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Freckled Page 5


  “Hi, Aunty Clorinda.” Mom wanted me to call her Mrs. Murioka to be respectful, but Clorinda told me to call her “aunty” like all the local kids do. She’s all smiling dimples and shiny black hair in a bun, and she takes the pink slip from my hand.

  “Toby, what you folks get today? You Wilsons get so many packages!” A few minutes later, she hands the box to me.

  If the box is light, it’s probably something from my grandma Gigi. If it’s a box of food from the co-op, I have to get Mom to help carry it to the van. I check the address. Yep, it’s from Gigi. Maybe she sent me something for school. I’d love to have a new knapsack or school supplies.

  Mom’s gone inside the Ching Young Store and is saying hi to Mrs. Ching, who runs the register from a square station surrounded by glass counters where she can keep an eye on everything. She’s short and wears tidy fitted muumuus and half glasses on a chain that she puts on her nose. Mrs. Ching never asks me to call her “aunty,” but she likes me, I can tell, because sometimes she’ll give me a Bazooka bubblegum from the big jar on the counter if I’m there alone.

  I’m always hopeful, but if Mom catches me with the gum, she’ll take it away. We don’t get to eat sugar like the town kids who run through Ching’s store, sticky with shave ice syrup and Tomoe Ame rice candy. Mom says sugar’s bad for us. She points out how many of the local kids have silver teeth and tells me it makes me hyperactive.

  While they chat about whether or not the Hanalei River will flood this year, I poke around in the dimly lit depths.

  Ching Young Store always reminds me of Aladdin’s cave of treasures. They have everything: tabis for reef walking, my favorite red scoop nets, spears, knives, fishing tackle, flashlights, matches, paraffin wax Pop uses for his surfboards but you can make candles with—and that’s just the non-food aisle.

  We can’t afford to buy much at Ching’s. It’s expensive, and we do better with our food stamps if we drive another hour or so into town in Kapa`a or Lihue. Trips into town happen every couple of weeks, with the monthly food stamp pickup at the big white state building in Lihue. We usually get our food right after that at the nearby Big Save: boxes of powdered milk and everything else Mom can’t order through the co-op.

  Getting food stamps has something to do with not having enough regular money. Pop works whenever he can get a job, plus his job at the Anchorage, but Mom doesn’t have a job and the three hundred dollars from Pop’s trust fund goes to gas, rent, and the co-op. We really need the food stamps, or we run out of food. Everyone we know gets them, including the local families.

  Mom needs matches and kerosene for the lamps, and today she buys me a Tiger’s Milk bar, since it’s our special day. On the way back home, I lick the carob coating off the peanut butter filling and eat it ever so slowly.

  “Go pick us some chard,” Mom says when we get back to the Forest House. “And be sure to get off all the caterpillars.”

  Mom doesn’t believe in using pesticides and fertilizers, so Bonny and I pick the snails, slugs, and caterpillars off the veggies every day, and she makes compost to feed the plants from leaves, grass clippings and horse or cow manure. Inside the house, Mom’s cooking the kidney beans she left to soak and brown rice. When you combine them, they form “a perfect protein,” which means we don’t have to eat meat to be healthy.

  Mom’s veggie plot is growing amazing even though we haven’t been here long. I squat in the red dirt of the row and pick a whole pile of the outer leaves of the chard, throwing the caterpillars away into the grass. “Don’t kill them. It’s bad karma,” Mom says.

  Karma is when someone dies and, if they were a good person, they come back as a more evolved thing. If not, they go back to start and are born as a slug or maybe a toad. Pop rolls his eyes a bit at the karma of caterpillars, so I’m pretty sure it’s okay to squish them. And we kill a lot of fish and reef creatures, but the karma on that is okay, I hope, because we are eating them. Today, we have uhu steamed with chard over rice and beans. Sitting on the front porch, eating together, it tastes so good. Especially since Pop’s in a good mood, even though he’s drinking and that means tomorrow morning will be hard.

  Pop goes surfing most mornings when there are waves, but when it’s flat, he and I go fishing. The morning after I register for school, Pop puts on an old canvas hat and his surf trunks. I put on my bathing suit bottoms and a little triangle top Mom made, and she daubs my skin with PABA, shaking her head and saying that I’ll probably get burned again, but I refuse to wear a hat. It makes it too hard for me to see everything, and my head gets hot.

