The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  The children were dressed in blue Kaua‘i work shirts, buttoned tightly at the wrist, and jeans. Tosi headed straight up into the mountains behind the plantation. He did not stop until they reached the first gate. Courtney and Brooke looked on curiously as Lily and Mamie jumped out and expertly jimmied the lock and opened the gate.

  “We’re not supposed to do this,” Claire said nonchalantly to the two girls.

  “Do what?” Courtney asked. “Open the gate like that?”

  “All of it,” Claire said. She yawned, having been up very late the night before with Gertrude.

  They passed through several more gates in the same way, and Courtney and Brooke were just beginning to enjoy the windy lawlessness when Tosi stopped the jeep with a lurch. Their heads jerked forward into the back of the seat.

  They were in a thick stand of mountain apple. The crimson-feathered ‘apapane in the high native forest above them were feeding on the nectar of the ‘ohi‘a lehua blossoms. At the edge of the trees, by an underground spring, a ditch fed fresh water into a flume. A long line of half-barrels, elevated on trestles, ran for miles down the side of the mountain. Narrow slats of wood were nailed at intervals across the top of the open flume.

  To the cousins’ amazement, Tosi and Lily and Claire slid down into the cold water. Lily Shields held the tin can in one hand as, shoulders hunched from the chill, she waded across the ditch to where the water poured into the barreled flume. She took a big breath and lowered herself deeper into the water. With her head just above the surface, she allowed her legs to float before her into the flume. She grabbed onto the first wood slat with her free hand to stop herself from being sucked down the flume by the fast fall of the water.

  “Last one down is a rotten egg,” she said and she let go of the slat and disappeared in a wake of water. By the time Courtney stepped tentatively to the edge of the ditch, Lily was halfway down Green Valley. Tosi and Claire waited in turn to shoot down the flume.

  Tosi said, “Mamie, you go last, behind them, just in case.”

  “Yes,” Mamie said to the girls, “it is very important that you get out in time. You’ll be going downhill very fast so when you see Claire pulling herself up through the slats, you must be ready to get out.”

  “Get out?” Brooke asked in dumb wonder.

  “You stick your arm up,” Tosi said. “Through the slats. And hold on.”

  Courtney started back through the grove of mountain apple trees. Mamie could see her disappearing through the tufted myrtle.

  “Did you tell her about Lorraine Mitsuda?” Claire asked Mamie angrily. Lorraine Mitsuda had not stopped herself in time and had been swept into the reservoir. She was mangled to death in the big pump. Benjie Furtado was there when they pulled out her legs, or so Gertrude said.

  “No, of course I didn’t.”

  “Who’s Louise Mitsuda?” Brooke asked.

  “I’m going,” Tosi said impatiently. As he hung from the slat with both hands, his pants filled with air and streamed out before him. Then, with a shout of happiness, he, too, disappeared.

  Claire, screaming with excitement, went down after him.

  Mamie looked at Brooke and then she took her hand and they walked back to the jeep together. Courtney was sitting in the jeep. They played Twenty Questions and ate tiny mountain apples until they saw Tosi, Lily and Claire hiking back up the steep dirt road.

  Their clothes were wet. Tosi carried the tin can. There was a tiny, watery trickle of blood on Tosi’s neck, behind his ear. Lily held her right wrist tenderly in front of her. Claire held long spears of yellow ginger and Mamie could smell the flowers long before they reached the jeep. Tosi put the can in the back and Brooke and Courtney helped wrap Claire and Lily in the towels. Brooke looked curiously into the tin can. She screamed with such terror and disgust that Lily forgot for a moment the intense pain in her wrist.

  In her rush to escape the horror of the can, Brooke overturned it and the black leeches inside flopped out onto the back seat.

  “They can’t stick to tin,” Claire said sympathetically. She gently plucked the leeches off the seat. “They’re for Jimmy.”

  “But where did you get them?” Courtney asked. She noticed a red welt on the top of Claire’s bare foot.

  “Where do you think?”

  “In the flume?”

  “This is why we wear clothes,” Claire said, her patience nearing its end.

  Courtney covered her mouth with her hand.

