To Paradise (39 page)

I sat in silence as Uncle William talked, until, finally, I heard him say, “And then there’s the property in Hau
‘
ula,” at which I sat up and leaned toward him, looking at the map of the island he was lovingly gliding his fingers across. “Just over thirty acres, but a useless piece of land,” he said. “Too arid and too small for significant farming; too remote to be a good homestead. The beach is no good, either—too rough and too much coral. The road’s just dirt, and the state has no plans to extend asphalt out that far. No neighbors, no restaurants, no grocery stores, no schools.”

On and on he went, detailing the property’s flaws, until I finally asked, “Then why do we have it at all?”

“Ah,” he smiled. “It was a whim of your grandfather’s, and your father was too sentimental to sell it. Yes,” he said, mistaking my look for surprise, “he could be sentimental, your father.” He smiled again and shook his head. “Lipo-wao-nahele,” he added.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s what your grandfather called this land,” he said. “The Dark Forest, technically, but he translated it as the Forest of Paradise.” He looked at me. “You’d think it’d be Nahelek
ū
lani, wouldn’t you?” he asked, and I shrugged. Uncle William’s Hawaiian was much better than my own; my grandfather had paid for him to study it when he was a college student and had just begun working for the family practice. “Technically, you’d be right, but your grandfather
Kawika said it was lazy Hawaiian, tacked on, that it’d be akin to calling it, oh, Kawikak
ū
lani.”
Kawikak
ū
lani:
David of Heaven. He began to sing:

“He ho
ʻ
oheno k
ē
ʻ
ike aku

Ke kai moana nui l
ā

Nui ke aloha e hi
‘
ipoi nei

Me ke
‘
ala o ka l
ī
poa

“You know that song, of course.” (I did; it was popular.) “ ‘Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai’: ‘The Bounty of the Sea.’
Lipoa:
It sounds the same, doesn’t it? But it isn’t—here, the word is
l
ī
poa,
and it refers to the seaweed. But your grandfather used
lipoa,
as in
ua lipoa wale i ka ua ka nahele,
‘the forest dark with rain’—very beautiful, don’t you think? So,
‘Lipo wao nahele’
: the Dark Forest. But your grandfather preserved the
mana
of the name: ‘the Forest of Heaven.’ ”

He sat back in his seat and smiled, such a gentle smile, filled with the joy of understanding a language I didn’t speak and couldn’t properly comprehend. Suddenly I hated him—he possessed something I could not, and it wasn’t money but those words, rolling like smooth, shiny pebbles in his mouth, white and clean as the moon.

“Is there a forest out there?” I asked, finally, though I had been about to pose it as a statement:
There’s no forest there.

“Not anymore,” he said. “But there once was, or so your grandfather said. He planned to plant it again someday, and it would be his paradise.

“Your father didn’t share his father’s appreciation for this land—he thought it wasn’t worth the bother. But he didn’t sell it, either. He always said it was because no one would buy it, it being so far out and so far from prime. Though I long suspected it was another form of sentimentalism. You know that the two weren’t terribly close, or at least that was what they’d both say, and yet I think that wasn’t really true. They were just too much alike, and both of them grew accustomed to this narrative, which seemed easier and more dignified than actually trying to close the distance between them. But I wasn’t fooled. Why, I remember…”

And then he was off, telling stories I had already been told: about how my father had wrecked my grandfather’s car and never apologized; about how my father had been a poor high-school student and my grandfather had had to make an additional donation to the school to ensure his graduation; about how my grandfather had wanted my father to be more of a scholar, whereas my father wanted to be an athlete. They were typical father-and-son problems, yet they felt as remote and uninteresting as something I might read in a book.

And behind this all were the words
Lipo wao nahele,
a phrase meant to be chanted, to be carried beneath the tongue, and although I was looking at Uncle William, smiling and nodding as he talked and talked, I was thinking of that land that was mine after all, where I had lain beneath an acacia tree and watched as, just a few yards away, Edward shucked off his shorts and shirt and ran, whooping, into the glittering water, and dived beneath a wave so large that, for a few seconds, it was as if he had been a victim of some kind of alchemy, and his bones had been turned to foam.

