Those nights. You’d come quiet to the side of our bed, still partially tangled in your sheets, swaying, with your hair smeared every direction, sniffling in your breath.
Mama, you’d say, it happened again.
I’d ask what you saw, and you’d start to talk in a spill of images—black fields cracked and empty, cane stalks shooting not from soil but from the chest, arms, eyes of me or your father or your brother or all of us, then a sound like the inside of a wasp hive—and while you talked your eyes were not your own, you were not behind them. You were only seven years old, and the things that were pouring out of you. But after a minute of talking this way you’d come back.
They’re just dreams, I’d tell you, and you’d ask what I was talking about. I’d try to repeat some interpretation of the nightmares—the cane, the reaping of your family, the hives—but you never remembered what you’d just been telling me. It was as if you’d just woken and found yourself in front of me while I told you someone else’s story. The nightmares happened every few months, then every few weeks, then every day.
The sugarcane plantation had been around since before we were born, our whole side of the island shagged with fields of cane, mauka to makai. I’m sure since the beginning people had been talking about the Final Harvest, but it seemed like it would never come: “Hāmākua’s always hiring,” your father said, dismissing the rumors with a flap of his wrist. But then, so soon after your nightmares reached their daily cadence, along Māmane came the low of the cane-truck horns, that September afternoon in 1994, and your father was one of the drivers.
If I could be above our town, looking down, I would remember it this way: Into the town came the tractor trailers, many with the chain-link-style beds, empty loops like the ribs of neglected animals, swaying as they made their way past the Salvation Army, past the churches, past the empty storefronts that used to hawk bins of cheap plastic imports, past the high school across from the elementary school, past the football-baseball-soccer field. As the trucks passed, blowing their horns, people left the bank and grocery store and gathered in rows on the sidewalks, or the shoulders of the streets. Even those inside that didn’t come out must have heard the truck horns moaning, the air brakes bleating, the hymn of an industrial funeral. It was the sound of a new emptiness coming. Because they would never be in the fields again, the trucks were polished to a mirror-shine, none of the dirt of work on them, and for all the Filipino-Portuguese-Japanese-Chinese-Hawaiian families that lined the streets, the chrome threw back a slippery quicksilver reflection of their dark-brown faces and the new truth settling there.
We were in that crowd, me, Dean, Kaui, and you. Dean stood still and stiff like a little soldier. His hands were already so big at nine, and I remember the dry sheath of his palm wrapped around my hand. Kaui was drifting in between my legs, the breathy tickle of her hair against my thighs, a few fingers pressing after. You were at my other hand, and unlike the confusion and anger thrumming along Dean’s fingers, his stiff neck, unlike the four-year-old’s dreamy spin of apathy coming from Kaui, you seemed completely at peace.
Only now can I guess what you’d been dreaming about—whose was the death, our bodies or the sugarcane. In the end it didn’t matter. You’d seen the end coming before any of us. That was the second sign. There was a voice inside you, wasn’t there, a voice that was not yours, you were only the throat. The things it knew, and was trying to tell you—tell us—but we didn’t listen, not yet.
Just one of those things, we said.
The cane trucks made their turn just before the grocery store, ascended the steep hill out of town, and never came back.
A few months after the plantation went under, we were completely stretched. Everyone was searching; it was no different for your father. He was driving for hours across the island, chasing a paycheck that moved like obake: here and gone. Sunday morning in the orange light bouncing off our old wood floors he’d be at the kitchen counter, clutching his favorite coffee mug spreading its Kona steam and sliding his fingers over the “help wanted” section, lips moving like a chant. Days he found something, he’d slowly cut it from the page and take it with just the tips of his hands and place it in a manila folder he kept near the phone. Days he didn’t, the sound of the newspaper as he crushed it was like a flock of birds taking flight.
But that didn’t stop your father’s smile; nothing would. He’d been that way even when things were steady, even when you all were in hanabata days, upper lips crusted with baby-leak, just learning to walk, and he would fling you into the air so your hair would flap open and your eyes would squint happy and you’d squeal your brightest. He’d throw you guys as high as he could—aiming, he said, for the clouds—and when you’d come back down so would my heart. You’ve got to stop, I’d say, especially when he’d do it to Kaui.
I not gonna drop ’em, he’d say. Besides, we can make another one if they break their necks or whatever.
Other times, in the morning, he’d stay in bed later—mostly he’d been an early man, that still continued after the cane trucks stopped—and he’d curl up close to me and start giggling through his thin mustache, and I’d try to scramble free from the covers before he’d rip a good fut and trap me in the cave of it with him, the ripe cheesy-beany stink of whatever was burning in his gut.
Almost taste better going out than coming in, yeah? he’d say, and giggle again, like we were back in high school goofing off in fifth period. I remember once he did his fut-under-the-covers thing and asked that same question and I said I don’t know, let me test, and slipped a finger up inside his boxers, just into his butthole, and he squealed and jerked away going, Eh, that’s too far, that’s too far, and I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. There was something about your father, and me, and us, and how we’d push each other, that went good with the quiet times, us in the bathroom watching each other brush teeth in the mirror, or juggling the one car we had (we traded the bust-up pickup for a bust-up SUV just after you were born) to get you all to science fair, basketball practice, hula performances.
But if we could’ve poured our money into a cup that cup would be half empty. Your father lucked into a part-time thing at one of the hotels, like everyone else wanted, but he couldn’t get full-time or the good tips at the restaurant, only working the room crews, and he’d come back and tell me about the barely touched plates of ahi on the balconies being picked over by a mass of mynahs and the volcanoes of clothes on the hotel room floors. Those haoles got two pairs of clothes for every day of vacation, he’d say, Two for every day.
And it felt like almost as soon as that hotel job came, it went, Seasonal Restructuring. And my hours at the mac-nut warehouse got slashed. Our dinners got simpler, never mind the food pyramid. Your father did everything he could, a house-painting job here, some landscaping there, a couple days bent over at a friend’s farm. I picked up a few nights at Wipeouts Grill. We came home with backs splintered with pain, aching legs, and blood-drumming foreheads, and we’d pass each other and hand you kids off while one person’s shift ended and the other’s began. But those shifts were less and less on the calendar, until suddenly we were at home using the calculator to find out how much time we really had.