The Village Under the Reef

Inversion

The valley has a lid on it again. Losa Fifita feels it the moment she steps off the 217 at Redwood Road: the air tastes faintly of pennies, and the Oquirrh Mountains, which should be standing purple-brown at the end of every westbound street, are simply not there. Gray sits on the city like a pot cover. The streetlights come on at four-thirty and make yellow rooms in the haze, one per pole, and she walks from room to room with her scarf over her mouth the way her mother taught her.

January used to mean snow, her grandfather says. In 2068 it mostly means this. A week of bright cold, then the warm air slides over the top of the valley and the cold gets trapped beneath it with everything the city breathes out. The radio calls it a red air day. Her mother, who works nights on a pulmonary floor, calls it overtime.

The community hall is a low cinder-block building painted the color of a peeled mango, set back from the road behind a gravel lot and a chain-link fence where someone has woven strips of plastic into the shape of a turtle. Inside, the fluorescent lights hum over folding tables and a stack of woven mats. Somebody's aunty is mopping. The place smells of floor cleaner and, underneath it, of last Saturday's kava, earthy and peppery, soaked into the plywood stage.

"He's up there," the aunty says without looking at her. "In this air. Tell him I said he's stubborn."

"He knows," Losa says.

The roof ladder is bolted to the back wall by the dumpsters. She climbs it with her backpack swinging against her spine and pulls herself over the parapet onto the flat tar roof, which is gritty and still holds a little of the afternoon's weak warmth. Sione Fifita is sitting in a webbed lawn chair in the exact center, wearing his ferry company jacket, the navy one with the cuffs gone soft and pale. He is eighty-one. His knees are bad and his eyes are not. He is looking straight up at nothing.

"No stars," she tells him.

"There are always stars," he says. "Tonight they are behind the soup."

Around his chair, set out on the tar in a wide ring, are the eight pieces of coral. They are gray-white and pitted, each about the size of a fist, and he carried them in his luggage from the island in 2041, wrapped in T-shirts, through three airports and a customs officer who wanted to know if they were alive. They are not alive. They were the edge of the old village, the rubble that a storm threw up on the beach the year he was born. He laid them on this roof when the hall committee gave him the key, and nobody has moved them since, not the roofers, not the boys who come up here to smoke and get chased down again.

"Sit," he says. "North."

She finds the piece of coral with the notch in it and sits cross-legged beside it, facing the wrong way on purpose, toward the chair, so she can see him. North is behind her: the refinery flares and the airport, the long flat glimmer where the lake used to come closer. South is Glendale and the river and, much farther, the place where the trains go. East is the Wasatch, invisible tonight but always there, a wall of granite and late-season snow the color of old teeth.

"Tell me the houses," he says.

This is the game. His grandfather Semisi taught it to him on a beach of crushed coral with the canoes pulled up behind them, and now it is hers, on a roof above a parking lot on the west side of Salt Lake City. The horizon is a circle. The circle is divided into houses, and every star that matters rises out of one house and sets into the house across from it. If you know which star is rising where, you know where you are pointed. If you know which swell is pushing the hull, you know it even when the clouds come in. Her grandfather's version has names in it she is not supposed to write down yet, and English names he lets her use for practice.

"Antares rises there," she says, pointing southeast without turning her head. "Sets there. Sirius, east-southeast. The Cross is upright when it's due south."

"When is it upright?"

"Not from here."

He laughs, a short bark that turns into a cough. She waits for the cough to finish. It takes longer than it did at Christmas.

"Not from here," he agrees. "Here you must take my word for the bottom of the sky. Good. Again, from the west."

They go around twice. Below them a car alarm starts and stops. The aunty's mop bucket clanks against the back door. Losa's breath clouds and joins the haze, and she thinks, not for the first time, that the two of them must look ridiculous up here, an old man and a girl in a puffer jacket naming stars inside a cloud. Paige, her best friend since fourth grade, once came up and lasted twenty minutes before announcing that her toes were dying and going home. Paige was born in Murray and has never seen the ocean except once, in San Diego, from a hotel window.

"Something happened at school," her grandfather says. He does not ask. He states it, the way he used to state the fuel level.

"We got the spring project." She pulls the paper out of her backpack, though it is too dark to read. She knows it by heart anyway. "'A Place That No Longer Exists.' We have to research it, interview someone, make a presentation. Mr. Danforth says it can be anything. A building that got torn down. A town. Jaxon is doing the old mall on Redwood. Carmen's doing her grandmother's apartment in Mexico City before it got knocked down for the train. One kid's doing the part of the lake that dried up, where people used to swim."

Sione nods slowly. He is watching the place where Sirius would be.

"You know what I want to do," she says.

"I know what you want to do."

"Is that bad?"

"It isn't bad." He shifts in the chair and it creaks. "It is not small, either. A mall is a mall. Nobody's grandmother is buried in the food court."

She has never seen Kolotai. Nobody her age has, not in person. It was a village of maybe four hundred people on a low island in Ha'apai, the middle group of Tonga, a place so flat her grandfather says you could stand at the meeting green and hear the surf on both sides. The sea had been coming for a long time before it came. By the year Losa was born the families had already moved twice: first inland to the center of the island, where the ground was a meter higher and the coconut palms were older, and then, when the king tides started walking into the inland houses too, all the way south to Tongatapu, to a new settlement among the yams and the vanilla plots. They named it Kolotai Fo'ou. New Kolotai. Her aunt Mele lives there now, in a cement house with a tapa-beating shed out back.

The old village is a reef at high tide. At low tide, on the right days, you can still walk it.

"I've never been," Losa says. "That's the problem. How do I present a place I've never been?"

"Most people present places they have never been. Look at the television." He holds out his hand, palm up, and she knows what he wants. She digs out her phone, unlocks it, and gives it to him. He holds it at arm's length and squints at it as if it is a gauge reading something unlikely. "Sela put photos. Yesterday. Mele told me. I cannot find them."

"Because you're in your messages. Here." She leans over his shoulder and opens the family's space, the private one that her mother and Aunt Mele set up years ago. The home screen is a photo of the old meeting green with the band standing on it in white shirts, taken in 2026, the year her great-grandmother was first recorded for the village.

Sela's photos are at the top. Sela is twenty-two and lives in Kolotai Fo'ou and works on the fisheries boat, and last week she went north with the crew and asked them to stop at the old island at low tide. There are eleven pictures. Wet sand the color of milky coffee. Black rocks furred with weed. A line of concrete slabs tilted at angles, their edges rounded off by water. A white cross half-sunk and leaning, a plastic flower wreath gone pale pink, a shell necklace someone has looped over a headstone so the sea will not take it. In the last picture the tide is already coming back across the flat in a sheet as thin as cling wrap, and the sky behind it is a hard, clean blue that does not exist in this valley in January.

Her grandfather goes very still. He enlarges the third photo with two fingers the way she showed him at Thanksgiving, and the headstone fills the screen. LESIELI FIFITA. 1965 to 2053. His mother. Losa's great-grandmother, who died in the new village and was carried back north on a fishing boat to be buried beside her husband, because she said she would not sleep anywhere else, and nobody could argue with her even then.

"The wreath is new," he says. "Mele sent it at Christmas. Good. The stone is clean." He looks a long time. "They scrubbed the weed off. Sela did that. You see her knees in the sand there, the marks."

Losa sees them. Two shallow dents beside the stone, already filling with water in the picture.

"You should say something," she says. "Under it. So she knows you saw."

"I don't know how."

"I know you don't know how. That's why I'm here." She shows him the small box under the photo. He types with one finger, slowly, in Tongan. She can read it, mostly: Mālō, Sela. The stone looks well. Your great-grandmother would be cross that you got wet. 'Ofa atu. He reads it back three times before she lets him press the arrow.

"Now you post one," she says.

"Of what? There is nothing here."

"Of this." She takes the phone back and stands and steps out of the ring, then turns and frames it: the lawn chair, the old man in the ferry jacket, the eight pieces of their village set out on the tar in a circle under a sky with nothing in it. It is a terrible photo. The light from the parking lot makes everything orange. He is squinting. She hands it back to him to post, because that is the point, and walks him through it: the plus sign, the photo, the box. He writes, The edge of Kolotai, on the roof in Salt Lake. North is where the girl is sitting.

They are both quiet after that. Somewhere toward the freeway a train lays down its long horn, two longs, a short, a long, and the sound flattens against the inversion and comes back.

"If you do this project," he says finally, "you will have to ask the family. Not just me. Mele. Your mother. The office."

"What office?"

"The community office in Kolotai Fo'ou. They keep the village record. Who may read what, who may hear what. Some of it is for the kāinga only. Some of it is for anybody. Some of it is only for the people whose grandparents are in the graves." He hands her the phone. "You don't get to decide that alone. I don't either."

"Okay."

"It's not okay. It's going to be an argument." He grins at her, his teeth very white in the orange light. "Your aunty Mele has been waiting her whole life for a good argument about the record. You will make her very happy."

He stands, which takes time. She doesn't help him unless he asks, and he doesn't ask. He folds the chair and leans it against the parapet, then bends, slowly, and touches each of the eight pieces of coral in turn, north first, going sunwise. He has done this every time she has been on this roof with him. She has never asked why. She thinks maybe she is supposed to know without asking, and maybe she does.

At the ladder he stops and looks east, where the mountains should be.

"In the summer," he says, "you will see the Cross from Tonga. Upright. Due south."

"Grandpa. We can't afford Tonga."

"I didn't say what we could afford. I said what you will see."

He goes down first, one rung at a time, and she waits at the top with the phone lit in her hand. Under Sela's photos, a new note has appeared from her aunt, who is awake on the other side of the date line, where it is already tomorrow afternoon. Saw you both. Tell your grandfather his chair is in the wrong place, the meeting green was north of the well, not west of it. Also tell him the girl is welcome to call me. We should talk about the project. I heard.

Losa did not tell anyone in Tonga about the project. She told her mother, at six this morning, over cereal, while 'Ana was pulling on her compression socks for the night shift she had just come home from and would go back to at seven. She stares at the screen. Then she laughs out loud on the roof, because somewhere on the fourth floor of a hospital on the east bench, between one patient's oxygen and the next, her mother has already started the argument for her.

The Meeting Green

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the meeting green, the mala'e, in the middle of the village
Recorded: 14 March 2026, late afternoon, on the steps of the old store, Kolotai, Ha'apai
Speaker: Lesieli Fifita, aged 61
Recorded by: Mele Fifita, her granddaughter, aged 16
Transcribed and put into English by: Mele Fifita, checked by her father, Sione Fifita
May be read by: anyone the family invites. Lesieli said this one may also go outside the family, "because a green is for everybody, that is what a green is for."

---

Is it on? The little light. Good. Then I begin, and you don't interrupt me, Mele, you write down your questions and ask them after.

This is the meeting green of Kolotai. I am sitting on the step of the store where Siaosi sells flour and tinned fish and the cold drinks when the generator is working, which today it is not. In front of me is the green. It is the shape of a breadfruit leaf, wide in the middle, with points at both ends, and the grass is short because the pigs keep it short and the boys cut it with machetes on Saturday when somebody important is coming. Behind it is the hall, which used to be blue and now is the color of the sky on a morning when it can't decide. On the east side the big tamarind. On the west side the dancing ground, which is the same ground, but you call it a different name when there is dancing.

You asked me to tell what happens here. Everything happens here. That is the short answer, you can put that at the top if you want.

When I was small, smaller than you, we did not have the hall. We had the green and the tamarind and a shelter with a roof of sago palm thatch. The men's kava was under the shelter. The women's mats were on the grass. When the boats came from Lifuka with the government man, he stood under the tamarind so he would not burn, and everybody sat facing him on the grass, and when he spoke too long the children went to sleep on their mothers' legs. I went to sleep on my mother's legs many times. I remember the smell of her skirt, the coconut oil and the smoke. I remember the ants that lived under the tamarind, the small red ones that bite like gossip.

You want the band. I know you want the band, your face is saying band.

Every village worth anything had a brass band. Kolotai had a good one. Not the best. Pangai was the best, they had money and new horns. But we had Pita Mahe on the euphonium and he was better than anyone in Pangai, I will say that on the record. The horns came on a ship before the war, the big war, from a man who had them in a school hall in New Zealand and did not need them anymore. By my time half of them were dented and the valves stuck when it was humid, which is always. The boys oiled them with coconut oil. You could smell the band before you could hear it.

They practiced on the green in the evening. Six o'clock, when the sun went down behind the hall and the heat came off the ground. You would be in your house cooking and you would hear them start, the tuba first, breathing like a cow, and then the cornets finding the note one by one, never at the same time. Then an old slow tune, then a march, then something from the radio that the young ones wanted. Old Pita would shout at them. "Breathe from the belly! You are playing with your mouth like a fish!" Every night the same. Every night we laughed.

When a ship came in, the band went down to the beach and played it in. When somebody died, they played the body from the house to the green to the graves, very slowly, so slowly you thought they would never get there, and the horns sounded like crying. When somebody important was married, they played until the generator ran out of fuel and then they kept playing in the dark. I married your grandfather on this green, 1984, and the band played for us, and the euphonium was so loud my mother said she would need a new pair of ears.

Write that down: my mother said she needed new ears.

The lakalaka. You will have to tell people outside what that is, because they will think it is like their dancing, and it is not. The lakalaka is standing. Rows of us, men on one side, women on the other side, everybody in their best, the ta'ovala around the waist, the women's hair oiled. We don't move our feet much. The story is in the arms and in the voices. A man of the village makes the poem, and then the poem is sung in parts, many parts, the men low, the women high, and some of the old women in the middle making a sound that I cannot tell you how to make, you have to grow up next to it. When the parts come together it is like the reef when the tide turns, all the water going one way at last.

We danced the lakalaka on this green for the centenary of the constitution, I think it was, or one of the kings' birthdays. I was in the second row. I was so afraid I would forget the hand for the word for "fish" that I watched my aunty's hands the whole time instead of looking at the people, and I didn't forget. Afterwards they gave us food on the green, so much food, the pigs from the umu laid out on the long mats, the yams, the lu with the coconut cream running out, the fish raw with lime and coconut. The children ate first under the tamarind and then ran away to the beach before anybody could make them help.

What else. The election. When they came to talk about the vote, they talked on the green. When the cyclone came in the year your mother was born, the green was where we put the sheets of roofing iron that blew off the houses, so the owners could come and find their own. Every sheet was bent in a different way and people knew their sheets like they knew their children. "That one is mine. You can see where my husband hit it with the axe." It took three days.

The court was here too, the small court. If somebody's pig went into somebody else's garden. If somebody's son said something to somebody's daughter. Everybody sat on the grass and the old men decided under the tamarind. My father was one of the old men by then. He was a fair man and a slow one. People said, if you want a fast answer, don't do your wrong thing in front of Fifita.

You are asking about the water.

All right. I will say about the water, since you are recording.

When I was a girl the high tide stopped at the beach. You could stand on the green and see the sea between the houses, but it was out there, where it belonged. Then about twenty years ago, maybe more, the big tides started to come in on the full moon at the beginning of the year. The king tides, the radio calls them. The first time, the water came up the path from the beach and lay in the low part at the north end of the green, just a little, the shape of a fish. The children played in it. Everybody laughed. Then every year it came a little further. Now in January and February the north point of the green is wet for a few days and the grass there has gone yellow and the pigs won't eat it because of the salt. The tamarind is still all right. The tamarind is on the high side.

Siaosi says the green is moving south. He means the dry part. He says it like a joke. It is not a joke.

The young men from the government came last year with their poles and measured. They put a metal pin in the step of the hall, there, you can see it, with numbers. They said the numbers to the town officer and the town officer said them to us on the green. He said maybe the families will have to go to the middle of the island, in time. He said in time. I asked how much time. He didn't know. Nobody knew. Some of the old men got angry. Some of them got up and walked to the beach and stood looking at the water like they were going to tell it off. One of the women started singing, very quietly, one of the old songs, and then other people joined, and then the meeting was finished, because you cannot have a meeting when the women are singing like that.

