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The Son I have always known—every Hontu knows—the story of the Lumber Yard Massacre. Larger for its countless retellings, it unfolds before my eyes like a Technicolor film with Dolby sound (lacking only the bouquet of buttered popcorn): A stand of caobas in the forest. Encircling it, the undefended bodies of my people, linked arm-in-arm to form a human fence. The white foreman, rifle at the ready, gives the signal. The shooting begins. The Hontus fall in an unbroken chain, a mile of them cut down like the trees they can’t save. They fall and keep falling. My father, brandishing his machete, breaks ranks and hacks off his own arm, hacks it clean through and carries the limb like a blood sacrifice to the feet of the white foreman. The god of unequal losses stanches the wound. The loggers, too stunned to keep shooting, plant their rifles in the earth. It was then, amidst the carnage and wonder, that my father became a Great Soul. The survivors of the massacre still talk about how he stood unflinching before the foreman with his severed arm, chanting the prayer of safe passage for the dead. They call my father Tano the Long-Rooted. Under his leadership, the people of Itok Island fled en masse to America—followed soon after by the loggers. Too many trees had already been lost. The monsoons washed the soil out to sea until no crop would take hold there. I was four years old at the time of the exodus. The medicine man put my father’s severed arm in brine and carried it aboard the ship in an empty kerosene can. The floating appendage exercised a morbid attraction: I could not stop staring at it the entire journey, nor could I resist the urge to poke it and swirl its salty surrounds each time the adults left the can unattended. Later, once the community had settled into its identical tract houses on square plots of bare dirt with one tree each, the medicine man transferred the arm to a fish tank and placed it in the center of the makeshift spirit lodge. A pack of the older boys, recently introduced to the American custom of mischief, added Kool-Aid to the brine, turning it a bright orange. The Hontus counted the transmutation a blessing and reeling with jubilation gave thanks to the god of signs and glad tidings. My father, torn between tradition and the inevitable, appointed a council of elders to help him govern the transplanted community. The sudden plethora of choices kept them sequestered in the spirit lodge day and night, grappling to reconstruct their island in the dry sea of suburban America, circa 1960. An impossibility. Already the young Hontus were seduced by the glimmer of roller skate keys and yellow hair—glimpsed only at a distance, for they were schooled at home and forbidden from playing with the nontribal children in the neighborhood. From a tender age I displayed an almost feline aptitude for escape. The hunger to foray beyond the imposed bounds, to skip off the front curb and cross to the “alien” side of the street, surpassed any scruples or fear I may have felt. There, the girls and boys rode scooters, bicycles, blew enormous bubbles out of chewing gum, walked side by side licking ice cream cones… “Only a trickster god would countenance such foolishness,” opined my father, gazing woefully at their white faces from the threshold of the spirit lodge. In consultation with the elders he formulated the policy that would define our relations for all times: “compassionate non-intercourse.” Gesturing with his one arm toward an imaginary Itok, he spoke the words that would later be etched upon our doorposts: “Never forget!” Shortly after the council issued this decree, the Hontus raised a fence along the border that divided our land from the land of these menacing others, a fence made not of collective will but of heavy-gauge steel wire. The chain links, while they did not stop me from gazing toward the forbidden world ten meters away, redoubled my hankering to break free. I developed the habit of pacing. The older boys tied my shoelaces together and nicknamed me Devil, after a misfit they had read about in a Gideon’s Bible someone left at our doorstep, but their taunts only added fuel to a fire already stoked. No sooner were their backs turned than I leapt the fence and raced across the asphalt to hide in the backyard of my one friend, a sticky-faced little girl named Marjorie, who dressed like a lumberjack and liked to play in mud. Permit me to clarify—not to defend my acts but merely to place them in perspective—that I was not the only Hontu youngster to transgress the decree of non-intercourse. The older boys had become quite adept at mischief, and once got caught in the company of cheerleaders, slurping shave ice at a Dairy Queen. But I was the son of a Great Soul, and therefore scrutinized. People began to whisper that I had gone bad. In truth, I was not yet bad, only naughty. Years later I would earn my nickname, become the misfit my people expected me to be—what recourse had I? To hack off both my arms? I might sacrifice every limb and digit and still my father’s glory would eclipse me. To Marjorie I was just another playmate. Unlike the grown-ups who ruled the neighborhood, she seemed not to notice our differences. Only once did it occur to her to ask, “Where’d you folks