Seeing Kauai's shore again, the green mountains, the white surf, the streamers of clouds almost level with his window, Wilson imagined he was gliding homeward in a dugout instead of a plane. It was a familiar fantasy, one he often summoned when thinking of the island where he was born.
The plane banked and dropped. Beneath him now the waves marched shoreward. The harbor entrance flashed past, and then they were over what had once been cane fields but was now a golf course. The plane touched down twice, roughly, before the brakes came on and the reverse thrusters roared.
George was waiting for him at the terminal. They shook hands, almost as if they were not brothers, and George said, “You made it.”
“I said I would,” Wilson replied.
“You didn’t have to,” George said. “We would have understood.”
“I did, though.”
“You look different.”
“Haole?” Wilson said, offering the Hawaiian term for mainlander, outsider, Caucasian.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody all right?” Wilson asked.
George looked at him. “Yeah, well, you know, considering everything.”
“George, she was old. Seventy-three.”
“She didn’t seem that old. You haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“Ten years,” Wilson said.
He found his bag and they moved out into the sun, its heat mitigated by the trade wind. Wilson had forgotten the wind. There was no other like it, constant, laden with moisture, cooling to the skin. He stood for a moment feeling it on his face.
“What’s the matter?” George said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just absorbing.”
George grunted. “Everybody’s waiting. Everybody came for lunch.”
“Just to see me? The haole come home?”
“They didn’t come for that. You know why they came,” George said.
“Same reason I did,” Wilson said. Humor, he remembered, was not one of George’s strengths.
The road into Lihue was wider, better paved and straighter than before, more like the roads where he lived in California. They drove east through town in silence, crossed the stream before Brewer’s Mill and went on toward Puhi. On both sides the hills rose, topped by white, thick clouds. At the base of the clouds were the cane fields, tassels tossing in the wind.
Only where road cuts exposed the red volcanic earth was there anything but green. They crossed a bridge new to Wilson and then turned to go through a mile-long tunnel created by trees arching over the road. The Tree Tunnel, the tourist brochures called it. But Wilson knew it as Knudsen’s Gap, and when it ended, he saw the view he loved, the long sweep of land toward Poipu, the turquoise ocean, the shimmering sky, the view of home. Involuntarily he drew in a great breath.
“I’d forgotten how it looks,” he said.
George turned to him. “What?”
“The view.”
“Oh, that. Well, even the hurricanes didn’t change that.”
At Koloa, beyond the cemetery, George turned left on a road that Wilson remembered perfectly, the road up which the school bus came, the way to town, his first entrance to the world. Everything began with that road, he thought.
Nor did the house seem changed. The rusty red roof still shaded the front porch, and the wooden walls were still painted white. Wilson got out of the car and started toward the steps. The screen door opened and his father, dry and sere as copra left in the sun, came out onto the porch, holding his cane and feeling his way along the wall with one hand. Wilson bounded up the steps and put his arms around him.
“Pa!”
The old man did not say anything, just held him tightly in his slender, arthritic arms. Then he pushed Wilson back a little and looked at him. In Japanese he said, “You’re home.”
Wilson felt tears in his eyes. “Yes, yes,” he said.
Then everyone was on the porch: his sister, Julia; her husband, Norman; George and his wife, Grace; and several children he could not immediately identify. Everyone crowded around, shaking his hand, kissing him, hugging him, all talking at once.
“I feel like the Prodigal,” Wilson said to George.
“Who?”
“The Prodigal Son. You know, in the Bible.”
“Yeah.”
“Wilson, you look so haole,” Grace said. “You’ve got a tie on. I never saw you with a tie before.”
He began stripping it from his neck, and they all laughed.
Wilson laughed, too. Then he thought of his father, and he went and put his arm around his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Pa.”
“It’s all right,” his father said. “She would laugh. She would laugh because you’re back. Maybe she’s laughing now.”
Trailing the others, Wilson and his father walked slowly to the backyard. They moved through dim rooms shuttered against the noon sun, his father leading the way, leaning heavily on his cane. They moved past furniture that had been new when Wilson was young but was now worn and faded, past the family pictures, each person individually framed. In one of them his mother, her hair cut square around her head, stared out at the camera from under her bangs, her mouth and eyes unsmiling. He paused. “How old was she there, Pa?”
“Nineteen,” his father said. “We just got married. She couldn’t speak English yet. I had to teach her. I had to teach her all the words so she could go to the store. The words for money, for food, for clothes. I had to teach her everything.”
“She had just arrived from Japan,” Wilson chimed in, for he remembered the story that had become one of the family’s legends. His mother wasn’t quite a picture bride, but she was not far from it: a distant cousin of his father, courted first through relatives and then by letter. She arrived on Kauai having seen his father only once, and that had been when he was still a boy, visiting Japan.
His father nodded. “Just from Japan,” he said. “I wrote her a lot of letters. She brought them with her, too, all tied up in little piles. She kept them for a long time. Then she did something with them. I don’t know where they are now.”
