Hawaii - James Michener [427]
"Ridiculous!" Hoxworth stormed. He was sick and tired of this infuriating Englishman and was at last ready to throw him off the plantation.
"No," Dr. Schilling replied soberly. "I'm convinced that they are about to die for lack of iron."
"That's preposterous!" Hoxworth stormed. "This goddamned island is practically solid iron. Look at the soil, man!"
"It's iron, that's true," Schilling agreed. "But I'm afraid it must be iron in some form that the plants cannot use."
"How can they stand in solid iron and not be able to use it?"
"That," Schilling said, "is why the universe will always be a mystery."
"Are you fooling with me?" Hoxworth asked ominously. "Who would dare?" Schilling replied.
"What do you want us to do?" Hoxworth asked quietly.
"I want to sprinkle iron, in a different kind of solution, over these plants."
"No! It's totally preposterous. You get back out there and find out what's really wrong."
"It's iron," Schilling said stubbornly.
"How can you be sure?"
"I can taste it."
"Have you run any tests on it?"
"No. I don't have to."
"Well, run some tests. No! Don't! You'd just distill yourself some more alcohol. What kind of iron do you want?"
"Iron sulfate."
As a result of this decision, in late 1911 Kamejiro Sakagawa marched through the experimental fields of the Hanakai Pineapple Plantation lugging a bucket of spray, which he directed onto the yellow leaves of the perishing plants, and as he passed, the solution of sulfate of iron ran down the narrow leaves and penetrated to the red soil about the roots. As if by magic the sickly plants began to revive, and within four days the yellow leaves were returning to their natural color. The Cayennes were saved, and when it was proved, as Dr. Schilling suspected, that they had been standing in iron yet starving for iron, Wild Whip joyously gathered up an armful of ripe fruit and tossed it onto the mansion floor.
"Brew yourself some alcohol and stay drunk as long as you like," he commanded.
Sometimes Kamejiro, running to work and running back to tend his hot bath, would not see the tall Englishman for weeks at a time, and then as he cut the lawn he would find Schilling in a basket chair by the side of the cliff, staring down at the play of surf as it struck the opposite rocks.
Schilling was a surprising man, a drunken, besotted individual who could think. One day when, he was driving into Kapaa with Whip in one of the first cars on Kauai, he spotted a junk yard and said, "You ought to buy that, Brother Hoxworth."
"That junk? Why?"
"You're paying a lot of money for iron sulfate, and that's what it is. Rusty junk to which sulphuric acid has been applied."
So Whip bought the junk yard and launched an iron sulfate factory, and in later years, when automobiles had become numerous, he bought all the old wrecks on Kauai for four dollars each, piled them up, drenched them with gasoline and burned away the rubber and the horse hair. When what was left had rusted he treated the junk with sulphuric acid and remarked, "Everyone who eats pineapple is eating the handiwork of Henry Ford, God bless him."
But in the growing of pineapple, which brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the territory, when one problem was licked, the next arose, for apparently the Cayenne did not enjoy growing in Hawaii and fell prey to one disaster after another. When the iron problem was solved, the mealy-bug arose, and once more the industry seemed doomed.
The ugly, louselike little bugs were moved from place to place by ants, who tended them like milch cows, living off their sweet, nutritious exudations. Particularly, the mealy-bugs loved pineapple, whose growth they destroyed, and it seemed an act of conscious malevolence when millions of ants hiked several miles to deposit their cows upon the precious pineapples. Dr.