Island Of Sweet Pies And Soldiers: A powerful story of loss and love

Ella began quivering and Violet pulled her in for a hug. “What is it, honey?”

“The air-raid drills scare me.”

“They’re just practice. Nothing is going to happen to us, especially with half the marines in America just up the street.”

There was some measure of comfort having so many armed men around. Soldiers with enough heavy artillery to sink the island and fancy new amphibious landing boats. A small piece of her wondered, though, if that also made the Big Island more of a target.

Chapter Three (#ulink_40df7930-d430-5333-815d-b9e0febc6c79)

Ella

I was already awake and still wrapped in my horse blankets when Mama came in this morning wearing slippers. Being from Minnesota, Mama doesn’t understand walking barefoot. Even in the house. She wears socks when it’s cold and Japanese slippers when it’s hot, the kind with velvet straps and woven straw where your foot goes. I’m her little native, she says, because I hate wearing shoes. A lot of the Japanese kids from the plantation don’t even get to choose because they’re so poor. For them, an umbrella is more important. It’s one or the other. Rain comes down in buckets here, so the umbrella wins out.

I pretended I was still sleeping because I worried there might be another air-raid drill at school. The noise sets something off inside me. We always have them on Tuesdays. So even if there was a surprise one yesterday, it could happen again. Half the time, I wet my pants. I guess I forgot to mention that earlier. Talk about embarrassing. It smells up the room and everyone turns to me. Sally Botello and Gina Chang pinch up their noses and fan their faces like they’re dying. Even Mrs. Hicks looks at me with such pity I want to ask her to please leave the classroom and head over to detention. Teachers should know better. At least the Japanese kids ignore it.

From halfway across the floor, Mama smelled like cinnamon and morning sun. When she shook me, I acted groggy, but she was wearing a huge smile as she sat on the edge of my bed. Snowflake, who showed up last night wet but alive, turned on her purr even louder. It’s almost like someone put a little motor inside her throat. I call it a purr-box.

Mama smoothed down my hair. “Good morning, sun blossom.”

She calls me weird names. Jean started it. And in case you’re wondering, I call Jean Jean, not Aunt Jean or Miss Quinlan. She said if we’re going to live together, I might as well save my breath. Which was smart, because I have less breath than other people. But I do also call her Honey Jean, mainly because honey is her favorite word. I called her it once and the name stuck.

“I have good news,” Mama said.

“School is canceled?”

She laughed. “Something even better.”

Nothing would have been better. My eyes stung with the coming of tears. I cry a lot for no reason. But the doctor says this is normal behavior for someone who has been through a difficult situation. Which I have.

“What?”

“Takeo said you could start Japanese school today! You’ll be the first non-Japanese in the school.”

Now, this was news. If I could have picked one thing to do in life, it was go to Japanese school, especially now that it was just fun stuff. Before Pearl Harbor, they taught them to write and talk Japanese. Not anymore. No one wants the kids to be spies.

Somehow, being white made me feel like an outsider, like the only piece of corn in a barrel of rice. Mama said we’re corn people, being from Minnesota. But I consider myself Hawaiian, or even partly Japanese. If you spend even five minutes around them, you will know that Japanese people are smarter, neater and more interesting than us. They also don’t talk as much, and are probably good at keeping secrets. Sometimes I wonder if I should tell Umi what I know. About my dad.

“For real?” I asked.

Mama pulled out a small wooden box and handed it to me. “You’ll need this, to write with.”

I sat up and opened the box. Thin bamboo brushes and bottles of ink were neatly packed in on top of white see-through-looking paper. I held it up to my nose and sniffed. It smelled of tree bark mixed with some kind of chemical.

A thin smile crept onto my face. The first one in a while. After the incident with Papa disappearing, it took about a hundred years before I smiled again. At least it seemed that way. Mama, too. Neither of us had anything to smile about, and I think we were both afraid to let ourselves have any kind of happiness. Then, about seven months later, I heard laughing in the kitchen. When I cracked open the door, I heard Jean telling jokes. I don’t know where she gets them, but she always has new ones.

“What’s the difference between an orange and a matter baby?” she asked.

Mama sat at the table with Betty Crocker opened in front of her. “What’s a matter baby?”

“Nothing, honey,” Jean said, in a sweet syrupy voice.

A laugh came out of Mama, and from then on, I knew laughing was allowed. We were moving on. But that was a lot easier said than done.

Chapter Four (#ulink_f324a941-740e-5326-8303-fe1be4796338)

Violet

In the months after Herman’s disappearance, Violet had dragged Ella to one form of specialist after another. They began with the plantation doctor, who prescribed small pink pills that caused Ella to walk around in a fugue state, bumping into walls and drooling. After a week, Violet flushed the pills down the toilet.

The psychiatrist turned out to be even worse. On the day they made the three-hour drive to Hilo, an angry rain forced its way in through the window cracks and drenched them before they had even arrived. Then they dashed through ankle-deep puddles only to find that the doctor would have to reschedule; he had gone to Kona. On their next visit, Dr. Stern spent a full hour interrogating Ella behind a closed red door. Violet knocked several times throughout and poked her head in. Ella never raised her gaze.

After the session, he invited Violet in. Looking over his wire spectacles, past a razorback nose, he said, “Mrs. Iverson, I’m afraid that shock therapy is the only thing that might bring your daughter around.”

No expert in medicine, she knew enough to take Ella by the hand and walk out the door.

When it came to Reverend Dunn, his answer was much the same, only in this case it wasn’t shock but prayer that would be her only salvation.

In desperation, Violet decided to enlist the help of a Hawaiian named Henry Aulani. He lived in a modest house at the bottom of the road down to Haina. More prison guard in appearance than healer, his mellifluous voice and coffee-colored eyes told a different story. Kids played in the yard and dogs wandered in and out the open back door. He brought them into the high-ceilinged kitchen, where dried plants hung from the rafters, filling the room with sharp and sweet scents of mint and forest.

“Please, sit.” He motioned to the table.

Violet felt her throat constricting at the thought of explaining Ella’s condition to yet another person. But he didn’t ask her anything about Ella.

“Tell me about your home,” he said.

“What do you want to know about my home?”

“Whatever you want to tell me,” he said.

Violet thought it a strange question. Weren’t they here about Ella? “Well, to start with, it’s bright yellow...”

She continued on. Ella remained mute until a few minutes later, when a black cat with yellow eyes jumped onto the bench and climbed into her lap. “What’s his name?” she asked Henry.

“Her name is Pele. And you must be special, because this cat doesn’t do that with most people,” he said.

“She purrs real loud,” Ella said.

On more than one occasion, Ella had asked Violet why humans don’t purr and if there was any way possible to learn how. “We purr. You just can’t hear it,” Violet had said.

If at all possible, the air in the kitchen now seemed easier to breathe. Whether it was the cat or Henry pulling Violet out of her own mind full of hidden fears, she couldn’t be sure.

Henry took both Violet’s hands. The warmth in his palms made her own tingle. “Now, tell me what happened.”

The date was forever etched in her mind. Friday, September 10, 1943. Violet had been with the sewing circle in the small blue-and-white church below town, assembling cardboard slippers for the wounded men still in the hospital at Tripler, in Honolulu. The group met every week. The horrors of Pearl Harbor were fresh in everyone’s mind, even though it had been over a year ago. As usual, Ella stayed next door with Mrs. Cody, who had most of the neighborhood playing in her yard.

When Violet returned to the Codys’ cottage, Ella was nowhere to be found.

“What do you mean, she’s not here?”