Cold Majuro Snow

by Darren Dillman

Enni Bilimon, the last Marshallese survivor of the Castle Bravo nuclear test, steps off the chipped concrete porch and maneuvers around the papaya and pandanus trees and sees the children dancing on the beach of the lagoon, swirling with their arms spread out, mouths open, faces tilted toward the clouds, catching with their tongues the first cold flakes of snow in Majuro’s history, spinning and hopping on little black and brown feet and yelping and hollering with the boys shirtless and the girls wearing floral-patterned homemade dresses called guams and dancing because, to them, the snow is something to celebrate.

Until the previous wet season the temperature had never fallen below sixty degrees Fahrenheit and during October, when there were eight days of fifty-degree temperatures, the Marshall Islands made international news with headlines like “Cool Weather in the Boiling Pacific?” and the major networks from America, the U.K. and Australia sent their reporters and camera crews for the first time since the nuclear bombs were tested eighty years before. And now, with the snow, the reporters have again descended upon the nation.

One of the children is Enni’s great granddaughter, Avery, who is five years old and a bundle of nonstop energy and funny faces and tantrums, with scrawny brown arms and legs and straight black hair stretching past her shoulder blades. The girl has started kindergarten at the Seventh Day Adventist school, a feat made possible by Enni’s granddaughter Curritha, who works for the Marshallese government and was owed a favor.

An uncomfortable chasm stirs inside Enni’s stomach and rumbles in her chest. She has been told the snow is a natural occurrence spawned by the unnatural chain reaction of climate change but this information conflicts with what she has experienced, probably because when Enni last saw snow she was dancing like the children before her with her friends and siblings and cousins leaping and stomping about the sand on the atoll of Rongelap and opening their mouths to catch the flakes, except that the flakes had not been related to snow and had been anything but cold.

*

Wearing a guam with ocean blue tidal patterns and a light jacket, Enni sits legs splayed on the tiled living room floor, holding a maze of pandanus vines that she is weaving into the shape of a marlin measuring twenty inches across. Beneath her hamstring an itch dances down her leg along the scars, the memories of pain and death calling out to her as though with harmless teasing. She glues an opaque blue button to the marlin’s eye and ties off the last strand of the tail.

Despite the cold, Enni puts on a pair of socks and tennis shoes and slips the marlin and a handful of smaller items she has weaved into a plastic sack and takes the twenty-minute walk to the Island’s End handicrafts store with smoke billowing from barbecues and trash-burning fires and the friendly playful shouts of children and others ricocheting from the corner of each block. There, at Island’s End, knowing the markup on the items will be a hundred dollars, Enni sells her work for a total of forty dollars and buys some canned vegetables and apples at the grocery store and a blueberry-cheese Danish at a bakery.

It’s miserably cold, she thinks. The total opposite of the miserably hot that the islands are known for. So cold, in fact, that it pinches the bone.

On her walk home she sees the Stanley boy, dark and skinny and shirtless and his hair unwashed, sitting and slouching on a broken concrete porch and looking on as another boy holds a cheap smart phone with a spider web of a cracked screen and when she strolls toward him the Stanley boy’s eyes betray fear and the unknown and the need for food.

“Yakwe,” she says, using the Marshallese greeting.

“Yakwe,” the boys say.

“Is your mother home?” Enni asks.

“She’s inside,” the Stanley boy says.

Enni regards the boy’s words and pulls the Danish from the paper sack and hands it to him.

“This is for you,” she says. “You can share.”

“Thank you,” he says innocently, unwrapping the Danish and tearing it in half and taking a massive bite as he hands the other boy his piece.

She holds the paper sack of groceries towards the Stanley boy. “Can you give this to her?”

“Yes,” he says. “Thank you.”

Enni knows she can’t give the boy a Danish every day and she considers the needs of all the others on the islands and how they have suffered through the years, not only with food but from diabetes and cancer and diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy, which people say does not exist in America, and the boy returns her warm grin.

