The Whiteness of Bones Read online

  SUSANNA MOORE

  THE WHITENESS

  OF BONES

  Susanna Moore is from Hawaii but now lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Moore is also the author of a nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, published by the National Geographic Society.

  ALSO BY SUSANNA MOORE

  One Last Look

  I Myself Have Seen It

  In the Cut

  My Old Sweetheart

  Sleeping Beauties

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2003

  Copyright © 1989 by Susanna Moore

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1989.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Lyrics from “Honolulu Hula Hula Heigh,” “Nani Kaua‘i,” “He‘eia” and “Hula” from Na Leo Hawai‘i Kahiko, reprinted by permission of Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

  Lyrics from “Every Night at Seven” by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner © 1951 Chappell & Co., & SBK Entertainment (Renewed). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Lyrics from “This Is Always” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon © 1946 WB Music Corp. (Renewed). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Lyrics from “The Girl from Ipanema” (Garota De Ipanema), Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim, English Words by Norman Gimbel, Original Words by Vinicius De Moraes © Copyright 1963 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes, Brazil. Rights administered by DUCHESS MUSIC CORPORATION, New York, N.Y. 10019 for all English Speaking Countries. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Robert van Gulik, excerpt from Poets and Murder Copyright © 1968 Robert van Gulik. Reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Moore, Susanna.

  The whiteness of bones / Susanna Moore.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.0667W4 1989

  813’.54—dc19

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82660-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Annabel Davis-Goff

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part II

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part III

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  ONE

  It is still said, in those small towns on the island of Kaua‘i that have remained unchanged for years, that if the legendary menehune do not finish a task in one night’s work, they abandon it forever at dawn. Anthropologists tell us that this is because the menehune, the tiny men and women who lay hidden in the wet forests through the long, hot days, were afraid to return to the same good taro field or water ditch, night after night, lest they be caught and bound into servitude by the lazier, bigger, more ferocious Tahitians.

  The menehune, who were the eleventh-century forebears of the more arrogant and more recent invaders from Tahiti, died out hundreds of years ago. They do not believe this in Waimea town. There are several sightings each year of menehune and many of the old people leave food out for them, papayas and ‘opihi, and the yams that the menehune love so much. There are royal fish ponds and ancient roads and black lava-rock temple sites hidden all over the island and to the initiated, the children who are born there and live there, these locations are revered and kept secret from outsiders.

  The irrigation ditches cut into the sides of the mountain by the industrious menehune were eventually built over by the industrious white men who came long after them to plant the lovely sugar cane, to sell it and to ship it far away. In place of the menehune ditches, diligently made by hand of cut-and-dressed stone, there now were aqueducts, wooden half-barrels laid on their sides and elevated on rusty trestles, to rush the icy spring water down the mountainside to the fields.

  This system of irrigation through flumes was simple, but effective. There were miles of flumes and, although they were difficult to reach and often hidden from view in thick stands of ‘ohe ‘ohe and pili grass, the children of the island used the flumes as water slides.

  The location of certain especially fast and dangerous flumes was kept secret in families for generations and passed on in unquestioned solemnity. It was against the law to use the flumes as water slides, but since the land and the water were owned by fathers or mothers or cousins, punishment, if one were so careless as to be caught, was seldom very severe.

  The children had been fluming all day in Makaweli. Mamie Clarke, twelve years old, sat on the front bumper of an old army jeep as Lily Shields, in the driver’s seat, let the heavy jeep coast recklessly back down the winding mountain road. Tosi, Lily’s adopted brother, who was Japanese, held his muddy feet on top of the strawberry guavas careening back and forth on the floorboard to keep them from rolling under the clutch pedal. Mamie jumped off at the bottom of the mountain, where the dirt track met the highway. She was covered with dust and the pakalana lei she was wearing when she started out had only a few crushed green flowers left on its string.

  “Meeting tomorrow afternoon,” Lily yelled back into the wind. Mamie held up her hand to show that she had heard. They belonged to a club.

  Mamie walked home through the sugar cane. The fields had been planted by her father’s grandfather. Sugar grew tall and pale green up the soft slopes of the mountains behind her. It swayed and bent over her as she splashed through the water in the bottom of a shallow ditch. The red, silted water was cool. The old, crooning sound of the cane came to Mamie. The cane knew different songs. That day, Mamie recognized “Tell Me Why” by Neil Young.

  It had not rained in three weeks and some of the cane, the growth farthest from water, had begun to turn brown at the roots. The dust made the inside of her nose dry and tight. She could see the Filipinos in their straw hats coming back to the cane fields from lunch in the workers’ camp.

  The camp glinted suddenly as the sun struck a rippled tin roof. There was a flash of bright red, too, from the leggy poinsettias that poked along the peeling wood porches of the old camp houses. Giant ferns and allamanda pressed densely around the little ramshackle houses that were like the forts a child might build with odd pieces of wood and the corroded sheet metal of abandoned cars.