That was also on the green. So you see, everything happens here.

I want to say one more thing and then you can ask.

You young ones will go away. I know you will. You will go to Auckland and Sydney and America. Your father is already talking about the ferries in other places, and he is the best engineer in Ha'apai, even if I am the one saying it. That's fine. That's what people do. My grandmother's brother went to Fiji in a boat with a sail and came back with a wife and a set of iron cooking pots. But when you are far, and somebody asks you, "Where are you from?", I want you to see this. Not the airport. Not Nuku'alofa. This. The breadfruit-leaf shape. The tamarind. The tuba breathing like a cow at six o'clock. If you see it, it is still here, even if the water comes. That's all. I am finished. Ask your questions.

---

Questions from Mele, answered after:

Q: What was the poem for the lakalaka about?

A: The voyage of the first family who came to Kolotai, from Tongatapu, a long time ago. How they followed a bird. I don't remember all the words. Ask Tavake's mother. If she is too tired, ask Tavake.

Q: Can I record the band?

A: You can record what is left of the band. Ask them to play the slow one, the one for funerals. Tell them it is for me and they will play it properly. Tell them to breathe from the belly.

Q: Grandma, are you sad about the water?

A: (laughs) What kind of question. Turn it off. No, leave it on. I am not sad today. Today the green is dry, the boys cut the grass this morning, my granddaughter is asking me questions on a little recorder with a light. Ask me again in January.

---

Transcriber's note (Mele, 2026): I recorded the band on 21 March, the funeral march, on the green, and put the recording with this entry. Pita Mahe's grandson played the euphonium. He was breathing from the belly.

Note added 2041 (Mele): The north point of the green has been under water at every spring tide since 2038. The families moved the hall's metal roof to the inland site in 2039. The tamarind is still standing.

Note added 2052 (Mele): The tamarind came down in Cyclone Hulita. The green is now sand and weed at high tide. We have pinned the old photograph of the band, 1984, to its place on the map, at the wedding of Lesieli and Viliami Fifita, so that the tamarind is in the picture.

Branches

Aunt Mele's face arrives on the kitchen tablet at seven on a Saturday morning, which is three in the morning Sunday in Tonga, which is the only hour of the week Mele is reliably not beating bark. She has a scarf tied over her hair and her reading glasses pushed up into it, and behind her, through an open window with no glass, Losa can see a slice of dark yard, the white fluorescent tube of the tapa shed, and the moths going around it in a cloud.

"You are not asleep," Losa says.

"You are not asleep either. Where is your mother?"

"Sleeping. She worked."

"Then we talk quietly and she can be angry later."

The kitchen in the Glendale house is long and narrow, with linoleum the color of oatmeal and a window over the sink that looks onto the backyard, the chain-link, the neighbor's dead apricot tree, and beyond everything the long white shoulder of the Wasatch, out again this week after the inversion broke in a hard wind on Tuesday. The sky above the peaks is so blue it looks enameled. On the counter there is a tray of keke 'isite draining on paper towels, because Grandpa Sione cannot sleep after five anymore and has started frying dough when he can't sleep, which her mother says is the most dangerous thing a man with his blood sugar can take up.

"Tell me what you want to show," Mele says.

Losa has written it out. She reads it off her own phone, holding it below the table where her aunt can't see her hands shake. A presentation, twelve minutes, for Mr. Danforth's tenth-grade humanities class at West High. The map of Kolotai, with the places pinned. Some of the photographs. Two or three of the recorded memories, played aloud or read. The graves, at low tide, Sela's pictures. And an interview with her grandfather, which she has already started.

Mele listens without interrupting, which is worse than interrupting.

"The graves, no," she says when Losa is done.

"Why?"

"Because they are not yours."

"They're my great-grandmother's."

"Yes. And Pita Mahe's grandparents', and the Taufa family's baby, and old Fusi who had no children at all and so belongs to everybody. You want twenty-five children in Salt Lake City to look at the Taufa baby's stone with the sea coming over it. Ask Mrs. Taufa. She will tell you no faster than I did." Mele rubs her eyes. "The map, yes. The green, yes, your great-grandmother said the green was for everybody, she put that on the record herself. The well, maybe. We will ask the office."

"The office is you."

"The office is not me. The office is five people and a filing cabinet and a computer that runs off a solar panel and makes a noise like a sick goat." Mele almost smiles. "I am one of the five. I am one vote. Ask Tevita's grandmother. She is also one vote, and she votes against everything on principle."

The office is in Kolotai Fo'ou, a cement room at the end of the new village hall. Losa has seen photos of it. It keeps the whole of the record, every recording since 2026, and the paper copies Mele typed out over the years, and the boxes of photographs people brought south with them when they left the island, and the logbooks of the fishing cooperative. Each entry is marked. Some may be read by the whole world. Some may be read by anyone in the family space. Some may be read only by the descendants of the people buried in the old graves, and a few, a very few, may be read only when the person who spoke them has died, or by nobody at all until a date written on the folder. Losa knows this the way she knows about the date line: as a fact, without ever having had to stand on it.

"So I ask the office," she says.

"You write to the office. In Tongan. With good spelling." Mele's eyebrows go up. "Your Tongan spelling is how?"

"It's improving."

"It is improving from a very low place." She leans out of frame and comes back with a strip of something pale in her hands, a length of beaten bark, unpainted, translucent at the edges where it has been beaten thinnest. She holds it up to the screen. The fluorescent light shines through the fibers. "You know what this is."

"Ngatu."

"Not yet. This is feta'aki. This is the white cloth before it becomes ngatu. Look." She runs a thumb along a seam where two strips have been overlapped and pounded together. "Separately, the strips are weak. You beat them, you join them with paste from the arrowroot, you beat again, and they hold. When it's long enough, forty meters, sixty, we put it on the board with the patterns, the kupesi, under it, and we rub the dye over it so the pattern comes up from below. Then it is ngatu. Then it is something a family can give."

"Is this a metaphor?"

"It is bark," says Mele. "Everything is a metaphor if you are fifteen. Write to the office."

The video freezes on her face mid-word, then drops. The tablet shows the family's home screen: the 2026 photograph of the band on the green, the tamarind still standing in the background, its shade a dark pool on the grass.

---

Her cousin Tevita comes over at ten with a rugby ball under his arm and mud on both knees, though it has not rained since December and Losa has no idea where he found mud. He is seventeen, plays lock for the Glendale under-18s, eats like the house is on fire and thinks he is very funny, which he sometimes is.

"Grandpa's frying again," he announces from the doorway, sniffing. "Oh, no. Oh, no, he made the good kind."

"Don't," Losa says.

He has already taken two off the tray. "Hot ones are better," he says around it. "It's science."

"It's not hot. It's been sitting there since five."

"Warm ones are better. It's still science." He drops into the chair across from her and looks at the tablet. "What are you doing?"

"Adding people."

She is on the family tree, which has been under slow construction since before she was born. It was Aunt Mele who started it and Losa's mother who kept it alive and now, mostly, it is the cousins who feed it, a few names at a time, when somebody at a funeral or a wedding says, Oh, and his mother's brother married a Havili from Neiafu, and somebody else writes it down on a napkin. Today Losa is adding the Mahe branch, because her project interview needs Pita Mahe, the euphonium player, and his grandson Siale, who played the funeral march on the green in 2026. There are seven people on the napkin her grandfather gave her this morning. She has found three of them so far.

Tevita leans over. "Who's that?"

"Siale Mahe. He played euphonium. He lived in Auckland. He died two years ago, but his grandsons are still there."

"Is he on the family tree because he's family or because he played euphonium?"

"His mother was Grandma Lesieli's cousin. Second cousin. Something."

"Something," Tevita says with satisfaction, as if this explains all Tongan genealogy, which in his opinion it does. "Hey. Put me in again. I want a new photo. The one from my birthday where I look like a bank robber."

"You're already in."

"Put me in twice. Different branch. Mom's side."

"That's not how it works."

"That's exactly how it works. I'm on two branches. I'm a merger." He takes another bite. "Ask Grandpa. Grandpa! Am I on two branches?"

From the front room, where Sione is watching a replay of last season's Pacific Nations Cup with the volume all the way down, comes a long-suffering voice. "You are on every branch. You are like a fungus."

Tevita grins, delighted, and goes out to watch with him.

---

At noon Paige comes over, in her sister's old ski jacket and a hat with a pom-pom the size of a grapefruit. She lives three streets over in a split-level with an above-ground pool that her family covers every October and uncovers every May, regardless of the weather, and she has been eating at the Fifita table since she was nine. She calls Sione "Grandpa" too. He let her start doing that the summer her own grandfather died.

"Okay," Paige says, setting her laptop on the table and opening it. "Test me."

They have been doing this since September. Losa built the list herself, inside the family space, because the family word list there already had five hundred words in it, each one with a small round button next to it, and when you pressed the button you heard Grandpa Sione saying the word, slowly, the way he would say it to a child. Most of the recordings were made in 2049 and 2050, when he still had all his teeth, and his voice in them is younger, rounder, with a laugh caught in the back of it. Paige's list is a small one, thirty words, and she has added a column where she writes the word phonetically, in her own invented spelling, which has a great many double o's.

"'Ofa," Losa says.

"Love." Paige taps the button anyway, to hear it, and Sione's voice comes out of the laptop's tinny speaker: 'Ofa. A tiny catch at the front of it, the glottal stop, the little closing of the throat that English doesn't have.

"Mālō."

"Thank you. Or, like, good job." Tap. Mālō.

"Fakamālō."

"The big thank-you. The formal one. Like at a ceremony."

"Fale."

"House." Tap. Fale.

"Fonua."

Paige frowns. "Land. But not only land. Land and the people on it. And the placenta?" She looks up, appalled and thrilled. "Grandpa told me it was the placenta too. Is that real?"

"It's real. They bury it."

"In Utah?"

"In the yard. Under the apricot." Losa nods at the window. "Mine's under there. And Tevita's is under the one at his house, which died, which he thinks is very funny."

"That's so metal," Paige says, with deep respect, and writes something in her column.

"Kāinga."

"Family. The big family. All the branches." Tap. Kāinga. Paige rests her chin on her fist and listens to the button twice more. "He says it like a door opening."

Losa doesn't answer that, because Paige is right and she can't think of anything to add.

They work through the rest. Kava. Umu. Ngatu. Paige gets everything but fakamālō, which she keeps saying with the stress in the wrong place, and Losa makes her press the button again and again until Sione himself shouts from the other room, "Fakamālō!", in a voice so much older and rougher than the recording that both girls jump and then laugh until Paige snorts.

---

That night, after her mother wakes, and eats, and leaves again, Losa sits on her bed with the window cracked an inch for the cold and writes the letter to the community office. It takes her three hours. She writes it in English first and then in Tongan, line by line, looking up the words she isn't sure of and pressing the button to hear her grandfather say the ones she thinks she knows. She does not ask him for help. She thinks this is probably the point.

She asks permission to show the green, the map, the band photograph, and the record entry of her great-grandmother Lesieli. She asks whether she may read from any other entries, and if so, which. She says she will not show the graves. She says she will say, out loud, to the class, that there are places in the village record that she is not allowed to show them, and why.

She reads it over. She takes out a sentence that sounds like begging. She adds a sentence at the end, which she does not translate first, which she writes straight into Tongan and then sits with for a long time, unsure if she is allowed to say it.

In English, if she had to put it in English, it would say something like: the land I know only from voices. In Tongan it is shorter and she is not sure the grammar holds. She leaves it.

She sends it before she can take it back. Then she lies back and thinks about the page her mother made in 2053, the one for Great-grandmother Lesieli, under its photograph of an old woman on a store step with her hand raised against the sun. Every March on her birthday the cousins leave wishes on it. Last year there were forty-one. Losa can recite some of them in the dark: a photo of a baby in Sydney named for her; a line of a song; Sela writing, I cleaned your stone today, it was very green; Siale Mahe's grandson Lomasi, from Auckland, saying only, We played Grandpa's recording of the slow one for you again.

Her own wish from last year is near the bottom. Happy birthday, Kui. I am learning the stars. She remembers writing it on the bus and feeling silly.

The birthday is in five weeks. She does not go and write anything new, because she wants to have something to tell her great-grandmother, and right now all she has is a letter to an office with a sick-goat computer, and she isn't sure yet what it will say back.

The Well

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the village well, behind the Taufa house at the south edge of the green
Recorded: 9 August 2030, morning, at the well, Kolotai, Ha'apai
Speaker: Losana Taufa, aged 70
Recorded by: Sione Fifita, aged 43, home on leave from the inter-island ferry
Transcribed by: Mele Fifita
May be read by: the family space and the descendants of Kolotai. Not for outside, at Losana's wish, "because outside people will think we were dirty, and we were not dirty, we were poor, which is different."

---

Sione, you sit there on the lid where I can see you. Not on the wall, the wall is loose. Your father sat on that wall when he was courting your mother and it was loose then.

So. The well.

You know the island is a stone in the sea. Underneath it, under the sand and the coral, the rain sits on top of the salt water. Like coconut cream sits on top of the water in the bowl, if you leave it. The old men called it the fresh skin. When it rains, the skin gets thicker. When it doesn't rain, it gets thinner. If you dig down to the skin and you take only a little, carefully, every day, the island gives you drinking water. If you dig too deep, you go through the skin into the salt and you have spoiled it. That is the first thing every child in Kolotai knew. Before the alphabet. Don't dig too deep.

This well was dug by the grandfathers of the Taufa family, my husband's people, and lined with coral stone, the flat pieces from the reef, and plastered, later, with cement when the first cement came from Nuku'alofa on the ship. It is two arms deep. You can see the water there at the bottom, the circle of sky in it, your face. It used to be three arms deep to the water. Now it is two. The water is closer because the sea underneath is pushing the skin up. That is the bad sign. Write that down so the young ones know what to look for, if they live on another island like this one.

When I was a girl, this is where the women were. The men had the kava and the green and the boats. We had the well. Every morning, before the sun was high, the girls came with the buckets. Then the plastic ones. Before that the big tins from the kerosene. Before that, my grandmother said, the coconut shells, many shells tied together on a carrying pole. You let the bucket down on the rope, you let it tip, you feel it get heavy, you pull, hand over hand. The rope burns. Every girl in Kolotai had the same line of hard skin here, inside the fingers. You could tell a Kolotai girl in Nuku'alofa from her hands.

And we sang to the rope. Not a real song, just a count, so the girls pulled together when two of them shared a big tin. One for the bucket going down, two for the bucket filling, then the pull in four, with a grunt on the last. My granddaughters laugh at me when I do it in the kitchen now, lifting a pot. They say Grandma is counting at the soup. Let them laugh. When they are old they will count at the soup too, and they won't know why.

We talked. Oh, we talked. That is what you are waiting to hear, I can see it.

Every marriage in this village was decided at this well before the families knew anything. Who looked at who in the lakalaka practice. Whose brother was coming back from Auckland with money. Who was pregnant before the wedding, and how many months, and whether anybody would say. The water came up and the news went down. Your mother, Lesieli, when she was sixteen, came here every morning for a month with no bucket at all, just to stand here and listen, because she wanted to know what the girls said about your father. Then she married him. So you see. You owe your life to this well. Write that down.

And the washing. Monday was washing. Every woman with her tub and her bar of blue soap and the children's school shirts. We did not wash at the well, that would spoil it. We carried the water to the tubs behind the houses, under the breadfruit trees. But we stood together at the well to fill, and then we called to each other over the fences all morning. The whole south side of the village smelled of blue soap on Mondays and the shirts hung white on the lines like birds on a wire.

