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

* * *

Toward the end of fifth period, the bell hadn’t even rung when Mr. Nakata showed up outside her classroom. He stood to the side and nodded, but didn’t enter. The look on his face was familiar, one part pity and one part annoyance at having to trudge over here. Even though it had been more than a year since he took over for Herman, in her mind Nakata would always be the new principal. No one could replace her husband.

When she acknowledged him back, all her students turned their heads in unison toward the door. “Keep practicing your lines, class. I’ll be right outside. And I expect that you will have no errors.”

The typewriters clicked away.

“I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s been a small incident with Ella,” Nakata said.

Her throat tightened. “Well, I am alarmed. Is she all right?”

He moved in closer and dropped his voice. Wafts of pomade rose from his slick hair. “She’s fine, but she wet her pants during the air-raid drill and Mr. Hodges sent her to the infirmary. I’ll watch your class until the bell.”

The school nurse should have a change of clothes for Ella, but it never got easier. Violet turned and ran.

“Violet, don’t you want to put some shoes on?” She ran back in, switched out her Japanese slippers for her flats and sped across the field to the infirmary. The campus was calm-before-the-storm kind of empty, minutes before school got out. She reached the infirmary, a converted old classroom, in one minute flat.

“Hello, Mrs. Baker. Where’s Ella?”

Mrs. Baker wore her whites crisp and clean, even though she had outgrown them several years ago. Nevertheless, her overabundant body made for good comforting to sick children. Or scared children, which had become more common these days with air-raid drills and gas-mask practice.

“She’s in the back. I got her changed but she refused to go back to class,” Mrs. Baker said.

Ella didn’t look up when Violet walked into the room. In the oversize PE uniform, her arms looked like small wires sticking out from the sleeves. Red spots patterned her arm, one trickling blood, which meant she was picking at herself again. If Ella noticed her arrival, she didn’t let on. She was drawing. Violet sat down on the worn-out carpet next to her.

“That’s a lovely cat, honey.” Nothing but silence. “Want to tell me what happened?”

Ella shook her head and filled in the wings of a giant bird hovering overhead. The bird appeared to be ready to snatch the cat away in its claws. “You worried about Snowflake? She’ll be there when we get home. She always is.” It better be the case. “Come on. We can bring that.”

Ella remained rooted. “Where are Umi and Hiro?”

“They had to help their father today, selling sweet potato.”

The distance between them narrowed when Ella’s focus shifted from the drawing up to Violet. Her brown eyes were still too big for her face. “I don’t like it here without them.”

Violet fought to keep her expression in order. Watching Ella suffer was the worst part of this whole war. “They’ll be back tomorrow. Plus, you know how close my room is.”

Luther Hodges, the shop teacher and Herman’s friend, popped his head in. “Everything okay here?”

“Just having a rough day. We’re fine.”

Ella began picking the scab on her arm vigorously. She wouldn’t look up.

“The sirens seem to set her off. I’ll keep an extra eye on her,” he said.

Ella seemed much more comfortable around the women teachers and women in general, but any help would be welcome. “Thank you.”

To Ella she said, “Did you hear that? You can always seek out Mr. Hodges if you are feeling scared.”

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

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

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?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that hide-and-seek is over,” Mrs. Cody said.

A brief search found Ella two houses up at the Hamasus’. Violet had to steady herself when she saw her daughter. Ella lay on the living room pune’e with blankets piled up around her and a warm cloth on her forehead.

Setsuko sat with her. “She wandered in only ten minutes ago. Something’s not right.”

Ella’s skin was the color of cooked rice and her eyes were shut tightly. Right at that exact moment, a feeling of cold ran through Violet, turning her blood to stone.

“You should have told me you weren’t feeling well, honey,” she said.

Ella didn’t answer. It was only the beginning.

* * *

Back at the house, darkness set in and Herman still had not returned. She assumed he was on a patrol, though he hadn’t mentioned he would be out that night. Soon after the bombing, Herman and half the plantation workers formed a group they called the Hawaii Rifles. The members would ride around on horseback, keeping an eye on anything out of order. None of the men had any experience, but that didn’t stop them. People wanted to feel like they were doing something.

With the onset of the war, predictability had become a thing of the past, but his absence seemed wrong in a way she couldn’t explain. Call it a hunch. She fixed a pot of sweet potato soup up for Ella, who refused even one spoonful. Her forehead felt clammy and her little body shook in small fits.

“That settles it. I’m taking you to the doctor in the morning,” Violet said.

A few minutes after midnight, Sheriff Souza knocked on the door. Standing on the porch, he was a mere shadow with a hat, and Violet invited him into the kitchen, where she turned on the light. Instinctively, she hugged herself. His hands were plastered in his pockets. “Mrs. Iverson, I don’t want to alarm you, but do you have any knowledge of your husband’s whereabouts? His car is down at the lookout below Kukuihaile.”

