The plane gathered dust quickly. By dawn on the second day—Monday, December 8—its lustrous flanks had dimmed, its hard skin had become minutely pitted. The morning wind blew its shattered glass aside and irreverently spun the amputated front wheel. Insects scurried across the knobs and buttons, now white with the droppings of curious birds. The sun began to rise. Soon it beat down mercilessly and the seats wilted. The stick grip became soft. With enough time, the plane would melt into the red soil and eventually disappear. But if it were like all the other foreigners who came to this island, it would never vanish completely.
Howard had not slept well and his head ached. The plane was on his mind, sprawled in his backyard like a hammerhead. All night he thought he’d heard a phlegmy, snorting exhale from its direction, as if it were alive and breathing. He’d been glad when dawn finally broke. But instead of heading to meet Mr. Harada and the strange pilot as planned, Howard walked toward the plane. At one point he stopped to comb his hair and catch his breath. The large, leaden creature did not stir. Still, something had been disturbed on Niihau. Howard could feel it. He was a Christian, so he shoved aside the sneaky feeling that his ancestors’ spirits had been upset. It was the devil, he said to himself, which tiptoed across these dry fields.
He stepped quickly now. As he drew alongside the scattered wreckage, a glint of metal half buried in the sand caught his eye. He stopped and squatted, peering closely. He was reminded suddenly of the sugarcane grown on the dunes and pushed horizontal by the wind, so that you had to lean down and swab the sand away to free it. Other islands called this Niihauan sugarcane Ko eli lima o halalii, or Sugarcane Dug by Hand, but to the Niihauans it was simply the normal adaptation of life on a weatherbeaten island. Now Howard saw a movement on the bright surface—his own shadow. Slowly he brushed away the soil. The piece was flat and squarish, with sharp metal edges where it had been torn from its original home. Perhaps it fit on the wheel somehow. Or it was part of the propeller, a mechanical wonder he had seen while on Kauai. As a boy he had liked to sit at the dock and watch the flat-bottomed ferry throw up a large spray of water and gasoline as it left its moorings. Onboard, large-hatted white ladies clutched their throats with one hand and waved their handkerchiefs in the other, while their men stood against the rails with self-satisfied smiles on their faces, but Howard and his friends had eyes only for the heaving, spinning propeller. The sound was one that every little boy loved—angry, aggressive, embattled. He would feel its reverberations in his stomach, at the tips of his fingers. Often his friends would cover their ears and laugh but he would not. He watched with his hands at his sides and his mouth pitched half open in awe so that he tasted the bitter edge of gasoline for hours afterward.
The piece was not as heavy as he expected. It was shaped haphazardly, as if hit by a lightning bolt. Perhaps he could cut it into an ornament for his hatband or fashion it into a bauble for his wife, Mabel. He turned the square over. Cut right, it might make a good blade handle.
What else could the plane offer? It had not occurred to him to take anything when he had first seen it. But now he felt a strange yearning. For what? There was nothing he needed. He put the piece into his pocket anyway, and fought the urge to touch the plane itself. The thing was bad luck—kapu even. It was from the modern world, and nothing good could come of that.
Ella arrived at the plane later. She stood a few yards off and looked around. No one else was there. The screech of a mynah bird startled her; she took a moment to pray against whatever made her so jumpy. It was already hot and she knew that she should be back at her house. But no, she was here, and it wouldn’t hurt to investigate further. She edged closer.
The plane was bigger than she’d imagined, and not at all as commonplace as her husband, Ben, had told her last night, when he would only let her gaze at it from afar, telling her there was nothing much to see. She had imagined something fierce, and it was, but after a moment, when the plane did not growl or spring up to bite her, she made her way to the wing, which she reached out and touched. Reddish dust sparkled on its leading edge; a gash like a mouth grinned at her from one side.
