The Burns Airfield sentry burst into the wooden barracks where First Lieutenant Jack Mizuha stabbed at a typewriter. It was an old typewriter and a bad one; the k didn’t work well, an especially unfortunate happenstance for an air base in Hawaii, where the names of so many streets and towns started with that letter. The young private saluted hurriedly, then dropped a bundle of papers on Mizuha’s desk. He left quickly, swinging his arms like an over-wound top. Everyone on Kauai was in motion—digging trenches, marching around bridges, waving in the newest cargo planes sent from the mainland. Still, no reason to behave sloppily, thought Mizuha. He was in a nervous mood himself. He blamed the typewriter, with its ornery keys.
The office was crowded with two desks, two chairs, and a surplus of file cabinets pushed together so that they only opened when their neighbors were nudged away. There was a conspicuous lack of shiny medallions or framed diplomas on the walls, though someone had hastily tacked a poster of a large-breasted white woman half dressed in sailor wear, which upon closer inspection of the edges had been torn recently from another location, most likely from the wall of a drinking establishment. But the disarray was hard to see in the dim light; windows were taped tightly according to the strict blackout rules even though it was daytime, so that Mizuha squinted over a small, weak lamp that made the dust motes in the air shine but little else. Mizuha’s other office, the spacious one that until only recently had contained pictures of the Mizuha family smiling from a bright green background courtesy of Waimea’s Family Photography Shop, with framed diplomas and pictures of airplanes on the walls, and his habitually neat stack of papers on the left side of his desk, was now occupied by a white man who had only a few days ago been of lower rank. Mizuha, an American citizen, had been the commander at Burns Airfield. But he was of Japanese descent, which meant his demotion had been swift and efficient. He was now an executive officer in a makeshift office.
He’d never met Aylmer Robinson, but everyone on Kauai knew Makeweli. It was the biggest ranch on the island. He’d heard Robinson was an eccentric man, devout, a loner, unmarried, perhaps even celibate. Despite the interesting fact that there were distress signals coming from Robinson’s island of Niihau, Mizuha stopped reading the report the sentry had unceremoniously dumped on his desk before he was even halfway down the page. There was no point in continuing; boats were not allowed on the water, and that was that. It was understandable that Mr. Robinson was concerned, but he would have to wait. As powerful as he was, the military was now more powerful.
Robinson did not know what to make of the flashes of light he saw from across the channel. He cursed himself for not using pigeons to communicate, as his brother Lester had suggested a few years before. Things could happen, Lester had insisted, but Aylmer couldn’t imagine what. Besides, Lester was not interested in Niihau; it was an affront to his acute business sense. Ranching that arid island lost money, lots of it. So he preferred to let Aylmer run its day-to-day affairs, though he was peculiarly insistent on this matter of carrier pigeons. Aylmer had scoffed. Niihauans had been living without that kind of speedy communication for centuries. He’d refused his brother, pointing out that one just never knew what disease the birds would bring on their feet and feathers. When Lester had looked unconvinced—many birds traveled to Niihau from other places, he argued—Aylmer had pressed; there was something spooky about messages dispatched by winged creatures—it brought to mind the devil’s hand. Furthermore, he added, it would just lead to frivolous contact with the outside world, messages to family members or friends on other islands. Besides, the Niihauans were mostly illiterate. Their schooling on the island didn’t go past fourth grade, if that. Education, in Aylmer’s mind, was for certain people, with certain temperaments. He was a Harvard man himself, and he knew that knowledge brought a responsibility for which some people did not have the constitution. This was not prejudice, just good sense. On Niihau, being under-educated meant that the people remained incurious about the world, and so protected from it, in Aylmer’s view. He was plain about this, and told everyone who asked with a defiant lift of his narrow chin, and even a quote from the Bible, whatever applied, a shepherd and sheep allegory, or something about the meek ultimately inheriting the earth. But he was not so eager to discuss the other obvious benefit, that a flimsy education ensured a ready workforce: by the age of sixteen, the boys were suited only to be ranch hands, the girls suited only to marry them, making shell leis and keeping a good Christian house along the way. No, there was no need for reading and writing. He sometimes rued his own education, which had foisted such responsibilities on him. He knew the evils of the world. No one protected him from its temptations.
Now he walked from the air base, past men in stiffly pressed uniforms with blank expressions and unnatural postures, and the incessant noise of planes landing and taking off, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The brothers had ultimately compromised, deciding on a signal system using lanterns and reflectors. But now there was no way to know what the problem was. The Niihauans would learn to write a little more, he vowed, and they’d go to the carrier pigeon idea, once things had returned to normal.
