House of Many Gods Read online

  Praise for

  KIANA DAVENPORT

  HOUSE OF MANY GODS

  “A powerful and moving experience.”

  —Washington Post

  “This is a lush, ambitious novel that delves deeply into familial conflict and forgiveness and offers a fascinating glimpse into the beauty and contradictions of native Hawaiian culture.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Davenport mines the depths of emotion.… Readers who enjoy a Doctor Zhivago-like saga will appreciate the broad scope of this novel.”

  —Library Journal

  “Richly textured … Her use of language is tender, lush and powerful; her fully formed characters each have a unique personality. Reading this novel was a sensual experience.”

  —The Brown BookLoft

  “House of Many Gods is a big and powerful book in its own class.”

  —Small Spiral Notebook

  SONG OF THE EXILE

  “The strengths of this novel are many. Davenport is a superb storyteller. She always keeps her readers engaged in her novel’s story and caring about her characters.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Deeply moving … You can’t read Kiana Davenport without being transformed.”

  —ALICE WALKER

  “A historical novel in the most vibrant sense of the term, Song of the Exile brings the past alive with grace and subtlety.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Davenport’s prose is as sharp and shining as a sword, yet her sense of poetry and love of nature permeate each line.”

  —ISABEL ALLENDE

  ALSO BY KIANA DAVENPORT

  Shark Dialogues

  Song of the Exile

  House of Many Gods is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are

  used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2006 by Kiana Davenport

  Maps copyright © 2006 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  Reading group guide copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

  Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing

  Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.

  Portions of this book originally appeared in “Bones of the Inner

  Ear”: Story Magazine, The O. Henry Awards Prize Stories (Anchor

  Books, New York, 2000) and The Best American Short Stories

  (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2000).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman

  Literary Agents for permission to reprint two poems from Poems of

  Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and

  Max Hayward, copyright © 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973. Reprinted by

  permission of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51545-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davenport, Kiana.

  House of many gods : a novel / Kiana Davenport.

  p. cm.

  1. Hawaii—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A88H68 2006

  813′.54—dc22 2005048174

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  v3.1

  To my beloved cousin,

  Rosemond Kehau Aho

  To Anita and Robert Yantorno

  And to the memory of Rostov Anadyr,

  who disappeared

  PULE HO‘OLA‘A HALE

  E ‘oki i ka piko o ka hale …

  He hale noho ho‘i no ke kanaka …

  Oia ke ola au e ke akua—amama ua noa.

  E Kū, E Kāne, E Lono

  Ku‘ua mai i ke ola …

  (HOUSE DEDICATION PRAYER)

  Cut the umbilical cord of this house …

  A house for man to dwell in …

  Let this be the life granted to us by the gods.

  O Kū, O Kāne, O Lono

  Let down the gift of life …

  —from THE POLYNESIAN FAMILY

  SYSTEM IN KA‘U, HAWAI‘I.

  By MARY KAWENA PUKUI and CRAIGHILL HANDY

  I drink to our ruined house …

  to lying lips that have betrayed us …

  and to the hard realities:

  that the world is brutal and coarse,

  that God in fact has not saved us.

  —ANNA AKHMATOVA, “The Last Toast,”

  Poems of Akhmatova

  Translated by Stanley Kunitz

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  PART ONE: KE ALA KE OLA - The Road of Life

