Post-termination walk in the cemetery

"I gather things have changed," I said to R at the guard shack this morning. He laughed awkwardly. The shack is being renovated; apparently they're going to add a walk-in closet. "For skeletons?" I asked. New windows, raw 2x4's, another guy seated on an office chair in the middle of it all. Up the hill, I approached Uncle J's brother, still seated in a chair beside the temple parking lot, the better to move cones when large buses pull up. He's a man of few words.. "It's not us," he said. "It's management. And look at this zoo." 

 

I gave Hoku the aloha shirt I'd promised him. He sports "formal wear" on Fridays (it's a work tradition), even as he spends hours weed whacking. I congratulated them on still having jobs. Lilith leapt toward Ola for her attention, then back to Hoku. Well, there were stories. S had overlooked some thefts by three guys (also left go). And Uncle J had been caught on camera giving flowers away. I chalked some of this up to anger at management. 

 

"Such a sweet crime," a friend says on the phone, "taking flowers."

 

from Startles

Stories are grim, but moments burst out like peonies. On Elepaio, a sign reads: “Private Sign / Do Not Read / $500 Fine.” I like the anonymous wit and the threat to me, who can’t be seen by the sign maker. In a framed, cracked mirror, I see my own torso reflected through the encroaching forest, take a selfie, which requires my face, my cap, my camera. I shoot a private photo of the private sign, and post it.

The joke’s on me, but who told it? That’s the funny part. I try to tell the canoe builder a “funny story,” but he asks me if I have any. I tell him one, but it’s not funny. I wonder how he knows about my stories. We’ve exchanged paranoia.

The tall husky mix who walked miles with me ran around the ranger’s cabin after a pheasant and brought it back in her mouth. Veered sharply, trotted back the way we’d come. How we choose other souls to accompany us; how we ourselves are chosen, is a mystery. She wore a collar, so someone had chosen her.

The story was framed by two episodes of forgetting, the first a face and the second a name. Both people recognized me, in a recognition scene that went only one way, or bent before it arrived, like a driveway in the forest. That way, you can’t see the house at the end of the road. It’s built-in privacy, and you can get fined for trespassing. I make the mistake of not asking, again.

Where we once belonged is no longer where you are, my friend. Two years ago you were still alive, looking forward to your granddaughter’s visit, a house on your land, a poetry workshop. You’d told me years before that you were no longer afraid to die. Were you still afraid of the violence, of not being found soon enough to tell the broken story of your death? Does death become you now, like a prayer scarf?

It’s the one way nature of the sign that makes me laugh. Someone has invited me into a conversation I can’t sustain, like talking to the dead. A grant writer invents new words for now forbidden ones: woman is now person; equity is now assumed. Because racism doesn’t exist, we indulge it more. We call it fairness.

Just when you think you belong, you trip hard on the rock of being seen as stranger. To be, long. A temporal measurement, as if duration were the only key. Sympathy sometimes leads to bad writing. Those who try too hard are both admirable and foolish.

 

On forgetting

 

Turns out I had met Bobby at the Ranger's cabin, that he was the man who makes canoes, and that he'd seen my photograph of one of his projects. 

 

When I got to the turn on Elepaio Road, off Haunani, I saw a dog in the distance staring at me. I stopped. She approached slowly, stopped again. She was a husky mix, tall and thin, with salmon collar and a sweet temperament. When I continued my walk, she came with me. I'd stop for photos, she'd veer off to flush pheasants, and once, two pigs. We walked to the end of the road, past the tall pines, and turned around. We walked and walked together, though she paused often to mark territory or to sniff. She came down Haunani with me, turned right on Maile. We got as far as the ranger's cabin. I wanted to ask Bobby about the dog, but he was gone. 

 

A sudden WHOOSH and the dog sprinted after a pheasant. They ran behind the cabin, pheasant screaming, until I saw, through the space between garage and cabin, that the dog had the pheasant in her mouth. She came running back. Not a gift I want, I thought. But as she came toward me, she veered suddenly and ran back toward Haunani, pheasant lodged firmly in her mouth. A chicken clucked next to the garage.

 

"Where's your dog?" asked a woman I ran into shortly after. When I said "Lilith," she remembered. She remembered my name, too. I told her that I don't recall names well any more, and she described the process by which she locks names into her head, but also told me about the time--horrified--she forgot a good friend's name. She's seen the light, collared, beautiful dog around. The dog walks the perimeter of her property near Elepaio. "Some dogs just wander," she said, lamenting that a lot of people now call animal control.

 

"I'm Michelle," she said. I tried the brain lock trick, but locks increasingly seem meant to be picked. 

