Page 59 of Talk Story

Keone wore his kīhei like he’d been born to it—which he had. It changed him—or rather it showed me something new in him that was hidden under the pilot’s uniform and the easy grin: a gravity, a rootedness. He caught me staring and didn’t smile this time, held my eyes a moment across the sand. Today he belonged to something that had been here long before me, and I was honored to witness it.

We waited. The waves came in long and easy. Mynahs fussed in the palms behind us and then even they went quiet.

And then, far out past the reef line, the canoe came into view.

She came around the point low and dark on the water, a double-hulled waʻa with her crew bending and pulling in, and as she cleared the point a man in the bow lifted a pū to his lips and blew. The conch’s long, low cry rolled across the bay and up the green wall of the valley behind us, and chicken skin rose on my arms the way it had the very first day, when Tiki put a stolen petroglyph on my desk.

Uncle Kalani, in full regalia of dyed, decorated kīhei and many lei, walked down to the waterline with Pali Moku at his side. The younger man wore a plain undyed robe, and his face was wiped clean of everything but purpose. As the canoe slid the last stretch toward the sand, Uncle Kalani lifted his voice in oli—a chant that rose and fell and asked, from discussion beforehand, for permission. For welcome. For the blessing of the ancestors on what we were about to do.

The crew in the canoe answered him, a call returned across the narrowing water, and the sound of those voices reaching for each other over the waves did something to my throat that I gave up trying to fight. Aunt Fae’s hand found mine and gripped it, hard.

The waʻa grounded. Strong hands ran her up the sand. And there, lashed amidships and wrapped in ti leaf and lauhala, rode the petroglyphs.

What followed, I’ll carry the memory of for the rest of my life.

They brought the stones up from the bay on a flatbed float that the village, with Josie’s leadership, had spent days transforming. It was buried in greenery—ti leaf and fern and the white plumerias of the town, woven and heaped until you couldn’t see an inch of metal, only a moving hill of green and flower with the wrapped stones riding the crest.

We processed through town with the slow-moving float; the waʻa crew and the kīhei-clad families walked ahead and alongside the float, and the rest of us came behind in a long bright tail, walking the closed main street of Ohia.

The town came out to witness, standing on their lanais and the shoulders of the road: the Pahinuis’ regulars, the keiki out and about on a Saturday morning, and the kūpuna in their folding chairs. Some of them lifted their hands, some waved ti leaves, some wept—and Uncle Kalani chanted the whole slow length of it.

I drove in the carpool that fell in behind once the float reached the valley road—Aunt Fae and Edith and Josie packed into Sharkey, Rita’s daypack between the seats, Tiki yowling editorial commentary from her carrier—and then the road ran out at the back entrance to the caves, and we walked.

The University of Hawaii students were there already, a small respectful cluster in archaeology work clothes, their tools, mounts and brushes laid out under a tarp—they were the crew who would reset the petroglyphs in the days to come, returning each stone to the rock face it had been gouged from, under the guidance of the kahu and the careful new oversight of Dr. Nainoa Emerson, who stood among them, appearing to be entirely well at last.

The stones were carried the last distance by hand.

People took up the petroglyphs one by one, unwrapped now, bare in the dappled light, and carried them, several to each stone, into the cave mouth. Uncle Kalani set a beat with his ipu, and hula dancers welcomed the stones back into their place.

The hike inside was well-lighted for the occasion, and the stones were hand-carried by Hawaiian families all the way to the main cavern. There, they were positioned on a bed of ferns spread on the clean stone of the cave’s floor, in the order the students would need to begin their work.

Each stone was home, waiting only to be lifted and sealed back into the wound it had been torn from.

I stood at the back of the gathering with Tiki’s carrier in my hand and watched the stones come to rest, and I felt not like an outsider—but like the last person in a long relay, holding the final piece.

Because I was.

I knelt and let Tiki out; she deserved to be a part of this last bit.

I’d carried a fragment of one of those big stones for weeks; the piece of petroglyph that a one-eared, kink-tailed cat had set on my desk amongst scattered Priority Mail envelopes.

Uncle Kalani turned and found me in the crowd. We’d arranged this quietly, weeks ago. He lifted a hand, and the gathering parted. Aunt Fae gave me a little encouraging push between the shoulder blades.

I walked up through all of them to the wall and found the stone missing a corner. I knelt and took the fragment from its pouch—cool in my palm, a figure holding a spear and its lightning bolt. I found edge that matched and set my piece beside it on a ti leaf, fitting the broken faces close, so the figure could be whole again when the students lifted it back into the rock.

For a moment my hand rested there, as Tiki came close and nosed the broken fragment. I found I’d gone past crying into something quieter and steadier and warm.

And then Keone was lifting me to stand, taking the sacred green maile lei from his own shoulders. He settled it around my neck and drew the ends straight, hanging loose and fragrant down my front, and he leaned his forehead to mine the way he had in the deep blue water a lifetime and five weeks ago.

“Welcome home,” he said, low, only for me to hear. “For real, this time. In front of everybody.”

One last chant from Uncle Kalani, then the kahu clapped his hands and the whole gathering burst into shouts of something like joy.

My ridiculous, one-eared cat, annoyed by the noise, stalked across sacred ground with her kinked tail high, surveying what she’d set in motion what seemed like a lifetime ago.

A few months later, our Friday afternoon at the post office was delightfully ordinary. Pua and I moved through the familiar closing ritual we’d done a thousand times—she counted down the register and restocked the counter, while I wheeled the empty mail hampers into the back and checked and sorted all the drop boxes. Tiki supervised from the top of the sorting shelf, tail hanging down like a furry bell pull.

“That’s it for the day.” Pua locked the cash drawer and stretched, working a kink out of her back. She’d let her hair go a little gray at the temples and it suited her—made her seem more approachable. “You hear anything more about what’s going on with the Valley?”