*

Enni often wonders why she and not her siblings lived to an old age. At the time of Bravo she was eight years old, the second oldest of five children, with her brother Henos her elder by one year and her younger siblings one year apart from each other. She had especially been fond of the youngest, five-year-old Nering, who wore her hair in two pigtails and had a cute leaf-shaped birthmark on her cheek and followed Enni everywhere with a cute hop to her step. She remembers how Henos could mimic, almost to perfection, the peculiar sounds of the dogs, birds, pigs and chickens in their neighborhood.

Everything had been perfect. Before the bomb. Before the sand-colored fissile flurries swirled to the beach on Rongelap and before Enni and her parents and siblings suffered burns and fell sick and the lesions appeared on their skin and the invaders in alien suits descended and transported them to the hospital.

She remembers lying in a bed with children surrounding her in adjacent beds and the air smelling of rubbing alcohol and other antiseptics and nurses sauntering back and forth and exiting through thick white curtains and returning. She was told that Henos and Nering and her parents were being treated at another location because of their burns and that a priest would visit her and soon a short brown balding man of around forty, with a nose that reminded Enni of a Count Dracula puppet the missionaries had used in their puppet shows, walked in wearing a blue collared shirt and khaki pants.

“Yakwe,” he said warmly. “I’m Joe.”

“Are you the priest?” Enni asked, her eyes skeptical.

“Yes, I am,” Joe said.

“Catholic?” she asked.

He nodded.

“My mom said not to talk to Catholic priests,” she said.

Joe laughed. “Your mother sounds like a wise woman.”

Although he spoke fluent Marshallese, Enni thought he looked similar to some of the missionaries who had visited before.

“Maybe you’d like to know where I’m from,” Joe said, picking up on her curiosity. “I’m from the Philippines. Believe it or not, it has even more islands than the Marshall Islands.” He looked at the beds and other children and was overcome with a solemn expression and cleared his throat. “How are you feeling?”

Enni didn’t immediately respond but her eyes, tired and despondent, answered for her. “When can we go home?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

“Did you see my brother and sister?” she asked. “Or my mom and dad?”

He gently shook his head. “The authorities wouldn’t let me.”

“What does a priest do?” Enni asked after a pause.

“Well, a good priest does a lot of things,” Joe said. “One thing they do is pray. And I’m going to be praying for you. But I don’t need to be your priest. I just want to be your friend. Is that okay?”

Enni thought about it and after a few seconds she looked up and nodded. When they finished talking he spoke to the other children as well and after he left she heard him arguing in English and raising his voice with the doctors and scientists in the area behind the curtains.

A minute later the Americans in alien protective suits rolled in trays of needles and tweezers and other shiny instruments. The lesions stung like hot pokers as the doctors prodded with the metallic pointed ends and the lesions on the back of her leg were especially painful and a man asked her repeatedly if it hurt and she said yes so often that she began to say it before the question was asked.

“What about now?” they asked.

“Yes,” she said, trembling.

“And now?”

“Yes,” she said, stifling a sob.

She closed her eyes.

A crash of metal.

When Enni opened her eyes she saw Joe standing beside the bed, confronting the man in the suit. Scissors, knives and other metallic objects were strewn across the floor.

“Get out!” Joe said. “Leave this girl alone!”

The people in the suits paused, then traipsed toward the curtains and exited.

*

Enni busies herself in the kitchen, preparing dinner, with rice steaming and a pound of fish sizzling in a large black frying pan and the cut pandanus fruit radiating yellow-orange Phoenix-like flames. She minces an onion and chops up a tomato and some celery and tosses the pieces in with the fish and stirs while pouring salt and pepper. She thinks of her daughter Ricina, who lives in Hawai`i and teaches second grade, and how she would like to see her again.

When her granddaughter Curritha comes home from work Enni scoops some rice into a bowl and adds some fish and vegetables and sets the bowl on the dining room table. Curritha sits down and sighs. She makes a separate bowl for Curritha’s husband Dyron, who works the late shift for the energy company and usually makes a quiet return home near midnight.

“How did it go?” Enni asks.

Curritha gives a gentle shake of the head. “No new compact. No funding. No apology.”

The Marshallese government, or Nitijela, is negotiating a new Compact of Free Association with the U.S. The original agreement established U.S. funding for education and healthcare and other vital needs for the Marshallese people following the nuclear tests.

