Puowaina

Here’s a story I’ve never told before, in all my long years—maybe I’ve been afraid to, afraid no one would believe.

No, it’s not about the Marchers of the Night (though I did see them once, at Ka‘ena Point, and ran like the wind before they could abduct me into their spirit ranks). It happened a long time ago—back when I was just a skinny little Hawaiian girl, ten years old. (Yes, I was skinny back then! My sisters used to joke that “even poi won’t stick to Nani’s ribs,” and it was true.) America had entered the First World War the year before, and the sleepy little Honolulu of my childhood suddenly woke up one day as a bustling seaport. Anchored in the harbor were the dreadnoughts of many navies—American, British, Japanese, Australian—and the once-uncrowded streets were now filled with servicemen on the prowl for bathtub gin and bedroom eyes. My mama volunteered on the ladies’ food-conservation committee, and as a good Victory Girl I gave up my weekly nickel to see the movies and pledged it to the war effort; but my parents had only daughters, no sons, so this was the closest the Great War came to knocking on our door.

We lived up on the furrowed slopes of Punchbowl Hill, in a big plantation-style house necklaced by a white picket fence, overlooking the green taro fields and glistening silver rice paddies of the Pauoa Valley. Mama was kanaka maoli, pure-blood Hawaiian; Papa was a haole from St. Louis, Missouri, who’d come to Hawai‘i as a young man and found success as an engineer for the Hawaiian Electric Company. When I think of my father, I think of fire: he had an Irishman’s red hair and florid complexion. When I think of Mama, I think of cooled lava: her hair, black as the volcanic ash of the hill we lived on, was usually piled like stones atop her head, but sometimes tumbled in a rockslide down her back. My two sisters favored my father, with light complexions and russet manes; I was my mother’s daughter, tawny skin and black hair, only worn shorter. 

I was a bit of a tomboy, you see, and long hair got in the way when I’d scale the heights of Punchbowl’s craggy ridges. All the neighborhood keiki climbed it, cutting our own trails that wound their way up to the five-hundred-foot summit. Sure, there was a road for cars to go up, but where was the fun in that? Leave that for the tourists and the soldiers on leave, come to take in the view. Back then, the view was just about all there was up there: the inside of the crater was a brown plain, sparsely decorated with lantana scrub, koa trees, the prickly panini cactus that flourished like a weed, and balloon plants, whose blossoms were round, hairy, and seemed to strike the neighborhood boys as hysterically amusing. But usually I’d go up alone—though I was never completely alone at the top. As I’d hike across the crater, I’d pass poor Hawaiian families squatting in sad little shacks and lean-tos, wives doing laundry in buckets as their children played with yappy little poi dogs. They might be stringing shell-and-seed leis for sale to tourists at the wharves, but otherwise had no jobs, nowhere else to live; when I could, I brought them fresh fruit from our garden.

On the southern rim of the crater there was a lookout, a tiny spur of land jutting like a raised eyebrow from Punchbowl’s massive crown. I’d sit on the edge of the lookout and gaze down at the city spread out below me, dollhouses scattered amid orchards of toy trees. It was hard for me to imagine that thousands of years ago, rivers of fire had spilled down these slopes to the sea. I’d try to picture the molten lava boiling away the ocean, but the scene was just too peaceful from up here—from Punchbowl’s equally placid volcanic sister, Diamond Head, on the left, to the slumbering mountains of the Wai‘anae Range on the right, and across the ocean to mysterious Moloka‘i wrapped in clouds on the horizon.

One day as I was sitting on the brow of the crater, I had a feeling—not a start or a fright, just a simple awareness—that there was someone standing behind me. I’d had this feeling a lot lately: I’d be alone in our backyard when I’d know that my sister Moani was standing in the doorway, and when I’d look up, there she was, asking me if I wanted to come and play jacks. Or I’d sense that my teacher was going to call on me to answer a question a split second before she did. It happened often enough that I was beginning to accept it as routine. I turned to see a man—Hawaiian, maybe twenty years old—standing behind me, wearing the drab, olive-colored uniform of the United States Army. He had a round, gentle face and smiling brown eyes. “Aloha,” he called out to me. 

I returned the greeting.

“Some view, eh?” he said as he approached. “Mind if I share?”

“Sure.”

He sat down a few feet away and extended a hand, something most adults didn’t bother to do with a little keiki.” “John Kua. Friends call me Johnny.”

I shook his hand, feeling very grown-up. “I’m Nani. MacGillvray.”

“You know why I like this side of the crater best, Nani?”

“Why?”

“’Cause I can see the house I grew up in from here.” He pointed into the middle distance, toward the crowded tenement neighborhoods of the Pālama district. “Right down there, on Cunha Lane. Little white-frame house sitting under a monkeypod tree.”

I squinted into the distance. “I can’t make it out.”

