It pained her that Herman, the man who had loved her with all his might, had been reduced to a case.
“Thinking about it and solving it are different matters,” she said.
Souza took a gulp of coffee and huffed. “What did Lalamilo say?”
She left out the part about staying at his house with Parker, but told him about the cave. “He agreed to take us.”
“That’s some story.”
Violet jumped to her feet. She’d had enough. “Do what you want. You can sit here and read your paper and drink your coffee, or get out there and help me find my husband. I’m going with or without you.”
That got his attention.
“You sure Lalamilo will agree to me coming?”
“He’s going to make you swear on a thirty-year-old bottle of okolehao.”
Souza grinned. He was in.
* * *
According to Zach, Operation Detachment was in full swing. Preparing to mobilize twenty-something-thousand marines overseas was no small feat, and the soldiers were growing antsy. Tempers shortened. All nonessentials were packed and stored. Combat gear was checked and readied.
On possibly the last pie-selling day before departure, the line outside Honey Cow Pies was full of men with straight faces. All the easy banter and light moods seemed to have evaporated. Jean had suggested a special Christmas pie, made from ohelo berries, a ruby-colored berry found only on the upper slopes of the volcanoes. Mr. Hayashi sometimes carried bags of them in his store when the cowboys would come down from the mountain with sacks full.
“Everyone deserves to taste an ohelo berry pie at least once in their life,” Jean had said.
Violet felt a stab. “Let’s hope these boys get a lifetime to have their pies.”
Jean was right, though. Nothing could compare. Tart and tangy and dazzling, the berries were a pie maker’s dream. And by the changed look on the men’s faces, it was clear they felt the same way. Just before they were to pack it up for the day, Luther stopped in. He wore his hair greased and pulled over the bald spot on his head. Violet had been avoiding him at school, not wanting to hear his rants on the Japanese and uneasy about his alcohol intake.
He gave them a hearty smile. “Been wanting to see the stand in action and I heard a rumor about some holiday pie that could knock your socks off.”
“You’re in luck. We only have a few pieces left. Why don’t you take them all?” Violet said, feeling a pinch of her old fondness for him.
He patted his paunch, which had grown in size. “Just one. Save the rest for the boys who really need it.”
Violet turned to Ella for a box. “Honey, can you...?”
But Ella was gone.
Jean handed her the box instead. “She may have gone off in search of Roscoe.”
“Where’s your Jap friend today?” he said.
Violet froze. That did it.
“Luther, please take your slice and leave. I won’t tolerate your insults any longer. Setsuko is a dear friend, and if you can’t see that, then I feel sorry for you. We aren’t at war with her.”
He shrugged. “Her. Her people. What’s the difference?”
“Guilt by skin color—is that how you see it?”
The broken capillaries in his cheeks flared red. “You have a lot to learn, Mrs. Iverson.” His eyes glazed over and he mumbled something about bombs and battleships as he stormed off.
Violet and Jean looked at each other.
“Good riddance,” Violet said.
Bitterness could eat a hole through anyone.
Violet hadn’t seen Parker since their overnighter, and she was growing despondent. He didn’t show at the pie stand that day, even though he’d said he would. Her mind was a flip-flopping mess. One minute, she figured he had lost interest. The next, she excused him because he was a busy sergeant getting ready for war. This was a different flavor of love than she was used to—okolehao instead of a smooth white wine. She had about given up hearing from him when the phone rang one afternoon.
“Violet?”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause. It was him. “I’ve been meaning to call, but it’s been crazy tense here. Now we’re restricted to only one small area of the camp, and everyone is running around like chickens without heads. The hooch from old Bernard has been a hot commodity.” He dropped his voice. “Listen, I’m dying to see you before I go. We’re getting liberty on the twentieth. Would it be too much to ask if we could stop in?”
By then, Violet felt like she would be on more solid ground again. “How about you and the boys come for a Christmas celebration? Just to be sure you have a proper holiday before you go.”
“That would be nice, Violet. Real nice.”
Closing her eyes, she saw Parker standing on the steps that first afternoon. A tall man in green. Only a few short months ago, but it felt like a lifetime.
“That’s settled, then,” she said.
There was a long pause. “Think Ella will mind if we bring Santa with us?”
“In Ella’s mind Santa is only a notch below Roscoe.”
“Done.”
* * *
Preparations began almost as soon as she hung up the phone. That afternoon, they piled in the school truck and sneaked down a muddy lane on Parker Ranch property to a grove of Norfolk Island pine trees. Setsuko brought a rusted handsaw, the only one they could find, to cut down their own Christmas trees. Never mind that a Hawaiian Christmas, without freshly fallen snow, always felt like a poor imitation. But none of the kids knew any different, and Violet and Jean decided they would give the soldiers a December to remember.
“What do you want for Christmas this year?” Setsuko asked Violet, as she maneuvered around the ruts in the road.
Jean guffawed. “That’s a loaded question.”
Violet punched her in the knee. “It’s an easy question. For the war to end today.” She let the words sink in, then added, “Oh, and I wouldn’t mind one of those fancy new electric mixers.”
