Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I spoke to Joanna deliberately. “When I was little, my mother”—I emphasized the word, stealing a look at Noelle, who seemed not to hear—“used to wear flowers in her hair. I can almost remember the scent, and I know they weren’t roses.” I turned to the ageless woman beside me. “Did you ever wear some other flower in your hair?”

  She gave me a smile that meant so little. “I like to wear awapuhi—ginger blossoms. It’s easy to find yellow ginger because it grows wild all over the island. I love the perfume of ginger.”

  “Of course,” I said, “—ginger blossoms. I’d forgotten.”

  “You must make our visitor a ginger lei, Noelle,” Joanna said quickly. “Caroline would like that.”

  “Please,” I said to Noelle. “I’d like to watch you make a lei.”

  She nodded absently, picking up a lemon wedge to squeeze over her papaya slice. Almost visibly she escaped into her misty world—mists that could come over her as quickly as clouds could cover the crater of Haleakala.

  When Tom had finished his coffee, he excused himself. “I’ve got to get back to the stable. Lihilihi is expecting her foal and I want to see her through.”

  He included us all in his casual “good night” as he left.

  Joanna looked after him affectionately. “I don’t know what I’d do without Tom.”

  “Sometimes he scares me,” Marla said. “It’s always surprised me that you trust him so completely, Mother. What do you think of Tom O’Neill, Caroline?”

  I hesitated. “I can’t give you a fair answer. I know he doesn’t want me here. He seems ready to judge me in some way, without giving himself time to find out anything about me.”

  David Reed was watching me. “Perhaps Tom wonders why you never came back to Hawaii—why you never wrote to your grandmother when you were old enough to write proper letters. Or to your aunt or your mother.”

  So he was judging me too, and just as unfairly.

  “I did write,” I told him. “I even wrote to you.”

  David looked startled, but Joanna was shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s the reason for Tom’s hostility. I’ve told him you never received our letters, Caroline, and that yours were never mailed.”

  “I’m sorry,” David said to me. “I didn’t know. Just the same, you might have tried to get in touch after you grew up.”

  “When I thought my mother was dead? When I thought my grandmother didn’t care anything about me?”

  David was looking at me in a different way—perhaps pitying me, and I didn’t want that either.

  When Marla got up to put dishes into the washer, and Noelle went dutifully to help her, Joanna waved me out of the kitchen, still not pleased with me.

  David drew me onto the lanai, where an overhead light touched the ferns and other plants to soft green.

  “Come outdoors and see the sky,” he said.

  4

  I went outside with David and when we reached the lawn he stopped me. “Do you remember how close the stars can seem on Haleakala?”

  Gazing up at the luminous sky, I remembered not only how the night had looked—I also remembered a small girl who had stood beside her father watching the heavens in delight. There’d been nights when he’d pointed out Polaris, the North Star, and Orion and the Pleiades. If only he could have brought me here again—that long-ago loving father whom I still remembered.

  The same feeling of wonder he had evoked came back to me as we moved away from the lights of the house, and the night spoke with voices I recognized. The birds were quiet except for a few that woke up at night, but there were insect sounds and wind in the trees. There was also something I’d called “the voice of the mountain.” Which wasn’t a voice at all, but only a vast silence—something so enormous, reaching clear to the sky, that it had seemed to speak to the small girl I’d been.

  A three-quarter moon shed its radiance on clouds that patched the mountain, and the glittering constellations added their own radiance to a luminous night. All this was familiar, and filled with whispering memories as wind stirred the branches of the camphor tree. High on the slopes a few lights shone, but those of houses nearby were hidden, so that only black treetops stood against the night blue overhead. Though the wind felt strong on my face, it was not biting, and it murmured like rushing water, carrying a scent that mingled all those Hawaiian flowers the sun had warmed during the day with those that bloomed only at night, like the cereus that grew over a stone wall and shone white in the darkness. A sweetness heavy with nostalgia for all I had lost so long ago.

  I tried to put something of the wonder I felt into words. “It’s strange how clearly so much comes back to me—the island, the ocean, and always the mountain. Though my feelings are different now—perhaps even stronger because of all I’ve missed. And because of my mother. If only there weren’t so many gaps—so many things I can’t remember at all.”

  David didn’t move into this world of the senses with me, as he might have done when we were children. Instead he asked a practical question.

  “How long are you going to stay here, Caroline?”

  The enchantment and mystery around us fell away.

  “My grandmother doesn’t want me to stay. I’m not sure I want to anyway. It hurts too much to watch my mother and see the way she is now. I’ll stay long enough to find out if I can help her. Which may not be very long.”

  “Not if you expect failure,” David said. “And of course there is a risk.”

  I looked at him quickly, but I couldn’t read his face in this soft, unfocused light. “What do you mean? What risk?”

