“Anchor Stone” by Hiroki Morinoue.

[1]

One morning, reading the paper, she hears mango fall. An abrupt snap of release, a rustling descent through thick leaves, a thud that sounds too heavy, a bounce, a settling in the underbrush. She walks outside to fetch it. The sun on her face feels strong for so early in the day. The ground is already warm.

Yellow-and-orange fruit, bright as flame. Before now, she has seen them only in Mexico, much smaller. This one’s as big as a softball but oddly shaped, a roundness radiating from a flattened axis, “oblong” too ordinary a word for such an eccentric variation. Spheroid? Ellipsoid? Ovoid? It looks like a swollen comma.

A thick drop of sap oozes from the broken stem, leaving a shiny trail on the skin, sticky on her fingertips. Up in the tree is a spectacle of mass ripening—mangoes in every phase of change, like maple leaves in autumn, turning from dark green to crimson to orange to banana-skin yellow. She remembers a maple tree a few blocks away from her childhood home. Whenever she mentions it, nobody believes her. No one can conceive of a maple tree in Los Angeles, an autumn in Southern California.

Mosquitoes attack her ankles, sending her back inside. Fortunately Hawaiian mosquitoes are small, leaving minor bites that stop itching after a fewminutes. Their California counterparts raised lumps she would scratch for hours.

In the kitchen she rinses off the dirt, peels the skin and eats the orange fruit down to the seed like corn off a cob, rotating it while chewing, leaning over the sink, juice dripping from her chin and fingers. It is the most accommodating fruit she has ever eaten, with no major obstacles on the path to gratification. Easy to peel, no fibers to pull off, no pulp or seeds to spit out, nothing to pick from between her teeth, only juicy, creamy fruit, sweeter than the ripest peach or plum.

She closes her hand over the flat-sided seed, template for the fully mature shape, the maximum swelling of flesh. This is the seed of the fruit from the tree in the yard of the cottage she lucked into, a complete but tiny house, further dwarfed by the mango tree, its branches partially covering one side of the roof. A bonsai house, well-kept, where she will remain in her recently reduced circumstances as long as the landlord allows. Forty-two, divorced, childless, adjusting to solitude, her old life has been cut away, all the people and places, and a new one grows from what’s left. She knows it will not be the same, but she doesn’t know how it’s going to be different.

Her first mango, and one is all it takes. The rash appears within twenty-four hours, on the undersides of her wrists. Lumpy, unbearably itchy, it reminds her of poison oak—a curse she thought she’d left behind. Scratching makes it worse, possibly even spreads it, but not scratching is unthinkable. When it comes to poison oak (and whatever she’s picked up now), she has no self-control and wants none.

It crawls up her forearms. Before she wises up it’s in the hollows of her ankles where she scratched the mosquito bites, and on her neck and forehead. On hot nights it spreads down her thighs in a red wave of swollen, sweating flesh. The itching leaves her sleepless and cranky. At work she is unable to concentrate.With people, impatient and distracted. Alone at home, sorry for her miserable self.

She suffers for a week while the poison runs its course. In feverish darkness, she ponders her complicity in visiting such a plague on her body. If there are no accidents, which she believes is true at some level of consciousness, then why did she do this to herself? If there is a God, then what sin has she committed to deserve such a punishment? Is this a down payment on the price of paradise?

Unlike the apple of Eden, the mango of Kaimukī presents an opportunity to keep on sinning long after the last bite has been consumed. The mango’s deepest, most irresistible temptation is not to eat but to scratch. Without hesitation she will yield. For a minute’s relief in the here and now, she will willingly trade hours of future torment. She scratches her skin until it bleeds.

In the yard, mangoes fall. Three or four a day, more overnight. She leaves them all to rot. She walks among her fallen, decaying crop, savoring her obstinate refusal to harvest. The air is black with fruit flies. Cockroaches the size of toy cars join worms and beetles at the sweet feast. Up in the trees, birds raise a ruckus while pecking holes in the ripening fruit.Over the fence, from her neighbors’ yard, an ingenious apparatus appears and hovers in the branches, a long bamboo stalk with a wire-rimmed canvas pocket at the end, big enough to hold two or three mangoes, designed to pluck them before they fall and pull them away to more eager, more likely rash-immune, arms. Rape of the mangoes. Sole eyewitness declines to notify authorities.

Raw, itchy, angry, she refuses to touch another mango. Coated with a flaking crust of calamine and scabrous flesh, she stays inside. She has not been expelled from the garden, she’s boycotting it. She’s on strike against God.