Not the drinking water. For drinking we had the rain tanks, the concrete ones the government gave, and the plastic ones later from an aid project. The well was for washing and for the gardens and for the pigs and for when the tanks were dry. In a long dry, the well was for everything. In the dry of 1998 I remember the whole village lined up here with every container that would hold water, all the way back to the green, and old Fusi standing on the wall, there, where it is loose, deciding how much each house could take. Nobody argued with Fusi. Even the Fifitas didn't argue with Fusi.

Now it is different. I will tell you how it is different because that is why you are recording, I know, you are not recording for the gossip.

Ten years ago, more, the water started to taste. Just a little. You taste it on the back of the tongue. The old women said, it is the dry, wait for the rain. The rain came and it still tasted. Then the breadfruit behind the Mafi house went yellow at the tips of the leaves. Then the pulaka in the pits, the big swamp taro, started to rot in the ground. My husband's brother dug down to look at his and the roots were soft and black and smelled like the reef at low tide. Then the government men came with a little meter and put it in the well on a string and it showed a number. Salt. Too much for the gardens. Not too much for washing, yet.

Now we wash with it still. The soap doesn't make bubbles. The shirts come out stiff. My granddaughters say the well water makes their hair like dry grass. They have stopped coming in the mornings. They go to the tanks. The well is quiet. Only the pigs come, and me, and you with your recorder.

(A child's voice, off. Speaker calls out.)

That is Sinai, my son's youngest. Come here, girl. No, come, he won't bite, he is only Sione Fifita, you have seen him fall off his bicycle. Put down the coconut. Take the rope.

(Pause.)

No, not like that, you are holding it like a fishing line. Both hands. Let it go down, let it go, feel it tip. You feel it? Now it is heavy. Now we pull together, you and me. One. Two. And three, four, and up.

(Grunting. The speaker laughs.)

You see, Sione? Nine years old and she has never once drawn from this well. Her mother brings the water from the tank in a jug with a lid. The girls of Kolotai used to have hard hands, and now they have soft hands, and I am not saying soft hands are bad. I am saying soft hands are new.

Taste it, Sinai. Go on, just a little, from your fingers.

(Pause.)

She has made a face like a fish. She is spitting on your shoes, Sione, I am sorry. Yes, girl, that is the reef you are tasting. When you are my age and somebody asks you what the well of Kolotai tasted like, you tell them it tasted like your face just now. Then go to the tank and wash your mouth and tell your mother I said you pulled very well, which is a lie, but a small one.

(Child runs off.)

She will remember the count. Not the water. The count. That is how it goes with children; they keep the rhythm and forget the reason, and one day the reason comes back and finds the rhythm waiting for it.

It is hard to explain to people from big places. They think the sea comes in like a wave and knocks your house down. Sometimes, yes, in a cyclone. But mostly it does not come like that. It comes up from underneath. It comes into the water you drink and the ground you plant in. It is very polite. It does not knock. It is already inside before anybody opens the door.

Sione. Stop looking at the water like that. You are a ferry engineer. You know about water.

(Speaker laughs.)

What else. The eel. You are not going to believe me, but put it in. When I was small there was an eel living in this well. A fresh-water eel, a black one, long as my arm. Nobody knew how it got there. The old men said somebody's grandfather put it in to keep the water clean, because it ate the insects and the frogs that fell in. The children were afraid of it. We used to drop pieces of coconut in to make it come up. Sometimes it came. You would see its face in the circle of sky at the bottom and then it would turn and go into the dark between the stones. When the water began to taste, the eel died. My brother pulled it up in a bucket. It was so thin. We buried it under the breadfruit. I am not saying it means anything. I am saying it happened.

So. The water.

You want to know what we will do. The town officer says the families will move to the middle of the island first, where the ground is higher and the fresh skin is thicker. He says they will dig a new well there and maybe that one will be good for twenty years. I asked him, and after the twenty years? He said, after twenty years we will see. I am seventy. I will not see. You will see. Your daughters will see.

I said to the town officer, if we go, we take the stones. The coral stones from the lining of this well. They were lifted from the reef by the Taufa grandfathers and carried here on their shoulders. They do not stay for the sea to have. The town officer said, Losana, the new well will be lined with concrete pipe. I said, then line the concrete pipe with these. He laughed. I was not laughing.

That is all I wanted to say about the well. Turn it off now. I want to draw one more bucket while you are here to carry it.

---

Recorder's note (Sione, 2030): I carried the bucket. The water was cloudy and warm and tasted of nothing for a moment and then of the reef. Losana poured it on the frangipani by her door.

Note added 2039 (Mele): When the families moved to the inland site, the stones of the Taufa well were taken up one by one by Losana's grandsons and carried inland on a handcart, and set as the top ring of the new well there. Losana Taufa supervised from a chair. She was seventy-nine.

Note added 2048 (Mele): The inland well went brackish in 2046. When the families came south to Tongatapu, the ring stones came too, in the hold of the ferry Sione Fifita had worked on for twenty years, and they are now laid around the base of the water tank behind the new Kolotai hall. Children sit on them. Losana Taufa died in 2044 and did not see this, but her grandsons say she would have expected nothing less.

Note added 2061 (Mele): Sela Fifita, aged 15, measured the old well site on the reef flat at low tide with a tape. The well mouth is under forty centimeters of water at low tide on a normal month. She found it by the shape of the hole in the rock. A small dark fish was living in it. She took a photograph and pinned it to the map. Mrs. Taufa's great-granddaughter has asked that the photograph be kept for the descendants of Kolotai only.

Umu on the Lawn

The office answers in eleven days, which Aunt Mele says is a record, because the last time anybody wrote to it from overseas, a man in Sydney wanting the land boundaries, it took four months and he got a no.

The answer comes as a typed letter, photographed on Mele's phone and sent on, with a stamp at the bottom in purple ink, slightly smeared: the outline of an island with a star above it and the words KOLOTAI FO'OU in capitals. It has five signatures. Mele's is the neatest. Tevita's grandmother's, Losa notices, is enormous and slanted and has gone through the paper in one place.

Losa reads it standing at the bus stop on 900 West, in sun so thin it barely warms her face, with the snow along the curbs gone gray and pocked. February in the valley is a held breath between inversions. The Oquirrhs are back on the western sky, brown and wrinkled. A magpie stands on the bus shelter roof and argues with nothing.

The office says yes to the green. Yes to the map, with the graves left unpinned in the version she shows. Yes to the photograph of the band. Yes to the entry of Lesieli Fifita, "because she already said so." For the well, no; the Taufa family has asked that it stay inside. For the beach and the canoes, which is her grandfather's own entry, she must ask him, because he is alive and can answer for himself. The house posts, no, not yet, ask again when the speaker has decided. The graves, no, with a short paragraph explaining why, in Mele's careful Tongan, which Losa reads three times. They are not hidden because they are shameful. They are kept because they are kept. That is the kind of sentence Mele writes and then says is not a metaphor.

At the bottom there is one more line, in handwriting, added after the typing: The girl's last sentence was correct grammar. Tell her. — L.V.

She doesn't know who L.V. is. She will have to look it up on the tree.

---

The umu is Tevita's mother's idea and the Fifitas' lawn, because the Fifita backyard is bigger and nobody on that side has complained since the Garcias moved out. It is for Aunty Seini's fiftieth birthday, which falls on a Saturday when the forecast says fifty-two degrees and clear, which in the second week of February counts as a miracle and has to be used.

The men start at six in the morning. Losa wakes to the sound of shovels in frozen dirt and goes to her window in her blanket. In the gray light her grandfather is sitting in a folding chair beside the hole with a mug in his hands, directing, while Tevita and two of his teammates and Uncle Paula dig. The pit is an old one, dug every year in the same corner by the fence and filled in again, so the ground gives after the first crust. The stones are already stacked beside it, river rock from the Jordan, round and gray and the size of loaves, which Uncle Paula collects in the summer from a bend where nobody minds. In Tonga the stones would be volcanic, Sione says, and better. In Utah you use what the river gives you.

By seven they have the fire going in the pit: split pine on the bottom, then the stones laid over, then more wood. The smoke goes straight up into the still cold air and then flattens at about the height of the roofline and spreads out over the street in a blue layer, a small private inversion of their own. Losa can smell it through the window glass. Pine resin and wet earth and something under it that she has no word for in either language, the smell of every family party she has ever been to.

Paige comes at nine in her pom-pom hat and stands at the edge of the pit holding a mug of hot chocolate in both hands like a lantern.

"This is a hole," she says. "With fire in it."

"It's an umu."

"I know it's an umu. I'm saying, objectively, it's a hole with fire in it, in your backyard, in February, in Utah. My mom would call the fire department."

"The fire department came once," Tevita says, leaning on his shovel. "In 2061. They stayed for lunch."

This is true. Losa has seen the photograph. It is pinned, as a joke, on the family map, at the address of the Glendale house, with a note in her mother's handwriting: Engine 14, ate three plates.

---

While the stones heat, the women make the food at the kitchen table. Losa is assigned to the lu pulu, because she has been making it since she was eight and is trusted. Taro leaves, the big ones, from the Pacific grocery on Redwood that flies them in frozen from Fiji; corned beef from the can, broken up with a fork; onion; and the coconut cream, which in this house is still made from fresh coconuts when there is time, because Aunty Seini says the canned kind tastes like a hospital.

Today there is time. Losa's mother is home, not sleeping for once, sitting at the end of the table in her scrubs top and pajama pants, cracking coconuts on the back step with the back of a cleaver in two sure blows each, so the water runs into a bowl. Her grandfather comes in from the cold to grate them. He sits with the old grating stool between his knees, a low wooden seat with a toothed iron blade bolted to the front of it, and turns the coconut halves against the teeth in small fast circles, and the white snow of the flesh falls into the basin underneath. He has done this since before he could walk properly, he says. His hands know it so well that he can talk the whole time.

"You asked the office," he says.

"They said no to the well."

"Of course. Losana Taufa would come back from the dead and pull your ears."

"They said yes to the green. And they said I have to ask you about the beach."

He grates. The coconut turns. "And?"

"And I'm asking you."

He doesn't answer for a while. Her mother, on the back step, splits another coconut with a crack like a breaking branch. The kitchen smells of onion and the sweet fat of the coconut and, through the open door, the pine smoke.

"The beach entry is mine," her grandfather says at last. "I was forty-five when I said it. My father had just died. I said some things about him." He tips the basin toward her so she can see how much he's grated. "Some of them I want people to hear. Some of them only you."

"So which ones?"

"I'll listen to it again and tell you." He smiles at her sideways. "Give me time. Old men are slow. Look at the stones. They have been in that fire two hours and they are still not ready."

She squeezes the coconut by hand, the way Aunty Seini taught her, wrapping the grated flesh in a square of clean cloth and wringing it over a bowl until the cream runs thick and white between her fingers and her wrists ache. Then she lays the taro leaves out in layers on a square of foil, in the shape of a cupped hand, and piles in the corned beef and the onion and pours the cream over it all and folds the leaves up around it and twists the foil closed. Twenty packets. She writes nothing on them. Everybody in the family knows which packets are hers by the way she twists the top, too tight, like a candy wrapper. Uncle Paula always complains he has to use a knife.

---

At eleven, the Māori teacher calls.

This was Losa's mother's idea, months ago. 'Ana had a patient in the spring, a woman from Auckland visiting her daughter in Sandy, whose brother taught traditional navigation at a voyaging school on the Waitematā. The patient left a card. 'Ana kept it in the drawer with the takeout menus for a year and then, one night in November, wrote.

His name is Hemi Kereama. On the tablet propped against the sugar jar he is a broad man in his sixties with a gray beard trimmed close and a blue wool hat, standing on the deck of what looks like a boat shed, with a long hull on trestles behind him and, out past it, a gray harbor under a gray sky. It is a summer morning in Auckland and it is raining. Losa can hear it on the shed roof.

"Kia ora," he says. "Mālō e lelei. Have I got that right?"

"Close," says Sione, from the grater, without looking up.

"Sione. Good to see you again, e hoa. You look like a man surrounded by coconut."

"I am a man surrounded by women. It's the same."

Hemi laughs, and they talk for a while in the shorthand of two men who have spent a lot of time on water, about wind and the price of fuel and someone they both apparently know on Rarotonga, while Losa wraps lu and listens.

Then Hemi says, "The girl. Losa. You know about the crossing."

"What crossing?" Losa says.

Her mother on the step goes still. Her grandfather stops grating.

"Ah," says Hemi, and grimaces at the screen. "I've spoken out of turn."

"You've spoken a little early," Sione says. He puts the coconut half down. He wipes his hands on the dish towel over his knee, slowly, finger by finger. "We were going to tell her after the project."

"Tell me what?"

Her mother answers from the doorway. "In July," 'Ana says, "a canoe is sailing from Nuku'alofa to Ha'apai. One of the new double-hulled ones, built at the yard in Tongatapu. They're taking young crew for the legs. One from each of the relocated villages, if the families can manage it. It's for the record. It's so the islands see the young ones going north again on the old road." She folds her arms. "Mele put your name in for Kolotai."

"Without asking me."

"Without asking any of us. That's Mele. Now we're asking."

The kitchen is so quiet that Losa can hear the fire in the yard, the pop of resin, Tevita's voice yelling at somebody to get the chicken wire. Hemi Kereama waits on the tablet with the rain behind him, very politely looking at something just off screen.

"I can't navigate," Losa says. "I've never been on a boat bigger than a paddleboard at Pineview."

"You can name the houses," her grandfather says. "You can name them better than I could at fifteen. On the canoe there will be a real navigator. You'll be a crew, nothing more. Bail, haul, hold a line, keep a watch. Learn." He looks at the screen. "Hemi will teach you what I can't. The things they do now, the way they train. I learned on a beach from an old man who hit you with a stick if you forgot. I don't think that's allowed anymore."

"It is not," says Hemi gravely. "We use a smaller stick."

Losa does not laugh. She looks at the lu in her hands, the green leaves, the white cream gone into them. She looks at her mother, whose eyes are red at the rims from the night shift and from something else. Her mother, she understands, has been saving for this since November. That is why the extra shifts. That is why the car with the cracked windshield is still the car.

"What about you?" Losa asks her grandfather. "You'd come?"

He picks up the coconut again. "My doctor says no flying."

"Then I'm not—"

"Then you go." He grates. The flakes fall. "And you post me photos. Many photos. Every one, you post. And you don't hold the phone at your chin so I see only your nostrils."

---

They open the umu at two. Everybody comes out into the yard, aunties and cousins and neighbors and the man from two doors down who always says he isn't hungry, and they stand around the pit in a loose ring with their breath smoking while Uncle Paula and Tevita pull back the wet sacks and then the dirt and then the banana leaves, which came frozen too, and the steam rises up in a sudden white cloud that smells of pork fat and taro and coconut and earth.

Tevita lifts out the first packet of lu with his bare hands, juggling it, swearing in two languages. He tears the foil and holds it up so everybody can see the leaves gone dark and soft and the cream gone thick and golden in the folds.

"Losa's," he says, and grimaces. "Too tight. Who's got a knife?"

Somebody laughs. Somebody starts to sing, one of the slow birthday songs, and the others pick it up in parts, the uncles low and the aunties high, Aunty Seini in the middle crying a little and pretending it's the smoke. Paige stands next to Losa and doesn't know the words and hums, in a careful, nervous alto, the note under the note, and it isn't wrong.

Losa takes a photograph of all of it, the pit, the steam, the ring of faces, the bare apricot tree, the mountains standing white at the end of the street, and posts it to the family space with no caption. She knows her aunt will understand it. She knows that by the time she is ready to go to bed, Aunt Mele will have written underneath it, from tomorrow: Your hole is too shallow. Tell Paula. Then, underneath that, one more line.

