Silversword

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Joanna spoke with more of her old spirit. “That’s only a notion you’ve cooked up, Tom. Maybe the truth would be easier for all of us to face. Easier than the way we’ve lived.”

  “What truth?” He answered her uncertainty with impatience. “Whose truth? Do you really know? I gave you what I found in the crater, and you didn’t turn it over to the police. I didn’t think you would. You didn’t want any real questions to start about what happened up there. You wouldn’t want that.”

  “I should have given it to the police! I shouldn’t have let myself become frightened. But with Noelle the way she was—I waited. And then it was too late.”

  “Let her stay that way, Joanna. You know it’s best.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know anything. Maybe that’s why I was so happy when Caro telephoned me from San Francisco. Perhaps she’s the one person who could be good for Noelle. Isn’t that possible?”

  I could hear Tom in the room below, not answering her, though his very movements sounded angry.

  “Go home, Tom,” she told him. “I’m tired and I don’t want to talk about this anymore tonight. There’s a lot I need to think about.”

  “Don’t do anything foolish, you’ll be sorry for,” he said. “Just get rid of Caroline as quickly as you can.”

  I heard him go off along the lower hall, and turned toward my room, feeling a little sick. Marla came with me.

  “Are you all right, Caroline?”

  “Not really. I feel as though I’d stepped into quicksand—as though I might sink any minute. What did they mean?”

  “You won’t sink! You’ve got a lot of your Grandma Joanna’s gumption. It was there when you were little, and it’s been showing in spurts ever since you arrived. Just don’t do anything silly and impulsive. For Noelle’s sake.”

  I steadied myself. “Marla, do you understand what they were talking about—Joanna and Tom?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to understand. I was unconscious that day, and a piece of my memory never came back. It’s gone in a different way from what happened to Noelle. Do you see this scar?” She pushed her bangs back from one temple and I saw the triangular white mark. “That’s where Pilikia’s hoof struck me. Though there was no lasting damage. I came through fine in the end. But I think they’re right, Caroline. Your best bet is to get away from all this as soon as you can. Don’t try to learn anything more than you can handle. It won’t help Noelle, anyway. When you’re gone, we can go back to living in our safe fantasy, where nothing more can touch us.”

  “Like the truth about my father’s murder?” I asked.

  The mischief that often lurked in her eyes was gone, and the smile lines were only wrinkles. “Don’t ever think such a thing! Let it alone! It’s much too late for all this talk about truth. Tom’s right about that. I’ll see you in the morning. We’re up early at Manaolana. Good night, Caroline.”

  She went into her room and closed the door firmly. I thought of David’s words about pressed flowers. Were some of them starting to open? I remembered those of my childhood—once open they could never close again.

  Weariness took over as I got ready for bed, yet I felt stirred up at the same time. For a few moments I stood at the open window where cool air washed away the warmth of the day. October was a pleasant month on Maui—not really hot, and here on the mountain it was always cool at night. The quiet seemed intense at first, until I began to listen to the small sounds—insects, a horse stamping in his stall, the barking of a dog. Car sounds were few, so I heard the nearby engine start. Then a car drove away, followed by another. So Koma and David had finished their talking and had finally left. I was no longer interested. Too much else had intruded.

  When I turned off the lights and got into the wide four-poster bed, it was only to lie awake thinking, as I was afraid I would do. I didn’t dare puzzle over Marla’s visit to my room, or about the conversation I’d overheard between Joanna and Tom. In that direction lay the quicksands I dared not step into. Yet I hated to think of Scott, as I so often did before I fell asleep.

  If I could just let him go entirely, but my memories were so mixed. In the beginning he’d been fun to be with. He’d brought a lighter, more playful note into my life, and it wasn’t until after we’d been married for months that I began to see what a putdown of others most of his funny stories were. At first I’d been impressed because he had so much talent as an artist. But it was quickly evident that he wasn’t going to work at his painting or do anything with it.

