The Watch

At ten he went up to his own rooms, because Kaʻai asked him to.

Kaʻai did not put it as a request. He stood in the door of the small sitting room with a candle in a saucer, shaded with his hand, and said that the household would keep the switchboard and the gates and the barracks, and that Captain Kealoha would wake His Majesty if anything happened, anything at all, and that His Majesty had been on his feet since five and had eaten nothing since the papaya; and then he waited, in the way he had waited for the King’s father on a thousand nights, with the patience of a man who has never yet failed to outlast anybody. The King went up.

He did not light the candle in his room. He took it from Kaʻai at the door and blew it out, because there was no blanket over the window here, and stood in the dark until his eyes had changed, and then went to the window and opened the shutter.

The bedroom was on the mauka side. It looked up the valley, at Punchbowl and the long dark slope of Nuʻuanu going up into the mountains, and there was nothing to see in that direction at all; no lights in the houses, no lights on the roads, the whole of the city behind the palace as dark as it must have been when the first Kamehameha marched his army up that valley a hundred and fifty years ago and there was no city. Only the sky. The sky over the mountains was full of stars, more stars than he had ever seen over Honolulu, because there was nothing on the ground tonight to put them out; and low over the Koʻolau there was a little cloud, lit very faintly pink from underneath, from the west, from the other side of the house, from the anchorage.

He knelt down by the window.

---

He did not know whom he was praying to. He had never known, and he had never been sure that it mattered.

He had been brought up to the Anglican prayer book on the first and third Sundays and the Catholic Mass on the second and fourth, and to the chants of the old religion in the room at the back of the barracks on Tuesday and Friday evenings, which the old woman had taught him not as a faith but as history, and then, when she thought he was not listening, as something more than that. He had been told by his father that a King of Hawaiʻi belonged to none of them and must be at home in all of them, and he had found that this was true, and that it left him, at night, on his knees, without any particular words. Mr Pell had said once that a constitutional monarch should pray in the language of the established church, and that where there was no established church he should pray in the language of the constitution, and the King had asked what language that was, and Mr Pell had considered it, and said: plain English, and very little of it.

He said very little of it. He said the names.

He said the name of the man on the pavement in Pālama, whom he did not know, and of the woman in Moʻiliʻili with her washing, whom he did not know either, and the family in the car on Nuʻuanu Avenue below the cemetery, and the boy with the bandaged leg who had made the Queen laugh, and Mr Shiroma’s brother, who had gone for aku. He said Mrs Freitas of Punchbowl Street, and the boy who had sold every copy of the Sunday paper on the corner of King and Richards Streets, and the others who had been under the sheets by the barracks wall, whose names he did not know, who had come to the railings to see if he had gone. He said the men in the water at Puʻuloa, whom Cunningham had seen swimming, all of them, the ones who had come out and the ones who had not, since he did not know which were which, and nobody would know for days. He said Colonel Pryce’s wife in Wahiawā, and the young corporal from Molokaʻi on his motorcycle, and the regiment on the beaches facing the sea. He said Minoru Takemoto on a beach. He said Kenzō Takemoto, number two hundred and seventy-eight. He said the young man at the microphone whose name he did not know.

He said his father’s name. He said the old Queen’s.

And then he stopped, because the next name was the one he did not say, and had not said for six years; and he knelt by the window in the dark with his hands on the sill, and did not say it.

---

The door opened behind him.

He knew it was Leinani by the step. She came in without a candle and shut the door and stood for a moment by it, letting her eyes change, as he had; and then she came across the room in the dark and knelt down beside him at the window, on the floor, in the ruined white dress, and put her shoulder against his, and did not say anything.

They knelt there together for a while.

“Dr Chun has sent me away again,” she said at last. “He says if I come back before six he will have the Guard put me out. He says there are three nurses now, from the Queen’s Hospital, real ones, and that I was very good, and that I am to go to bed.” She was quiet. “I am not going to go to bed.”

“No.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“No,” said Leinani. “I thought not.”