“Eh, neither can I.” He laughed. “But I know it’s there.” Despite his good humor, there was something sad in the way he said it.

I asked, “You just get home from the war?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m stationed here on O‘ahu. Schofield Barracks.”

“How long you been in the Army?

“Oh, I joined up even before we declared war. Saw the writing on the wall, figured we were going to get into it eventually. You come a lot to Puowaina?”

I was confused by this. “You mean Punchbowl?”

“Punchbowl’s the name the haoles gave it when they came,” he told me. “The old Hawaiian name is Puowaina—means ‘hill of sacrifice.’”

“Why did they call it that?”

He hesitated for a moment, then explained, “Long time ago, there was an altar up here—like in church, yeah? Except on this altar, people were put to death for violating the kapu—the rules—laid down by the chiefs. Or they might be offered up as a sacrifice to the gods in exchange for something, like to end a drought.”

My eyes popped at that. “Honest?”

“Honest! Not for a long time, though.” He winded. “We know better now.”

“How do you know that’s what happened?” I said dubiously.

“My tūtū used to tell me stories about long ago, back when the slopes of Puowaina were covered with pili grass.” He took note of my skepticism.  “You want to see where it happened?”

Well, what keiki wouldn’t? He got up and led me over to a large, impressive pile of perpendicular stones that looked, if not like an altar, then definitely like something that used to be something. “The chiefs would bring the victims up from the town,” he said with an expansive wave of his hand. “Sometimes they’d drown them in the ocean before they brought ‘em up here…and that’s when they were feeling kind. Other times they’d bring ‘em straight up and put them in that fire oven, over there” —he pointed to another, smaller pile of rocks not too far away—“built especially for burning men alive.”

I gasped. To think that a place like Punchbowl, which I thought I knew as well as the back of my hand, could have such a hidden, and bloody, history! Needless to say, I was thrilled.

Johnny went on to tell me a few other legends about Puowaina—how the side of the crater had once opened up and poured fiery lava on a band of warriors who had cruelly destroyed a helpless village on Kaua‘i—but, as fascinating as I found it all, eventually I looked at the fading sunlight and said, “I better go, I’ll be late for supper. Nice meeting you, Johnny,”

“Yeah, same here. Maybe I see you again sometime. Aloha, Nani.” 

Well, after that, I saw Punchbowl in a whole new way. A little scary way, to tell you the truth. I’d think about climbing it, then look up at the brooding summit, imagine men burning in fire overs, and think, Eh, maybe I stay home—and I’d go play in my own backyard. That was where I was, late one afternoon, when I looked up from my game of hopscotch and noticed something funny in the sky above a neighbor’s house. The sun was already behind Punchbowl, throwing its dying light onto a big cloud, making it glow like embers. But it was the shape of the cloud that was funny: a long “body” thinning at one end into a curved tail, and at the other end fattening into a diamond-shaped head. It looked exactly like a mo‘o, a lizard, breathing fire into the sky above the home of Mrs. Fereia, a widow who lived across the street. 

Then my mother called me in for supper, and at the table I happened to mention what I’d seen.  Mama seemed unusually interested in what I’d said.

“The cloud looked like a mo‘o?” she asked me. “Are you sure?

“What’s a mo‘o?” my little sister, Moani, asked.

“You are,” my big sister, Cynthia, taunted.

“Am not! I don’t think.”

My mother hushed them both. I told her, “It was lit up like it was on fire!”

“And it was directly above Mrs. Fereira’s house?” Mama said.

“What’s so all-damned fascinating about that?” my father asked, finally looking up from his bowl of clam chowder.

Mama instantly seemed to regret her interest in the subject. She explained, reluctantly, “In the old days, the appearance of a mo‘o was thought to be an ill omen, for women especially. It augured the worst kind of misfortune.” 

Father let out a derisive snort, as we all knew he would. 

“Superstitious claptrap,” he declared. “There are thousands of lizards on this island, and what do they do? Augur? Portend? No. They stick to ceilings, leave their droppings everywhere, and womankind is none the worse off for their presence, unless it’s to clean up after them.” He shook his head disgustedly and returned his attention to his soup.

In fairness it must be said: Papa would have been equally likely to pronounce as “claptrap” a sighting in the clouds of the Virgin Mother. He had no patience for any kind of religion, whether it was Christianity or the old, so-called pagan Hawaiian beliefs. My mother gave me a look that told me, Subject closed.

Father believed in science, especially as it was represented by his beloved 1915 Ford Model T Roadster—the first model to feature electric headlights. Each morning he would patiently hand crank its engine, then proudly—and, it must be admitted, a bit speedily—drive it down the steep hills of the Pauoa Valley to the offices of the Hawaiian Electric Company on King Street. And nearly every day he would inquire of his daughters, “Who wants a ride to school?” —but because so few of our classmates’ families owned automobiles, we feared being seen driven to school, lest our friends accuse us of being stuck up.