  He was in total agreement with Grandmother Elizabeth in so many ways, and of course that pleased her, though sometimes it seemed to put me on the outside against them both. They shared the same degree of narrow intolerance for so many things that I liked and enjoyed. Intolerance for people, mostly.

  What a shock Hawaii must have been for my grandmother. Never mind that a great many different races lived in San Francisco—there she was able to mix only with her own kind and ignore whatever lay outside. In Hawaii she must have found that altogether too many mixes of people lived together, more or less accepting one another. Of course, it had been my adventurous father who had brought her to Maui for a visit after he’d been married to my mother for several years, and I had been born. He had fallen in love with the island, just as he’d fallen in love with Noelle. He’d often talked to me lightly about both his loves, and I’d felt safe because my mother and father loved each other and loved me.

  My thoughts were not helping me to sleep. Noelle could be the key to everything. How could I let her stay frozen and lost, no matter what happened? I must do something—I must make a plan. Not much time was left to me, and tomorrow I must begin. Suddenly I knew the first thing I would attempt.

  In the morning I would go with David Reed to the house where my mother and father and I had once lived so happily. At least, Ahinahina had seemed a happy place to me then. Not as exciting, of course, as my Grandma Joanna’s house, where something was always happening. But there must have been happy times there for Noelle that she would remember better than I. So tomorrow we must take her with us. Perhaps we could give her an experience that would prompt some chain of memory that would start her on the road back. Her mind had moments of lucidity so that I sensed a consciousness in her, however long buried. Even my own presence might stir some hidden memory to life.

  Now at last I could relax a little and begin to feel drowsy. Pictures began to form in my mind and run along of their own accord on an unwinding reel. I was content to let my thoughts wander while I watched what appeared on the screen of my memory.

  Strangely, the pictures didn’t concern Scott or my father, or even Joanna as she used to be. Though Noelle was there. The time that came back to me was a long-ago day spent with my mother and a young David, whom I still knew so much better than the man he had become.

  The excursion had begun easily. My mother had been a great fiction reader, so she sometimes drove down to Wailuku to the main library of Maui. David had been visiting Manaolana at the time, so on this occasion my mother invited David to come with us.

  “I’m going to Wailuku early in the morning,” she told him. “If you like, I’ll drive you up Iao Valley and you can take Linny into the gorge. She’s never seen the Needle. Then I’ll go back to town and when I’m through at the library I’ll pick you up at the Japanese Gardens. We can take a picnic lunch and it will be fun.”

  My mother always made whatever we did seem fun. David liked the idea, and I was enthusiastic. A whole adventure in the company of my hero! What more could a little girl ask?

  It was easy to remember the way my mother had been, because I’d found her not all that much different. Except that there was no gaiety in her now. Old memories that I’d shut away were pouring back.

  I’d loved the drive down the mountain, with the sea coming closer, and the marvelous view of West Maui across the isthmus. The West Maui mountains had always seemed more mysterious to me than Haleakala, which lived on my horizon every day. Haleakala’s drama lay
beyond her summit, where I’d never been. The West Maui mountains didn’t rise to our mountain’s more than ten thousand feet, but their jagged peaks always looked dramatic and inviting.

  We drove across the flat plain where nothing much had grown until two sons of missionaries, who were pioneers in the sugar industry, brought water clear from wet country near Hana, and the isthmus came to life with sugarcane fields. Wailuku was just across the plain on West Maui, beyond the larger, commercial city of Kahului. Visitors were always confused by the k’s in Hawaiian place names, but I’d loved to click them on my tongue when I was little.

  Even as a little girl, I knew what Wailuku meant. Stories of old Hawaii were my fairy tales, my giants and dragons, except that some of them were true.

  A great battle had been fought in Iao Valley and the narrow gorge that ran up to the Needle. There Kamehameha the Great had defeated the chief who opposed him on Maui. David had told me that the king had the advantage of guns given him by foreigners, so it hadn’t been a fair fight against spears and shields. The gorge had run crimson with blood from the awful slaughter that gave the town its name. Wailuku meant “river of blood.”