“It takes time,” Enni says. “It’s always like that.”

Curritha grabs a fork and takes a bite of fish.

“Thanks for dinner, Grandma,” Curritha says. Enni pours filtered rainwater from a plastic jug into a glass and sets it in front of Curritha. “They want to give as little as they can. They’re stuck in the Eighties. Disciples of Reagan. He said we were getting too much.”

Enni prepares two small bowls of food for Avery and William and calls them to come eat and in a minute Avery skips into the dining room, followed by her six-year-old brother.

“Can we eat in the living room?” Avery asks.

“No!” Curritha says. Enni offers a glance that encourages tolerance. “Okay. But don’t make a mess, or you’ll be the ones cleaning it up.”

Enni sits down beside Curritha and eats from her own bowl.

“If we reach a deal, I might have to go to Kwajalein,” Curritha says.

There’s a pause while they eat.

“What’s the U.S. envoy like?” Enni asks.

Curritha shrugs. “She seems nice. Says the right things. But our problem is D.C. It’s like they’re allergic to apologies. What’s so hard about apologizing? It wouldn’t cost them anything, but it would go a long way. It would mean something to us.” She stops eating, looks at Enni. “Wouldn’t it mean something to you?”

Enni thinks about it and looks into her bowl of food. She suddenly stops, looking up. “I won’t know until it happens.”

*

At nine o’clock Curritha orders the children to bed and they patter barefoot to their rooms, except for Avery, who grabs Enni’s hand and looks up at her imploringly.

“Grandma, tell me another story,” she says in a secretive voice. “One with Letao.”

Stories of Letao, the trickster in Marshallese folklore, would make it difficult for most children to sleep but since the first story Enni told Avery about him the girl can’t seem to get enough of the character’s mischievous ways.

“Let’s wait until the weekend,” Enni says.

“You said that last time,” Avery whines.

“I did?” Enni asks, wondering if her brain has fogged up again or if the girl has borrowed a trait or two from Letao.

“Yes,” Avery whines emphatically.

“Why not a story about Lijakkwe?” Enni asks, referring to the legend of a beautiful woman.

“No!” Avery says. “Letao!”

Hand in hand, Avery leads Enni into a small dorm-sized room with a wooden ceiling. Two twin beds separated by four feet of space lie against the opposite walls. Avery slips into bed, pulling the blankets up to her shoulders as Enni closes the door and sits beside her. The overhead light is dim, lending a gothic quality to a story that needs few props. Because Curritha doesn’t approve of such stories, Enni speaks in a low and steady voice, retelling the story of Letao and the King of Kiribati and how the king wanted Letao to show him his secret of cooking food in an earthen pit and how, while preparing the pit, Letao convinced the king to crawl into it and the king was cooked as part of the meal.

When Enni finishes telling the story Avery’s pupils are dilated, her eyes wide with astonishment.

“Why did Letao do that?” she asks.

“There is no why with Letao,” Enni says. “It’s his nature.”

“But what did the king do to him?” Avery asks.

“He didn’t have to do anything to him,” Enni says. “No one can trust Letao. He is very, very tricky.”

Avery asks another question, and another, but Enni has no answers.

This is what I get for my granddaughter going to the Seventh Day Adventist School, Enni thinks. Marshallese children are supposed to go to sleep when the story ends, not ask questions. That’s something American children do.

“Good night,” Enni says, giving her great-granddaughter’s hand a final squeeze.

“Good night, Grandma,” Avery says.

On her way out Enni turns off the light and closes the door.

*

Enni sits on the back pew of the Cathedral of the Assumption, gazing forward. Green wooden rafters adorn the ceiling as a dark brown Christ stretches on the centered Cross along an ivory-colored wall in front. There’s no one else in the sanctuary. Enni has believed in God before but sometimes her doubts overwhelm her and she loses focus, refraining from both church and Bible for months. More than anything, she appreciates the church’s peace and quiet.

After several minutes of sitting and thinking she rises from the pew, her mind calm and body relaxed, and she peruses the name plates of former priests in the entrance lobby and finds the one of Joe Bong. She visits it often and even though she has read his biography many times before she reads it again, reminded of his life’s details and service to the Marshallese people.

