A beautiful North Shore early morning, a sweet whiff of damp foliage that had the freshness of lettuce, and a gauzy veil of greeny-gold heat haze like a halo of pale light over the stillness of Waimea. A fuzz of reddish gnats and tiny jeweled flies stirred in the warmth. A troop of surfers, thirty or more, their boards under one arm, batted at the insects with their free hands as they loped barefoot toward the beach. There, the pale sprawl of bay glowed as smooth as a lake between the arms of spiky black lava on either side, the Leaping Rock on the left, the boulders at Pinballs on the right. One of the surfers muttered, “Total glass.”
A few distant corrugations, the twitch of a ribbed swell toward the horizon, but near to, this dawn, the sea was a white whisper.
In the parking lot, gilded by the sun striking through the haze, Sharkey reached to his roof rack for his board, Olive beside him, the surfers passing.
“Give him a hand, guys.”
“No, I’m cool.”
His will was strong, yet trembled with the weight of the board when he clapped it under his arm. But he was determined not to be helped.
Around him, in the lacework of sun-flecked shade, the surfers young and old, the young ones chattering, the older ones solemn and silent—Jock, Garrett, Brock, Ryan, the Florence brothers, and others on the beach sitting cross-legged, some pacing. Sharkey recognized Stickney and Wencil, Alex, Fonoti and Frawley, and from the kapu camp Rhonda, Winona, and Kimo, the schoolchildren gathered near them. Skippy Lehua had come with some of his grommets, and Sugar with her three children, May and her Chinese husband. All of them tense and tearful in their gaudy shirts. Moe was there. So was I.
“Insane,” Sharkey murmured.
As we gathered on the foreshore, three black-and-white HPD police cruisers drew up at the edge of the parking lot. Six officers got out and marched to the beach, where they stood in a line, at attention, and saluted.
Onlookers too, early risers, rock jumpers, beachgoers, gawkers, tourists, crowding the surfers.
A hoarse haole voice: “Some kind of Wayan ceremony?”
The kahu had been waiting on the beach. He was wrapped in a priestly green gown and wore a lei of niihau shells, his long black hair under his crown of flowers drawn back and braided. He strode to a dome of sand and beckoned to Sharkey, who handed him the small green bundle, the ashes wrapped in sacred ti leaves. And then the kahu faced the bay and recited a chant in Hawaiian that silenced all the whisperers. It was not a lament—it sounded more like a plea for mercy.
“Lehu kane,” he said when he finished, and sprinkled the green bundle with water from a coconut shell. A robed Hawaiian man stepped next to him, carrying a conch shell. He was also wearing a flower crown, and fastened to his neck a heavy russet cape. He blew a long sputtering trumpet blast on the conch.
Sharkey accepted the green bundle and fixed it with a strap to the nose of his board. The plop of a small insistent wave snatched at a length of sand and turned it to a rim of gravel. A golden plover, its head down, strutted past, its beak lowered to stab at a sea bug, as Sharkey set his board in the fribble of the shore break.
He flattened himself on it. He cupped his hands and paddled slowly into the whispering water of the bay, breathing the tang of the sea, liking the salt, the familiar taste of surfing. The surfers massed behind him and dropped to their boards and followed on them, staying together, a flotilla of them, stomachs pressed against the boards, rhythmically stroking the water.
At the center of the bay they fanned out, making a great bobbing circle, an eccentric lineup, Sharkey in the center. And when he sat and straddled his board, they did the same. He picked open the leaf bundle, cradled it in his hands, and held it close to his eyes, improvising a prayer, asking forgiveness, muttering, “Max,” as though to a friend, and then whirled it, scattering the cloud of ashes. Acting as one, the surfers slipped the leis from their necks and flung these flowers into the center of the circle and slapped the water, a clatter of smacks and splashes, wrinkling the sea.
In the silence after that, they parted the circle, like an entry break in a reef, allowing Sharkey to paddle through the gap.
As he stroked alone toward shore, a thickening ripple from the incoming swell rose behind him, lifting him a little, and the next was a big enough bump, gulping under his board, to get his attention. He crawled to a kneeling position and rocked himself into the following wave, a small one, the sort he called a threshold, like the first wave he’d ever ridden, at Magic Island.
He tipped his board into the wave’s shallow sloping face and got to his feet. Without effort, like a hero on a flying carpet, not tensed in a surfer’s stance but standing confidently upright, a fearless boy again. Hands on hips, he slid to shore, and to Olive, on the chuckle of a wave that was freaked with froth.