[2]

“Invisible Water” by David Hamma. Both from the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

A year later she’s back on the job, this time with a better attitude. Armed with information and the proper tools. She has questioned her neighbors and friends at work. Searched the Kaimukī Library. Queried the Net. Learned her lesson.

It turns out the mango is related to poison oak. The irony does not escape. The house she last lived in was at the edge of a wood she rarely entered for fear of poison oak. Inches off the trails, easy to spot but hard to avoid, it grew everywhere in Portola Valley, a dangerous bush proliferating beneath live oak and bay laurel trees for miles at a stretch.

Even if she managed to prevent the leaves from touching her skin, she would invariably pick up the oil from her clothing or the fur of her dog. She always had a run of the rash somewhere on her body, but she never learned to live with it. She heard that as Portola led his troops over the Santa Cruz Mountains way back when, some burned the shrub in their campfires, inhaled the poison and died horrible deaths.

She learns that her tree is not a Haden or Pirie (two local favorites) but a hybridwhich, by an act of genetic serendipity, produces fruit as desirable as that of either variety.

She figures it’s the sap that gave her the rash, that she’s not allergic to the leaves of the tree, the pollen from the flowers, or the skin or meat of the ripe fruit. Blisters did not bloom on her lips after she ate it. All she needs to do, she is certain, is avoid touching the sap.

Thus her outfit: Tennis shoes. Old blue jeans tucked into the tops of white athletic socks. Heavy-duty rubber gloves pulled over the cuffs of a long-sleeve denim work shirt. Red bandanna rolled and worn as a sweatband around her forehead. Exposed skin on face and neck covered withmosquito repellent. Baseball cap.

Her tools: An aluminum ladder to get her up on the roof, where she has access to the upper branches of the tree, and a homemade mango-picker modeled after her neighbors’ stealth grabber. Getting the bamboo was not easy. The commercial fishing-rod poles weren’t long enough. She ended up cutting her own, a twelve-foot stalk, in a bamboo forest on Mount Tantalus, strictly legal, with a permit from the Forestry Division to show on demand.

She’s outfitted, armed and ready to go.

The harvest never comes.

Mango trees are supposed to fruit between March and October, but on hers nothing happens.Months pass, red new leaves turn to green, flowers bloom and pollen dusts the air, but no buds show. She asks her neighbors, what’s the problem? They say, it happens. You never know, sometimes a mango tree skips a year or two.

[3]

In year three, the early signs are favorable. In January, tiny green buds appear in the tree. She goes up on the roof to get a closer look. She can’t imagine what she’ll do with all these mangoes. There must be hundreds of them.

Early in February, the trade winds rise. They blow day and night, pummeling her thin-walled house, relentlessly clanging the neighbors’ wind chimes, flapping loose gates, rolling wayward trash cans down the street, jarring the local dog network into barking fits. One night, awake after a chaotic, wind-driven dream, she hears a small object hit the roof, roll down the slope and plunge into silence.

It’s not until the next night, after hearing it repeated several times, that she realizes what’s making the sound. The winds are blowing the buddingmangoes off the tree.

The next morning she sees them scattered all over the yard. Climbs to the roof and finds more in the rain gutter. Perfect, comma-shaped miniatures the size of golf balls. She is definitely losing her mangoes. At this rate, she calculates with a rush of panic, they will soon be totally gone. She feels like a woman going bald.

In the same way she used to worry about her failed marriage, she wonders if it’s her fault. Are the young mangoes unable to withstand the winds because she didn’t water the tree enough? Because she watered too much? Should she have, as one neighbor suggested, fed the tree some fertilizer? Is there some elixir she doesn’t know about, available from an obscure garden supplier, that toughens up mango stems the way gelatin fortifies fingernails? Back in India, home of the mango, is some prayer or ritual act performed during a significant phase of the tree’s annual cycle?

By day, in frustration, she rakes up the fallen embryos. At night she cringes at the terrible falling sounds. But she can’t stop the process. The winds blow for weeks, and finally she concedes. This year there will be no harvest. And this year is her last chance.

Uncomfortable as a talker to plants, she decides to write the tree a letter. She composes it on the computer, then handwrites the final draft. It is an apology (O mango, abundantly leafy yet fruitless, forgive me if I have inadvertently or neglectfully done you harm), a farewell (For I am out of here, as the house has been sold and I have been notified to vacate the premises in sixty days) and a warning: I gravely urge you to prepare for a shock far worse than the still-gusting Cruel Winds of February. The landlord tellsme that our new owners intend to prune you in a most extreme manner, reducing your farthest reaching branches to mere stubs, sparing only your life, allowing you to grow back but never again to such house- and yard-dwarfing proportions.

