The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  Daniel’s smiled turned serious. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Easy to get lost along the way,” he finally said.

  “But you found your way home, yeah.”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  It was all Nori needed to hear. “You’ll check on Mama then?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I’d love to see Mama Natua again.” He reached over the train tracks for a coconut tart.

  “Thank you.”

  “What else can you tell me about Mama’s health?” Daniel asked, biting into the tart.

  Nori sat back and began to tell him everything he needed to know.

  13

  The House Call

  Four days after the eruption, Daniel reached for the screen door and stepped into the Natua porch for the first time in more than a dozen years. The sweet scent of flowers and damp earth hung heavy in the air, bringing back a rush of childhood memories. He was happy to see that nothing had changed. The long wooden tabletop where Mama and Auntie Leia sat stringing their leis was laden with orchids, pikake, kukui nuts, shells, and ti leaves. He walked into the warm cluttered house and followed the voices to the kitchen, where Auntie Leia and Auntie Nori were there waiting for him.

  When Daniel was shown into Mama Natua’s room, he put down his brown leather medical bag, a gift from his mother when he graduated from medical school, and walked across the room to push the curtains apart, sunlight spilling into the dark and cramped space.

  “She likes it dark,” Auntie Leia said.

  “I’ll need the light,” he said, keeping his voice low and professional.

  Mama squinted at him, sizing him up from her armchair as he pulled a chair over and sat down in front of her. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “He’s Mariko’s boy,” Nori said. “Daniel’s a doctor now,” she added.

  Mama stared a moment longer. “You always liked to run around, didn’t you?” she said. “Even as a boy, yeah.”

  Daniel looked up at Auntie Leia. When Auntie Nori asked him to give Mama a checkup, she warned him that Mama could be difficult.

  “She’s confused, must think you’re someone else,” Auntie Leia said. “She’s been a handful all morning, yeah. Threw a tantrum, didn’t want to eat her sweetbread and mashed papaya.” Leia shook her head.

  Daniel smiled at Mama and asked both of his aunties to wait in the living room while he examined her. During his geriatrics rotation, he saw patients with senility at differing stages. He knew that the less distraction there was, the calmer the patient remained.

  “You call if she acts up, yeah,” Auntie Leia said as they walked out of the room.

  Mama’s gaze followed them.

  “Mama, it’s nice to see you again,” Daniel said, pulling back her attention.

  He looked her straight in the eyes, keeping her focus on him. When he held out his hand to her, Mama suddenly leaned forward in her armchair and looked closely at Daniel. She reached out to him and he took her hand in both of his, his fingers entwining her wrist, his thumb finding a strong pulse.

  “Always a charmer, yeah,” she said, pulling away. “Why did you come back that morning by the beach if you were going to leave again anyway?” she asked.

  “Mama, look at me. I’m Daniel Abe, Mariko’s son.” He tried to sort out what Mama was saying. “Mama, do you remember my mother, Mariko? We used to come and visit you when I was a boy. She always brought you the sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves that you liked.”

  Mama looked at him, her eyes searching his. “Why did you leave your family? I told Koji it wasn’t right. You should have gone home, eh,” she said, becoming more agitated.

  “Who should have gone home?” Daniel asked. But even as the words left his lips, the pieces came together and the realization hit him straight in the gut. She was talking about his father.

  “Always such a good-looking boy,” Mama Natua mumbled. “Too busy chasing trouble to know how lucky you were, yeah.”

  Daniel sat listening. He couldn’t be certain if Mama was talking about an incident that had really occurred, or if it was a confused memory from the past. Uncle Koji would have told him if his father had returned. Daniel wanted to probe further, but he needed Mama to calm down and focus so he could examine her as thoroughly as possible.

  Her gaze drifted away from him.

  Daniel had to pull her back. “Mama, do you remember when Wilson, Mano, and I were boys and down at the beach near Reeds Bay? It was early in the morning, just after the New Year, and you were collecting shells for your leis.” He looked directly into her eyes, reaching down into his bag and retrieving his stethoscope. “You knew right away we were up to no good,” he continued. “Wilson had gotten hold of a string of firecrackers and we had this grand plan of setting them off and scaring up some sand crabs.” He slowly placed the chest piece against the neckline of her muumuu, lowering it slowly as he talked, having captured her attention. “When you saw what we were up to, you came running down the beach and put an end to our pranks.”

