By dusk the Niihauans had drifted away to look at the plane and then drifted back, then drifted away for evening prayer and drifted back again, tidelike, still drawn to the excitement of a forbidden mea mai ka ‘aina ‘e. More sweet potatoes and poi were pushed in front of the pilot. Someone started a game of kini kini, others sang quietly.
Only when they were up the hill did Yoshio stop the cart and look at his wife, who had pushed one thin arm over her face and turned it from him. He glanced furtively from side to side and leaned forward to touch her, then leaned back before he did. For a while they sat canted away from each other—he fiddling with his large, square hands, she jerking with strange wet gulps, like the desperate suckling of a newborn—until Taeko began to squirm. Yoshio finally reached forward to stroke his child’s head with his fingertips. He clucked at her soothingly. He felt his wife stiffen at his proximity.
-Why didn’t you tell them? she said through her tears. About what the pilot said.
-That news, coming from me? Pearl Harbor bombed? It’s too horrible for our neighbors to understand. Mr. Robinson will let them know soon enough.
She straightened and stared at him, and despite the smallness of her bones, her birdlike fragility, her face had hardened into something fearful.
-You think Mr. Robinson will solve everything! she cried. Yoshio squeezed her shoulders to calm her. He tsked his tongue against his teeth.
-The Niihauans trust him. You know how it is here, he said softly.
-We should have said something.
-Kachan, let the Old Lord handle this. It’ll be fine.
-You say that, but you don’t believe it.
-I do. We’ve done nothing wrong.
-We’re Japanese. That is enough.
Yoshio turned away and brought his hands together unconsciously. Before he knew it he was squeezing them again, the word Japanese ricocheting through his skull. He felt the sting of an old blister, the crack of his thumb bone.
-We’re American citizens. Born and bred on an American island. Now, time to go home. He lifted the reins and slapped them against the horse’s shoulder, but Irene grabbed his arm.
-There will be more of them, she said. He said so himself. Coming on the submarine to take over the island.
-Mr. Robinson will let us know of the dangers ahead. Come on.
-They’ve attacked Pearl Harbor, now they’ll go on to Kauai. Then to us, here on Niihau.
-Quiet! Yoshio glanced around nervously. Enough talk of this.
-We must see the plane, cried Irene. The horse jerked forward, but Irene still clung to his forearms, until finally he pulled back and the cart stopped.
-I need to see it. She was breathing hard and her eyes had taken on a starved look he saw often but could not quite interpret.
-Kachan, we must go home. It’s bad luck to go near a thing like that. We need to stay away from everything until Mr. Robinson comes.
-Then I’ll go alone. She squirmed sideways in her seat and shifted Taeko from her lap.
-Okay, okay. Slow down, sweet, slow down. I’m here. And he swung himself quickly off the cart and raised his arms to take his child.
They walked carefully, Yoshio with Taeko in his arms now, Irene with the hem of her dress bundled in her hands to keep from tripping on it, her mouth set in a grim line. He thought that for once she was glad for the familiar silt against her face and the continuing heat because she looked so drained by fear and strangely light that without the heavy, oppressive air, she would surely float away. As the metal creature grew closer and larger, Yoshio felt dizzy. It was the strong smell of food and intermittent singing from Mr. Kaleohano’s house that did it. Such merriment was absurdly out of place, but it was his fault, wasn’t it? He should have wheeled toward his neighbors the second the pilot had spoken; he should have yelled at the top of his lungs. Pearl Harbor! he could have screamed. Instead his throat had squeezed shut and his body had seemed nailed to the floor.
He held out his hand when the debris thickened, but Irene did not notice, or simply ignored him, and stepped slowly, eyes wide. Her lips were pursed in something between disgust and wonder. Sometimes, when jellyfish washed ashore after a storm, he moved this gingerly, this warily. But jellyfish did not scare him like this recumbent beast, shattered but still dangerous in a dark, unnameable way. Yoshio followed Irene until she stopped just short of the wingtip and stood with her arms folded. He stopped too, his shoulder in front of her, his hand dangling in case she wanted to hold it.
He was scared, no doubt about it. He tried to remind himself that this was only a lifeless piece of metal and glass, brought here by a boy. He scanned the side and saw nothing too threatening: the red Japanese circle, the large, jutting wing. He had, he realized, half expected a message to be scrawled on the plane. An explanation or a declaration of some kind, something to match the destruction the plane had supposedly wreaked. He was disappointed in the simple red circle and in the gray, silent bulk.
-It’s big, Irene said.
The body aft of the wing sagged sideways. Part of the nose gear burrowed into the ground, and the wheel struts had disappeared under the belly, crushed by the emergency landing. Still, Irene was right; despite its damage it was still an impressive size. But to Yoshio it was more the world it came from that struck him as immense, that forgotten place of complicated machinery, so different from the simplicity of Niihau that from Yoshio’s vantage point it appeared in a flash as almost divine. Here, in this tangled piece of metal, were the godlike powers to destroy and create at will, and with it all the rage and sorrows of the outside world.
Yoshio looked for the bullet holes that the pilot indicated had drained his gas tank and forced his landing. He could see them if he looked closely, tear-dropped holes near the belly. He turned to Irene to point them out and assure her that no Niihauans would guess they were there and that there had been a conflict. But her face was so white that he decided against it, and neither spoke for a while until Irene realized that Taeko had pulled her hand from her father’s. She walked in her stiff, unsteady lockstep toward the plane, her arms forward as if reaching for its blistered metal edges and shattered glass. Irene lunged with a cry of rebuke and fear, pushing past Yoshio’s hips and breaking him from his reverie. He watched in what appeared as slow motion as she swooped their child from the ground and pulled her against her breast; and simultaneously saw her leg jerk back as a bright red ribbon of blood leaped from her toe. He heard her gasp and realized with the part of him that quickly grasped and appreciated irony that his wife was the first, but perhaps not the last, on this tiny island to be wounded by the war, and it was, of course, because of him.