The Whiteness of Bones Read Free

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.
    “Why can’t they plant them in the
ground?
” she would ask.
    “Perhaps because it is not their ground,” McCully would answer quietly.
    Mamie was looking for McCully.
    She found him in his office at the sugar mill.

    They walked slowly back through the camp. McCully had to stop only once to admire the sweet-smelling wooden weather vane of two men fighting with machetes that Daldo Fortunato, one of the mill foremen, had just finished carving. McCully patiently helped Daldo attach it with chicken wire to the top of Daldo’s aluminum mailbox. Then they all made small bows to Mrs. Nagata, standing on her tiny green lawn, more like a baby’s quilt than a lawn, watering her vanda orchids.
    Mamie took McCully’s hand as they came nearer to the house. She was relieved to see that Mary was no longer on the veranda. McCully stopped at the edge of the garden. They both saw Hiroshi at the same time, still sitting in the fold of the banyan, smoking his stained ivory pipe, his torn straw hat in his lap. He looked as if he were waiting for them.
    She watched from the screened window of her bedroom as McCully and Hiroshi stood under the banyan tree. McCully was much taller than Hiroshi, and from a distance it looked as if McCully were talking to a child. Hiroshi held his hat respectfully in both hands. They were not there long, McCully with his hand on Hiroshi’s rounded shoulder for a moment, nodding his head as he listened to the old man. Then McCully put his hands in the pockets of his baggy khaki pants and turned to stare at the calm brown sea and Hiroshi looked back at the house once. Looking for me, Mamie thought. “Looking for me, my sweet Hiroshi,” she said aloud, weeping. Her face burned with shame.
    She knew that she would never see him again.
    When Claire banged her way into the room, flinging open the screen door, and saw Mamie standing at the window, she said loudly, “Oh, no, don’t tell me you’ve been reading
The Constant Nymph
again!”
    Mamie wiped her face quickly, the face that used to be her own, said yes, and vomited.

TWO

    Mamie and Claire were accustomed to walking each late afternoon into Waimea to the Dairy Queen, where they would buy two enormous root beer floats and one cheese dog and carefully carry them back along the quiet two-lane highway to the palm grove. They would then untie the pacing Jimmy from an old gate and sit in the grove while the sun went down behind them. Some of the palms, planted to commemorate great events, long forgotten now, had been trained to grow crookedly and Claire liked to sit on an old tree that grew horizontally, its long fronds shading her like a