  But all that was distant history on that lovely autumn day when my mother left us to climb the black gorge on foot, while she drove back to town for her books.

  Perhaps I’d loved David so much as a little girl because while he was always kind, he never made fun of me, he expected me to live up to whatever physical demand he might put upon me. That my legs were so much shorter than his didn’t matter. He would wait for me, and he would slow his own stride. He would even lift me over some rocky place that I found hard to climb, but he would never carry me, as my father was so quick to do. And with David, I never complained. I had to keep up. His excitement about whatever he planned was catching, and I could be excited too.

  We followed the easy trail that climbed the gorge toward the Needle, and he told me of times when, along with other boys, he’d clambered over the great boulders down in the stream. That would be much too rough going for me. Partway up, we stopped at a place where we could watch the “river” that had once run with blood—now tumbling peacefully toward the sea, its voice filled with ripples and gurgles of musical sound. The sun, risen high enough by this time, made the water sparkle with light as it leapt over black rocks. David, already interested in camera effects, pointed out the contrast between white water and the dark, shadowed recesses of rock. He made everything interesting and alive for me. Not even Grandma Joanna was as exciting to be with as David. Part of it was that he liked to make things happen.

  But the gorge hadn’t been all black rocks and water. The mountains came steeply down on either side, lush and green, narrowing to the valley. Candlenut trees grew so thickly in some places that they made a glorious soft cover that was a lighter green than the mountains, hiding the water. Kukui trees, Hawaiians called them. In fact, they looked so soft and feathery that I told David I’d like to jump right off the trail and be caught in all that bouncy green. He’d said I’d better not try—I’d go crashing right through to the rocks in the stream below.

  That was the day he promised to bring me a kukui nut lei—but he never did. Not after what happened in the crater just a little while later.

  I remembered something else he had told me about the history of the gorge.

  “Once not even fighting armies could have lived down here, Caro. This was all volcano fire. Lava built up the Needle and through millions of years it wore down to the way it looks now. From here it seems green and soft because of all the tree ferns clinging to its sides. But it’s lava rock underneath. We’ve come at the right time—later in the day there’ll be clouds hiding the top.”

  The things David had told me, taught me, still seemed to echo through my mind as I relived that day.

  The Needle was a spectacular formation. A curve in the road below made it suddenly visible, where it thrust twelve hundred feet straight up above the valley floor, cutting into a blue Hawaiian sky.

  We’d climbed a hill where we could best view it, and everything around us seemed as quiet as if we’d been in a church, with only the birds singing choir. I could still see the shining look in David’s eyes. For once I’d asked no questions, and because of his own vivid imaginings I could picture—not the warriors fighting Kamehameha’s army—but the roaring flames of the volcano all this had once been part of. When I reached my hand to touch the black rock of an outcropping, I was surprised to find it cold. On the way down it had been comforting to hold on to David’s large, sure hand.

  Now I lay in my bed of koa wood at Manaolana and marveled that all of that wonderful day had somehow been preserved in my consciousness, so that it could surface in pictures that were almost intact. Of course, there were gaps that I could never fill. About the rest of the day, I remembered only vaguely that we’d gone to the Heritage Gardens to see the Japanese pavilion with its green tiles and red columns. We’d followed walks among plantings, and crossed an arched bridge over a pond. My mother had driven up to meet us there, but I remembered nothing else of our picnic, or of the trip home.

  It was enough. This would be my “peaceful place” to return to in my mind when I needed it. A small girl who was long gone, and a boy of twelve who didn’t exist anymore, could still occupy that lovely gorge below the Needle and bring me comfort. I went to sleep feeling my fingers once more in David’s strong, protecting clasp.