How could something this large and ponderous make its way across the sky? It baffled her. She tried to imagine how her home would look from so far up in the air, near where she supposed heaven was. She knew it would seem small, but she wondered further if it would be insignificant, the way an insect is not just small but insignificant, so much so that you don’t feel bad about giving it a good stomp, don’t think about it at all really. And she wondered at how hitting the line of the horizon must spin you back the other way, so that you circled endlessly, like an ant yourself, in the blue. What did flying feel like? It would be like a long, flat-out run on a horse, she decided, that moment when the horse switched from a canter to a gallop and only one leg instead of two touched the ground at once, and you knew it, even though you weren’t quite sure how you did. She rarely galloped these days; that was for ranch hands and children. But the few times she allowed herself to, she loved the exhilaration, the freedom. And what would happen when the plane hit a cloud? Would you float even more? Ella sighed. For once she marveled at how much she did not know. It had never occurred to her before, but then why should it? She was wise in the ways of the island—how to string shells into a lei, when the imu was hot enough for cooking, what it meant when a child cried for so long in that certain way. She knew everything she needed to, and that was all there was, until now. Now something had come from outside, and it brought up odd, discomfiting feelings. She dropped her hand from the hot metal and stepped back.
She wondered what her ancestors would have done with this sudden intruder. Her family had hosted Captain Cook, but they’d learned quickly that not all the gifts that the explorer brought were good for the island. Even the missionaries had made disruptive changes, though of course they had brought God, and for that Ella was grateful.
Ella’s ancestors had latched onto Christianity quickly. Only a year before the missionaries’ arrival on the Sandwich Islands, as they were then called, the ancient Hawaiian religious doctrines—the Kapu—had been abolished by King Kamehameha. Nothing had been offered to replace them. Suddenly, without warning, the Hawaiians were spiritually adrift, their lives unstructured, their gods meaningless. It was into this void that Christianity landed, by fortuitous luck or, as the missionaries would later claim, divine intent, in the unlikely form of a boatload of wan, seasick, petrified New England Christians seeking to spread their Word.
Within the year, Christianity drummed and thrummed on all of the Sandwich Islands. Those first emissaries of the 1820s did not initially make their home on outlying Niihau. But every now and then they braved the difficult crossing to ensure that God’s word was still firmly planted in the red, dusty soil. The changes everywhere were swift, like a sudden rainstorm on thirsty, waiting soil. Willing rivulets were carved, then streams, then rushing rivers. The Puritan missionaries waved and shouted, whispered and moaned, rolled their eyes to the heavens. They decreed new lifestyles for the savage Hawaiians, beginning with the very structures they lived in. Homes were to be not just shelter, but hearths of religious and social purity, a place of gathering for the family. The well-insulated grass huts with cool dirt floors were replaced by small wooden structures. Women were expected to stay at home and manage the children instead of wandering to other villages for days at a time, showing a distasteful independence. Malos, men’s loincloths, were replaced by pants and white shirts; the women were quickly covered by long, heavy mu‘umu‘us or fitted holokus. There was to be no more sexual openness. Surfing (naked bodies on wood and steep waves) and sliding (naked buttocks placed on large tropical leaves down steep hillsides) were frowned upon. The sacred Makahiki festival, a weeks-long sporting celebration, was abolished. But even though Hawaiians, and especially Niihauans, converted at a fast rate, the missionaries were distraught over their insufficient piety. Secretly, they fretted that the islanders mimicked Christian rites but remained heathen in spirit.
What the good Christians must have reluctantly realized was that what appealed most to the Hawaiians was not the ideals of their religion, but its ritual nature, and so its proximity to the old Kapu worship. Bells, hymns, and parables of the fantastic—a man who rose from the dead, fishes multiplied magically to feed thousands—these were the things that Hawaiians could relate to. The rest of it—long sermons, no dancing during worship, restrictive clothing in hot weather, a ban on sports, severe punishments and shame for certain sexual liaisons, suppression of the kahuna healers—was obeyed but not embraced.
Soon Hawaiians were dying of foreign diseases. Ella’s own grandmother had taken only a few days to expire from a strange and devilish sickness. She had raved incoherently at the end, finally drowning in the fluid that bubbled from her insides. So died much of the Hawaiian culture, quickly, painfully, an asphyxiation without recourse. With each death from smallpox, measles, or influenza, the Old Ways slipped away. Foreigners took root and spread their habits, their language. It was hardly more than a century later now, and much of the true Hawaii was lost. Only on Niihau, it was agreed among the people who admired the Robinsons, were Hawaiians protected.
Ella turned away suddenly, and left quickly.
Back in her Puuwai house, Ella sat at her kitchen table and stared at her hands. The strange machine scared her. A foreigner was on the island, and though he had not been aggressive and Mr. Kaleohano was handling the particulars of his sudden arrival, things were not right. Mr. Robinson would arrive today, but it would not hurt to pray. She brought her palms together and closed her eyes, even as the plane leaped up in her imagination and took wing into the morning sky.