Huli
“Now I know you three gettin in trouble on purpose.”
Uncle shook a bent finger at the three of them. Shay’s honi let him know it was indeed on purpose that they chose community service instead of sitting around in a humid 80 degree classroom. Leo shoved Kai forward after her.
Kai faced Uncle, who patted the boy’s shoulder with a calloused hand.
“Braddah, you welcome hea anytime.” He said.
“Uncle, last week-”
“When last week? I no remembah you. You welcome hea, make all da trouble you like. Maopopo?”
Kai’s teeth grinded together. He looked over to the loʻi just visible beyond the hale. “Thanks.”
“Right on, braddah.” He slapped Kai on the back and pushed him forward, “let’s remind everyone why we hea.”
Kai was tempted to mutter that they were here for detention, but as he slipped through the crowd to where Shay was chatting with the other volunteers, he had to remind himself that everyone else chose to be here. Leo stood behind the two of them, keeping an obvious arms length within reach of Kai in case he repeated his mistakes from the last community work day.
“Right hea is da kalo. Hāloa. Hāloanakalaukapalili.” Uncle bends and scoops a kalo from its base, working him free from the mud. “Who his parents?”
He points his finger at Leo.
“Hoʻohōkūkalani and Wākea,” Leo said. If he stood any straighter he’d break his back, Kai thought.
“Den what?”
He points at Shay.
“He passed, so they buried him where the sun could reach him.”
“Das right, he neva make um. Bumbye grew da first kalo. Den what?”
“They had another son.”
“A nada son. His inoa?”
The finger pointed at Kai. A few volunteers glanced at him when he didn’t respond immediately. The rushing stream and heart-shaped leaves quivering against each other filled the silence. Shay looked at Leo whose straight ahead stare never wavered. She knew he had been rattling off moʻolelo and ʻōlelo to Kai all morning on the bus over. Uncle didn’t even blink. “His name? It was…wasn’t it also Hāloa?”
Uncle nodded.
“ʻAe. Aurite, braddah.”
Kai released a heavy breath. Hāloa wasn’t nearly as hard to remember as Hoʻoho…well, as the parents.
“Hāloa. Kanaka Maoli numba ʻkahi. Hāloa ʻkahi and ʻlua mālama one a nada.” It took a moment, but Kai eventually pieced it together: the siblings cared for each other. Mālama was also easy to remember.
Kai let his gaze wander again to the loʻi from last week’s detention.
That day was hot like today, but more humid. Sometimes humidity makes it hard to breathe, to remember the word mālama. He barely remembered the faces of the guys who claimed to be from the “better part of the island” when they passed through carrying yeti coolers stuffed full with green bottles, but he did remember how their taunts felt like centipedes crawling
up his skin. He could still hear them yelling, “look at that moke, got pineapples?” and “what are you? 10 percent kalua pig, 90 percent cabbage?”
He heard the pop of a bottle being opened against the lip of another and the sting when the bottle cap slapped his sunburned neck. He felt the cramp in his arms when he decided enough was enough, and the rubbery flesh of the guy’s ankle when he yanked him into the loʻi.
He remembered the cold water rushing down his shirt as the two of them slipped and took down a chunk of the wall. Leo was there, pushing the other guys back as Shay waded over yelling “you’re hurting them!” She probably wasn’t talking about any of the guys throwing punches that afternoon.
He remembered how the once clear stream became cloudy. He couldn’t remember if the red water was earth or blood.
Uncle said something as he massaged away the dirt from the corm and the leaf flopped against his arm, but Kai was reminded of how easily the plants toppled and drowned in loose mud. He looked away, away from Uncle who worked everyday in the loʻi he destroyed. “Da ʻoha momona now. Den what?”
Someone said, "da kine."
“Das right,” he made a chopping motion between the base and the stalk.
Uncle was looking at Kai again, reeling him in. His eyes said, eh! Da show’s ova hea boy! You think it’s hot? Try come awakea!
Uncle’s hand came down again. Cut, he was saying. Cut here.
The tension in Kai’s shoulders trickled away as he took a deep breath, a real breath of fresh air. Uncle nodded.
“Replant da huli.”
Uncle lowered himself into the next loʻi and swaddled the base of the huli with cold wet soil.
“You bring good mana when plant da keiki, da keiki gon grow strong and feed you. Maopopo?”
The ʻae was unanimous. Uncle lingered on Kai long enough to see him mouth, “ʻAe.” After pule, everyone followed Shay as she surged forward into the loʻi. Uncle was already bent at the waist and working the mud, his back to Kai. Leo grabbed the neck of Kai’s shirt like yanking a stubborn weed that would not come loose.
“Leave your problems outside this time. This is their life. No kalo, no connection to the land.”
“I got it the first time.”
Leo’s nagging resembled a mosquito, but he just loved this place in a way Kai was only now beginning to understand. He slipped out of his already sweaty shirt and ran from his too-serious detention brother. He escaped down the path between the loʻi, dodging tossed weeds and empty wheelbarrows.
Stretching his neck, he shook out his arms all the way down to his fingers, which feverishly itched to sink into the cool mud.
Kalilinoe Detwiler
As a Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist and scholar, Kalilinoe Detwiler explores paths of cultural perseverance by expressing ancestral knowledge in the present through creative media and writing. By writing with place and honoring that which she learns from kumu through kilo, she continues to work on productions that center Kanaka ʻŌiwi cultural practitioners and imagine Indigenous futures. She is pursuing an English Ph.D. at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where she will further develop her responsibility to Hawaiʻi through research on ʻŌiwi rhetorics, interdisciplinary storytelling, and Indigenous frameworks of analysis that sustain ʻŌiwi ways of knowing and being.
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