Back at the Makeweli Ranch, he sent for his dinner. It was early yet, but he would go to the beach once the sun had set. He wanted to see the lights again. Perhaps if he stared long enough, he could discern their meaning. He sat at his wooden kitchen table—there was a grand dining room, but that was used only for entertaining, which, as he hit his fifties, was something he liked less and less—and stared out the picture windows. The sinking sensation in his stomach had not been hunger, he realized, but fear.
He cut his meat slowly and ate without relish. Again he glanced outside. The clouds rosied at the edges. They lost their billowed look, fanning out as the afternoon wind and heat lessened. He asked his manservant, a small, quiet Hawaiian who liked, inexplicably, to salute, to fetch Mr. Shanagan.
A rock wall surrounded the back area of the house and what had once been Great-grandmother Sinclair’s beloved garden. It had been carefully planted with her own hand but was now, Robinson noted, tended by strangers. There was a fountain she would not recognize and flowers imported from the mainland whose names she could not have pronounced. And it wasn’t just the garden; the idea of two Great Wars only thirty years apart would have stymied her. She’d befriended the Maoris in New Zealand and the Hawaiians here; she would see no reason why the great governments couldn’t get along as the Lord commanded.
From the direction of his brother’s home, a large but plain ranch house fifty yards to the left, Aylmer thought he heard the hesitant plunk of a piano. He wondered if one of his nephews was at it again, and whether the abrupt sound, not unlike the barks of an embattled dog, had startled the finches that now sprang from the rim of the fountain and flew off. It was the same piano his great-grandmother, in that curious mix of irrational stubbornness and brilliant foresight so peculiar to his family, had brought over on the long sea voyage from New Zealand. Then Mr. Shanagan appeared at the gate. Aylmer watched him as he stopped to press down his shirt with his hands and began to lope toward the house.
He entered the room in his dark socks, his boots removed in the tradition of the islands. He doffed his wide-brimmed hat and squinted at Aylmer.
-Can I do fer ya, Mr. Robinson? He rubbed his sunburned chin. There was a low whirring sound as his hand wended back and forth on the uneven whiskers.
-Tell the boatman we’ll be heading to Niihau soon.
-They’re letting boats by, eh?
-Soon enough, he said.
-You know, when I came here from Ireland, Mr. Robinson—and here he lowered his voice to a whisper—I’d never seen so many Orientals. It was like they multiplied like fleas. Seemed like it wasn’t a good idea, so many of them here.
-The mysterious ways in which God works, we can’t always understand, Robinson said, and he went back to staring out the window, so Shanagan thought he might be talking about the sunset, which was spraying the sky with pink and orange.
-’Tis a godly sky, he offered hesitantly.
Robinson frowned and waved his fork in his direction.
-The issei work hard and know their place. They don’t talk back, they don’t argue. And they’re not greedy, they don’t need a large wage. See, the good Lord’s shut out of the places they come from. It’s His way of sending the unlucky to a good Christian land, to learn His ways. Everyone deserves a chance at a Christian life, Mr. Shanagan.
-’Tis true, sir. He’s the way to heaven and everyone gets a chance, I’ll agree with you there. Even Pearl Harbor, which’s a living hell, if you’ll excuse me using the word, has a meaning somewhere, though I tell you, I can’t figure it out right now.
-It all comes down to faith, Mr. Shanagan. Don’t ask for answers. Just have faith. He pushed back from the table and nodded at the sky, which was streaked with the last rays of the sun. Saddle me a horse. I’ll be riding to the point now.
The signal continued for a long time. Sometimes it was just a steady light, sometimes it seemed to flicker on and off. Sometimes it appeared to wander slightly across the darkness, as if someone had hoisted up the lantern and rode it across Mount Paniau’s wide summit. On another day, to anyone else, this kind of signal would have been insignificant. But any light from Niihau, which had none of the modern conveniences, was a dire message in itself. Horse and rider stood still on the dark beach, watching. In front of them crisscrossed the hastily laid barbed-wire fence that, as Robinson approached, looked like a long, jagged bush of thorns. He hadn’t expected it to change the look of the once beautiful beach quite so much.
Should he have warned the Niihauans about the war? Just two months ago he had asked the men to furrow the open, fallow fields, on orders from the government. But he had not explained that everyone on the islands was doing it in order to discourage enemy planes from landing in the event that American relations with Japan broke down beyond repair. He had told them it was a new method of windbreak, and they had, of course, believed him. Should he have instead come clean, explained to them that the island air bases had taken to lining up their planes wingtip to wingtip and out in the open, to discourage the Japanese-American saboteurs they were sure would attack first? This prejudice had ironically ensured the squadron’s almost complete and utter destruction when the Imperial Navy had attacked instead, from the air. Or should he have long ago explained to the Niihauans that people were anxiously following news from Europe, where the world was slowly falling to a rapacious German leader? That thousands were dying, and that there seemed to be no way to stop it?
