The Whiteness of Bones (7 page)

It also went through her mind that she was named Wilding after the spinster lady who had adopted her mother. The desk was made the year Mamie was born, McCully had told her many times.

She turned to McCully. “I didn’t do it, Father.”

He nodded slowly. She did not know what he was thinking, or if he believed her.

Mamie touched the words of her name. “Do you believe me?” she asked quietly. Her eyes filled with tears.

He stood up. Mamie heard his right knee crack. He shook the creases out of his trousers. There were bits of red Kaua‘i dirt stuck in the crenulations of the rubber soles of his work shoes.

“Yes,” he said.

It never occurred to either of them to try to discover who had defaced McCully’s beautiful desk, a gift from the Waimea High School Shop, Class of ’61. Years later when Mamie did learn who had laboriously carved
MARY WILDING CLARKE
in the desk, she was only a little surprised at the revelation. She had already convinced herself that she, Mamie, had done it.

She used to wake in the hot nights after McCully showed her the defacement and whisper to herself, Maybe I did do it, yes, perhaps I did. I must have. I did.

It might have seemed to an outsider, or someone who lived in a city, that Mamie and Claire’s days were long and lonely. That their most intimate companion was a lackadaisical, superstitious Filipino housemaid, or that Claire spent a large part of her time talking to a mongoose, might have been significant in a different setting. But there, on the westernmost boundary of the United States, on the very edge, it did not seem strange at all.

Mamie did have her best friend, Lily, the co-founder of The Mothers Club, but Lily lived an hour’s drive away in Koloa. That Lily also seemed to live contentedly in a kingdom of her own making, several light-years away, only enhanced her in Mamie’s eyes. They wrote letters to each other, part rebus, part rhyme, and left the letters in hollow tree trunks, to be picked up and delivered by one of the many unusually devoted servants of the eccentric Shields family. Lily even tried sending messages by her brother’s carrier pigeons, but it was not a successful experiment.

Mary did not approve of the friendship. Even when there was the possibility of Mamie’s hitching a ride with one of the ranch hands into Koloa, Mary would find a way to prevent Mamie’s going. Lily Shields, even though she was just a girl, made Mary very uncomfortable. It is possible that Mary was a little jealous of the child.

Mamie had another friend, Sherry Alden, who was the daughter of the English teacher at the high school. Sherry played the ’cello and knew about such things as withdrawing troops from Vietnam (yes) and B. F. Skinner (no). She was Mamie’s first
leftist friend. She was two years older than Mamie, which gave her mystery and prestige, and it was Sherry who gave Mamie her first hint that there was a big, alluring world awaiting them. They would lie on the cool floor of Sherry’s untidy room and listen to a bossa nova record that Sherry had sent away for, Stan Getz and João Gilberto, and it was during these delightful sessions that Mamie took Sherry’s hint about the world. Listening to the sweet Brazilian music with intense pleasure and identification, Mamie began to see that she might find a place in that lovely universe beyond her cane fields.

The more she listened to the music, the greater was her longing, and she imagined herself in the poignant, erotic world of jazz sambas and men who loved you so crazily they wrote songs about you: “Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, he smiles but she doesn’t see …” Sherry introduced her to other music, too. She liked to listen to the St. Matthew Passion at full volume and she insisted on playing Edith Piaf while they read Raymond Radiguet with a French dictionary, but it was the seductive Brazilian music that entered Mamie’s soul and stayed there.

Mamie was very impressed by what seemed to her to be the very bohemian and intellectual pursuits of the entire Alden family. Mr. Alden was writing a novel on the weekends, and the mother, who made her own candles, taught a sculpture class at the university extension in Lihue. Mamie was fascinated by them. Unlike her own family, they did things together. Sherry’s mother kept a shell-encrusted casket, that she had made herself, in the center of the cluttered dining room table into which they all dropped their loose change and the odd dollar bill in the hope that they would put enough away to enable them to emigrate to Bali.

Despite the charm of the family itself, Mamie always felt a
little uneasy when she was alone with Sherry. Sherry wanted to massage her back or arm wrestle or brush her hair and Mamie felt guilty that Sherry caused her to feel so uncomfortable. There was a time in the fall, when school resumed, when Sherry would telephone Mamie every evening. Mary was pleased because she hoped that Sherry would replace Lily Shields as Mamie’s friend.

Then, suddenly, Mamie refused to even come to the telephone when Sherry called, and she would no longer go to Sherry’s house after school. Mamie would have nothing to do with the Aldens.

Mary, who was constantly levying petty punishments on Mamie for walking through the workers’ camp—she was convinced that Mamie would be assaulted by one of the local boys—and who would never understand that the workers’ camp was the safest place that Mamie could be, was angry that Mamie would not be Sherry’s friend. She was further upset when Mamie refused to explain her sudden loss of interest in the Aldens.

It would have been impossible for Mamie to explain to her mother just what had happened. Mamie knew that Mary would not believe her. Mamie herself had some difficulty believing what had happened, even though she went over it many times in her mind.

She had been invited to spend the night at Sherry’s house. Sherry’s parents had gone to a Kundalini yoga class after dinner and Sherry and Mamie had played cards, crazy eights, and made a marble cake in ice-cube trays. They picked
pakalana
flowers in the dark garden and Mamie pinned them in her hair. Sherry began to act a little silly right before bedtime and Mamie had insisted on undressing and taking a shower alone.

In the bedroom, Sherry had waited nervously for Mamie before getting into bed. She had even waited for Mamie to
turn down the cotton blanket. When Mamie, her dismay growing like a flowering tree inside of her, did turn down the blanket, she uncovered a sheet that was marked with a huge brown stain.

