carefully sorted and folded the papers and placed them into the saddlebags. I hung the bag on the handlebars and delivered the papers. On the weekends, I had an additional five newspapers for the Sunday-only subscribers.
I rode my bike as close to the front porches as I could and tossed the papers without even stopping, but some deliveries were a bit more difficult than others. Some houses had long driveways, and some wanted their papers placed by their side door, so I had to remember which was which and carefully maneuver to accommodate those preferences.
Three of the houses on my route were home to some pretty intimidating dogs; I dreaded going to those houses. The German shepherd was, by far, the largest dog, but it was the dachshund that I was most afraid of.
The shepherd just stared at me from behind the porch screen whenever I rode up. He usually didn’t bark, but if Willy was with me, he would go nuts, barking and growling and revealing white, glistening rows of teeth. Willy simply walked alongside me and ignored the dog, and that just seemed to drive the shepherd mad.
The dachshund, on the other hand, was entirely different. It loved to chase after me, bolting its long red, sausage-shaped body with the stubby legs and long ears out the doggy door on the side of the house. If I was alone, I’d just pedal faster than the dog’s short legs could carry it, but if Willy was with me, he would fight back when the whacko wiener tried to nip at him. Willy never went after other dogs, but he always stayed by my side and made sure neither one of us got bitten. Sometimes I would order him to wait for me by the road, and he would obey. He was a loyal and brave dog.
The other challenging part of my paper route was collecting the money. My newspaper subscribers were mostly supervisors or managers at the sugar plantation, so it seemed to me that they should have had the money ready, but many of them didn’t. In fact, half of them had many excuses, and I had to pester them for days. The newspaper company wouldn’t pay me until I collected and turned in the subscription dues each month, and that was even worse than the hotheaded hotdog.
Still, the paper route was my first real job, and I felt good about earning money on my own and contributing to our family’s tight budget. Each month, we used the five dollars I earned to buy a 100-pound bag of rice. I was pretty proud of myself when I saw my parents and my brother and sisters enjoying that rice, especially since my mother made all sorts of wonderful and delicious things out of it.
Garden of Sugar and Pineapples
Willy and Me
September, the start of a new school year, was a month away, and I was eager to go. “Eh, you guys tink high school going be hud?” I asked my friends.
“Yeah, my brudda was telling me mo’ homework,” Trudeau said.
“Dat’s nuts. Dat’s all I need,” I grudgingly commented, “mo of da proper English stuff again.”
“If Mrs. Anderson no flunk you first and you no graduate,” Trudeau smiled.
“Pssh, she going pass me. I make too much humbug in her classes. Every time she ask me to read, da whole class no can stop laughing. I dunno why sumtimes but I no caya. I no tink she like keep me around for one mo’ year,” I said with confidence.
“Dat’s true. Nobody can do anyting wit’ you in dat English class,” said Freddie, another friend and classmate.
Trudeau and Freddie were my closest friends, and we all lived in the Spanish Camp. Trudeau’s family lived across the dirt road from my house, and Freddie and his folks lived to the right of Trudeau. They both attended Koloa School with me, but Trudeau was definitely the smartest of the three of us, at least academically. His parents each owned their own car, and they both spoke English, as well as their native tongue, Filipino. Freddie’s mom and dad drove cars and spoke English as well. His father was a mechanic and could always be found under the hood of a car or with his legs sticking out from under one. Freddie was artistic, but he was also mechanically inclined, and he aspired to be a mechanic like his father.
As for me, I was considered the humbug, the troublemaker, “always either causing mischief or getting into it,” as the adults so affectionately put it. I personally found it was ridiculous that Freddie’s and Trudeau’s parents feared that their sons would get into trouble by hanging out with me. I might have been the one to suggest the fun things we did around the camp, but Freddie and Trudeau always eagerly went along with my schemes and adventures. Of course, whenever anything went haywire, I took all the blame.
