Ruth listened for an hour to the dog’s whines, all the while sobbing to herself. Finally it stopped, and Ruth fell into a troubled sleep.
Supper the next day was Portuguese bean soup, and the only thing Ruth could abscond with was a piece of cornbread. She stuffed it into her pocket, not caring that it began to crumble almost immediately. No matter: Sister Bonaventure, alert to the situation, confiscated the bread at the door.
Later that evening, the dog’s cries returned. Not caring whether she woke anyone up, Ruth ran out of the dorm and into the classroom from which she had first seen her friend. She looked out the window.
Only sat on the side of the road, whimpering. She gazed at him—his light brown fur painted black by the night, the amber circles in his eyes flashing briefly as he turned his head. Ruth listened helplessly to his cries, feeling a grief and sorrow and anger unlike anything she had ever known. But she cherished every second she could still see him, until finally his cries stopped, his silhouette merged with that of the noni bush, and he was gone.
The next night there was only silence outside, and that—that was so much worse. Ruth cried into her pillow until she found another use for it and began punching it furiously, bam bam bam, then holding it by the ends and smashing it against the wall again and again.
Suddenly Sister Louisa was there, taking the pillow away from her. “Ruth, stop, please,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I hate you!” Ruth screamed at her. “Go away!”
There was such hurt and venom in her voice that it brought tears to Louisa’s eyes. She dropped the pillow on the bed. Ruth snapped it up, threw it at the head of the bed, then dove into it, sobbing.
Louisa left, a dagger in her heart—no worse, she knew, than the one in Ruth’s—and desecrated the silence of the corridors with her own sobs.
Chapter 2
1920–1921
The following evening after supper, Ruth slipped like a pō makani, a night breeze, through a back window. As dusk fell she began walking purposefully down Meyers Street, intent on finding her friend. She didn’t dare call his name at first, afraid the sisters might hear, so she poked her head through the wood post fences surrounding Mr. Mendonca’s pastures, looking for anything that did not seem cow-shaped. “Only?” she whispered. “Only, it’s me.” All she heard in reply was the lowing of cattle. She continued downhill.
The sky deepened to a dark blue, a thin moon rising above Diamond Head. The quickening darkness turned benign sights into fearsome shadows: a banyan tree’s dense cluster of aerial roots looked like a forest of bone, a thicket of skeletons. The thick gray trunk and branches of an earpod tree loomed over Ruth like some headless beast with scores of arms. She brushed against a spiky protea plant whose leaves cut her like a bundle of knives.
Occasionally a dog barked from afar, but the bark was either too high-pitched or too low.
“On-ly!” she called, raising her voice the farther she wandered from the Home.
She had thought he’d be here, waiting for her. “Only!” The steeply sloping hill plunged down and down. Barely able to see where she was putting her feet, she tripped on something in the road. She fell tumbling down the hill, rocks and pebbles raking her skin.
She came to an abrupt stop, slamming into a fence post, and cried out. On the other side of the fence, pigs were gorging themselves at a feed trough. She reached down to feel the cut on her leg and her fingers came back sticky with blood—more blood than she had ever seen before. She started crying, crying and calling, “Please, Only, I love you, please come back!”
Suddenly she heard a bark, muffled as if from a distance. Hopefully, she kept calling his name. The barking drew closer and closer, a four-footed shape separating itself from the shadows.
But it was a big black German shepherd and he was barking combatively at her. Moments later came the crunch of feet on gravel, a golden halo of light from a kerosene lantern, and a man’s voice saying, “Well, now. Who’s this you’ve found, Hugo?”
In the lantern light she saw a man in overalls who stooped down and smiled at her. “’Ey, little wahine, it’s okay. I’ll help you.”
But as grateful as she was to see the man, it was not the help she wanted, from the one she wanted. Only was gone. She knew that now.
* * *
She had traveled more than a mile downhill to Mr. Silva’s hog farm on Rose Street, a feat that grudgingly impressed the sisters even as they scolded her for running away. Sister Lu cleaned and bandaged her wound—minor, if messy—but when she tried to engage Ruth, the little girl refused to answer.
Her anger was like the tough, leathery skin of the lychee fruit, which only grew harder with time. She woke up angry and went to bed angry. When a sister asked her to do something, she did the opposite. Whenever a girl tried to comfort her, she turned her back on her. She refused to eat Thanksgiving dinner because she had nothing to be thankful for. Christmas Day she spent in bed, feigning illness, stubbornly refusing to enjoy the gifts and treats the sisters had gone to great lengths to provide.
In January, when she turned five—a slice of birthday cake thrown against the wall—Ruth was advanced to kindergarten in the hope the change in routine might improve her mood. Young Sister Augusta was the teacher, and she introduced Ruth to a stack of square wooden blocks—colored yellow, blue, green, orange, red—with funny markings on their sides that the sister said were “numbers” and “letters.” But what piqued Ruth’s interest despite herself were the shapes printed on the other sides, shapes that Ruth immediately identified as animals: a cow, a horse, a fish, even …
“Is this a dog?” It was a blue shape with four legs, fur, and a muzzle.
“No, that’s a wolf,” Sister Augusta said. “But there may be a dog in there somewhere. Why don’t you find out?”
Ruth picked up the blocks one at a time, able to make no sense of the ones with marks like “M,” “8,” “Q,” “2,” or “G”—but whenever she turned a cube over and found an animal, she set it aside with the animal facing up. Soon she had a cow, turtle, duck, eagle, lamb, fish, hen, goose, wolf, and … yes, a dog! She smiled as she admired her wooden menagerie.
“That’s very good, Ruth,” the sister said. “You’ve sorted out all the animals. Now can you put all the kinds of animals together? The ones with fur, the ones with feathers, the ones that live in the sea?”
Ruth shuffled the blocks around, grouping the dog, cow, wolf, horse, and lamb together; then the duck, goose, hen, and eagle; and, finally, the fish and the … She frowned. Turtles walked on land, they had four feet like a cow or a horse—but she remembered on a visit to the beach seeing a turtle swimming in the water, so hesitantly she put the turtle alongside the fish.
“Very good, Ruth!”
Ruth was indifferent to the sister’s praise. But she liked the blocks.
She learned quickly that she could stack them too and began building towers of animals, arranging them by color. Halfway through, another girl, Opal, came up and sighed, “Oooh, pretty. Is that a cow? I like cows.”
“Me too.”
“Can I have him? My blocks don’t have a cow.”
Opal snatched the orange cow off the top of its stack.
“That’s mine. Give it back!” Ruth said.
“No!”
Opal jealously gripped the block in her hand and began to walk away.
Shrieking with fury, Ruth jumped Opal from behind, the two of them toppling like a stack of falling blocks. “Give me my cow, give me my cow!” Ruth yelled, trying to grab it out of Opal’s hand.
Opal wouldn’t give an inch: “No! It’s mine now!”
Sister Augusta rushed over, separated the combatants, and said in her loudest, harshest tone, “That’s enough! Both of you. Right now!”