  Pop slings his fishing bag over his shoulder, moving slowly because he’s hungover, which means I have to be extra quiet and not annoying. The bag is a dark green satchel that holds gear and the fish we’ll get, and it smells like the ocean. He pulls on sock-like reef tabis, Japanese water shoes he bought at Ching’s. I don’t have tabis because they don’t make them in my size.

  Pop is the only haole guy I’ve ever seen throw net. He’s proud of having been taught how to fish this way by big wave waterman Tiger Espere on Oahu as a thank-you gift for taking pictures of Tiger surfing. Tiger is a big, scary man who dominates the waves on the North Shore and is a badass Hawaiian. If Tiger taught Pop, then it’s okay that Pop does it, in spite of being haole. Pop just tells the guys who hassle him who he learned from, and that shuts them up.

  Pop says that our way of fitting in on Kauai is to not be seen or heard. Henry Paik, a local guy who lives in Hanalei and who is teaching Pop slack-key guitar, tells him that we can live in our little hippie enclave at the end of the road near the Taylor Camp, but we better not go to the places where the locals hang out and take up space or their fish, or “we goin’ get plenty humbug.”

  We’ve visited Uncle Henry and his wife at their tidy little house in Hanalei, where Mrs. Paik let me play with her collection of painted wood kokeshi dolls and we ate a meal of fish, rice, and seaweed. I enjoyed their flush toilet and fancy shell-shaped hand soap.

  So far we haven’t had any trouble, though we hear of other haoles getting hassled and beaten up. A haole couple even got shot in their house in Wainiha, and nobody knows who killed them. People from Taylor Camp disappear, and nobody knows what happened, so Pop listens to Henry and does what he says.

  The throw net is Pop’s prized possession. He bought it for a huge amount of money, ninety dollars, from old Mr. Yoshimura in Kapa`a. Mr. Yoshimura makes the nets by hand with his shuttle and a big spool of see-through fishing line called suji. Pop rinses it with stream water after every use because salt ruins it.

  Pop slings the heavy throw net over his shoulder easily as he sets off down the trail. I can’t even lift it because it weights thirty or forty pounds. Pop looks so tall and strong to me. He can do anything, and he’s handsome with his skin the color of caramel and his blond hair like vanilla ice cream. Bonny cries at being left behind, and I feel bad for her, but happy to be old enough to help my dad.

  We go down the path beside the stream through tall, white-barked Java plum trees with their little bombs of sour purple fruit, and under the big open shadowy dance of kamani trees to get to the ocean. I run with no shoes, my feet like horse hooves by now as I hop from rock to rock. It’s too early for the Taylor Camp people to be out, so when we reach the beach, we’re alone with the long shiny reef and the wind just beginning to snag the silky water.

  Pop takes a moment to drape the circular net ringed in flat three-inch lead weights just so from his shoulder and hip, so that it will open in a perfect circle when he throws it over the fish. There’s care in each movement, the beginning of the quiet that is an important part of fishing. He’s shown me several times how he arranges the net, explaining the placement of each draped ruffle as it hangs.

  When he’s teaching me something, it’s the best between us. I’m a quick learner, I’m not a whiner, and I’ll try anything. I’m still doing the best I can to make him forget I’m a girl.

  Pop walks onto the reef as graceful as a bul
lfighter pictured in National Geographic, and the net is his cape. I follow him, careful not to scare the fish, trying to get what I can with my little scoop net—but my big catch, the octopus, remains a time when I got something good when we really needed it. I’ve earned my place behind him.

  To get a good haul with the net, Pop has to wade at least knee-deep into the surge at the outer edge of the barrier reef. That reef takes the brunt of the ocean’s movement and the fish like it there, in bubbly water where food is stirred up for them. The edge drops off into a deep channel with strong currents. Pop doesn’t want me getting swept out by a wave, so he makes me stay behind him.

  I scoop up tiny opae shrimp, their bodies as clear as glass with just the shapes of their guts to define them. I put a couple on the hook of my bamboo pole and jig them up and down in a likely looking pool. I keep one eye on the pool, the other on Pop.

