‘Great.’
‘The enlargement did pick up one sign,’ he says. ‘But nothing helpful.’
‘What does it say?’
‘White letters on black paint. Hard to read ’cuz it’s in script. Best we can make out, it’s just telling people not to go tramping around on the graves. Doesn’t really make much sense,’ says Harry. ‘A churchyard in the middle of nowhere. Does it look like a place where you’d draw crowds?’
‘Far from it,’ I tell him.
‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘From what I can see, the picture’s a big zero.’
A woman has come in. She’s straightening some of the books on a shelf, replacing a few others.
Harry wishes me luck and we hang up.
The woman is dusting, opening the center glass panel.
I get a closer look at the framed picture propped on the shelf. A man in a leather flying cap, standing in front of a plane. A face recognizable to any schoolkid of my generation.
She sees me looking.
‘He lived in the area for a while,’ she says. ‘In fact, he’s buried just down the road — a little churchyard.’
I’m doing almost sixty, looking at my watch. It is nearly four o’clock, and I’m wondering what the parameters of Kathy Merlow’s afternoon are. Her note said she spent her afternoons in the churchyard. I am praying that she is still there today.
It hit me with the intensity of a moonbeam through an open window, the inscription on the back of the snapshot. Something about the wings of the morning.
When I showed the woman in the library the snapshot, she said, ‘That’s it. That’s the place he’s buried.’
Directions were something else. Reluctant at first, she said they’d had a lot of problems right after he died, the curious flooding the little church, taking pictures and picking flowers. But that was twenty years ago, and things are now quieter. Still, the locals are protective. After assurances that I was supposed to meet somebody there, that I was late, she finally told me where it was.
Past the Seven Pools, not to be fooled by the little church out on the highway, ‘most tourists are,’ she says. A left turn off the road, and then a dogleg, another left.
Dana was right. The road is worse on this side of town, beyond Hana. It is more narrow, overgrown with vegetation that brushes both sides of my car in places as I rocket past. I come to the top of a hill and nearly careen down a private driveway before I see the turn in the road. By now Dana and the agents are probably wondering where I am, looking for the car in the parking lot.
A few camera-toting tourists are crawling on the highway at the bridge, near the path to the Seven Pools. A couple of them give me dirty looks as I rocket across the bridge ahead of a line of cars coming the other way.
Two miles on I see a church on the right. False lead. I pass it. A mile down is an open gate, on the left, a sign. I turn in. Gravel and lava stone, chained-off private drives two hundred feet in, so I turn left, under a grove of giant banyan trees that transform the driveway into a cave of foliage, dead moss hanging from their limbs.
Then I see it. The little church from the snapshot, green clapboard over white plaster.
I dead-end in a dirt parking lot under the shade of the trees. Two mangy dogs lying like they are dead a few feet away. One of them raises his head enough to look at me as the dust from my wheels reaches, then settles on him. He sneezes, then puts his head down and goes back to sleep.
There are two other vehicles in the parking lot, a small pickup with gardening implements and a sedan. A guy is loading a mower into the back of the truck, along with some plastic bags of cut grass.
A man and woman standing, looking at a headstone in the cemetery at the side of the church, under a large banyan tree. Some distance off beyond the cemetery, through a gate, an old lady, cloaked in flowing garb, a broad straw hat, sits at an easel painting. The signs of serenity. Fronds clacking in the dwarfed palms that line the open grass.
I take the little path through a gate in the low stone wall leading to the church. The door is not locked, but I peer through one of the windows. A few wooden pews and a raised pulpit up front. There is no one inside, so I take the path to the right, toward the graveyard at the side of the church. Here the sun’s rays are warm. The humid air hangs heavy. In the distance is a fence, maybe a hundred yards away, where the world drops off, land’s end, blue water to the horizon, white breakers crashing on the few rocks that have clawed their way up from the depths.
There is the rumble of a junker engine and the sound of rubber on gravel as the gardener in his beat-up pickup pulls out.
Headstones and other monuments line the narrow path that zig-zags toward the open grass and the cliff beyond. I wend my way through.
The couple, Asian tourists, seem finally to lose interest in the headstone. They make their way across the grass toward the parking lot.
I take their place. Under the banyan tree at the near edge of the grass is a grave, a plain flat marker, nothing fancy, no shrine. The name engraved there had been its own monument during life, flashed ‘round the world before the information highway was a deer track in the electronic brush.
We make idols of rock stars and bobbing heads doing gangsta rap, people whose contribution to life is as fleeting as the pixels that carry their image to our televisions screens. Nothing enduring. It is a measure of our spiritual poverty. He was from a different time.
A rectangular pile of lava rocks ringed by a pinioned chain just a few inches off the ground. The headstone, unpolished gray granite, a soft cursive script:
Charles A. LindberghBorn, Michigan, 1902Died, Maui, 1974
‘If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea’ CAL
As I look up, the aspect of the little church looms before me through the hanging frowns of trees that ring it. Whoever took the snapshot had done so from this location.
There is no sign of Kathy Merlow. I turn and walk toward the fence, the cliff fifty yards away; undulating blue waters, and the glint of sunlight on crested waves.
The old woman is packing up, folding her easel, the afternoon’s work done. She is in on a section of grass beyond a gate, a sign hanging on the fence.
KIPAHULU POINT PARK
This seems to merge with the grass of the cemetery.
I plant myself by the fence and wait, looking at the sea, hoping that Kathy Merlow will appear. I look at my watch — after four-thirty. I wonder if Opolo has had any luck with the mail carriers, whether Dana is frantic looking for me.
I see a big blue sedan out on the highway. It cruises by at a slow speed. Stops at the gate. The driver, his head a dot in the distance, stops to read the sign on the gate. Then he drives off.
The Asian couple have made their way to the car, the thunk of doors being closed, the engine started. Pretty soon they will be closing the gate on the road. My chances of slipping back here tomorrow are not good. Dana and Opolo will want to know where I’ve been, the third degree.
The old lady is drifting by on the grass, thirty yards away, struggling with her easel and a small stool, a wooden box of painting paraphernalia. I look at the parking lot. Except for my car it is now empty. I watch as the old lady moves away from me now, toward a small opening in the fence, near the entrance to the park, and suddenly it hits me — not the gait of an old woman.
I am off the fence, moving toward her at a good rate. Ten feet away, staring at her back.
‘Excuse me.’
She turns. Not the wrinkled and weathered countenance of age, but tan and more vigorous than our last meeting, the vacant gaze of Kathy Merlow.