She put her head against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of carbolic and smoke and, faintly, under it, of the flowers she always wore in it, which she had not worn today.

“The boy with the leg,” she said. “His name is Yoshio. He is ten. He was in the street outside his house in Kakaʻako when the thing came down, and he has a piece of it in his leg still, Dr Chun says, and it will come out in the morning when the light is better. His mother works at the cannery. His father is on a boat. He has asked me four times whether the King is still here, and I have told him four times that the King is still here, and the fourth time he said, then why can I not see him, and I said that the King was a very busy man, and he said that he did not think kings were busy, he thought they sat on chairs.” She laughed, very quietly, against his shoulder. “I said I would ask.”

“I will go in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Leinani. “He would like that.” And then, after a moment, in the same voice, as though it were the next thing on the same list: “He is about the age she would have been.”

---

The King did not move.

It had been six years. Six years and nine months. In six years and nine months neither of them had said it, or anything near it, or anything that pointed towards it; they had passed the shut door at the end of the corridor every morning and every night, one after the other or side by side, and neither had ever looked at it, and neither had ever said a word, and he had thought, in so far as he had let himself think about it at all, that this was how it was going to be, for the rest of their lives, and that it was what she wanted.

“Six,” he said. “She would be six. Nearly seven.”

“I know. I meant,” Leinani said, “that he is about the size.”

They knelt by the window in the dark.

“Keʻala,” said the King.

He had not said it aloud since the March of 1935, in the corridor, to the doctor who had said three times that there was nothing that could have been done. He said it now, by the window, quietly, to the dark and the stars over the Koʻolau and the pink light on the cloud from the fires on the far side of the house; and it was only a name, two words in Hawaiian, the fragrance, the scent that stays in a room after the flowers have been taken out, which was why she had been given it; and he found that he could say it, and that the house did not fall down.

Leinani did not say anything. She put her hand into his, on the sill, and held it very hard.

“She is at Mauna ʻAla,” he said, “with my father. Between my grandfather and my father. In the vault of the second house. I go there on her birthday. I have never told you that.”

“I know you do,” said Leinani. “Kaʻai tells me. I go on the day she died. I have never told you that either. Kaʻai has never told you, because I asked him not to.”

“Kaʻai,” said the King.

“Kaʻai,” said the Queen; and for a moment, kneeling at the window in the dark with their hands together on the sill, they very nearly laughed.

---

It was then that the singing began, on the lawn.

He did not hear it start. He became aware of it the way he had become aware of the bells at noon, by its being there; one voice, a woman’s, under the banyan, singing very low, so low that at first it might have been somebody talking. Then another joined it, a man’s, and then several, and then he knew what it was, because there was only one thing in the Kingdom that several hundred people of a dozen races would all know the words of and sing together in the dark on the lawn of ʻIolani, and it was Kalākaua’s hymn, the anthem of the Kingdom, to the tune the German bandmaster had written for it seventy years ago, slow and grave, a hymn more than a march.

Hawaiʻi ponoʻī, nānā i kou mōʻī.

Hawaiʻi’s own, look to your King.

They sang it very softly. He had heard it sung at the opening of the ʻAhaʻōlelo every year of his reign, and at the investiture, and on Kamehameha Day by the regiment’s band at Schofield, loud and bright with the brass; and he had never heard it like this, by several hundred people in the dark, not loud at all, as though they were singing it to the children who were asleep on the grass, and did not want to wake them, and wanted them to hear.

He did not get up and go to the window on the other side of the house to look. He knelt where he was, with the Queen’s hand in his, and listened to his people singing the anthem of his Kingdom to themselves, in the dark, on his grass, under the banyan, on the night of the seventh of December; and he understood, kneeling there, that they were not singing it to him. They were singing it to each other. He was only the word in it.

It came to the end. There was a silence. Then, from under the banyan, the first woman’s voice began it again, alone, and they sang it a second time, softer still.

---

Takemoto came at ten to eleven.