  Mama Natua flashed him a smile.

  “Can you take a big breath for me? Breathe in and out?” he asked.

  Surprisingly, she did as he asked without putting up a fight.

  “You were up to no good, yeah,” Mama Natua repeated.

  “We were,” he said, and laughed. He took out a tongue depressor. “Can you open wide for me?”

  She did, her breath warm and sour.

  “You made Wilson give you our entire string of firecrackers. I thought he was going to actually cry that day,” Daniel said. “Do you remember what you gave him in return?”

  Mama remained quiet.

  Daniel watched her trying to remember. For the first time in months, he felt like a doctor again, a part of him fearful he’d lost his touch. His careful fingers felt the lymph nodes to each side of her neck, pressed along her side and down her spine, her face open and accepting as a child. He looked at her eyes, into each of her ears, quick and careful and efficient. Then he bent down and rummaged through an inside pocket of his bag, looking for something.

  “Shells, yeah!” Mama Natua yelled out, a child’s excitement in her voice.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “You gave him the shells you had collected.” He smiled. “And I kept this one.” He held up a seashell in his hand, no larger than a pikake bud, coral-colored with rows of soft whorls, collected that day on the beach. It had caught his eye and he picked it out of the pail that day and had held on to it ever since.

  Mama reached for it, her eyes lighting up with delight. “You’re not Franklin,” she said, her eyes focused on him.

  “No, I’m not Franklin. I’m Daniel,” he said. It was the first time in years he’d said his father’s name aloud.

  Mama smiled. “You were always a good boy,” she said.

  * * *

  Mama still needed blood tests and a more thorough exam that Daniel would have to arrange through Hilo Hospital. While Mama clearly suffered from senility, her vitals appeared stable for someone who had never seen a doctor in her eighty-three years. Daniel busily answered Auntie Leia’s and Auntie Nori’s questions about Mama’s health, keeping any questions about his father to himself for a little longer. After so many years, Daniel was surprised how just hearing the name Franklin still affected him, and how quickly his father became flesh and blood again.

  As he walked home, Daniel’s thoughts were filled with questions. He cut through an old neighborhood, streets lined with small, rickety houses crowded with roaming chickens, stray dogs; a goat eating from a neighbor’s toppled garbage. A bare-assed little boy clutching a coconut ran toward a house. If Mama had really seen his father and Uncle Koji together after he’d left them, when did he return? And why hadn’t his mother or Uncle Koji ever said anything? As he combed the past for answers, what became abundantly clear was how easily his mother and the entire community had erased all memories of his father from their lives. His mother had stopped speaking of him, while all the tangible obje
cts that belonged to him had slowly disappeared from the bungalow. She’d kept in a box for him a few family photos, a tarnished money clip, and an old slingshot his father had made out of manzanita, but there was little else.

  Just before he turned down the paved street that led back to the bungalow, Daniel remembered his father’s hunting knife. His mother had kept it in the drawer of her bedside table. She once told him his father had killed a wild turkey in the upcountry with the knife when he was a teenager.

  “It’s to keep us safe when Daddy’s away, yeah,” his mother had said. She let him hold it. “Careful, now,” she added. It was heavy and sharp and cool in his hand.

  His father had left the knife with them for their protection.

  Daniel remembered sneaking into her room a few times to play with it, pretending he was the one chasing down a wild turkey in the upcountry. After cutting his finger, he stopped. Over the years, he’d forgotten all about it.

  As soon as Daniel arrived home, hot and anxious, he went directly to his mother’s bedroom and pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, only to find it empty. Clouds had captured the sun, and a gray light suddenly washed over the room like sadness. Had he dreamed it all? Daniel sat down on his mother’s bed, looked around her spare room, and wondered what other secrets she had kept from him.