  PUNAHELE - Favored Child

  ANAHOLA - Time in a Glass

  KULA ‘IWI - Here My Bones Began

  NIKOLAO - Nikolai

  NOI NO KA ‘ĪEWE - Request for the Placenta

  ‘ŌULI - Portent

  HA ‘I MO ‘OLELO - The Telling Wind

  NIKOLAO - Nikolai

  POLIHALE - Home of the Spirits

  MELE KANIKAU - Chant of Mourning

  PART TWO: EIA KA PILIKIA LĀ - Here Are Our Troubles

  ALOHA ‘ĀINA - Love for the Land

  KA HĀ O KONA WAHA - The Ritual of Hā

  NIKOLAO - Nikolai

  ‘OKI I NA MAKE - To Cut Out Death

  HULIKO‘A WAHA ‘AWA - Profile of a Bitter Mouth

  HA ‘AWINA NO‘ONO‘O - An Offering of Thoughts

  ‘OHANA O KAUMAHA - Family of Sorrow

  PART THREE: HŌ‘IKE NA KA PU‘UWAI - Revelations of the Heart

  MAKANI PĀHILI - Hurricane

  NIKOLAO - Nikolai

  HO‘OHĀMAU, HO‘OLOHE - To Be Silent, to Listen

  PALAI - To Turn Away in Confusion

  AIA NO I KE KO A KE AU - Time Will Tell

  ANAHOLA - Time in a Glass

  NĀ MEAHUNA O KA PU‘UWAI PŌLOLI - Secrets of the Hungry Heart

  MIHI - Remorse

  WAIHO KĒNĀ I KE ĀKUA - Take It to the Gods

  HŌ‘IKE NA KA PU‘UWAI - Revelations of the Heart

  HO‘OHOLO - Decision

  HA ‘I A‘O - To Give Advice

  PART FOUR: E PULE I KĒIA MANAWA - Now Is the Time for Prayer

  PIKELOPOLO - The City of Peter

  MOKEKAO - Moscow

  ‘IMI, ‘IKE, MAOPOPO - To Seek, to Sense, to Understand

  MANA ‘OLANA - Hope

  ĪNANA HOU - To Come to Life Again

  ‘ĪLOLI - Deep Emotions of Gestation

  ‘IKE ‘IA NĀ MAKA I KE AO - The Eyes Are Seen in the World, the Child Is Born

  Ē NĀ HANAUNA, Ē! - O, Generations, O!

  Hawaiian-English Glossary

  Russian-English Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  A Conversation with Kiana Davenport

  Reading Group Topics and Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  KE ALA KE OLA

  The Road of Life

  PUNAHELE

  Favored Child

&nb
sp; WAI’ANAE COAST, 1964

  MORNING, THE AIR ASTONISHINGLY CLEAR. THE SKY SO UNBLEMISHED and wide, there is divinity in the light. Sun and heat already strong, the shapes of all things are revealed. Old roosters crowing, shopkeepers yawning, rolling back iron window grilles. The absolute poise of women with blood-leaping grace walking dusty roads to market.

  In shanty houses, in rumpled beds, the piping cries of humans waking. A dozing father’s muscular, copper-colored arm falls from a bed to the floor. An infant crawls across the floor, picks up the father’s hand, and drools. The hand scoops up the child, cupping it like a well-loved toy. It lifts the child up to the day. Here is the still life. The sudden, static poem of being.

  Down no-name roads, children stare from windows of abandoned, oxidizing buses, like little clusters of roe. Fresh from sleep, their faces are lovely to behold. Some windows have curtains, there is even a tilting mailbox near the road. A boy appears in a doorway, shaking out a sleeping mat. He rubs his eyes and stares as if in deep remembrance. An old man waters his taro patch, whispering to heart-shaped leaves that it is morning.

  Life is not weary of these folks. They have held on to ancient rhythms in this world that was bequeathed to them …

  THIS WAS THE WILD PLACE, THE UNTUTORED PLACE, WHERE THE Grand* Tūtū of the coast, the rugged Wai‘anae Mountains, watched over the generations. Here, thirty miles west of Honolulu, were the rough tribes of Wai‘anae, native clans that spawned outcasts and felons. Yet their towns had names like lullabies—Ma‘ili, Nanakuli, Lualualei—until up past Makaha and Mākua the coastal road ran out, coming to a blunt point like a shark’s snout.

  And there was history here, many-layered legends. A reverence for the old ways, the good ways. Each town was set apart by a valley, by plains of weedy, rust-red dirt dotted with patches of taro fields and herds of sharp-ribbed cattle. The soil was coarse and punishing; it was unforgiving and bit back. Still, old tūtū men and women planted their taro at Mahealani Hoku, the full moon. And when they harvested the taro, underneath was good. And slogging in the lo‘i, the taro mud, was good. Good for arteries and circulation. Good for hoof-thick fingernails.