  She took the dirt road that ran through the camp. Piles of rotting mangoes, black with drunken fruit flies, lay under the big trees. The branches drooped low, heavy with fruit. The spoiled mangoes smelled li
ke sweet jam.

  Mamie’s hair was cut very short. Despite her boyish head, her arms and back and neck had a tender, lithe refinement. She moved with the easy grace of a child who has been brought up under the sky. In the bright sunlight, her eyes seemed as if they were yellow, but inside her father’s palm grove, in the shade, her eyes were brown. Her skin was the color of homemade taffy.

  It was much cooler in the grove. Another song was serenaded there, “Waimanalo Blues,” as the rushing, rustling branches creaked and groaned above her. She picked up two coconuts, two cents, and carried one under each arm.

  The palm grove had been planted by the Chiefess Deborah whose land it once was, before she removed herself and her large retinue to the more convivial, more temperate, climate on the banks of the Wailua River. Long-horned cattle brought in sailing ships by Captain Vancouver once grazed in the palm grove. There were more than five hundred trees, and generations of workers had eaten the milky meat, plaited rope from the hemp, carved bowls from the shells, and woven prized floor mats from the green, sharp-edged fronds. Now McCully Clarke paid his children a penny a coconut to collect them. The Chiefess, when she abandoned the Waimea plantation, had tired of the heat and the muddy water. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds and ten young men were needed to carry her litter to the little dock. She took the long-horned cattle with her.

  Through the palm trees, Mamie could see her mother, Mary, bending in the flowers at the side of the plantation house. She was transplanting the delicate Tahitian gardenias she had brought from Hanalei the day before and watering them from a big, square tin that once held soy sauce.

  The house, long and low, sat on a wide expanse of lawn between the Pacific Ocean and the palm grove. With its damp, brown sand, glittering with mica, the beach hemmed the land like a bejeweled lace ruffle on an old green gown. The rich iron silt from the Waimea River one mile to the east and the irrigation runoff from the cane fields made the ocean the opaque color of coffee with milk. It was not a beautiful beach, with its slow, small breakers, and the children rode their bikes through the bending cane to swim instead in the dangerous white surf at Polihale. Several people drowned at Polihale each year, usually young servicemen in tight nylon bathing suits. Cheap hotels, the children called the suits. No ballroom.

  The house had a peaked, corrugated-tin roof and long verandas running the length of both sides, so that a fresh trade wind blew through the cool, open rooms day and night. On the veranda facing the ocean were rocking chairs and big hikie‘es where guests would sleep at night. Leaning against the inside wall of the ocean veranda were canoe paddles made of koa wood, some of them one hundred years old. They were used whenever McCully and the boys took the outriggers to the reef, and during the months spent training for the canoe races. Some of the paddles had been won in races, and the dates of the victories were carved on their long, smooth handles: 1903, 1928, 1931, 1952, 1969, 1971, 1972.

  The flowers that surrounded the house were white flowers. Mary had planted white ginger five and six plants deep under the bedroom windows so that you fell asleep and awoke to the heavy, narcotic smell of ginger. She had not planted them outside the dining room, as she knew that the odor would be too strong, so white oleander and spider lilies, only mildly scented, were allowed to grow there. The children could eat without getting flower-headaches. The faint smell of the deadly oleander always reminded Mamie of the afternoon that Hiroshi, the gardener, found a man, woman and two children lying dead in the sea grape. They were holding in their hands sticks of leaf-stripped oleander. Perfectly grilled hot dogs swayed on the tips of the sticks. There were several bites in each of the hot dogs, or so Gertrude, the maid, had whispered to Mamie. Gertrude’s boyfriend was a part-time policeman. That the dead people were tourists was evident immediately. Not much sympathy was felt for the visitors from Denver, so stupid as to roast hot dogs on poisonous sticks. In Waimea town, the strange deaths only strengthened the islanders’ instinctive disapproval of outsiders.

  Mary planted the white, trumpet-shaped datura that grew to fourteen feet along the grove veranda. It was another deadly plant, but the gardenia with its sturdy, shiny leaves did not seem to mind, for it grew happily alongside. Only the edge of the lawn, near the eucalyptus, was left unplanted, as Mary, after years of Hiroshi’s warnings, had finally admitted that only the sea grape and the creeping purple morning glory, clinging to the sand, were able to withstand the spray from the ocean.

  Mary worked in her garden all day long. She was from Oklahoma. Mamie wondered if there were any flowers or trees in Oklahoma. Mary worked in the moonlight, too, especially when the thorny, night-blooming cereus, on its three-winged stem, was opening on the lava-rock walls. She corresponded with the Horticulture Department of the University of Hawaii and botanists from the mainland came to visit her. Mamie did not fully understand, or appreciate, perhaps, just what her mother did, as it seemed to Mamie that the difficult task was to keep things from growing. If you happened to spit guava seeds on the path, it was not uncommon to see a guava shoot sprouting there a few days later. Perhaps if Mary had shown as much interest in her daughter as she showed in her plants, Mamie would have been less confused.

