PERSONAL ESSAYS

MISS NOBODY FROM CALIFORNIA
2023

Mary Elizabeth Bond Bowman came into full aunt bloom for me in 1984. Right after my mother’s memorial service, the relatives gathered at our family place in Kailua, O‘ahu, for the usual wind-down that was always the best part of a funeral.

Some of them were sitting under the trellised hau tree my long-dead father had planted in 1940. Betty was seated in a plastic lawn chair, an empty plate on her lap, a glass in her hand. She was conversing. I was nearby talking to her three daughters, paying no attention to Betty – until she uttered the F-word.

“Ma!” the three daughters shouted in unison, as if they had rehearsed as a Greek chorus.

A hush overcame the extended throng.

Aunty Betty, who was in her early 70s at the time, puffed herself up, and held forth.

“When I was little I was the only girl in the family, so of course I had to be good. Then I was a school girl and had to be good. I grew up to be a librarian, and anyone know librarians have to be good. Then I got married and had kids, and naturally a mother has to be good. And now I am an old lady and I will say ‘fuck’ whenever I want!”

In my childhood and youth Aunty Betty was one of two Aunty Bettys among my seventeen aunts. Even though I was only ten I still remember the day when she achieved her status as the aunty with the most kids. My father observed, in a tone of either awe or disgust, “Betty’s got another bean in the oven.” I think he meant “bun.” Aunty Betty told me decades later that she and Pierre planned on six kids, but Lani, No. 4, the last bean, “blew out the works.”

Betty lived in the hinterlands of Hawaii Island, near the little town of Hāwī on the island’s northwest cape, famous for its unceasing winds. Uncle Pierre was the Industrial Relations Manager for Kohala Sugar Company, in charge of the welfare of employees. To visit from O‘ahu we had to fly to the island’s only airport at Hilo, and take the open-air sampan jitney, twisting along the Hāmākua coast for at least four hours. My little brother always upchucked.

Betty faced stiff competition in my aunt-evaluating mind. The cake-baker aunt gave us kids her excess frosting to spread on graham crackers. The British war bride sang “Lavender’s Blue” in her beguiling English accent. The seamstress allowed me to pilfer her fabric scraps to make doll clothes.  But eventually Betty eclipsed them all, even the one with the dancing black eyes and tantalizing smile who could charm children into believing that doing chores followed by a swim was a “schemey idea.”

A few months after that F-word incident Betty’s children engineered a huge family party at their 1880-vintage plantation house to celebrate Pierre’s 75th birthday. 

Betty and Pierre were seated on wicker “thrones” in the open-sided shed normally used to store riding mowers, boats, trailers and such. They greeted the hundred-plus guests moving in a sort of receiving line. When the line petered out to just a few stragglers – at least one of whom heard this – Betty leaned toward Pierre and whispered, “Oh Pierre, I feel a stirring in my loins!” Pierre turned his head toward her, gave her a blank stare and replied loudly, “Hah??”

This remark made it around the family in what might have been record time, decades before the term “going viral” came into vogue.

It also fixed Betty in my mind as the aunt I wanted to know better. So whenever my freelance magazine writing required a trip the Big Island, I also visited Hāwī. I soon realized that Aunty Betty was a natural storyteller who saw the comical side of most everything. Betty told stories of Kohala Sugar Plantation, where she lived for 60 years. Her stories generally had a juicy flare, including a lot of her own experiences marrying into a part-Hawaiian family and finding out that her mother, in Southern California, “thought Pierre had a ring in his nose and lived in a tree and scratched.”

Every time I visited I was so captivated by her stories and her manner I thought I would never forget either. And then, only an hour later, I couldn’t remember any of it, least of all her hilarious and ribald turns of phrase. Eventually I wised up. I would excuse myself for a few minutes, ostensibly to the powder room, dodge into the guest room, and scribble details, trying to capture her voice.

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1994.Several years into my visits,  I show up on her doorstep dragging an enormous suitcase. “What is THAT?” says she. “Your burden of guilt? You better come in, dear child!”

