It’s just Hoku and me working his little farm. We weed. We turn soil and introduce manure. Other natural fertilizers. We move rocks. Clear cane. I like the way the machete feels. The way a hacking strike makes the stalks clap before they fall. The hiss and clatter of moving a set of stalks, the way something more organized and ordinary appears underneath the cane when we clear it, when the ground is just the ground. Waiting to be turned. Hoku has a narrow, long yawn of land out here. At one end he built a corrugated tin shed and stretched a tarp over six poles for a garage and workbench. At the other end our grooming meets a fence and the stalks and bushes that lean over it. Okay, Hoku wants to try and get these fields ready for a crop as soon as he can—I don’t know if to start selling it or so he can start eating again, or what. I never see him with food. The only water he drinks is whatever beer is on sale at the grocery store. We don’t talk much. He just gives me directions, and I even surprise myself when I mostly follow them without a word. We till. We weed. We saw. We hammer. We sweat. We splinter. We work.
I’m tilling and I’m gone. Zoned in the tang of gasoline and clipped grass, the drone of the engine, and the buck and dive as the tiller spins down the soil. I’m something like asleep until I see her toes in front of me, about to go under the tiller blades.
I flinch and pull the tiller up short. There she is. A broom of black kinked hair. Sun-dark skin and blunted face of an original Hawaiian. Bare-chested and thick-titted and all broad belly, glittering with a day’s work of sweat. She stands facing me and doesn’t blink. Completely statue, okay? Not breathing.
Then she takes a step.
Hula dreams, I think. That’s you.
She takes another step. A weight pulls all my guts down: I have the distinct feeling she wants to harm me.
“Wait,” I say.
She takes another step.
“Wait,” I say again, and start to step backward. But I’m still holding the tiller’s handles, the engine still pockpockpocking and droning. The breeze absolutely dead. There’s a smell that was never there, the strong smell of keawe-wood smoke. Like out of nowhere there’s a forest on fire right behind us. But it’s only the woman and even in the time it took to understand the smell is her, she’s moved again. She steps through the tiller, stands between the handles. Which puts her right between my arms.
I jump back from the handles and start to say— But suddenly I feel like I’m thin and strong and old, like a bird made out of leather. I’ve walked a million miles. There is a child on my back, wrapped in tapa cloth and smoothed bark-rope. It’s easy—I’ve carried whole generations this way. I’m ascending alongside the cold mineral smell of a stream, up the muddy trails to the mist and scraggy peak of a mountain ridge. Could be the Ko‘olaus or the Waihe‘e Ridge or anywhere at all in Hawai‘i, right? I’m hefting kalo in bunches, hairy roots tickling my wrist. When I look around I see there is no sugarcane here, never has been. Plants that are dinosaur-height and mad with color. The muscles of their roots, tendrilled through the rich earth—but there’s something like a sudden impact on my lungs and eyes and then Hoku’s voice calling, Hey hey hey.
Blue. I’m looking at the sky. The cool grit of soil on my back. My mind dilates; I’m waking up. And, okay, here’s Hoku above me, blocking out the clouds, shirt slouching off his chest as he bends forward. He kneels to my side, glances up and down along my whole body. “What, drugs or something?” he asks. I can smell the sour mix of coffee and hot dogs on his breath.
“I just thought I’d lie down for a second,” I say. “You know, do some cloud gazing.” I roll over, kneel, stand. My vision pinwheels. “You normally work your slaves to death, or what?”
“You only been working for an hour,” he says. “Still morning.”
“I know what time it is,” I say. Which is a lie, right? I’m not sure exactly where I am.
“I not working you,” Hoku says. “You is working you.”
I stand on the flat ground and feel the tilt and swerve. The sun is white and everywhere. “I’m fine,” I say. “Let’s get back to it.” And I do, okay? But the tiller and the dirt and my skeleton don’t feel like they’re even in the same reality.
After what seems like a reasonable amount of time, I sit on a folding metal chair that’s stenciled with Property of Honoka‘a High School and drink a glass of tap water in the shade.
“Stop looking at me,” I say to Hoku. I take another swallow of water.
Hoku stops doing whatever he was doing and walks over to me. Leans against one of the workbenches. He crosses his arms and wants to know if I have cancer.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“You not working for me if you gonna die in my field,” he says. I ask him where else he’d get labor so cheap. He laughs. “In Honoka‘a? I sneeze and it hits someone without a job.”
I snort, but he’s right.
And he starts a nagging interrogation. Every illness he can think of: Cancer? Heart murmur? AIDS? Sickle cell? Gonorrhea? Asthma? Tumor? Chronic laziness? And even though I answer no to all of these things, it doesn’t matter. Something about his eyebrows. His jaw. Either I tell the truth or I’m never coming back here.
“I don’t need this,” I say.
“Then go,” he says.
We both just stand there. He places his hands on the workbench and leans forward on locked elbows.
“I’ll see a doctor,” I say, and shrug.
Hoku yanks on the brim of his wide-brim, woven hat, but it can’t go any lower on his head, right? Stands back from me.
“Go home,” he says.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
I can’t tell him what I’ve seen. They are there. Finding me when I close my eyes. Women who can only be Kānaka Maoli, skin joyfully dark and thick with work, proud cheeks and eyes full of the old island ways. The salty, fruit-tinged stink of their sweat takes over my nose. They dance on a hilltop. They dance in a valley. Kaholo, ‘ami kāhela, lele, ‘uwehe. They reap in bundles with hands plunging into dark-brown soil that gives and gives and gives. Something is alive all over my body now. Something like a hula that won’t stop dancing.
“There’s something here,” I say. “I can feel it. Something big.”
35
DEAN, 2009
Portland
When I step outside the prison it’s not at all like I was thinking. It’s a flat paper-colored sky that got enough light to make the wet flash off the sidewalks but then it’s dim enough it still feels like I’m inside. Might as well I’m in Spokane, it’s the same sort of feeling, where you can’t tell October from March and you just know some of the brown is leaking from your skin every day. I’m on the steps outside County Corrections and I’m back in Noa’s clothes, got his skinny-ass sweatpants ending at my shins and the waistband knifing into my hips and tearing with each step and the hoodie I have to keep open ’cause it ain’t zipping up ever. I feel like everywhere I’m about to rip.
I’m out. Nobody to escort me, or some sheriff or county worker or whatever to chaperone me from this place to the next. I got a thick plastic bag with all the stuff I was carrying when they brought me in: wallet, one penny, two quarters, receipt from a 7-Eleven, credit card, cell phone. I wonder who got to smoke the joints I had, bet it was one of those fucking cops and his wife or something. Now, out here, there’s tan pebbly steps in front of me and people in the street below with their briefcases and kids waiting for buses and construction workers at the end of the block with some buzzing machine scraping metal over the wet blacktop.