  And they ocean-fished by the dark moon when plankton came, bringing the big fish. And they gave back to the sea what was not needed. And they rested and worshipped according to moon phases. Living by the old Hawaiian moon calendar, honoring their gods, they prayed that theirs would be a good death. That their bones would not lie bleaching in the sun.

  Here too, among steep ridges in valley recesses were ancient ruins, sacred heiau, prayer-towers, and sacrificial altars. Here in caves hidden by volcanic rocks, in bags of rotting nets, eyeless skulls watched the land to see what kapu would be broken. And what the gods would do. In ancient days the coast had been a place of refuge for warriors weakened in battles. Here they had hid, tending their wounds, regathering their strength. Here, at night, across the valleys folks still heard those warriors marching back across the land to battle. Some mornings there were giant footsteps.

  Seaward, the Wai‘anae Coast was untouched and magnificent, its beaches great strands of soft, white powder. Yet only the boldest strangers ventured there. Last holdout of pure-blood Hawaiians, it was the skill of Wai‘anae to keep outsiders out. Dark, husky local boys stalked foolhardy tourists at beach parks, vandalizing their rented cars. They ambushed soldiers venturing out from military bases. Sultry girls tossed back their hair, breathing self-esteem, hips swaying insolently as they strode by on crumbling rubber slippers.

  Homestead youngsters raised on Welfare, their lives were circumscribed by landlessness, poor education, drugs. Outsiders saw in them the criminal intent, the wish to self-destruct, not looking deeper where hunger for beauty lay. Not hearing the suck and lisp of dreams, despair, then resignation. Yet here was tribal confidence, a sense of deeply rooted blood, of elders standing behind them for now, for good, for always. And the youngsters grew insolent and fearless. Even hardened surfers from Honolulu, out to catch the waves at Yokohama Bay, showed respect. They did not enter the sacred Kaneana Caves. They left the coast before moonrise.

  In the town of Nanakuli, off the coastal highway, a house stood halfway up Keola Road, a sprawling Homestead house that vaguely resembled a shipwreck listing to the left. Generations earlier, it had been a house of pride, of people vivid with ambition. Then life, and neglect, had made the house seem very old. But scandals made it new again, embellishing its history.

  The town itself was like that, constantly renewed, rewritten by its tragedies. There were shootings. Whirl-kick karate death gangs. Marijuana farmers were hauled off to Halawa Prison, while girls gave birth in high-school johns. But there was Nanakuli magic, too. Wild-pig hunting with uncles, their boar-hounds singing up jade mountains. And torch-fishing nights—elders chanting, bronzed muscles flashing, strained by dripping haunches of full nets. In tin-roofed Quonset huts, and ancient wooden shacks, women sang at rusty stoves, their shadows epic on the walls.

  HE LEANED FROM HIS WINDOW, LOOKING OUT AT A BLOODRED VALLEY, the color so beloved and worshipped by the ancients. A silent man, an empty room, only the white rectangle of a bed. He was Noah, and he had come home from combat in Korea without the will to speak. He did not, in fact, remember that war. When folks mentioned it, he shrugged, sure that they were making it up. This was his life now, leaning from his window, the windowsill grown shiny from the years of his forearms.

  Having dismissed the past, he was acutely aware of the present, watching the comings and goings of his family, the neighbors, the progression of their small town, Nanakuli, slung like a hammock between mountain and sea. Knowing he watched them, folks behaved a little better. Sometimes while he dozed, children tiptoed close and left things on his windowsill. A mango, a green apple. He woke and leaned down, watching how the apple focused the glow of afternoon.

  Since his niece had departed, he did not really sleep. He listened for the cries of little Ana, her abandoned child. He had watched the mother go, driving off with her arm waving out the window of Nanakuli’s only taxi. A graceful arm, a careless arm, looking severed from the elbow. She never looked back. Her face was already looking toward the sea, already going makai and makai and makai, out into the world where life, real life, awaited her.

