Everyone knew about the caves. We were taught to stay away out of respect. Not many went there, but I did.
It was cool in the caves, at least 5 degrees cooler than the shadeless lava outside. There was a fine silty dust on the floor, and on shelves to each side were people — burials, I guess. Most of the people lay wrapped in bark-cloth kapa. One of them, a man dressed in Western clothes, was said to be a sailor, laid to rest in a coffin. The coffin’s lid had been wrenched off and the faded blue stripes of his trousers were exposed. His skull wore a hat with a string around it, perhaps from a last lei put there by a sweetheart.
Lying next to him was a collection of bones wearing a lei niho, a necklace of high rank in the ancient days, made up of a large whalebone fishhook threaded on hundreds of finely braided strands of human hair.
One day at work I told my friends about the caves and word got to a guy who was a Hawaiian artifact collector. He asked if there was any Hawaiian stuff in there and I said there was a lei niho.
This man offered me $100 if I would bring the lei niho to him.
Well …
It was 1950. I was 17. A hundred dollars was a month’s pay. It was three trips to another island and back. It was food for the house for two months. I took it.
I lowered myself onto one of the shelves so that I lay on top of the dead guy, or dead woman, who wore the lei niho. I balanced on my elbows while I untied the fastening from around the crumbling neck bones covered with dried skin. As I worked, I decided she was a woman. She seemed to be grinning at me with her teeth all showing through her papery lips. I could feel her ribs under mine.
It would have been easier just to get a rock and knock the skull from its, her, shoulders but that seemed worse than what I was doing already. “She is dead, she doesn’t need this anymore,” I thought, but when the fastening pulled loose at last I was shivering.
I got my grave robber’s pay. I gave it to my mother, who at first was happy but in about 30 seconds knew it was bad. She asked what and where and why I got the money and would not take it. I couldn’t stop shivering and went to bed early.
That night, I woke up with the feeling of a dead weight on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I opened my eyes slowly and saw a woman, not in her body but showing me what her body had been, and she was lovely, and easing her weight onto me bit by bit as I had done to her.
She spoke in Hawaiian and I understood. She smiled. I heard her say, “You see I am beautiful, but more beautiful when I have my necklace.”
Soft, silty dust began to fall from her hands into my mouth. I began to choke.
“I’ll put it back,” I cried. “I’ll put it back.”
“Oh no, it’s too late for that. Hila hila oe, shame on you, stealing from your own place,” she said.
She leaned forward and the weight of a mountain crushed the spirit from me.
I found myself standing, hovering maybe, next to her and she said, “You will not rest.”
My mother cried when she found me, worked like a detective to find the lei niho, and now I see her coming, carrying the necklace in a bundle of green ti leaves, scrambling but with care over the tilting lava field, toward the cave entrance that it is now my duty to guard for eternity.