The canoe is called Tuitui. It means stitching. Now you are sewn in. Do not complain.

The Canoe Beach

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the canoe beach, on the lagoon side, west of the green, where the boats were pulled up
Recorded: 2 November 2032, after dark, on the beach, Kolotai, Ha'apai
Speaker: Sione Fifita, aged 45, engineer on the inter-island ferry
Recorded by: 'Ana Fifita, his daughter, aged 18
Transcribed by: 'Ana Fifita
May be read by: the family space. The section marked [kept] is for his grandchildren only, to be heard in his voice, not read. Reviewed by the speaker in February 2068: the rest may now go outside the family, for his granddaughter's school.

---

Is it hearing me with the waves? Good. Hold it lower. The wind is from the east, it'll take my voice away over the lagoon if you hold it up like that.

My father was buried yesterday. Everybody knows that, so I don't need to say it, but I am saying it so it is in the record with the date. Viliami Fifita, sixty-nine years old. The band played him from the house to the green to the graves. Pita Mahe's grandson played the euphonium and he was very good. Your grandmother said afterwards it was too loud. That is how you know she was pleased.

I came down here tonight because I couldn't sit in the house with all the mats and the food and the aunties. That is not a criticism, put that in, I don't want trouble. I just needed the water.

This is the canoe beach. You know it, you learned to swim here, but I want to say it for people who don't know it. The lagoon side of Kolotai faces west, toward the other islands of Ha'apai, which you can see on a clear day as low black lines on the edge of the sea, like somebody drew them with a pencil and didn't press hard. The water inside the reef is calm, green over the sand, brown over the weed, and very warm. The ocean side, the east side, is rough, with the swell coming all the way up from the storms of the far south and breaking white on the reef edge, and nobody keeps a boat there. Here, on the lagoon, the sand is coarse, crushed coral and shell, white like sugar, and when you walk on it barefoot it squeaks. The beach curves. At the north end there are the pandanus trees, where the women used to cut the leaves for the mats. At the south end, the big rock, the black one, that the children jump off.

When I was small, the canoes lived here.

Not one canoe. Many. Each family had a fishing canoe with one outrigger, a dugout from a breadfruit log, the outrigger float lashed on with sennit, the coconut fiber rope, and later with nylon. They were pulled up on the sand above the tide, in a row, under the coconut palms, with their paddles lying in them and the fishing lines wound on sticks. In the morning, before light, the men came down and pushed them out. You heard the hulls scraping on the sand all along the beach, like somebody clearing their throat. Then the paddles. Then nothing, they were out on the lagoon in the dark, and you only heard the men calling to each other across the water, very quiet, the way you talk in a house where somebody is sleeping.

My grandfather Semisi had the last big canoe in Kolotai. Not a fishing canoe. A sailing canoe, one hull and a big outrigger platform and a sail of pandanus mat. Later the sail was canvas, from a government tarpaulin, but he kept the shape. He used it to go to Lifuka for the market and to Nomuka to see his sister. When I was eight, nine, ten, he took me. That is where I learned.

I am going to say about the stars now. This part is for anybody.

My grandfather said the sky is a house with no walls. He drew it on this beach with a stick. A circle in the sand. He put shells around the edge, one for each house of the sky, where the stars come up and where they go down. He said a star is a road. When it is low on the edge it points you somewhere. When it climbs up, it is no good anymore, it is too high, it points everywhere. So you need the next one, coming up out of the same house behind it. All night you follow a line of stars coming up out of one place, one after another, like people coming out of a door. In the morning, when there are no stars, you have the sun at its rising and you have the swell.

The swell he taught me lying down. You lie in the bottom of the canoe on your back. You close your eyes. He said the eyes are liars, the sea makes pictures for them. You feel the canoe move under your spine. The big swell from the southeast, which is always there, the long one, the old one, lifts you from that corner. Another, smaller one comes from somewhere else, from a storm a long way off. You feel them cross. Where they cross, the canoe does a little thing, a twist, here, in the hips. When you know which swell is which, you know where you're pointed, even under cloud, even in the dark, even with your eyes shut. When we came near an island, the swell bent around it and came back, and you could feel that too, the island pushing back at you before you could see it.

I was not good at it at first. He hit me with a stick. A small stick. Put that in so people don't think he was cruel. He was not cruel. He was afraid. He was the last one in the village who knew it and he was getting old, and his own sons had gone to the ships and the engines and didn't want it. I didn't want it either, really. I wanted the engines too. I wanted the ferry, the big diesel, the smell of it. And I got the ferry. But I got this too. I kept it. Like a coconut in a bag on a long trip that you forget is there and then one day you're thirsty.

That is why I am an engineer who can find Nomuka with the engine room flooded. That has happened, put that in also. 2029. Ask the captain.

Now the canoes are gone. You know this. By the time I was a teenager the outboard motors and the aluminum boats had won, and the men stopped paddling. Why paddle. The young men went to Nuku'alofa and Auckland. The canoes sat on the beach and the sun cracked them and the sennit rotted. My grandfather's sailing canoe lay up under the pandanus for nine years after he died and then in the cyclone of 2014 it went out on the tide and nobody saw where. I like to think it went to Nomuka to see his sister.

And the beach is going too.

Look. You can see in the moon. Where the canoes used to sit, under the palms, there's no sand now. The sea has taken it. The palms on the edge are standing in the water with their roots showing like the legs of an old man in a river. Three have already fallen. My father pulled one of them away with the tractor in March so the boats could come in. That was the last work he did. He was so tired after, he slept from the afternoon to the next morning, and your grandmother said, you see, the sea is trying to take him too. She said it as a joke. Nobody laughed.

The beach is moving inland. Like the green. Every big tide it bites off a little and puts it back somewhere else, further along, or out on the reef where you can't use it. You can see the old line of the beach from here when the tide is low: there's a step in the rock, out there, with the weed on it. When I was a boy that step was dry sand and we sat on it to eat green coconuts.

[kept]

---

(Note from the transcriber, 'Ana Fifita, 2032: the section marked [kept] is held in the record as audio only. It is about Viliami Fifita, about his last years, and about what Sione said to him and did not say. It is not transcribed. It is to be heard by his grandchildren when he decides.)

---

I'm done with the kept part. You can keep it going now.

I want to say one more thing. For anybody.

When you are on the water a long time, on a ferry, on a canoe, you stop thinking the land is the main thing and the sea is the empty part between. It turns around. The sea is the road and the islands are where the road stops for a while. My grandfather said, our people didn't live on islands. They lived on the sea, and they rested on islands. So if the islands go under, I don't know. Maybe we rest on other islands. Maybe the rest is in other places. Auckland. Sydney. America. But the road is still there. The stars still come up out of the same houses. The swell still comes from the southeast. If my grandchildren learn the houses, they will be able to find this beach, even when there is no beach.

That's all. Turn it off before your grandmother comes looking for us.

---

Note added 2041 (Sione): The beach is gone at high tide. At low tide the sand is still there under ten centimeters of water and the step in the rock is a ledge where the octopus lives. I am leaving for Salt Lake City next week with 'Ana and her husband. I have put eight stones from the north end of the old beach in my bag. If customs takes them, there are more.

Note added 2060 (Mele): The big black rock at the south end, the children's jumping rock, is the only thing above water at high spring tide. Sela and the other children of Kolotai Fo'ou swam out to it on a fisheries boat trip and jumped off it once each.

Note added February 2068 (Sione, aged 81, recorded in Salt Lake City, transcribed by Losa Fifita, aged 15): I have listened to this again, with my granddaughter. My voice was very young. I said the eight stones were from the north end of the beach. They were from the south end. I was confused because I was packing in the night. I am correcting it now so there is no argument later. The kept part is still kept. I will tell her when.

Kava Circle

On the first Friday in March the hall smells of wet wool and powdered root. Snow came down in the afternoon, the heavy spring kind that falls in clumps and melts on the windshields as fast as it lands, and every man who comes in through the double doors stamps his boots on the rubber mat and shakes his shoulders like a dog. There are twenty of them tonight, maybe more, sitting cross-legged on the woven mats in a long oval that bends around the plywood stage. In the middle, the big wooden bowl, the kumete, with its many short legs, broad as a car tire and stained on the inside the color of strong coffee by forty years of kava.

Losa has been coming to this circle since she was small, at the edges, with the other kids, eating chips out of the bag and being told to be quiet. She is not at the edges tonight. Tonight she is sitting at the bowl.

The girl who mixes the kava is called the tou'a. It is always a young unmarried woman, and in this hall it is usually Tevita's sister Salote, who is twenty and has been doing it for years and has the wrists for it. Salote has the flu. Salote called Losa's mother at four in the afternoon and said, in a voice like a rasp, Tell the girl it's time. Then she hung up before anybody could argue.

So Losa sits at the head of the bowl with her legs folded to one side the way Salote showed her, in a long black skirt and her mother's old ta'ovala, the woven mat tied around her waist with a cord of plaited coconut fiber, and in front of her the bowl and a bucket of cold water and the cloth bag of ground root, gray-brown, the smell of it rising peppery and damp, like the floor of a forest after rain. She pours the water. She drops in the bag. She kneads it, steadily, the way she has watched Salote do it a thousand times without knowing she was watching, the water going cloudy, then tan, then the color of milky tea. Her hands go numb in the cold. Her wrists burn. Nobody talks to her. That is correct. The tou'a works; the men talk.

Her grandfather sits at the far end of the oval, in the place of the oldest, with his back to the cinder-block wall and a cushion under him, which he pretends not to need. Next to him sits Uncle Paula, and next to Uncle Paula is a man Losa does not know, from Glendale, with a guitar across his knees.

The talk tonight is about her.

---

It is not supposed to be about her. It is supposed to be about the hall's roof, which leaks at the northeast corner, and the summer rugby tournament, and whether the community should send money to the family in West Valley whose father lost his warehouse job. These things are discussed, in the slow, roundabout way of the circle, each man taking his turn, each man saying "with respect" and "as my brother said" before saying the opposite of what his brother said. Cups go around. The cups are half coconut shells, polished on the outside, and when Losa fills one from the bowl and the server carries it across the mats, the man who receives it drinks it down in one long pull and hands the shell back empty, and somebody along the mats says mālō, low, the way you would say it to a neighbor over a fence.

Then the man with the guitar plays a little, an old song from Vava'u about a girl waiting at a wharf. A few voices take up the harmony. One of the uncles makes the high, nasal, almost painful sound at the top of it that old Tongan singing has and English singing doesn't, and the hair stands up on Losa's arms.

When the song is done, Uncle Paula clears his throat and says, "Since the girl is here."

Her grandfather looks into his cup.

"She's doing a school project," Uncle Paula says. "On Kolotai. For the Americans. I'm not against it. I'm saying it out loud because some of the families asked me to, and I'd rather they hear it here than in the parking lot." He nods to the circle. "Some people are worried. That she'll show things. That it'll go on the internet, and some professor in California will write a book about the drowned Tongans, and put our grandmothers' graves on the cover. These things have happened. Not to us. To other people."

There is a murmur. Somebody says, "Ko e mo'oni." True.

Losa's hands stop in the bowl. She makes them start again.

"The office already decided," says her grandfather, mildly. "Mele sent the letter. The girl wrote to the office in Tongan and asked. She asked first, before she did anything." He lifts his eyes and looks around the oval, one face at a time. "How many of your children wrote to the office in Tongan?"

Silence.

"How many of you wrote to the office?"

Somebody laughs, uncomfortably. Uncle Paula raises a hand in surrender. "I'm not saying she did wrong. I'm saying people are worried."

"People should be worried," says a voice from the near end. It is old Kalolaine's son, Hopoate, a thin man in a faded basketball jacket who drives a forklift and has a son Losa's age. "Not about her. About us. We're all here. Most of our kids don't speak. My boy doesn't speak. He understands, he doesn't speak. He's never seen the village. When I'm gone, who's going to tell him the green, the well? This girl's doing it. She's doing it in English, for a school. Fine. At least she's doing it." He turns his cup in his hands. "My boy did his project on a ballpark."

There is a long pause, and then a ripple of laughter goes around the circle, the sore, warm kind, and the guitar player strums a single chord as if to underline it.

"The question," says her grandfather, "is not if. The question is what, and how, and who decides. The office decides. For the graves, no. For the well, no. For the green, yes, because Lesieli said so on the record. Nobody here can overrule Lesieli Fifita. I tried for fifty years."

More laughter. The cups go around again.

Then her grandfather says, not loudly, "There is also my beach."

The circle settles.

"I've listened to it. My own entry, from 2032, the night after my father's funeral. Most of it may go outside. I've told the girl which part. One part, no. One part is for my grandchildren and it stays in my voice. She knows that. She agrees." He lifts the coconut shell and drinks, slowly, and sets it down. "When she stands in front of her class, she's going to say there are things she isn't allowed to show them. She's going to tell them why. That, for these American kids, will be the most important thing in the whole presentation. They have never in their lives been told that something is not theirs to see." He smiles faintly. "Their grandparents should have tried it."

Nobody argues with that. Losa keeps kneading. Her eyes sting and she blames the cold water.

---

It is a little after eleven when her grandfather stands up to use the bathroom and doesn't quite make it to standing.

She sees it from the bowl: he gets his knees under him and pushes against the wall and then something goes out of him, a looseness in the shoulders, and he sits back down hard on the cushion with a grunt, one hand flat on the mat beside him. His face goes gray under the brown. Uncle Paula has him by the arm in a second. Somebody says his name. The guitar player is already on his feet.

"I'm fine," Sione says. "My leg is asleep."

"Your face is asleep," says Uncle Paula. "Sit."

Losa doesn't remember getting up. She is suddenly at his side on the mat in her mother's ta'ovala with her wet hands dripping kava on her skirt, and she has her phone out and is calling her mother, who is on shift four miles away on the east bench, before anybody tells her to.

'Ana answers on the second ring. Losa says what she has seen, quickly and exactly, the way her mother taught her for exactly this, years ago, when Grandpa first came to live with them: color, breathing, speech, hands. Her grandfather says, loudly, toward the phone, "'Ana, I'm fine, the girl is panicking," and her mother says, "Put me on speaker," and then, in her work voice, very calm, asks him to tell her what day it is, and squeeze Losa's hand with each of his hands, and smile, and say the name of the ferry he worked on.

"Peau Lelei," he says, cross. "Monday through Thursday, the northern run. Friday the southern. Saturday dry-docked if the captain was drunk. It's Friday. My granddaughter's hand is wet."

Her mother breathes out on the other end of the line, a long breath, the first unprofessional sound she has made.

"I'm sending someone anyway," 'Ana says. "Don't argue with me, Dad."

---

It is not a stroke. That is the first thing, and the most important, and the young doctor in the emergency department at the hospital on the east bench, where 'Ana works, says it three times as if he knows the family needs to hear it three times. It is his blood pressure, which dropped when he stood. It is the kava, a little, and the new pill for his heart, a little, and the fact that he is eighty-one and has been sitting on a cold floor for four hours in March. They keep him for the night, to watch.

Losa sits by the bed in a plastic chair in her mother's ta'ovala, because she hasn't had time to take it off, and a nurse who knows her mother brings her a blanket and a cup of apple juice in a sealed plastic tub with a foil top, the kind you get for children. Through the window the city lies below them, spread out to the west in a grid of orange light under the low snow clouds, all the way to the dark line of the Oquirrhs. Somewhere in that grid is the hall with the bowl still in the middle of the floor, unwashed, the cloth bag sagging in the dregs. Somewhere is their house. Somewhere, very small, is the roof with the eight stones in a ring, collecting snow.

"You left the bowl," her grandfather says. He is awake. He has been awake the whole time, she thinks, pretending.

"Hopoate's going to wash it."

