From her bedroom window, Jana Rutherford, christened Johanna after her Grandmother Davison, looked out at the familiar scene she loved. Beyond the rim of beach stretched the distant blue line of ocean against an orange-pink sky. As she watched, a single boat, its sails billowing like winged gulls, moved slowly along the horizon.
She never tired of the Hawaiian landscape. She would never forget her first sight of the Big Island ten years before. She was standing at the railing of the steamer coming from Oahu with her father. “Look, Jana,” he had said, “there it is, Hawaii, the biggest of all the islands.”
There, in the direction he pointed, the Big Island seemed to emerge out of a sea of turquoise water rising steeply into lush green walls of dark tropical vegetation from the beach below on which foam-scalloped surf swirled.
“That’s where we’re going to live, Jana; that’s our new home,” he said. “We’re going to be happy there.”
And they had been. Especially Jana. From the beginning she had loved everything Hawaiian. Even her name sounded better in Hawaiian: Koana. It sounded softer, more musical.
A gentle wind now rustled the fronds of the palm trees outside the house and stirred the lattice blinds. Reluctantly Jana turned back to her bedroom. There were still things to do before tomorrow. More packing. The steamer left early from Hilo for Honolulu. There she would board the ship sailing to the United States.
One task had been left to the last—going through the koa-wood chest. It contained things stored through the years. It held her childhood, as well as an assortment of memorabilia of the last ten years. It was a job she had procrastinated doing. It would be like opening a Pandora’s box of memories, some good, some bad. But she couldn’t put it off any longer.
Kneeling in front of it, she lifted the lid. The collection of a lifetime was piled haphazardly within: old dolls long since put away; worn books; a ragged Teddy bear missing one eye and too scuffed and limp to pass along to some other child—yet too beloved to give away. There was a cardboard portfolio she had made to hold some of her first drawings and watercolors. And in one corner, there was a battered shoe box. When she picked it up a fine drift of sand spilled over her hands. Inside were all sorts of seashells. A whole parade of happy days spent searching for them marched through her mind.
Then she saw what lay underneath, at the bottom. Her memory book, a little warped, mildewed at the edges, its original pink cover turned brown. The spray of pansies painted diagonally across its front had faded. After taking it out, Jana sat back on her heels and placed it on her lap. Slowly she turned the yellowed pages, one after the other, until she read:
September 1884—Kimo left today. He has gone to Germany to be apprenticed to a famous cabinet maker. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone. A year, maybe two. We walked down to the beach together, and he wrote in the sand, “Kua kua makamaka.” In Hawaiian that means “forever friends.”
That was the last entry in the book. The rest of the pages were blank. So much had happened since she had written that. Why had she stopped writing in this book? Was it because of her grandmother’s wish in giving it to her that Jana should record “only sunny hours, joy-filled days, and happy memories” in it?
Jana closed the book thoughtfully. She replaced it inside the chest and slowly closed the lid. She couldn’t throw it away. So much of the last ten years was recorded within its covers. And so much was unwritten as well.
Was it the Christmas of 1886 when everything had changed for her…?
To read more, ask you local bookseller for The Promise by Jane Peart.