The Bones of Kahekili
From over the lofty Koolau Mountains, vagrant wisps of the trade
wind drifted, faintly swaying the great, unwhipped banana leaves, rustling the palms, and fluttering and setting up a whispering among the lace-leaved algaroba trees. Only intermittently did the atmosphere so breathe--for breathing it was, the suspiring of the languid, Hawaiian afternoon. In the intervals between the soft breathings, the air grew heavy and balmy with the perfume of flowers and the exhalations of fat, living soil.
Of humans about the low bungalow-like house, there were many; but
one only of them slept. The rest were on the tense tiptoes of
silence. At the rear of the house a tiny babe piped up a thin
blatting wail that the quickly thrust breast could not appease. The mother, a slender hapa-haole (half-white), clad in a loose- flowing holoku of white muslin, hastened away swiftly among the banana and papaia trees to remove the babe's noise by distance. Other women, hapa-haole and full native, watched her anxiously as she fled.
At the front of the house, on the grass, squatted a score of
Hawaiians. Well-muscled, broad-shouldered, they were all strapping
men. Brown-skinned, with luminous brown eyes and black, their
features large and regular, they showed all the signs of being as
good-natured, merry-hearted, and soft-tempered as the climate. To
all of which a seeming contradiction was given by the ferociousness
of their accoutrement. Into the tops of their rough leather
leggings were thrust long knives, the handles projecting. On their
heels were huge-rowelled Spanish spurs. They had the appearance of
banditti, save for the incongruous wreaths of flowers and fragrant
maile that encircled the crowns of their flopping cowboy hats. One
of them, deliciously and roguishly handsome as a faun, with the
eyes of a faun, wore a flaming double-hibiscus bloom coquettishly
tucked over his ear. Above them, casting a shelter of shade from
the sun, grew a wide-spreading canopy of Ponciana regia, itself a
flame of blossoms, out of each of which sprang pom-poms of feathery
stamens. From far off, muffled by distance, came the faint
stamping of their tethered horses. The eyes of all were intently
fixed upon the solitary sleeper who lay on his back on a lauhala
mat a hundred feet away under the monkey-pod trees.
Large as were the Hawaiian cowboys, the sleeper was larger. Also, as his snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older. The thickness of his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple, exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was all haole--a white man.
On his back, his great white beard, thrust skyward, untrimmed of
barbers, stiffened and subsided with every breath, while with the
outblow of every exhalation the white moustache erected
perpendicularly like the quills of a porcupine and subsided with
each intake. A young girl of fourteen, clad only in a single
shift, or muumuu, herself a grand-daughter of the sleeper, crouched
beside him and with a feathered fly-flapper brushed away the flies. In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness, and awe, as if she attended on a god.
And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and
to many and sundry, a god--a source of life, a source of food, a
fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness
of thunder and punishment--in short, a man-master whose record was
fourteen living and adult sons and daughters, six great-
grandchildren, and more grandchildren than could he in his most
lucid moments enumerate.