"Hopoate is going to leave it till Sunday and it's going to smell like a goat." He shifts against the pillows. There is a clip on his finger with a red light inside it and a cord going to a screen that beeps when he moves, and he watches the numbers with professional interest, an engineer reading a gauge. "You mixed well. A little weak. Salote makes it stronger."

"Salote has wrists like a rugby player."

"Salote is a rugby player."

That's true. Salote plays for the women's side, in the front row. Losa laughs, and the laugh unlocks something, and for a minute she cries, quietly, into the hospital blanket, while her grandfather looks out the window at the city and lets her.

When she is finished, he says, "I want you to do something."

"Okay."

"Not now. When you get home. Open the family space. My page, the one for my voice, with the words. Look at my settings." He frowns at the ceiling. "Mele did something to it last year. She made it so I can only see. I can listen, I can look at the photos, I can type my little messages under them. But I can't move anything. I can't throw anything away."

"I know," Losa says. "She told me. It's because you deleted the Havili branch."

"I did not delete the Havili branch."

"You deleted fourteen Havilis, Grandpa. By accident. In 2066. It took Tevita a week to put them back."

He is quiet. Then he laughs, a short helpless snort that sets off the beeping. "Fourteen?"

"Fourteen. And a dog."

"There was no dog."

"Somebody put in a dog. Tevita thinks it was Tevita."

"Then leave it," he says. "Leave the setting. It's a good setting. I'm an old man, I press the wrong things." He turns his head on the pillow and looks at her, and his eyes in the gray hospital light are very clear and very dark. "What I want is different. I want you to record me again. Now, while I'm slow but not stupid. Not the beach. Not the green. The houses. The star houses, the real names, the ones I haven't let you write down." He holds her gaze. "Mele will say they must go into the record kept. She is right. But I want them in my voice, while my voice is still my voice. Before July."

"Before the canoe."

"Before the canoe. You'll need them. Hemi has his names, his teachers' names. They're good names, they work. But they are not Semisi's. Semisi's are for Ha'apai. Semisi's are for the road to Kolotai."

She doesn't say anything. She doesn't trust what would come out.

"Also," her grandfather says, "I want a real cup of tea. Not this." He looks at her apple juice with contempt. "Tell your mother. She has power here."

---

At two in the morning, when he is finally asleep, she opens the family space and goes to her great-grandmother's page.

It is Lesieli's birthday in three days. The wishes have already started coming in, a few from each branch, from the time zones in order: Sydney first, then Auckland, then Nuku'alofa and Kolotai Fo'ou, then nothing for a long gap of ocean, then Hawai'i, then the West Coast, then them. A photo from Aunt Mele of the women's group in the tapa shed behind the hall, eleven women in a row on their knees along a length of white bark cloth as long as a bus, holding up their beaters in salute. A note from Lomasi Mahe in Auckland. A drawing from a cousin's child in San Mateo of a big tree with a woman sitting under it, which Losa realizes, with a start, is the tamarind.

She types her wish carefully, in Tongan first, then English underneath, because Paige reads the page too now and asked her to.

Kui, I mixed the kava tonight. Grandpa fell over but he's all right, he's complaining about the tea. In July I'm going to sail north to where you are. I'll come at low tide. I'll bring something. I don't know what yet.

She looks at it for a long time. Then she adds one more line, and doesn't translate it, and posts before she can take it out.

Mālō 'aupito.

Thank you very much. The kind of thanks you say when what you have been given is too big to carry and you are going to carry it anyway.

The House Posts

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the house posts of the old Fifita fale and the other big houses of Kolotai
Recorded: 17 June 2045, afternoon, at the inland site, Kolotai, Ha'apai, beside the posts lying on the ground
Speaker: Tavake Vea, aged 66, carpenter and lasher
Recorded by: Mele Fifita, aged 35
Transcribed by: Mele Fifita
May be read by: kept by the speaker's wish, "until I decide." Released by the speaker, in his own voice, on 11 March 2068, aged 89: "The girl in America may show the posts. Not my wife's part. The posts."

---

You've put the recorder on the post. Take it off the post. The post doesn't need to hear this, it was there.

So.

These are the four posts of the Fifita house. Lying here on the grass like four men who have walked a long way and lain down to rest. They came inland yesterday on the tractor trailer, one at a time, with Sione's nephews walking alongside holding ropes so they wouldn't roll. Pita Mahe's boy drove. Very slowly. He drove like the posts were his grandmother.

Let me tell you what they are. These are from the tree called fehi, which is the hardest wood we have. You cannot drive a nail into fehi. The nail bends and looks at you. The tree for these was cut on Tofua, the volcano island, before my father's time, and floated down to Kolotai behind a canoe, all four, lashed together into a raft. When they got here, they were shaped with adzes, which took months. You can still see the adze marks, look, here. Like the scales of a fish. My grandfather said a post should always show the hand that made it. A smooth post is a post that is ashamed of something.

They were the corner posts of the big fale of the Fifita family, the old one, the oval one, before the cement houses. The roof was the sago palm thatch, many layers, so thick that rain could not get through for ten years, and under the roof the rafters, the ridge, the purlins, all tied. Not one nail in the whole house. Tied. With kafa. You know kafa, the coconut fiber rope, the sennit. The boys made it, sitting under the trees, rolling the fiber on their thighs, so many meters, more than you can believe. When they finished a coil, it smelled sweet, like coconut and like the sea, because the husks were soaked in the lagoon for months before you could use them.

That is my work. I am a lasher. I tie houses.

You look at a good fale from the inside, lying on your back on the mats in the afternoon, and you look up, and the lashings are where the beams meet. Each lashing is a pattern. Black kafa and red kafa, the red from the dye, wrapped in shapes. Diamonds. Triangles. Zigzags like the lightning. The fish. The flying fox. The shapes are not only beautiful. The shapes say whose house it is, and who tied it, and sometimes what happened there. The Fifita house had at the main corner a pattern called the turtle's back, because Viliami Fifita's grandfather caught a big turtle the year the house was built and fed the whole village. When the old ones lay on their backs in that house, they saw the turtle and remembered the feast.

Women's patterns are on the tapa. Men's patterns are on the lashings. Some of them are the same patterns. A turtle on the bark cloth, a turtle on the beam. My wife, Lu'isa, used to say the house and the cloth were talking to each other all night, while we were asleep. She said this to annoy me. It is true, though.

The Fifita fale was the biggest in Kolotai after the hall. Thirty people could sleep in it for a funeral. The year the cyclone took the roof, 2014, I was thirty-five and I retied it with my father, and he was seventy, and he sat on the ridge beam with his legs hanging down on each side like a boy on a horse, and passed the kafa down to me, and told me every time I did it wrong. When we finished, he climbed down and lay on the mats and looked up at all of it and didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, "It's not bad." That was the best thing my father ever said to me.

You want to know why the posts are on the grass.

You know why. You were there. But I'll say it for the people later.

In the big tide of February, 2043, the sea came into the Fifita house. Most of the families were already inland by then, but Lesieli would not leave the old house while it still had a roof, and the posts were still standing in the old ground. Not a wave. It came up through the floor. The floor was crushed coral and then the mats, and the water came up through the coral, slowly, very quietly, and the mats floated. Lesieli was asleep. She woke up because her hand, hanging down from the bed, was in the sea. She laughed, she said later. She said, "Viliami, your house is drinking." Viliami was eleven years dead.

After the tide went out, the posts stood in wet sand. Fehi doesn't rot easily, but salt in the bottom of a post every month, every year, it will go in the end. The thatch was already gone, we had put iron on years ago. So the family met, and talked, and the elders said: take the posts.

Some people asked, why the posts? The posts are only wood. Build a cement house inland, with a tin roof and windows, like everybody. They have built one. Lesieli lives in it. It's a good house, it has a tank and a water filter and a solar panel for the light. But you cannot lie on your back in a cement house and see the turtle.

So yesterday, we dug them out. You saw. Six men around each one, and the sand coming up wet and gray and smelling like the bottom of the lagoon. The posts were deeper than I thought. More than a man's height in the ground. My grandfather, or his grandfather, dug that deep, by hand, on purpose, so the house would never go anywhere. And now it's going somewhere.

I'll tell you something. When we pulled out the main corner post, the one with the turtle lashing at the top, there was something at the bottom of the hole. Under it. I got down in the hole to see, in the water. A stone, flat, from the reef. And on the stone, things. Some shells. A fishhook made of bone, very old, broken. And a piece of something black, which I think was the kafa from a lashing, from a house before this house. Rotted to almost nothing. When I touched it, it fell apart.

Mele, don't write what we did with those things.

(Pause.)

All right. I'll say we put them back in the hole and filled it. So the old house stays where it was, and only this house travels. That part you can write. Not more than that.

What else.

These posts will lie here for a while. We'll build the Fifita fale again here, inland, with them, an oval house, maybe smaller. I'll tie it. I'll make the turtle again at the main corner. My hands are still good. My eyes are getting bad, but lashing is in the hands. My grandson, Lupe's boy, will roll the kafa, if I can get him off the telephone. He's eleven. He says rolling the fiber on his thigh hurts and he wants to buy rope from the shop in Pangai. I said to him, yes, buy rope from the shop, and when the turtle on our beam is made of shop rope you can explain that to your great-great-grandfather.

He didn't understand me. He will understand later.

I'm going to say one more thing for the young ones who aren't here. For Sione's daughters, for 'Ana in America and her little ones when they come. For Mele's children. Even for the strangers, if one day this is shown to strangers.

A house is not only where you sleep. A house is the posts. The posts are where you tie everything. If the ground under the posts goes, you dig up the posts and carry them. If the ground under the next posts goes, you carry them again. We are a people who carry our posts. We did it from the beginning, when we came across the sea in the big canoes. Somebody carried the first posts on the deck. I think they carried them on purpose, so that wherever they stopped, they could tie a house and lie on their backs and see something they knew.

That's all. Now turn it off. My wife is calling. She wants to tell you her part and I'm not sure I want her to.

---

Note added 2045 (Mele): Lu'isa Vea's part was recorded on the same day. It is kept.

Note added 2047 (Mele): The Fifita fale was rebuilt at the inland site by Tavake Vea and five young men, with the four posts and a roof of iron sheeting. The turtle lashing at the main corner was retied by Tavake Vea in kafa rolled by his grandson Kepu, who was thirteen and did not complain, or not much.

Note added 2048 (Mele): When the inland site was given up and the families came south, the four posts came on the ferry with the well stones. The Fifita fale was not rebuilt on Tongatapu. The posts were set instead as the four corners of the new tapa shed behind Kolotai Fo'ou hall, where the women's group beats and paints the ngatu. The turtle lashing is at the northeast corner, where you can see it lying on your back on the mats at lunch. The women say the house and the cloth are still talking. Tavake Vea says this is because the women are always talking.

Note added 2061 (Mele): Lu'isa Vea died in March. On the day of her funeral, the women of the tapa group hung a new length of ngatu, twenty-four meters, from the turtle corner to the far post. It is painted with the turtle pattern and the flying fox. It is still hanging.

Note added 2068 (Lupe Vea, office of Kolotai Fo'ou): My father, Tavake Vea, listened to this entry again on the eleventh of March, at the request of the office, after a second letter from Losa Fifita in Salt Lake City, asking about the posts only. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said it may be shown, except my mother's part, which stays with the family. It was he who made me add, in February, the line on the office reply about her grammar; he has read her first letter four times. He also said that if she comes in July, she should lie down on the mats in the shed at lunchtime and look up at the turtle, and then she will know what the presentation was really about.

A Place That No Longer Exists

The recording happens on the roof, because her grandfather will not do it anywhere else.

It is the third week of April and the valley has turned, the way it does, almost overnight. The inversion season is over. The cottonwoods along the Jordan have gone a hazy, acid green, and the lawns on 1000 North have been cut for the first time and smell sharp and wet in the evenings. On the east side the Wasatch still wears snow above the tree line, bright as paper in the low sun, but below it the foothills are a soft brown-green, and at eight o'clock the whole range goes pink and then violet and then gray, slowly, like a stove ring cooling. For the first time since October, from the roof of the community hall, you can see stars.

Not many. The city takes most of them. But the bright ones are there, and Sione Fifita, in his ferry jacket, in his lawn chair, with a blanket over his knees that he says he does not need, sits in the ring of coral and names them.

Losa holds the phone. She has set it to record sound only, no picture, the way the office asked. The little red dot glows on the screen. Before they started, Aunt Mele came on video from Kolotai Fo'ou and said the words that go at the top of a kept entry, so that whoever hears it later knows what it is and who may hear it, and then she said, "Sione, go slowly, the girl has to write the place of each name later, and her hands are cold," and then she said, "'Ofa atu," and went away. Now there is only her grandfather's voice and the hum of the freeway and, every few minutes, a plane coming down out of the north toward the airport, its lights blinking red and white.

He gives her the houses. The real names, the ones she was not allowed to write until tonight. He goes around the circle sunwise, starting at the notched stone, and for each house he says the old name, and the star that rises there in each season, and the island it will take you to if you leave from the canoe beach of Kolotai and keep it on your bow. Some of the names she has heard before, half-hidden in his English stories. Some she has never heard at all. He says them slowly and twice, and the second time she hears his grandfather in the way he says them, a different rhythm, as if he is reciting something he was made to repeat on a beach with a stick waiting.

At the house where the long southeast swell comes from, he stops for a while.

"This one is not a star," he says in English. "This one is the old wave. It doesn't have a rising and a setting. It is always there. My grandfather said this is the house your grandmother lives in." He clears his throat. "He meant his grandmother. Now it is my grandmother. One day, it will be me. Not soon. But one day. When you are out there, and you don't know which way, lie down in the bottom of the canoe and feel for this one. If you feel it, you are not lost."

She doesn't say anything. The red dot glows.

He goes on around the circle. It takes an hour and forty minutes. By the end his voice is hoarse and he is leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and she is shivering and has stopped noticing. When he says the last name, at the notched stone again, she stops the recording and saves it, and the family space asks her where to put it, and she chooses the record, and the folder Mele made, and the setting that says kept: descendants of Semisi Fifita only.

"There," he says. "Now I can die."

"Grandpa."

"Not tonight. Tonight I want soup."

---

The presentation is on a Thursday at the end of April, in Room 214 of West High, which faces the parking lot and the old brick of the gym and, past that, the green line of North Temple where the train runs out toward the airport. It is a hot day for April, the first warm one, and the windows are propped open with textbooks, and the room smells of sunscreen and dry-erase markers and somebody's microwave burrito from lunch.

Losa goes ninth, after Jaxon's mall, which is mostly photos of an escalator, and before Carmen's grandmother's apartment, which Carmen has made into a cardboard model with real curtains. There are twenty-six students and Mr. Danforth, who is young and wears the same green cardigan every day and is the first teacher Losa has had who says "Fifita" right the first time.

She also has guests, which is allowed. In the back row, in the chairs by the radiator, sit her mother, in scrubs, because she is going straight to work after; Tevita, who skipped his own class to come and is pretending he was given permission; and Paige, who is in this class anyway but has moved to the back to sit with the family. Between them, in his ferry jacket, despite the heat, sits Sione Fifita, with his cane across his knees and the face of a man about to watch a launch. He has never been inside an American high school before. He has spent the first ten minutes looking at the ceiling tiles with keen technical disapproval.

Losa plugs her tablet into the screen at the front of the room. The first image comes up: a satellite photograph, sharp and blue, of a scatter of low islands in the middle of a vast dark ocean. Most of the islands are not much more than smudges of green wrapped in pale rings of reef.

"This is Ha'apai," she says. "It's in the middle of Tonga. Tonga is in the South Pacific, about twelve hundred miles northeast of New Zealand. I've never been there."

She clicks. The image moves in closer, closer, until one smudge fills the screen: a long, thin island, very green, and at its northern end a pale, ragged patch where the green stops and the reef begins.

