Hawaii - James Michener [390]
"These poor bastards are talking of joining England, or going it alone. Just to make a few more dollars on their labor contracts."
"That's all beside the point, Whipple. You're contaminating the new nation, and for the good of all, you've got to go."
"But I'm determined to fight this insidious idea of surrender. I'll not let this revolution . . ."
"Get out!" Micah thundered. "I'm trying to save Hawaii, and I can't do it if you're here. You're an evil, corrupt bully, and these islands have no place for you. Go!"
The old man shoved Whipple from the door, so in the vital years that followed, Wild Whip traveled abroad with his Chinese-Hawaiian wife, his two facial scars offsetting her crystalline beauty; and from a distance he followed the affairs of home. He was in Rio when word arrived of McKinley's election to the Presidency, and he paused in his work long enough to tell Ching-ching, as he called his wife, "In two years the islands'll join America. Thank God it's over."
"Shall we return for the celebration?" Ching-ching asked.
"No," Whip scowled. "It's Uncle Micah's show. All I did was get him started." He said no more about annexation, for he was on the trail of something that was to have almost as profound an effect upon Hawaii as her union with the United States. One morning he burst into his wife's room in their hotel in Rio de Janeiro, crying, "Ching-ching! I want you to taste something."
"What are you doing?" she laughed, for she was not yet out of bed and he was wheeling in a small table bearing one dish, a knife and a fork.
"I'm bringing you one of the most delicious things yet invented. Tuck a towel under your chin." He threw her one of his shirts and tied the sleeves about her pretty olive throat. Then from a paper sack he produced a large, golden, barrel-shaped pineapple. Holding it aloft by its spiny leaves, he asked, "You ever see a more perfect fruit than this?"
"Very large for a pineapple," Ching-ching remarked. "Where'd you get it?"
"More than six pounds. They tell me ships bring them down here regularly from French Guiana. They're called Cayennes, but wait till you taste one." With a large, sharp knife Wild Whip proceeded to slice away the hard outer skin and the series of eyes. Soon a most delicious aroma filled the room and a golden juice ran down off the tip of the knife, staining the tablecover.
"Watch out, Whip!" his wife cautioned. "It's dripping."
"That's what makes it smell so good," he explained. With a sturdy cut across the middle of the pineapple he laid it in half, then sliced off a perfect circle of heavy, golden, aromatic fruit. He slapped it onto the plate, handed Ching-ching a fork and invited her to taste her first Cayenne.
"That's heavenly!" she cried as the slightly acid juice stained her chin. "Where did you say they grow?"
"Up north."
"We ought to plant these in Hawaii," she suggested.
"I propose to," he replied.
When Micah Hale was approaching seventy-six and was more tired than he dared admit, word reached Honolulu that in Washington the House of Representatives had finally approved annexation by a vote of 209 to 91. That night Micah's vigil began, for at dinner he said to his wife Malama, "We have two more weeks to wait, and then we'll know what the Senate is going to do."
"Are you confident?" his gracious Hawaiian wife inquired.
"If prayer to an understanding God is efficacious, then I am confident."
The Hales ate in candlelight and sat across from each other so that verbal communication was quick and direct. Malama, in her sixty-fifth year, was stately rather than vivacious. She had not gone to flesh as had so many of her Hawaiian sisters, and her silvery gray hair was complemented by the pale light. She retained her saucy manner of tilting her head quizzically when an idea amused her, and now she said softly, "It will be proper for Hawaii to submerge itself in America. We're a poor, weak group of islands, and anyone who had really wanted us in the last fifty years could have snatched us. It's better this way."
Micah, momentarily relaxed