  14

  The House on the Hill

  It was late afternoon by the time Koji walked up the dirt road to his cottage from the train barn. At the top of the hill, he paused to wipe the sweat from his neck with a bandana and looked up at the darkening sky, looming gray and heavy. He turned when he heard footsteps to see Razor walking up the hill toward him.

  Koji smiled to see his old friend, the slight limp he inherited after breaking his leg as a boy more pronounced. Never fused back together right, Razor explained, though it had never slowed him down and was usually noticeable only when he was tired.

  “I was hoping to see you,” Koji said.

  “Here I am, yeah.” Razor stopped and looked toward Koji’s house. “Remember when we were teenagers cutting cane,” he said, “just dreaming, yeah, to be living in this house on the top of the hill?”

  Koji smiled. “Who would have thought, eh?”

  “You deserve it,” Razor added. “No one could cut cane like you.”

  “All I did was swing a knife.”

  Razor shook his head. “Took skill, skill I never had, eh.” He paused for a moment before adding, “Another harvest almost over.”

  Koji smiled. “Not a minute too soon, yeah.”

  “Still got Pele to deal with, eh.”

  They both looked toward the mountain. Mauna Loa was still erupting, with no signs of stopping. Puli Plantation was on the southern side of the volcano, too far away from the eruption to feel any real effects, though Koji detected hints of sulfur in the air.

  “Not the first time Pele showed her might,” Koji said.

  Razor nodded, then smiled. “We were just boys the first time, yeah. Remember? The ground kept shaking so they let us out of school. Thanked Pele all that afternoon, yeah.”

  Koji laughed at the memory. They had tried to catch a ride up closer to the eruption, but no one would take them. Instead, they spent the afternoon playing baseball against the Sakata boys until it was dark. By the next morning, Pele had quieted and they reluctantly returned to school.

  “This time’s different,” Razor said, “feel it in my bones. Pele’s not going away so easily. You wait and see, yeah.”

  Koji didn’t disagree. Life on the island could change in a heartbeat. “I’ve been thinking about staying with Nori and Samuel down in Hilo for a few days after the harvest, spend some time with Daniel.”

  His plan was to finish up the harvest in the next couple of weeks, do the last of the sugar train runs, and head down to Hilo to stay with Nori and Samuel during the lull. She’d asked him to stay with them several times after Mariko’s death, but he couldn’t bring himself to remain down in Hilo without her. Now, after two years, he needed a change of scenery. He also wanted to get to the bottom of what was bothering Daniel.

  “Sounds good, yeah,” Razor said, as if he knew what Koji was thinking. “It’s about time, eh.”

  Koji nodded. “Come in for a while?”

  “Nah,” Razor said, “just wanted to say hello. Gotta get back.”

  “See you soon, then,” he said.

  Razor smiled. “I’ll be around.”

  Koji watched his friend make his way back down the road and toward the cane fields before he headed back to his cottage.

  * * *

  Koji turned off the radio and finished cleaning up the kitchen. He looked around the small room, worn and scrubbed, an old table and two mismatched chairs taking up most of the floor space. On the counter were a coffeepot and a single mug. What Koji never told Razor was just how happy he was to have a place of his own after a lifetime of living with others. A few years after his family arrived from Japan, the plantation had prospered and the simple cane grass huts of their Kazoku Village were replaced by clapboard, tin-roofed houses, which Koji’s family shared with another family, eleven in all, living in the hot, cramped four rooms until his sister married and moved to the other side of the island, and his mother passed away. By then, his father had been dead for a lifetime, and Koji had been cutting cane for almost twenty years.

  * * *

  Koji had been just shy of his sixteenth birthday when he was given his first cane knife, a blunt-tipped machete that belonged to his father. It was three days after his father had accidentally cut the palm of his left hand, leaving the wound to fester and stink, until it was too late and had to be amputated, his heavily bandaged stump propped up on a pillow like an offering. As Koji stood in the hospital’s long, open ward, crowded with two rows of beds, his thoughts couldn’t stop circling around his father’s missing hand, how it must be as dark as a bruise with shriveled, claw-like fingers. Where was it? Had it been thrown back into the cane field waiting to be hauled away with the cane trash?