  It’s strange the way vivid dreams, or vivid relivings of the past, can affect one afterwards. Joanna had invited David to come for breakfast, and when he walked into the kitchen, I found myself looking at him with a new self-consciousness that was almost embarrassment. I wondered if he had ever relived our trip to the Needle. But of course he couldn’t have. He probably had no idea of all he’d meant to a small girl that day, or of how deeply I’d loved him with a child’s yearning, innocent affection.

  Marla was already at the big table when I came in, and she smiled at me, and then quickly gave me another look. I think she recognized that I’d gone into some new place in my mind. Joanna caught the change in me too, and her eyes seemed thoughtful as they rested on me.

  Once or twice as we ate, David glanced my way, questioningly, and I realized that I’d been staring at him, trying to find my David in this grown man who was a stranger to me.

  I wrenched my thoughts from pleasant memories and gave myself determinedly to the disturbing present. Noelle was now, and when she drifted into the kitchen, greeting us all vaguely, and with no memory of having met me yesterday, I tried to face the immensity of the challenge I’d set myself. How could I possibly reach my mother in the short time before Joanna would send me away?

  At least Tom wasn’t with us this morning. He had breakfasted earlier, and Joanna had been up in time to serve him, since Susy Ohara wouldn’t come in until later. In the past, Joanna had been accustomed to cooking for the ranch hands some of the time. Only because she liked to. In those days there’d been a lot more help. Tom would probably disapprove of my taking Noelle with us to Ahinahina, and he might have opposed me openly, swaying Joanna.

  “Do you remember our family parties?” Joanna asked, sitting down beside me with her coffee. “A lot of us are more or less related up here on the mountain. The Baldwins and other families went into raising sugar, pineapple, and ranching, and some of them built homes up here. But there are enough of the older family members left who are curious about you, Caro, and dying to meet you. I’m holding them off.”

  “Why shouldn’t I meet some of them while I’m here?” I asked.

  Joanna looked at David, who had been listening with interest. “You tell her for me,” she directed.

  As he spoke I again found myself trying to find the boy I remembered in his man’s face, with its dark look that still seemed exciting. For a moment last night he had been touched with that quality that I’d loved as a child, but which now made me uneasy.

  “By this time people call it the Legend of the Crater,” h
e said. “There are a lot of different versions about what happened. It shocked the whole area. Especially when nobody could give a clear account of what happened and your father suffered two wounds. There was still more buzzing because of your mother’s state, and when your San Francisco grandmother took you away. Sympathetic buzzing, since everyone was concerned about Joanna. Over the years it all died down. But now that you’ve returned, you can’t help being a center of interest. That’s just what Joanna doesn’t want to see revived.” He looked at my grandmother. “Is that the story?”

  “Yes. That’s about the way it is, Caroline,” Joanna said. “We don’t want the whole thing dredged up again.”

  Across the table Noelle was buttering toast, and paying no attention. Her own protective shield seemed to close about her so that little meaning touched her. Sometimes it took an effort to gain her attention. This was exactly what I had to break through. Every instinct told me that it was better for her to be hurt, to feel pain again, because only then could she adjust to living in the present. Now she was in a limbo where nothing existed except in the most trivial way. Morning was a time for courage, a time for action.

  I spoke to her deliberately, touching her hand. “Noelle, David is taking me to Ahinahina this morning. Do you remember? That’s the house where you used to live a long time ago. Would you like to come with us?”

  Marla made a sound of protest, but Noelle was already responding.

  “Ahinahina,” she repeated softly. “Do you know what that means in Hawaiian? It means very gray.”

  “That’s why it’s the name given the silversword,” I said. “It was a beautiful name to give our house.”

  Joanna noticed the pronoun and looked unhappy, but Noelle didn’t hear it because another word had caught her attention.

  “Yes, I know Ahinahina means silversword. That’s a monstrous plant. Sometimes I dream about it at night.”

  “I’ve never seen a silversword,” I said carefully. “It grows only in the crater, doesn’t it—and I’ve never been up there. But I’ve seen pictures and I thought it was a beautiful plant. Especially when it’s in bloom.”