Hiding from the crowned virus, and my landlord half waves, a downward motion, to the lemon tree who’s called the bees and small white moths to the once-empty yard these years in Kaimukī.
“Has to come up.” White-teeth smiling as he speaks, and he hides behind dark glasses. Three open-heart surgeries, and he wears no mask to catch the droplets of the killing virus that carries on wind, clothes, touch, exhale, and I wonder at the Sunday god he says will save him.
November, three years before, my youngest daughter and I entered this yard of dust, red and thick, that coated feet, screens, and floors in the new place named home. I mopped nightly, sometimes again in the morning, when sleep wouldn’t stay, and my daughter slept in a room that didn’t feel like home. Running the mop around blue-green painted furniture, dense old wood that I found on Craigslist’s to fill the spaces divorce took, I held sleep away. I carry particles that old wood can fill, I told the new grey house with its rope window sash cords and secrets, as I engraved home near the H-1 freeway and sounds of cars as ocean waves.
Some of the previous tenants’ mail came, and I wondered about their reasons for leaving. Leaving is a full and empty word. I knew this on nights the mop caught the earth in the white cords of fabric, and I asked my body to hold the water—not cry at divorce— and my eyes found poetry lines in the swirls of dirt against the metal sink and curving drain.
When asked why divorce, I’d say, “I married him because he was nice to me. It wasn’t enough.” This is the truth and not enough of the complexities of truth. How to explain that I chose safety in marrying him? My tongue could not explain the last months of marriage. My mouth caught in water and his anger. Body and breath a relief when I closed the door of first the pale green house and then car a last time – my car filled with dirt and dug-up plants from that marriage yard.
The night my landlord called to tell me I got the small grey house in Kaimukī, he’d said, “Divorce is hard. I was going to rent the house to a couple who attend my church—my church near the mall, but the husband didn’t like the sound of the freeway. The wife, she had to make her husband happy, and I know divorce must be hard for you.”
“This tree, you know,” my landlord says again, stepping closer with his unmasked face. “This tree,” he says and points. He calls me outside, waving me from the front screened door that still has the shape of a fist pushing through the metal—the shape he said he’d fix three years before. I trace the way of the metal, trusting it’s not a memory of someone’s violence or someone’s fear. The landlord waves me into my yard of gardenia, puakenikeni, pikake, basil, lemon, and vines, and I am rhizomes rooting throughout the yard.
Mornings, I thread my way into these plants with the mud-covered hose that tangles and stops the spraying water, tugging and reaching uncovered hands into the red muddying earth as we hold each other, the spray of the hose soaks the plants and me. Afternoons, I thread my way into the different shades of late-day light in this yard, calling to each plant as I shed the day from my moving chest.
Help me breathe, I tell the yard almost every day.
During rainy season, water rushes from the un-guttered edges of the roof casting rivulets of water and brown-red dirt into the garage where the washer threatens to fall off the wooden palette, it’s balanced on, as too-full loads of clothes knock against its sides. I run out the front door in bare feet, maybe catching slippers on my feet as I jump down the one, two, three, four, five front steps quickly to turn on the small pump before the water rises over the bike tires, stored photo albums, pencil cases, art supplies from my children’s school days, and the clean clothes that have sat in the dryer too long.
Before the rainy season, I planted grass seeds my youngest daughter collected on hikes along the ridges of Koʻolau, Waʻahila – mountains to hold the earth in place in this red yard. “We need to plant Indigenous plants,” she’d said. “They will hold the earth here.”
The landlord catches my attention in the yard again, and the lavender I planted for my mother’s memories tells me to walk gently toward his waving hand. I touched the edge of my door, taking the short steps off my front stairs. Safety. Feet on stones, and I feel the heat built from morning.
“This tree has to come up. I want to plant a mango tree here—the most delicious type. I’ll fill it with peat moss so it will grow quick,” he says, folding his hands in shapes of carried moss, stepping on the vine with thick leaves and small yellow fruit at the base of the lemon tree. I breathe in and out the safety I feel in this yard, asking my breath if this safety is deep-rooted in forms of healing from harmed domestic spaces. I know I carry these spaces of harm in my body. They haven’t left.
Tree, I tell her, as I step closer to the landlord, hold steady. Hold your young fruit. Small buds webbed between each spike and branch, and she carries sprouting fruit. The scent of her young falls heavy during rains on the concrete of Kaimukī, and when it does, I lean into her leaves, catching the green between my thumb and fingers. The oils coat, and I trace the smell against my upturned wrists and hair-warmed neck. Mother, I call her as landlord speaks again about his plans in my small yard, cradle your children. Mind how you go.
“I’ll give you some of the fruit—mango. The most delicious. I’ll share some, if you share with me. If you’re still here. I see your ʻulu tree is going off,” he says. “Maybe take a while to fruit, the mango—not long. I get the best trees,” he says, giving me the name of the mango tree that will fruit quickly.
“I want to grow mango for my church friends. I will give you some,” he says, stepping again on the twisting vines at his feet. He watches my face. “I hope you are around to eat the fruit. Maybe you’ll still be here.”
“My vine,” I say, my palm facing up. I hear my mother’s still cracking jaw, a jaw that understood the patterns of my father’s fists, words on the tips on her tongue, a tongue that weighed words. We women in my family carry our mother’s tongues and weigh and know the outcome of syllables.
My mother held words down, crafting safety in rented spaces, bowing her head, doing prayer work—warmth in the hair—as landlords talked dos and don’ts. She sewed words on her old Singer sewing machine by the oil-laced wick down Keʻei after shutting the heavy wooden windows from night salt air and rain-winds. But never from the night ocean that called to us with stories. My mother sewed safety nets frantically to the old radio playing the classical music she knew as a child in Dronfield, as landlords entered the soft spaces woven from every movement of her hands, arms, and body.