In so many ways, the war was stealing happiness. Taking away fathers and husbands, and returning them to the earth in wooden boxes. Or in many cases out in the Pacific, to the bottom of the sea.
“Santa Claus, I hope you’re listening,” Jean said, looking up. “And we all know what Setsuko wants. The sooner the better, please.”
Setsuko produced a flat smile. “I’m with Violet. End the war. And give us our Japanese school back.”
“Nothing else?”
“I could use some new yarn. In every color. All the Filipinos want chicken sweaters now, for their cocks,” Setsuko said, straight-faced.
“What’s not to love about a well-dressed cock?” Jean said.
Setsuko just shook her head, a thin smile appearing on her lips.
“One-track mind,” Violet said.
“Just trying to add some cheer.”
Speaking of Filipinos, why was it that in the islands, the Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hawaiian, haole, all managed to coexist? Neighbors became friends and families overlapped. Macadangdang was generous with his coconuts, Lalamilo provided much-needed moonshine, Hamasu shared his victory garden, Souza sold his meat and Pang produced rice. Of course, everyone had their squabbles, but nothing to go to war over.
“What about you, Honey Jean?” Violet said.
“Goodness, there’s so much to want for. Mainly, I want our boys to come back safe. My little brother, Zach, if only I could steal him away and chain him to a tree in the back of Waipio Valley, I swear I would.” She sniffled. “And that stupid, lying, cheating Bud Walker. I want to forgive him and tear up that letter.”
The letter had been placed prominently on top of the icebox. Sealed with wax and dried tears.
“He’s not worth all that goodness you have inside you,” Setsuko said.
W
ell, that got Jean bawling, and pretty soon, all three of them were one big mess of tears. It was like someone opened up a dike and years’ worth of pent-up feelings poured out, fish and all. At some point along the road, the crying turned into side-stitching laughter.
“Look at us. A cab full of hormones. Woe is the man who crosses our path,” Violet said.
Jean caught her breath. “Right here in this very truck is the difference between men and women. And crying is heaven’s way of washing away sorrows. It’s God saying sorry.”
* * *
One problem with a Norfolk pine in your living room was it could be as wide as it was tall. The branches hung their scaled needles like dark green skirts. It took all three of them plus Irene Ferreira to get the tree perfect. Even then, there was no way to manufacture smell. The tree gave off nothing. Fortunately, Jean had picked up a bucketful of pinecones from Mr. Suares, who had driven partway around Mauna Kea to pick them.
Ornaments were pulled out from their boxes in the hall closet and unwrapped. Soon after the war started, there had been a mass call to destroy German glass-blown and wooden ornaments. Violet had watched Herman burn some of her favorite carvings of tiny mice pulling sleds packed with miniature painted presents, and nutcracker men inside nutcracker men. But he had insisted. Now they hung origami made by the kids, glitter-dipped pinecones and stars fashioned from driftwood.
When they pulled out the ladder and finally finished stringing the lights, which had been absent since Pearl Harbor, Jean stood back and held her hands over her cheeks. “I’ll wager that this is the finest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen,” she said.
It was lopsided and sparsely decorated, but Violet had to agree that the tree had character.
They also decided to dig an imu behind the house, and keep it under wraps in case Mr. Nakata came sniffing around. He had heard about the lion, but anything soldier-related, he kept out of.
There was simply no better way to prepare a pig than slow-cooked in the earth with kiawe wood, hot rocks and banana leaves. Hiro and Setsuko supervised, and Violet enlisted a few of her football players to help. School had just ended for the break, and the boys were eager to earn a few extra dollars.
This would be the last weekend selling their Honey Cow Pies, and on Thursday afternoon, Jean found Violet sitting at the kitchen table chewing her nails down to the quick instead of peeling sweet potato like she was supposed to.
“Anybody know where Violet is?”
It took a moment for the question to register. “Check the icebox,” Violet said.
“Ha! That must have been some night you spent in the valley.”
Some night was putting it mildly. Since then, Violet had lost her toothbrush, forgotten to put her slip on before school and found her missing shampoo bottle in the icebox.
“I feel like I’ve been ambushed. Why can’t I have more time to sort things out?”
“Nature has a way of piling up situations all at the same time. Some kind of universal rule,” Jean said. Until now, she had been silent on Violet’s bouts.
“Have you ever been so confused your mind went blank, just checked out completely?”
Jean laughed. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to? Listen, that heart of yours has a whole lot of protective layers, with good reason. But the signs were all there. You just turned up your nose at them.”
“Signs?”
“Don’t play dumb. You’ve fallen flat for him.”
Violet dropped her face in her hands. “This was the exact thing I was trying to avoid.”
“No one can avoid life, sweetie. And that’s God’s honest truth.”
“I’m not trying to avoid life, just the agony part. I’m not ready and now Parker has complicated everything.”
“Who is ever ready? All I know is that man has the patience of a saint,” Jean said.
“I’m sure after Waipio he’s washed his hands of me.”
“Oh? And that’s why he called today, isn’t it.” Jean stood there with her hands on her hips, reminding Violet of her own mother, about to dispense essential advice, whether she wanted it or not. “Being afraid of pain is like being afraid of the dark. You need to face it head-on, and if the pain comes at you swinging, swing back.”