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Aunty Betty was born in July 1912 in Browning, Montana, where her dad was a hydrologist with the new federal U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.  Browning, where the Northern Plains meet the Rockies, was the location of the Bureau of Indian Affairs agency for the Blackfeet Nation.  It got so cold the nails in the walls popped. After a huge blizzard covered their doors and windows a Blackfeet man dug a tunnel through the snow so they could get out their kitchen door. The after-storm sunlight glowed so magically in the tunnel four-year-old Betty thought she was standing inside of a pearl.

She hated kneeling for her bedtime prayers because the floor was so cold. Oldest brother Paul told her people died because they didn’t say their prayers. She ignored him. But then, during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, their next door neighbor died. “See?” said Paul. “I told you so.” Betty’s knees hit the cold floor, no more questions asked.

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1999. One afternoon when I am visiting, she has me drive her to her volunteer post at St. Augustine’s thrift store, which she describes as “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Before we get out the door she says,
“Now do I have everything? The key, a handkerchief, the Lord’s cash box… Once I got there to find a clothes basket full of eight starving kittens. Another time it was a bag with a ratty fur coat, a pair of shoes and a breast pump – take your pick. Pierre is buried in the church yard across the parking lot from the Little Shop. I shouldn’t have buried the boy so close to the road. Everybody passing can see if I haven’t weeded his grave.”

****

Eventually the Bonds moved to Southern California. And eventually she got a degree in English and Social Studies at Pomona College and a graduate degree in Library Science from the University of California/Berkeley in 1935. In those years, she said, “I was kind of snitzy. If a guy asked me out, I was doing him a favor to accept.”

She had been a children’s librarian in Beverly Hills for several years when a college friend, Hannah Akau from Hilo, Hawaii, wrote to tell her about an opening for a school librarian on the Big Island. She got the job, arriving in Hilo in October of 1940. Chinese-Hawaiian Hannah was a high school biology teacher married to a Hawaiian-haole named Clifford Bowman.

Hawaii had been a U.S. territory since 1900, but it felt like a foreign country. For part of her duties, the blonde and blue-eyed Betty Bond and another librarian took a book wagon through the rural districts of Puna, Ka‘u and Kohala, all populated largely by Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, along with a sprinkling of haoles. The two young librarians opted for a ten-cent school lunch at their noontime stops so they could spend most of their dollar-a-day lunch allowance on drinks when they overnighted in Kailua-Kona or Waimea.

The book wagon couldn’t make it into steep Waipi‘o Valley on the Hāmākua coast. It fell to Betty to load books for the two-room school into gunny sack saddle bags so she could deliver them on horseback. The isolated residents, mostly full-blood Hawaiians and a few Chinese, spoke Pidgin English. Although some of the words in the conglomerate oral language had once been standard English, Betty couldn’t understand anything they said.

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1994. Every time 4 p.m. comes around she says, “I’ll make my kiss now.” It’s her Kiss of Death vodka. She and Pierre used to drink bourbon, but when he became diabetic and had to forsake booze she switched to vodka for its virtues of being odorless and tasteless. She also bought Pierre a supply of non-alcoholic beer and threatened all bystanders that whoever told him it was N/A would come to a sad end.

****

Early in 1941 her friend Hannah Akau Bowman invited her to a lu‘au attended by many assorted Bowmans. Weeks later Betty recognized Pierre Bowman on the Hilo wharf.  Even at a distance she knew it was him “because he walked like a constipated teddy bear.” He invited her to have a drink. And then, how about getting together next Saturday?

A few weeks later they attended a Bowman gathering at the family’s old place at Volcano, so isolated everyone stayed overnight. Betty was crammed into one of the two small bedrooms with some other women. Pierre shared the front room’s gigantic hikie‘e with various relatives, dreaming that one was Betty. But in fact it was his aging full-blood Hawaiian great-aunt Emma, awakened suddenly while she slept in her voluminous mu‘umu‘u. She bolted upright, looked straight at Pierre in the slight light from the Franklin stove, and indignantly commanded: “Pi‘a! Keep your hands to yourself!” In a jocular version of her courting story Betty says, “It was love at first touch.” In a serious moment she says, “Not love at first sight, but I knew I’d found my other half. I love to read. He could barely make it through an article in Readers Digest. But he ‘learned’ me to be loving.”

