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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Gods and sharks
>> Big Island
Cruz MacKenzie did not sleep well. Part of it was that he hadn't slept on the ground in at least 10 years -- not since he got used to the resort life.
Part of it was that the Kona sky was so clear that the stars practically shouted "Look at us!" And as he stared into the dazzling infinity of the heavens, his thoughts returned to Mano's words, spoken as they sat by the campfire he'd built on the beach:
"Like people, eh, there's good sharks and bad sharks. From olden times, way back, when a shark attacked a human, the men went out and killed the shark.
I remember one time, I was little, we were living on the beach at Waipio, and a shark attacked a surfer. They heated breadfruits in an imu. When they got very hot, they put 'em in a big calabash and went out to sea and fed 'em to the shark. It swallowed the breadfruits whole and the heat killed it, cooked it from the inside. But at the same time, we made our offerings to Mano, made our peace."
"Can't Mano the shark stop the bad sharks from attacking humans?"
Mano poked at the embers with a kiawe stick. "Does your Christian God, who they say created man in his own image, prevent humans from doing terrible things to one another? Or to the rest of his creation? Could the Great Spirit of the Indians keep one tribe from making war against another and taking slaves?"
"Maybe that's asking too much of a god."
Mano shifted his okole in the sand, nursing a can of Bud. "Before you asked about being connected. To the sea, I mean. It's like this, bruddah. God is in you as much as God is in that shark over there. You get mana, the shark get mana. Main t'ing, you got to go with the mana."
"You mean, like, to be at one with it?"
"You got to feel it and go with it. This time, bringing you here, we got the go-ahead. Next time, who knows, maybe the mana will say no."
Having been raised on the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's and Nicene Creeds, Cruz was used to religion having predictable form. "When you say to 'feel it' and 'be in tune,' Mano, it leaves so much open to the emotion of the moment."
"There's no emotion in the spirit. It is truth. The spirit is what is."
"Like the God of the Old Testament, Jahweh. His name, he said, means 'I am that I am.' "
"And that's all's that I am, I'm Popeye the sailor man, toot toot," Mano sing-songed with a kolohe grin. "And Mano is Mano, he is what he is."
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