Robinson’s horse snorted restlessly and pawed at the ground. Robinson patted his flinching withers, keeping his eyes on the light, as if by staring hard enough he could divine what it meant. No, he said to himself. It was right that he had said nothing. Niihau was now the last place on earth that did not understand the turmoil the world was in, and that in itself was a blessing from God. Everyone needed a paradise, a respite from the terrors of the world. Niihau was his homage to a more perfect place, one where the good Lord Himself would find relief when He finally came down to earth again. There had been no need to tell the Niihauans about the outside world; he himself wished he did not have to know. This signal was just a panicky response to his tardiness. Or perhaps someone had fallen off a horse and needed a hospital. It was something that could wait, he reassured himself.
He patted his horse again, and exhaled slowly. They were out past curfew, and though he doubted it mattered much, it wouldn’t do to alert a jumpy soldier. He listened. The wind crackled through the palm leaves. The surf, unreachable beyond the barbed wire, maintained a quiet, rhythmic mutter against the sand. He tried to read the hands of his pocket watch and, when he couldn’t, guessed by the movement of the stars that he had been watching those desperate lights for almost an hour. He used to ride at night often, just happy to be in the saddle and away from people, enveloped in the warm evening breezes and darkness, protected. But that was in his youth—these past few decades he was usually in bed by now, reading, or even asleep. How swiftly life passed. If he had looked forward from one of those nights on his horse, back when he was fresh out of Harvard and new to the world, he would never have imagined himself here, on the same Kauai beach, head of his family’s business. At the time he had actually believed that life opened like a flower, from a narrow stem outward, that he was bound for far-off places and exotic people. He had wanted to be a missionary in the strictest sense of the word, sent on a ship to spread His word to the most heathen of places, the bowels of Africa or the searing plains of Persia. Instead life was like a funnel, where moments thrown in the mouth converged into a tight, predictable trajectory. His father had let him think that upon his graduation, the world was his, but in effect had always known he would be back to run the business. Sons followed the word of their fathers, he’d said, knowing that the metaphor with God would hit home. And so Aylmer had returned. It was only the first years that were hard, when the imprint of the world (or more likely, since Aylmer had not traveled beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts, its promise) lingered like a sharp, metallic aftertaste. And then, like all after-tastes, it had gone and things had become easier.
He sat for a while longer. His horse stamped nervously now and then but quieted under the pressure of his hand. The warm breeze and the rhythm of the incoming surf lulled him and he almost forgot, in the beauty of the night, that the world was at war. The flashes had become part of the night sky, a bright, undulating star on the horizon, beckoning, Robinson thought, much like the guiding light of Jesus’ birth.
He dismounted as quietly as he knew how. His horse nuzzled the dune grass, disinterested. The sand was deep and Robinson broke into a sweat quickly, though it wasn’t a far walk. The Japs would have a time getting up this beach, he thought with satisfaction. At the barbed wire he stopped. It looked flimsy, thin ligaments stretching from post to post. He reached out to push on it carefully, twanging the wire like a ukulele. It had little flex. He felt a surge of pride; his men, and the others of course, had dug deep. Still, barbed wire was for cattle, not men with guns and savvy. He reached out and pressed down on one of the barbs, harder than he meant to, and pulled away as the edge punctured his skin. He thought with surprise how it hurt and put the finger in his mouth, the blood sharp on his tongue. Perhaps it’ll slow them down at least. Give us all a few minutes to grab a gun and defend ourselves.
Finally he heard voices skittering on the wind. He couldn’t see from whom or whence they came, so he crouched to be safe, and on his hands and knees, a little embarrassed by the indignity of crawling at his age, he scuttled back to where he had come. He led his horse to the trees. He stood there a long time before he made out two hunched figures and the small orange flare of their cigarettes along the shoreline. He heard the boastful staccato of young men but could not make out their words. Japanese? Finally he heard one speak.
So then this horse’s ass of a guy stands on his bar stool, and takes off his shirt to show us. There was a snorting laugh. Says he got it from Italy, the Battle of fucking Ravioli or something. Another laugh, and the words faded again. Robinson mounted and rode back to Makeweli. It was Wednesday night, December 10. He was already three days overdue on Niihau.