When Pierre popped the question months later she planned to go home to California to tell her family she was going to marry Pierre Bowman. She booked passage on a ship leaving Dec. 13.  A week before the sailing date she and Pierre would have a weekend together. Once again, he drove hours to Hilo from Kohala, where he worked and lived at Kohala Sugar Plantation. They took a picnic to Puna on Saturday. He would pick her up again the next morning at 8:30 to take her to Kealakekua in Kona to meet his father and his father’s fourth wife, Helen.

Eight-thirty came and went. Nothing unusual. Then nine. At ten she started to count all the times he’d been late. She began to fume. When he finally appeared about 10:30 she greeted him with: “What’s your excuse this time?” Says Pierre: “There’s a war on.” “That’s the dumbest excuse I ever heard.” He turned on the car radio. She listened. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed. All civilian ship sailings were cancelled.

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1998.  I am partaking of the promised breakfast of “two dead papayas, frozen banana bread and a kind word” when Betty’s daughter-in-law drops by after Jonah-and-the-Whale Bible study at her Mormon church and wearily flops into a chair.  “Phoof,” she says. “I had no idea Jonah was so depressed.“ Aunty Betty replies, “Well, I’d be depressed too, floating around in the dark inside that whale with all those dead turtles.”

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They were married January 31, 1942, at Christ Church, the Episcopal chapel in Kealakekua, with Don and Helen Bowman as their only guests.  Betty’s mailed announcement to her family of her inter-racial marriage caused Betty’s mother to declare that her heart was broken. Brother Paul didn’t speak to her for thirty years. And then Betty and Paul both attended a family wedding and fell into each other’s arms.

Her haole family’s attitude about race, color and culture had a counterpart. Pierre’s elderly widowed great-aunt Emma, the one he had accidentally fondled, was the default matriarch of the Hawaiian side of the Bowman family because Pierre’s Hawaiian mother and grandmother had both died. When she heard Pierre was getting married she sniffed and said, “And just who is Pi‘a marrying? Miss Nobody from California?”

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The wedding happened regardless. Miss Nobody said, “I wore satin underpants and a crappy short dress made by a seamstress at a Hilo dry goods store, pure white with lace medallions. And a hat that looked remarkably like a chamber pot.” She showed me a picture. The hat did look like a porcelain chamber pot I had once seen under the guest bed at the 19th century-vintage home of my grandfather.

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2002. On nearly my last visit with Aunty Betty she says, “My traveling days are over.” Says I, “Even just to O‘ahu?” She replies, “Even.” Now I’m past 80 myself and I understand better how this comes about. But before she gave up on airplanes, she did make a trip to O‘ahu when she was 85, to spend a few days with daughter Bobbi, the one conceived during the WW II blackout hours at the Kona Inn. They went calling on a string of Kohala friends, the ones who hadn’t quite died but who were hanging on in hospitals all over Honolulu.  Bobbi graciously served as taxi driver on this mission of mercy, which took the bulk of the day. When at last they walked out of hospital number five Aunty Betty looked beat. But the way she expressed it was, “That was depressing. Let’s go fuck a sailor.”

****

“It was martial law then, and everyone was frozen to their job, I was stuck in Hilo, and Pierre was in Hāwī, the headquarters of Kohala Sugar. We each got a week off. We honeymooned at the Kona Inn with a bottle of ‘okōlehao. Blackout was at 4 p.m. What was there to do?” She pointed out that their first child, my cousin Bobbi, was born nine months later. After the blackout honeymoon they became a weekend commuter couple. On Saturdays Betty took the sampan “bus” to Hāwī .