Sometimes, though, Papa would smile devilishly at me and whisper, “C’mon, Nani—I’ll let you drive,” and my hesitation would disappear like the new moon. I would sit in his lap as he disengaged the parking brake and opened the throttle, and we would hurtle down Pauoa Road as if on a roller coaster. Then, when we reached level ground, Papa would turn off onto a quiet side street with no traffic, carefully place my hands on the steering wheel, and allow me to “drive” the Tin Lizzie for an entire block. (His hands rested lightly but reassuringly on the top of the wheel, in case he needed to take control.) It was always a thrill for me, and well worth the occasional stink-eye I might get from a jealous classmate.

“Mum’s the word, eh?” Papa would say as he dropped me off at school, and as I nodded readily he would race off, with a squeal of his transmission, to work. 

Two weeks after I saw that fiery cloud above her house, Mrs. Fereira died unexpectedly of influenza, as so many people were these days. It was very sad; she was a nice lady, still young, and her Portuguese sweet bread was divine. But I didn’t really think of it as having anything to do with what I’d seen in the sky. I’d almost forgotten about what Mama had said about bad luck and lizards.

I don’t think Mama forgot, though. After she learned the news about Mrs. Fereira, Mama gave me the strangest look all day.

It wasn’t long after that I had the most awful nightmare. It started out nice enough: I was soaring like a gull over the sea, though the shadow I seemed to cast on the water was much bigger than a bird’s, the wind raking pleasantly through my hair. But then night and fog darkened both sky and ocean, and soon I felt myself dropping like a stone, unable to see a thing in the foggy dark…until the very last moment, when the fog blew away to reveal treetops looming up below me, and I crashed into them with a sound like crumpling wood and metal. Suddenly my whole body was drenched—not with water, but with what smelled like gasoline. Its acrid odor filled my lungs and stung my eyes.

I yelled so loudly it woke me up.

Cynthia and Moani tried to quiet me but couldn’t. I was a dervish of anxiety. Only Mama, hurrying in from her bedroom, could quell my night terrors. “Sssh, sssh, it’s all right,” she said, taking me up into her arms and rocking me. “It was just a bad dream.”

“I fell.” I told her breathlessly. “I was flying and I fell….”

“You fell into bed, safe and sound,” Mama said with a smile. “See?” As I calmed down, I told her a little more about what I’d dreamt, and she reassured me that I was home and safe. But though I felt better when she finally left, I still didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night.

By the time I got to school the next morning I’d mostly forgotten about it. But the teachers were all talking to each other about a story in that morning’s newspaper about two aviators named Clark and Gray, who had just made the first interisland airplane flight in Hawai'i. The pair had taken off from O‘ahu in a seaplane, landed briefly on Maui before heading for Hilo on the Big Island—and then promptly disappeared, and were feared to have crashed.

When I heard this I began choking again on gasoline fumes, so overwhelming that I had to flee into the bathroom, where I gagged over the sink.

When I got home that afternoon, Mama was looking at me strangely again. “Nani,” she said, “tell me again about your bad dream.”

I repeated what I’d told her last night, then said I wasn’t feeling well and asked if I could be excused from supper and go straight to bed. She put a hand on my forehead, said, “Yes, of course,” and tucked me into bed. Once she left the room, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go to sleep, after all; but eventually I did.

That night I dreamt calmer, though still exotic, dreams: I found myself walking through a jungle of algaroba trees and maile vines, feeling hot and sweaty and hungry, but oddly unafraid. There were no jarring crashes, no smell of gasoline; just heat, humidity, and a dull ache in my belly. This time I didn’t wake up from it with a shout, just drifted out of it into other, less interesting dreams.

The next morning, over my breakfast poi, I calmly told my mother, “It’s all right, they’re alive. They’re walking out of the jungle, that’s all.”

“What? Who?” my father said.

“The two men in the plane,” I replied casually.

Mama looked stricken.

“It’s nothing,” she told my father. “Just a story Nani made up.”

“That’s nothing to be spinning yarns about,” Papa chide me. “Those poor devils are probably lying at the bottom of the ocean.”

But Papa was wrong. That day, against all odds, Harold Clark and Robert Gray emerged unharmed from the thicket of the Kaiwiki Forest on the eastern slopes of Mauna Kea, where their seaplane had crashed two nights before. They had walked away from the crash and then kept on walking through the jungle, without any food, for the next two days.

I thought Mama would be happy to learn this, but when I got home she took me aside and told me, sternly, “Nani, you must stop doing this.”

This was the last thing I expected to hear. “Doing what?”

“Seeing things. In the clouds, in your dreams.”

“But I’m not doing anything,” I protested.  

“You’re telling your father things you can’t possibly know! He won’t understand.”