The old Ford. Why on earth would he be down there at this hour? Her mind raced to imagine the possibilities. Submarine spotting. Airplane spotting. Aside from those, there was no reasonable explanation. Not for Herman.

“I don’t, Sheriff. Maybe he was on watch duty?”

Souza’s expression looked wooden and unreadable. “I yelled around. Did he mention he would be going anywhere?”

She shook her head. “I was at the sewing circle and he usually works at school until dark.”

“I’ll be honest with you—this seems fishy. With curfew and all.”

More than fishy. Herman was the kind of man who never missed an appointment, showed up on the dot. He was reliable to a fault. If he’d had duty tonight, he would have told her.

“Maybe he said something to Luther?” she said.

Souza seemed relieved to have somewhere else to go. “I’ll have a word with him. You stay here in case Herman shows up.”

As she waited, minutes expanded to hours and Violet was no longer sure if she was awake or dreaming. She closed her eyes and willed herself to wake up, only to understand that she already was. Rain began to bucket down, pelting the windows with tadpole-size drops.

Before long, Souza returned. “Ma’am, Luther didn’t know a thing. But he was pretty liquored up. I’ll talk to him more tomorrow.”

“If anyone, he would know.”

“Try to get some rest. I’ll put a call out, see if anyone knows anything. And send a car out first thing in the morning. Meantime, stay here. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

They were the most feeble words she’d ever heard him speak.

* * *

In the kitchen, where Violet waited, the rickety icebox kick-started into high gear every once in a while, startling her with its hum. The wetness of the air caused her hair to stand on end. She felt torn in half.

Sheriff Souza called at eight o’clock with no real news. Mr. Fujimoto had been sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store when he thought he had seen Herman driving north toward Waipio, but that was all. Friday afternoons in town were usually crawling with people, now that the evenings were off-limits. No one would have been paying attention.

“I’m going to head back to the car right now with a few of my men, search the area for any signs. I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can,” he said.

She hated to think of what that implied. As of now, she was suffering from a trembling in her gut that would not stop. Scenarios played out in her head. Herman meeting up with Japanese soldiers who had crept ashore and scaled the cliffs. Or slipping and falling from those same cliffs. It was simply impossible that her husband would not be found alive and in one piece with a perfectly rational explanation.

Ella slept uneasily through most of the morning, thrashing about in her bed and tangling herself in the blankets. Violet felt her forehead, which had cooled but was still clammy against the back of her hand. Low clouds blocked the sun, allowing only gray light in through the windows. In despair, she called Setsuko, careful not to say much on the line.

Within minutes, her friend stood in the living room with her arms wrapped around Violet. “It will be all right, Violet, I promise you.”

“Did you see him after school?” Violet asked.

“No, I went straight to Japanese school. I didn’t get back until five, just before Ella showed up on my porch.”

Footsteps announced a visitor, and Luther appeared at the door. A veteran of the Great War, he’d arrived in Honoka’a eight years earlier to take over the position as shop teacher and unofficial handyman. Deaf in one ear, and the size of a bear, he and Herman became fast friends. Luther had lost a nephew at Pearl Harbor and had been drowning his sorrows in the bottle, which worried Violet since he had no wife and no other family around.

Overnight, Luther’s face had turned ashen and his clothes crumpled. “Any news?” he asked.

She repeated the sheriff’s update and added, “Herman drove out there without telling anyone, which concerns me. He didn’t mention anything to you?”

“Nope. I’ve been up most of the night thinking on it. Would it be possible he was meeting someone to fetch a new batch of okolehao?”

“He would have mentioned it. Plus, he still has a few bottles left,” she said.

“Yes, but you know how much it’s worth these days, now that everything’s being rationed. We both know he’s a shrewd businessman.”

True. Okolehao was a Hawaiian ti-root moonshine, but some of the locals also used pineapple, taro, sugarcane or rice. Just up the road, Waipio Valley had become a hotbed of illegal okolehao production during Prohibition. Violet hated the stuff.

“I feel like he would have told me. But I suppose it’s possible.”

She wanted to believe him, and wondered if Herman had gone down into the valley to meet someone. There was a Hawaiian man down there he had mentioned once or twice. And maybe the river had overflowed and he was stuck down there. It made sense and was about the only thing that could possibly, remotely, hopefully have been true. But truth, she was finding, didn’t always want to be known.

“I’m heading over now to talk to the sheriff,” he said.

Violet dropped down on the cracked red paint of the front step. She watched him walk away. Unable to do anything else, she lay back and let the tears come. Setsuko sat next to her and held her hand while she went numb from the inside out.

* * *

Just before lunchtime that day, Ella called out, “Mama?”

Violet rushed to the pune’e. “Good morning, love. How you feelin’?”

There was a new vacancy in Ella’s eyes, like someone had taken an eraser and removed all the brightness, leaving a dull brown. Ella didn’t answer, just closed her eyes and rolled to face the wall.

Setsuko had slipped on an apron and said from the kitchen, “Ella, I have your favorite. Rice cakes.”