The King heard him on the stair, and knew the step, and got up from the window before the knock. Leinani got up too. She lit the candle on the table by the bed, with a match from the box, and shaded it with her hand, and turned the wick down very low, and then went and stood by the window with her back to the room.

Takemoto came in and stood inside the door. He had his jacket on and his hat in his hand. In the small low light his face was grey, and very still, and the King saw that he had been walking in the dark for some time, on the road, before he came in, so that he would be able to say it.

“Sir,” he said. “I have come from the court.”

“Yes.”

“The Chief Justice has been sitting since six. He is still sitting. There are eleven of the Realm’s officers on the bench in the corridor with their files. He has heard thirty-one, sir, one at a time. He has signed twenty-two. He has refused nine. The nine he refused, he wrote on the back of the file why, in his own hand, and gave it back to the officer, and the officer went away.” Takemoto’s voice was the switchboard voice, the outside voice, flat and quick and steady. “He refused the priest from the Hongwanji, sir. The one who comes at New Year. He said there was nothing in the file but the man’s occupation.”

“And the twenty-two.”

“The police have gone for them, sir. With the warrants. One constable and one of the Realm’s officers to each house. They are being taken to the station on King Street tonight, and to the island in the harbour in the morning, the Kuhina Nui says, and they will be seen by a judge again within the week.” Takemoto stopped. He stood quite still with his hat in his hand. “My father’s warrant was signed at twenty past nine, sir. The officer had a letter, from the consulate, from last year, asking my father to help with the census of Japanese nationals for the Emperor’s birthday, and a list of the teachers he had employed who had come from Japan, and the minutes of a society he was treasurer of, that collected money for the Red Cross in Japan, in 1938. For the wounded in China, sir. The Chief Justice read it all. He asked the officer two questions. Then he signed it.”

The King said nothing.

“I was in the corridor, sir. I saw him sign it. The Chief Justice saw me. He did not say anything, but he saw me.” Takemoto turned his hat round in his hands, once. “The constable went for him at a quarter to ten. My father was at the school. He was sitting at the door, in his good suit, as he said he would be. There were forty families in the cellar. He asked the constable to wait while he went down and told them he was going, and gave the key to Mr Kaneshiro next door, and told him to keep the cellar open as long as anybody wanted it. And then he went with them. The constable told me. He said my father went very quietly, and thanked him, and said that he was glad it was a Hawaiian constable and a warrant from a Hawaiian judge, and that he had always known it would be.” He stopped. “I did not see him go, sir. I was at the court. I came straight here.”

---

The King stood by the table in the low light of the candle and looked at him.

There was nothing he could do. He had known that at three o’clock, at the old Queen’s desk, with his hand on page nineteen, and he had chosen it; and he knew it now, and he would not pretend otherwise, to Haruo Takemoto of all people, in his own bedroom, at ten to eleven, on this night.

“I cannot do anything, Haruo,” he said. “I will not pretend to you that I can. If I could I would not, and you know why, and so does your father. I am sorry. I am more sorry than I know how to say.”

“I know, sir,” said Takemoto.

He stood for a moment longer. Then he said, quite steadily, in the outside voice, the voice for the switchboard and the columns of numbers on the right of the page:

“It was signed by a judge, sir.”

“Yes.”

“It was signed by a judge of the Kingdom,” said Takemoto, “in a court of the Kingdom, after he had read the papers and asked two questions. And he refused nine. And he wrote down why.” His voice did not change at all. “That is what my father said to the constable. That he had always known it would be. He has been afraid all year, sir, of the other thing. Of somebody coming in the night without a judge. Of a list with a column on it that says what he is.” He looked at the King, in the candlelight, and his face was perfectly still, and his eyes behind the round spectacles were not. “That is not what happened to him tonight. I wanted you to know that I know that, sir. I wanted to come and tell you that I know.”

By the window, with her back to the room, the Queen made a small sound, and was quiet.

On the lawn below, on the other side of the house, very faintly, they had begun the anthem a third time.