  I love the colors of everything: sparkling light on the water, the layered green of Makana Mountain behind us, the dark ironwoods, pale gold beach, turquoise shallows, the deep blue of the ocean beyond. I wish I could paint what I see, but the watercolors I have are too pale, and my pens can’t get the right effect.

  The sun is getting hotter. I can feel my face heating up with the sunburn I’ll have later on because I hate wearing a hat, and Mom didn’t get zinc oxide on my nose this morning. Pop has been standing still, only his head moving as he scans the water, holding the carefully draped net just so. Waves crash and boil around him and suck back and forth across his legs. It’s amazing that he can hold the heavy net for so long with his arms bent.

  Pop bows back in a sudden, fluid way, and throws the net outward in an explosive forward movement. The net flies out of his arms, spinning open in a perfect circle, and drops to disappear into the waves. He leaps after it, grabbing a cord in the center, and hauls back, stumbling and almost falling, making me jerk my pole up with fright—but he gets his footing and leans back, the muscles in his arms and back bunching as he hauls in the catch.

  The net’s thrashing with fish. Pop scoops the whole flapping thing up in his arms and turns and walks with a long stride back across the reef. I yank up my pole and run after him, forgetting to watch for tube worms and feeling one puncture my foot.

  “Ow!” I yell, but don’t slow down because I’m too excited. At the beach he tosses the net down on the sand.

  A whole school of manini is caught in it, green-striped tangs that taste good pan-fried with butter and garlic salt. My mouth waters at the thought. I kneel in the sand and help him untangle the fish, each about the size of Pop’s big hand. They have a rough feel to their skin, and lots of poky fins that catch on the net.

  “We should just clean them here,” he says. “Don’t want to stink up your mom’s compost heap.”

  “Okay.” I wrinkle my nose. Manini are algae eaters, and their diet makes their guts really smelly. He hands me the Swiss Army knife and gets out his fishing knife with the plastic sheath.

  He’s taught me how to clean fish already. I find a flat piece of bleached white coral and lay the fish, still flapping, on it. I push the point of the knife into the fish’s poophole and cut away from myself, anchoring it with my left hand, all the way up to the pectoral fins. The manini jerks under my hand, a yucky reminder that it’s alive. Being quick is being kind, Pop tells me. Responsible fishermen kill their fish right away to spare them the death of suffocation outside the sea.

  Being quick, I hook my finger into the guts and rip them out, tossing them into a tide pool where crabs and other fish will eat them. I breathe through my mouth so I don’t smell the guts, and I don’t look at my bloody hands. Pop has already cleaned three and is untangling a fourth by the time I’ve finished one.

  Several people from Taylor Camp wander down, looking hopeful. Pop is generous—after all, the fish won’t last long in our little fridge with no freezer, and there will be more tomorrow.

  A lady from the camp squats beside me naked in her oily tan and puka shells, her brown braids trailing the sand. She watches as I try to work fast, cleaning her fish. “You know a lot about this, for a little girl.”

  “My dad taught me.” I’m proud as I hand three fish to her. She walks off down the beach, carrying the fish in her hands, against her bare belly.

  Pop is happy about the haul, and he’s feeling better now that he’s more awake. Maybe his hangover is better. I have to be careful around Pop when he is drinking. I keep count of how many joints, hash pipes, mushrooms, or drinks my parents have. I can look at their eyes to see if it’s a good time to ask for something, or if I should just hole up in my room with Bonny and keep the door shut. Sometimes I feel a tight, worried feeling in my tummy about them, but mostly it’s good because they are happier when they are drinking or smoking.

  We walk back up to the Forest House and into the yard, where the sun has finally reached Mom’s garden patch. She’s squatting among the plants, weeding in her work muumuu, a shapeless garment dark enough not to show dirt. Bonny’s “helping,” which means sitting on the ground sucking a finger and digging at the weeds with a spoon.

  “We got a lot of fish!” I’m noisy—almost yelling with excitement—but Pop just grins this time. He opens the green satchel to show our treasures, fish lining the inside like stacks of fat green leaves.