Enni recalls Joe visiting her when she was fourteen, just before the first of her surgeries. She lay in a hospital bed, waiting for the nurse to prep her. The doctors had found a lump in her leg. She would have nine additional lumps—and as many surgeries—in the years following.

“How are you feeling?” Joe said.

As usual she didn’t answer such a question but her eyes reflected fear.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” Joe said.

He waited, determined not to do all the talking.

“Why is it okay?” Enni asked.

“Fear rears its head either when we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, “or when we know what’s going to happen but we resist it.”

After a moment she asked, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“So you’ve identified the source of your fear,” Joe said.

“What do I do if I don’t want to be afraid?” Enni asked.

“Unfortunately, there’s not a magical remedy,” Joe said. “Not for most people. It’s part of our biology.” Joe leaned closer to her and spoke in a lower voice. “You want to know what I do?” Enni answered yes with a flick of her eyebrows. “When I feel afraid, I find someone I’m close to, and I share my fears with them. Then I ask them to pray for me, and I hold their hands for a while. When the visit is over, I squeeze their hands to let them know I love them.”

Enni responded with a calm but perplexed expression. “Does the fear go away?”

“Sometimes,” Joe said. “But even when it doesn’t, I always feel better.”

Slowly, Enni offered Joe her hand. “Will you squeeze my hand?”

“You know I will,” Joe said and took her hand.

*

The next day school is cancelled and the clouds hang stubbornly in the sky and the children hop and prance in the lush white snow that hasn’t been swallowed by the surf, some running barefoot with their feet stomping in the snow and kicking through it and slipping and falling down, laughing at each other and themselves.

Wearing a thick sweater and pants, Enni watches from the back porch as Avery and another girl build a snowman using two pandanus fruits for eyes, a small rock for a nose and a row of seashells for a mouth.

“Grandma, look!” Enni says. “We named him Letao!”

Enni laughs. Then she sees a boy with folded arms flapping like a chicken as he mocks another boy and then several boys are throwing snowballs at each other and soon the smaller Stanley boy slips down on one knee, holding the side of his head and crying. Enni stands up and walks briskly toward the boy and when she reaches him she examines the side of his head and finds no blood or bruising and she puts her hand on the boy’s back and consoles him with the soft words of someone who has seen worse and knows the essence of pain and the truths and insight that follow in its path.

“He hit me with a rock,” the boy says between sobs.

“That was a mean trick,” Enni says. “I’m sorry.”

Enni helps him to his feet, the boy trembling as they amble to his house. When they reach the front door his crying stops and Enni asks him to sit down and as she accompanies him on the mottled porch she asks for the name of the boy who threw the snowball and he tells her.

“I hate him!” the boy says.

“You don’t hate him,” Enni says. “You’re angry. You’re hurting. I’ll talk to your mother about what happened but you have to forgive him.”

“What do you mean, ‘forgive?’” the boy asks.

“It means to let go. Don’t remind him of what he did or try to get even.”

“But he needs to pay!” the boy says.

“That is for your parents to decide,” Enni says. “Now come here.”

The boy relents and Enni takes him into her arms and strokes his head as he wails, his tears flowing onto her hands but she makes no effort to dry them or wipe them away. After a few minutes she diverts the boy’s attention, asking him about school and his hobbies and which creation stories he has heard and that someday, if he has time, she’ll tell him a story about a Marshallese legend like Letao or Lijakkwe. Then they enter the house through the door and she tells his mother about the incident, entrusting the matter to the other woman.

*

When Enni returns home, she sits on the floor and begins weaving a new design—a sea turtle—and as she weaves she ponders her advice to the Stanley boy and how, when she was younger, anger consumed her like the dancing serpentine flames of a bonfire.

For the remainder of his life Joe kept in touch, visiting her at least once a year and always offering some form of insight either through Scripture or psychology. When she was in her mid-twenties she learned that Joe had been diagnosed with cancer and would be having surgery in Honolulu so she took a flight to the city and stayed with relatives.

She visited Joe in the hospital before the surgery as he had done for her, his face lighting up when he saw her. He sat up and took her hand.