  He didn’t answer, and we walked on across the side lawn. Over near the camphor tree we were approaching I heard something rustle and caught a movement in its spangled shadow. But when I looked closely everything was still. Some small animal probably. We stopped a little way off from the tree and David put his hand on my arm.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been hard on you, Caroline. Because I love Joanna as though she were my own grandmother, I’ve blamed you for some of her unhappiness. I know how much she grieved when your other grandmother took you away and she never heard from you again. Perhaps she wanted you here because she was always more lonely than she’d admit. She’d lost Noelle too, and Marla—well, Marla is Marla, and not the most lovable person in the world. Though I must say she’s been very good to her sister.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know—tonight there seemed so much antagonism between us. Perhaps we’ve changed too much to ever come together again. What she wants and I want are at opposite poles.”

  “Give her time. A grandchild can be pretty important. My own parents couldn’t be more loving to my son.”

  “I don’t know very much about you anymore,” I said. “I’m sorry about your wife. Joanna told me a little while ago.”

  “I’m getting used to it—though I expect one never does entirely. Kate died three years ago. We had one child. Peter’s eight now, and he stays with my parents in Hana. That’s a good place for him to grow up since it’s mostly unspoiled, and I can see him often. I understand you’ve gone through a divorce recently. That can be a sort of dying too.”

  This “dying” was too recent and I couldn’t talk about it yet. I stretched my arms to the sky and breathed deeply before I let them drop. “The peace here is heavenly. The rest of the world seems far away.”

  “We’d like to keep it that way. On Maui we’re trying to protect what we have left before it’s all lost. The way Waikiki on Oahu has been lost.”

  “You mean because they’re developing West Maui—all those luxury condominiums and hotels?”

  “It’s no simple matter. We’re pretty ambivalent. We need visitors and the money they bring, God knows. But this makes living expensive for the ordinary Islander. Most of the jobs easily available are tourist-serving jobs. Our young people can be anything they want these days—lawyers, doctors, scientists. Not just guitar players and hula dancers. Or workers in sugarcane and pineapple fields, th
e way it used to be. But there’s never enough money for the education they need, and sometimes they’re not motivated to care. We need the tourists, but we can resent them too. Mainland people can come in with all the same hang-ups they had at home, and the same prejudices. And they start making the same mistakes here that they made at home. So I’m glad there are a few fighting organizations coming to life now to take a stand.”

  “This up-country part of the island seems almost the way I remember it. There’s still open country around here.”

  “Even Hana’s in danger of changing if too much money comes in from outside and too many rich malihini start grabbing. Hana’s always been hard to get to, so it’s been able to stay isolated. But now, with helicopters and planes, people can move in. The Park has managed to preserve more than twenty-eight thousand acres from development—land that can stay wild, the way it always was. But there are some who feel the Park system’s taken too much land for its own purpose. There’s always a difficult balance between what people need and what the land needs.”

  I liked David’s concern and involvement.

  He went on soberly.

  “There’s a strange aspect to the Navy’s bombing of Kahoolawe—the island we talked about at dinner. That very bombing has kept the island off-limits for so many years that the artifacts over there have been preserved. They haven’t been looted as they were in other places. Bombs were never dropped on the whole island and the Navy claims they’ve just moved the surface dust around a little in their target practice. But sometimes bombs fall where they’re not supposed to, and it’s all too close to our island. Koma Olivero, who shares a small house with me, has been working with an organization dedicated to stop the bombing. I help when I can.”

  We’d reached the shadow of the big camphor tree, and David returned to a more personal present. “How long do you think you’ll stay, Caroline?”

  “How can I tell, when Joanna doesn’t want me to stay?”

  “Maybe she needs you more than she’s ready to admit.”

  “Noelle is the only one who needs me. Everyone else is trying to shield her and keep her the way she is.”

  “What if you make her worse?”

  “Worse than being nothing?” I cried. “A minute ago you sounded as though I shouldn’t expect failure. But now you’re warning me.”

  “If you try to change her, you’ve got to believe that it’s possible. But at the same time you need to face the risk of causing still more regression. You may have to choose.”

  “I wish Joanna could have warned me! It’s all happened so fast.”

  “You know what the people at Manaolana remind me of?”

  “Tell me.”

  “When I was a kid growing up in Hana, a Japanese friend brought me a box of water flowers. A tiny box with bits of pressed paper in it. When I sprinkled them in a bowl of water they opened into beautiful shapes and colors that floated for a long time.”

  “I remember,” I said. “My father gave me some of those too, when I was little. What made you think of water flowers in connection with Manaolana?”

  “Because everyone here—Marla, Joanna, Noelle, maybe even Tom O’Neill—are all like that now. Pressed into tight little packages that are still set in the past. I wonder if you are their bowl of water, Caro? Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of. Because if you are, no one may be able to stop what you’ll make happen. And what if they aren’t all beautiful flowers when they uncurl? What if there are dragons—monsters?”

  I didn’t much like the picture he was presenting, and I remembered how tantalizing he had been sometimes as a young boy, teasing me with questions I couldn’t answer.

  “Then why would my grandmother ask me to come?”

  “She’s capable of dreaming. And of making a mistake.”