Finally, I had information to tell Edward: He may have discovered that the land belonged to me, but I was able to tell him what it had meant to my grandfather, the last person in our family to be addressed as Prince Kawika. Today I am embarrassed about how gratified I was by his excitement, to finally have something to give him and to have it be so enthusiastically received, with all the selfishness of the gift-giver.

It became a shorthand between us. Not quite a joke. But not something I thought I took seriously. I had little imagination, and he had less, but we began to speak of it as someplace real, as if, every time we mentioned its name, a new tree would begin to sprout, as if we were speaking the forest into being. Sometimes we would take you with us on our weekend road trips, and in the afternoons, after you and Edward swam, you would come lie by my side and I would tell you stories I remembered from when I was little, replacing every magic forest, every haunted glen, with
Lipo-wao-nahele. The witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” which had so confounded me when I was a child, with its gingerbread walls and gumdrop-trimmed eaves (What was gingerbread? What were gumdrops? What were eaves?), became a palm hut in Lipo-wao-nahele, its roof made of scallops of dried mango, its doorway a curtain of strings of crack seed, their salt-and-sugar perfume filling the witch’s kitchen. Sometimes I would tell you about it as if it were a place that actually existed—or, rather, I would let you believe it was anything you wanted it to be: “Are there bunnies there?” you’d ask (you were fixated on bunnies, in those years). “Yes,” I’d say. “Is there ice cream there?” you’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Was there a model train set in Lipo-wao-nahele? Was there a jungle gym you could have all to yourself? Was there a tire swing? Yes, yes, yes. Anything you wanted could be found in Lipo-wao-nahele, which was equally defined by what it lacked: bedtime, bath time, homework, onions. There was no room for things you hated at Lipo-wao-nahele. It was heaven as much for what it excluded.

What was I doing? These were the years when you were five, six, seven, eight, still young enough to believe that, because I told you wonderful things, I was wonderful as well. Back then, it seemed not just harmless but helpful. It made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I might be a king after all. Here was this land that my grandfather thought was paradise, and so why should I not agree? Who was I to say that he might not be right?

You may be wondering what your grandmother thought of all this. When she discovered I was with Edward again—and of course she was going to discover it, that was an inevitability—she didn’t speak to me for a week. Though such was the power of Lipo-wao-nahele that, as I remember it, I didn’t even care. I had a different, bigger secret, and that secret was a place where I would feel invincible, where I for once would feel like I belonged, where I would never feel shame or apology for who I was. I had never rebelled as a child, not ever, and yet I had still disappointed her, because I had never been able to be the son she had wanted. But I hadn’t done that on purpose, and if I’m to be honest, there was a thrill in defying her, in being the agent of her dismay, of inviting Edward
back to our house, my house, to have him at our table, my mother a hostage.

We began driving out there every weekend, Edward and I, and although the first time we went I was deflated, thinking only of Uncle William’s dismissals (
a useless piece of land
), Edward was so excited that I let myself become excited as well. “Here’s where my offices will be,” he said, pacing out a square around the acacia. “We’ll keep the tree and build the courtyard around it. And there is where we’ll build the school, where we’ll teach the kids only in Hawaiian. And there’s where your palace will be, near that monkeypod tree. See? We’ll situate it facing the water, so when you wake you’ll be able to see the sun rise over the ocean.” The following weekend, we spent the night there, camped out on the beach, and after the sun had gone down, Edward scooped up a dozen of the tiny firefly squid that had washed onto shore, and skewered them on
‘
ō
hi
‘
a branches and roasted them for us. The next morning, I woke early, before Edward, and looked toward the mountains. In the dawn, the land, which normally looked so scorched, appeared lush and soft and vulnerable.