  “You barf and you’re walking home,” Claire said, dangling the last leech over Courtney’s head.

  The island children were without fear. They grew up in the mountains and in the water, without benefit of organized games or even toys—in the Clarke household there were only a couple of packs of greasy old playing cards and some clumsy but fast home-made skateboards—and they drew their inspiration and pleasure from the ocean and valleys around them.

  Lily Shields broke her wrist fluming that day. That is how she came to be able to write with her right foot, an accomplishment she later mysteriously claimed saved her from many awkward situations.

  Mamie had proved herself a kind friend, never regretting that she had remained behind with her stepcousins. She would go down the fast flumes many times in the years to come, and the sisters from the mainland, who had never before eaten the wild apples that tasted like roses, or seen black leeches, went back down the mountain with a gratifying sense of their own awakening courage.

  Claire and Mamie had been taken early to the dentist in Lihue, and the two tender girls, left on their own, decided to have a morning swim in the muddy waves in front of the house. Perhaps they wanted to test their daring and prove themselves to their new heroines. It was not necessary, for Claire and Mamie loved them, but it is possible that they did not know that.

  As they walked through the kitchen with their beach mats and nose plugs and plastic eye protectors for sunbathing, just some of the extensive equipment that fascinated Mamie and Claire, who would never have taken even a towel to the beach, a sleepy Gertrude said casually, “Watch out for da shock.”

  “Oh, we’re used to it,” said Courtney politely. “We go to camp in Maine.”

  Gertrude watched dreamily from the big kitchen window as the girls gingerly edged their way through the eucalyptus trees and wandered off, on tiptoe, down the beach.

  They were brought back to the house three hours later by two embarrassed Japanese fishermen who had been surfcasting off the Point and had had some trouble at first making out what the two babbling children were trying to tell them. The men had kindly carried them to the plantation house, reasoning soundly that there were not too many places in the area that would claim two convulsive white children.

  McCully was called from the mill office, the fishermen given lemonade in the kitchen, and Courtney and Brooke were put to bed and coaxed back to life with little sips of warm saké. McCully was able to learn, finally, after Dr. Shields came down in a rush from the Big House, that they had been attacked, although it is really too strong a word, by a school of baby hammerhead sharks. They had been nuzzled and butted in the muddy water by the nearly blind but curious sharks, and although the sharks would not have caused them grave injury, and would certainly never have eaten them, Sheridan Shields said that they had nearly died of fright.

  When Mamie and Claire ambled into the house, pleasantly absorbed with the thawing of their jaws, they were startled to find the two girls in bed, covered with blankets, Gertrude stroking the pale pink hands laid limply on top of the blankets like rabbit paws, and Mitsuya feeding the girls from bowls of miso soup.

  In the kitchen, McCully, who was rarely angry, asked a frightened and bewildered Gertrude why she had let the girls go into the water.

  “I told da kine, watch out for da shock. Watch out for da shock,” she said, “an da kine went anyway.”

  “They thought you meant the shock of the water, that it would be cold. They don’t speak English the way you do, Gertrude.”
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br />   “But, that’s what I say, da shock!” Gertrude did not understand why he was angry, and McCully knew that it was unfair to blame her. She was accustomed to the usually harmless independence of Mamie and Claire, and she had warned the two little girls in her fashion.

  Despite Claire and Mamie’s begging them to stay, and Mary’s promise of a trip to the caves at Ha‘ena, Courtney and Brooke left two days later, as soon as they regained the full use of their arms and legs. They would be several weeks early at their boarding school in Switzerland, but special arrangements had been made by Aunt Alice, and the school, though staffed only by building maintenance, would be delighted to see them again. After all, as their stepmother had explained to the headmistress, they had been “mauled by wild sharks.”

  Mamie and Claire were very sorry to see them leave. Mamie had been reading The Wilder Shores of Love aloud to them and Claire had even taught them how to catch crayfish in the flume reservoir (white bread balled up and wadded onto the end of a palm-frond spine). They felt for years after that they could have turned their stepcousins into barefoot Kaua‘i girls if they had only been given the chance.

  “Children recover quickly,” Mary said dryly to her daughters. She was trying to make them feel better. She allowed them to kiss her on the cheek. “I know,” she said.

