“I know you can hear me,” she said aloud, replacing the dish towel on its hook. “Don’t worry, Mari, we’re watching over him.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Nori’s heart jumped; she turned to see her old friend Koji Sanada, muddy shoes in one hand, standing in the doorway. She hadn’t heard him come into the house. She smiled now to see him, wearing a T-shirt and baggy work pants. He’d always been like a brother to her. Nori was an only child of pineapple-picking parents who barely noticed her and had eventually drank themselves to death. They’d all grown up together in the tightly knit community, watching the rise of the sugar plantations and the growth of Hilo.
“To myself,” she said, and looked away flustered. “What are you doing here and not at the market?”
Nori knew the locals were already gathering there.
“I wanted to leave this here for Daniel,” Koji said. He placed a wrapped box on the kitchen table.
Nori smiled. She knew it was most likely another railcar—an addition to Daniel’s favorite train set that Koji had started building with him when he was a seven-year-old boy. Every year since, he had added to it.
“He’ll be happy to have it waiting for him,” she said.
“Is there anything else that needs doing before he arrives?”
Through the years, Hilo town had weathered many ups and downs, and Koji was someone on whom the locals could always depend. Now, just past fifty, he was still in better shape than many men a decade younger, solid and muscular. He’d grown up and worked on a sugar plantation since his father was hired by John Dillingham back in the late 1800s, when many of the big sugarcane plantations were started. “Sweetness runs through my blood,” he liked to tell her. Koji knew more about the cane work than most of the lunas, the mostly Portuguese foremen who oversaw the workers. He was a legend in the fields, his skill becoming mythical over the years. He was known as the fastest cane cutter on the Big Island, and still held the record of cutting twelve hundred pounds of sugarcane in an hour. After twenty years of cutting cane at the Puli Plantation, and even as age and later injuries slowed him down, the owners had asked him to stay on to run the sugar train.
“Everything’s done here,” Nori said.
“Mariko would be happy to have him home, yeah?”
“Very happy,” she said.
“I’ll take the sugar train back up to Puli once the cane is unloaded at the station. Come back down to the market in the truck afterward.” Koji ran his hand over his short, graying hair and looked around. He stood a moment lost in memory. “The place looks good.”
Since Mariko’s death, Koji had stopped coming to the bungalow. Before then, he was there every Sunday helping Mariko to fix one thing or another, spending time with the two of them at harvest end, and later, when Daniel came home at Christmas every year. They were his family, but now he kept to himself. While they had all mourned her death, Koji’s loss felt all the louder in his silence.
Nori smiled. “Don’t be late, yeah.”
“Haven’t I always kept the train on schedule?” Koji said.
“Always a first time.”
“I’ll be there.”
Koji lifted his hand in a wave and stepped out the back door. Nori watched as he pulled on his shoes before thumping down the stairs. She waited a few minutes in the quiet kitchen, but Mariko never returned.
3
Rising Winds
The winds had risen by the time Koji brought the sugar train back to the Puli Plantation. Over the years Puli had become one of the largest sugar plantations south of Hilo, several thousand acres not twenty miles up the mountain from town. From the train barn, he walked past the sugar house and mill, up the road to his small tin-roofed wood cottage that overlooked the cane fields. Only after all his work was completed did Koji really feel the sharp tug of excitement at Daniel’s return. He wondered how long it would take for Daniel to slow to the island rhythms again. Daniel would have to readapt to living in a small island town with its sudden midafternoon rainstorms; the muggy heat and fierce winds; the dense, green blankets of foliage; and the hovering, dark volcanoes that loomed over everything. From the moment Koji set foot onto the black lava rocks as a boy, he knew that the island was a living organism and they were simply guests.
The winds grew stronger now, pulling at Koji, ghosts urging him back to the cane. I still have to change and drive back down to Hilo, he thought, even as he turned around and began to walk back down toward the fields.
* * *
The air stilled for a moment followed by the rustling of cane leaves.
“You’re going the wrong way, yeah,” Razor Takahashi said, meeting Koji at the edge of the field, a sweat-slick layer of cane dust on Razor’s face, a pint-size bottle of whiskey in his hand. The trade winds rose and had the tall cane swaying back and forth like hula dancers. The northern fields were the last of the fields being readied to be burned.
“Just need to walk a bit,” Koji said.
“Can’t get enough of the cane, eh?” Razor said and laughed.
It was true. Koji often felt a pull toward the cane. It was in his blood, the only life he’d known, and the place where he felt most at home. It was something he knew Razor understood.
Razor took a swig from the bottle. He reached out and offered Koji a drink. “What time is Daniel coming home?”
Koji shook his head and smiled at his old friend. “He’s arriving soon. I better go. I’ll see you soon, yeah. Save some for me,” he added, pointing to the bottle before he walked into the sugarcane field.
When Koji turned back, Razor was already gone from sight.
* * *
Razor had been his first real friend at the plantation. Their lives before then had been uprooted when his father lost their small rice farm in Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan after a series of bad business deals. “Isn’t sugarcane just another type of farming?” his father had reasoned. “A three-year contract offering steady pay and free housing, and we’ll return to Japan standing firmly on our feet again.” All Koji remembered was how weak his legs felt after sailing across the ocean for more than three weeks aboard the City of Tokio, weaker than standing all day bent over in their wet rice paddy field. It was early morning when they’d arrived in Hilo, the town shrouded in mist, reminding him of the Japanese village in a folktale his mother had read to him and his sister. Koji imagined the spirits from those stories had followed them all the way across the ocean. Even the same dark and foreboding mountains stood tall in the distance.
A dockworker unloading the ship followed his gaze. “That’s Mauna Loa, yeah, Hawai’i’s version of Mount Fuji,” he’d said. “There are four more volcanoes that make up the island,” he added. “No need to worry, eh. Only three of them are active.”
Five volcanoes on one island.
Koji was immediately captivated.
His family’s papers were quickly signed and collected at the harbor by Japanese-speaking immigration officers. After, they were herded into a tent for a quick health clearance, poked and prodded by Japanese doctors hired by the plantations before they were packed onto horse-drawn wagons with the other new arrivals, squeezed so tightly together that Koji could hardly move in the breathless heat. From there they were bumped and jostled for two hours through dense forests of ohi’a trees, shrubs, and thick, overgrown foliage, and then up a winding, treacherous mountain road to their new home at Puli Plantation.