She stood next to the bed, the hem of the blanket held high in her hand, staring at the stain for a long time. For the briefest moment, Mamie thought she must be mistaken, but when Sherry began to giggle spasmodically, Mamie forced herself to admit that the stain was dried blood. Sherry had begun to menstruate and she had saved the proof of it for Mamie.

She was giving it as an offering to Mamie.

Mamie did not want it.

Her only thought had been how to get away. She wanted to sleep in her own clean bed. She could already see herself running down the black highway in her nightdress. She could see herself scratching at the back door for Gertrude to let her inside (she would have to sleep in Gertrude’s room so that her mother would not ask any questions). She could see herself writing to Lily Shields in the morning, not to tell her what had happened, but to reassure herself and to fortify the only friendship she would ever, ever have—she was thinking all of this, still holding the blanket, when Sherry’s parents came cheerfully into the room.

Mamie had slept on the floor, or that is pretended to sleep, while Sherry wept loudly. Mamie had listened, horrified and ashamed, until Sherry had fallen asleep. In the morning, Mamie sneaked away before anyone else was awake.

Mary never could reconcile herself to what she saw as Mamie’s willful refusal to be friends with the right kind of girl. Because Mamie never would explain why she no longer wanted to see Sherry, Mary decided that Mamie was a secretive child. Mamie knew that her mother thought less of her because of
this, but it would have been impossible for Mamie to save herself simply by telling the easy truth.

She went back several times to Mr. Tsugiyama’s photography studio to look at the proofs and select the poses she liked best. Mr. Tsugiyama had his own particular favorites and they spent quite a bit of time over their final choice. At one point, Mr. Tsugiyama went into the back and made green tea for them. In the end, although she preferred a rather perky shot that was not at all like her, at least in spirit, she succumbed and agreed with Mr. Tsugiyama that the serious one of the girl (it was hard for her to think that the photographs were of herself) with the hopeful gaze was the best one. He was very pleased that she agreed with him. She ordered five prints.

She returned only once more, to pick up the finished portraits. She had never once considered where she would find the money to pay for them. When she told Mary that she needed forty dollars cash money (an expression she had learned from the workers), Mary, perhaps because of her constant state of benign distraction, gave it to her without question.

Mamie never told anyone about her sitting with Mr. Tsugiyama. She kept the photographs under her clothes in a drawer in her bedroom. She took them out when she was alone and lay on her bed and stared at them. She was not vain. She was not interested in the length of her lashes or the sweet curve of her lower lip. Mamie was trying to understand just who she was, and how she came to be that way.

One quiet afternoon, three police cars from Waimea Township turned into the fields. The cars bounced slowly up and down the dirt lanes of the camp. The officers’ voices were calm over the loudspeakers as they advised the startled residents to evacuate immediately to higher ground. A tsunami, originating in the cold waters of the Sea of Japan, was rapidly approaching the island. The tidal wave was expected to strike the south shore in less than two hours.

Stores and houses were closed and boards hastily hammered over glass windows. Livestock was brought in from the low grazing lands and, roped in single file, led reluctantly up the winding road of Waimea Canyon. There was no time to lure them into horse trailers and cattle vans, so the cavalcade looked more like placid animals being led to the Ark than animals in flight. School buses drove slowly through the town, doors open, and people jumped onto the moving buses, pulling children and dogs and cats behind them.

There was no panic. The only indication that some unusual manifestation of nature was about to alter the world was the gradual but steady change in the wind and sky. The dance of
the trees grew more violent as the trees made deeper and more ecstatic bows. The sky darkened as a watery black ink stain seeped slowly north from the horizon. The animals, too, began to tremble and howl, heads cocked toward the ocean, listening to some silent, terrible warning.

Benjie Furtado was on the end of the dock, helping the returning fishermen to fasten their rocking boats. There was not enough time to take the boats out to sea. The water grew more muddy and turbulent. It was as if the shallow ocean bottom were being stirred violently. The siren from the Fire Station keened out over the bay.

McCully was at the mill. He came back to the plantation with Officer Higa, who dropped him at the grove. There were only two good roads into the mountains, and there was a danger that the townspeople would be caught and drowned in their cars. McCully had arranged for Daldo Fortunato to meet him at the plantation house with his truck.

When McCully reached the house, a little more worried now that it had taken him so long to get there in Officer Higa’s slow-moving patrol car, he found Mary and Claire throwing seedlings and plants onto sheets of burlap. Gertrude, a little hysterical, was walking in circles. Mitsuya was tying up the corners of the burlap. Claire had Jimmy on the end of a long clothesline, and the mongoose accompanied Gertrude in her pacing. The siren made it difficult to hear.

Daldo pulled up in the truck and helped the women heave the burlap sacks into the open back.

“Where is Mamie?” McCully asked.

Mary looked up, worried, as she realized that Mamie was not with them.

Claire pulled Jimmy, hand over hand, into her arms. Jimmy was chattering and biting the air. Daldo lifted Claire into the back of the truck.

“Where is she?” Mary asked Claire.

“I thought she was with Gertrude.”

Gertrude began to whimper. McCully grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Where is she?” He shook her.

She shuddered and said, “Orval came during lunch and told her he seen Hiroshi at da reeva.” She started to moan again.

“And?” McCully spoke low. He pressed her shoulders as he held her firmly before him.

“She went to da bridge to try find Hiroshi.”

She fell forward into McCully’s arms and he helped her climb into the back of the truck with Claire, while Daldo took Mitsuya and Mary into the front with him. McCully slammed the heavy door, and the truck creaked and bounced through the grove and onto the highway that was already blocked with cars and school buses. Through the swaying and creaking trees, McCully could see a winding line of cars and animals and people climbing the soft slope of the mountain. It looked like a pilgrimage.