That summer, if I wasn’t hanging around with Trudeau or Freddie, I was with Willy. My dog was three or four years old by then. My father had found him at work, and he’d brought the homeless Poi dog mutt home to be our family pet. He’d grown into a medium-sized dog with a brown coat and a few black spots, and we’d quickly become inseparable. Everywhere I went, Willy followed. If I walked to school, he walked right along with me and hung around in the bushes near the school campus to wait for me. When we were dismissed from school, he would come bounding out to meet me and walk me home. Willy was a great swimmer as well, so we often swam in the Waidagi River or Waita Reservoir. I loved to hold his tail so he could pull me through the water. As close as I was to Trudeau and Freddie, Willy had always been my best friend.
When I started school that fall, Willy had to wait at home, because I had to ride the bus for thirty minutes to Kauai High in Lihue. Our time together was cut short, as I was busier and had to travel farther away. Nevertheless, every day when I came home, my dog barked and jumped around me, begging to play and letting me know he’d missed me. My mom would stand by and laugh, amused by Willy’s antics while I played tag or fetch with him or wrestled him on our grass lawn.
One afternoon when I arrived home, Willy did not rush to greet me. “Ma, where’s Willy?” I asked when I walked through the kitchen door.
My mother looked up from the kitchen sink, concerned. “Hmm. I neva see him today,” she replied.
I spent the afternoon calling for him and looking around in all the places I knew he liked to rest and nap during the day, but there was no sign of him. I thought he might have wandered off somewhere for an adventure of his own, but it dawned on me that I should look under the house.
There, in the deep, dark crawlspace of our elevated dwelling, I found Willy, all curled up with his nose tucked under his stomach.
“Willy! You worry me. You neva hear me call you?”
I called out to him again, but he did not move. I crawled under the house, but in my heart I knew, even before I reached him, that my best friend was gone. I was already crying as I pulled his lifeless body out. I carried him in to my mother.
Tears formed in her eyes as she held me. She knew how much I loved him. She helped me look him over, and we found no signs of injury or suffering. “Mael, he was sleeping peacefully. We hope he went like dat, in peace.”
I was devastated, but I knew she was right.
“You need help burying him?”
“No,” I said. “I do it myself, for Willy.”
I carried my dog, wrapped in an old towel, to the creek behind the camp. I picked a nice spot where the sun shone down most of the day but there was a little shade from the bamboo trees. I labored for an exhausting hour, trying to dig a hole deep and wide enough the bury him. It was hard, because my tears kept blurring my vision so much that I could not accurately place the shovel. What I ended up with was a hole twice as deep as it was wide. I tried to gently place Willy in, but his body had stiffened, and that only made me cry harder; I had wanted to put him into the earth before he was no longer the dog I knew. I figured I could lay him in his resting place vertically if need be.
Just at that moment, my brother Hank came up behind me. “You like me help you, Menal?”
“No. I can do it.”
“Why you dig it like dat? He no going fit.”
“I like him look like he standing up,” I said, not wishing to explain that I had not intended that at all.
Hank nodded, clearly understanding my pain and not wanting to upset me, but I could tell he did not think
it was a great idea. “I can help you if you want to dig it wider so he can lie down like he sleeping,” my brother offered. “No, I can do it.”
Hank nodded again and walked away.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and continued digging, trying to widen the hole for Willy to sleep in. It took a long time, and dusk had fallen by the time I finished. I kept looking at Willy, waiting for him to wake up, but he never did. I carefully shifted him closer to the hole and gently placed him in his grave. His fur was still soft, and I petted him one last time before curling his tail over his hind leg. “Willy, you are my best dog and best friend. I going miss so much. Why you neva say goodbye?” I said. I wanted to pray for him, but I didn’t know how.
Tears started to blur my vision again, and I didn’t want to face the difficult task of covering my dog with soil. I tried to imagine Willy in Heaven, happily running in a field with the other dogs. With each shovel of dirt, spots of Willy’s brown fur disappeared, until only loose, dark soil marked the spot where he lay. Once my grim duty was done, I stood there and let the tears flow freely. I had never known loneliness before that time.
I stood alone among the tall bamboo trees as sorrow closed in on me. I felt hurt and alone, and the wind blew through the bamboo leaves with a whisper that sounded like voices. I was suddenly scared