“Mr. Rosa, the driver, saved the front seat for me. Just before he’d drop me off he’d say, ‘Well, girl, getting anxious?’ There would be tee-hees from the back row. Pierre and I practiced Holy Matrimony all day Sunday. I got back on the bus at 6 a.m. Monday and Rosa would say, ‘Did you have a good time?’ Tee-hees in the back. Then Pierre and I consulted a rabbit, and it died.” In those days, the rabbit pregnancy test was the infallible scientific standard. In May Betty quit her job and moved to Hāwī.

“A Chinaman said to Pierre, ‘Eh Bowman, I see you make one baby already.’ Pierre said, ‘How you know?’ After all, I was only four months along. The answer: “She walk like one duck.”

****

1996. She hoists herself from a chair and says, “Every time I stand up, it’s a victory over gravity.” On the other hand, such victory be damned, she also says, “I’m looking forward to hopping the twig.” She says, at her facetious best, “I got a certificate at the last interdenominational kupuna recognition day for being alive.” She describes her life as a long grind of burps, farts and involuntary whistles. “I keep trying to die, but something always comes up. But before I do die, I would like to make ZEPHYR on a triple word score.

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Kohala plantation was the 20th century form of the “Missionary Plantation” started in 1862 by Christian missionary Elias Bond to support his mission. It was just a coincidence that Betty’s birth surname was Bond and that she later was the librarian at the Bond Memorial Public Library in another little nearby town, Kapa‘au. Pierre had come to the plantation in early 1935 to visit his friend Jimmy Gibb, who worked there in management and lived in the bachelors’ quarters. “Pierre said to Jimmy, ‘How can you live in a dump like this?’ Six months later Pierre was back, hired as a sort of welfare worker for laborers.”

Betty’s move to the plantation eliminated the jitney driver’s remarks, but, “Within days of arriving, the wife of the assistant manager came to my house and ran her fingers along a baseboard, checking for dust. She chastised me for spending $15 instead of $10 on a maid, and scolded me for spending $40 on groceries.”

All such information was common knowledge on a plantation that was all things to all people working there, and the managerial ranks were especially privy to each other’s affairs. Her forty dollar grocery bill was a community scandal.

“I was 29 years old. I had college degrees in English and Library Science. For six years I’d been a librarian in Beverly Hills and Hilo. Now I was at the bottom of the list. If someone showed up at your house, you had to serve them tea. One day there was a knock on my door and there were several ladies on my doorstep. Having recently learned that cinnamon toast was not acceptable, I hauled out a fruitcake I’d been given and sliced it airmail-thin, to go around.”

Her plantation education had begun for real.  “I learned quickly that the plantation manager was King, his wife was Queen, and they could make your life miserable. You had your place, and you better fit in. You never stepped out of the house unless properly clothed and in your right mind. I’d as soon go to the store in hair curlers as I would go naked to church. You were pushed into your place and you belonged. All the men worked for the same company, Kohala Sugar, consolidated from several smaller plantations. The sole purpose was producing sugar, in a never-ending cycle of planting, cultivating and harvesting.

“Most of the 6,000 people were workers, who lived in about twenty ‘camps’ segregated by ethnic origin or nationality. Only about 200 were haole, the men all front-line supervisors. There were quite a few Scots. One would come, and then send for nephews, kind of like the Filipinos in the fields. None were Oriental, except maybe a Chinese bookkeeper. Only Pierre was part-Hawaiian. The wives all had a common background. One of those haole women married a Portuguese, an engineer. Only two women were local, only one of them part-Hawaiian. Most had come from the Mainland as school teachers or nurses. There were no “scrub” haoles. But all these women had given up their professions to stay home. I would have to go to their tea parties, totally bored listening to them brag about their children and complain about their maids. Within a few months I had a kid, and a maid, just like the rest of them.”

But she devised an antidote   to boredom. At the tea parties she imagined the hostess ‘sporting’ in bed with her husband. And then the hostess in bed with THE manager. Later she found out that one of the attendees had remarked, “That young Mrs. Bowman is so sweet. Always has such a pleasant smile on her face.”