“He will if I explain it to—”

“No!”

Mama seldom raised her voice to me, and it stung. “You asked me about my dream and I told you,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“No, you didn’t, I know that,” she said, softer. “But from now on I won’t ask you any more questions, and I don’t want you to tell me anything about what you—see. You understand?”

“But what if I have another nightmare?”

My mother looked pained at the thought, but said nothing.

Angrily I turned and ran out of the house, without any real idea of where I was going. Then I glanced up at the slopes of Punchbowl and I sensed, somehow, that if I went up there now I would find Johnny Kua. I picked some mangoes from our tree, put them in a sack, then began climbing the trail to the summit, baffled as to why Mama was scolding me for things I didn’t have any control over—what I saw in the clouds, or dreams that came to me in the night. I ate one of the mangoes on the way up, then when I reached the top I gave the rest to one of the squatter families and hurried across the crater to the lookout. Sure enough, Johnny was standing there, once again gazing down at the city. 

He turned, saw me, smiled. “Well, if it isn’t Nana MacGillivray. Aloha.”

“Hi,” I said, sounding pretty glum.

“What’s wrong?”

I was suddenly reluctant to tell him for fear that he might have the same reaction as my mother.

“’Ey,” he prodded gently, “what is it, what kind of pilikia are you in?”

We sat down and I told him everything: the mo‘o in the clouds, Mrs. Fereira’s death, my dream about the two aviators. To my relief, he didn’t laugh or even look at me cross-eyed, but seemed to accept my story at face value. I told him about Mama scolding me, half afraid he’d scold me too. But he just smiled.

“Nani, there’s nothing the matter with you,” he assured me. “What you dreamt is called a ‘revelation of the night.’ You have a gift. Your mama knows it too, even if it scares her.”

“A gift?” That wasn’t the word I’d have used to describe it.

“We Hawaiians live in two worlds, Nani,” he said gently. “This world you see around us, that’s just the first layer, like the skin covering our bodies.  There’s another layer underneath, like you and I have blood and bones beneath our skin. My tūtū said the ability to see this second layer of reality is called ‘ike pāpālua: it means ‘twice knowing.’ Seeing events that haven’t happened yet—or things happening now, but at a great distance—that’s a special gift you have, Nani. The haoles call it ‘second sight.’”

“So I’m…not being bad when I see things?”

He laughed. “No, just the opposite. Your gift is pono—a very good thing.”

“It doesn’t feel good,” I said.

“That’s because your mama is afraid of it, or she’s worried your father will be afraid. The important thing is, don’t you be afraid of it.”

“Johnny, do you have—‘twice knowing’?”

He shook his head. “No, I joined the Army early on a hunch, not a vision. I’m not like you.”

I thought about that a moment, and as I did I could see Johnny glancing down at the city again, and I knew he was looking at his family’s house in Pālama.

“Johnny?” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Shoot.”

“Why do you look so sad when you look down at your home?” I didn’t need second sight to see it.

He smiled sheepishly. “Long story. Maybe I tell you sometime.”

“Can’t you go back there and visit your ‘ohana?’”

He smiled and said,” I think maybe you’re the one who needs to go home…your mama’s probably worried.”

We got up, and then he squatted down and put his hands on my shoulders. “Just remember, Nani: it’s pono. Don’t be afraid of it, no matter what happens.”

But something in the way he said that only made me feel more afraid.

For the next few weeks I tried not to remember my dreams, and even did my best to avoid looking up at the clouds. One weekend Papa took us all for a Sunday drive to Kailua, though this was not as restful as it sounds: Papa took the hairpin turns at his customary brisk clip up the windward side of the island. But we did have fun, stopping to watch the geyser of water erupting out of the Hālona Blowhole, and later Papa bought us all ice cream cones at the Elite Ice Cream Parlor.

The following day, I was playing tag in the schoolyard when I got tagged by Annabel Lucie—a girl I hardly knew—her fingertips just barely grazing the skin of my arm. All at once I had a familiar feeling—like when I was in the ocean, bodysurfing, and a wave pulled me under. It felt like I had a wave sitting on top of me and I didn’t have more than a single breath in my lungs, but I didn’t dare open my mouth to take another. The air of the playground actually began to thicken, to liquefy, as if it were turning to water all around me. I could still see the other girls playing tag, but now they were running in slow motion in the water, their hair floating up from their faces, oblivious to what was happening around them. I felt the sting of salt in my eyes; I couldn’t hold my breath much longer and was on the verge of taking in a deep swallow of ocean when…

“Nani? You okay?”

It was my friend Beverly’s voice, and the touch of her hand on my arm caused the water to evaporate, just like that. I was no longer bursting for breath.

“Nani? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I lied and returned to the game, though steering clear of Annabel after that.

I went to bed that night with the salty taste of the ocean still on my lips.