come from, anyway?” I told her about my island, omitting any reference to the massacre, and she removed the Tootsie Roll from her mouth long enough to say, “I’m from Ohio,” and to show her teeth, which were brown in some spots and white in others. It was through Marjorie that I gradually came to know the other nontribal children on our block and to join in their games. In the great American tradition of show and tell, they displayed to me, first, their toys, then their weewees—the latter, not so different from my own. Having no toys, I lowered my pants. Thus, I established rapport and earned a place in their circle, but they were not satisfied for long. Have you no bicycle, they asked, no GI Joe, no football…? None of these things could I lay claim to. The Hontus disdained ownership; what little the community had was held in common. Tomorrow my Keds might be taken from me and passed to another child whose need the elders deemed greater than my own. “Can’t you see he’s poor,” Marjorie said with a shrug of her freckled shoulders. The concept of poverty was new to me, but I sensed in it something dark and isolating. Already the white children were drawing away from me, their attention riveted by the chrome hood ornament on their father’s new Buick or the tinny refrain of the Good Humor truck. “I am not poor,” I protested, puffing out my scrawny chest as I had seen the other boys do. “I have a special thing… a thing none of you has ever seen, not even on TV.” “He’s faking,” accused a buck-toothed youth with incipient acne. “I have a thing you will not find in any store,” I insisted, “a thing you cannot buy or trade stamps for or win in a sweepstakes.”A chorus of voices demanded, “Show us!” Had I ignored their taunts and dares, how different my life might be today—the Hontus, however fiercely they defend the traditional ways, do forgive their own. The god of return and reconciliation sees to it. But I did not stop to think about waterlogged deities with the faces of fish. A moment’s hesitation and I might lose my chance to ride the shiny scooters, to suck jawbreakers, to touch the yellow down between the little girls’ legs… all the joys for which there were no gods. “Wait here,” I said and raced hammer-hearted across the street. As I hurtled the chainlink fence, I could smell yams frying for the midday meal. While the women labored singing in the communal kitchen, the men and children napped in the scant shade of the widely spaced trees. The door to the spirit lodge stood open. Seeing no shoes lined up beside the footbowl, I stole inside. Illumined only by the embers of a wood fire, the room lay cloaked in a perpetual twilight. The cloying scent of incense could not quite mask a second, more pungent smell, reminiscent of the morning after a pig roast. I pinched shut my nostrils and approached the fish tank. Its orange brine glowed faintly in the penumbra. I could not see my father’s severed arm, but I knew from the stench that it was somewhere nearby. Beginning first to sweat, then to pant, I reached deep into the tank. My fingers made contact with the spongy dead flesh—recoiled—groped for a firmer hold. The arm had lost its resiliency; saturated bits of skin and tissue broke away at my touch. I submerged my other hand, then my forearm. The embalmed appendage, bloated to twice its original size, slithered from my grasp again and again. Extracting my hands and wiping the slime on my polo shirt, I gulped back a sob, raised myself up onto the balls of my feet, and plunged my face into the tank. My jaws closed about the floating trophy. A taste of salt and sugar and rancid hope stunned my senses. I reared back, clasping it to my heaving chest with both hands and spitting gristle out from between my teeth. Zigzagging, I crossed the room. Not until I reached the doorway did I notice the men huddled there, praying in whispers. They made no attempt to stop me as I passed, only prayed at my back in a low moan that has rung in my ears ever since. The white children made much of the wasted arm, pummeling it with sticks and baseball bats until the last bit of flesh jarred loose from the bones and lay rotting on the sidewalk. I left them to their fun and walked down the highway, weaving among the cars. Damn the god that spared my life! Damn the policeman who led me by the collar through the front door of my father’s house. “Is this your son?” asked the white stranger, brandishing a shiny badge I would have given anything to wear. “I do not know this devil.” My father raised his one remaining arm as if to strike me. For a moment it hovered in mid-air, then slowly it dropped and hung dead weight at his side. I might have repented, might have purged the wicked wanting from my heart and embraced anew the scaly gods of my island—there are rituals for such things. But repent I could not. The pliant animal of my nature would not allow it. Soon I would be old enough to choose among an endless gamut of vices and indulgences; I would be white; nobody’s son. The medicine man scraped the remains of my father’s severed limb from the pavement and replaced it in the fish tank, along with a second dosing of Kool-Aid. Between mischief and miracles the distance had already narrowed. An open Gideon’s Bible lay bathed in an orange glow. Soon we would all be white. |