The summer of 1942, with all of Hawaii fixated on the specter of another attack like Pearl Harbor, haole women on the plantation who had children or were expecting were evacuated to the U.S. Mainland. Pregnant Betty refused to go. Instead the Red Cross gave her a suitcase of supplies and  a booklet of instructions for what to do in case of invasion.

“We were supposed to hide in the woodlot on the old Bond estate with the suitcase containing bottled sterile water, newspapers, clean rags, something to wraps the baby in, sharp scissors, a roll of bandage to tie the cord, and the diagram showing how to have your baby under a tree. One other woman was in the same boat. Our husbands arranged for a Filipino to drive us to Kohala Hospital in case they were unavailable. After all, Pierre was a major in the ‘Ukulele Army,’ the home guard militia. He would be called to duty. But no invasion materialized, and he actually did take me to the hospital. After the war I met the Filipino who was supposed to drive. I swear he was a hundred years old.”

****

1998. She sees fit to admit to me, “For two weeks I have had an infection in my ass. Why can’t I have nosebleeds instead? For two whole weeks I have done nothing but take my pants down.” Then she sets the table for dinner, points to a damaged teaspoon and explains her use of her garbage disposal: “I am starting to make a set grapefruit spoons.”

****

“North Kohala was the sticks. It was an hour’s drive to Waimea, if you were lucky. Three hours to Kona, four or five to Hilo. So you just didn’t go anywhere. We had a social club, of haoles, of course, a monthly dance, sometimes dinners at people’s homes. The dinners didn’t come up to much – steak and kidney pie and trifle, with Japanese girls in kimonos waiting on you. The clubhouse had only one bathroom, so it was reserved for the ladies. The men peed outside.

“The only bitterness was the haole swimming pool by the manager’s house. No one was to swim there but haoles, but everyone knew their children sneaked in a kid or two they knew from the camps.”

Although the most egregious haole privileges ended after the territory-wide 1946 sugar plantation labor strike, the camp workers still were deferential. “You’d go to the movies and suddenly the line to get in was like the Red Sea parting, so the haoles could go in first.” 

But there also was contention of various sorts within the haole ranks.

Newly minted teachers recruited from the Mainland by the Territorial Department of Public Instruction were invariably sent to the farthest outposts, including the district of Kohala. First they endured more than four days on a ship from California, then the gut-churning Hāmākua coast jitney ride. Finally came the surprise of the housing – little two-bedroom cottages each lodging four teachers. No hot water, just a kerosene stove, the cold Kohala wind rattling the double-hung windows, cockroaches scuttling across the bare floors at night. Maybe the highlight was the managerial bachelors looking you over while you discreetly gave them the eye.

But it was not a bachelor who shared star billing in one of the biggest public disgraces that ever rocked Kohala Sugar.

“In those days, the haole managerial families invited teachers to their homes. Eleanor Beers – don’t confuse her with my dear friend Eleanor Banks – was invited to the home of the construction superintendent. Eleanor looked with favor on old Sid Beers and it was LOVE. And scandal. He’d been married 25 years. Women gossiped incessantly and would cross the street to avoid Eleanor. After a time, they went to the PTA to get something done to get rid of her. But the president of the PTA was dallying with his family’s maid, Maude. They went to the Portuguese Superintendent of Schools in Hilo, but he was living in sin with his secretary. Finally they got Eleanor exiled to Pāhoa way on the other side of Hilo, as far from Kohala as possible without leaving the island. But later she came back and married the guy, dullard that he was. It was the only divorce in 50 years among the managerial ranks.

“Now – fifty years later -- there are only six managers’ wives left. They play bridge on Sundays from 2 p.m. until cocktail time, and then they embark on the ‘Senile Shuttle’ because none of them drive at night anymore.”

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2002. Once in the later years of my periodic Aunty Betty visits, she follows “Goodbye” with “You feed my soul.” Another time she bids me adieu by declaring me her Honorary Daughter.