  “Do you think I shouldn’t have come?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. Anyway—what does it matter, since you’re here? And if you’re that bowl of water, maybe all the secrets will open up, in spite of anything you or they can do to hide them.”

  “What secrets?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But what if it’s better if they stay hidden?”

  He reached up to pluck a leaf from the camphor tree and rolled it in his fingers, releasing a nose-tingling scent—a delaying action while he made up his mind before going on.

  “What if they were set—pressed—into this pattern when the accident happened up in the crater all those years ago? If it really was an accident.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked quickly.

  “I can’t give you a reason. Maybe when we’re young our senses are more open to nuances than they become later. I was twelve or so when it happened, and I was visiting Manaolana. Even before I knew what had happened, I could feel something awful in the air—something threatening. Joanna came as close to falling apart as I’ve ever seen her. I don’t think she ever recovered from the change in your mother. In fact, no one was the same afterwards. I’d used to love visiting my godmother, riding the horses, talking with Tom. But after that they all made me uneasy, and Noelle scared me. So for a while I didn’t come back.”

  I had been here too, with whisperings going on around me that I couldn’t understand. It had been terrifying to be shut away from my parents, when nobody would explain. That was the first time I ever saw my grandmother cry. I had come upon her sitting in the dark on the lanai of the empty ranch house one evening. When she saw me she took me on her lap and held me close, and in a little while her tears stopped. Perhaps because she had to keep me from knowing all of what made her cry.

  “No one told me right away that my father was dead,” I said to David. “Not until we were on the plane for home did Grandmother Elizabeth tell me that my parents had been killed in a riding accident. She let me believe my mother had died too!”

  “Sometimes I think children have more sense than grownups.” David sounded angry. “That was a rough time, but I think you’d have done better with more of the truth. You were such an eager little girl. I used to enjoy that. It gave me a chance to show off how much I knew. And you were smart enough so that I was flattered at the way you soaked everything up and wanted more.”

  “If only I could have understood …”

  “I was nearly in my teens and I couldn’t understand. Of course, they packed me off to Hana fast, and I doubt if my parents knew much more than was picked up in the papers. But, Caroline—all of this is so long ago. Can’t you just let it go and think about what matters now?”

  “It’s long ago for all of you, but for me it’s almost as if it had just happened. Especially when it comes to my mother.”

  I looked off at the high black silhouette of the mountain, where a portion of its summit rose above the clouds, the night sky lighter behind it.

  “I’ve never forgotten the mountain,” I said. “Sometimes I’ve dreamed about it as though there were magic there.”

  “The crater’s still a holy place to many Hawaiians. They believe that those who don’t respect its power can come to harm. Though they can be a bit afraid of it too. Some of us never go up there without some little offering to Pele wrapped in ti leaves.” He laughed a bit sheepishly. “Oh, well, no need to get mystical. Maybe Marla’s been telling me too many of the old legends that she puts into her books.”

  “You told me a lot of those legends yourself, David. You always liked the gory ones. And you made me believe them all.”

  “You can remember that? I think you wanted to grasp at everything there was to know.”

  I’d lost most of that in growing up, I thought. Or perhaps I hadn’t found anything lately that I’d wanted to reach for. Now there was Noelle, and something was stirring in me—possibly a sense of purpose, in spite of all the warnings.

  “What do you think happened up there, David?”

  “I’ve told you—I don’t know. In the old days they might have brought in a kahuna. There are still priests around for those who want them. At least Joanna might have. Sh
e has strong feelings for the past and old Hawaiian ways. But of course your father came from the States, and he wasn’t into any of that. Respect for the crater, I mean. Maybe he was even the one who offended the mountain.”

  He was only half joking, and I shivered. “Stop it! Are you still trying to scare me? I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said, and there was a questioning rise in his voice. “Our ages seem to have caught up—almost.”

  I went on quickly. “Surely the accident was investigated thoroughly at the time?”

  “As much as it could be. Which doesn’t mean that all the facts came out. So what about it, Caro? Are you going to open everything up and hurt them all over again? Is it worth it to do that? Or even safe?”

  There seemed a challenge in his words, and I tried to see his face in the moonlight. All I could catch was a dark shining in his eyes, and for the first time since I’d met him today, I sensed again an old, almost dangerous excitement in him that I remembered. It troubled me, since I didn’t know what drove him now.

  “Look,” I said, “don’t push me into anything. I can’t accept your whimsy about pressed flowers.”

  He laughed. “I’m not worried—you’ll push yourself. But those flowers illustrate something, don’t they?”

  “I don’t care about that. It’s my mother who matters to me.”

  “It might take a lot of nerve and determination to stir everything up. I suspect you’ll be blocked at every step.”

  “Why? What are they hiding?”

  “They like the status quo. It’s what they’re used to—especially Noelle. You might make everything worse for them. Worse for you too.”

  I still sensed that hint of suppressed excitement in him that I didn’t understand. He seemed to push me with one hand and pull me back with the other. Testing me, perhaps?

  “I just don’t know …” I turned from him and started toward the house.