"This is where my family's village was. It was called Kolotai. About four hundred people lived there. It's not there anymore. It isn't destroyed; nobody blew it up. It's underwater. Most of the time, at high tide, it's a reef. At low tide, sometimes, you can walk across it. My cousin did, last January. She's twenty-two. She works on a fisheries boat."

She clicks again. The map comes up.

It is the map from the family space, the one with every place in the old village pinned, but this is the outside version, the one the office approved, with the graves left off and some of the houses left as unnamed dots. Each pin is a small colored circle. The map underneath is a drawing, not a photograph: Aunt Mele drew it in 2039 from memory, with help from the old people, on a big sheet of white paper, and photographed it, and Sela laid the pins over it, one by one, the summer she was fifteen. You can see the shape of the green like a breadfruit leaf. You can see the hall, the store, the paths. On the lagoon side, a curve of beach with small canoe shapes drawn along it, very carefully, like a child's drawing of fish.

"My family keeps something we call the village record," Losa says. "Since 2026, the old people have been recorded talking about the places in the village. Each place. One at a time. My aunt started it when she was sixteen, about my age. She recorded her grandmother, my great-grandmother, telling about the meeting green." She touches the green on the screen and it opens: the photograph of the band, 1984, white shirts, dented horns, the tamarind behind them, a young woman in a white dress beside a young man in a jacket too big for him. "That's her. That's the wedding. The band is playing for them."

Somebody in the second row says, quietly, "That's so cool."

She plays thirty seconds of the funeral march. It comes out of the classroom speakers thin and a little tinny, recorded on the green forty-two years ago, and a dog barks somewhere in the background, and the euphonium comes in low and slow under the cornets, and the whole room goes still, even Jaxon. In the back row her grandfather sits with his eyes closed.

Then she reads. She reads a page of her great-grandmother's entry, in English, from her own transcript, the part about the tuba breathing like a cow at six o'clock and old Pita shouting about the belly. People laugh, which she hoped they would. She reads the part about the water lying in the low corner of the green the shape of a fish, the first time, and the children playing in it. Nobody laughs. She reads the last part, the part where Lesieli says if you see it, it is still here. Her voice holds. She does not look at the back row.

She shows a photo of Pita Mahe's euphonium, which is in a glass case in the new hall now, dented, with a strip of tapa tied around its bell. Tevita in the back says audibly, "That's the family tuba," and the class laughs, and she is grateful to him, more grateful than he'll ever know, and doesn't correct him.

She shows the canoe beach, and plays her grandfather's young voice from 2032 saying our people didn't live on islands, they lived on the sea and rested on islands. She shows the posts, the four hardwood posts now standing at the corners of a tapa shed on Tongatapu, with the women kneeling along a length of white cloth between them, beaters raised. She shows the lashing at the top of one post, the turtle's back, black and red.

She saves the hardest part for the end.

"There are things in the village record I can't show you," she says.

She clicks to a black slide with nothing on it.

"The village had graves. My great-grandmother is buried there. At low tide you can still see some of the stones. My cousin took photos. My family's community office in Tonga decides who sees what in the record. For the graves, they said no. Not because it's a secret, exactly. Because the people who are buried there belong to their families, and their families didn't say yes. Also the well. A woman who lived next to it asked that it stay in the family, because she was worried that outside people would think the village was dirty. It wasn't dirty. It was poor. She said that's different."

She looks out at the room. Twenty-six faces, some of them interested, some of them squinting at the black slide as if something will appear on it.

"There's also a part of my grandfather's entry that's kept. It's about his dad. He's going to let me hear it someday, but not yet." She swallows. "And last week he recorded the names of the star houses, which is how he learned to navigate, from his grandfather. Those are kept too. So, um. There's a lot of the village I'm not going to show you. And that's part of the place. That's part of what it was. A place where people decided what belonged to who."

She clicks once more. The map comes back, all its colored pins glowing over Aunt Mele's careful drawing, and then, slowly, as she touches a button, a pale blue wash creeps over it from the north and west, from the lagoon and the reef: the tide line in 2026, then 2030, then 2041, 2048, 2052, 2061, moving south across the green, the well, the beach, the houses, until only the south end of the island is left white and dry, and the drawing of the tamarind is under water, and the little fish-shaped canoes are under water, and only the black rock at the end of the beach stands up out of the blue.

"In July," Losa says, "I'm going to sail there on a canoe. A traditional one. Just for one part of the trip. I'm going to be crew. I'm going to look at it at low tide. That's it. Thank you." She hesitates and then says, because she has practiced it, "Fakamālō atu."

---

There is a silence that is longer than any silence after any of the other presentations, and then Mr. Danforth starts clapping, and the class claps, and someone at the back whoops, which turns out to be Tevita.

Carmen raises her hand while Losa is still unplugging the tablet. "Can I ask a question?"

"Okay."

"Are you mad? That it's underwater?"

Losa thinks. She thinks about her great-grandmother on the step of the store, laughing and saying, ask me again in January. She thinks about Losana Taufa with the coral stones, and Tavake Vea with the posts on the grass, and her grandfather on the roof in the ring of stones, picking up each one, north first, sunwise.

"Sometimes," she says. "Mostly I think they didn't let it go. They kept moving it. They kept carrying things."

Jaxon raises his hand. "What's the thing at the end? The black rock?"

"The jumping rock. The kids used to jump off it."

"Do they still?"

"My cousin did. Once."

"Sick," says Jaxon, sincerely, and that is the end of the questions.

---

In the hallway afterward, in the crush of the bell, her grandfather is waiting by the drinking fountain with his cane, like a ship at anchor in a fast current, everybody parting around him. Her mother has already gone to her car; she has to be on the floor by three. Tevita is talking to a girl from the volleyball team. Paige is beside Sione, holding his elbow, very lightly, in case.

Losa stops in front of them. She doesn't know what to say.

"The tide map," her grandfather says. "With the blue. Who made that?"

"Me. And Sela. She gave me the measurements from the fisheries boat. And Aunt Mele had the old ones, from the office."

He nods slowly.

"Was it too much?"

"It was correct," he says. "Most things that are correct are too much." He lifts one hand off the cane and taps it, gently, on the side of her head, twice, the way you'd tap a gauge to see if the needle is stuck. "You said the canoe."

"I wasn't supposed to?"

"You were supposed to. Now twenty-six American children will ask you in September if you went. Now you have to go." He smiles, the full white flash of it. "That is navigation. You say the island out loud. Then you can't turn back."

Paige, on his other side, says carefully, "Mālō, Grandpa," and he turns to her, astonished, and says, "Mālō, Paige. 'Ofa atu," and Paige goes so red she has to look at the drinking fountain.

---

That night her aunt posts a photograph to the family space from the tapa shed. It is midafternoon on Friday there, and the light comes slanting in under the roof onto a long length of cloth laid out flat on the mats. It is not finished. It has been beaten and joined and rubbed over the patterns with the brown dye, but not yet painted over by hand with the black lines that will make the shapes sharp. In the brown, though, you can see them already, coming up out of the cloth the way the pattern boards lay them under it: the turtle and the flying fox. Down the long center, though, painted straight onto the brown by hand in a single wavering line, runs something Losa has never seen on a ngatu before.

It is a chain of small circles, each with a dot in the middle. She counts them. There are thirty-two.

Underneath Mele has written: For July. The women are calling it Losa's road. I told them it's Semisi's road and they told me to be quiet and beat. Your house names are in the record. Don't tell anyone which circle is which.

The Beating Ground

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the beating ground under the breadfruit trees behind the Vea house, where the women of Kolotai made the bark cloth, and the paper mulberry gardens beside it
Recorded: 4 May 2058, morning, in the tapa shed behind Kolotai Fo'ou hall, Tongatapu, during work
Speaker: Mele Fifita, aged 48, with the women's group speaking around her
Recorded by: Sela Fifita, aged 12, her daughter
Transcribed by: Sela Fifita, with help
May be read by: anyone. The women of the group agreed together, "because the cloth goes out of the village anyway, at every wedding, so the story of it can go out too."

---

Is it recording through the noise? Sela, hold it nearer to me and away from Aunty Vika's beater, she hits like a man building a road.

(Laughter. Rhythmic beating continues under the speaker for the whole recording.)

I'm going to talk while I work, because if I stop, the bark dries and I have to wet it again, and because I can't say this sitting still.

The old place is gone now. I'll say that first. The beating ground of Kolotai was behind the Vea house, on the high side of the village, under four breadfruit trees that were planted by Tavake's great-grandmother. It is under the sea at every tide now, not only the big ones. I went to see it from the boat in March. You can see the breadfruit stumps when the water is low, black, with the weed on them, like the bottoms of four burnt candles. That's all.

So I'm going to tell it, here, in the new shed, with the posts from the Fifita house at the corners and the turtle up there in the northeast where you can see it if you look. Look up, Sela. Not at the recorder. At the turtle. Good.

The beating ground. When I was a girl, every house had a log. A beating log, a long, heavy log of hard wood, flat on the top, raised up a little on two stones so it rings when you hit it. The women sat at the logs cross-legged with a pile of wet bark strips beside them, and the mallets, which are square, four-sided, grooved on two sides and flat on the other two. You beat with the grooved side first, to spread it. Then the flat side, to make it smooth. Every woman's mallet was different. My grandmother Lesieli's was so old the grooves were nearly flat and the handle was black from her hand. When she died, I took it. This is it. I'm beating with it now. Listen.

(Beating. A slightly different pitch.)

You hear the sound is lower? Old wood. Old hand.

That sound, the beating, was the sound of Kolotai in the mornings. You woke up to it. Tok, tok, tok, all over the village from under the breadfruit, many logs, all at different speeds, so it sounded like rain on a roof that can't decide. My mother said you could tell who was beating by the rhythm. Losana Taufa beat slow and heavy, she was a big woman. Lu'isa Vea beat fast, in threes, like she was in a hurry to finish and go gossip at the well. My grandmother beat in a rhythm like the band's slow march, I don't know why. Maybe she was thinking of the band. She married to the band.

You know how it's made. Sela knows. For the record, I'll say it.

You plant the hiapo, the paper mulberry. Long straight sticks in rows in the garden, close together, so they grow up thin and tall and don't branch. When they're two, three meters high and as thick as your thumb, you cut them. You take the bark off in one long strip, pulling from the bottom, and it comes off white inside, wet, and smelling like green almonds. Then you scrape off the outside bark with a shell, the dark part, and you're left with the inner bark. That's the cloth, before it's cloth. You soak it, then you beat it. A strip as wide as two fingers, you beat until it's as wide as your hand. Then you join the strips, laying them over each other, and you beat them together. That's the feta'aki, the plain white cloth. Then later, all the women together, we paste the feta'aki in layers over the pattern boards and rub the dye over, and then it becomes ngatu.

The paper mulberry is the first thing that went.

Before the houses, before the well, the gardens on the low side of the village went salty, and the hiapo doesn't like salt. The leaves curled. The bark came off brown. The women moved the gardens to the high side behind the Vea house, near the beating ground, and that was all right for a while. Then that went too. When we moved inland in 2039, the first thing the women's group did was not build houses. The men built the houses. The first thing we did was plant the hiapo. Before anything. Losana Taufa said, if we have no cloth, we have no weddings, we have no funerals, we have nothing to give each other. We planted it in the rain with our hands in the mud and the children helping. And it grew.

And when we came here, south, to Tongatapu, in 2048, we brought cuttings. In buckets. On the ferry. Some of these sticks in the garden out there behind the shed are from the plants that were from the plants that were from the gardens at Kolotai. I'm not saying the bark is better. All the bark is the same. I'm saying I know where it came from.

(Another voice, off: "Mele, say about the boards.")

Aunty Vika says say about the boards.

The kupesi, the pattern boards. You lay the cloth on top of them, and when you rub the dye over, the pattern underneath comes up into the cloth, like a stone in a road shows through a sheet when you lay it down. In the old days the kupesi were carved wood or sewn from coconut leaf ribs onto a pandanus mat. Every family had its own. Some designs belong to everybody, like the flying fox, the two birds, the Tongan coat of arms. Some belong to only one family or one village. Kolotai had a kupesi of its own called the canoe beach, three canoe shapes in a row and a line of sand. My grandmother's sister made it, long ago. It was sewn on a mat. When the Fifita house drank the sea in 2043, that mat floated and got soaked and the stitches rotted. My grandmother cried more for that mat than for the house.

We remade it. Tavake Vea made the canoes again from wood, from memory, small, with a knife, and we sewed them down. It's here. It's on the board under the long table there. Sela, show the recorder.

(Pause. Sound of movement.)

Not like that, it can't see, it only hears. Never mind.

The women say I should talk about the women and not only the cloth.

So.

On the beating ground at Kolotai, we were not only beating. We were looking after each other. Everybody knows what goes on at the well, you have that on the record from Losana. Losana got the well; I'm taking the beating ground. Here was different. At the well you were standing, and fast, and you had the bucket to carry. Here you were sitting, all morning, for weeks, all together, the young ones and the old ones. The old ones sang. Old songs, work songs, the songs for the beating with the rhythm in them, and songs from the lakalaka, and songs nobody knew where they came from, and sometimes, when they thought the young girls weren't listening, songs that you could not sing in front of the men. (Laughter.) The young girls listened.

If a woman's husband was bad to her, the beating ground knew first. If a girl was going to go to Auckland and was afraid, the beating ground knew. If someone was sick, the women went from the beating ground to her house with food, all together, still with the bark on their hands. We decided a lot of things on the beating ground that the men think they decided on the green.

Don't laugh, Aunty Vika, they will hear this.

They should hear it.

(Pause. Beating stops for a moment, then resumes.)

There's one more thing.

When we left Kolotai for the last time, in 2048, the women went to the beating ground. All of us, the night before the ferry. The ground was already wet half the day by then; the breadfruit trees had started dying from the roots. We took the logs. All the beating logs, every one, even the ones nobody had used in years because the woman had died. We lifted them out of their stones. They were heavy, those logs. Some of the young men helped, but most of it was us.

My grandmother Lesieli was eighty-three. She couldn't lift. She sat on the ground in the dark under the breadfruit, by her own log, which was ours, which was her mother's, and she beat on it with her mallet. Not on bark. Just on the bare wood. One last time. Slowly. The rhythm of the band's march. And then, one by one, all the women, at all the logs, they started too, without any bark. Just the wood. All the different rhythms. All over the dark. Like the old mornings.

I don't know how long we did it. Until she stopped.

Then we carried the logs down to the ferry.

They're here. Look. This one, under my knees, that's ours. That one, by the post, is the Vea log. The heavy one is Losana Taufa's. Her granddaughter beats on it now and she beats slow, like Losana, because the log is used to it.

(Pause.)

Sela, stop crying, you'll get salt in the bark.

(Laughter, kindly.)

That's all. Put that we're making a ngatu for the wedding of the Mafi boy in June, forty meters, kupesi of the flying fox and the canoe beach. Put that the women of Kolotai Fo'ou sent it. Turn it off, my hands are dry.

---

Transcriber's note (Sela, 2058): I'm sorry I cried. It was the part with the logs. Mom says I can leave that in.

Note added 2063 (Mele): Hiapo cuttings from the shed gardens were sent this year in damp newspaper in a box to Salt Lake City, Utah, to 'Ana Fifita, for Losa's school science fair. They were stopped at the border and destroyed. 'Ana says the inspector was very kind about it and looked at the map of the village for twenty minutes on her tablet while they waited. Losa came second at the science fair with a project on salt in groundwater.

Note added January 2068 (Mele): The women's group is making a ngatu for July, thirty meters, kupesi of the turtle and the flying fox, with a line of thirty-two circles down the center, painted freehand, which is not on any board. It is not for a wedding or a funeral. The women have not told me who it is for. They think I don't know.