Violet began to wonder if Ella’s condition might not be a sickness at all. The timing was peculiar. Disease is in the mind, her father used to say, never allowing anyone to skip chores because of a sniffle or miss school due to a burning throat. As though you could think yourself well. Was it possible that we could also think ourselves sick? Violet reminded herself that Ella had been playing at the Codys’, so what could she possibly know?

“Did you happen to see Daddy yesterday afternoon? Before he drove off.” Ella shook her head. “Did he say anything to you at all yesterday about going someplace in the afternoon?”

In the silence between them, her fear began to spread.

“Honey, I need you to talk to me.”

“My tummy hurts,” Ella whispered.

“Setsuko, would you mind fixing some poi?”

A voice inside was telling Violet that the two incidents were connected. Her tough little girl suddenly seemed so fragile. “Where were you when the other kids were looking for you?”

“I had a good hiding place. I told you that,” Ella said.

Violet watched the rise and fall of her ribs. Tenderness rushed through her.

“Sometimes, when you hold things inside, it can make you feel sick. Is that what’s happening?”

Ella shook her head again, limply.

Violet let out a big sigh. “We can keep it just between you and me, but I need you to tell me anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Even if you don’t think it matters.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

She prodded Ella for more information, but Ella refused to answer. Frustration was building up inside, causing every cell in her body to hurt. She wanted to scream.

* * *

When Sheriff Souza returned, his face had bad news written all over it. He didn’t waver as he asked her to accompany him into the kitchen and swung the door shut. Her heart dropped.

He chewed on his lower lip for a moment before speaking. “Now, I can’t say that we found anything conclusive, and there was plenty of rain last night, but we combed the area around his car and there appear to be some broken bushes. And blood. Just a small amount, but it was near the edge of the overlook.”

The word blood was all she heard. “Did you look below? Could he have been hurt and fallen?”

She pictured the cliffs. Lofty, vertical slabs that plunged straight into the roiling blue. In some areas, small outcroppings of land jutted out.

“Anyone falls, they end up in the water. Or on the rocks. We didn’t see a body on the rocks.”

A body. She felt herself unraveling at the seams and had to check to make sure her upper half was still connected to her lower half. Strangely, she felt as though she were listening to a radio detective show. Herman dead was impossible. Husbands were not allowed to die. Especially young ones. Especially hers.

The words came out in a whisper. “Luther thinks Herman went into Waipio with someone for okolehao. That blood could have been from anything, couldn’t it? A pig, a goat.”

“Could have been. I sent Boy Rapozo down to check. No one coughs down there without him knowing about it. Gonna have the blood tested. Do you know his type?”

“O.”

The ringing in her ears ramped up and Violet focused on Souza’s bristly mustache and the way his lips jutted out underneath. How his gaze moved around the kitchen, trying to find an anchor.

“Thank you, Sheriff.”

“We’ll get to the bottom of this. People don’t just disappear in Honoka’a. Not on my watch.”

As it turned out, they did. The only lead that turned up was from a chicken farmer up the way who claimed he heard two gunshots that afternoon. But even he couldn’t be sure from which direction they had come. Speculation in town was rampant. Herman worked for the Japanese. A moonshine deal had soured. He was gambling on cockfights. Working for the FBI.

That people thought someone as upstanding and well liked as Herman could be a spy boiled her insides. But she had to admit most things Japanese did have a special place in his heart. His secretary was Japanese, he boasted that some of his best teachers were Japanese, and many of his friends were Japanese. He liked Japanese food, drank Japanese wine, and grew Japanese sweet potatoes in his garden. But did that make him a spy?

Violet swayed back and forth between her own two theories. One was that he might have been on watch for the Hawaii Rifles, and been ambushed by the Japanese while out patrolling along the cliffs. But no one else had seen anything suspicious and no one else had up and vanished. The other idea was that he had upset someone in the spirit business, because he had on several occasions voiced an interest in making his own. She had argued against it.

“How will it look if the school principal is also a moonshine distributor?” she had said.

“Honey, it would just be for a few of us around here. And we could use the extra money to buy more land.”

“Not a good idea,” she’d insisted.

If only she could find his calendar, which he also used as a sort of journal. It was not on his desk where it usually was and had yet to turn up. Either he had it with him, or someone took it. This was the one piece of information that didn’t fit. How could someone have taken it? Sheriff Souza had interrogated everyone in the school on this small fact, reasoning that if someone had taken the journal, someone had access to his office.

For an entire week, Ella wouldn’t eat solid food and Violet took to feeding her spoonfuls of chicken broth and rice. She refused to go back to school, and so Violet had to bring her to class once she returned to work the following week. There was no way for Violet to hide the swollen redness of her eyes, so she didn’t even bother. Sleep came sparingly. By mornings, her pillow was soaking and covered in clumps of hair. Herman, where are you? As best she could, Violet tried to stay in that slice of time just after waking, before she remembered. It never lasted more than three seconds.

Eventually, the blood results came back. Human. Type O.