UNDER THE
HAU TREE
by
Katherine Yates
THE woman was stringing scarlet wili-wili seeds into a barbaric necklace. The man was tossing over a basket of unmounted kodak prints, with now and then a perfunctory comment. The drooping branches of the hau tree shut out the glare of the late afternoon sun, and the fluttering leaves were backgrounded by a purple-blue horizon from which long lines of white surf came rolling in, curling nearer and nearer until they washed softly up the sand to the very foot of the hau tree, and then slid silently back beneath the oncoming white edge just behind. Four or five wee, tawny Hawaiian children had gathered under the shoreward end of the pier where, with much giggling and splashing, they had discarded their holokus and overalls and were paddling joyously in the clear water, carefully out of range of the hotel office.
The man continued to toss over the prints idly. Suddenly he stopped and bent forward over one of them with a gasp of astonishment. "Where did you get that?" he exclaimed, turning quickly upon the woman.
She glanced up from her beads. "I took it," she said carelessly.
"No, no, I mean this one!" and he thrust the picture almost into her face.
"Certainly. I see," she said, still carelessly. "I said that I took it—photographed it."
"You couldn't have." The man's eyes, full of incredulity, stared at her and then at the picture, and then back at her again.
She nodded her head. "I did," she said.
"When did you take it?" he asked harshly.
"When? Oh, about three weeks ago, the morning they went away." The woman tied the thread of the necklace and then wrapped the long line of red around and around her white throat like three scarlet gashes.
The man leaned nearer. "Here? They were here?"
"Yes. See, they posed under that coconut tree over there, the one with the monstera vine swinging down."
The man turned and gazed at the tree and at the great leaves of the swinging, swaying vine, and his finger touched the picture where the same giant spray swayed over the heads of the two. His face showed utter incredulity.