Tuitui

The canoe smells of new rope and old salt and, faintly, of the varnish they painted on the deck in May. Losa learns this on her first night aboard, lying on her back on the platform between the two hulls, her head on a coil of line, with the whole of the southern sky going around above her like a wheel somebody has given a slow push.

There is no inversion here. There is no lid. The sky goes all the way down to the water in every direction, and the water is black and moving and alive with small green sparks wherever the hulls cut it, and the stars come down to meet it so that, at the very edge, she cannot tell which lights are in the sky and which are reflected. The air is warm even at midnight. It tastes of salt and of the smoke from the little cooking box at the stern, where somebody is heating water for the watch.

Tuitui is twenty-two meters long. Two hulls, painted black, joined by a deck of planks lashed across them with crossbeams, and in the middle a small hut of canvas over a frame, where the crew sleep in turns. Two masts. Two sails, crab-claw shaped, the color of raw bark in the daytime and of nothing at all at night. She was built at the yard in Tongatapu over three years, by men and women from six of the relocated villages, and every crossbeam is tied, not nailed. Losa knows the lashing at the forward beam on the port side. It is a turtle's back, black and red. Tavake Vea, eighty-nine, tied it sitting in a plastic chair on the slipway, with his great-grandson rolling the kafa beside him and complaining the whole time, in March. Aunt Mele sent her the photo.

She has been aboard for thirty-one hours.

The leg from Nuku'alofa to Nomuka was sailed by another crew, the young ones from 'Eua and Kotu, and she came out to join at Nomuka by fisheries boat, with Sela, who is not crew but is allowed to come as far as the meeting with the escort. Sela hugged her on the fisheries boat's deck so hard her sunglasses fell off. Sela is taller than she looked on the screen and has a scar on her chin from a fish hook and laughs at everything. She calls Losa "the American" and has already taught her two words that are not on the family word list, and that Losa is not, Sela says, to teach to Paige.

Now, from Nomuka, the canoe is sailing north toward the middle islands of Ha'apai. Her leg. Two nights, if the wind holds. The navigator is a woman from Vava'u called Heilala Lavaka, maybe fifty, with gray in her braid and a voice that never rises. She does not use any instruments. There are instruments on board, in a sealed box under the hut, with the escort boat a mile off with its own, in case. Heilala does not open the box. She stands at the stern beside the long steering paddle, in a fleece jacket, barefoot, and looks.

Losa's job tonight is watch. Two hours. Sit at the forward end of the starboard hull, keep an eye on the sail, call out if the wind shifts or a light shows on the water. Don't sleep. Don't talk unless it matters.

She has not slept for most of the thirty-one hours anyway. She was sick for the first six, violently, over the side, while the crew pretended not to notice and a boy from Kotu called Sefo, who is sixteen, held the back of her T-shirt so she wouldn't go in. After that her body figured something out and the sickness went away and left her hollow and light, as if she'd been scrubbed out. She ate cassava and a tin of mackerel at sunset and it was the best meal of her life.

---

At one in the morning, Heilala calls her back to the stern.

"Sione's girl," she says, in Tongan, and then in English, because the boy from Kotu has told everyone her Tongan is "improving from a very low place," which Losa suspects came from Mele somehow. "Come here. Tell me where we are going."

Losa stands beside her at the steering paddle. The deck rolls under her feet, long and slow. She looks at the sky.

She knows it. That is the strangest part. She has never seen this sky, not like this, not with the whole bottom of it showing, but she knows it, because she has stood on a cinder-block roof in Salt Lake City for six years with an old man in a lawn chair telling her it was there. The Cross is over in the southwest now, leaning down toward the water. Above it and to the left, the two Pointers. Far over to the northeast, low, coming up out of the black water, a bright star which her grandfather calls by his grandfather's name and which she is not allowed to say aloud here, to anybody, even Heilala.

"North," Losa says. "A little east. There, under that star." She points. "It's coming up out of the house where he said the road to Kolotai starts. When it's too high, there'll be another one under it. Two of them."

Heilala looks at her for a long moment in the dark. "Who told you that?"

"My grandfather."

"His grandfather told him."

"Semisi Fifita."

The navigator nods slowly. "My teacher talked about Semisi Fifita," she says. "He said there was an old man in Ha'apai who knew the northern houses better than anyone, and nobody would learn from him, and when he died they lost it. My teacher was sad all his life about it." She is quiet. "Your grandfather learned?"

"He learned. Then he went to the ferries."

"And now you."

"I'm just crew."

"Everybody is just crew." Heilala adjusts the paddle, a small movement, the whole canoe leaning very slightly in answer. "Lie down."

"What?"

"There. On the deck. On your back. Close your eyes. Tell me the swell."

So she does. She lies down on the planks behind the hut, on her back, and closes her eyes, and the stars go away, and she has nothing.

For a long time she has nothing. The canoe moves. It moves a lot. It goes up and down and side to side and there is the slap of water on the hulls and the creak of the lashings and somebody snoring in the hut. It is just motion. It is like lying on a mattress in the bed of a pickup on the Bangerter Highway.

"You're thinking," says Heilala above her. "Stop thinking. Feel the big one."

Hemi Kereama said that too, on the tablet in May and June, every Thursday night from his boat shed, in the rain or out of it. He had her lie on the kitchen floor in Glendale with her eyes shut while Tevita rocked a folded ironing board under her shoulders, badly, to make the point that a body can learn a rhythm before it has anything real to learn it from. Tevita was terrible at it. The point got made anyway.

She tries to stop thinking. She thinks instead about the roof. About her grandfather saying, you don't feel it with your mind, you feel it in your hips. About the night on the roof in April, when he told her about the old wave, the one that lives in the house where your grandmother lives. About him saying, if you feel it, you are not lost.

And then, under everything, she does feel it.

It is slower than the rest. Much slower. A long lift, from behind her and to her right, a lift that goes on and on, like someone very large breathing in their sleep, and then lets her down again. The other motions ride on top of it, quick and choppy, but this one is underneath them all, and it does not change. Southeast. Coming from the southeast, all the way from the other side of the ocean.

She opens her eyes. She is crying, she notices, a little, the tears running sideways into her ears.

"Southeast," she says. "The long one. It's there."

"It's always there," says Heilala. "Now feel the other one."

---

At dawn on the second day, she sees the island.

It comes up out of the sea as a line, first, very low and dark, exactly the way her grandfather's young voice on the beach tape said it would, like somebody drew it with a pencil and didn't press hard. Then the line gets trees on it. Then, as the light grows behind them and goes from gray to pink to the clean hard blue that she saw in January in Sela's photographs, the trees get shapes, palms, their heads all leaning the same way. The water goes from black to deep blue to green. There are birds, white terns, two of them, flying out from the land low over the waves and turning back toward it, and Heilala points at them without a word and Losa understands: they are going home to fish later, so home is that way, so the land is that way. A man in a lawn chair told her about the birds. She did not think she would ever see them.

They sail up the outside of the reef, carefully, all morning, with the escort boat closer now and Heilala at the paddle and the young crew at the sails. The sun is very hot. Losa has burned her nose and the tops of her feet. At eleven, with the tide falling, Heilala brings the canoe in through a gap in the reef where the water is pale and quiet and turns it and lets the sails go slack. The anchor goes down. The noise stops.

"Kolotai," Heilala says. "Your grandfather's road ends here."

Losa looks.

There is no village. She knew that. She has seen the photos a hundred times. But she still expected, somehow, at least the shape of a place. There is no shape. There is an island to the south, long and thin and green, with palms and a white beach on the lagoon side and nobody on it. To the north, where the island should go on, there is water: wide, flat, pale green water, with a darker band of reef under it and the waves breaking white on the outer edge. That is all. Except, standing up out of the water about two hundred meters away, a single black rock, the size of a car, with a bird on it.

"The jumping rock," she says.

Behind her, Sela, who has come over from the escort boat in a dinghy to be here, says, "Wait."

---

They wait two hours. Nobody tells the crew to do anything. The young ones from Kotu and 'Eua swim off the hulls, shrieking. Sefo from Kotu gets out a guitar that has been in the hut the whole time, wrapped in a plastic bag, and plays something slow. Heilala sleeps in the shade of the sail with her hat over her face. Losa sits on the forward crossbeam with her feet in the water and watches the tide go down.

It goes down like a breath out. Slowly, at first, then all at once. The pale green water draws back off the reef flat toward the outer edge, and things begin to show. Weed, brown and gold. Black rock, pitted, furred. Sand, wet and gray-white. Then, as the water thins to a sheet over everything, the edges of things that are not reef.

A line of slabs, tilted, their corners rounded. A circle in the rock, dark, with water in it. A long low ridge that might have been a path. Beyond them, a flat place the shape of a breadfruit leaf, wide in the middle, with points at both ends, now covered with a short green-brown weed that ripples in the last of the water like grass in wind.

"Go on," says Sela. "I'll come."

Losa climbs down off the hull into water up to her knees. It is warm. It is so clear she can see her feet, white and strange, on the sand. She wades. Sela wades beside her in reef shoes, holding a plastic bag. The canoe crew, quietly, without anybody saying anything, have all come to the side of the hulls to watch.

The meeting green is soft underfoot. Weed and sand. Small crabs scatter from her feet. At its south end, a flat stone with a metal pin set into it, green with corrosion, numbers stamped on it, which she knows from the record, which a young man from the government put into the step of the hall in 2025 and her great-grandmother watched him do it. Beyond it, to the west, the low ridge of the beach, the step in the rock where her grandfather sat as a boy to eat green coconuts, and where now, in the pool under the ledge, something with eight legs folds itself away from her shadow. To the south of the green, the dark round hole of the well, a hand's depth of water in it. She doesn't go near. She stands where Losana Taufa told her grandfather to sit, on the lid that isn't there, and looks, and then she turns her back on it.

And then, at the east edge, the graves.

She has promised herself she won't photograph them. She doesn't. Sela leads her through, carefully, the way you'd lead someone through a sleeping house. The stones lean every way. Some are just concrete slabs, flat. Some have crosses. Some have shells laid on them in patterns, the shells loose now, moved by the tides. The Taufa baby's is very small. It has a plastic toy car on it, cemented down, faded white.

LESIELI FIFITA. 1965 to 2053. Next to it, VILIAMI FIFITA. 1963 to 2032. The plastic wreath from Christmas, sun-bleached to the color of a shell. The shell necklace.

Losa kneels on the wet sand beside her great-grandmother. It is cold through her shorts, colder than the water. She takes the brush out of Sela's bag, a stiff plastic one from the dollar store on Redwood Road, and starts on the weed at the base of the stone.

Sela kneels beside her and does the same for Viliami.

They work for a long time. Neither of them talks. The water is beginning to come back, she can feel it, a thin cool line moving across the sand toward her knees. When the stones are clean, Losa takes out the thing she brought.

It is a piece of coral, gray-white, pitted, the size of a fist, with a notch in it. She took it off the roof of the community hall in Salt Lake City on the night before she flew, at two in the morning, with her grandfather's permission, while he sat in the lawn chair and watched her do it and did not say anything at all. He touched it first, before she picked it up. Then he told her which way to put it.

She sets it at the head of the stone, facing north.

"It's from the beach," she tells her great-grandmother. "The south end. He wanted to correct that. He says sorry about the north." And then, because she can't think of anything else, and because the water is coming and she has a canoe to get back to, she says the thing every Tongan girl says when she is leaving the house of an older woman, quick and plain and in her real voice, not her school voice. Then she gets up off her knees.

Sela takes one photograph, of the two girls' footprints going out across the sand toward the black canoe, filling with water.

That night, on the canoe, anchored inside the reef with the tide coming in over the old village, Losa sits at the forward end of the starboard hull with her phone, in a dead zone, with no way to post anything to anybody, and writes the first sentence of her own entry for the record. She deletes it. She writes it again.

Above her, out of the house where her grandfather told her the road starts, the next star of the road is coming up.

The Graves

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the graves of Kolotai, the fa'itoka, on the east side of the old village behind the green
Recorded: 22 September 2064, evening, by video call, Auckland to Kolotai Fo'ou
Speaker: Siale Mahe, aged 69, euphonium player, of Kolotai, now of Māngere, Auckland
Recorded by: the office of Kolotai Fo'ou (Lupe Vea), with Mele Fifita
Transcribed by: Lupe Vea
May be read by: the descendants of those buried at Kolotai. Not for outside. Not to be shown in any presentation. Siale Mahe: "If a stranger hears this, they will think it is sad. It is not only sad. Only our people will know that."

---

Can you hear me? The connection is bad, my grandson says there are too many people in Auckland watching the rugby. Lupe, if I disappear, keep talking to yourself, I'll come back.

So. The graves.

I'll tell you how they were and what we did there, and then the hard part. I want to start with the band, because the band was how you got to the graves. You did not walk to the graves. You were played there.

When I was a boy, a funeral in Kolotai was three days, four days. The body lay in the house on the mats, under the ngatu, with the women sitting all around. The kava was going on the green. The pigs were in the umu. People came from Lifuka, from Nomuka, from Tongatapu, on every boat. And then on the last morning the men lifted, and the band went in front, and we walked. From the house, to the green, and around the green once, sunwise, so the person could see it, and then east on the sand path between the breadfruit to the graves. All the band in white shirts. Slowly. Very slowly. The slow march is a hard thing to play because you have to hold every note longer than your breath wants. Old Pita Mahe, my grandfather, used to say, the slow march is for the person in front of you, not for you, so you breathe for them. I didn't understand him until I played it for him.

The graves were on the high ground on the east side, behind the green, where the sand was white and dry and the casuarina trees made a sound in the wind like a long breath out. That's why they put them there. High and dry. Our people dig the grave and then, after the burial, the family makes the grave up into a mound, a long mound of sand, and decorate it. Black stones from the beach around the edge. White coral sand on top, raked. Shells, the cowries and the white clams. Bottles pushed upside down into the sand around the edge, the green bottles and the brown ones, so that when the sun goes down they glow. Sometimes a ngatu over it, a whole length, held down with stones, for the first days. Flags. Flowers, the real ones, and later the plastic ones because the real ones die so fast in that sun.

Every Saturday the women went to tidy them. Not only their own families. Everybody's. With the brooms made from coconut leaf ribs, sweeping the white sand back up onto the mounds where the rain had washed it down. Picking up the shells the wind had moved. Talking. Laughing. The children running around the stones playing tag, and nobody telling them off, because the old people liked the noise. My grandmother said, the dead are bored, let them watch the children.

And the food. People forget that part. On the Saturday after a funeral, and then every year on the day, the family carried food to the graves: a basket of the cold leftover pork, green coconuts with the tops cut off for drinking, keke 'isite wrapped in a cloth, sometimes a pot of 'ota 'ika if somebody had caught fish that morning. You ate sitting on the sand at the foot of the mound, with your back against your grandfather, so to speak. The children fought over the coconut flesh. The old women told the person in the grave the news, out loud, between bites, who had married, whose pig had run off, which boy had gone to Auckland and not written. My grandmother told her mother every year that the band was getting worse. It was not. She just wanted to give her something to argue with.

I'll tell you one Saturday, so it's not all "every Saturday." I was eight. My grandmother woke me before the sun and put the coconut-rib broom in my hand, the small one, and said, today you sweep your great-grandfather. I said I wanted to go fishing with my cousins. She said the fish will still be stupid tomorrow. So I went, very cross, kicking the sand all the way up the path.

When we got there, the bottles around his mound had fallen in the night, a dog or the wind, half of them lying on their sides. She made me stand every one back up, neck down, pushed in to the shoulder, and they had to be in a line, not crooked. Green, brown, green, brown. If I got the order wrong she pulled it out and gave it back to me. I did that whole mound three times. My hands were full of sand. Then she sat down at the foot of it and opened a green coconut with her knife and gave it to me, and drank from the other one, and said to the mound, very loud, "Your great-grandson is lazy, but he is learning." Then she said to me, "Stay until the sun goes down. Then you'll see why."

