After the swim they stop at the Iolani Palace for a picnic. President Dole came aboard looking like Father Christmas with his long white beard and invited the whole sorry bunch of them from the China—Colorado Volunteers and the 8th Infantry and the Utah Battery and the engineers and the hospital people, everybody but the damn mascot goat—and now they’re breathing air heavy with the smell of flowers and spread out at long, long tables set on the grass under the trees with plates and utensils and cloth napkins for what they call a loo-wow. Hod still has water trapped in his ears from the surf, the bottoms of his feet scraped by coral. There were Kanakas riding the waves in on their wooden boards, men and women wearing almost nothing at all, but they disappeared quick once the beach was mobbed by the sickly-skinned, boat-dopey soldiers, peeling their uniforms off to give themselves up to the sea water. Only Big Ten chose not to go in, sitting on the shore with all his uniform still on, even his boots.
“My people will row on top of the water all day and all night,” he says, “but swimming is for fishes.”
Hod thinks it’s so the others won’t see how dark he is all over.
The food is hard to believe and just keeps coming. The local Americans, celebrating the Annexation Bill just passed in Congress, have roasted a whole herd of pigs down in holes in the ground, serving up steaming chunks from them wrapped in palm leaves, and then there are crabs and fish and chickens and yams and huge sweet potatoes and pineapples that never been in a can and bread and cocoanut milk and the best coffee Hod has ever tasted and dates and cocoanut pudding and something called alligator pears that Big Ten at first tries to eat without peeling the hide off. Inside they are light green and creamy and nutty tasting and you eat them with Worcestershire sauce. Everybody eats twice as much as they can hold, the food on the trip so far just pitiful, salthorse and sea biscuit, and no reason to think it will improve for the rest of the way. Three days into the voyage they let some carrier pigeons loose up top, supposed to fly with their messages back to San Francisco.
“I was gonna eat them birds,” said Big Ten, watching them fly. “Now we stuck with fishee ricee.”
The Chinamen and Japs who serve as the crew of the transport always have something you can buy to eat, a nickel here, a nickel there, even doughnuts if you catch them at the right time, but they won’t take Army grub in trade. The yellow men were left on board, helping the stevedores load coal into the ship, when the regiment marched away.
“Yo, Chief!” calls Corporal Grissom down the table. “Introduce me to your sister.”
There have been a lot of them telling Big Ten he looks just like the Kanakas and he takes it like a sport. He turns to the long-haired girl who is serving and speaks some of his lingo at her, but she just covers her face and giggles. There are dozens of the Kanaka girls serving in their bright shifts with flowers in their hair, and white women too, white women in clean white dresses with high collars and little straw hats moving around the long tables under the banyan trees with platters of food and urns of coffee.
“I think she’s a Princess,” says Big Ten. “They aint spose to talk with commoners.”
Corporal Grissom points to the Palace, just visible through the trees. “They say they got the Queen shut up in there. Once the Americans bumped her off the throne she hooked up with some bunch that wanted to put her back on it, so they stuck her under house arrest.”
“Tough duty. Lookit that place.”
“She should of behaved herself.”
“If this was my island,” says Big Ten, looking around, “I’d sure as hell want to get it back. In fact, I think I better volunteer to be on her guard detail, make sure she don’t bust out and cause any more ruckus.”
They all agree that duty here would be paradise, even without women serving you a feast every day. There is a kind of orchestra playing for them while they eat, natives wearing bright-colored shirts and ropes of flowers around their necks and some of the instruments Hod has never heard before. Suddenly it is their table’s turn to give back the compliment and they stand to sing On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away only with the words changed for their section of the country—
Oer my Colorado Rockies flies the eagle
Down the slopes flow rushing rivers clear and cool
Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood
Where I single-jacked for silver, Nature’s school
But one thing there is missing in the picture
Without her face it seems so incomplete
On the ship it is a whore they sing of, each verse nastier than the next, but this is polite company, with officers hovering and white ladies present—
I long to see my mother in the doorway
Of our cabin years ago, her boy to greet
Big Ten has a strong bass voice and can harmonize with anybody. Hod sings along, letting the other voices carry his, wishing he could feel a part of this like he did on the run with the Butte contingent of the Commonweal Army. But all he feels is that he’s hiding from something, that his life is not real, and being here in this dreamland, pleasant as it is, doesn’t help any. When the China was towed up to the wharf there were little Kanaka boys and girls swimming all around the hull who smiled and shouted and dove down under to grab for pennies the soldiers threw overboard. That’s me, Hod thought as he and Big Ten, throwing nothing, watched them splash and shout. That’s my whole damn life. Scrambling for pennies to entertain the folks up high—
Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight in Colorado
From saloons there comes the sound of men at play
Oer the glory holes the caution lights are gleaming
In my sweet Colorado, far away!
“So the Philippines is just like this, right?” says Private Neely when they have received their applause and are allowed to sit down and gorge themselves again.
There has been a lot of talk during the long, stomach-heaving days at sea as to where exactly the islands are and what the nature of the people on them is.
“They’re just like Cuba and Porto Rico,” insists Corporal Grissom, who has never been to either of those places, “only farther away.”
“It’s part of China,” says Private Falconer, “only the Papists got there before the other religions.”
“You sit under a tree,” says Sergeant LaDuke, “and take a nap, and when you wake up your lunch has dropped down into your lap.”
Runt, before they booted him out for being too small and too young, showed them the islands on a map he got hold of somewheres.
“Jesus, lookit em all,” said Neely, impressed. “We got to liberate every one of those?”
“We just wrap up the big one here,” said Runt, poking his finger onto an island called Luzon, “and the rest of em tip over like dominoes.”
Manigault strolls by them, wearing a white duck uniform and white canvas shoes like the navy officers.
“Dig in, fellows,” he says jauntily. “This will have to last you quite a while.”
“We been hearing plenty talk here, Lieutenant,” says Corporal Grissom. “There was some sailors at the wharf who see everything that comes on the wire, and their scut is that after what Dewey done to the Spanish fleet it’ll be over before we even get there.”
Manigault gives him a pitying smile, then nods toward an enormous roast pig being carried past on a litter by two barefoot Kanaka men.
“There is no feast,” he says, “without a slaughter.”