I ask her did she see it, too. Did she feel it.
“Yes,” she says.
I think of all the other hula that had been in me. From that first night, the cafeteria, to college and Van, to this. Alive alive alive, goes my heart.
“Kaui,” Mom says slowly, “what is happening on that farm?”
37
MALIA, 2009
Honoka‘a
These days I try not to hope too much. I’d started to believe that, whatever gods there are, our future isn’t tied to them, not our present, not our past. They’ve become nothing to me, without Nainoa. And isn’t it foolish to expect anything, one way or the other, anyway? Isn’t that the thing that’s always undone people? And yet here I am, hoping again, itchy with it, because of what happened in the music last night. Something is happening down here, I don’t know what, something of the gods and Nainoa and us. So I’m here, sitting in the unlined bed of Kimo’s pickup with my daughter, our backs against the cab as we face rear to the road behind us, passing a thermos of coffee back and forth, the faint taste of its plastic like opening an old refrigerator, underneath that taste the good rinse of the Kona beans, we pass it back and forth when the truck’s not bucking through the graveled potholes of the farm road. We have bandannas over our noses and mouths to block the dust from the ride, making us into bandits, or the Bloods and Crips on Kaui’s rap albums. Through the bandannas everything smells like old cotton and coffee, and we lift the cloths up enough to sip the mug, then drop the bandannas back over our faces and pass the thermos to each other. Road dust churns in our wake. The truck bucks again and again. We take a corner a little fast and Kaui almost tumbles over, sloshes coffee on her fingers and the thigh of her jeans. “That fucking fuck,” she hollers.
“You mean your uncle?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “Fuck him and his driving. He’s trying to kill us.”
“Pass me the coffee if you’re not going for it,” I say. Just as I take a sip, we hit a smooth section and I drink long, smack my lips, make an ah sound after I swallow. “That wasn’t so hard. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
“Whatever,” Kaui says.
“How far down is the farm?”
“Almost there.”
And then we are. Clearing the final corner, I see that the high grass and old cane and eucalyptus trees are chopped back and away and there’s a flat, wide field of a hill, the domed glass greenhouse in the center of the plot, pipes kinking up and down into the ground around the property like a half-buried skeleton, a smaller shed to the side. Raised platforms all around the greenhouse, a riot of elephant-eared taro rising from each platform. A man with a wide-brimmed, tall woven hat, old-school Hawaiian country-farmer style, sand-colored boots and grubby jeans, balding shirt, strides to the truck.
“You’re late.” He nods to Kaui.
“Sorry,” Kaui says in that flat way she uses on me, too, when she wants me to know she doesn’t mean it.
“I bet,” the man says. He’s got curly whiskers patchy all over his chin and dark cheeks, thick eyebrows, serious stares; Hawaiian-Okinawan, I figure.
“You probably just finished shitting anyway,” Kaui says. She hands him the thermos. “Was it a soft-serve morning, or more like a German sausage?” She hops from the pickup bed with her backpack and snatches the thermos back. I swing each leg over the tailgate and step down off the bumper.
“This the ‘ohana, then, yeah,” the man says to me, to Augie. Augie gets out of the truck cab. Kaui chatters for a minute with Kimo and then the truck starts off, Kimo’s arm cocked out and throwing a shaka sign before the truck bucks through the first dusty turn and is gone.
* * *
THE MAN IS HOKU and he shows me the farm, what he and Kaui have been doing. It’s all aquaponics and biodigesters, build-outs just getting started for a solar array and micro-windmills that hang like tree leaves and spin the smallest breezes. He explains it all and I’m in and out, not catching all of it, not so interested in much of what he’s saying. It’s a farm, what is there, really, to understand? The whole time we’re touring he’s got Kaui at work already, shoveling cow manure into a large black cylinder that she tumbles with a double-handed crank, or she’s out pruning plants and wrestling with pipes. She’s got her hair lashed up into a topknot, body flexing with each punch of the shovel, eyes squinting against the threads of the pipe, the back of her black T-shirt already calicoed with sweat.
Hoku laughs. “You don’t get it, yeah?”
“Looks like a small farm to me,” I say, fingering the leaves of one of the taro plants. “Kalo” is the other name for it, the one I prefer, the one that makes me think of night marchers and Pele and ‘aumakua, and there you are again, waiting in the part of my heart that rests until everything is quiet, then suddenly jumps.
“Everything gotta start somewhere,” Hoku says. “Everything big starts small.”
“You ever actually do work yourself?” I say. “Or you’re mostly a full-time tour guide?” I give him an acid smile. Kaui is wrenching on another pipe, arms going like the inside of an engine, broad and strong and full of sun like her keiki days. I remember. Augie is standing next to her, hair ruffled by the wind.
“You charming, just like your daughter, yeah,” Hoku says. “Easy, Hawaiian. I was just showing you around quick one time.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“You don’t get it, yeah?”
“What is there to get?”
“Your daughter. I hate for say it,” Hoku says, “but she figured this out.”
“Figured what out?”
“The whole thing,” Hoku says. “The way to chain it all together, plus this new stuff she’s making. All the designs.” He talks again about aquaponics, the biodigester, the kalo feeding from the waste of fish feeding from the plants, and on and on: a cycle, he says, twirling his finger. It’s everything at once, the whole system feeding itself without intervention.
“Right here,” he says. “It’s perfect.” He steps off the raised platform under the shade of the materials shack. “But girl’s, like, selling everyone on it. Gonna change everything in farming, I tell you. Just gotta make ’um work bigger. She got plenty ideas now.” After a few steps toward the place where Kaui is working, Hoku turns back. “You not coming?”
It’s almost as if a switch has been turned on: a warm excitement and guilt juicing through me at the same time. She didn’t get this capable overnight. These abilities—she’d been doing something extraordinary, all those days when we were watching Noa instead. Bit by bit she got bigger. Quiet and furious. We never really paid attention, did we? Now look at you, Kaui.
“I’m going to stay,” I say. “Just a minute. Give me a minute.”
“Yeah, okay,” Hoku says. “Stay in the shade, grab one drink from the cooler if need.”
“Right,” I say, shading my eyes with my hand so I can see her better.
He goes the rest of the way out to my daughter and together they move from one task to another: slicing open parts of a large black drum—a water tank or something else—adding rubber pieces to it, fitting pipes, dragging scrap metal upstream, and then Kaui and Hoku talking about how to make something from it, her fierce gaze locking on an engine they have set up on a board straddling two sawhorses. I’ve never seen Kaui this way, never felt her this way: the whole farm, the whole situation, like an extension of the tendons and muscles of her body.