The Whiteness of Bones Read Free Page B

Sharlagne’s brother had returned the day before from Vietnam and there was a party that night at the Fire Station.
    Mitsuya smiled. She had no teeth. “No need,” she said. “You
pau
now. See you bumbye.”
    Everyone on the plantation spoke Pidgin English. Mamie and Claire could speak Pidgin, and McCully, of course, spoke Pidgin most of the time. Mary did not, out of principle, and she wondered aloud what the girls would do when they were in the “real world” and had to speak in complete sentences. “As if this is not real enough,” Mamie said to Claire in astonishment. “As if I am ever going to leave Waimea!”
    Claire seemed to take her mother as she found her, with ironic calm, but Mamie was baffled by her. The puzzling thing to Mamie, as well as to McCully, was that Mary was not affected by the island itself in that passionate way that so moved them. Mary admired her island flowers, but Mamie could imagine her mother loving flowers in Eugene, Oregon, or Cuernavaca, Mexico. McCully’s pious great-great-grandfather had made the long, dangerous journey of one hundred and sixty-four days around the Horn in order to convert the natives in Hilo. He had stayed on, less pious, but far happier, to buy up all of the land and to plant coffee and sugar, and to bring more heathens from Japan and China to work in his fields and to pray in his churches. McCully was as much a part of the island as the trees in the groveor the coconut on Mitsuya’s cake. But Mary never came under the spell.
    Perhaps she was a bit frightened of it, the spell, and could not have succumbed to it even had she wanted to. Perhaps it had to do with the air, the unusual feel of the air, so thick with fragrance and moisture that it was almost tangible. It was the same temperature as the body, so there seemed to be no difference, no separation, between body and atmosphere. You were the air. That is what Mamie and McCully felt, and Orval and Sharlagne and Hiroshi and Claire. But Mary wore gloves when she gardened and, strangest of all, shoes. In fact, she wore shoes all of the time. Mary clearly did not feel that she and the air were one.
    Mamie knew that something had happened to her mother many years before, and she was willing to take into consideration the unhappy circumstances of her mother’s early life, but, try as she might, what information she did possess was not ever enough to justify her mother’s apartness, or as she would have put it, that Mary was not that finest thing, “an island girl.”
    She knew that as a child in Oklahoma, Mary and her younger sister, Alice, had been left orphans when their mother died of pneumonia and their father ran off to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. They were adopted by a Miss Henrietta, a kindly, elderly spinster and Christian Scientist, who lived in the biggest house in town. She had raised the two girls, sent them to school, and accompanied them on holidays to Santa Fe and Pasadena. When she died unexpectedly, leaving her estate to the Christian Science church, Mary was stranded once again, this time at Stanford University. Alice, who was still in high school, took the first train east to New York City and a job as a hat model.
    It was at Stanford that Mary met McCully. He was studyingagriculture in preparation for the time when he would manage the plantation at Waimea as his father had done before him. To the surprise of his family, who did not ever imagine that he would return with a dry, quiet mainland girl to an island where there were as many beautiful, riotous girls as beautiful, riotous flowers, he brought Mary home as his bride. As far as Mamie could discover, she went right to work in the garden.
    Mamie did not blame Mary for her resistance to the tropics, but she was depressed by it. It seemed so much against her mother’s best interests. She talked these things over with her friend, Lily Shields, who lived at Koloa in the Big House. Like Mamie, Lily was under the spell. As she was also