“How is my girl?” he asked in Marshallese.

“I’m okay,” she said. “The real question is, How are you?”

“And you should know me well enough to know that that is a rhetorical question,” Joe said. “I am as good as I’ve ever been. No matter what happens or doesn’t happen, it is well with my soul. And that is my wish for you.”

Enni tried to smile but failed and looked down at the floor.

“Talk to me,” Joe said. “I won’t judge you. That’s always been our own compact.” He paused. “Are you revisiting the past?”

Enni cleared her throat and looked at him. “I’m still angry.”

Joe nodded. “And you have the right to be. Almost anyone would be angry if they had lost what you lost and suffered as you have. But you don’t have to be like everyone else. If you remain angry long enough, the anger turns to bitterness. And if you stay bitter long enough, the bitterness turns to poison. In a way, it is like cancer. Cancer of the soul.” He squeezed her hand, looking intently at her with the energy that remained. “Enni, please don’t give in to bitterness. Don’t hang on to that pain. Free yourself from the past. Focus on the here and now.”

Enni nodded. “Okay.”

Joe relaxed, his face awash with peace. He survived the surgery but died four years later.

*

The next day the clouds give way to blue sky and the snow melts into sludge with the refuse streaming into the ocean from the beach. Then at dusk the frosty chill returns like a restless ghost and after dinner the people of Majuro emerge from their houses and Enni watches as the residents of the Uliga section of town build a towering bonfire with rotten furniture and broomsticks and discarded wood and warped books and anything that will burn. The fire warms the people and the children jump and dance and shriek because even though they have been bitten by the cold they have rediscovered warmth, just as some in their lineage have been cleansed of cancer from the nuclear tests decades before.

*

On the final day of snow the reporters make their rounds throughout the town. Enni puts on her jacket and shoes and ambles past the trees to the beach. The kids are in school and the locals appear less in awe of the snow, with few people outside.

As the white flakes tumble to the sand Enni becomes aware of a thin woman with long strawberry blonde hair sitting on her haunches and collecting snowflakes in a small green plastic container. She is dressed in blue jeans and wears a heavy nylon University of Hawai`i jacket.

Enni approaches her and says hello in English and the woman introduces herself as Sherri Kowalski, an environmental science researcher with the University of Hawai`i.

“You like the snow?” Enni asks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kowalski says with interest. “That’s why I’m collecting it. To see what’s in it. We want to run some tests.”

“What do you think the tests will find?” Enni asks.

“We’re not sure. That’s the big question.”

This time when Sherri looks at Enni a crease forms between her eyebrows. “You look familiar. I’ve seen you in a newspaper or magazine. Oh my . . .” Sherri stands. “Are you the Bravo survivor?”

“Yes,” Enni says, smiling.

Sherri suddenly stiffens and stands in her tracks and she looks up and grasps the contradiction of snow and radioactive ash and ponders Enni’s suffering many decades before and her eyes gloss over.

“You saw this before, but …” Sherri says. “But it wasn’t snow.” She reaches her hands around Enni’s shoulders and embraces her tenderly. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” Enni says. “It was a long time ago. I’ve released my grudges.”

“I don’t think I could be as forgiving,” Sherri said.

As Enni thinks about it, she holds out her hand and a snowflake sways into her palm. She watches as it turns to water and a grin tugs at the corners of her lips.

“I had a good teacher,” she says.

She scans the ocean and its hard cold blue. Whether or not the waters will one day rise and cover the islands or if the islands should freeze or if the Marshallese should suffer any other calamities she feels an awesome fearlessness that has ripened in her old age and she wonders if she would have gleaned it if not for the tragedy of her childhood.

Enni regards Sherri tranquilly. “It is well with my soul,” she says.

 

Darren Dillman teaches writing at San Carlos Apache College in Arizona. He has also taught in China and in the Marshall Islands. He grew up in New Mexico and earned a doctoral degree in creative writing from Western Sydney University. He’s the author of the novel, The Preacher (David C Cook Publishing, 2009). His short fiction has appeared in roughly a dozen journals, including Shenandoah, Tulane Review, George Washington Review, and The Laurel Review.