Hawaii - James Michener [349]
Nyuk Tsin considered this for some time and said, "I don't like to give up even an inch of the vegetable field for a house."
"But look!" Kimo argued. "For a little corner of the vegetable field, you'll get a whole lot of land up here.'"
"If we do that," Nyuk Tsin countered, "Apikela will have to walk great distances for her maile. And I can walk better than Apikela."
"What I had in mind," Kimo explained, "was that Apikela should stop bothering with the maile and help you with the vegetable field down there. That way, the boys can study longer for their school."
The plan was so reasonable that next day Nyuk Tsin invited Kimo to accompany her to the vegetable field, and the huge man explained how little land would be taken off by the house, and he reminded her how much forest land she would be getting in exchange, and on the spur of the moment she said, "Good."
They took down the upland house and for several nights slept in the open while the lowland house was building, and after a while the first of the famous Kee houses stood on Nuuanu Street. This one was a ramshackle affair, neither waterproof nor tidy, but it comfortably housed five Chinese and two Hawaiians. In a way, it was also responsible for the good fortune of the Kees, for one day when Nyuk Tsin was trudging up the valley toward her new fields, which because they were so high did not produce as well as the lower, she was stopped by a handsome young man of twenty who was riding in a gig and who called, "You the Pake who has the field in there?" She said that she was, and he reined in his horse, climbed down, and extended his hand. "I'm Whip Hoxworth," he said, "and I'd like to see your field, if I may." He tied the horse to a tree and tramped in with her, kicked the soil, rubbed some through his palms, and said, "Pake, I'd like to make a deal with you. I brought back with me from Formosa, nearly lost my head doing it, about a hundred pineapple plants. I've tried growing them in low fields, and they don't work. Seems to me a field at this elevation might be nearer to what they knew in Formosa. Tell you what I'll do. I'll give you all the plants that are now living. And if you can make them grow, you can have them. All I want is some of the fruit and some of the seed."
"Can you sell pineapple?" Nyuk Tsin asked suspiciously.
Whip Hoxworth turned and pointed expansively back down the valley, and although trees cut off his view, that did not disturb him. "Every house you can see down there will want to buy your pineapples, Pake. Is it a deal?"
It was, and young Whip Hoxworth had made a shrewd guess, for Nyuk Tsin's upper field was exactly the soil needed for the Formosa pineapple, which was markedly sweeter and in all ways superior to the grubby degenerates that had been introduced into the islands half a century before. Now Nyuk Tsin hiked out of her upper Nuuanu fields day after day, her back loaded with pineapples which she hawked through the city. Her vegetables from the lower field also prospered, but best of all, her four sons were learning their necessary lessons.
In only one venture was Nyuk Tsin failing and that was, as before, her taro bed, for not satisfied with selling the brutish bulbs to the natives, and the leaves to anyone who wanted to steam them for vegetables, while keeping the stalks to herself for picking and serving with fried mullet, thus exacting three profits from the