The Falling Shrapnel

By half past ten the city had begun to count.

It did not count in numbers. Nobody had numbers; nobody would have them for days. The city counted in places. It counted in streets and houses and names, and the places came in to ʻIolani one at a time, by the telephone in the basement and by the Guard at the gates and by people who simply walked in off King Street through the open gates and asked for the King and were brought to him, because nobody that morning could think of a reason not to.

The pier below the tower, where the first bomb had come through the roof of the warehouse at eight, and there had been men on the pier, stevedores who worked on Sundays for the overtime, and the freighter alongside had burned at the stern until the fireboat got to her.

The power station along the harbour, hit twice, burning still, so that the lights had gone in half the city and the trams had stopped where they stood.

A street in Kakaʻako, near the cannery, where an aircraft had come down it at the height of the roofs at a quarter past eight with its guns going, from one end to the other, and the people who had come out of their houses to look at the sky had been standing in it.

A street in McCully, where three houses had been set on fire at a quarter past nine, and the fire had gone along the street from house to house because the engines were all at the harbour, and the people had stood in the road and watched it with their furniture round them on the grass.

A car on Nuʻuanu Avenue, at the corner below the cemetery, where Mr Pell was, with a man and his wife and two children in it, going up the valley to be safe, and something had come down on it.

The roof of a school in Kakaʻako, the government school, empty on a Sunday, thank God, with a hole in it the size of a door and the classroom underneath full of glass.

A woman on a back step in Moʻiliʻili, hanging out washing.

An old man on his own porch in Pālama, the one the shopkeeper had rung about, who had come out to look at the sky.

And King Street, outside the makai gate of ʻIolani Palace.

---

The Guard had laid them along the wall of the barracks, in the shade, under sheets from the palace linen cupboard, the Queen’s monogram in the corners. The King had gone along the line at a quarter past ten, alone, before anybody could stop him, and had lifted each sheet, and looked, and put it back. He had made himself do that. He had not made himself count them, and he did not. He knew two of the names, because the people who had come with them had told the Guard: a Portuguese woman from Punchbowl Street named Mrs Freitas, who had come down to the palace with her sister after the first wave because, the sister said, it was the safest place in the city; and a Chinese boy of fourteen who sold the Sunday paper on the corner of King and Richards Streets, and had been selling it there at a quarter past nine to the people at the railings, and had sold, the sister said, every copy.

The sister had not been hurt. She was sitting on the grass under the banyan with her hands in her lap. Somebody had given her a cup of tea and she was holding it and not drinking it.

The King did not write the names down. He had stopped writing things down. He found that he did not need to. He was going to remember them.

---

“Sir,” said Kealoha. “May I have a word. Not here.”

They were in the Grand Hall. The hall was full of glass. Moses and two of the maids were sweeping it, very slowly and carefully, into heaps along the walls, and it crunched under the King’s shoes, and the light came in through the empty frames of the windows on the makai side with nothing between it and the floor. There were people in the hall, which there had never been on a Sunday, or on any day without an invitation: a constable who had come with a message from the Chief of Police to say that the King’s note had been received at nine and acted upon, and that he had six men on the Moanalua road and was sending more; a boy from the telephone exchange with a written list of the lines that were still working; a priest from the Catholic cathedral, Father Damasus, a Belgian of seventy who had walked over to say that the cathedral was open and the people were in it and that he would pray for the King, and had then sat down on the bottom stair because his legs would not hold him, and was still sitting there, with glass round his feet, and Moses bringing him water.

He went with Kealoha into the State Dining Room. Its windows were gone too. The table was laid for lunch for two, with the silver Moses had polished at six because he had not been allowed to dress the King, and there was glass on the cloth, all over it, in the wine glasses, on the plates, glittering. Kealoha shut the door, which did nothing, since the windows were open to the lawn.

“Sir,” he said. “The fragment. The one that came down on the path at a quarter past eight.”

He took the handkerchief out of his pocket and unfolded it on the cloth between the King’s place and the Queen’s, brushing the glass aside with the edge of his hand, and there it was, the jagged grey piece of metal the size of a thumb, with its one bright edge. Kealoha turned it over with one finger, and pointed, and the King bent to look.

On the inside of the curve there were letters. Part of a word and part of a number, stamped into the metal, upside down, cut off by the tear. He could read three of them. They were in the Roman alphabet, and they were English.

“It is ours, sir,” said Kealoha, very quietly. “From one of our own shells. One of the black ones, from the ships or the Army’s guns. They are meant to burst at a height, and some do not, and some burst too low, and what goes up comes down.” He turned it over again. “Most of what fell on the city this morning was theirs, sir. I saw it fall at the gate. I saw it fall on the waterfront. I am not saying anything else. But some of it was ours. In McCully, perhaps. In Pālama. On the school. I think some of what came down on the city was the Realm’s own guns, firing at them, and coming down on us.” He did not look at the King. “I may be wrong. I am only a man who reads books.”

The King looked at the three letters for a long time.

“Who else knows?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Then do not tell them. Not today, Thomas. You may be right, and it will be known in time, by people whose business it is to know it. Today the people under the sheets by the barracks were killed by Japanese bombs, at my gate, and I saw it, and that is what today is. The rest is for another day.” He folded the handkerchief back over the fragment himself, and gave it back. “Keep it. Keep it somewhere safe. One day somebody will ask, and you will be able to show them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kealoha put it away. He stood for a moment with his hand on his pocket.

