Koji had been just shy of his sixteenth birthday when he was given his first cane knife, a blunt-tipped machete that belonged to his father. It was three days after his father had accidentally cut the palm of his left hand, leaving the wound to fester and stink, until it was too late and had to be amputated, his heavily bandaged stump propped up on a pillow like an offering. As Koji stood in the hospital’s long, open ward, crowded with two rows of beds, his thoughts couldn’t stop circling around his father’s missing hand, how it must be as dark as a bruise with shriveled, claw-like fingers. Where was it? Had it been thrown back into the cane field waiting to be hauled away with the cane trash?

“Pay attention out there,” his father snapped, startling Koji. “It only takes a moment for your life to change.”

Koji began cutting cane that June. After years of watching others cut and stack the cane, he was one of them. He listened to the workers curse the mostly Portuguese lunas who lorded over them on their big horses, unable to pause and stand and take a breath without the luna’s whips raining down upon their backs. It didn’t matter that they were immigrants too; they were haoles and would automatically be given the higher-paid, better jobs on the plantation. Koji held the heavy knife in his hand and looked out at the tall, billowing cane, the red earth the color of his father’s dried blood. The first morning he worked beside two older Filipino men, Efren and Francisco, both good men who knew his father. Less than half an hour later, Koji was sweating and felt the solid weight of the long cane knife straining the muscles of his arm. He gripped the knife tighter and swung it over and over again.

Every whack of the machete was a challenge.

Every whack of the machete taunted him.

He couldn’t disappoint his father.

“Slow down, eh, or you’ll faint from the heat before you finish a row,” Efren warned him.