  But she was hardly a good example and even Mamie knew better than that.

  It was not long after the incident with the sharks that Mary reminded McCully that it was time for Mamie to go to school in Honolulu. There probably was no connection between the “attack” on the two mainland girls and her reminder that Mamie be sent away, as it was a tradition in those families who lived on outer islands for the children to attend the Punahou School in Honolulu as soon as they were old enough, but Mary’s sudden interest in household matters did not go unmarked by McCully or Mamie.

  McCully felt sorry for the girl, not because she was going to Punahou, that had been done in his family for generations and he knew that she would be well-educated there, but because he saw that she was always misunderstood by her mother. The child had bad luck. It was not that she tried to please her mother, or even to anticipate her approval. Just getting Mary’s attention would have been more than enough to thrill Mamie. It would not have mattered much, however, what Mamie did, for Mary was unable to be very interested in either of her daughters. She had tried when they were babies, but the intimacy had terrified her and she had lost heart. They exasperated her.

  McCully and Mary went to Honolulu for ten days, McCully to make the arrangements for Mamie to go to school, and Mary to search for older and stranger varieties of plants. She was still trying to find a gardener to replace Hiroshi.

  Mamie and Claire were left in the house with Gertrude. Mitsuya came each morning to cook and the days were lazy and peaceful. Mamie wandered home from school the long way, through the town, hoping, as she still did, to catch sight of Hiroshi or to hear some news of him. He had disappeared. She stopped in at the feed store with its dry, pleasant smell of manure and bird seed, but no one had seen him. She stopped at Yumi’s Menehune Inn to buy some li hing mui and a Spam sandwich. No one had seen him.

  The evenings were spent watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island.” Each of them picked the part she wanted to be that night. Claire kept trying to change her part, but Gertrude and Mamie were adamant once the roles had been chosen. Claire would watch in petulant dissatisfaction, stroking Jimmy. “I don’t see why I can’t be Ginger Grant if I want.”

  “You have to pick at the beginning of the show,” Mamie said. “You can’t say, ‘I have dibs on Ginger’ halfway through when Gertrude is already Ginger. It’s not fair.”

  “Why do you make the rules?”

  Mamie thought for a moment. “I don’t,” she said. “That’s just how it is. It’s just right, that’s all.”

  Claire could think of no further argument, and besides, once the program began, they were so happily immersed in the plot, it was difficult for Claire to remember that she was angry.

  A few days went by before Mamie noticed that Benjie Furtado, Gertrude’s boyfriend, was keeping them company at unaccustomed times of the day and night. Benjie was very handsome. He was small and slight in that girlish, delicate way of young Filipino men, with black hair greased back into a d.a., and a thin black moustache. He wore tight tank tops with PRIMO BEER and MAUI NO KA OE printed on them and slippers with thick black rubber soles. Gertrude, who was plump and soft, adored Benjie, and Gertrude, with her good nature and easy ways, knew that Benjie was her destiny. Mamie was surprised to see him at the house so often, but Gertrude explained that he was on sick vacation.

  Soon Benjie was watching “Gilligan’s Island” with them. He sat in McCully’s leather chair and drank San Miguel beer from the brown bottle. Then Gertrude began to want to sit in the chair with him. This was impossible, so they moved to the big hikie‘e. They necked while Mamie and Claire sat in front of them on the floor, painting their short nails, eating sweet and sour preserved apricots with just the tips of their fingers, so as not to smear the polish. Despite the occasional moan or burp from the lovers, the girls were very content. They were not in the least disturbed by the voluptuary sweetness that slowly overtook the house. Jimmy was slightly frenzied, perhaps because of the erotic, sweaty scent that padded the air around Gertrude and Benjie whenever they stirred. They did not stir much. From the hikie‘e in the library to the refrigerator to, eventually, the big bed in McCully and Mary’s cool bedroom. Gertrude very kindly gave a grumbling Mitsuya the week off.