  “Pay attention out there,” his father snapped, startling Koji. “It only takes a moment for your life to change.”

  Koji began cutting cane that June. After years of watching others cut and stack the cane, he was one of them. He listened to the workers curse the mostly Portuguese lunas who lorded over them on their big horses, unable to pause and stand and take a breath without the luna’s whips raining down upon their backs. It didn’t matter that they were immigrants too; they were haoles and would automatically be given the higher-paid, better jobs on the plantation. Koji held the heavy knife in his hand and looked out at the tall, billowing cane, the red earth the color of his father’s dried blood. The first morning he worked beside two older Filipino men, Efren and Francisco, both good men who knew his father. Less than half an hour later, Koji was sweating and felt the solid weight of the long cane knife straining the muscles of his arm. He gripped the knife tighter and swung it over and over again.

  Every whack of the machete was a challenge.

  Every whack of the machete taunted him.

  He couldn’t disappoint his father.

  “Slow down, eh, or you’ll faint from the heat before you finish a row,” Efren warned him.

  Koji was already suffocating. Dressed in gloves and several layers of clothing to protect against the sharp cane leaves, they all wore straw hats against the sun, and bandanas tied over their mouths to keep out the dust. Koji soon sweated through both shirts and the jacket that clung heavily to his back like wet rags. By the end of the day, Koji could barely lift his left arm, and the palm of his hand burned and bled watery pus from his broken blisters. Only then did he realize how much his parents had endured every day since they arrived at Puli, especially his mother, who returned home from the fields filthy and exhausted every afternoon, stripped off her layers of clothing, and began to cook dinner for them. After dinner, she washed clothes, or sewed, or tended their garden before finally finding a moment to rest, while his f
ather went down to the river to drink with the other Japanese men. In the early hours of the morning it began all over again.

  Day after day, Koji gripped his father’s machete in his callus-hardened palm. It didn’t take long for him to find his rhythm among the older men. It soon became evident he was born for cane cutting, a strong, broad-shouldered boy with an easy swing that came naturally to him. Within months, Koji was noticed by the luna as a talented cutter, stacking hundreds of pounds of cane each day. Not long after, his water breaks grew longer while other lunas paused to nod his way. At the end of his first year, Koji stood hot and uncomfortable in the wood-paneled foyer of the plantation manager’s big house, clutching an envelope containing his first cash bonus for cutting the most cane by the end of the harvest.

  * * *

  Sixteen years ago, when Koji retired from cutting cane and began running the sugar train, he was given the sugar train cottage to live in. The house on the hill, Razor had always called it. One of the few things Koji had taken from the old house was his mother’s small Buddhist shrine, which now sat on his kitchen shelf above the coffeepot. Koji lit a thin stick of incense, watching the dark curl of smoke rise into the air, bringing with it the welcoming scent of agarwood and sandalwood, a reminder of his childhood in Japan, and growing up on the plantation. His mother used to light a stick of incense every morning, praying for the health of her family. The small bundle of incense she bought weekly at the plantation store had been her one extravagance. Once a year, when they were still young, she took Koji and his sister down to Hilo town, where they visited a Buddhist temple and lit incense in memory of their ancestors. “Never forget,” his mother said, bowing low, “we are here because of them.” Even as a boy, Koji remembered thinking, No, I’m here because of you and Father.

  His mother had stopped lighting incense after his father’s death. Her shrine sat empty and scentless in the corner of their bedroom for years. Koji wondered if his father had been embraced by their ancestors after he died, or did they feel cheated, too, just like his mother did? His father’s death came quietly one morning, two years after he’d lost his hand. When they returned home one afternoon from working in the fields, his mother thought his father was napping, only to discover his body stiff and lifeless. It was the first and only time he heard his mother scream, high-pitched and feral. All that had mattered to Koji back then was earning a man’s wage to help take care of his family. He wanted to make his father proud, but day after day, the more cane Koji cut, the farther his father drifted, cold and distant, sitting outside their cottage every morning as he watched them leave him behind.