“Somebody ought to have noticed, sir,” he said. “That is all.”

“I had noticed too,” said the King.

---

He went out onto the front steps.

The lawn was full. It had been filling since the gates were opened at a quarter past nine, and it had gone on filling after the aircraft left, more people coming in all the time from King Street and Richards Street, in through the open gates and the gap in the railings where the bomb had taken them down, past the hole in the road and the car on its side, which the Guard had roped off with a length of the cord from the flagstaff. They came from McCully and Pālama and Kakaʻako and the streets round the harbour, from the places where the sky had come down. Some of them were hurt, and went to the barracks, where there was a queue now at the door. Most of them were not. They came in through the gates as though they were coming into a church, slowly, holding each other, looking about them at the lawn and the banyan and the glass on the gravel and the palace with its windows out; and they did not come near the steps. They spread out across the grass and under the trees and sat down, the way people sit down at the end of a long walk. Nobody came up to him. Nobody asked him for anything. They looked at him on the steps, and then they looked away, and sat on the King’s grass in the shade, and some of them, he saw, closed their eyes.

He had thought, when he opened the gates, that he was letting in the wounded. He understood now that he had misunderstood. They did not want anything from him. They wanted to be here. They wanted to be inside the railings of the one house in the city that had been bombed at its gate and had not moved, and to sit down.

He stayed on the steps. It was the thing he could do, so he did it.

---

Dr Chun came at a quarter to eleven, a small grey Chinese man with a bag, walking very fast, who had been at the Queen’s Hospital since a quarter past eight and had been sent away by the night sister because, she said, the King needed him more and she had a dentist. He bowed to the King on his way past, without stopping, and went into the barracks. The Queen’s voice came out of the barracks windows, giving orders. The Guard went in and out carrying basins.

Mrs Higa came out of the kitchen door at the side of the palace with two girls behind her carrying a tub of rice between them, and went across the lawn among the people, and the King saw that she was making musubi, the rice pressed into triangles with a strip of seaweed, the way the plantation women made them for the men in the fields, and handing them to anybody who would take one, Hawaiian and Chinese and Portuguese and haole, and that she was talking to each of them as she did it in her own dialect of Japanese that none of them understood, and that they were taking them.

He saw a Japanese family come in at the Richards Street gate, a man and his wife and their mother and three children, all in their Sunday clothes, and stop just inside the gate, and look at the lawn, at the hundreds of people on it, and not come any further. The man had his hat in his hand. He stood very still. The King saw the woman put her hand on her husband’s arm, the way Leinani had put hers on his own on the lawn at a quarter to eight. People on the lawn nearest the gate had turned to look at them.

It was not two hours since aircraft with the red sun on their wings had come up King Street and dropped bombs on the people at these railings. Everybody on the lawn had seen them, or heard of them. The King watched the faces turned towards the family at the gate, and could not read them, and was afraid.

Mrs Higa saw them too. She went across the lawn to them with her tub, quite slowly, and said something to the woman, and gave each of the children a musubi, and took the old mother by the arm, and brought them in, and found them a place under the banyan, among a Hawaiian family from Kakaʻako, who looked at them for a moment, and then moved up to make room. Nobody said anything. The man sat down with his hat on his knee. After a while, the Hawaiian woman beside him said something, and the man answered her, and the King could not hear what they said.

---

That the blow had fallen here, on Hawaiʻi, and not on some fleet at sea or some base in the Realm’s own territory, was a thing he began to think about on the steps that morning, watching the Japanese family sit down under the banyan among the Hawaiians from Kakaʻako, and he did not stop.

It had fallen on the Realm’s fleet. That was the war. That was what the Japanese admiral had come across the Pacific to do, and he had done it, and the Realm would answer him, and it would be the Realm’s war, fought in the Realm’s name by the Realm’s men, and the King of Hawaiʻi would have no say in any of it, because the Treaty gave him none.

But it had fallen on Honolulu too. On purpose. Not on some base that happened to be in the islands; on the city, on the pier and the power station and the streets and the people at the railings of the King’s own house, who had come to see if he had gone. It had fallen on Hawaiian subjects hanging out their washing and selling the Sunday paper. Some of it had fallen from the Realm’s own guns, if Kealoha was right. Most of it had fallen from aircraft that had come a long way to drop it, and had dropped it here. And it had fallen on a Kingdom with its own Crown, which the Realm had undertaken to defend; and on a hundred and fifty thousand of that Kingdom’s subjects whose fathers had come from the country that had done it, and who were sitting at this moment on the King’s lawn eating Mrs Higa’s rice, or standing at the gate with their hats in their hands, waiting to see whether anybody would move up.

It was going to be very heavy. He did not yet know how heavy. He knew that he was going to carry a part of it, and that nobody was going to ask him which part, and that he was going to have to decide.

Takemoto came up the steps behind him at a quarter past eleven, with the headset round his neck still and the pad in his hand.

“The Kuhina Nui is at the gate, sir,” he said. “He walked from Mānoa. His driver could not get the car through. He came down King Street, sir. He has seen the street.” And then, after a moment: “I still cannot get the school. The line to Nuʻuanu is down.”