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Besides unknowingly marrying into the plantation community, Betty didn’t foresee the parallel bargain of marrying the Bowman family. Pierre and his siblings were so tight-knit they wouldn’t let Betty or the other wives (or husbands) play poker with them. Maybe they should have, because the Excluded formed the In-law Club, and, worse, the Excluded were inclined to gossip.  Various tidbits leaked out as asides in the couple of decades I visited with Aunty Betty over the dead papaya breakfasts or the Kiss of Death vodka of the late afternoon.

There was the bachelor brother who, before motoring over the famously windy Nu‘uanu Pali in an open Roadster, donned a hairnet so as not to spoil his good looks. And the sister who, as a surprise, fixed up a brother-in-law for a “good time” when he was traveling on the Mainland. And then there were some cousins who, “if brains were dynamite, they couldn’t blow their noses.” And there was good-but-sad reason for the family rule that the Bowman brothers were not to drink at a family lu‘au until they had  the pig out of the imu.

Her father-in-law was the most recurring subject. Sometime in Betty’s early plantation days, on a trip to Hilo she discovered at the Pu‘ueo Poi Factory on the north edge of Hilo a kid named Bowman Chang. She inquired of Pierre: Is this kid yours? “No, Cliff’s.” So she asked her brother-in-law Cliff, her college friend Hannah’s husband. “Not mine. The old man’s.” Another time she was with Pierre and Cliff in Kona. Some older Hawaiian women approached. One said, “Ho, you boys good. But not like your father.” And then there was the one sister-in-law who insisted that the very first time he met her, he made a pass.

“He was the greatest bull shitter that ever lived. To watch him operate was something. My mother loathed everything about him. But when he presented her with a tea cup that had come as a prize in a bag of flour he had her dancing in her drawers. He could give a kid a piece of worn-out rope with the same result. When he married his fourth wife, Helen, everyone wondered why. He thought he was the Lord’s anointed, but I think he was a guy who had had too many milkshakes and just wanted a peanut butter sandwich.”

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1999. We drive to the end of the road, where the trail switchbacks down a thousand feet to Pololū Valley. We stand at the overlook, the sea silver and wild below, and speak of how nature is good for the soul. On the way home, we stop at Hala‘ula. For once Aunty Betty is at a loss for words, pondering tall weeds growing through cracks in the concrete, roofs sagging dangerously, exterior walls stripped of paint by the unceasing Kohala winds, windows broken at the store where everyone once gathered. She points out the ruins of the movie theater, where the Red Sea had parted for the haoles. The shingles have rotted and the sugar mill has gone to rust. Only haole koa grows where the rows of identical little camp houses once stood. A cow switches its tail in cane grass gone wild. “Oh!” she almost whispers. “We thought it would never end. But it’s all gone! In one generation!”

Later, back at the house, she flat out says she is ready to go herself. But then she leavens it: “After all, Pierre has been gone almost five years. He’s up there somewhere, entirely unsupervised.”

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In 1946 the Bowmans were quartered in the sprawling old house at Union Mill a couple miles from Hāwī.  Union Mill – and this former manager’s house --had been absorbed by Kohala Sugar in 1936. The house was built in New Hampshire in 1881, dismantled, and shipped around Cape Horn by order of the first Union Mill manager. All the pieces were floated in at Hala‘ula, dried out, and reassembled by Japanese carpenters.  “It was painted white because it was the manager’s home,” she tells me. “Anybody else had their choice of cat shit yellow, dog shit brown, green or gray.” The massive kitchen included a screen safe that was built by a Japanese carpenter in 1885. In the early days it had stood with its legs in tin cans of kerosene, to keep bugs out. No one thought about the fire hazard.

Eventually, when Kohala Sugar closed in 1975, Pierre and Betty were able to buy the old place outright, continuing to live in it until 1990, when they moved to a small one-level home in a Hāwī subdivision better suited to their elder years.

But back in the “full steam ahead” years, “Every wife had a maid. Japanese were prized because they were more efficient.  Our first one was a Puerto Rican kid who threw food on the table. I was accused of hiring my maids by the pound. Then we had Isabel for 31 years.  She was Puerto Rican too. There was nothing else for rank-and-file girls to do, except work in the fields or stay home. They were all known as So-and-So’s maid, like “Bowman’s Isabel.” They didn’t eat with the family but they certainly were privy to all the family secrets.