  She was leaving behind intractable red dust, valleys that seized up and swallowed livestock, forests of mean kiawe trees whose barbed-wire thorns could skin a human clean. She was leaving, she said, a place of hopelessness, a coast of broken, thrown-away lives.

  Noah heard a voice call softly in the dusk, like someone calling in a dream. “Mama … Mama …”

  The child she left behind. Sometimes in the shock of early morning, he heard her chattering to herself. He rose, looked out the window where she was leashed by a harness to a wire clothesline. For hours she played alone in the gritty yard, building a little house with scraps of linoleum, then tidying each cranny.

  In the heat of her chores, the child ran up and down the clothesline so it seemed to hum and sing as if she were a note running up and down a scale. After several hours, her hands grimy, her face bearded with dirt, she would grow lonely and would scream, which started the boar-hounds barking. She would scream until someone ran from the house and picked her up.

  One day she screamed and no one came. Her screams grew so piercing, a young goat tethered to a tree fainted out of terror. Finally, Noah left his room, walked outside, removed the harness from the child, and pumped it with his shotgun, watching it leap and dance around the yard. Then he took Ana in his arms, humming while she slept. After that folks paid more attention, holding her more often. She grew up feeling loved, but quiet, a pensive child who sat alone like an old woman tired of talking.

  THERE WERE SO MANY ELDERS IN THE HOUSE, FOR YEARS SHE COULD not keep them straight. Fight-full uncles and great-uncles smelling of tobacco and gun bluing. Big-breasted aunties and great-aunties whose hands reeked of Fels Naphtha. At dusk they gathered on the lānai in competitive fugues of storytelling,
and often they talked about her mother. Ana sat in the shadows and listened and, sensing her nearby, they fell silent, or sent her off to her cousins.

  For years, she thought that sleeping alone was what people did when they were contagious, for she and her cousins grew up sharing beds; sleeping head to toe—husky boys with bronzed shoulders, and girls with names like Rosie, Ginger, Jade, one girl named Seaweed. Girls whose mothers were all headstrong beauties, famous up and down the Wai‘anae coast—Emma, Nani, Ava, Māpuana, and for a while there had been Ana’s mother, Anahola.

  Along with its tempestuous women, the big house was famous for its damaged men. Ana’s great-grandfather had come home from World War I with his nose shot off. Doctors had built him a metal nose which he removed each night before he slept. Folks said that’s why his wife had gone insane, lying under his empty face. Great-uncle Ben, his son, came home from World War II without an arm. Ben’s younger brother, Noah, returned from Korea silent as a grub.

  Their cousin, Tito, a champion swimmer, had been a diver for the U. S. Navy. Deep saturation dives, day after day, year after year, until nitrogen bubbles trapped in his bone marrow turned his bones to rotting crochet. Now wheelchair-bound, he had become a poker master. There were other families, other vets. And sometimes they all came together, remembering war with fierce lyrics and metaphoric dazzle, as if peacetime were the nightmare.

  Once a year on Veterans Day, folks came from up and down the coast, bringing baskets of food. They sat watching the veteran sons, and sons of sons, like people at a zoo. The damaged men would drink too much, strip off their clothes, and rave and dance with savage grace, while light hung in the space of a missing limb. Their mutilations glowed. Then they would wrestle their boar-hounds to the ground, play pitch and catch with great-grandpa’s bronzed nose till everyone went home.

  OF ALL HER COUSINS IN THAT HOUSE, ROSIE, FIVE YEARS OLDER, grew to be Ana’s favorite. Smart and feisty with sightly darker skin, the girl gave Ana a feeling of security, a deep sense of okayness. Rosie’s mother was Ava, and she was the one Ana kept her eye on. The woman had grown up wanting to be an Olympic swimmer, but then she turned beautiful and the dance halls found her. Folks said she looked like Lena Horne. Slow-hipped, honey-colored, each night Ava and her sisters dressed for the Filipino dance halls, rice-powdering their cheeks and arms to make them pale, puckering and rouging their perfect lips.