The next morning, as my classmates and I filed into the schoolroom, I cautiously skirted past Annabel as she settled in at her desk, two rows behind me. I didn’t touch her, didn’t come close, but in my nervousness I bumped into her desk as I passed, and that was apparently enough to trigger it.

With the same absolute clarity that I’d dreamt of falling like a meteor from the skies above the Big Island, I now found myself trading water off Waikīkī—I could see Diamond Head off to my right, and some dozens of yards in front of me, a line of surfers rode a break I recognized as the one called Castle’s Surf. 

But the fact that I could see the surfers’ backs meant that I was too far out. My leg cramped suddenly; I flailed in the water like a fish without a fin. I tried to call out to my family on the beach—not my family, I knew, but Annabel’s—and to her older brothers, swimming closer to shore. I didn’t know if they could hear me, couldn’t tell whether they saw me frantically trying to get their attention. A wave suddenly slapped me in the back, knocking the wind out of me as it pushed me under water and held me there. I knew I had only a single breath in my lungs, and I started to panic as I fought the reflex to open my mouth, and …

A boy’s hand clasped my arm, pulling me up to the surface.

No—a boy jostled me as he passed me in the classroom, startling me from my trance. I was no longer drowning, I was back at school, in my classroom.

I took a deep gulp of air and hurried to my desk.

I sat there wondering what had happened. Had—would—Annabel be saved by someone, one of her brothers, maybe? Or had it just been me who’d been rescued, by that boy’s brief contact? And should I warn Annabel, tell her not to go swimming at Waikīkī—or at least not to swim beyond the surf break?

My first instinct was to do just that. But then I worried: What if she didn’t believe me? What if she told the teacher I was trying to frighten her? What if the teacher told my mother, or, worse, my father?

Paralyzed with anxiety, I fretted over the question all week and into the next. And that Monday morning, Annabel came to school breathless with the news that she had nearly drowned in the surf off Waikīkī and had only been saved at the last minute by a surfer paddling by on his board.

She had certainly not been saved by me, and, as relieved as I was that she was all right, I was also angry at myself for doing nothing.

I thought of what Johnny had told me: “It’s pono.” But I knew that what I had done, or failed to do, was not pono. 

That night, alone on the slopes of Puowaina, hiding behind some kiawe brush, I wept in frustration. I was just a little keiki, why did I have to make such important choices? I didn’t want to see these terrible things! Go away, dreams, I commanded them. Go away and leave me alone!

To my relief and amazement, this actually seemed to work, at least for a while. The dreams and visions of other places, other people’s lives, all stopped—as if my conscious mind were stubbornly refusing to take messages from my unconscious. Weeks went by without anything odd or disturbing happening to me. My dreams were all placid, benign: clouds that looked like clouds; flying that didn’t end in a tailspin; frolicking in the ocean, but not nearly drowning.

So at first it seemed typically peaceful to find myself dreaming one night that I was on the beach, building sand castles as I listened to the rumbling sigh of the surf behind me. As in any dream, there were things that made sense only in a dream, so it didn’t surprise me when I looked up to see a group of tanned young Hawaiian men wearing old-style malo cloths walking up the beach—and carrying lit torches, though it was the middle of the day. I heard drums, too; but when I turned around to see where they were coming from, I saw an outrigger canoe coming ashore. And the young men were now carrying a long bundle, about six feet long, wrapped in tapa cloth. They stopped in front of me and lowered their burden for me to look at.

I was startled to see that it was my father bundled up in the tapa cloth, his eyes closed, his skin looking unusually pale. But there was such a peaceful calm on his face, it didn’t bother me. I asked him, “Papa, are you sleeping?”

“Yes,” one of the young men said with a nod, “he sleeps the moe ‘uhane.”

I had no idea what he meant by this and somehow didn’t think it important enough to ask.

The men lowered Papa into the hull of the canoe, now bobbing in the shallows, then pushed it away from shore. In moments the canoe bearing my father was being paddled out to sea, where the sunlight sparkling off the ocean made it seem as if the canoe were riding waves of white fire. It was beautiful to see, and though parts of this dream  may have puzzled me, I didn’t find it at all frightening, and awoke with a feeling of serenity and peace.

After breakfast, Papa again asked, “Anybody need a ride to school?”—and when Cynthia and Moani shook their heads, all he had to do was look at me with that devilish smile and I replied eagerly, “I do!”