For a moment they stood looking at the picture. Then his father tugged at his arm, and they walked past the old kitchen stove over which his mother had spent so many mornings, until finally the backdoor window illuminated the way to the present.
Julia and Grace had spread lunch on tables in back of the house. Everyone sat down, and in the afternoon sun and breeze they ate a larger lunch than Wilson had consumed in years, both traditional dishes (“You remember poi?” Grace asked) and chips and hot dogs for the children.
“I saw you once on television,” Julia said.
Wilson shook his head and laughed. “It’s the only time I’ve ever been on television.”
George said, “Did you see Wilson, Pa?”
Wilson’s father had slumped into his canvas chair under the big Norfolk pine. He looked up from his plate and then nodded his head rapidly. “It was good, good. I didn’t understand it all, but it was good.”
“You going to have your own show?” George asked.
Wilson laughed. “Never. It was just that someone read one of my books and figured I knew all about Asian-American history. I was one of those momentary experts. They’ve already forgotten me, I’m sure.”
“Your mother was proud,” his father said.
“She cried,” one of the children said.
“She cried?” Wilson asked.
“She cried a lot,” one of the nieces said solemnly.
“Sssh,” Julia hissed.
No one offered to elaborate, and Wilson was left to wonder. He had never seen his mother cry, never in all the years he had been at home. He could not picture her in tears.
“Well, I’m glad it was only that once,” he said. “I wouldn’t want her to cry a lot.”
To his embarrassment, no one laughed at this.
“You’re a famous guy,” his father said. “The only famous son I got.”
“Come on,” Wilson said. “George is famous. More famous than me. He got the Silver Star.”
“And the Purple Heart,” Grace said.
“But I never was on TV,” George said.
“You should have been,” Grace said. “All those other boys that went to Korea should have been, too.”
“Going to Korea never got me on TV,” George repeated.
“Well, I never thought being a history professor would, either,” Wilson said.
His father put down his plate and struggled to get out of his chair. “We got to go to the mortuary,” he said.
Wilson did not really want to go to the mortuary, but he knew it was required.
“George?” his father said.
“Yeah, sure,” George replied.
The mortuary was hot and silent. Mr. Yamashita, the mortician, took them to the room where his mother lay. They stood looking down at her. She’s thinner, Wilson thought. And it doesn’t look like her. She seemed more like a replica of someone he once knew.
He thought back to the days when his mother, in her own way, ruled the house, a dictator who handed out the chores, barking “George!” or “Wilson!” or “Julia!” She expected much and said little, yet he seemed to remember that they all laughed a lot. Only when his father came home from work did things change. His father became the one who issued orders, and his mother was transformed into that picture on the kitchen wall.
They stood still, just looking at her, for what seemed a long time. Wilson did not know what to say, but he felt as if he should say something, offer some personal form of benediction. He murmured, “She’s so, so, so small. . . .”
“She never was big,” his father said. “But she was strong. For her size, I never saw such a strong woman.”
Wilson nodded.
They kept staring at the body, waiting, as if they expected her to reply, to offer them some absolution, but nothing happened. At length, Wilson became aware of a fly buzzing somewhere against a screened window. It seemed to sound interminably in its attempt to escape, so close to the open air and yet unable to find the way beyond the screen.
At last, his father turned slowly and shuffled into the hall. “The service is tomorrow morning,” he said. “At 10 o’clock. At the church.”
Wilson knew he meant the new church, the United Church of Christ across the street.
“It’s what she wanted,” his father said.
“But you didn’t?”
His father frowned. “The old way is the best. But she didn’t think so. Me, you can take to the temple. But her, it’s the church. I guess it helped her. The minister came most every day. A woman preacher—she liked that. I didn’t understand it. I understand the old way, not a church run by a woman.”
Wilson remembered the last time he was home, the last time he saw his mother alive. He remembered how on Sunday she walked to the Koloa church and his father drove to the Buddhist temple in Lihue. They went their separate ways without speaking of it, but the tension beat down like an island shower, sudden and intense, and when it lifted in the afternoon, the air still held the heavy scent of rain.
“Do you go to church?” the old man asked Wilson without looking at him as they started down the steps toward the car where George was waiting.
Wilson, who was neither Christian nor Buddhist but simply a doubter, said, “No. I don’t go to temple, either.”
“Huh,” his father said. Wilson could not tell whether it was a comment or an exhalation because his father had reached the bottom stair and it was a long step down to the ground.
They drove home in silence. Once his father said to George, “You got the flowers?” and George nodded. The wind had risen with the passing of the afternoon. Now it whipped the fronds of the big palm behind the house.
Wilson went back to his chair in the yard. There, for the rest of the afternoon, he struggled to make conversation. His father fell asleep under the pine and began to snore. The women smiled. “He does that every afternoon,” Grace said. “He can really snore.”