  Benjie’s cousin, Cecil, began to drop by after work. He had been in Vietnam and, according to Gertrude, he had come back a “hang-loose keed.” Mamie asked him about the war while they played slap dominoes and he said, “The big things in my life, good things and bad things, happened there. What I dream about is the smell. There was a smell there. I smelled it as soon as I got off the plane. It was like what the food smells like in the back of a Chink restaurant after it’s been there a week.”

  He came back the next evening for a rematch and before Mamie could even say hello or double-or-nothing, he said angrily, “Don’t ask me no more about Nam. You started me thinking about it,” and she said, “Sure, Cecil,” and calmly set up the tiles.

  Four days after Mr. and Mrs. Clarke boarded the plane for Honolulu, the girls stopped going to school. Mamie no longer read. Benjie and Gertrude spent most of the day in McCully and Mary’s bed. At two in the morning, a tousled, sated Benjie, clearly nude under McCully’s roomy bathrobe, barbecued char siu pork for them and fried bananas, and Gertrude taught the girls how to crack gum. Gertrude could crack gum louder and faster than anyone in Waimea. This was a feat proved at the last Captain Cook Festival when she’d won first prize in a gum-cracking contest. The local newspaper begged her to reveal her special formula, two Juicyfruits? One Hubba Bubba? But she refused to tell. Gertrude no longer bothered to dress when she staggered out of the bedroom every evening. She waddled happily to the kitchen in her big black brassiere and big black panties, and rustled up a few bags of Fritos and bottles of Coke for the girls.

  Mamie and Claire were virginal odalisques, if such a thing is possible. They, too, moved in a dream of languorous stupefaction. It is to their credit that they never, even later, saw the slightest immorality in the situation. Perhaps they were simply fulfilling their true natures, and the competent, but sterile, years of their parents’ rule had left them porous and expectant for just this sort of innocent sensuality.

  The house was a mess. Dishes coated with plum sauce and dried lau-lau leaves were on every tabletop, and every chair held empty white cardboard take-out containers and jars of hair cream and saucers overflowing with cigarette butts. Jimmy gained five pounds just from licking the dirty plates. Since they had unconsciously restricted themselves to only a few rooms of the house, it could not be said that they had spent the time in filth. It was untidy, but not sordid.

  The night before the Clarkes were to return, th
ey seemed to realize that their idyll had come to an end. They felt no dread at the return of McCully and Mary because they felt no guilt. They did feel, all four of them, a luxurious and intimate regret. Mamie hoped that they would be together like this for the rest of their lives, as soon as the girls could get away from their parents.

  Gertrude washed the badly stained sheets until four o’clock in the morning.

  It was Cecil and Benjie’s job to collect and burn the trash—the beer cases, boxes of See’s candy, Dairy Queen cups and rib bones of various unidentifiable animals. The enormous bonfire on the beach burned exuberantly through the night.

  Mamie and Claire cleaned the kitchen. Every glass, every plate, pot, utensil and cup had been used and left, encrusted and glazed, in the sink and on the counters for the whole, happy ten days.

  There were a few things that they had left until it was too late, such as the cigar burn in McCully’s bathrobe, and the empty bottles of California wine that McCully was saving for a special occasion, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  They went about their chores happily. Claire said she felt like the elves in The Shoemaker and the Elves, and Benjie asked, “What’s an elve?”

  While Claire gaily told him the story, Mamie scraped the last of the cold malasadas into Jimmy’s greasy, smiling mouth.

  THREE

  Several weeks after McCully and Mary returned from Honolulu, Mary asked Mamie if she would like to help her in the garden. Mamie was very pleased to be asked and worked quietly at the small chores that Mary gave her—weeding under the milky plumeria trees and watering delicately by hand the trembling young liliko‘i shoots.

  Mary may have suspected by then that Hiroshi had done exactly what Mamie told McCully he did, for how else could his disappearance be explained? Mary was also not so removed from her daughter that she did not know that Mamie was an intelligent and honest child. She had behaved rashly when Hiroshi was dismissed, Mary told herself, and she considered that she may not have been kind to Mamie. That she had profoundly altered Mamie’s view of the world and herself in it did not occur to her. She was less honest and less intelligent than Mamie. She did feel sorry that the whole thing had ever happened. She should have told Mamie.