I climbed into his lap and the Tin Lizzie took off down Pauoa Road. As usual, Papa took us onto a quiet little side street where I could steer, but this time I reached up and gripped the wheel in my hands—

And suddenly the car was spinning sideways—lurching off the road and down a steep embankment, though the street we’d been on a moment before had been flat as a board. The world literally turned upside down as the automobile rolled over with a crunch, jolting me out of Papa’s lap. I fell, my head banging into the roof, which was now below me—and only inches from where a huge rock had torn a hole in the vinyl. I screamed as we kept on rolling and I was thrown like a beanbag around the passenger compartment. Then I heard a sound like tearing metal under me, and the whole world exploded in an angry roar. Flames were everywhere but we were still rolling, a fireball encased in metal. I continued to scream—even as I found myself suddenly, safely, in Papa’s arms again.

“Nani, what is it, what’s wrong?”

We were stopped in the middle of that quiet, level little side street—the car no longer tumbling end over end, no longer in flames. But the sudden normalcy and safety were anything but reassuring. My screams died in my throat as I looked around me and realized that what I’d seen hadn’t really happened.

Not yet.

I started to cry. Papa held me tightly against him. “It’s all right, baby, everything’s all right….” But it wasn’t, because as I turned my tear-streaked face into the crook of his arm, I caught one last glimpse from inside the burning car—a man’s hand lying limp on the crushed steering wheel. And though I dearly wished I didn’t, I knew for certain whose had it was, or would be.

When I finally stopped crying, Papa asked me again what was wrong, what had happened. I told him I’d just gotten scared. It didn’t sound convincing even to me, but in the absence of any other explanation, Papa took me home…and, after he had reassured himself I wasn’t injured, he left me in Mama’s care. She put me to bed, stuck a thermometer in my mouth, and left to make me some tea. I lay there terrified to tell her what I’d seen, yet terrified not to. I thought of Annabel—but that had turned out all right, hadn’t it, even though I’d said nothing? Maybe this would too. How did I know what was the right thing to do?

Mama came back into the room to find me crying again. She sat down on the bed, took me in her arms, and asked, “What did you see, Nani?”

I looked at her fearfully.

“I know I promised I’d never as you that again,” she said gently, “but never mind that. What was it you saw in the automobile?”

“You won’t be angry at me?”

“No. I swear.”

I told her. She listened, looking concerned but not angry, even when I told her the last image I’d seen, the man’s hand—the hand I knew belonged to Papa.

“You—you never saw your father’s face?” Mama asked hopefully. 

“Not this morning,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I…I had a dream last  night.” I went over every detail: playing on the beach; the Hawaiian boys carrying torches; Papa sleeping as they carried him….

Mama was looking increasingly agitated. “But he was—just sleeping?”

“Yes. I asked one of them, and he said, ‘He sleeps the moe 'uhane.’”

She nodded. “Spirit sleep.’ Hawaiians believe that when someone is deeply asleep, their soul travels outside of their body. What happened next?”

“Then they put Papa into a canoe and took him out onto the ocean.”

She could not have looked more horrified had I said that Papa had been stabbed with a whaling knife in his back.

My heart was racing now. “Mama? Did I say something wrong?”

She sat, pale and silent, for the longest while, then finally worked up the nerve to tell me: “A dream of a canoe is a dream of death. Your father was sleeping the spirit sleep, and was making the final journey…to the next world.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “Maybe the canoe was just going to—to Maui, or the Big Island….”

Tears filled her eyes.

“A dream of a canoe is a dream of death,” she repeated, and began to weep.

Now it was my time to comfort her, holding on to her, offering her hope. “There’s still time, Mama! We can warn him about what’s going to happen….”

She shook her head. “He would never believe us, Nani. He would deride it as—'Hawaiian mumbo jumbo.’”

“But we have to do something, we can’t just let him die! What can we do?”

She looked more shaken and afraid than I had ever seen her.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. ”I don’t know.”

Later, trusting an instinct I wished I didn’t have, I hiked up the trail to the Punchbowl lookout, where of course Johnny Kua was again waiting for me. “Funny how you’re always here when I come,” I said.

“Or maybe you only come here when I’m here,” he pointed out. “You’re the one with second sight, ‘ey?”

But I really was glad to see him. I told him about what had happened in the car, the terrible fate that seemed to await my father, and I desperately sought his advice. “Johnny, can I—can I change the things I see?”

He considered that. “Sometimes, I’ve heard, you can. Sometimes, what’s seen in the 'ike pāpālua is just what’s possible, not inevitable.”

“So I should warn Papa? Tell him not to drive so fast, to be more careful, or he’ll…he’ll…”

Gently, he put a hand on mine. “Tell him.”

I tried to hold back my tears of worry and hope. “I can save Papa?”

“You can’t if you don’t try.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Tell him.”

I thanked him and scrambled down the hill in record time.

When I got back, my father was already home—he’d left work early out of concern for me—and so I couldn’t speak freely to Mama. When Papa tried to give me a little kiss on the cheek, I couldn’t help myself, I flinched a little, afraid that his touch might plunge me into another vision of his death. This only made him fret more about my own health, and over supper he stole worried glances at me; I could see a similar worry in Mama’s face as she gazed at Papa.