Now, however, I can see that Lipo-wao-nahele meant different things to us—different, but the same as well. It was, for both of us, a fantasy of usefulness, our own usefulness. Edward had inherited a small amount of money from his mother, enough to rent a single-room cottage on a Lower Valley property owned by a Korean family about a five-minute walk from me; he had an occasional job painting rooms for a construction crew. I didn’t even have that—after you left for school for the day, I had nothing to do but wait for you to come home. Sometimes I helped my mother with simple things, like stuffing envelopes with solicitations for the Daughters’ annual fund-raiser, but mostly I just waited. I read magazines or books, I took long walks, I slept. I hoped for my attacks in those days, for they would prove that my inactivity wasn’t laziness or driftiness but a necessity. “Are you taking it easy?” my doctor—my doctor since childhood—would ask me at my appointments, and I would always say I was. “Good,” he would say, solemnly, “you mustn’t overtax yourself, Wika,” and I would promise him I wasn’t.

We were inessential in every way. I to you and my mother; the both of us to Hawai
‘
i. That was the irony—we needed the idea of Hawai
‘
i more than it needed us. No one was clamoring for us to take over; no one wanted our help. We were playacting, and because our pretending affected no one—until, of course, it did—we could be as indulgent as we wanted. The things we convinced ourselves! That I would be king, that he would be my first adviser, that in Lipo-wao-nahele we would rebuild the paradise my grandfather had supposedly dreamed of, though he certainly couldn’t have dreamed that someone like me would be his representative. In reality, we did nothing—we didn’t even try to plant the forest he wanted.

The difference between us, however, is that Edward believed. He was rich in belief; it was all he had. Lipo-wao-nahele was a retreat and a pastime for him just as it was for me, but it was something more, too. Looking back, I can understand how Edward
needed
to be Hawaiian, or at least this idea of Hawaiian he had created. He needed to feel that he was a part of some larger, greater tradition. His mother was dead, and he had never known his father; he had few friends and no family. To be Hawaiian was not a political imperative for him but, rather, a personal one. Yet here, too, he was unconvincing to others, kicked out of Keiki k
ū
Ali
‘
i, unwelcome (or so he said) in the Hawaiian-language classes he tried to take, expelled from the h
ā
lau because a painting job had meant he would miss too many practices. This was his birthright, and even here he was unwanted.

But at Lipo-wao-nahele, there was no one to tell him no, and no one to tell him that his way of being Hawaiian was incorrect. There was only me, and sometimes you, and we believed whatever he said. I was the king, but he was the leader, and over the years, those thirty acres were being reclassified in his mind from metaphor to something else. It would be his kingdom after all, and we his subjects, and no one would be able to deny him ever again.

The first step was changing our names.

This was 1978, a year before we left. He had already changed his, the previous year. First he had become Ekewaka, the
Hawaiianization of Edward, and a strange and awkward name to say aloud. I had been relieved when he told me he was changing it again, to Paiea, his middle name. “A real Hawaiian name,” he said, proudly, as if he had thought of it himself, instead of merely remembering that it had been there all along. Paiea: the crab, and Kamehameha the Great’s given name. And now Edward’s, as well.

I should have anticipated his wanting to change our names too, but somehow, like so much else, it never occurred to me that he might ask for something so large. “A Hawaiianization of a Christian name is still a Christian name, just in brownface,” he said. It was clear that he had learned this term, “brownface,” recently, because uncertainty softened his voice a bit as he said it.

“But it was the king’s name,” I said, in a rare show of resistance, though I wasn’t arguing so much as I was bewildered. Was the king not Hawaiian enough, either?

“That’s true,” he admitted, and looked momentarily confused. Then his face cleared. “But we’re going to begin again out in Lipo-wao-nahele. Your blood gives you a right to the throne, but we’re going to begin a new dynasty for it.”

He had begun keeping a list of what he considered “true” Hawaiian names, those that predated Western contact. But he bemoaned how few there were, how they had gone almost extinct from lack of interest. It had stupidly never occurred to me that a name, as much as a plant or a creature, could vanish from lack of popularity, nor did I quite see the point of Edward’s quest: You couldn’t force a name back into existence. A name was not a plant or an animal—it flourished from desire, not need, and therefore was subject to all the fickle attentions of humans. Had the old names disappeared because, as he claimed, they had been banned by the missionaries, or had they disappeared simply because they couldn’t withstand the novelty of the Western ones? Edward would have said that both arguments began in the same place: They had been shoved aside by the interlopers. But shouldn’t a name that was meaningful be meaningful enough to hold its place, even in the face of insurrection?