  Bonny claps her hands and Mom says, “Good job!” and kisses Pop on the mouth. We all take the fish down to wash them in fresh water at the stream.

  “Time for you to bathe, too,” Mom says. “In fact, I’m done working in the garden. Let’s all clean up.”

  Midday is the ideal time to bathe. The sun has really warmed things up in the yard. But Limahuli Stream, which is rainwater from high in the mountains, is always cold. We take our much-dried and rehung towels with us and walk up the path to a swimming hole just off the road above our house. As usual, there are no cars on the narrow two-lane highway that dead-ends at pretty Ke`e Beach in another half-mile.

  I take off my suit, rinse it in the stream, and spread it on a rock to dry. Once in the water, my teeth chatter. Mom gives me a squirt of Dr. Bronner’s All-Purpose Soap. The peppermint smell of the soap, with its flip-top plastic bottle, makes every already-cold minute in the chilly stream energetic, not relaxing like a warm soak in the tub at the Rocky Point house.

  Limahuli Stream’s stones are browny-green with algae, and slippery. I burrow my feet into smooth gravel between the rocks and wash quickly, under the arms and my butt and pie. Mom gives me another squirt to soap up my hair. Pop’s naked beside me doing the same, and as usual I keep my eyes off him. Though being naked with the family doesn’t feel strange, this is the kind of time when I think of my grandma Gigi and know she wouldn’t like how we live. Maga, Mom’s mom who was married to my scientist Grandpa Garth, wouldn’t care. Maga likes to study other cultures and tell loud stories about natives around the world, and she’d just say we’re our own kind of tribe.

  Mom and Bonny bathe, too, but Bonny’s fussing about being cold. I don’t like washing in the stream either at first—it’s always too cold—but after I’m soaped up the pool’s deep enough to dive forward into. I swim around and crawl over the rocks, pretending to be a mermaid. I cross the swimming hole to sit between two boulders and let a mini-waterfall wash the last of the Dr. Bronner’s out of my hair and down the stream.

  I love the pressure of the waterfall, the breathless chill, the way it pushes me down like a hand and I have to be strong to resist it. I turn my head and drink, and the water tastes like rain.

  Afterward, we wrap in our towels and walk back down the path to our house. We lie in a naked row on our towels in the sun, drying off.

  I lift my head and glance over at my family. Pop’s on the other side of Mom, an arm flung over his eyes. The sun turns the hairs on his body to gold, the big cage of his ribs sloping down to his flat belly, his root a shrunken mushroom, his legs like fallen trees.

  Beside me, Mom’s eyes are shut. Her body is dark and long, and she’s lost the
tan lines from Oahu. Her breasts droop on either side of her chest, empty pouches with leathery tips now that Bonny’s done nursing.

  Bonny’s fallen asleep, tucked against Mom’s side. My sister’s thick white-blonde hair is bright against Mom’s tan. I like the darkness against the light, the velvety baby texture of Bonny’s skin against the smooth brown expanse of my mother.

  Mom smells delicious, like the coconut oil she puts on her skin. I put my hand against Mom’s thigh just to see what it looks like there.

  My hand is a small, square miniature of my father’s big one. Freckles up my arm look like cinnamon and are the same color as Mom’s tan. I’m relieved by this. Sometimes I worry I got into my family by accident because I don’t look like Mom except for my eyes, or like Pop except for my hands and feet.

  I turn over on my towel and fold my hands under my chin, to watch some ants working very hard to move a seed. They pass it among themselves, and pick it up and set it down, and it takes a long time to get it a short way as they try to help each other.

  In my imagination, I shrink down to tiny. I build a cart for the seed, and the ants load it on the cart. Then, I hitch the ants to the front of the cart and sit up high cracking a whip as they pull it to their nest. It still takes a long time to move the seed, even with the cart, but that’s okay. We have all day.

  Chapter Six

  School Does Not Go Well

  Bathing in Limahuli stream

  Age: 6, Hanalei, Kauai, 1971

  I’m excited to go to school after visiting the long wooden building with the red tin roof in the middle of Hanalei to register. It’s full of hundreds of kids who could be future friends. I’m ready to have friends to play with and excited to learn.