All One Time

by Michael Copperman

When I saw uncle Robert out back of my Aunty Ruby’s house after mochi-making a few days before the New Year, I was in my early twenties and he seemed unchanged from my memories of childhood. His weathered koa skin was carved with deep smile-lines, and he still was spry, always the first to leap to help to lift a table or shoulder a bag of rice. It was the first time I’d been back to the islands since my grandpa’s funeral—probably seven years before—and Robert set his veiny brown hand on my shoulder and squeezed a greeting, then held out two plastic bags of pomelos the size of basketballs. “For you!” He sat down next to me on the cinder block beneath the eaves. “I know you Lynny boy, you always liked da kine jabon. You always ate ‘em till they were gone. Bet you still like peel ‘em to eat ‘em all one time, eh? I show you how.”

Robert had started work at the grocery store before he finished high school—he worked his whole life for my grandfather, and then my uncle and cousins. He was at every Christmas and New Year’s party, every family gathering, and so I was a teenager before I understood that helping was Robert’s place–being handy beyond mere hire, minding details, taking care of, his place not a seat at table, but a strong pair of hands turned to the work that needed to be done. Perhaps my confusion came because every man was called ‘uncle’, because nobody ever explained exactly who was related to who how, but it was also because he was more present than my actual uncle who never spoke to me. Robert always had a kind word for a small, quiet boy who could barely understand what he said in his strong pidgin, and I always listened to him. It seemed to me that he knew me in a way nobody else recognized.

He had remembered, from when I was a kid, that I loved jabon–and he had brought me the best and ripest fruit from a tree in the neighborhood. He worked an old ivory-handled pocket knife free from his pocket, held it in his still steady hands, took the biggest jabon, sliced it all the way around and began to work free the thick yellow rind and white starchy casing. When he held the stripped globe, he worked his thumbs into the hole, broke it in two, and then broke off a section and showed me how he worked his knife along a seam, flicked free the grape-sized seeds into the dust of the yard and slipped the ruby jewels free from the membrane and handed them to me, grinned with his yellowed, filling-shot teeth as I bit down on the firm sweet flesh that to me meant the happiness of sunlight and childhood for a brown boy who lived most of the time in Oregon where he never belonged. The look on my face was what he’d come for, that, and to sit with me after producing a second knife, as he and I peeled all the fruit so it could be eaten all at once if I wished.

Here in my hand is a pomelo I’ve bought today, after the news came. It is a pale yellow, dappled a little with brown spots like freckles, and only a little larger than a grapefruit, but when I press my nose close there is the telltale nectar scent. I work my kitchen knife around, slip the white rind free, press my fingers into the center and break out a section, slit the first piece and then the next down the seam, separating out the bright jewels of flesh one by one.

This morning uncle Robert went out in his pickup to retrieve the grocery carts customers take from the parking lot. He was the only one who would go after the carts, track them up and down the main drag of the highway, turning down the dusty side streets and back alleys. He signaled to turn left by the KFC and one car stopped and beckoned him forward, and he turned as a speeding sedan took the cab of his truck and the life in it.

What I need to say, in my ugly haole English that is my only tongue, is that all those years ago, after we peeled that jabon, I ate the sweet fruit slow as I could, ate it all one time.

I need it now, and will. Uncle, I thank you for it always.

Michael Copperman has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF.