As they approached the plantation, Koji felt the heat through his gloves as he gripped the iron lever and applied the brakes to slow the train for the last few miles. Hot and sweaty, Koji hung out the open window for some fresh air as the train entered Puli, the last stretch of tracks circling around the cane fields that led back to the train barn. The sky gave off a hazy gray light, the air smoky and warm. Koji coughed, spitting up phlegm. The remnants of the morning’s cane burning of a nearby field remained in the dark cloud of smoke still lingering overhead. Mauna Loa’s eruption did little to disrupt Puli from completing its year-end harvest and getting the sugar on ships to the mainland.

During the past ten years Koji had cut cane, he’d stood hypnotized in those very same fields watching the cane burning during harvest as the heat pressed up against him. Billows of black smoke rose into the sky as flames raced through the fields. The controlled fire spread quickly, consuming the hidden pests and the leafy tops of the sugarcane, returning the ash to the soil as nutrients. The crackle of the leaves and straw rose in a choking cloud—gloomy and serious and stifling. After, the fire was quickly contained and the fields watered down with hoses before the cane was cut. All that was left were the thin stems, their tough outer layer shielding the raw cane underneath. The scorched stalks leaned over like drunken men, felled by the fire that cleared away the cane trash and by the gravity of their own weight.

On those windless mornings during the burning, a blanket of pewter haze hovered in the darkened sky. Koji tied his bandana tightly over his nose and mouth as he moved between the blackened rows to cut the charred cane. His eyes stung and watered, his throat raw and sore from the lingering smoke, thick and acrid, that filled his lungs. When he was finished for the day, his clothes were filthy and any fraction of exposed skin was as dark as coal. Koji felt like he was emerging from another world—one as harsh and as suffocating as any volcano eruption, only all of it had been man-made.

* * *