Violet stared at her. “But...”
“I’m not finished. If you arrange your life to sidestep it, that won’t work, either. Each one of us has to be brave in our own way. Not one person in this whole world is immune.” At some point Jean had picked up a wooden spoon and now waved it around. “So the moral of the story is you gotta take your chances, doll.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Violet
In the days before the Christmas party, Violet, Jean and Ella all tried to bolster themselves up for the inevitable. Ella had taken to drawing pictures of lions with renewed vigor, and added in pigs after hearing the story of Akala. Every day, she asked how often they would drive to Waimea to see Roscoe once the soldiers left.
“We can sneak him in here on a weekend here or there,” she told Ella.
With gasoline rations the way they were, not often enough was the real answer. Violet wondered if she could justify to the ration board the drive to Waimea if not to sell pies to the soldiers. Gas was one of the more closely monitored items.
“Mr. Nakata won’t mind?”
A lion would be hard to hide, but let him say no to her daughter. “How about this. We won’t tell him.”
She looked at Ella, whose little face glowed at the news. All the same, she suspected there was something else bothering her. Something to do with Herman.
* * *
Irene came over to help with the imu on the morning of the party. Cooking the meat was traditionally a man’s job, but when short of men, they used the next best thing—a group of women and a ten-year-old boy. According to Parker, the soldiers had to stick around camp and wouldn’t be arriving until afternoon.
“You’d make someone a great husband, Irene Ferreira,” Jean said, as she stood to the side and fanned the coals with a piece of cardboard.
“Gee, thanks.”
“In all honesty. A great wife, but also a great husband. You’re the whole package,” Jean said.
And then some, Violet thought.
“I hope your brother sees it the same way.” Irene stood up and grinned, smearing ash through her hair.
After shoveling earth over the pig and the turkey, Jean looked up and asked the sky to please hold any rain until later.
Everyone reconvened in the kitchen and got to work on the potatoes and pies. Ella turned on the radio, which featured a daily Christmas program. It was playing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” As Bing Crosby crooned, Violet felt like someone had thrown sand in her eyes. Standing there up to her shoulders in mashed potatoes, she felt another round of crying coming on. Fortunately, the song ended, and “Jingle Bells” came on. Ella stood on her tippy toes, singing in her off-key voice. It was impossible not to smile instead.
When afternoon rolled around, she reached for her faithful red dress, the one that always made her feel like Christmas. Jean helped her pin up her hair, adding in glitter meant for the tree. Ella was awfully quiet. Eventually she showed up looking like an elf in a green velvet frock that pinched at the shoulders and fell above the knee. The dress had fit her when she was seven. Violet knew better than to say anything. Outgrown favorite dresses had always been a touchy subject with Ella. And this one Herman had brought back from Oahu in a fancy box.
“Mama, you look like a movie star.”
“Now, that’s an exaggeration if I’ve ever heard one, but thank you. Come on. The guests should be arriving.”
On cue, men’s voices rang out from the lanai. Violet felt her heartbeat ramp up. She peeked through the window before walking out. Roscoe stood alongside the men wearing a huge red bow on his withers and antlers o
n his head. He looked annoyed. Both Zach and Parker carried boxes with presents stuffed inside and Tommy held a six-pack under each arm. All three soldiers were dressed in their blues. Jean ran outside. “Say, don’t you boys clean up nicely.”
Violet went out a moment later, trying not to look at Parker. Which was a dumb notion. Of course her eyes went straight to his face. Blink, she reminded herself.
“Hi” was all she could think to say.
Irene hung a plumeria lei over each man’s neck. “Mele Kalikimaka. It’s what we say here in Hawaii.”
The boys all laughed and smelled the yellow flowers. “Come again?” Zach said.
“You heard me,” Irene said, swatting his shoulder.
Right then, Violet was grateful for Irene’s ice-breaking skills.
Ella burst out of the house and beelined to Roscoe. And then she noticed the boxes. With paper in short supply, the presents were wrapped in brown sacks and the comic section of the newspaper. Instead of ribbon, they’d used cord.
“Come see our tree!” she said to the men, leading them all inside.
A band of fog had crept down from Mauna Kea, swallowing the house and everything around it. Not quite snow, but it would do. The Christmas lights spiraled up the tree, giving off bursts of color that shaped snowflake patterns on the walls.
“Doozy of a tree. Looks like something Paul Bunyan would have hauled in,” Zach said.
It did take up half the room.
Parker pointed to the largest of boxes that he had placed under the Norfolk.
“This one’s for you, Ella.”
Tommy opened beers for everyone.
“Can I have one, Mama?” Ella asked.
Violet and Jean exchanged glances. “Ask me again in ten years, sweetie.”
She went to the kitchen to check on the casserole and Parker trailed behind her. Even from across the room, she could sense him. Sitting through dinner, she realized, would be torture. He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, watching as she opened the cupboard, turned down the stove and dabbed her face with a napkin.
“What?” she finally said.
“Nothing.” His eyes had her pinned. “Just taking every last bit in.”
Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers Page 23
