign and familiar at the same time.
He used to walk home this way every day from school, but now everything appeared much smaller than he remembered. His old high school and the baseball field looked faded and run-down, and the bleachers where he sat with Maile, his high school girlfriend, sagged in the distance. All those weekends spent with her at the beach or Wailuku River, along with Wilson, Mano, and other high school friends, smoking and drinking whatever could be pilfered from their parents without getting caught. Daniel tried not to think of Maile when he was in Chicago, but here, she was everywhere. She’d been the only girl for him back then. The last he’d heard from her was a card she’d sent after his mother passed away. She was living in Honolulu and engaged to be married. All at once, his mother was gone and so was Maile. He had no right to hope for anything from her, but he’d still felt grief-stricken.
Daniel picked up his pace. After so many years living in Chicago, his body still hummed with the traffic and noise bouncing off the tall buildings. A part of him had been apprehensive about returning to Hilo, anxious that he wouldn’t be able to adjust to the unhurried island quiet, only to arrive in the midst of a different kind of turmoil and chaos with Mauna Loa’s eruption. He was quickly reminded that the island was just as volatile and unpredictable as anything a big city could offer.
What Daniel didn’t miss about Chicago was the cold. He still felt the icy wind against his cheeks, chapped raw and red,
his fingers so cold he could barely get his key in the door. He had shivered through so many frigid winters dreaming of warm Hilo mornings that smelled sweetly of papaya and guava, pikake and ginger flowers. It was what he longed for most when he walked along the shore of Lake Michigan bundled up like an Eskimo during the long, dark winters that felt like a scentless, icy purgatory. His first winter there, he couldn’t imagine how people lived in such cold.
Instead, Daniel had returned to a gray veiled sky of smoke and ash and the scent of sulfur that was finally being carried away by the warm trade winds. Still, he felt calmer to be home, away from Chicago and the turbulence of the hospital, the knot in his stomach loosening. Daniel walked toward downtown, along ghostly streets that were once lined with new markets and small restaurants opened by the influx of workers coming for the plantation work.
Before leaving for his first year of college, he had walked down these very same streets, smelling the sweet aromas of baking bread topped with butter and sugar from the Villanueva Bakery and the rich, fragrant scent of pan de coco that wafted from the doorway of De La Rosa Cakes, making his mouth water. Back then, everyone from the plantation owners and workers to the missionary families and the locals shopped at the bakeries. The crowded streets came alive at night with a colorful mix of languages, foreign foods, and the rhythmic, pulsing music of Filipino bands playing in the growing number of clubs and bars that had opened. Now, six years after the stock market crashed, there were only the empty, run-down storefronts with their faded signs written in two languages, one English, the second either Japanese or Portuguese or Tagalog.
Daniel turned down the street toward Kalakaua Park, directly across from the Federal Building, still the biggest and sturdiest structure in Hilo, and the first built using reinforced concrete, back in 1917. It had been inspired by all the sugar and cattle wealth, a stately Renaissance Revival design that still appeared out of place. Auntie Nori always thought it was showy, just like the haoles who built it.
The Color of Air Page 4