After supper I insisted on helping Mama wash the dishes, and once alone with her in the kitchen I could tell her that we had to do something to warn Papa, we had to try. She had apparently come to the same conclusion, because she said, “I know we do. I could never forgive myself if I didn’t.”

“Do you want me to go tell him what I saw?”

“No, you leave that to me. I’d rather he be angry with me than with you. I’ll talk to him after you leave for school tomorrow.”

I went to school the next day filled with excitement and hope that we would be able to prevent this horrible future from coming to pass. I could barely keep my mind on my schoolwork, and when we were dismissed for the day I ran like a banshee—one of Papa’s favorite expressions—all the way home. As I neared our house I could see Mama sitting on our lānai in a big wicker chair. I pounded up the steps and onto the porch and asked her breathlessly, “Did you tell him?”

Only now that I was so close did I notices the distant look in her eyes. 

“Yes,” she said, her tone flat as a broken piano. “I told him.”

She wasn’t looking at me so much as past me.

“You told him about the car accident?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him about Mrs. Fereira?

“Yes.”

“And the two pilots? And Annabel Lucie?”

She said tonelessly, “Coincidence.”

I blinked. “What?”

She sighed like a balloon losing the last of its air. “Your father says that was all just coincidence.”

“But I saw his car go off the road,” I said. “I could feel the flames!”

“It doesn’t matter what you felt.” There was a bleak surrender in her voice that I had never heard before.

“Did you tell him about the canoe?”

She broke into a short, sour laugh. “Oh, yes. The canoe. He especially liked that.”

She looked straight at me now, and I saw the exquisite, unbearable hurt in her eyes.

“He told me I was acting like a …’superstitious native whore,’” she said, and though I didn’t know the word, I could feel the shame in her voice as she spoke it aloud. “That I was filling my daughter’s head with ignorant pagan nonsense…making her throw a fit in the car. He said if I didn’t stop it, he’d leave me, and he’d take you and your sisters with him.”

I was shocked not just by Papa’s cruel words but by the fact that Mama had even repeated them to me. It was the first time in my life that a grown-up had shared such a thing with me…such a raw, adult pain.

I went to her and hugged her, and she held me to her for a long while as we sat there on the lānai. Then finally she said, sadly, “There’s nothing more we can do for him, Nani. We did our best.”

That night, Papa sat me down and explained to me the laws of physics and the inviolate rules of science. He didn’t scold me, just warned me not to let my imagination get the better of me, and never to credit any of Mama’s “fairy tales.”

After that, he also stopped offering me a ride to school. I think he was afraid that being in the car would trigger another “wild burst of fancy,” as he put it.

Two months later, Papa was on his way to work, driving too fast down a steep hill, when he lost control of his beloved Model T and plunged into a ravine. The last of the series of rolling impacts punctured the ten-gallon fuel tank under the front seat, which exploded, killing him instantly.

When I think of my father, I think of fire.

Those were sad days for our ‘ohana. Papa’s body was burned so badly that his casket had to remain closed during the services at the Nu'uanu Funeral Parlor. I had never heard a Hawaiian kanikau before, a lamentation chant; the mourners cried the traditional wail of “Auwē! Auwē!—Alas! Alas!”—as I stared helplessly at the coffin, unable even to kiss my papa goodbye. But this was so much harder for my sisters, because Papa’s death had come as such a complete shock and surprise to them. Mama and I had been more prepared, and shared our own secret sorrow, our inability to prevent what we’d known would come to pass.

But in addition to my grief, I also felt a budding anger at one who’d given me, I felt, a false hope.

After Papa’s burial I didn’t even bother to change out of the black dress I was wearing before I went charging up Punchbowl Hill. I got my dress torn and dirty, black ash soiling black lace, but I didn’t care. I raced across the crater’s desolate face to the lookout, where, of course, I found a uniformed soldier standing with his back to me. Johnny turned as I approached; his eyes were sadder than the saddest kanikau. “I’m sorry, Nani,” he said.

I ran at him and began pummeling him with my fists, screaming. “You told me I could save him!”

He winced, but it wasn’t from my blows, I’m sure. “I told you to try.”

I kept pounding at him, ineffectually, with my little fists.

“What’s the good in seeing what’s going to happen,” I cried, “if I can’t change it!”

“Nani, listen, listen to me.” He squatted down, took my hands in his, and closed his big fingers around my balled fists. “You did change something.”

“I didn’t change anything!”

“You did. You did save someone.”

“Papa’s dead.”

“But you’re not. You saved yourself, Nani.”

I stared at him, not comprehending. He let go of my fists. I let them drop helplessly to my sides.

“I swear, it’s true,” Johnny said. “After your mama told your papa what you saw, he stopped asking you to ride with him to school. Didn’t he? And if he hadn’t, you would’ve died with him in that car.”