On nights when the ocean washed into the sand yard past the old rock wall—a thunder of waves, talking old stories, moʻolelo of places and its people—my mother read her children stories by the kerosene lamp. And the smell of the burning wick mixed with the rain falling on day-warmed sand lit the pages. She read old tales of sisters, creating the three daughters my bones, my hips, would one day carry. My breath found the salt air from the one open window my mother left bare for airflow. Children need night air, she’d say.
I look up again, smile at this landlord. Mother, where are the sounds of mother? Mind how you go. Mind. I search. Women can’t carry angry words, not here. I know anger.
When speaking to landlords, perhaps my mother said, My hand’s and my children’s hands, reached into this dark earth, turned over and touched every worm and rock to cover seed rows in rich dirt to plant food to feed us. In this rented earth, we mothers feed our children. Maybe she said or thought, my children have tasted the earth from wet fingers. We carry our mother’s still cracked jaw in our teeth. My mother’s voice repeats in ringing ears as my landlord speaks—grow, grow, grow, grow, she says. We say these words as sounds silently to the vines, plants, and children who gather in the hem of skirts hiding. My mother knew the sounds of living in tents. She knew tin roofs in Miloliʻi, Kealakekua, Keʻei, and Hōnaunau. Home. Safety. I weave my mother’s thick Welsh bones into my heated skin and prepare words for my landlord.
“Dig the lemon tree up,” he says again. “Do you have a container?” He glances around the yard. “Your plants, I guess they broke out of the pots,” he says.
“They decided this was home,” I say. “I couldn’t say no to them. They decided.” I laugh, and he steps around my small yard.
“I can do it. We can do it, dig this tree back up,” he says, pointing to the man he’s brought to dig in the earth in my rented yard. Both men, pushing seventy. Both men, no masks, stepping closer.
“Lady, move,” the man with the landlord says, waving me from the path.
“Yes, six feet, of course,” I say, taking steps backward.
He carries a shovel and anger.
“How are you doing with social distance?” I ask the man.
“Own my business, so have to work,” he says. “It’s hard work,” he says. “Hard work in the sun.”
“What are these plants,” my landlord asks. Stepping toward plants. “Do you use these?”
“Looks like pumpkin,” the other man says.
“Yes, I use the plants. Yes, some pumpkin and squash vines. Maybe cantaloupe.”
“I see some tomato,” the landlord says. “This one,” he says, touching a plant, “it’s not the best kind of aloe. I have the best. Do you use this medicinally?”
“I need the plants. I use the plants. Yes,” I say, thinking that I have to look up a recipe for the noni growing in the backyard. When I was ten or eleven, my mother and stepfather talked about growing and selling noni from our Hōnaunau house—it’s earth. Somehow that plan fell away with the plans to move to Jamaica—a place my step-dad said would be better for a black man like him.
Noni can, and I list in my mind as the landlord looks around at the plants, it’s benefits—treat fever, boost immunity, help with arthritis, decrease of gout, and fighter cancer. It hadn’t cured my mother’s cancer. When dying from breast cancer, maybe she forgot noni.
“I can dig her up, the lemon tree,” I say. “I will dig her up. She has fruit I don’t want to break and fall.”
Inside my body must remember more. It must remember what salt is in the waters of itself, the water that remember ancestors. Water knows water—it must carry the story of its body in all its forms.
The landlord’s voice carries through the screened windows—seven days he’s in and out of the yard. Why don’t you rest on your seventh day? What does your god ask? I place music in my ears and attempt breath as my body cracks open with memories of young violence on my young body.
I cry too much at the pace of his steps around the outside of the house. My daughter runs her hands across my arms that have gone numb. “I don’t know why I feel this way,” I say. We talk on words like trigger, danger, and safety.
Sleeping, I wake up with wild hair and a half-opened curved and a refusing early morning mouth that knows drool and stink and doesn’t care, and his voice has left the yard. I listen for his voice and the sounds of digging. I dig deeper into the feeling of sleep.
He doesn’t return for several days. Landlord has asked me not to water the two bare trees—small and stiff—they’ve planted in the yard. I water around them.
“You might want to come,” my daughter says, knocking on and opening my door.
“Why?
“He’s in the yard. They’re in the yard again,” she says.
Landlord in the yard again today—his return. The gardener with him measures the mango trees for life with some device I can’t see from the doorway.
“They’re dying,” he says when he catches me watching from the doorway. “Some don’t take,” and I wonder if I’ve killed them with my grief and fear in isolation.
“I’ll water them,” I say. “I can water them.”
“Don’t water them,” he’d said. “I’ll be by to monitor them. I’ll probably be long-gone before they fruit, but my sons will care for them after. Don’t touch them,” he said.
I water around them, ignoring their presence each morning, and now they die in my growing yard.
“I can water them,” I say again, feeling their thirst.
He doesn’t answer. He continues to the next trees in my neighbor’s yard.
In the late-day orange sun that is beautiful to photograph, I step on the stones that lead to the brown and leafless sticks. “Come to life,” I say. “I’m sorry I cried my fear and grief into you. You are welcome in my yard. Come to life.” I tug at the hose twisted in the last pile I left from the morning’s water.
Rain Wright received her Ph.D. in English with a focus in creative writing from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She currently teaches writing at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa as a lecturer. Rain has been published Hawai’i Review, Mud Season Review, Connotations Press: An Online Artifact, Madras Magazine, Summit Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Entropy Magazine, Dreamers, The Pinch Journal, and Afterhours Journal. She won the 2014 University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Biography Prize for her work A Way With Water. Her dissertation was nominated for the same prize in 2019. Rain is obsessed with the ocean. She feels it cures everything.