Wilson thought about how many days like this there must have been for his mother, of how the island, a dot in the midst of the Pacific, was all the world there really was for her.
She never learned to drive a car, but instead depended on her feet or her family for transportation. Shopping at the mall in Lihue was an adventure for her. She never swam; to her, the beach at Poipu was only a place to sit on Saturday afternoons for a picnic. But she loved the little wooden bathtub where she soaked away the fatigue of the day. He could picture her in it, a faint smile of pleasure on her face.
“Is the bathtub still here?” he asked.
“Sure,” Grace said.
“I’d like to use it.”
Grace smiled. “You can wash off the mainland,” she said.
Wilson went into the bathroom, undressed and climbed into the tub. He sank back in the water and let it rinse the long trip from his body. It had been many years since he had taken a Japanese bath.
Afterward, he lay down in the front bedroom. Darkness slowly descended, bringing with it vaguely familiar sounds: the croak of frogs from an irrigation ditch, an occasional groan from the timbers of the house, the crash of the wind in the palm, rattling and cracking its fronds. He lay awake, drifting back and forth between present and past. He tried to think of his mother, to resurrect her memory, but too much time had elapsed since his last visit home. I didn’t really know her anymore, he thought. I didn’t know her.
He fell asleep with that thought.
Many mourners came to the memorial service, most of them his parents’ age, small, Japanese, expressionless. They stepped up to Wilson as he stood by the door in the morning sunlight, sometimes shaking his hand, occasionally hugging him. Their murmurs were like the rustle of leaves as they passed. “So sorry, Wilson.” “God bless you.” “God be with you.”
The minister, an athletic young woman, a haole in a long black robe with a many-colored stole, gave a brief eulogy. She skipped his mother’s birth in Japan and dwelt on her marriage to his father “so many years ago” and her “long service to the Koloa community,” praising her diligence, her patience, her work in the Sunday school with the children and so on.
Wilson half listened, now and then feeling his throat choke with emotion. He glanced at his father, whose head was bowed. The old man was crying, not graceful tears but sniffling and coughing sobs. Wilson felt suddenly embarrassed. He had never seen his father cry. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his own tears and handed it to his father.
His father took it blindly, clapping it to his eyes.
Another lunch appeared, as if by magic, on the tables behind the house. People crowded into the yard, eating, talking, greeting one another. Wilson wandered among them, shaking an unfamiliar hand here and there. At last he sat down beside his father, who was once again in his canvas chair under the giant pine.
“How you doing, Pa?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“It was a nice service,” Wilson said.
“Yeah.”
His father paused and added, “You know the last thing she said to me?”
“No,” Wilson said.
“I made your lunch.”
“What?”
“I made your lunch. Then she closed her eyes. She never did open them again.”
“That’s a funny thing to say,” Wilson said.
His father nodded. “I wonder what she meant. She hadn’t made my lunch for a couple of weeks. She was sick. Grace made my lunch. She couldn’t.”
Toward evening, George took him to the airport to catch his plane. They walked to the place where Wilson had to go through the agricultural inspection. George clapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand. “So long, bro. Come back,” he said.
“I will.”
George held his hand a moment longer than was necessary. “I know you won’t.”
“I will. I promise. I’ll try to come back more often.”
George smiled. “Well, I hope so. Come for Pa’s funeral, anyway.”
“George!”
“It won’t be long now. Now that she’s gone, there’s nothing really for him to live for.”
“He’s got all of you. All of us.”
“But she was what he really needed. She was what kept him going. She didn’t need him, but he needed her.”
“I hope he lives a long time.”
“I hope he does, too,” George said. “But I don’t think so.”
Wilson picked up his bag to start inside, but George had one final thing to say.
“She really missed you when you left, you know. We were still here, but she was always talking about you.”
“Oh, come on,” Wilson said. “That was because she didn’t see me all the time.”
George smiled. “Well, partly. But there was another reason. It took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally did. It was because you did what she wanted to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got away. You got off the island. She never did. She never could.”
“You mean she envied me?”
“Something like that,” George said. “She never would have said so, but I don’t think she wanted to come here in the first place.”
“She came to marry Pa.”
“I know,” George said. “She came because she promised she would. I don’t know why she promised, but she did. Once she got here, she wanted to leave, but she never could because she had promised. It was the way people did things then. For honor. I don’t know if she ever loved Pa or even if she ever loved any of us, but it doesn’t matter—she stayed.”
“She could have gone,” Wilson insisted. “She could have gone anytime.”
“No. She couldn’t go back on her word. She couldn’t ever leave.”
George looked off toward the mountains. “But now she has,” he said, and he turned and walked back to his car.
Wilson watched him go, with words in his mind that he wanted to speak but for which there now was no audience. Then he, too, turned and went home.
Carl Heintze, ’47, is a former newspaperman living in San Jose who serves as a class correspondent for Stanford.