So I stayed, still cross. And when the sun went down behind the lagoon, it came through the bottles. All of them, all over the graves, every family's bottles, lighting up green and brown on the white sand, like a village of little lamps. Like the dead had turned the lights on in their houses. My grandmother didn't say anything. She just looked at my face and laughed, because she knew she had me.

After that, I went every Saturday without being asked. Put that in, Lupe. My grandsons don't believe it.

That is how it was. Now the hard part.

The sea started to come into the graves in the 2040s. Later than the green, because the graves were higher. But it came. First in the king tides. The mounds got wet at the bottom. The bottles fell over. Then the shells and the coral sand washed off and the mounds went flat. Then, in some of the old graves on the low side, the sand washed away so far that... I'll not say. You know what I mean. The families who had people on the low side came with the boats and moved them. Some to the inland site, then again to Tongatapu. Lupe, your grandmother's sister was one. That was very hard. That was the hardest thing this village did. Harder than the posts, harder than the well stones. I was there for some of it. We played. We played the slow march for every one, again, on the boats, at sea, from the reef to the new place. Twice for some of them.

And some families said no.

The Fifitas said no. Lesieli said no. She said, I was married on that green and my husband is up on that sand and I will lie next to him and the sea can come and visit. She said it to the town officer and to the family and to everybody on the boats and nobody could change her mind. When she died, in 2053, the families had been on Tongatapu five years. The boys took her north on the fisheries boat. I flew from Auckland for it. We buried her at low tide. On the sand that was left, next to Viliami. There was no green to walk around. We played on the boat, all of us who were left from the band, seven of us, gray-headed by then, holding our horns over the side of the boat because there was nowhere to stand. We played the slow march while they dug. The tide came in while we were playing and we had to hurry the end. The only time in my life I ever hurried the slow march. She would have laughed at us.

The Taufas said no too, for the baby. The little one. Losana's great-grandson, who died at two months, in 2037. Losana said, he was born in Kolotai and he will stay in Kolotai. So he stayed.

Old Fusi, who had no children. Nobody asked Fusi, he had no family to ask. Everybody was his family. The village decided together, on the green, the last time we had a meeting on the green before the inland move. We decided Fusi stays. Because he would have wanted to supervise the sea.

(Pause. Connection breaks and returns.)

Lupe? Can you still hear? Good.

Now I want to say something for the young ones. For my grandson here, who is sitting next to me pretending to look at his phone. For Sione's granddaughter in America. For Sela, the one who goes up there and scrubs the stones.

I know some people think we should have moved everybody. I know there are people in Auckland, in Sydney, our own people, who think we left our grandparents to the sea. I've heard them. At the kava. They say it and then they drink. I don't argue with them. They have their families and their reasons and they carried their people south, and that was right for them.

But I want to say for the record, so nobody says later that we didn't think about it: the ones who stayed, stayed on purpose. They are not lost. They are not abandoned. They are the last of Kolotai standing where Kolotai is. Every day the tide goes over them and every day the tide goes out again and there they are. When the young ones come at low tide with their brushes, and they scrub, and they put the shells back, that's the same as the women on Saturday mornings with the coconut-rib brooms. It's the same work. Only the broom is different.

I am going to be buried in Auckland. In Māngere. Near the airport, so I can hear the planes. My wife is there. I've told my sons. But when I'm buried, I want them to play the slow march, if anybody can still play it, and go around something, anything, once, sunwise, before they put me down. A carpark. A rugby field. I don't mind. So that I see it.

That's all. Lupe, are you crying? You are crying. You are worse than Sela.

Turn it off. My grandson wants the computer back for the rugby.

---

Note added 2064 (Lupe Vea): After the recording, Siale Mahe played the first eight bars of the slow march on his euphonium into the call. He had not played for six years, he said. It is attached to this entry. Kept, with the rest.

Note added 2066 (Mele Fifita): Siale Mahe died in June. At his burial in Māngere the family played the slow march from a recording, his own, from the green in 2026. Before they put him down, the bearers walked him once around the rugby field next to the cemetery, sunwise. His grandson filmed it and sent it to the office. The office has put it with this entry.

Note added 2068 (Sela Fifita, aged 22): On 14 July I went with my cousin Losa Fifita from Salt Lake City to the graves at low tide. She cleaned our great-grandmother's stone. She did not take any photos. She put a stone from the old beach at the head of the grave, from her grandfather in America, facing north. Then she said goodbye to Kui in the ordinary way, the way you say it at a house. The tide was coming. We walked back to the canoe. On 15 July, at the afternoon low water, we went out again with a bucket and did the others: the Taufa baby's, old Fusi's, and the ones nobody comes for anymore. Nobody asked us to.

The Reef

The tide table lives in a plastic sleeve taped to the inside of the hut, a sheet printed in Nuku'alofa for the fisheries crews and gone soft at the corners from wet hands. Sela brings a fresh copy across from the escort boat at first light, in the dinghy, with two cups of instant coffee wedged between her knees, and the two of them read it together on the forward crossbeam with their legs hanging over the water.

Kolotai is not on it. Kolotai has not been on a tide table for twenty years. But Pangai is, and Sela knows the correction the way her mother knows the price of flour: add twenty-two minutes for the reef flat, more if the wind has been in the north. Fifteenth of July. Low water, Pangai, 1:25 p.m. Low water at the old village, near enough, a quarter to two.

"Heilala says one more tide," Sela says. "Then south. The escort wants to be in Nomuka before the weather."

"What weather?"

"The weather Heilala says is coming. The sky looks the same to me." Sela blows on her coffee. "It always looks the same to me. That's why I'm on the fisheries boat and not on this one."

The morning is long. Losa has slept four hours on the deck with her head on a coil of rope and her cheek has the pattern of it pressed into the skin. Her nose has peeled. The water inside the reef is the clean pale green of a bottle held up to the light, and so still at this hour that she can see the shadow of the canoe on the sand below it, two black hulls lying side by side three meters down, with small striped fish going in and out between them as if the shadow were a reef of its own.

There is no signal. There has been no signal since Nomuka. But the escort boat carries a satellite messenger the size of a sandwich, for emergencies and the fisheries office, and the skipper lets each of the young crew send one line a day. Last night Losa used hers. *We cleaned Kui's stone. The notched one is at the head, facing north.* The answer came back in the dark, while she slept, and Sela copied it onto the back of her hand in ballpoint because the messenger only keeps ten.

*Bring one back for the gap. South end of the old beach, where the octopus is. The kept part I will tell you in the winter, on the roof, when there is nothing to see.*

Losa reads her cousin's hand twice. Then she goes into the hut and takes out the ngatu.

The women of the tapa group sent it out with Sela, folded into a square the size of a couch cushion and wrapped in a plastic tablecloth with oranges printed on it, to be carried home in Losa's suitcase and hung in the hall in Salt Lake City for her grandfather. Nobody told her that last part. Sela told her. The two of them unfold one end of it on the deck, a meter, no more, because the wind is getting up and Heilala is watching from the stern. Brown and black and the pale gold of the bark. The turtle along the border. The flying fox. And down the middle, painted freehand in a line that wavers where somebody's wrist got tired, the circles, each with a dot.

Sefo from Kotu comes and squats beside them and looks at it for a long time and says nothing, which for Sefo is a speech.

They fold it up again, on the old creases, and put it back under her bag.

---

At noon Heilala calls her to the stern and makes her lie down again, on her back on the warm planks, eyes shut.

"Not the big one," the navigator says. "You have the big one. The other one. The little one that comes round the island and back."

It takes Losa half an hour to find it, and when she does she is not sure, and says so. A small quick push from the northwest, against the grain of everything, like a hand on a door from the wrong side.

"That is the island talking back," Heilala says. "It is the last thing the village can still say to a canoe. When the reef goes too, that one will go." She is quiet for a while. "Your grandfather would have felt it from Tongatapu. Mine would have. Mine was very rude about it."

---

At one-fifteen the water is going out over the flat like a breath let go, and the two cousins climb down off the hull with a bucket, two brushes from the dollar store on Redwood Road, a scraper Sela borrowed from the fisheries boat's engine room, and Losa's phone in a ziplock bag.

Yesterday was for Kui. Today is for the others.

The Taufa baby's stone first, because it is small and the weed on it is thick and Losa has been thinking about it all night. The plastic car cemented to the slab has gone the white of old bone; she scrubs around it carefully, the way you would wash a sleeping child's face. Then old Fusi's, which is a plain concrete slab with his name scratched into it while it was wet, F U S I and nothing else, the letters full of green. Sela does the letters with the corner of the scraper. Losa does the edges. At the foot of the slab, pushed into the sand to the shoulder, she finds the neck of a green bottle, the last of somebody's ring of bottles from a Saturday forty years gone, and she wiggles it straight and pushes it back in, neck down, the way Siale Mahe's grandmother made him do it three times over.

"Who taught you that?" Sela says.

"A recording. On the boat coming out."

"Uncle Siale's?" Sela sits back on her heels. "He said you'd come. Before he died. He told Mum, the American girl will come one day and do the bottles wrong."

"Did I do it wrong?"

Sela looks at it. "No," she says. "Don't tell anyone. He'd be so annoyed."

There are eleven more stones on the low side whose families went south long ago and do not come. They do as many as they can. They do not talk much. The sun is very hot on the backs of their necks and the weed comes off in long brown ribbons that the last of the water carries away from them across the flat, and once a small gray crab comes and stands on the edge of a slab and watches them work, the way old men used to watch at the beating ground, and then goes away again sideways, unimpressed.

At half past one Losa stands up on the meeting green with her knees soaked through, takes the phone out of the ziplock bag, and gives it to Sela.

"Now?"

"Now. While it's dry."

---

KOLOTAI VILLAGE RECORD
Place: the reef where the village was
Recorded: 15 July 2068, at low water, standing on the meeting green, Kolotai, Ha'apai
Speaker: Losa Fifita, aged 15, great-granddaughter of Lesieli Fifita
Recorded by: Sela Fifita, aged 22, her cousin, holding it out of the splash
Transcribed by: the speaker
May be read by: anyone. The office agreed on 2 August. One vote against. "Because the reef is the only part of Kolotai that a stranger can still go and stand on, so it is the only part a stranger should be told about."

---

My name is Losa. I was born in Salt Lake City in 2053, the year my great-grandmother died, so I never met her and I have never lived in Kolotai. Everything I knew about it until this week, I knew from voices. My great-grandmother on the step of the store. Losana Taufa at the well. My grandfather on the beach the night after his father was buried. Tavake Vea with the posts on the grass. My aunt at the beating log. Siale Mahe from Auckland, about the graves, which I listened to on the fisheries boat coming out, with the volume very low.

This entry is about the reef. That's the only place in Kolotai I've been. I'm standing on it.

You get to it on a canoe called Tuitui, from Nomuka, in two nights, if the wind is from the east. At night the canoe's wake has green sparks in it. The sky is so big it goes under the water at the edges. If you are fifteen and you have never been on a boat bigger than a paddleboard at Pineview, you will throw up for six hours and a boy from Kotu will hold your shirt.

When you come in through the gap in the reef, at the north end of the island, the water goes pale green and very quiet. There's nothing there. That's the first thing. You expect a village, even after you've seen the photos, and there's nothing, only water, and a black rock with a bird on it.

Then you wait for the tide.

At low tide the reef flat comes up. It comes up slowly, like a picture developing. First the weed, then the rock, then the white sand. Then, if you know what you're looking at, the green. It's still the shape of a breadfruit leaf. It's covered in a short brown weed that moves like grass when the last of the water runs off it, and there are small crabs, gray, the color of the sand, that run when you come. The metal pin the government put in the step of the hall in 2025 is still there. It is green now and you can still read the numbers. I didn't write them down. I don't think they matter anymore.

The beach is a ledge in the rock with an octopus under it. The well is a round hole with a hand of water in it. I didn't go close to the well. I stood where Losana Taufa told my grandfather to sit and then I turned around.

The graves I'm not going to describe. You know why.

What I want to say is this.

I thought it would be sad. I thought I'd walk across it and cry the whole way, and I did cry, but only once, and it wasn't at the graves. It was on the canoe the night before we got here, lying on my back with my eyes shut, when I felt the old swell come from the southeast, the long one, the one my grandfather said is the house where your grandmother lives. I felt it for the first time. Under everything. And I knew where I was.

On the reef, I wasn't sad. I was busy. There was weed on Kui's stone and the tide was coming. My cousin Sela had a brush from the dollar store on Redwood Road. We cleaned. Then I put the stone my grandfather gave me at the head of the grave, facing north, the way he told me. Today we came back and did the others. My knees are wet right now.

When I get home, people in Utah are going to ask me, "Is it gone?"

I don't know how to answer that in English. In English there are two choices: it's there, or it's gone. Kolotai is both, twice a day. At high tide, it's gone. At low tide, it's there. You can stand on the green. You can sit on the step where my grandfather ate green coconuts. You can put your hand in the well. And then the water comes back, and you have to leave, and nothing's there but a black rock. And then the water goes out again.

The people of Kolotai didn't wait for the water. They carried things. They carried the well stones inland, and then south across the sea. They carried the posts twice. They carried the beating logs in the dark. They carried the hiapo cuttings in buckets. They carried their grandparents on boats, playing the slow march at sea. Some people they didn't carry, because those people said no, and that was carried too, the no. My grandfather carried eight stones from the old beach in his luggage through three airports. He told me they were from the north end. They were from the south end. He corrected it in the record, in February, so there wouldn't be any argument. I carried one of them back.

I think a place that no longer exists is a place nobody carries. Kolotai isn't that.

I want to put in one more thing, for whoever reads this later. For somebody's grandchild in Sydney, in Auckland, in Salt Lake, in a place we haven't moved to yet.

If you go, go at low tide. Take a brush. Don't take photos of the graves. Lie down on the canoe on the way there with your eyes shut until you find the long swell. It's still there. It comes from the southeast. If you feel it, you're not lost. And when you leave the reef, say goodbye the ordinary way, the way you would at a house. Because it is.

That's all. Mālō 'aupito. Fakamālō atu.

---

Sela stops the recording and hands the phone back without a word and turns away to look at the black rock for a while, which is how Losa knows it was all right.

The water is coming. It comes the way it went, as a thin sheet first, so smooth it shows the sky, sliding in over the weed from the outer edge with a sound like someone turning the pages of a big book very slowly. Losa wades west across the green, past the pin in its stone, to the ledge at the south end of the old beach. The octopus is home; she can see one curled arm in the shadow and the water breathing over it. On the lip of the ledge, among the rubble the sea has broken off it, there is a piece of old coral the size of her fist, gray-white and pitted, with a flat side that will sit well on a tar roof. She picks it up and turns it over in her hand. It has no notch. It will need one, her grandfather will say, and will make one with a screwdriver in the garage, badly.

She puts it in the bucket with the brushes.

They finish old Fusi's edges with the water over their ankles, then over their shins, and when it reaches their knees they stop, because Heilala is standing on the hull with both arms up and that means now. They walk back across the reef flat with the bucket between them, the green going under behind them a hand's width at a time, the slabs, the well, the low ridge of the old path, until there is only the pale water and the black rock with its bird.

On the canoe, with her legs still wet and the stone from the beach wrapped in a T-shirt in the bottom of her bag, beside the folded ngatu, Losa takes the tide table out of its sleeve and copies the next lines into the back of her notebook under the entry, the Pangai times with Sela's twenty-two minutes added in her own hand, so that in Salt Lake City, at the kitchen table in Glendale with the inversion sitting on the valley, she will be able to look at the clock and know when the green is dry.

Low water, Kolotai, Ha'apai, 16 July: 2:31 in the morning, 2:58 in the afternoon.