  As Mamie stepped onto the thick lawn, she saw Hiroshi sitting in one of the folds of the banyan tree, eating his lunch from an aluminum bento box. Ever since her father told her that in India entire families, entire villages, lived in enormous banyans like the one in their garden, she had been particularly interested in the tree. She did not like the smell of the banyan, a smell of rotten fruit and sap-stained leaves, but she liked imagining Indians tucked into clefts in the branches, taking sodas from an icebox wedged into a bend of the trunk, tying their turbans to air roots when it was time to sleep. She dropped the coconuts outside the laundry door and went to sit with Hiroshi.

  He had been with her mother and father since before Mamie was born. After World War I, he had come from Japan when his father, working as an indentured laborer in the cane fields, had finally saved enough money to send for his family. McCully’s father had recognized Hiroshi’s gift for growing things and had given him to McCully and Mary as a wedding present.

  She sat next to Hiroshi in the shade. He was eating cold cone sushi, agé, and he handed Mamie the damp, wrinkled end of it, the part that resembled an old woman’s elbow. She ate it as he neatly repacked his box, folding the used waxed paper precisely into fourths, shaking out the last drops of gen mai cha from the bamboo thermos, burying in the hard dirt the big, hairy seed from the mango. The skin on his fingers was so calloused that it was cracked and split. He had a wispy white chinbeard that Mamie liked to comb. The tufts of hair were like thin ribbons of smoke. His face was very wrinkled from years of squinting in the bright sunlight.

  Mamie watched him in adoration. He patted his lap. She slid over and sat on his legs. She noticed that someone, probably Orval Nalag from the camp, had scratched “I Fock Tiny” on the trunk of the banyan.

  “We’re going to Koke‘e tomorrow. You coming?” Hiroshi tucked Mamie’s thick brown hair behind her ears. His old fingers trembled.

  “For plants?”

  “She like move down more ginger.”

  “No,” Mamie said. She felt very comfortable leaning back against Hiroshi. He, too, had an odd smell, like camphor wood and kim chi.

  He rested his hands on the elastic waist of her faded red palaka shorts. The water in the bottom of the irrigation ditch had rinsed the red dirt from her feet, but a henna anklet of dried mud prettily encircled her brown calves.

  “You got chawan hair,” he said, fondly stroking the back of her head.

  “I don’t like chawan hair,” she said. She shook her head to push his hand away. Chawan hair was hair that had been cut under an inverted rice bowl. She could hear him chuckling behind her. She laughed, too.

  He slid one of his old hands inside her faded shorts and moved it down inside her warm, white cotton underpants until it was resting softly on her labia.

  She tur
ned to look at him. She was not frightened of him. She was confused. There were tears in the wrinkles of his face. She took his big, hardened hand by the wrist and pulled it away from her. There was a little snap of the elastic waistband as both their hands came awkwardly out of the shorts. She placed his hand palm-down in the dirt.

  She could see her mother, Mary, binding the straggling, willful shoots of a cape jasmine to a post of the veranda. Her younger sister, Claire, was standing on the veranda steps with her mongoose, Jimmy. She could hear Gertrude loudly singing a maudlin Filipino love song in the laundry room.

  She lifted herself from Hiroshi’s bow legs. She walked slowly across the lawn. She felt as though her body, by some mistake or accident, had passed out of her keeping. I did not have it very long, she thought.

  She padded noiselessly through the cool forest of Norfolk pine, the dry brown needles cushioning the earth beneath the bare feet that used to belong to her, and went through the banana plantation, the banana leaves tattered and flapping, and the heavy, purple, inflorescent banana blossom hanging from its notched rope. The cone was like a part of the human body not meant to be exposed, a heart swinging on a spiny string of vertebrae or the pink tip of a dog’s penis emerging harmlessly from its sheath.

  She followed the dirt road into the workers’ camp. The wooden houses were silent in the middle of the afternoon. There were big fishing nets thrown to dry on porch railings. A smell of brine and salt fish came from the nets. Rows of pale blue Japanese glass balls lined the rickety steps of the houses. A spindly papaya tree grew in each small, pretty yard. Mangy, happy dogs with protruding hip bones rushed out, yelping, to sniff her hands. She could smell fried Portuguese sausage. The bare legs and feet of Orval Nalag stuck out from under a two-tone, turquoise-and-white 1959 Chevrolet. The soles of his feet were blotted with motor oil. Coffee cans planted with pink bougainvillaea closely marked the neat boundary between Daldo Fortunato’s house and the house of his first cousin, Ray. These plantings in old oil drums and tin cans, the plants outgrowing the containers quickly, made her mother furious.