“The camp women had pull-hair fights. The funniest one was at the old boxing hall at Union Mill, between Mrs. Quintal and Mrs. DeSouza. Old Al Quintal was known for his generous equipment. In the middle of the hair-pulling and yelling, Mrs. Souza screamed, ‘Your man get one prick like a jackass!’ Mrs. Quintal bristled with renewed intensity. Then she suddenly let go of her hold, faced Mrs. DeSouza, and said, ‘How you know?’”

Betty was the only haole wife who let her children play with kids in the camps. Once eldest daughter Bobbi invited a camp friend to stay overnight.  “That camp kid said, ‘Ho, lonesome your house. Nobody here.’ At the friends’ house the kids slept three in a bed. She couldn’t get over our four kids each having a bed.”

The Bowmans’ new maid, Isabel, lived in the Puerto Rican camp, so the maid’s quarters out back were vacant. Pierre offered the little cottage to Nicomedis Bumanglang, a bachelor who had come from the Philippines in 1934 and became an irrigator. In exchange for the cottage, he did the extensive yard work.

“NIcomedis lived with us. He practically raised Maile and Lani (born in 1946 and 1951.) The girls could ask for candy in Filipino before they could say ‘good morning’ in English. They’d go off to the movies with Nicomedis and his friends, a carload of Filipinos and two little blonde girls. Once some tourists thought the girls had been kidnapped and tried to get them to go with them. The kids said, ‘No.’

“One year on his three-month vacation Nicomedis went home and married Catalina and brought her back. She had worked for an American company in the Philippines and called us ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir.” At the plantation she worked as a janitor at the dispensary. Japanese and Filipinos don’t like each other, and she was always tattling on the Japanese girls, Rose and Sueko.

“When Bobbi was entering eighth grade in 1955, she left Kohala to board at Punahou in Honolulu and  everyone was so sad. Nicomedis gave her five dollars and said, ‘You go Punahou School, no puck around.’”

Two decades later, Bobbi’s sister Maile married a guy from New Mexico, Olin Kane.  “Nicomedis said to Olin, ‘No make sass to me. I change your wife shitty diaper.’ But when Maile brought her twin baby girls home from New Mexico a few years later he and Catalina were blissful.”

Nicomedis retired in 1978. He and Catalina moved back home and bought a small house in Northern Luzon. Bobbi and the youngest sister, Lani, visited him there in 1986. Catalina had died. By then Nicomedis was in his 80s. He loved seeing “his girls” but said, “I stay so old now, this time our last time. No worry sad, I come you on the wind.”  A few months later he died.

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1994. While I am visiting, a scandal erupts at the state-run Kohala Hospital. It was a new hospital in the 1950s but now it’s a 22-bed geriatric facility where Aunty Betty volunteered for a time “shoving Jell-O into trembling jaws.” It has now come to light that someone absconded with two tons of steak – ribeye, sirloin, Porterhouse, flank and tenderloin. Also five tons of pork butt and untold quantities of raw octopus, shrimp, salt salmon and butterfish. A former administrator blows the whistle, citing 1990-1994 accounts that show the annual food bill jumping from $29,000 to $93,000. Nobody raises the question of who might suspect that supplies were diverted to a catering business specializing in lu‘aus and political fundraisers. Aunty Betty says, “Oh, come on. Most of the patients don’t even have teeth. How could they eat pork butt?”

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In December of 1947 Pierre went fishing in a 16-foot outboard skiff with Nicomedis and his friend Pablo Ambrocio. The outboard conked out and they were lost at sea for three days. “Pierre said the Filipinos – Catholic as they all are -- were praying. He told them, ‘Quit praying and start bailing, or we’re all going to drown.’ The news by then had got around, and the camp people came to the back door and said ‘Ai-ya, Missus. He was such a good man.’ I said, ‘Don’t tell the kids.’ And they didn’t. In those old days people were good.” The Coast Guard finally rescued the trio, the skiff and the dead outboard. Happy ending, good story.