 

--Volcano 

Another termination

My last few conversations with S in the cemetery were largely about Uncle J,, who has been terribly depressed lately. Word had it that he'd quit his other job and was doing extra hours at the cemetery. I delivered an envelope to Uncle J a couple of weeks ago; in it was material from the Mayo Clinic about depression. I wrote a note to him from Lilith and me and added that "S cares about you." Today, S--who was "terminated" a week ago-- texted me to say that J had been fired.

 

Lilith and I have been interacting with S and J for ten years now, through COVID (they denied it) and Trump (they loved him) and Biden (he was demented) and Harris (she was dumb). We hardly agreed on anything, except that we loved Lilith and were oddly fond of one another. More recently, the cemetery politics had gotten very nasty, and I talked to them about that, as about mortality and friendship. You can't help but feel deeply in such a place. 

 

I worry about them, S and J. I grieve for that community (another employee had quit recently under the stress of surveillance and problems with the boss). And, since writers are always problematic in this way, I feel the probable loss of my 10 year project, Lilith Walks. In our own ways, Lilith and I will have been "terminated" by the vulture capitalists and their henchmen. I will not lose my livelihood, but my stories, my threads, my documentation, part of my vocation have been taken from me.

 

When I get back to O`ahu, I'll seek out Lilith's and my remaining friends, and see what they make of all the unmaking going on around them. Cut trees, cut people, cut cords.

 

Two disasters

 

1.

 

I'd been sitting on a rock wall for hours at the Jaggar lookout, staring at Kilauea burping lava but not yet erupting, when I saw a man standing behind me wearing a Gauley River teeshirt from West Virginia. "Wasn't there a mining disaster near there in the 30's," I asked him. A woman who may have been his daughter said, "yes, Hawk's Nest Tunnel." I told him about _The Book of the Dead_, by Muriel Rukeyser. I remembered that lots of miners died of silicosis; the corporation hadn't sprayed water on the rock before the miners drilled into it. That the corporation brought in African Americans from the south to work during a strike and they also died of silicosis. 

 

His father was a coal miner; had been trapped in a mine for days once. Dangerous work. They just lost two miners near them recently. He'd wanted to be a history professor, but didn't finish school after his daughter came along. His wife was a teacher, then a principal. He noticed when he worked at her school that he was smarter than the teachers. They were good at what they did, but one woman left her keys in her car every morning, and he had to retrieve them for her. No common sense, he said. 

 

2.

 

Seated beside me, after the couple from Texas left because their time on-island was running short, was a gray stubble-chinned white man with an accent that had nothing to do with Hawai`i. Did I hear him mention Arkansas? Lives in Pahoa, loves Ledward Kaapana's music, but wasn't at the concert the other night. He'd lost his house in 2018. "It was like a big party on the road down there," he said, "every night, because no one thought their house was getting destroyed." He'd stayed in his house until the last moment because other places had been ransacked while their owners weren't allowed in. One guy had a house up a hill, and he was in there when the lava started pushing against the walls. Horror movie. Yes, he'd seen the destruction of camera V3 by Kilauea a couple of months ago, as the tephra got closer and closer and the lens finally broke. It had taken a long time to get things straight after his house was destroyed.

 

"So the volcano destroyed your house and you're up here watching Pele now?" "Yes, I prefer to watch up here."

 

Someone asked if he'd leave Hawai`i. No, he likes it here. There's nowhere he'd rather be.

On "termination"

My cemetery buddy, Scott (he of all conspiracy theories, meditations on mortality, lover of trees, who cared about walkers like me, and asked after us when we disappeared, who visited his late wife's grave most days, who spoke his mind to the bosses), just texted me to say that he'd been "terminated" by Valley of the Temples cemetery. Lilith and I will miss him. 

 

God damn the vulture capitalists.

 

On chickens

He waved from his truck going by as I took a photo of yet another stump (HELCO had taken down a lot of trees next to power lines during the month of storms). The wood was nearly saffron, a flag pole of splinters sticking up from a rough table. As I got to where he'd turned in at the old ranger cabin, he greeted me. "You've got chickens," I noted, as a hen and several chicks walked in front of me. 

 

I told him that when I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia there was one rooster in town that caused quite a kerfuffle. No one wanted it around. "Should have killed it," he said. He'd grown up in Arlington. Half-Hawaiian, half-Minnesotan, dad in the military. 

 

Of these chickens, he said, "they're moa--m o a--he carefully spelled it out for me. The chickens brought by early Polynesians. They're great for this place; they eat mosquitos and centipedes. Strangely, you can hunt them all the time. There are seasons for pheasants, even doves (they were brought in to hunt), but the moa have no season." He said he'd killed some of them. "Do they taste good?" "No, I get them for my friends who work with feathers."

 

"I'm Bobby," he said. "Nice to meet you," I responded. As he walked toward the garage (where I had once taken pictures of a canoe) and I up the hill, I wondered if we hadn't met before.