She addresses the envelope “MANGO” and delivers the letter personally, affixing it to the tree’s trunk with a push pin. She stores the stepladder under the house, rakes up the fallen buds a final time and turns her attention from the tree.

She spends less time at home, leaving for work an hour earlier each morning to give herself free time for afternoon house-hunting. The effort is discouraging. She soon gives up looking only for a house with a mango tree in the yard, admits it’s asking too much. But she stands firm on her refusal to live in a high-rise.

soon gives up looking only for a house with a mango tree in the yard, admits it’s asking too much. But she stands firm on her refusal to live in a high-rise.

Weeks pass. A month before moving day, she is no closer to finding a new home. The winds fall. Calm is restored to the neighborhood and her dreams. On a sunny morning in mid-March, she hears a familiar sound. It can’t be, but it sounds like a mango falling. She goes outside to check.

She finds the newly fallen fruit among several others in various stages of consumption and decay. Above, the tree is filled with ripening mangoes. How could this be happening? She watched this season’s mangoes die an early death. Are these new ones, or buds she failed to notice that escaped the winds? It doesn’t matter. She has thirty days to reap the harvest.

[4]

For the next month, mangoes are her life. Gathering, processing and distribution take hours a day. Every morning before work, every evening before dinner, she’s busy with mangoes. She can’t skip a day. There’s gold in the yard, and she’s compelled to mine it. Determined to make amends for prior neglect.

It becomes a ritual. First an Easter-egg hunt in the yard, a search for the bright-colored treasures concealed in the bushy green mondo grass and under the walking lily. She carries two plastic supermarket bags, one for keepers, one for throwaways. As long as she stays on top of the situation, most are keepers.

The trick is to get to the mangoes before other creatures do. Some are goners already, deeply bruised or split open on impact, perforated by bird beaks, munched by insects, swarming with fruit flies. Some can be partially salvaged. At the height of the harvest she gathers a dozen mangoes a day, just from the ground.

Up on the roof, it’s a different drill: survey the tree, check on the crop and selectively harvest. Walk along the diagonal rooftop, handpicking the fruits or netting them. She takes only the brightest colored mangoes, ripe and ready to fall, their stems easily broken with a quick tug. Some mornings she comes down the ladder with fifteen or sixteen mangoes, the bag so heavy its handholds stretch like taffy.

Still in uniform, she sets up the home processing plant. First she washes themangoes in warm, soapy water and rubs them with a sponge to remove the hardened sap.Next she rinses themand allocates each to one of three dish drainers, sorting by degrees of ripeness for later distribution to the refrigerator, paper grocery bags or production line.

The production line is the fate of fruit that can’t wait. She peels the skin and cuts most of the meat off with a knife, then takes the seed in both rubbery hands and squeezes the rest into a big bowl. She puts equal portions of slices and mash into sealable sandwich bags and transfers them to the freezer where, she has been assured, they will last for at least six months.

Every day, she eats what she can—mangoes straight, sliced mangoes with granola and milk, mangoes blended into smoothies with banana, papaya and yogurt. Still, she has hundreds more than she can ever use. Bagged by the dozen, she gives them away to neighbors, friends, people at work, the landlord, the new owners when they come by to see the house. In return, some bring her mango bread, mango jam, mango chutney, pickled mango, mango ice cream.

She keeps a mango count, enters it into her computer and views the data on pie charts and bar graphs. At the end of the harvest, she has collected four hundred forty mangoes—an average of twenty mangoes a day for a period of twenty-two days, not counting the throwaways, only two every three days. Her freezer is filled with orange baggies, room for nothing else. One shelf of her refrigerator is still occupied by ripening mangoes, down from three at the peak of the harvest. Finally the tree is empty.

The night before she leaves, she writes a farewell letter:

Dear Mango:

I and others too numerous to name would like to thank you for your abundance. Your progeny were well received by all.

I have good news. The new owners, impressed by the quality of your fruit (as personally experienced) and the extent of your seasonal yield (as witnessed in my computerassisted presentation), have decided to abandon their radical chainsaw agenda for your future. Instead, you will be trimmed only minimally, to bring your branches away from the roof and telephone lines.

I leave you in what I now believe to be good hands.

Aloha.

Her new home has no mango tree. What it has is lychee, avocado, kukui and a big patch of banana plants.

JOHN WYTHE WHITE is a frequent contributor to SPIRIT OF ALOHA. His new novel, A High and Beautiful Wave,will be published this year. “Unstill Life with Mangoes” received honorable mention in Honolulu Magazine’s fiction contest and was published in Hybolics, Bamboo Ridge Press’s Best of Honolulu and White’s Short Times in Paradise.