Disbelievingly, I said, “Me?”

“He’s thanking you for it, Nani. Can you hear him? He’s thanking you for telling him, so his little girl didn’t die with him.” 

I couldn’t hear Papa, and I didn’t know how Johnny could, either.

“You—said you didn’t have ‘twice knowing.’”

“I don’t. But I know, in a different way, that there are some things in the future you can change, and some things you can’t. What happened to your papa was one you couldn’t, and I’m sorry—but there’ll be others that you can. Don’t give up, Nani. Your gift saved you—it can help save lots of other people too.” 

He stood up, and as he did, I heard a kind of low thunder rumbling in the distance behind us.

“You hear them, don’t you?” Johnny asked.

“Yes,” I said, baffled. “What is it?”

“Something else you can’t change,” he said sadly.

In moments there were dozens of airplanes—more than I’d ever seen, in strange unfamiliar shapes—roaring above us. They were flying so low that I could see the markings on their sides—a bright red circle, like a burning sun at daybreak. They thundered on, swooping low over the harbor, where they began dropping torpedoes on the ships at anchor there. The explosions were deafening, even from here, and they turned mighty destroyers into flaming wreckage within minutes. Columns of thick black smoke rose from the ships like grave markers. Wave after wave of planes came, until there were so many they almost formed a cloud that resembled the lizard I’d seen in the sky—but this was more like a dragon breathing bursts of fire onto the land.

Johnny stood there on the lookout, as flames leaped and smoke rose behind him, and smiled his gentle smile.

“There’s nothing you can do for me, either,” he said, adding fondly, “Aloha, Nani. Use your gift wisely.”

And then I blinked, and he wasn’t there any longer. Neither were the airplanes, or the burning ships in the harbor. Not knowing what was real and what wasn’t, I walked slowly to the edge of the crater and peered down at the city. Honolulu—the Honolulu of 1918—lay dozing peacefully below me, as if what I had just seen was only a bad dream the city was having as it slept.

I would see this carnage again, of course…though not for another twenty-three years. But I never saw Johnny again.

As Honolulu’s day of destiny approached, I did try to warn the authorities about the Pearl Harbor attack, even though Johnny had said that it couldn’t be prevented. I wrote letters to the Navy, but they all went unanswered. In the month leading up to the bombing, it seemed as if every other week the local newspapers were full of speculation that the Japanese might attack or invade Hawai'i, so I’m sure I appeared to be just another vocal alarmist. The few officials I managed to meet with in person dismissed me as well, and even had they believed me, they were at such a low level in the chain of command that they probably could not have made any difference. The Japanese planes came, and the rising sun breathed its dragonfire onto Honolulu. All I could do was to warn people I knew personally, and try to get them to safe havens where they might survive the aerial assault.

This is what I’ve tried to do all my life, what Johnny wanted me to do: to use my gift wisely. He was right: if there were some things I couldn’t change, there were others that I could. Sometimes that meant warning a friend away from a certain place at a certain time, avoiding an accident that would have claimed his life; sometimes it was telling a neighbor family that a fire would break out in their apartment the following day, or warning a pregnant woman that her baby was backward in her womb and would need special medical attention if it was to be delivered safely. Some people heeded my advice; some didn’t. I’ve never counted the number of lives that have crossed mine in this way, but I imagine it would be nearly a thousand over the long course of my life, and I am proud to say that a majority of those lives were improved for having touched mine.

I’m grateful, now, for this gift I’ve been given, as well as for the young man who crossed so huge a gulf to help me understand it. Once a year, in his honor, these old bones of mine make a solitary pilgrimage up Punchbowl Hill. Of course, it looks considerably different that it did when I was a girl: today the crater is graced with lush green grass and tall white monuments to the thirty-five thousand fallen souls who now abide there. One of the most beautiful of these monuments bears an inscription—a quotation from Abraham Lincoln—with words I’ve always found ironic in this place that was once known as Puowaina:

THE SOLEMN PRIDE THAT MUST BE YOURS

TO HAVE LAID SO COSTLY A SACRIFICE

UPON THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM

When this National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific was first dedicated, the many graves were marked with thousands of small white crosses, each like a tiny sapling whose life was cut short too soon; but today these have been replaced with simple flat headstones. I make my way slowly across the serene expanse of lawn, carrying a plumeria lei to one particular grave located not far from the lookout where I first met my old friend, in sight of his onetime home. And now, as I bend down, tears fill my eyes, as they always do, and I drape the lei across a granite marked that reads:

JOHN ROBINSON KUA

HAWAII

PVT 25 INFANTRY

WORLD WAR II

Mar 2, 1920    Dec 7, 1941

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This piece first appeared in Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary, edited by Carol Serling. Copyright © 2009 by Alan Brennert.

Image by Katya Austin.