It was almost 50 years before Pierre really did pass on. In the pre-dawn of February 1, 1995, in the rented hospital bed they had squeezed into their bedroom, “He just turned himself to the wall and was gone.” Betty waited for it to get light, and then she called her son, Kimo. He and his grown son Moffett came right over. They had thought a lot about the Dodo Mortuary hearse from Hilo and had decided Kimo’s station wagon was a better choice. They dressed Pierre in his best red palaka shorts, but Betty said, “Take those off, they’re too good. Somebody can use them.” So they traded for his old puka shorts.

At first they covered Pierre completely with a blanket, but then uncovered his face so he could look out the window. It’s a long way to Hilo. Kimo stopped in Waimea for gas at Bozo’s Shell station. Moffett caught Bozo peeking in the back of the station wagon. “It’s all right,” said Moff. “We didn’t do it. He was already dead.”

By the time the rest of the family assembled numerous days later at St. Augustine’s tiny Episcopal Church for the service, the story had made the rounds.  So had the stomach flu. One of Maile’s teenage twins – the ones whose father Nicomedis admonished to ‘no make sass to me’ – was so ill she couldn’t attend. She stayed at her grandparents’ house, and at the moment she thought the service was beginning, she squeezed herself into Pierre’s closet, hugged his clothes to herself, and cried.

****

2005. More than a year after Aunty Betty passed on, I make yet another trip to Kohala, this time with my cousinly niece, Kāhea.  About ten years earlier Kāhea, raised in Montana and then a student at Macalester College in Minnesota, spent a semester at the University of Hawaii’s Hilo campus. Many weekends she would take a bus to Kohala and hang out with Aunty Betty.  One morning Kāhea came out from the guest room to find Aunty Betty and various relatives around the kitchen table. Wearing a pair of baggy overalls, Kāhea explained that she was having menstrual cramps and could not bear to wear tight pants.

“Ah!” said Aunty Betty in a knowing sort of way. “How well I remember. But eventually you come to menopause and you’re over all that blood and those godawful cramps. But then you get old, and you totter around your house, and your eyes get fuzzy, and your heart goes funny, and hair grows on your chin where you certainly don’t want it. And besides all that, the hair on your twat falls off.”

Kāhea, tenderly 20, was stunned by Aunty Betty’s finale, thinking that only 13-year-old boys use such language. She remained stunned for a decade, until she returned to Kohala with me.

We go to Aunty Betty’s grave in the churchyard of St. Augustine’s and place lei on the two little graves holding Uncle Pierre and Aunty Betty’s ashes. For a moment or two we are somberly silent. So is the air, except for a guy on a riding mower way on the other side of the tiny white church.

And then Kāhea says, addressing Aunty Betty’s grave: “I loved you dearly. And I think I should tell you one of my most dramatic memories from those times I came for a weekend with you.”

She then launches loudly into the twat story, and we laugh ourselves to tears. And then we both realize the mower noise ls gone but the mower man is still there.

“Oh, no!” says Kāhea. “I hope he didn’t hear that.”

Well, if he did, he did, and too bad. We laugh some more. And now some 15 years have passed and we still love that story, and Aunty Betty too.

****

2022. In the years after that 2005 twat trip, Kāhea requested more travels with me in Hawaii, the better to learn yet more about being Hawaiian. We visited more graves, met more cousins, practiced chants as we floated  in the ocean. She requested a Hawaiian name “if the spirits will give it.” They did, and I presented it in a beach ceremony at sunrise In July 2007: Kāheaikamelekai, Called by The Song of the Sea. When her first daughter was born in Minnesota in 2013, she and her husband asked me to give the baby a Hawaiian name. Kāhea and I grew closer and closer. I named their second daughter too. On those trips we always reminisced about Aunty Betty. And then one day it came to me that I had something additional I needed to do. With a mental nod to Aunty Betty, I declared Kāhea my Honorary Daughter.